adulthood with Americans killing and dying halfway around the world, and now, as Boomers reach retirement and beyond, our country is doing the same damned thing.”6 This assumes that 5,000 Americans dying is the same damned thing as 58,000 Americans dying, and that a hundred thousand Iraqis being killed is the same damned thing as several million Vietnamese being killed. If we don’t keep an eye on the numbers, the programming policy “If it bleeds it leads” will feed the cognitive shortcut “The more memorable, the more frequent,” and we will end up with what has been called a false sense of insecurity.7
This chapter is about three kinds of organized violence that have stoked the new pessimism. They were given short shrift in the preceding chapter, which concentrated on wars among great powers and developed states. The Long Peace has not seen an end to these other kinds of conflict, leaving the impression that the world is “a more dangerous place than ever.”
The first kind of organized violence embraces all the other categories of war, most notably the civil wars and wars between militias, guerrillas, and paramilitaries that plague the developing world. These are the “new wars” or “low-intensity conflicts” that are said to be fueled by “ancient hatreds.”8 Familiar images of African teenagers with Kalashnikovs support the impression that the global burden of war has not declined but has only been displaced from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere.
The new wars are thought to be especially destructive to civilians because of the hunger and disease they leave in their wake, which are omitted from most counts of war dead. According to a widely repeated statistic, at the beginning of the 20th century 90 percent of war deaths were suffered by soldiers and 10 percent by civilians, but by the end of the century these proportions had reversed. Horrifying estimates of fatalities from famines and epidemics, rivaling the death toll of the Nazi Holocaust, have been reported in war-torn countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The second kind of organized violence I will track is the mass killing of ethnic and political groups. The hundred-year period from which we have recently escaped has been called “the age of genocide” and “a century of genocide.” Many commentators have written that ethnic cleansing emerged with modernity, was held at bay by the hegemony of the superpowers, returned with a vengeance with the end of the Cold War, and today is as prevalent as ever.
The third is terrorism. Since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, the fear of terrorism has led to a massive new bureaucracy, two foreign wars, and obsessive discussion in the political arena. The threat of terrorism is said to pose an “existential threat” to the United States, having the capacity to “do away with our way of life” or to end “civilization itself.”9
Each of these scourges, of course, continues to take a toll in human lives. The question I will ask in this chapter is exactly how big a toll, and whether it has increased or decreased in the past few decades. It’s only recently that political scientists have tried to measure these kinds of destruction, and now that they have, they have reached a surprising conclusion: All these kinds of killing are in decline.10 The decreases are recent enough—in the past two decades or less—that we cannot count on them lasting, and in recognition of their tentative nature I will call this development the New Peace. Nonetheless the trends are genuine declines of violence and deserve our careful attention. They are substantial in size, opposite in sign to the conventional wisdom, and suggestive of ways we might identify what went right and do more of it in the future.
THE TRAJECTORY OF WAR IN THE REST OF THE WORLD
What was the rest of the world doing during the six hundred years when the great powers and European states went through their Ages of Dynasties, Religions, Sovereignty, Nationalism, and Ideology; were racked by two world wars; and then fell into a long peace? Unfortunately the Eurocentric bias of the historical record makes it impossible to trace out curves with any confidence. Before the advent of colonialism, large swaths of Africa, the Americas, and Asia were host to predation, feuding, and slave-raiding that slunk beneath the military horizon or fell in the forest without any historian hearing them. Colonialism itself was implemented in many imperial wars that the great powers waged to acquire their colonies, suppress