posts: 9678
Data license: CC-BY
This data as json
id | title | slug | type | status | content | archieml | archieml_update_statistics | published_at | updated_at | gdocSuccessorId | authors | excerpt | created_at_in_wordpress | updated_at_in_wordpress | featured_image | formattingOptions | markdown | wpApiSnapshot |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
9678 | War and Peace | war-and-peace | page | publish | <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>This topic page presents an empirical perspective on the history of war and peace. </p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:heading --> <h2>War and Peace after 1945</h2> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":4} --> <h4>The absolute number of war deaths has declined since 1945</h4> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:columns --> <div class="wp-block-columns"><!-- wp:column --> <div class="wp-block-column"><!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>The absolute number of war deaths has been declining since 1946. In some years in the early post-war era, around half a million people died through direct violence in wars. In recent years, the annual death toll tends to be less than 100,000.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>The decline of the absolute number of battle deaths can be seen in the first visualization here that shows global battle deaths per year by world region, which pulls together data from two sources: more recent data from the <a href="https://ucdp.uu.se/encyclopedia">Uppsala Conflict Data Program</a> (UCDP) and older data from the <a href="https://www.prio.org/data/1">Peace Research Institute Oslo</a> (PRIO). We see three marked peaks in war deaths since the end of World War II: the Korean War (early 1950s), the Vietnam War (around 1970), and the Iran-Iraq and Afghanistan wars (1980s). The 2010s were also a period of high battle-deaths, driven by the conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Within the sources on which this chart draws, the region of the conflict has been coded in quite a particular way, relating to the source's methodology for identifying and distinguishing conflicts. In most instances, the region attributed to the conflict will be the same region as where the fighting took place. But in some cases it refers to the region where the armed forces fighting in the conflict have come from.{ref}You can read more about how region is defined within <a href="https://ucdp.uu.se/downloads/brd/ucdp-brd-codebook-221.pdf">the codebook</a> that accompanies the UCDP Battle-related Deaths Dataset on which this chart draws.{/ref}</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>In a second chart here, we show a similar breakdown but where the region is defined exclusively in terms of where the fighting actually took place. This 'geo-referenced' data is available only in the UCDP data from 1989. Comparing the charts for this later period, we see that the regional breakdowns are very similar across the two approaches used to attribute conflicts to regions.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --></div> <!-- /wp:column --> <!-- wp:column --> <div class="wp-block-column"><!-- wp:html --> <figure><iframe style="width: 100%; height: 600px; border: 0px none;" src="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/battle-related-deaths-in-state-based-conflicts-since-1946-by-world-region"></iframe></figure> <!-- /wp:html --> <!-- wp:html --> <iframe src="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-state-based-conflicts-by-world-region-ucdp-since-1989" loading="lazy" style="width: 100%; height: 600px; border: 0px none;"></iframe> <!-- /wp:html --></div> <!-- /wp:column --></div> <!-- /wp:columns --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":4} --> <h4>Other forms of large-scale violence</h4> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>The chart above refers only to battle deaths occurring in conflicts that involved at least one state on one of the opposing sides. For more recent years, we show these 'state-based' conflict deaths alongside battle deaths in 'non-state' conflicts (where two or more organisations are fighting but no state is involved), and also violent deaths in 'one-sided violence' (where there is only one organised aggressor, such as in genocidal violence).</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>We see that, in recent years, state-based conflicts form the majority of such deaths, though the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 stands out for its very high death-toll.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:html --> <iframe src="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ucdp-deaths-in-conflicts-by-violence-type" loading="lazy" style="width: 100%; height: 600px; border: 0px none;"></iframe> <!-- /wp:html --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":4} --> <h4>The share of battle deaths is declining even faster</h4> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>The previous two graphs showed absolute numbers, but as the world has seen rapid population growth (see our entry on <a title="World Population Growth" href="http://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth/">global population growth</a>), it is more appropriate to look at relative numbers. Here we show the battle deaths in state-based conflicts per 100,000 people per year. The figures are shown by type of conflict.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:html --> <figure><iframe style="width: 100%; height: 600px; border: 0px none;" src="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rate-in-state-based-conflicts-by-conflict-type"></iframe></figure> <!-- /wp:html --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":4} --> <h4>A greater number of increasingly less-deadly conflicts</h4> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>The stacked area chart here shows the number of ongoing conflicts each year has risen. This increase however only relates to civil conflicts within states. Conflicts related to the expansion or defence of colonial empires ended with decolonisation. Conflicts between states have almost ceased to exist.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:html --> <figure><iframe style="width: 100%; height: 600px; border: 0px none;" src="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-conflicts-and-incidences-of-one-sided-violence"></iframe></figure> <!-- /wp:html --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>But the number of war victims varies hugely between different wars: whereas 1,200,000 died during the the Korean War (1950–1953), other wars had 'just' 1,000 victims. For this reason, statistics on the number of wars need to be interpreted alongside data on the size of these conflicts.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>The increase in the number of wars is predominantly an increase of smaller conflicts. This follows from the previously shown declining number of war victims while the number of conflicts increased. The decreasing deadliness of conflicts can be seen in the bar chart.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":6} --> <h6>Deadliness of wars - average battle deaths per conflict by decade, 1950-2016</h6> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:image {"align":"center","id":19036,"linkDestination":"custom"} --> <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><a href="https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/05/Deaths-per-battle-01.png"><img src="https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/05/Deaths-per-battle-01-750x512.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19036"/></a></figure></div> <!-- /wp:image --> <!-- wp:heading --> <h2>The past was not peaceful</h2> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>It would be wrong to believe that the past was peaceful. One reason why some people might have this impression is that many of the past conflicts feature less prominently in our memories; they are simply forgotten.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":4} --> <h4>The decline of wars between 'Great Powers'</h4> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:columns --> <div class="wp-block-columns"><!-- wp:column --> <div class="wp-block-column"><!-- wp:image {"align":"center","id":50750,"sizeSlug":"large","linkDestination":"custom"} --> <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter size-large"><img src="https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2022/04/Percentage-of-years-in-which-the-great-powers-fought-one-another-1500–2000-709x550.png" alt="" class="wp-image-50750"/></figure></div> <!-- /wp:image --></div> <!-- /wp:column --> <!-- wp:column --> <div class="wp-block-column"></div> <!-- /wp:column --></div> <!-- /wp:columns --> <!-- wp:heading --> <h2>Data Quality & Definition</h2> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":3} --> <h3>Counting world conflict deaths: why do sources differ?</h3> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp-block-tombstone 49534 --> <!-- wp:columns --> <div class="wp-block-columns"><!-- wp:column --> <div class="wp-block-column"><!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>To answer the question of how many people die in conflicts today, and how this has changed over time, we can turn to a number of different datasets.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Here we show the world conflict death rate since 1989 according to five sources.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>The ‘UCDP all’ series is an aggregation of the deaths recorded in each of the three categories of conflict used by <em><a href="https://ucdp.uu.se/">Uppsala Conflict Data Program</a></em>: state-based conflict, non-state conflict and one-sided violence. (We show the data for these categories separately <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace#other-forms-of-large-scale-violence">here</a>).</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>We've summarised more information about the data sources and how we handled them to produce the chart above in a document, <em><a href="https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/09/Notes-on-five-sources-of-the-world-conflict-death-rate-since-1989.pdf">World conflict deaths since 1989: Notes on five sources</a></em>.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>You see in the chart that there are certainly similarities across the different sources. Overall they show a decline in conflict deaths into the 2000s, followed by an increase in the 2010s.{ref}From country-level data we can see that this rise is driven largely by the war in Syria.{/ref}</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>But there are also large differences. Most noticeably, there is a large jump in 1994 – marking the Rwandan genocide – which is present in some series, but absent from others.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>If you look closely, you’ll see that there are large relative differences between the series over the entire period as well, though they are understated by the 1994 peak. If you hover over the datapoints, you can see the exact figures: the highest figure for a given year is typically well more than double the lowest.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --></div> <!-- /wp:column --> <!-- wp:column --> <div class="wp-block-column"><!-- wp:paragraph --> <p></p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --></div> <!-- /wp:column --></div> <!-- /wp:columns --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":4} --> <h4>What explains the differences?</h4> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Discrepancies between different sources of conflict deaths data are partly to do with the differences in how the underlying source information – for instance newswires, death registers, government or NGO reports, or indeed other conflict databases – are selected and interpreted.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>But they also reflect conceptual differences in terms of which deaths are and aren't included in the source's definition.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>And the differences reflect that conflict and deaths are not equally well-documented across world regions. Conflicts and deaths in Europe are often documented well, while this sometimes is less the case for conflicts in other regions, especially in Africa and Asia.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Below we relate some of the differences visible in the chart above in terms of some key conceptual differences lying along three dimensions: <em>Who</em>, <em>How</em> and <em>What.</em></p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":4} --> <h4>The Who, How, and What of conflict deaths data</h4> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p><strong>Who: </strong><em>civillian vs military deaths</em></p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>The <em>Correlates of War </em>series aims to include only deaths of military personnel, whereas the other sources capture – at least to some extent – civilian deaths too. As we would expect then, the <em>Correlates of War</em> figures are generally lower than the others.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p><strong>How:</strong><em> direct vs indirect deaths</em></p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>In addition to those deaths caused directly by violence – for instance those from gunshot or explosions – a significant proportion of lives lost in conflict are <em>indirect</em>: due to disease, starvation or exposure. This is particularly true where conflicts lead to famine or outbreaks of disease among the civilian population. But historically, such indirect deaths were also a major cause of military fatalities.{ref}For instance, roughly two-thirds of military fatalities in the American Civil War were due to disease, according to Sartin, 1993. Infectious Diseases During the Civil War: The Triumph of the “Third Army”. Clinical Infectious Diseases Vol. 16, No. 4.{/ref}</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>The UCDP and IHME data include only direct deaths. The <em>Correlates of War</em> series includes military personnel that died from diseases 'contracted in the war theatre'. The <em>Conflict Catalog</em> series (running to 2000 only) tries to include indirect deaths of both the military and civilian populations. Peter Brecke, the author of the dataset, however acknowledges that the degree to which this is in fact achieved varies considerably across conflicts.{ref}“The total fatalities estimates, I am sure, vary significantly in terms of the degree to which they include disease, starvation, etc.” <a href="http://www.cgeh.nl/sites/default/files/Notes%20about%20Conflict%20Catalog.pdf">Notes Regarding the Conflict Catalog</a>, 2012{/ref}</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">While indirect deaths represent a </span><a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31437-5/fulltext"><span style="font-weight: 400;">substantial proportion</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of the social costs of conflict, t</span>here is a conceptual difficulty in drawing a consistent boundary between indirect deaths attributable to the conflict and those due to other factors. For instance, whilst famines are often triggered by conflicts, <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/famines#why-do-famines-occur">many factors contribute</a> to their onset and severity, such as the level of sanitation or the transportation infrastructure present.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Brecke does not attempt to provide a clear-cut definition, and this conceptual boundary has been largely dictated by the available primary sources he used in each estimate. Nevertheless, as we would expect, the death rates reported in the <em>Conflict Catalog</em> do come out the highest.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p><strong>What:</strong> <em>state involvement and one-sided violence</em></p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Across the various sources there three broad <em>kinds</em> of violent event distinguished: state-based conflict, non-state conflict and one-sided violence. The kind of event depends on the type of actors involved. State-based conflict is that involving at least one state-actor, and includes conflicts between states ("inter-state" conflicts) and those between a state and non-state actor ("extra-state" conflicts), such as civil wars or colonial wars.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Non-state actors are those that demonstrate a degree of coordinated military organisation but whose identity falls short of statehood. Non-state conflicts are those between two or more non-state actors, with no state involvement.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>‘One-sided violence’ on the other hand is where one organized actor (either a state or non-state group) attacks people that do not have any organized military capability to defend themselves, as in the case of genocide or '<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politicide">politicide</a>'.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>The <em>UCDP state-based</em> and <em>Correlates of War</em> series do not include such events. It is for this reason that they do not show the jump in 1994 that marks the Rwandan genocide.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Here we picture the definitions used in the various sources across these three dimensions.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:image {"align":"center","id":20481,"linkDestination":"custom"} --> <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><a href="https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/09/Five-sources-cube.png"><img src="https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/09/Five-sources-cube.png" alt="" class="wp-image-20481"/></a></figure></div> <!-- /wp:image --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":4} --> <h4>Are deaths from terrorism included in counts of conflict deaths?</h4> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>There are also efforts to collect data specifically on the number of people dying from acts of <em>terrorism</em> – this is discussed in our entry on <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism">Terrorism</a>.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>How does the concept of terrorism relate to the concepts of conflict used in the data shown above? To what extent are terrorism deaths included in this data?</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>In general, definitions of terrorism include only violent episodes that are carried out by <em>non-state</em> actors, and definitions often emphasise events where civilians or to military personnel who are unarmed or not on duty are the target.{ref}See for instance the definitions employed by the Global Terrorism Database, discussed <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism#the-criteria-for-terrorism">here in our entry on Terrorism</a>. {/ref}</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>As such, definitions of conflict deaths that include both civilian deaths and deaths caused by non-state actors will include a large fraction of the deaths normally attributed to terrorism. That is true for instance of the ‘UCDP all’ series in the charts shown above. This dataset, for example, includes direct deaths occurring in the September 11 attacks in the United States, and in the Taliban insurgency following the 2001 war in Afghanistan.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>There are however some situations where deaths that would fall under typical definitions of terrorism might not get included even in the UCDP’s broad definition of conflict. In particular, as mentioned above, the UCDP classification system has a requirement that non-state actors must have a certain degree of institutional organisation for an event to be included in its dataset. Deaths caused by attackers falling below this threshold of organisation – such as in ’lone wolf’ attacks perpetrated by ideologically-motivated individuals – would not be included in the UCDP data but might fit under common definitions of terrorism.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Because deaths due to conflict and terrorism can be attributed and grouped into ’events’ or ‘episodes’ in different ways in different datasets, it is difficult to make direct comparisons and know exactly the extent to which deaths included in one dataset are included or excluded in another. But because the <em>larger</em> events that would fall under typical definitions of terrorism – for instance those that are conducted by well-organised groups or are part of long-running insurgencies – will also be included in broad definitions of conflict like those used by UCDP, the latter are likely to include the majority of deaths commonly attributed to terrorism.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:heading --> <h2>Data Sources</h2> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":4} --> <h4><strong>Uppsala Conflict Database Program / Peace Research Institute Oslo</strong></h4> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:list --> <ul><li><strong>Data:</strong> Armed conflicts, non-state conflicts, one-sided violence, and battle-related deaths</li><li><strong>Geographical coverage: </strong>Global</li><li><strong>Time span:</strong> since 1946 (armed conflicts, battle deaths), since 1989 (non-state conflicts, one-sided violence, battle-related deaths)</li><li><strong>Available at:</strong> Online <a href="https://ucdp.uu.se/downloads/">here</a> and <a href="https://www.prio.org/data/1">here</a></li></ul> <!-- /wp:list --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":4} --> <h4><strong>The Correlates of War Project</strong></h4> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:list --> <ul><li><strong>Data:</strong> Inter-state, intra-state, non-state, and extra-state wars</li><li><strong>Geographical coverage: </strong>Global</li><li><strong>Time span:</strong> 1816-2007</li><li><strong>Available at:</strong> Online <a href="https://correlatesofwar.org/data-sets/COW-war">here</a></li></ul> <!-- /wp:list --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":4} --> <h4><strong>Peter Brecke's Conflict Catalog</strong></h4> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:list --> <ul><li><strong>Data:</strong> Conflicts</li><li><strong>Geographical coverage: </strong>Global</li><li><strong>Time span:</strong> 1400-2000</li><li><strong>Available at:</strong> Online <a href="https://brecke.inta.gatech.edu/research/conflict/">here</a><a href="http://www.cgeh.nl/data#conflict"></a></li></ul> <!-- /wp:list --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":4} --> <h4><strong>Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation / Global Burden of Disease</strong></h4> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:list --> <ul><li><strong>Data:</strong> Deaths from conflict and terrorism</li><li><strong>Geographical coverage: </strong>Global</li><li><strong>Time span:</strong> since 1990</li><li><strong>Available at:</strong> Online <a href="http://ghdx.healthdata.org/gbd-results-tool">here</a></li></ul> <!-- /wp:list --> | { "id": "wp-9678", "slug": "war-and-peace", "content": { "toc": [], "body": [ { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "This topic page presents an empirical perspective on the history of war and peace. ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "War and Peace after 1945", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 2, "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "The absolute number of war deaths has declined since 1945", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 4, "parseErrors": [] }, { "left": [ { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "The absolute number of war deaths has been declining since 1946. In some years in the early post-war era, around half a million people died through direct violence in wars. In recent years, the annual death toll tends to be less than 100,000.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "The decline of the absolute number of battle deaths can be seen in the first visualization here that shows global battle deaths per year by world region, which pulls together data from two sources: more recent data from the ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "https://ucdp.uu.se/encyclopedia", "children": [ { "text": "Uppsala Conflict Data Program", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": " (UCDP) and older data from the ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "https://www.prio.org/data/1", "children": [ { "text": "Peace Research Institute Oslo", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": " (PRIO). We see three marked peaks in war deaths since the end of World War II: the Korean War (early 1950s), the Vietnam War (around 1970), and the Iran-Iraq and Afghanistan wars (1980s). The 2010s were also a period of high battle-deaths, driven by the conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Within the sources on which this chart draws, the region of the conflict has been coded in quite a particular way, relating to the source's methodology for identifying and distinguishing conflicts. In most instances, the region attributed to the conflict will be the same region as where the fighting took place. But in some cases it refers to the region where the armed forces fighting in the conflict have come from.{ref}You can read more about how region is defined within ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "https://ucdp.uu.se/downloads/brd/ucdp-brd-codebook-221.pdf", "children": [ { "text": "the codebook", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": " that accompanies the UCDP Battle-related Deaths Dataset on which this chart draws.{/ref}", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "In a second chart here, we show a similar breakdown but where the region is defined exclusively in terms of where the fighting actually took place. This 'geo-referenced' data is available only in the UCDP data from 1989. Comparing the charts for this later period, we see that the regional breakdowns are very similar across the two approaches used to attribute conflicts to regions.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] } ], "type": "sticky-right", "right": [ { "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/battle-related-deaths-in-state-based-conflicts-since-1946-by-world-region", "type": "chart", "parseErrors": [] }, { "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-state-based-conflicts-by-world-region-ucdp-since-1989", "type": "chart", "parseErrors": [] } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "Other forms of large-scale violence", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 4, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "The chart above refers only to battle deaths occurring in conflicts that involved at least one state on one of the opposing sides. For more recent years, we show these 'state-based' conflict deaths alongside battle deaths in 'non-state' conflicts (where two or more organisations are fighting but no state is involved), and also violent deaths in 'one-sided violence' (where there is only one organised aggressor, such as in genocidal violence).", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "We see that, in recent years, state-based conflicts form the majority of such deaths, though the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 stands out for its very high death-toll.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ucdp-deaths-in-conflicts-by-violence-type", "type": "chart", "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "The share of battle deaths is declining even faster", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 4, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "The previous two graphs showed absolute numbers, but as the world has seen rapid population growth (see our entry on\u00a0", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "http://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth/", "children": [ { "text": "global population growth", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": "), it is more appropriate to look at relative numbers. Here we show the battle deaths in state-based conflicts per 100,000 people per year.\u00a0The figures are shown by type of conflict.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rate-in-state-based-conflicts-by-conflict-type", "type": "chart", "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "A greater number of increasingly less-deadly conflicts", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 4, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "The stacked area chart here shows the number of ongoing conflicts each year has risen. This increase however only relates to civil conflicts within states. Conflicts related to the expansion or defence of colonial empires ended with decolonisation. Conflicts between states have almost ceased to exist.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-conflicts-and-incidences-of-one-sided-violence", "type": "chart", "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "But the number of war victims varies hugely between different wars: whereas 1,200,000 died during the the Korean War (1950\u20131953), other wars had 'just' 1,000 victims. For this reason, statistics on the number of wars need to be interpreted alongside data on the size of these conflicts.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "The increase in the number of wars is predominantly an increase of smaller conflicts. This follows from the previously shown declining number of war victims while the number of conflicts increased. The decreasing deadliness of conflicts can be seen in the bar chart.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "Deadliness of wars - average battle deaths per conflict by decade, 1950-2016", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 6, "parseErrors": [] }, { "alt": "", "size": "wide", "type": "image", "filename": "Deaths-per-battle-01.png", "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "The past was not peaceful", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 2, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "It would be wrong to believe that the past was peaceful. One reason why some people might have this impression is that many of the past conflicts feature less prominently in our memories; they are simply forgotten.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "The decline of wars between 'Great Powers'", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 4, "parseErrors": [] }, { "alt": "", "size": "wide", "type": "image", "filename": "Percentage-of-years-in-which-the-great-powers-fought-one-another-1500\u20132000.png", "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "Data Quality & Definition", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 2, "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "Counting world conflict deaths: why do sources differ?", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 3, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "To answer the question of how many people die in conflicts today, and how this has changed over time, we can turn to a number of different datasets.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Here we show\u00a0the world conflict death rate since 1989 according to five sources.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "The \u2018UCDP all\u2019 series is an aggregation of the deaths recorded in each of the three categories of conflict used by ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "url": "https://ucdp.uu.se/", "children": [ { "text": "Uppsala Conflict Data Program", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" }, { "text": ": state-based conflict, non-state conflict and one-sided violence. (We show the data for these categories separately ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace#other-forms-of-large-scale-violence", "children": [ { "text": "here", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": ").", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "We've summarised more information about the data sources and how we handled them to produce the chart above in a document,\u00a0", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "url": "https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/09/Notes-on-five-sources-of-the-world-conflict-death-rate-since-1989.pdf", "children": [ { "text": "World conflict deaths since 1989: Notes on five sources", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" }, { "text": ".", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "You see in the chart that there are certainly similarities across the different sources. Overall they show a decline in conflict deaths into the 2000s, followed by an increase in the 2010s.{ref}From country-level data we can see that this rise is driven largely by the war in Syria.{/ref}", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "But there are also large differences. Most noticeably, there is a large jump in 1994 \u2013 marking the Rwandan genocide \u2013 which is present in some series, but absent from others.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "If you look closely, you\u2019ll see that there are large relative differences between the series over the entire period as well, though they are understated by the 1994 peak. If you hover over the datapoints, you can see the exact figures: the highest figure for a given year is typically well more than double the lowest.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "What explains the differences?", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 4, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Discrepancies between different sources of conflict deaths data are partly to do with the differences in how the underlying source information\u00a0\u2013 for instance newswires, death registers, government or NGO reports, or indeed other conflict databases \u2013 are selected and interpreted.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "But they also reflect conceptual differences in terms of which deaths are and aren't included in the source's definition.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "And the differences reflect that conflict and deaths are not equally well-documented across world regions. Conflicts and deaths in Europe are often documented well, while this sometimes is less the case for conflicts in other regions, especially in Africa and Asia.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Below we relate some of the differences visible in the chart above in terms of some key conceptual differences lying along three dimensions: ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "Who", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" }, { "text": ", ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "How", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" }, { "text": "\u00a0and ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "What.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "The Who, How, and What of conflict deaths data", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 4, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "children": [ { "text": "Who:\u00a0", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-bold" }, { "children": [ { "text": "civillian vs military deaths", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "The ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "Correlates of War\u00a0", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" }, { "text": "series aims to include only deaths of military personnel, whereas the other sources capture \u2013 at least to some extent \u2013 civilian deaths too. As we would expect then, the ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "Correlates of War", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" }, { "text": "\u00a0figures are generally lower than the others.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "children": [ { "text": "How:", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-bold" }, { "children": [ { "text": " direct vs indirect deaths", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "In addition to those deaths caused directly by violence \u2013 for instance those from gunshot or explosions \u2013 a significant proportion of lives lost in conflict are ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "indirect", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" }, { "text": ": due to disease, starvation or exposure. This is particularly true where conflicts lead to famine or outbreaks of disease among the civilian population. But historically, such indirect deaths were also a major cause of military fatalities.{ref}For instance, roughly two-thirds of military fatalities in the American Civil War were due to disease, according to Sartin, 1993. Infectious Diseases During the Civil War: The Triumph of the \u201cThird Army\u201d. Clinical Infectious Diseases Vol. 16, No. 4.{/ref}", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "The UCDP and IHME data include only direct deaths. The ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "Correlates of War", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" }, { "text": " series includes military personnel that died from diseases 'contracted in the war theatre'. The ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "Conflict Catalog", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" }, { "text": " series (running to 2000 only) tries to include indirect deaths of both the military and civilian populations. Peter Brecke, the author of the dataset, however acknowledges that the degree to which this is in fact achieved varies considerably across conflicts.{ref}\u201cThe total fatalities estimates, I am sure, vary significantly in terms of the degree to which they include disease, starvation, etc.\u201d ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "http://www.cgeh.nl/sites/default/files/Notes%20about%20Conflict%20Catalog.pdf", "children": [ { "text": "Notes Regarding the Conflict Catalog", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": ", 2012{/ref}", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "children": [ { "text": "While indirect deaths represent a ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-fallback" }, { "url": "https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31437-5/fulltext", "children": [ { "children": [ { "text": "substantial proportion", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-fallback" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "children": [ { "text": " of the social costs of conflict, t", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-fallback" }, { "text": "here is a conceptual difficulty in drawing a consistent boundary between indirect deaths attributable to the conflict and those due to other factors. For instance, whilst famines are often triggered by conflicts, ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/famines#why-do-famines-occur", "children": [ { "text": "many factors contribute", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": " to their onset and severity, such as the level of sanitation or the transportation infrastructure present.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Brecke does not attempt to provide a clear-cut definition, and this conceptual boundary has been largely dictated by the available primary sources he used in each estimate. Nevertheless, as we would expect, the death rates reported in the ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "Conflict Catalog", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" }, { "text": " do come out the highest.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "children": [ { "text": "What:", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-bold" }, { "children": [ { "text": "state involvement and one-sided violence", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Across the various sources there three broad ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "kinds", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" }, { "text": " of violent event distinguished: state-based conflict, non-state conflict and one-sided violence. The kind of event depends on the type of actors involved. State-based conflict is that involving at least one state-actor, and includes conflicts between states (\"inter-state\" conflicts) and those between a state and non-state actor (\"extra-state\" conflicts), such as civil wars or colonial wars.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Non-state actors are those that demonstrate a degree of coordinated military organisation but whose identity falls short of statehood. Non-state conflicts are those between two or more non-state actors, with no state involvement.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "\u2018One-sided violence\u2019 on the other hand is where one organized actor (either a state or non-state group) attacks people that do not have any organized military capability to defend themselves, as in the case of genocide or '", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politicide", "children": [ { "text": "politicide", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": "'.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "The ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "UCDP state-based", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" }, { "text": " and ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "Correlates of War", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" }, { "text": " series do not include such events. It is for this reason that they do not show the jump in 1994 that marks the Rwandan genocide.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Here we picture the definitions used in the various sources across these three dimensions.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "alt": "", "size": "wide", "type": "image", "filename": "Five-sources-cube.png", "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "Are deaths from terrorism included in counts of conflict deaths?", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 4, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "There are also efforts to collect data specifically on the number of people dying from acts of ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "terrorism", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" }, { "text": " \u2013 this is discussed in our entry on ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism", "children": [ { "text": "Terrorism", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": ".", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "How does the concept of terrorism relate to the concepts of conflict used in the data shown above? To what extent are terrorism deaths included in this data?", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "In general, definitions of terrorism include only violent episodes that are carried out by ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "non-state", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" }, { "text": " actors, and definitions often emphasise events where civilians or to military personnel who are unarmed or not on duty are the target.{ref}See for instance the definitions employed by the Global Terrorism Database, discussed ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism#the-criteria-for-terrorism", "children": [ { "text": "here in our entry on Terrorism", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": ". {/ref}", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "As such, definitions of conflict deaths that include both civilian deaths and deaths caused by non-state actors will include a large fraction of the deaths normally attributed to terrorism. That is true for instance of the \u2018UCDP all\u2019 series in the charts shown above. This dataset, for example, includes direct deaths occurring in the September 11 attacks in the United States, and in the Taliban insurgency following the 2001 war in Afghanistan.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "There are however some situations where deaths that would fall under typical definitions of terrorism might not get included even in the UCDP\u2019s broad definition of conflict. In particular, as mentioned above, the UCDP classification system has a requirement that non-state actors must have a certain degree of institutional organisation for an event to be included in its dataset. Deaths caused by attackers falling below this threshold of organisation \u2013 such as in \u2019lone wolf\u2019 attacks perpetrated by ideologically-motivated individuals \u2013 would not be included in the UCDP data but might fit under common definitions of terrorism.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Because deaths due to conflict and terrorism can be attributed and grouped into \u2019events\u2019 or \u2018episodes\u2019 in different ways in different datasets, it is difficult to make direct comparisons and know exactly the extent to which deaths included in one dataset are included or excluded in another. But because the ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "larger", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" }, { "text": " events that would fall under typical definitions of terrorism \u2013 for instance those that are conducted by well-organised groups or are part of long-running insurgencies \u2013 will also be included in broad definitions of conflict like those used by UCDP, the latter are likely to include the majority of deaths commonly attributed to terrorism.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "Data Sources", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 2, "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "children": [ { "text": "Uppsala Conflict Database Program / Peace Research Institute Oslo", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-bold" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 4, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "list", "items": [ { "type": "text", "value": [ { "children": [ { "text": "Data:", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-bold" }, { "text": " Armed conflicts, non-state conflicts, one-sided violence, and battle-related deaths", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "children": [ { "text": "Geographical coverage: ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-bold" }, { "text": "Global", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "children": [ { "text": "Time span:", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-bold" }, { "text": " since 1946 (armed conflicts, battle deaths), since 1989 (non-state conflicts, one-sided violence, battle-related deaths)", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "children": [ { "text": "Available at:", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-bold" }, { "text": " Online ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "https://ucdp.uu.se/downloads/", "children": [ { "text": "here", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": " and ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "https://www.prio.org/data/1", "children": [ { "text": "here", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" } ], "parseErrors": [] } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "children": [ { "text": "The Correlates of War Project", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-bold" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 4, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "list", "items": [ { "type": "text", "value": [ { "children": [ { "text": "Data:", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-bold" }, { "text": " Inter-state, intra-state, non-state, and extra-state wars", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "children": [ { "text": "Geographical coverage:\u00a0", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-bold" }, { "text": "Global", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "children": [ { "text": "Time span:", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-bold" }, { "text": "\u00a01816-2007", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "children": [ { "text": "Available at:", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-bold" }, { "text": "\u00a0Online\u00a0", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "https://correlatesofwar.org/data-sets/COW-war", "children": [ { "text": "here", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" } ], "parseErrors": [] } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "children": [ { "text": "Peter Brecke's Conflict Catalog", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-bold" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 4, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "list", "items": [ { "type": "text", "value": [ { "children": [ { "text": "Data:", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-bold" }, { "text": "\u00a0Conflicts", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "children": [ { "text": "Geographical coverage:\u00a0", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-bold" }, { "text": "Global", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "children": [ { "text": "Time span:", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-bold" }, { "text": "\u00a01400-2000", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "children": [ { "text": "Available at:", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-bold" }, { "text": "\u00a0Online\u00a0", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "https://brecke.inta.gatech.edu/research/conflict/", "children": [ { "text": "here", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "url": "http://www.cgeh.nl/data#conflict", "children": [], "spanType": "span-link" } ], "parseErrors": [] } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "children": [ { "text": "Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation / Global Burden of Disease", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-bold" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 4, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "list", "items": [ { "type": "text", "value": [ { "children": [ { "text": "Data:", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-bold" }, { "text": " Deaths from conflict and terrorism", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "children": [ { "text": "Geographical coverage: ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-bold" }, { "text": "Global", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "children": [ { "text": "Time span:", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-bold" }, { "text": " since 1990", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "children": [ { "text": "Available at:", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-bold" }, { "text": " Online ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "http://ghdx.healthdata.org/gbd-results-tool", "children": [ { "text": "here", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" } ], "parseErrors": [] } ], "parseErrors": [] } ], "type": "article", "title": "War and Peace", "authors": [ "Max Roser", "Joe Hasell", "Bastian Herre", "Bobbie Macdonald" ], "excerpt": "Humans are capable of atrocious cruelty \u2013 the history of war makes this all too clear. How many died in war? And what are the prospects for making the world more peaceful?", "dateline": "December 13, 2016", "subtitle": "Humans are capable of atrocious cruelty \u2013 the history of war makes this all too clear. How many died in war? And what are the prospects for making the world more peaceful?", "sidebar-toc": false, "featured-image": "Screenshot-2022-02-28-at-19.34.31.png" }, "createdAt": "2022-02-24T11:26:48.000Z", "published": false, "updatedAt": "2023-11-09T12:53:25.000Z", "revisionId": null, "publishedAt": "2016-12-13T10:53:18.000Z", "relatedCharts": [], "publicationContext": "listed" } |
{ "errors": [ { "name": "unexpected wp component tag", "details": "Found unhandled wp:comment tag image" }, { "name": "unexpected wp component tag", "details": "Found unhandled wp:comment tag image" }, { "name": "unexpected wp component tag", "details": "Found unhandled wp:comment tag image" }, { "name": "unexpected wp component tag", "details": "Found unhandled wp:comment tag list" }, { "name": "unexpected wp component tag", "details": "Found unhandled wp:comment tag list" }, { "name": "unexpected wp component tag", "details": "Found unhandled wp:comment tag list" }, { "name": "unexpected wp component tag", "details": "Found unhandled wp:comment tag list" } ], "numBlocks": 67, "numErrors": 7, "wpTagCounts": { "html": 5, "list": 4, "image": 3, "column": 6, "columns": 3, "heading": 18, "paragraph": 43 }, "htmlTagCounts": { "p": 43, "h2": 4, "h3": 1, "h4": 12, "h6": 1, "ul": 4, "div": 12, "figure": 6, "iframe": 5 } } |
2016-12-13 10:53:18 | 2024-02-16 14:22:38 | [ "Max Roser", "Joe Hasell", "Bastian Herre", "Bobbie Macdonald" ] |
Humans are capable of atrocious cruelty – the history of war makes this all too clear. How many died in war? And what are the prospects for making the world more peaceful? | 2022-02-24 11:26:48 | 2023-11-09 12:53:25 | https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Screenshot-2022-02-28-at-19.34.31.png | {} |
This topic page presents an empirical perspective on the history of war and peace. ## War and Peace after 1945 #### The absolute number of war deaths has declined since 1945 The absolute number of war deaths has been declining since 1946. In some years in the early post-war era, around half a million people died through direct violence in wars. In recent years, the annual death toll tends to be less than 100,000. The decline of the absolute number of battle deaths can be seen in the first visualization here that shows global battle deaths per year by world region, which pulls together data from two sources: more recent data from the [Uppsala Conflict Data Program](https://ucdp.uu.se/encyclopedia) (UCDP) and older data from the [Peace Research Institute Oslo](https://www.prio.org/data/1) (PRIO). We see three marked peaks in war deaths since the end of World War II: the Korean War (early 1950s), the Vietnam War (around 1970), and the Iran-Iraq and Afghanistan wars (1980s). The 2010s were also a period of high battle-deaths, driven by the conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Within the sources on which this chart draws, the region of the conflict has been coded in quite a particular way, relating to the source's methodology for identifying and distinguishing conflicts. In most instances, the region attributed to the conflict will be the same region as where the fighting took place. But in some cases it refers to the region where the armed forces fighting in the conflict have come from.{ref}You can read more about how region is defined within [the codebook](https://ucdp.uu.se/downloads/brd/ucdp-brd-codebook-221.pdf) that accompanies the UCDP Battle-related Deaths Dataset on which this chart draws.{/ref} In a second chart here, we show a similar breakdown but where the region is defined exclusively in terms of where the fighting actually took place. This 'geo-referenced' data is available only in the UCDP data from 1989. Comparing the charts for this later period, we see that the regional breakdowns are very similar across the two approaches used to attribute conflicts to regions. <Chart url="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/battle-related-deaths-in-state-based-conflicts-since-1946-by-world-region"/> <Chart url="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-state-based-conflicts-by-world-region-ucdp-since-1989"/> #### Other forms of large-scale violence The chart above refers only to battle deaths occurring in conflicts that involved at least one state on one of the opposing sides. For more recent years, we show these 'state-based' conflict deaths alongside battle deaths in 'non-state' conflicts (where two or more organisations are fighting but no state is involved), and also violent deaths in 'one-sided violence' (where there is only one organised aggressor, such as in genocidal violence). We see that, in recent years, state-based conflicts form the majority of such deaths, though the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 stands out for its very high death-toll. <Chart url="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ucdp-deaths-in-conflicts-by-violence-type"/> #### The share of battle deaths is declining even faster The previous two graphs showed absolute numbers, but as the world has seen rapid population growth (see our entry on [global population growth](http://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth/)), it is more appropriate to look at relative numbers. Here we show the battle deaths in state-based conflicts per 100,000 people per year. The figures are shown by type of conflict. <Chart url="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rate-in-state-based-conflicts-by-conflict-type"/> #### A greater number of increasingly less-deadly conflicts The stacked area chart here shows the number of ongoing conflicts each year has risen. This increase however only relates to civil conflicts within states. Conflicts related to the expansion or defence of colonial empires ended with decolonisation. Conflicts between states have almost ceased to exist. <Chart url="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-conflicts-and-incidences-of-one-sided-violence"/> But the number of war victims varies hugely between different wars: whereas 1,200,000 died during the the Korean War (1950–1953), other wars had 'just' 1,000 victims. For this reason, statistics on the number of wars need to be interpreted alongside data on the size of these conflicts. The increase in the number of wars is predominantly an increase of smaller conflicts. This follows from the previously shown declining number of war victims while the number of conflicts increased. The decreasing deadliness of conflicts can be seen in the bar chart. ###### Deadliness of wars - average battle deaths per conflict by decade, 1950-2016 <Image filename="Deaths-per-battle-01.png" alt=""/> ## The past was not peaceful It would be wrong to believe that the past was peaceful. One reason why some people might have this impression is that many of the past conflicts feature less prominently in our memories; they are simply forgotten. #### The decline of wars between 'Great Powers' <Image filename="Percentage-of-years-in-which-the-great-powers-fought-one-another-1500–2000.png" alt=""/> ## Data Quality & Definition ### Counting world conflict deaths: why do sources differ? To answer the question of how many people die in conflicts today, and how this has changed over time, we can turn to a number of different datasets. Here we show the world conflict death rate since 1989 according to five sources. The ‘UCDP all’ series is an aggregation of the deaths recorded in each of the three categories of conflict used by _[Uppsala Conflict Data Program](https://ucdp.uu.se/)_: state-based conflict, non-state conflict and one-sided violence. (We show the data for these categories separately [here](https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace#other-forms-of-large-scale-violence)). We've summarised more information about the data sources and how we handled them to produce the chart above in a document, _[World conflict deaths since 1989: Notes on five sources](https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/09/Notes-on-five-sources-of-the-world-conflict-death-rate-since-1989.pdf)_. You see in the chart that there are certainly similarities across the different sources. Overall they show a decline in conflict deaths into the 2000s, followed by an increase in the 2010s.{ref}From country-level data we can see that this rise is driven largely by the war in Syria.{/ref} But there are also large differences. Most noticeably, there is a large jump in 1994 – marking the Rwandan genocide – which is present in some series, but absent from others. If you look closely, you’ll see that there are large relative differences between the series over the entire period as well, though they are understated by the 1994 peak. If you hover over the datapoints, you can see the exact figures: the highest figure for a given year is typically well more than double the lowest. #### What explains the differences? Discrepancies between different sources of conflict deaths data are partly to do with the differences in how the underlying source information – for instance newswires, death registers, government or NGO reports, or indeed other conflict databases – are selected and interpreted. But they also reflect conceptual differences in terms of which deaths are and aren't included in the source's definition. And the differences reflect that conflict and deaths are not equally well-documented across world regions. Conflicts and deaths in Europe are often documented well, while this sometimes is less the case for conflicts in other regions, especially in Africa and Asia. Below we relate some of the differences visible in the chart above in terms of some key conceptual differences lying along three dimensions: _Who_, _How_ and _What._ #### The Who, How, and What of conflict deaths data **Who: **_civillian vs military deaths_ The _Correlates of War _series aims to include only deaths of military personnel, whereas the other sources capture – at least to some extent – civilian deaths too. As we would expect then, the _Correlates of War_ figures are generally lower than the others. **How:**_ direct vs indirect deaths_ In addition to those deaths caused directly by violence – for instance those from gunshot or explosions – a significant proportion of lives lost in conflict are _indirect_: due to disease, starvation or exposure. This is particularly true where conflicts lead to famine or outbreaks of disease among the civilian population. But historically, such indirect deaths were also a major cause of military fatalities.{ref}For instance, roughly two-thirds of military fatalities in the American Civil War were due to disease, according to Sartin, 1993. Infectious Diseases During the Civil War: The Triumph of the “Third Army”. Clinical Infectious Diseases Vol. 16, No. 4.{/ref} The UCDP and IHME data include only direct deaths. The _Correlates of War_ series includes military personnel that died from diseases 'contracted in the war theatre'. The _Conflict Catalog_ series (running to 2000 only) tries to include indirect deaths of both the military and civilian populations. Peter Brecke, the author of the dataset, however acknowledges that the degree to which this is in fact achieved varies considerably across conflicts.{ref}“The total fatalities estimates, I am sure, vary significantly in terms of the degree to which they include disease, starvation, etc.” [Notes Regarding the Conflict Catalog](http://www.cgeh.nl/sites/default/files/Notes%20about%20Conflict%20Catalog.pdf), 2012{/ref} While indirect deaths represent a [substantial proportion](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31437-5/fulltext) of the social costs of conflict, there is a conceptual difficulty in drawing a consistent boundary between indirect deaths attributable to the conflict and those due to other factors. For instance, whilst famines are often triggered by conflicts, [many factors contribute](https://ourworldindata.org/famines#why-do-famines-occur) to their onset and severity, such as the level of sanitation or the transportation infrastructure present. Brecke does not attempt to provide a clear-cut definition, and this conceptual boundary has been largely dictated by the available primary sources he used in each estimate. Nevertheless, as we would expect, the death rates reported in the _Conflict Catalog_ do come out the highest. **What:**_state involvement and one-sided violence_ Across the various sources there three broad _kinds_ of violent event distinguished: state-based conflict, non-state conflict and one-sided violence. The kind of event depends on the type of actors involved. State-based conflict is that involving at least one state-actor, and includes conflicts between states ("inter-state" conflicts) and those between a state and non-state actor ("extra-state" conflicts), such as civil wars or colonial wars. Non-state actors are those that demonstrate a degree of coordinated military organisation but whose identity falls short of statehood. Non-state conflicts are those between two or more non-state actors, with no state involvement. ‘One-sided violence’ on the other hand is where one organized actor (either a state or non-state group) attacks people that do not have any organized military capability to defend themselves, as in the case of genocide or '[politicide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politicide)'. The _UCDP state-based_ and _Correlates of War_ series do not include such events. It is for this reason that they do not show the jump in 1994 that marks the Rwandan genocide. Here we picture the definitions used in the various sources across these three dimensions. <Image filename="Five-sources-cube.png" alt=""/> #### Are deaths from terrorism included in counts of conflict deaths? There are also efforts to collect data specifically on the number of people dying from acts of _terrorism_ – this is discussed in our entry on [Terrorism](https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism). How does the concept of terrorism relate to the concepts of conflict used in the data shown above? To what extent are terrorism deaths included in this data? In general, definitions of terrorism include only violent episodes that are carried out by _non-state_ actors, and definitions often emphasise events where civilians or to military personnel who are unarmed or not on duty are the target.{ref}See for instance the definitions employed by the Global Terrorism Database, discussed [here in our entry on Terrorism](https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism#the-criteria-for-terrorism). {/ref} As such, definitions of conflict deaths that include both civilian deaths and deaths caused by non-state actors will include a large fraction of the deaths normally attributed to terrorism. That is true for instance of the ‘UCDP all’ series in the charts shown above. This dataset, for example, includes direct deaths occurring in the September 11 attacks in the United States, and in the Taliban insurgency following the 2001 war in Afghanistan. There are however some situations where deaths that would fall under typical definitions of terrorism might not get included even in the UCDP’s broad definition of conflict. In particular, as mentioned above, the UCDP classification system has a requirement that non-state actors must have a certain degree of institutional organisation for an event to be included in its dataset. Deaths caused by attackers falling below this threshold of organisation – such as in ’lone wolf’ attacks perpetrated by ideologically-motivated individuals – would not be included in the UCDP data but might fit under common definitions of terrorism. Because deaths due to conflict and terrorism can be attributed and grouped into ’events’ or ‘episodes’ in different ways in different datasets, it is difficult to make direct comparisons and know exactly the extent to which deaths included in one dataset are included or excluded in another. But because the _larger_ events that would fall under typical definitions of terrorism – for instance those that are conducted by well-organised groups or are part of long-running insurgencies – will also be included in broad definitions of conflict like those used by UCDP, the latter are likely to include the majority of deaths commonly attributed to terrorism. ## Data Sources #### **Uppsala Conflict Database Program / Peace Research Institute Oslo** * **Data:** Armed conflicts, non-state conflicts, one-sided violence, and battle-related deaths * **Geographical coverage: **Global * **Time span:** since 1946 (armed conflicts, battle deaths), since 1989 (non-state conflicts, one-sided violence, battle-related deaths) * **Available at:** Online [here](https://ucdp.uu.se/downloads/) and [here](https://www.prio.org/data/1) #### **The Correlates of War Project** * **Data:** Inter-state, intra-state, non-state, and extra-state wars * **Geographical coverage: **Global * **Time span:** 1816-2007 * **Available at:** Online [here](https://correlatesofwar.org/data-sets/COW-war) #### **Peter Brecke's Conflict Catalog** * **Data:** Conflicts * **Geographical coverage: **Global * **Time span:** 1400-2000 * **Available at:** Online [here](https://brecke.inta.gatech.edu/research/conflict/)[](http://www.cgeh.nl/data#conflict) #### **Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation / Global Burden of Disease** * **Data:** Deaths from conflict and terrorism * **Geographical coverage: **Global * **Time span:** since 1990 * **Available at:** Online [here](http://ghdx.healthdata.org/gbd-results-tool) | { "id": 9678, "date": "2016-12-13T10:53:18", "guid": { "rendered": "https://ourworldindata.org/?page_id=9678" }, "link": "https://owid.cloud/war-and-peace", "meta": { "owid_publication_context_meta_field": [], "owid_key_performance_indicators_meta_field": { "raw": "* Over the last decade the annual number of deaths from conflicts was **100,000** globally.", "rendered": "<ul>\n<li>Over the last decade the annual number of deaths from conflicts was <strong>100,000</strong> globally.</li>\n</ul>\n" } }, "slug": "war-and-peace", "tags": [], "type": "page", "title": { "rendered": "War and Peace" }, "_links": { "self": [ { "href": "https://owid.cloud/wp-json/wp/v2/pages/9678" } ], "about": [ { "href": "https://owid.cloud/wp-json/wp/v2/types/page" } ], "author": [ { "href": "https://owid.cloud/wp-json/wp/v2/users/2", "embeddable": true } ], "curies": [ { "href": "https://api.w.org/{rel}", "name": "wp", "templated": true } ], "replies": [ { "href": "https://owid.cloud/wp-json/wp/v2/comments?post=9678", "embeddable": true } ], "wp:term": [ { "href": "https://owid.cloud/wp-json/wp/v2/categories?post=9678", "taxonomy": "category", "embeddable": true }, { "href": "https://owid.cloud/wp-json/wp/v2/tags?post=9678", "taxonomy": "post_tag", "embeddable": true } ], "collection": [ { "href": "https://owid.cloud/wp-json/wp/v2/pages" } ], "wp:attachment": [ { "href": "https://owid.cloud/wp-json/wp/v2/media?parent=9678" } ], "version-history": [ { "href": "https://owid.cloud/wp-json/wp/v2/pages/9678/revisions", "count": 29 } ], "wp:featuredmedia": [ { "href": "https://owid.cloud/wp-json/wp/v2/media/49645", "embeddable": true } ], "predecessor-version": [ { "id": 58445, "href": "https://owid.cloud/wp-json/wp/v2/pages/9678/revisions/58445" } ] }, "author": 2, "parent": 0, "status": "publish", "content": { "rendered": "\n<p>This topic page presents an empirical perspective on the history of war and peace. </p>\n\n\n\n<h2>War and Peace after 1945</h2>\n\n\n\n<h4>The absolute number of war deaths has declined since 1945</h4>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-columns\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-column\">\n<p>The absolute number of war deaths has been declining since 1946. In some years in the early post-war era, around half a million people died through direct violence in wars. In recent years, the annual death toll tends to be less than 100,000.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The decline of the absolute number of battle deaths can be seen in the first visualization here that shows global battle deaths per year by world region, which pulls together data from two sources: more recent data from the <a href=\"https://ucdp.uu.se/encyclopedia\">Uppsala Conflict Data Program</a> (UCDP) and older data from the <a href=\"https://www.prio.org/data/1\">Peace Research Institute Oslo</a> (PRIO). We see three marked peaks in war deaths since the end of World War II: the Korean War (early 1950s), the Vietnam War (around 1970), and the Iran-Iraq and Afghanistan wars (1980s). The 2010s were also a period of high battle-deaths, driven by the conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Within the sources on which this chart draws, the region of the conflict has been coded in quite a particular way, relating to the source’s methodology for identifying and distinguishing conflicts. In most instances, the region attributed to the conflict will be the same region as where the fighting took place. But in some cases it refers to the region where the armed forces fighting in the conflict have come from.{ref}You can read more about how region is defined within <a href=\"https://ucdp.uu.se/downloads/brd/ucdp-brd-codebook-221.pdf\">the codebook</a> that accompanies the UCDP Battle-related Deaths Dataset on which this chart draws.{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<p>In a second chart here, we show a similar breakdown but where the region is defined exclusively in terms of where the fighting actually took place. This ‘geo-referenced’ data is available only in the UCDP data from 1989. Comparing the charts for this later period, we see that the regional breakdowns are very similar across the two approaches used to attribute conflicts to regions.</p>\n</div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-column\">\n<figure><iframe style=\"width: 100%; height: 600px; border: 0px none;\" src=\"https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/battle-related-deaths-in-state-based-conflicts-since-1946-by-world-region\"></iframe></figure>\n\n\n\n<iframe src=\"https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-state-based-conflicts-by-world-region-ucdp-since-1989\" loading=\"lazy\" style=\"width: 100%; height: 600px; border: 0px none;\"></iframe>\n</div>\n</div>\n\n\n\n<h4>Other forms of large-scale violence</h4>\n\n\n\n<p>The chart above refers only to battle deaths occurring in conflicts that involved at least one state on one of the opposing sides. For more recent years, we show these ‘state-based’ conflict deaths alongside battle deaths in ‘non-state’ conflicts (where two or more organisations are fighting but no state is involved), and also violent deaths in ‘one-sided violence’ (where there is only one organised aggressor, such as in genocidal violence).</p>\n\n\n\n<p>We see that, in recent years, state-based conflicts form the majority of such deaths, though the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 stands out for its very high death-toll.</p>\n\n\n\n<iframe src=\"https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ucdp-deaths-in-conflicts-by-violence-type\" loading=\"lazy\" style=\"width: 100%; height: 600px; border: 0px none;\"></iframe>\n\n\n\n<h4>The share of battle deaths is declining even faster</h4>\n\n\n\n<p>The previous two graphs showed absolute numbers, but as the world has seen rapid population growth (see our entry on <a title=\"World Population Growth\" href=\"http://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth/\">global population growth</a>), it is more appropriate to look at relative numbers. Here we show the battle deaths in state-based conflicts per 100,000 people per year. The figures are shown by type of conflict.</p>\n\n\n\n<figure><iframe style=\"width: 100%; height: 600px; border: 0px none;\" src=\"https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rate-in-state-based-conflicts-by-conflict-type\"></iframe></figure>\n\n\n\n<h4>A greater number of increasingly less-deadly conflicts</h4>\n\n\n\n<p>The stacked area chart here shows the number of ongoing conflicts each year has risen. This increase however only relates to civil conflicts within states. Conflicts related to the expansion or defence of colonial empires ended with decolonisation. Conflicts between states have almost ceased to exist.</p>\n\n\n\n<figure><iframe style=\"width: 100%; height: 600px; border: 0px none;\" src=\"https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-conflicts-and-incidences-of-one-sided-violence\"></iframe></figure>\n\n\n\n<p>But the number of war victims varies hugely between different wars: whereas 1,200,000 died during the the Korean War (1950\u20131953), other wars had ‘just’ 1,000 victims. For this reason, statistics on the number of wars need to be interpreted alongside data on the size of these conflicts.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The increase in the number of wars is predominantly an increase of smaller conflicts. This follows from the previously shown declining number of war victims while the number of conflicts increased. The decreasing deadliness of conflicts can be seen in the bar chart.</p>\n\n\n\n<h6>Deadliness of wars – average battle deaths per conflict by decade, 1950-2016</h6>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/05/Deaths-per-battle-01.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"750\" height=\"512\" src=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/05/Deaths-per-battle-01-750x512.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-19036\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/05/Deaths-per-battle-01-750x512.png 750w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/05/Deaths-per-battle-01-150x102.png 150w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/05/Deaths-per-battle-01-400x273.png 400w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/05/Deaths-per-battle-01-768x525.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\" /></a></figure></div>\n\n\n\n<h2>The past was not peaceful</h2>\n\n\n\n<p>It would be wrong to believe that the past was peaceful. One reason why some people might have this impression is that many of the past conflicts feature less prominently in our memories; they are simply forgotten.</p>\n\n\n\n<h4>The decline of wars between ‘Great Powers’</h4>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-columns\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-column\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"709\" height=\"550\" src=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2022/04/Percentage-of-years-in-which-the-great-powers-fought-one-another-1500\u20132000-709x550.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-50750\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2022/04/Percentage-of-years-in-which-the-great-powers-fought-one-another-1500\u20132000-709x550.png 709w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2022/04/Percentage-of-years-in-which-the-great-powers-fought-one-another-1500\u20132000-400x310.png 400w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2022/04/Percentage-of-years-in-which-the-great-powers-fought-one-another-1500\u20132000-150x116.png 150w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2022/04/Percentage-of-years-in-which-the-great-powers-fought-one-another-1500\u20132000-768x595.png 768w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2022/04/Percentage-of-years-in-which-the-great-powers-fought-one-another-1500\u20132000-1536x1191.png 1536w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2022/04/Percentage-of-years-in-which-the-great-powers-fought-one-another-1500\u20132000-2048x1588.png 2048w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 709px) 100vw, 709px\" /></figure></div>\n</div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-column\"></div>\n</div>\n\n\n\n<h2>Data Quality & Definition</h2>\n\n\n\n<h3>Counting world conflict deaths: why do sources differ?</h3>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-columns\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-column\">\n<p>To answer the question of how many people die in conflicts today, and how this has changed over time, we can turn to a number of different datasets.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here we show the world conflict death rate since 1989 according to five sources.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The \u2018UCDP all\u2019 series is an aggregation of the deaths recorded in each of the three categories of conflict used by <em><a href=\"https://ucdp.uu.se/\">Uppsala Conflict Data Program</a></em>: state-based conflict, non-state conflict and one-sided violence. (We show the data for these categories separately <a href=\"https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace#other-forms-of-large-scale-violence\">here</a>).</p>\n\n\n\n<p>We’ve summarised more information about the data sources and how we handled them to produce the chart above in a document, <em><a href=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/09/Notes-on-five-sources-of-the-world-conflict-death-rate-since-1989.pdf\">World conflict deaths since 1989: Notes on five sources</a></em>.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>You see in the chart that there are certainly similarities across the different sources. Overall they show a decline in conflict deaths into the 2000s, followed by an increase in the 2010s.{ref}From country-level data we can see that this rise is driven largely by the war in Syria.{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<p>But there are also large differences. Most noticeably, there is a large jump in 1994 \u2013 marking the Rwandan genocide \u2013 which is present in some series, but absent from others.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you look closely, you\u2019ll see that there are large relative differences between the series over the entire period as well, though they are understated by the 1994 peak. If you hover over the datapoints, you can see the exact figures: the highest figure for a given year is typically well more than double the lowest.</p>\n</div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-column\">\n<p></p>\n</div>\n</div>\n\n\n\n<h4>What explains the differences?</h4>\n\n\n\n<p>Discrepancies between different sources of conflict deaths data are partly to do with the differences in how the underlying source information \u2013 for instance newswires, death registers, government or NGO reports, or indeed other conflict databases \u2013 are selected and interpreted.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>But they also reflect conceptual differences in terms of which deaths are and aren’t included in the source’s definition.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And the differences reflect that conflict and deaths are not equally well-documented across world regions. Conflicts and deaths in Europe are often documented well, while this sometimes is less the case for conflicts in other regions, especially in Africa and Asia.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Below we relate some of the differences visible in the chart above in terms of some key conceptual differences lying along three dimensions: <em>Who</em>, <em>How</em> and <em>What.</em></p>\n\n\n\n<h4>The Who, How, and What of conflict deaths data</h4>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Who: </strong><em>civillian vs military deaths</em></p>\n\n\n\n<p>The <em>Correlates of War </em>series aims to include only deaths of military personnel, whereas the other sources capture \u2013 at least to some extent \u2013 civilian deaths too. As we would expect then, the <em>Correlates of War</em> figures are generally lower than the others.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>How:</strong><em> direct vs indirect deaths</em></p>\n\n\n\n<p>In addition to those deaths caused directly by violence \u2013 for instance those from gunshot or explosions \u2013 a significant proportion of lives lost in conflict are <em>indirect</em>: due to disease, starvation or exposure. This is particularly true where conflicts lead to famine or outbreaks of disease among the civilian population. But historically, such indirect deaths were also a major cause of military fatalities.{ref}For instance, roughly two-thirds of military fatalities in the American Civil War were due to disease, according to Sartin, 1993. Infectious Diseases During the Civil War: The Triumph of the \u201cThird Army\u201d. Clinical Infectious Diseases Vol. 16, No. 4.{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The UCDP and IHME data include only direct deaths. The <em>Correlates of War</em> series includes military personnel that died from diseases ‘contracted in the war theatre’. The <em>Conflict Catalog</em> series (running to 2000 only) tries to include indirect deaths of both the military and civilian populations. Peter Brecke, the author of the dataset, however acknowledges that the degree to which this is in fact achieved varies considerably across conflicts.{ref}\u201cThe total fatalities estimates, I am sure, vary significantly in terms of the degree to which they include disease, starvation, etc.\u201d <a href=\"http://www.cgeh.nl/sites/default/files/Notes%20about%20Conflict%20Catalog.pdf\">Notes Regarding the Conflict Catalog</a>, 2012{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">While indirect deaths represent a </span><a href=\"https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31437-5/fulltext\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">substantial proportion</span></a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> of the social costs of conflict, t</span>here is a conceptual difficulty in drawing a consistent boundary between indirect deaths attributable to the conflict and those due to other factors. For instance, whilst famines are often triggered by conflicts, <a href=\"https://ourworldindata.org/famines#why-do-famines-occur\">many factors contribute</a> to their onset and severity, such as the level of sanitation or the transportation infrastructure present.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Brecke does not attempt to provide a clear-cut definition, and this conceptual boundary has been largely dictated by the available primary sources he used in each estimate. Nevertheless, as we would expect, the death rates reported in the <em>Conflict Catalog</em> do come out the highest.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>What:</strong> <em>state involvement and one-sided violence</em></p>\n\n\n\n<p>Across the various sources there three broad <em>kinds</em> of violent event distinguished: state-based conflict, non-state conflict and one-sided violence. The kind of event depends on the type of actors involved. State-based conflict is that involving at least one state-actor, and includes conflicts between states (“inter-state” conflicts) and those between a state and non-state actor (“extra-state” conflicts), such as civil wars or colonial wars.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Non-state actors are those that demonstrate a degree of coordinated military organisation but whose identity falls short of statehood. Non-state conflicts are those between two or more non-state actors, with no state involvement.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u2018One-sided violence\u2019 on the other hand is where one organized actor (either a state or non-state group) attacks people that do not have any organized military capability to defend themselves, as in the case of genocide or ‘<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politicide\">politicide</a>‘.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The <em>UCDP state-based</em> and <em>Correlates of War</em> series do not include such events. It is for this reason that they do not show the jump in 1994 that marks the Rwandan genocide.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here we picture the definitions used in the various sources across these three dimensions.</p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/09/Five-sources-cube.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"3510\" height=\"2822\" src=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/09/Five-sources-cube.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-20481\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/09/Five-sources-cube.png 3510w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/09/Five-sources-cube-150x121.png 150w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/09/Five-sources-cube-400x322.png 400w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/09/Five-sources-cube-768x617.png 768w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/09/Five-sources-cube-684x550.png 684w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 3510px) 100vw, 3510px\" /></a></figure></div>\n\n\n\n<h4>Are deaths from terrorism included in counts of conflict deaths?</h4>\n\n\n\n<p>There are also efforts to collect data specifically on the number of people dying from acts of <em>terrorism</em> \u2013 this is discussed in our entry on <a href=\"https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism\">Terrorism</a>.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>How does the concept of terrorism relate to the concepts of conflict used in the data shown above? To what extent are terrorism deaths included in this data?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>In general, definitions of terrorism include only violent episodes that are carried out by <em>non-state</em> actors, and definitions often emphasise events where civilians or to military personnel who are unarmed or not on duty are the target.{ref}See for instance the definitions employed by the Global Terrorism Database, discussed <a href=\"https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism#the-criteria-for-terrorism\">here in our entry on Terrorism</a>. {/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<p>As such, definitions of conflict deaths that include both civilian deaths and deaths caused by non-state actors will include a large fraction of the deaths normally attributed to terrorism. That is true for instance of the \u2018UCDP all\u2019 series in the charts shown above. This dataset, for example, includes direct deaths occurring in the September 11 attacks in the United States, and in the Taliban insurgency following the 2001 war in Afghanistan.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>There are however some situations where deaths that would fall under typical definitions of terrorism might not get included even in the UCDP\u2019s broad definition of conflict. In particular, as mentioned above, the UCDP classification system has a requirement that non-state actors must have a certain degree of institutional organisation for an event to be included in its dataset. Deaths caused by attackers falling below this threshold of organisation \u2013 such as in \u2019lone wolf\u2019 attacks perpetrated by ideologically-motivated individuals \u2013 would not be included in the UCDP data but might fit under common definitions of terrorism.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because deaths due to conflict and terrorism can be attributed and grouped into \u2019events\u2019 or \u2018episodes\u2019 in different ways in different datasets, it is difficult to make direct comparisons and know exactly the extent to which deaths included in one dataset are included or excluded in another. But because the <em>larger</em> events that would fall under typical definitions of terrorism \u2013 for instance those that are conducted by well-organised groups or are part of long-running insurgencies \u2013 will also be included in broad definitions of conflict like those used by UCDP, the latter are likely to include the majority of deaths commonly attributed to terrorism.</p>\n\n\n\n<h2>Data Sources</h2>\n\n\n\n<h4><strong>Uppsala Conflict Database Program / Peace Research Institute Oslo</strong></h4>\n\n\n\n<ul><li><strong>Data:</strong> Armed conflicts, non-state conflicts, one-sided violence, and battle-related deaths</li><li><strong>Geographical coverage: </strong>Global</li><li><strong>Time span:</strong> since 1946 (armed conflicts, battle deaths), since 1989 (non-state conflicts, one-sided violence, battle-related deaths)</li><li><strong>Available at:</strong> Online <a href=\"https://ucdp.uu.se/downloads/\">here</a> and <a href=\"https://www.prio.org/data/1\">here</a></li></ul>\n\n\n\n<h4><strong>The Correlates of War Project</strong></h4>\n\n\n\n<ul><li><strong>Data:</strong> Inter-state, intra-state, non-state, and extra-state wars</li><li><strong>Geographical coverage: </strong>Global</li><li><strong>Time span:</strong> 1816-2007</li><li><strong>Available at:</strong> Online <a href=\"https://correlatesofwar.org/data-sets/COW-war\">here</a></li></ul>\n\n\n\n<h4><strong>Peter Brecke’s Conflict Catalog</strong></h4>\n\n\n\n<ul><li><strong>Data:</strong> Conflicts</li><li><strong>Geographical coverage: </strong>Global</li><li><strong>Time span:</strong> 1400-2000</li><li><strong>Available at:</strong> Online <a href=\"https://brecke.inta.gatech.edu/research/conflict/\">here</a><a href=\"http://www.cgeh.nl/data#conflict\"></a></li></ul>\n\n\n\n<h4><strong>Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation / Global Burden of Disease</strong></h4>\n\n\n\n<ul><li><strong>Data:</strong> Deaths from conflict and terrorism</li><li><strong>Geographical coverage: </strong>Global</li><li><strong>Time span:</strong> since 1990</li><li><strong>Available at:</strong> Online <a href=\"http://ghdx.healthdata.org/gbd-results-tool\">here</a></li></ul>\n", "protected": false }, "excerpt": { "rendered": "Humans are capable of atrocious cruelty \u2013 the history of war makes this all too clear. How many died in war? And what are the prospects for making the world more peaceful?", "protected": false }, "date_gmt": "2016-12-13T10:53:18", "modified": "2023-11-09T12:53:25", "template": "", "categories": [ 57, 55 ], "menu_order": 207, "ping_status": "closed", "authors_name": [ "Max Roser", "Joe Hasell", "Bastian Herre", "Bobbie Macdonald" ], "modified_gmt": "2023-11-09T12:53:25", "comment_status": "closed", "featured_media": 49645, "featured_media_paths": { "thumbnail": "/app/uploads/2022/02/Screenshot-2022-02-28-at-19.34.31-150x100.png", "medium_large": "/app/uploads/2022/02/Screenshot-2022-02-28-at-19.34.31-768x511.png" } } |