The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,184

War, with 23,000 battle deaths, and the 1998–2000 war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, with 50,000. By the first decade of the new millennium, interstate wars had become few in number, mostly brief, and relatively low in battle deaths (India-Pakistan and Eritrea-Djibouti, neither of which counts as a “war” in the technical sense of having a thousand deaths a year, and the quick overthrow of the regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq). In 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2009, there were no interstate conflicts at all.

The Long Peace—an avoidance of major war among great powers and developed states—is spreading to the rest of the world. Aspiring great powers no longer feel the need to establish their greatness by acquiring an empire or picking on weaker countries: China boasts of its “peaceful rise” and Turkey of a policy it calls “zero problems with neighbors”; Brazil’s foreign minister recently crowed, “I don’t think there are many countries that can boast that they have 10 neighbors and haven’t had a war in the last 140 years.”24 And East Asia seems to be catching Europe’s distaste for war. Though in the decades after World War II it was the world’s bloodiest region, with ruinous wars in China, Korea, and Indochina, from 1980 to 1993 the number of conflicts and their toll in battle deaths plummeted, and they have remained at historically unprecedented lows ever since.25

As interstate war was being snuffed out, though, civil wars began to flare up. We see this in the enormous dark gray wedge at the left of figure 6–2, mainly representing the 1.2 million battle deaths in the 1946–50 Chinese Civil War, and a fat lighter gray bulge at the top of the stack in the 1980s, which contains the 435,000 battle deaths in the Soviet Union–bolstered civil war in Afghanistan. And snaking its way through the 1980s and 1990s, we find a continuation of the dark gray layer with a mass of smaller civil wars in countries such as Angola, Bosnia, Chechnya, Croatia, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Iraq, Liberia, Mozambique, Somalia, Sudan, Tajikistan, and Uganda. But even this slice tapers down in the 2000s to a slender layer.

To get a clearer picture of what the numbers here are telling us, it helps to disaggregate the death tolls into the two main dimensions of war: how many there were, and how lethal each kind was. Figure 6–3 shows the raw totals of the conflicts of each kind, disregarding their death tolls, which, recall, can be as low as twenty-five. As colonial wars disappeared and interstate wars were petering out, internationalized civil wars vanished for a brief instant at the end of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union and the United States stopped supporting their client states, and then reappeared with the policing wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. But the big news was an explosion in the number of purely internal civil wars that began around 1960, peaked in the early 1990s, and then declined through 2003, followed by a slight bounce.

FIGURE 6–3. Number of state-based armed conflicts, 1946–2009

Sources: UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset; see Human Security Report Project, 2007, based on data from Lacina & Gleditsch, 2005, updated in 2010 by Tara Cooper.

Why do the sizes of the patches look so different in the two graphs? It’s because of the power-law distribution for wars, in which a small number of wars in the tail of the L-shaped distribution are responsible for a large percentage of the deaths. More than half of the 9.4 million battle deaths in the 260 conflicts between 1946 and 2008 come from just five wars, three of them between states (Korea, Vietnam, Iran-Iraq) and two within states (China and Afghanistan). Most of the downward trend in the death toll came from reeling in that thick tail, leaving fewer of the really destructive wars.

In addition to the differences in the contributions of wars of different sizes to the overall death tolls, there are substantial differences in the contributions of the wars of different kinds. Figure 6–4 shows the second dimension of war, how many people an average war kills.

FIGURE 6–4. Deadliness of interstate and civil wars, 1950–2005

Sources: UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset, Lacina & Gleditsch, 2005; adapted by the Human Security Report Project; Human Security Centre, 2006.

Until recently the most lethal kind of war by far was the interstate war. There is nothing like a pair of Leviathans amassing cannon fodder, lobbing artillery shells, and pulverizing each other’s cities to rack up truly impressive body counts. A distant