MCdread
Couldn't she get drowned?
- Joined
- Jun 21, 2001
- Messages
- 5,348
Yesterday the french newspaper Le Monde had this cover story:
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0,36-700474,0.html
(Sorry, french link, but I give an extensive summary in the rest of this post)
It is a report conducted by a group from a Vancouver university and financed by the UN, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and UK. It basicly took the task of filling the offcial void in statistics concerning armed conflicts since the end of world war. Some of the conclusions are quite interesting and coming against some of the popular perceptions. This report found that the number of wars has been in clear fall since 1992, ie, since the end of the Cold War, while the number in genocides has fallen 80%. In terms of the victims, it has dropped even more dramatically:
The two charts on the right tell the death rate among combatents in a war and the absolute number of victims respectively, since 1946. In the first case we see that there was a high rate in the 60s and 70s, probably due to the Vietname and colonial wars, while the number of victims experiences some high peaks, which seem to be the Korea War at the early years of the time scale and the Vietnam. Since then the number has been dropping. The high peak in the 80s must be due to Iraq/Iran and Afghanistan. So, for example in 1950 a war had an average of 38000 victims, while in 2002 only 600. The Le Monde text also says that the number of refugees has dropped 30% in the last decade and coup d'etats were for example, 25 in 1963 and only 10 in 2002. The top graph indicates the total number of armed conflicts. There was a constant rise of wars until the early 90s and since then it has dropped. Most of those are civil wars. This seems to indicate that the Cold War favoured the proliferation of marginal wars, ie, the blocs in confrontation battled each other in lesser wars in the 3rd world, and since the fall of the USSR, some of the ideological support for that has disappeared, but many countries still suffer the heritage of those years. Nevertheless, those wars seem to be less violent, and are mostly among assymetric forces, typically guerrilla wars against the central state.
Another interesting and surprising graph is the bottom left one, which tells the number of conflicts in which each nation has taken part. To the surprise of many and my own, the 2 most belligerant countries in the past 60 years (at least in terms of number of wars, probbaly not the most deadly ones though...) are the UK with 21 wars followed by France with 19. The USA come only in third with 16, with Russia/Soviet Union has 9. Of course, many of these participations are not significative. For example, in the II Gulf War, most of the military effort was condcuted by the United States, although other countries also took part. The same for the Vietname War.
Basicly they conclude that the end of the Cold War was what made possible this drop of conflicts, and since then the dominat paradigm has been to solve wars by diplomatic action (with a few notable exceptions of course), also helped no doubt by the fact that number of democracies in the world multiplied by a factor of 4 since the end of WWII. The UN, for all its faults, has also been more active than ever in conflict solving and peace keeping since the fall of the Berlin wall.
These are all good news, and it is something that I always thought to be true, and tried to say to prophets of doom always pointing out to the increase of tragedies and conflicts to prove the End is near. However, not everything is great. In Africa for example, things have gone worse. In 1946, the continent was entirely in european hands and there was no armed conflict. Later, there were a few colonial wars, but in recent years, the continent has experienced a terrible spiral of violence, with lots of civil wars, genocidical actions, and the use of children-soldiers.
Another matter of concern is the question of terrorism. The study concludes that the terrorist activity has fallen since 1980 on average. However, nowadays (and in the future) it has the power to be more dangerous, ie, less frequent, but deadlier. The supression of the ideological support for much of terror groups after the Cold War coincided with the rise of islamic terrorism. This is also important, because a future tendence (and already seen) is that terrorism might become more and more the cause why states go to war.
Thoughts?
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0,36-700474,0.html
(Sorry, french link, but I give an extensive summary in the rest of this post)
It is a report conducted by a group from a Vancouver university and financed by the UN, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and UK. It basicly took the task of filling the offcial void in statistics concerning armed conflicts since the end of world war. Some of the conclusions are quite interesting and coming against some of the popular perceptions. This report found that the number of wars has been in clear fall since 1992, ie, since the end of the Cold War, while the number in genocides has fallen 80%. In terms of the victims, it has dropped even more dramatically:
The two charts on the right tell the death rate among combatents in a war and the absolute number of victims respectively, since 1946. In the first case we see that there was a high rate in the 60s and 70s, probably due to the Vietname and colonial wars, while the number of victims experiences some high peaks, which seem to be the Korea War at the early years of the time scale and the Vietnam. Since then the number has been dropping. The high peak in the 80s must be due to Iraq/Iran and Afghanistan. So, for example in 1950 a war had an average of 38000 victims, while in 2002 only 600. The Le Monde text also says that the number of refugees has dropped 30% in the last decade and coup d'etats were for example, 25 in 1963 and only 10 in 2002. The top graph indicates the total number of armed conflicts. There was a constant rise of wars until the early 90s and since then it has dropped. Most of those are civil wars. This seems to indicate that the Cold War favoured the proliferation of marginal wars, ie, the blocs in confrontation battled each other in lesser wars in the 3rd world, and since the fall of the USSR, some of the ideological support for that has disappeared, but many countries still suffer the heritage of those years. Nevertheless, those wars seem to be less violent, and are mostly among assymetric forces, typically guerrilla wars against the central state.
Another interesting and surprising graph is the bottom left one, which tells the number of conflicts in which each nation has taken part. To the surprise of many and my own, the 2 most belligerant countries in the past 60 years (at least in terms of number of wars, probbaly not the most deadly ones though...) are the UK with 21 wars followed by France with 19. The USA come only in third with 16, with Russia/Soviet Union has 9. Of course, many of these participations are not significative. For example, in the II Gulf War, most of the military effort was condcuted by the United States, although other countries also took part. The same for the Vietname War.
Basicly they conclude that the end of the Cold War was what made possible this drop of conflicts, and since then the dominat paradigm has been to solve wars by diplomatic action (with a few notable exceptions of course), also helped no doubt by the fact that number of democracies in the world multiplied by a factor of 4 since the end of WWII. The UN, for all its faults, has also been more active than ever in conflict solving and peace keeping since the fall of the Berlin wall.
These are all good news, and it is something that I always thought to be true, and tried to say to prophets of doom always pointing out to the increase of tragedies and conflicts to prove the End is near. However, not everything is great. In Africa for example, things have gone worse. In 1946, the continent was entirely in european hands and there was no armed conflict. Later, there were a few colonial wars, but in recent years, the continent has experienced a terrible spiral of violence, with lots of civil wars, genocidical actions, and the use of children-soldiers.
Another matter of concern is the question of terrorism. The study concludes that the terrorist activity has fallen since 1980 on average. However, nowadays (and in the future) it has the power to be more dangerous, ie, less frequent, but deadlier. The supression of the ideological support for much of terror groups after the Cold War coincided with the rise of islamic terrorism. This is also important, because a future tendence (and already seen) is that terrorism might become more and more the cause why states go to war.
Thoughts?
