indi.ca

Soldier near a (re)captured LTTE tank, now a tourist attraction. A9 road

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Nobody declares war anymore, but we still fight. What’s going on?

The Word War

Use of the word war in books, 1600-2008 (Google NGrams)

If you look at the use of the word ‘war’ it’s declined dramatically after World War II, at least in the Google corpus of books.

If you’ll note the other data points, you can see that people finally began making love and not war around 2003. Peace fought an extended battle with conflict beginning in the 80s, only recently emerging ahead.

Does that mean we were fighting less wars? Actually, yes. State-based armed conflict rose till 1992 and has since tapered off (Human Security Report). Non-state armed conflict has also declined.

The Dying

If you look at dead people, that number is also dropping. According to this data via Cato, deaths in violent conflict have declined dramatically from the days of taxpayer funded industrial slaughter. Now it’s more of a do-it-yourself at home sorta thing.

So by those metrics, it looks like war is in serious retreat. Peace and love are on the march. Is it?

The Fighting

Nope. Look at this graph (ibid). Shit is way out of control. There’s less dying and less state on state conflict, but internal conflicts are still a serious problem. They too, however, have been declining since 1992.

So What?

So people are fighting less violently, among themselves. But even that is going down. Kinda.