Is War Over? — A Paradox Explained

Key Takeaways

violence and war the insane root Tennessee if Isis continues the Russians are invading Ukraine and the Palestinians and Israelis continue to slug it out does that make you feel gloomy well don't because if you look at the numbers war actually seems to be going out of fashion while the global population is at an all-time high it seems that we live in the most peaceful period in human history how is this possible [Music] as of September 2014 there were four conflicts going on in the world that had caused at least 10,000 people to die since January 2013 9 conflicts that killed more than 1,000 people and 13 that killed more than 100 since January 2013 not really peaceful but consider this of all the conflicts going on none is an active war between countries they are either civil wars or local conflicts although civil wars are terrible and caused huge suffering their impact is usually way smaller than a war between nations or empires when two nations engage in war they can mobilize much bigger forces have access to all of the state's resources and logistics and almost to all of the population so why have we transitioned from wars between nation-states to civil wars a lot of it is to do with colonialism and the Cold War when the Cold War ended a major driver of armed conflict vanished too but the breakup of the communist dictatorships revealed new or old tensions and brought new conflicts in the now freed state which often resulted in civil war much more importantly in 1945 nearly all of Africa much of Asia and parts of Latin America were under colonial by 1990 all but a few islands were independent but wait couldn't you argue that what today's multinational corporations are doing in the third world is just as bad as colonialism let's look at Congo it was established as a colony in 1885 by the Belgian King an area 80 times the size of Belgium violence committed against the indigenous Congolese and the ruthless system of economic exploitation had killed about half of the population by 1908 about ten million Congolese were executed or starved to death millions were mutilated and traumatized the economic exploitation of the Congo remains the top priority and forced labour never really ceased completely until the end of Belgian role in 1960 which is not really that long ago so no colonialism was much worse than a vulture capitalism is today and it ended just two generations ago most of the conflicts that are going on right now are in areas that 60 years ago were under foreign control but things are getting better until 1989 victory for one side of the civil war was common while nowadays victories are much rarer at the same time negotiated endings have jumped from 10% to almost 40% what about the rest of the world why have nation-states stopped attacking each other there are four major reasons one democratization the steady development from autocracy to democracy democracies hardly ever fight each other of all the State against state wars fought since 1900 only a minority were fought between democracies to globalization war is just not as effective at achieving economic goals as it used to be today it's almost always cheaper to buy resources on the global market than to seize them by force people from other nations are more valuable to us alive than dead which overall is a pretty new concept three war is so 20th century World War 1 warfare was seen as an inevitable part of the human experience and as a valuable tool which you could use to achieve goals when diplomacy hit a brick wall today we have rules that declare acts of aggression illegal and stipulate that armed force is only justified in self-defense or with the authority of the UN Security Council these rules are still broken but today it's harder to do so without sparking opposition and disapproval also we have an International Court for war crimes in the Hague and that's a very recent innovation before borders are mostly fixed now after World War two territorial wars are generally stopped when most countries pledged to accept international borders and respect other nations autonomy but is all of this just an anomaly or are we on the road to lasting peace truth is we don't know yet we need a big enough sample to rule out the historical average which is about one or two big Wars per century we just haven't had enough time since World War two to rule out the possibility that war is not going away if we don't have one major war in the next 75 years we can be really confident that humanity is changing so you see war might be over yes there are nasty conflicts going on in many places but overall things are getting better and we can make them even better by speaking up for peace and democracy [Music] [Music]