5/22/2021 Is the World Getting Safer?

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Is the World Getting Safer?

New research debunks the theory that wars are becoming less deadly and less frequent.

By Nikita Lalwani and Sam Winter-Levy

JANUARY 12, 2020, 7:51 AM

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I
n 2011, the psychologist Steven Pinker published The Better Angels of Our Nature, a
bestseller with a bold thesis: Almost every form of violence, including war, was on
the decline. Thanks to the spread of Enlightenment values, Pinker argued, humans
had become more peaceful and less bloodthirsty. Asked in a 2014 interview whether
humans would ever return to their violent past, Pinker replied, “Well, how likely is it
that we’re going to start throwing virgins into volcanoes to get good weather or that
you’re going to have a return of slave markets to New Orleans? I think pretty unlikely.”

Pinker was not the first to forecast the end of war. The political scientist John Mueller
made a similar argument in the late 1980s, maintaining that great-power war, like
slavery, had gone out of style. As early as the first decade of the 20th century, no fewer
than three books were published heralding the decline of war. The most famous of
them, The Great Illusion, by Norman Angell, was published just four years before the
start of World War I. (“How can we possibly expect to keep alive warlike qualities,” he
wrote, “when all our interests and activities … are peace-like?”)

Into this debate steps Bear F. Braumoeller, a political scientist and statistician at Ohio
State University, whose newest book, Only the Dead, undermines the decline-of-war
thesis. Amid pages of data and statistical analysis, Braumoeller writes in prose lucid
enough to be accessible to a lay audience. “For the last two hundred years at least,” he
writes, “I can find no general downward trend in the incidence or deadliness of warfare.
If anything, the opposite is true.” He warns, “It’s not at all unlikely that another war that
would surpass the two World Wars in lethality will happen in your lifetime.”

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Only the Dead: The Persistence of War in the Modern Age, Bear F. Braumoeller, Oxford University Press, 344 pp.,
$29.95, Sept. 3, 2019

The disagreement between Braumoeller and Pinker stems primarily from a difference in
how they understand the data. From World War II to the present day, international
conflict does indeed appear to be on the decline. Zoom out, however, and the story
looks less uplifting: Over the past two centuries, the rate of conflict initiation between
countries has actually increased (Pinker’s graphs don’t show this, Braumoeller argues,
in part because they include data only from Europe). Apart from the two world wars, the
Cold War was the most conflict-ridden period since the Napoleonic Wars; the end of the
Cold War was the first time the rate of conflict initiation fell in nearly 200 years. The
rate of conflict initiation is a measure of how often states resort to force scaled by the
number of opportunities for violence to occur. But Braumoeller argues that his findings
hold pretty much no matter how war is measured; even when one evaluates the
propensity of states to wage all-out wars, the Cold War was one of the most warlike
periods of the past 200 years outside of the two world wars.

Optimists about the decline of war tend to dismiss one or both of the world wars as
anomalies, focusing instead on the 70-year period known as the “Long Peace” that
followed them. But without more rigorous statistics, it’s impossible to tell whether the
seven-decade Long Peace since World War II demonstrates conclusively that the world
has become more peaceful; it could just as easily have happened by chance. In an
attempt to figure out which is more likely, Braumoeller uses formal statistical methods
to separate the underlying rate of conflict initiation and war lethality from the noise of
random variation.
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years, whether measured in absolute terms or relative to the combatants’ populations;

that there has been no systematic downward trend in the potency of the causes of war;
and that although the rate of international conflict initiation did fall at the end of the
Cold War, it had actually been steadily rising until the 1990s.

From World War II to the present day, international conflict does

indeed appear to be on the decline. Zoom out, however, and the
story looks less uplifting.

Braumoeller’s analysis of the data is thoughtful and convincing. Perhaps his most
troubling findings concern the potential for war to escalate. War, like earthquakes and
terrorist attacks, follows an unusual probability distribution known as a power law: the
overwhelming majority of the observations are relatively small in magnitude, but a few
are extraordinarily large. Indeed, one of the great strengths of Braumoeller’s book is his
attention to lesser-known but remarkably violent conflicts. For example, when you
measure battle deaths as a proportion of the combatants’ populations, the two world
wars are not even among the three most lethal wars of all time—they are surpassed by
the Paraguayan War in the 1860s, the Chaco War between Paraguay and Bolivia in the
1930s, and the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. “Wars escalate more quickly, and reach more
astounding sizes, than just about anything else found in nature,” he writes.

And once begun, as Braumoeller shows from his analysis of wars since 1945, wars retain
the same devastating escalatory potential today that they displayed in 1913 or 1938.
Today, Braumoeller calculates, the chance that a new war will escalate to be roughly as
deadly as World War I stands at about 1 percent. The chance that a new war will produce
almost twice as many battle deaths as World War II, in which around 65 million people
died, is one in 200. That may sound low, but as Braumoeller points out, “If we keep
fighting wars that pass the thousand-battle-death threshold at a rate of roughly one
every other year, the probability of seeing such a war in the next century jumps to
nearly 40%.” Just because great-power clashes have not spiraled into all-out war since
World War II, “the escalatory dynamics that produced mindboggling carnage in the
Paraguayan War, the Chaco War, the Iran-Iraq War, and the two World Wars are every bit
as operational today as they were then.”

In addition to claiming to have data on their side, the proponents of the decline-of-war
thesis also argue that a fundamental change in the conduct of international politics has
occurred:
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the shift to a change in attitude in developed countries; others point to the rise of
peacekeepers and international organizations, or the deterrent effects of nuclear
weapons. Pinker, for his part, traces the decline of violence to several overlapping
factors, including what he calls a “civilizing process,” through which the consolidation
of state power helped reduce violence within states, and a “humanitarian revolution,”
an expansion of empathy that helped extend rights to people of all races and to women,
led to the abolition of slavery, and fostered norms against warfare throughout the
international system.

Braumoeller does not dispute that the emergence of modern states has suppressed
violence within them. But he argues that violent competition between states is a
different matter. The complexity of the international system makes it difficult to
assume that the fact that people are becoming more peaceful—if true—will translate
neatly into a fall in interstate violence. In an anarchic international system, where
states must act strategically to maintain their advantage, there is little guarantee that a
more pacifistic public will produce a less violent foreign policy or a more peaceful
world. Germany’s decision to support Austria on the eve of World War I, for example,
was based in part on a belief that other powers had embraced pacifism. One German
diplomat argued that “England is absolutely pacific and France as well as Russia
likewise do not feel inclined towards war.” As for nuclear weapons, there is a long
history of claims that past military technologies have rendered war unthinkable, and
while nuclear weapons may deter great-power conflicts from escalating, they have also
created novel ways in which states could stumble into war, such as through the
accidental launch of one of the hundreds of missiles the United States and Russia keep
on “launch on warning” status.

One of the richest sections of the book is Braumoeller’s discussion of international

order. While he finds no evidence of a general linear trend toward a less warlike world,
Braumoeller does find what he calls “islands of peace” throughout history, periods in
which international conflict is much less likely than it is in others. He attributes these
islands to the emergence of international orders. The postwar Western order is one such
example, but international orders do not always have to be liberal. The Concert of
Europe, for example, founded at the Congress of Vienna in the aftermath of the
Napoleonic Wars, was profoundly undemocratic, an attempt to make the world safe for
reactionary imperialism and roll back constitutional reform across the continent; it was
widely despised, especially by British liberals such as Lord Byron, Richard Cobden, and
Percy Bysshe Shelley. And yet it kept the peace for almost four decades—the least
warlike period on record in Braumoeller’s data.
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International orders are a mixed blessing: While they tend to foster peace among their
members, those members are prone to initiate war with third parties. Indeed,
Braumoeller argues that the coexistence of multiple orders, such as those that existed
before World War II and during the Cold War, make the world a much more dangerous
place—especially when they are based on conflicting principles of legitimacy. If he is
right, the only thing more dangerous than the collapse of the U.S.-led liberal
international order would be a competition between it and a rival Chinese-led order
characterized by authoritarianism, statist capitalism, and digital surveillance.

International orders are a mixed blessing: While they tend to

foster peace among their members, those members are prone to
initiate war with third parties.

Today, with the conditions for a regional war in the Middle East riper than they have
been for years, the liberal international order under strain, and the deterioration of U.S.-
Chinese relations, Only the Dead makes for sobering reading. Braumoeller’s is the most
serious response to Pinker’s claims so far. Pinker and the other optimists will no doubt
respond in due course, and the debate will continue.

But getting the answer right matters. Whether intentionally or not, Braumoeller argues,
the decline-of-war theorists encourage a certain kind of complacency: States have
historically worked hardest for international peace when the dangers of conflict have
been most apparent. In this, he echoes Henry Kissinger, who wrote in the 1950s of the
passing of the Concert of Europe that the achievement of this era was “not
inconsiderable: a period of peace lasting almost a hundred years.” Yet, he continued, it
was “a stability so pervasive that it may have contributed to disaster. For in the long
interval of peace the sense of the tragic was lost; it was forgotten that states could die,
that upheavals could be irretrievable, that fear could become the means of social
cohesion.” World War I shattered the complacency of this era; what will do the same for
ours?

Nikita Lalwani is a 2020 graduate of Yale Law School.

Sam Winter-Levy is a Ph.D. candidate in politics at Princeton University. Twitter: @SamWinterLevy

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