The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,185

second and third are the wars in which a Leviathan projects its might in some other part of the world to prop up a beleaguered government or keep a grip on its colonies. Pulling up the rear are the internal civil wars, which, at least since the Chinese slaughterhouse in the late 1940s, have been far less deadly. When a gang of Kalashnikov-toting rebels harasses the government in a small country that the great powers don’t care about, the damage they do is more limited. And even these fatality rates have decreased over the past quarter-century.26 In 1950 the average armed conflict (of any kind) killed thirty-three thousand people; in 2007 it killed less than a thousand. 27

How can we make sense of the juddering trajectory of conflict since the end of World War II, easing into the lull of the New Peace? One major change has been in the theater of armed conflict. Wars today take place mainly in poor countries, mostly in an arc that extends from Central and East Africa through the Middle East, across Southwest Asia and northern India, and down into Southeast Asia. Figure 6–5 shows ongoing conflicts in 2008 as black dots, and shades in the countries containing the “bottom billion,” the people with the lowest income. About half of the conflicts take place in the countries with the poorest sixth of the people. In the decades before 2000, conflicts were scattered in other poor parts of the world as well, such as Central America and West Africa. Neither the economic nor the geographic linkage with war is a constant of history. Recall that for half a millennium the wealthy countries of Europe were constantly at each other’s throats.

The relation between poverty and war in the world today is smooth but highly nonlinear. Among wealthy countries in the developed world, the risk of civil war is essentially zero. For countries with a per capita gross domestic product of around $1,500 a year (in 2003 U.S. dollars), the probability of a new conflict breaking out within five years rises to around 3 percent. But from there downward the risk shoots up: for countries with a per capita GDP of $750, it is 6 percent; for countries whose people earn $500, it is 8 percent; and for those that subsist on $250, it is 15 percent.28

A simplistic interpretation of the correlation is that poverty causes war because poor people have to fight for survival over a meager pool of resources. Though undoubtedly some conflicts are fought over access to water or arable land, the connection is far more tangled than that.29 For starters, the causal arrow also goes in the other direction. War causes poverty, because it’s hard to generate wealth when roads, factories, and granaries are blown up as fast as they are built and when the most skilled workers and managers are constantly being driven from their workplaces or shot. War has been called “development in reverse,” and the economist Paul Collier has estimated that a typical civil war costs the afflicted country $50 billion.30

FIGURE 6–5. Geography of armed conflit, 2008

Countries in dark gray contain the “botttom billion” or the world’s poorest people. Dots represent sites of armed conflict in 2008.

Sources: Data from Harvard Strand and Andreas Forø Tollefsen, Peace Research Institute of Olso (PRIO); adapted from a map by Halvard Buhang and Siri Rustad in Gleditsch, 2008.

Also, neither wealth nor peace comes from having valuable stuff in the ground. Many poor and war-torn African countries are overflowing with gold, oil, diamonds, and strategic metals, while affluent and peaceable countries such as Belgium, Singapore, and Hong Kong have no natural resources to speak of. There must be a third variable, presumably the norms and skills of a civilized trading society, that causes both wealth and peace. And even if poverty does cause conflict, it may do so not because of competition over scarce resources but because the most important thing that a little wealth buys a country is an effective police force and army to keep domestic peace. The fruits of economic development flow far more to a government than to a guerrilla force, and that is one of the reasons that the economic tigers of the developing world have come to enjoy a state of relative tranquillity.31

Whatever effects poverty may have, measures of it and of other “structural variables,” like the youth and maleness of a country’s demographics, change too slowly to fully explain the recent rise and fall of civil war in