What was the rest of the world doing during the six hundred years when the great powers and European states went through their Ages of Dynasties, Religions, Sovereignty, Nationalism, and Ideology; were racked by two world wars; and then fell into a long peace? Unfortunately the Eurocentric bias of the historical record makes it impossible to trace out curves with any confidence. Before the advent of colonialism, large swaths of Africa, the Americas, and Asia were host to predation, feuding, and slave-raiding that slunk beneath the military horizon or fell in the forest without any historian hearing them. Colonialism itself was implemented in many imperial wars that the great powers waged to acquire their colonies, suppress revolts, and fend off rivals. Throughout this era there were plenty of wars. For the period from 1400 through 1938, Brecke's Conflict Catalog lists 276 violent conflicts in the Americas, 283 in North Africa and the Middle East, 586 in sub-Saharan Africa, 313 in Central and South Asia, and 657 in East and Southeast Asia. Historical myopia prevents us from plotting trustworthy trends in the frequency or deadliness of the wars, but we saw in the preceding chapter that many were devastating. They included civil and interstate wars that were proportionally (and in some cases absolutely) more lethal than anything taking place in Europe, such as the American Civil War, the Taiping Rebellion in China, the War of the Triple Alliance in South America, and the conquests of Shaka Zulu in southern Africa.

The PRIO researchers aim for criteria that are as reliable as possible, so that analysts can compare regions of the world and plot trends over time using a fixed yardstick. Without strict criteria -- when analysts use direct battlefield deaths for some wars but include indirect deaths from epidemics and famines in others, or when they count army-against-army wars in some regions but throw in genocides in others -- comparisons are meaningless and are too easily used as propaganda for one cause or another. The PRIO analysts comb through histories, media stories, and reports from government and human rights organizations to tally deaths from war as objectively as possible. The counts are conservative; indeed, they are certainly underestimates, because they omit all deaths that are merely conjectured or whose causes cannot be ascertained with confidence. Similar criteria, and overlapping data, are used in other conflict datasets, including those of the Uppsala Conflict Data Project (UCDP), whose data begin in 1989; the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), which uses adjusted UCDP data; and the Human Security Report Project (HSRP), which draws on both the PRIO and UCDP datasets.

In 1946, just when Europe, the great powers, and the developed world started racking up their peaceful zeroes, the historical record for the world as a whole snaps into focus. That is the first year covered in a meticulous dataset compiled by Bethany Lacina, Nils Petter Gleditsch, and their colleagues at the Peace Research Institute of Oslo called the PRIO Battle Deaths Dataset. The dataset includes every known armed conflict that killed as few as twenty-five people in a year. The conflicts that rise to the level of a thousand deaths a year are promoted to "wars," matching the definition used in the Correlates of War Project, but they are otherwise given no special treatment. (I will continue to use the word war in its nontechnical sense to refer to armed conflicts of all sizes.)

Like Lewis Richardson, the new conflict-counters have to deal with failures of thinginess, and so they divide the conflicts into categories using obsessivecompulsive criteria. The first cut distinguishes three kinds of mass violence that vary in their causes and, just as importantly, in their countability. The concept of "war" (and its milder version, "armed conflict") applies most naturally to multiple killing that is organized and socially legitimated. That invites a definition in which a "war" must have a government on at least one side, and the two sides must be contesting some identifiable resource, usually a territory or the machinery of government. To make this clear, the datasets call wars in this narrow sense "state-based armed conflicts," and they are the only conflicts for which data go all the way back to 1946.

The second category embraces "nonstate" or "intercommunal" conflict, and it pits warlords, militias, or paramilitaries (often aligned with ethnic or religious groups) against each other.

The third category has the clinical name "one-sided violence" and embraces genocides, politicides, and other massacres of unarmed civilians, whether perpetrated by governments or by militias. The exclusion of one-sided violence from the PRIO dataset is in part a tactical choice to divide violence into categories with different causes, but it is also a legacy of historians' long-standing fascination with war at the expense of genocide, which only recently has been recognized as more destructive of human life. Rudolph Rummel, the political scientist Barbara Harff, and the UCDP have collected datasets of genocides, which we will examine in the next section.

The first of the three categories, state-based conflicts, is then subdivided according to whom the government is fighting. The prototypical war is the interstate war, which pits two states against each other, such as the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88. Then there are extrastate or extrasystemic wars, in which a government wages war on an entity outside its borders that is not a recognized state. These are generally imperial wars, in which a state fights indigenous forces to acquire a colony, or colonial wars, in which it fights to retain one, such as France in Algeria from 1954 to 1962.

Finally there are civil or intrastate wars, in which the government fights an insurrection, rebellion, or secessionist movement. These are further subdivided into civil wars that are completely internal (such as the recently concluded war in Sri Lanka between the government and the Tamil Tigers) and the internationalized intrastate wars in which a foreign army intervenes, usually to help a government defend itself against the rebels. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq both began as interstate conflicts (the United States and its allies against Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and the United States and its allies against Baathist-controlled Iraq), but as soon as the governments were toppled and the invading armies remained in the country to support the new governments against insurgencies, the conflicts were reclassified as internationalized intrastate conflicts.

Now there's the question of which deaths to count. The PRIO and UCDP datasets tally direct or battle-related deaths -- the people who are shot, stabbed, clubbed, gassed, blown up, drowned, or deliberately starved as part of a contest in which the perpetrators themselves have to worry about getting hurt. The victims may be soldiers, or they may be civilians who were caught in the crossfire or killed in "collateral damage." The battle-related death statistics exclude indirect deaths arising from disease, starvation, stress, and the breakdown of infrastructure. When indirect deaths are added to direct deaths to yield the entire toll attributable to the war, the sum may be called excess deaths.

Why do the datasets exclude indirect deaths? It's not to write these kinds of suffering out of the history books, but because direct deaths are the only ones that can be counted with confidence. Direct deaths also conform to our basic intuition of what it means for an agent to be responsible for an effect that it causes, namely that the agent foresees the effect, intends for it to happen, and makes it happen via a chain of events that does not have too many uncontrollable intervening links. The problem with estimating indirect deaths is that itit requires us to undertake the philosophical exercise of simulating in our imagination the possible world in which the war didn't occur and estimating the number of deaths that took place in that world, which then is used as a baseline. And that requires something close to omniscience. Would a postwar famine have taken place even if the war had not broken out because of the ineptitude of the overthrown government? What if there was a drought that year -- should the famine deaths be blamed on the war or on the weather? If the rate of death from hunger was going down in the years before a war, should we assume that it would have declined even further if the war hadn't occurred, or should we freeze it at its level in the last year before the war? If Saddam Hussein had not been deposed, would he have gone on to kill more political enemies than the number of people who died in the intercommunal violence following his defeat? Should we add the 40 to 50 million victims of the 1918 influenza pandemic to the 15 million who were killed in World War I, because the flu virus would not have evolved its virulence if the war hadn't packed so many troops into trenches? Estimating indirect deaths requires answering these sorts of questions in a consistent way for hundreds of conflicts, an impossible undertaking.

Now that we have the precision instrument of conflict datasets, what do they tell us about the recent trajectory of war in the entire world? Let's begin with the bird's-eye view of the 20th century in figure 6-1. The viewing was arranged by Lacina, Gleditsch, and Russett, who retrofitted numbers from the Correlates of War Project from 1900 to 1945 to the PRIO dataset from 1946 to 2005, and divided the numbers by the size of the world's population, to yield an individual's risk of dying in battle over the century.

Wars, in general, tend to be destructive in many ways at once, and the ones that kill more people on the battlefield also generally lead to more deaths from famine, disease, and the disruption of services. To the extent that they do, trends in battle deaths can serve as a proxy for trends in overall destructiveness. But they don't in every case, and later in the chapter we will ask whether developing nations, with their fragile infrastructure, are more vulnerable to knock-on effects than advanced nations, and whether this ratio has changed over time, making battle deaths a misleading index of trends in the human toll of conflict.

The graph reminds us of the freakish destructiveness of the two world wars. They were not steps on a staircase, or swings of a pendulum, but massive spikes poking through a bumpy lowland. The drop-off in the rate of battle deaths after the early 1940s (peaking at 300 per 100,000 people per year) has been precipitous; the world has seen nothing close to that level since.

Eagle-eyed readers will spot a decline within the decline, from some small peaks in the immediate postwar decade to the low-lying flats of today. Let's zoom in on this trend in figure 6-2, while also subdividing the battle deaths according to the type of war that caused them.

Source: Graph from Russett, 2008, based on Lacina, Gleditsch, & Russett, 2006.

FIGURE 6-1: Rate of battle deaths in state-based armed conflicts, 1900-2005

FIGURE 6-2: Rate of battle deaths in state-based armed conflicts, 1946-2008

This is an area graph, in which the thickness of each layer represents the rate of battle deaths for a particular kind of state-based conflict, and the height of the stack of layers represents the rate for all the conflicts combined. First take a moment to behold the overall shape of the trajectory. Even after we have lopped off the massive ski-jump from World War II, no one could miss another steep falloff in the rate of getting killed in battle that has taken place over the past sixty years, with a paper-thin laminate for the first decade of the 21st century at the end. This period, even with thirty-one ongoing conflicts in that mid-decade (including Iraq, Afghanistan, Chad, Sri Lanka, and Sudan), enjoyed an astoundingly low rate of battle deaths: around 0.5 per 100,000 per year, falling below the homicide rate of even the world's most peaceable societies. The figures, granted, are lowballs, since they include only reported battle deaths, but that is true for the entire time series. And even if we were to multiply the recent figures by five, they would sit well below the world's overall homicide rate of 8.8 per 100,000 per year. In absolute numbers, annual battle deaths have fallen by more than 90 percent, from around half a million per year in the late 1940s to around thirty thousand a year in the early 2000s. So believe it or not, from a global, historical, and quantitative perspective, the dream of the 1960s folk songs has come true: the world has (almost) put an end to war.

Civilian and military battle deaths in state-based armed conflicts, divided by world population. Sources: UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset; see Human Security Report Project, 2007, based on data from Lacina & Gleditsch, 2005, updated in 2010 by Tara Cooper. "Best" estimate used when available; otherwise the geometric mean of the "High" and "Low" estimates is used. World population figures from U. S. Census Bureau, 2010c. Population data for 1946-49 were taken from McEvedy & Jones, 1978, and multiplied by 1.01 to make them commensurable with the rest.

Let's take our jaws off the table and look more closely at what happened category by category. We can start with the pale patch at the bottom left, which represents a kind of war that has vanished off the face of the earth: the extrastate or colonial war. Wars in which a great power tried to hang on to a colony could be extremely destructive, such as France's attempts to retain Vietnam between 1946 and 1954 (375,000 battle deaths) and Algeria between 1954 and 1962 (182,500 battle deaths). After what has been called "the greatest transfer of power in world history," this kind of war no longer exists.

Now look at the black layer, for wars between states. It is bunched up in three large patches, each thinner than its predecessor: one which includes the Korean War from 1950 to 1953 (a million battle deaths spread over four years), one which includes the Vietnam War from 1962 to 1975 (1.6 million battle deaths spread over fourteen years), and one which includes the Iran-Iraq War (645,000 battle deaths spread over nine years). Since the end of the Cold War, there have been only two significant interstate wars: the first Gulf War, with 23,000 battle deaths, and the 1998-2000 war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, with 50,000. By the first decade of the new millennium, interstate wars had become few in number, mostly brief, and relatively low in battle deaths (India-Pakistan and Eritrea-Djibouti, neither of which counts as a "war" in the technical sense of having a thousand deaths a year, and the quick overthrow of the regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq). In 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2009, there were no interstate conflicts at all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FIGURE 6-4: Deadliness of interstate and civil wars, 1950-2005

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

Until recently the most lethal kind of war by far was the interstate war. There is nothing like a pair of Leviathans amassing cannon fodder, lobbing artillery shells, and pulverizing each other's cities to rack up truly impressive body counts. A distant second and third are the wars in which a Leviathan projects its might in some other part of the world to prop up a beleaguered government or keep a grip on its colonies. Pulling up the rear are the internal civil wars, which, at least since the Chinese slaughterhouse in the late 1940s, have been far less deadly. When a gang of Kalashnikov-toting rebels harasses the government in a small country that the great powers don't care about, the damage they do is more limited. And even these fatality rates have decreased over the past quarter-century. In 1950 the average armed conflict (of any kind) killed thirty-three thousand people; in 2007 it killed less than a thousand.

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

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

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

FIGURE 6-5: Geography of armed conflit, 2008

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

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

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

Whatever effects poverty may have, measures of it and of other "structural variables," like the youth and maleness of a country's demographics, change too slowly to fully explain the recent rise and fall of civil war in the developing world. Their effects, though, interact with the country's form of governance. The thickening of the civil war wedge in the 1960s had an obvious trigger: decolonization. European governments may have brutalized the natives when conquering a colony and putting down revolts, but they generally had a fairly well-functioning police, judiciary, and public-service infrastructure. And while they often had their pet ethnic groups, their main concern was controlling the colony as a whole, so they enforced law and order fairly broadly and in general did not let one group brutalize another with too much impunity. When the colonial governments departed, they took competent governance with them. A similar semianarchy burst out in parts of Central Asia and the Balkans in the 1990s, when the communist federations that had ruled them for decades suddenly unraveled. One Bosnian Croat explained why ethnic violence erupted only after the breakup of Yugoslavia: "We lived in peace and harmony because every hundred meters we had a policeman to make sure we loved each other very much."

Many of the governments of the newly independent colonies were run by strongmen, kleptocrats, and the occasional psychotic. They left large parts of their countries in anarchy, inviting the predation and gang warfare we saw in Polly Wiessner's account of the decivilizing process in New Guinea in chapter 3. They siphoned tax revenue to themselves and their clans, and their autocracies left the frozen-out groups no hope for change except by coup or insurrection. They responded erratically to minor disorders, letting them build up and then sending death squads to brutalize entire villages, which only inflamed the opposition further. Perhaps an emblem for the era was Jean-Bédel Bokassa of the Central African Empire, the name he gave to the small country formerly called the Central African Republic. Bokassa had seventeen wives, personally carved up (and according to rumors, occasionally ate) his political enemies, had schoolchildren beaten to death when they protested expensive mandatory uniforms bearing his likeness, and crowned himself emperor in a ceremony (complete with a gold throne and diamond-studded crown) that cost one of the world's poorest countries a third of its annual revenue.

During the Cold War many tyrants stayed in office with the blessing of the great powers, who followed the reasoning of Franklin Roosevelt about Nicaragua's Anastasio Somoza: "He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." The Soviet Union was sympathetic to any regime it saw as advancing the worldwide communist revolution, and the United States was sympathetic to any regime that kept itself out of the Soviet orbit. Other great powers such as France tried to stay on the good side of any regime that would supply them with oil and minerals. The autocrats were armed and financed by one superpower, insurrectionists who fought them were armed by the other, and both patrons were more interested in seeing their client win than in seeing the conflict come to an end. Figure 6-3 reveals a second expansion of civil wars around 1975, when Portugal dismantled its colonial empire and the American defeat in Vietnam emboldened insurrections elsewhere in the world. The number of civil wars peaked at fifty-one in 1991, which, not coincidentally, is the year the Soviet Union went out of existence, taking the Cold War-stoked proxy conflicts with it.

Only a fifth of the decline in conflicts, though, can be attributed to the disappearance of proxy wars. The end of communism removed another source of fuel to world conflict: it was the last of the antihumanist, struggle-glorifying creeds in Luard's Age of Ideologies (we'll look at a new one, Islamism, later in this chapter). Ideologies, whether religious or political, push wars out along the tail of the deadliness distribution because they inflame leaders into trying to outlast their adversaries in destructive wars of attrition, regardless of the human costs. The three deadliest postwar conflicts were fueled by Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese communist regimes that had a fanatical dedication to outlasting their opponents. Mao Zedong in particular was not embarrassed to say that the lives of his citizens meant nothing to him: "We have so many people. We can afford to lose a few. What difference does it make?" On one occasion he quantified "a few"--300 million people, or half the country's population at the time. He also stated that he was willing to take an equivalent proportion of humanity with him in the cause: "If the worse came to the worst and half of mankind died, the other half would remain while imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist."

If battle death rate as a percentage of pre-war population is calculated for each of the hundreds of countries that have participated in international and colonial wars since 1816, it is apparent that Vietnam was an extreme case… The Communist side accepted battle death rates that were about twice as high as those accepted by the fanatical, often suicidal, Japanese in World War II, for example. Furthermore, the few combatant countries that did experience loss rates as high as that of the Vietnamese Communists were mainly those such as the Germans and Soviets in World War II, who were fighting to the death for their national existence, not for expansion like the North Vietnamese. In Vietnam, it seems, the United States was up against an incredibly well-functioning organization -- patient, firmly disciplined, tenaciously led, and largely free from corruption or enervating selfindulgence. Although the communists often experienced massive military setbacks and periods of stress and exhaustion, they were always able to refit themselves, rearm, and come back for more. It may well be that, as one American general put it, "they were in fact the best enemy we have faced in our history."

As for China's erstwhile comrades in Vietnam, much has been written, often by the chastened decision-makers themselves, about the American miscalculations in that war. The most fateful was their underestimation of the ability of the North Vietnamese and Vietcong to absorb casualties. As the war unfolded, American strategists like Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara were incredulous that a backward country like North Vietnam could resist the most powerful army on earth, and they were always confident that the next escalation would force it to capitulate. As John Mueller notes:

Ho Chi Minh was correct when he prophesied, "Kill ten of our men and we will kill one of yours. In the end, it is you who will tire." The American democracy was willing to sacrifice a tiny fraction of the lives that the North Vietnamese dictator was willing to forfeit (no one asked the proverbial ten men how they felt about this), and the United States eventually conceded the war of attrition despite having every other advantage. But by the 1980s, as China and Vietnam were changing from ideological to commercial states and easing their reigns of terror over their populations, they were less willing to inflict comparable losses in unnecessary wars.

A world that is less invigorated by honor, glory, and ideology and more tempted by the pleasures of bourgeois life is a world in which fewer people are killed. After Georgia lost a five-day war with Russia in 2008 over control of the tiny territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Georgia's president Mikheil Saakashvili explained to a New York Times writer why he decided not to organize an insurgency against the occupation:

The explanation was melodramatic, even disingenuous -- Russia had no intention of occupying Georgia -- but it does capture one of the choices in the developing world that lies behind the New Peace: go to the mountains and grow beards, or do nothing and stay a modern country.

We had a choice here. We could turn this country into Chechnya -- we had enough people and equipment to do that -- or we had to do nothing and stay a modern European country. Eventually we would have chased them away, but we would have had to go to the mountains and grow beards. That would have been a tremendous national philosophical and emotional burden.

Other than the end of the Cold War and the decline of ideology, what led to the mild reduction in the number of civil wars during the past two decades, and the steep reduction in battle deaths of the last one? And why do conflicts persist in the developing world (thirty-six in 2008, all but one of them civil wars) when they have essentially disappeared in the developed world?

A good place to start is the Kantian triangle of democracy, open economies, and engagement with the international community. Russett and Oneal's statistical analyses, described in the preceding chapter, embrace the entire world, but they include only disputes between states. How well does the triad of pacifying factors apply to civil wars within developing countries, where most of today's conflicts take place? Each variable, it turns out, has an important twist.

One might think that if a lot of democracy is a good thing in inhibiting war, then a little democracy is still better than none. But with civil wars it doesn't work that way. Earlier in the chapter (and in chapter 3, when we examined homicide across the world), we came across the concept of anocracy, a form of rule that is neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic. Anocracies are also known among political scientists as semidemocracies, praetorian regimes, and (my favorite, overheard at a conference) crappy governments. These are administrations that don't do anything well. Unlike autocratic police states, they don't intimidate their populations into quiescence, but nor do they have the more-or-less fair systems of law enforcement of a decent democracy. Instead they often respond to local crime with indiscriminate retaliation on entire communities. They retain the kleptocratic habits of the autocracies from which they evolved, doling out tax revenues and patronage jobs to their clansmen, who then extort bribes for police protection, favorable verdicts in court, or access to the endless permits needed to get anything done. A government job is the only ticket out of squalor, and having a clansman in power is the only ticket to a government job. When control of the government is periodically up for grabs in a "democratic election," the stakes are as high as in any contest over precious and indivisible spoils. Clans, tribes, and ethnic groups try to intimidate each other away from the ballot box and then fight to overturn an outcome that doesn't go their way. According to the Global Report on Conflict, Governance, and State Fragility, anocracies are "about six times more likely than democracies and two and one-half times as likely as autocracies to experience new outbreaks of societal wars' such as ethnic civil wars, revolutionary wars, and coups d'état.

Figure 5-23 in the preceding chapter shows why the vulnerability of anocracies to violence has become a problem. As the number of autocracies in the world began to decline in the late 1980s, the number of anocracies began to increase. Currently they are distributed in a crescent from Central Africa through the Middle East and West and South Asia that largely coincides with the war zones in figure 6-5.

The vulnerability to civil war of countries in which control of the government is a winner-take-all jackpot is multiplied when the government controls windfalls like oil, gold, diamonds, and strategic minerals. Far from being a blessing, these bonanzas create the so-called resource curse, also known as the paradox of plenty and fool's gold. Countries with an abundance of nonrenewable, easily monopolized resources have slower economic growth, crappier governments, and more violence. As the Venezuelan politician Juan Pérez Alfonzo put it, "Oil is the devil's excrement." A country can be accursed by these resources because they concentrate power and wealth in the hands of whoever monopolizes them, typically a governing elite but sometimes a regional warlord. The leader becomes obsessed with fending off rivals for his cash cow and has no incentive to foster the networks of commerce that enrich a society and knit it together in reciprocal obligations. Collier, together with the economist Dambisa Moyo and other policy analysts, has called attention to a related paradox. Foreign aid, so beloved of crusading celebrities, can be another poisoned chalice, because it can enrich and empower the leaders through whom it is funneled rather than building a sustainable economic infrastructure. Expensive contraband like coca, opium, and diamonds is a third curse, because it opens a niche for cutthroat politicians or warlords to secure the illegal enclaves and distribution channels.

Collier observes that "the countries at the bottom coexist with the 21st century, but their reality is the 14th century: civil war, plague, ignorance." The analogy to that calamitous century, which stood on the verge of the Civilizing Process before the consolidation of effective governments, is apt. In The Remnants of War, Mueller notes that most armed conflict in the world today no longer consists of campaigns for territory by professional armies. It consists instead of plunder, intimidation, revenge, and rape by gangs of unemployable young men serving warlords or local politicians, much like the dregs rounded up by medieval barons for their private wars. As Mueller puts it:

Many of these wars have been labeled "new war," "ethnic conflict," or, most grandly, "clashes of civilizations." But in fact, most, though not all, are more nearly opportunistic predation by packs, often remarkably small ones, of criminals, bandits, and thugs. They engage in armed conflict either as mercenaries hired by desperate governments or as independent or semi-independent warlord or brigand bands. The damage perpetrated by these entrepreneurs of violence, who commonly apply ethnic, nationalist, civilizational, or religious rhetoric, can be extensive, particularly to the citizens who are their chief prey, but it is scarcely differentiable from crime.

Mueller cites eyewitness reports that confirm that the infamous civil wars and genocides of the 1990s were largely perpetrated by gangs of drugged or drunken hooligans, including those in Bosnia, Colombia, Croatia, East Timor, Kosovo, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Zimbabwe, and other countries in the African-Asian conflict crescent. Mueller describes some of the "soldiers" in the 1989-96 Liberian Civil War:

Combatants routinely styled themselves after heroes in violent American action movies like Rambo, Terminator, and Jungle Killer, and many went under such fanciful noms de guerre as Colonel Action, Captain Mission Impossible, General Murder, Young Colonel Killer, General Jungle King, Colonel Evil Killer, General War Boss III, General Jesus, Major Trouble, General Butt Naked, and, of course, General Rambo. Particularly in the early years, rebels decked themselves out in bizarre, even lunatic attire: women's dresses, wigs, and pantyhose; decorations composed of human bones; painted fingernails; even (perhaps in only one case) headgear made of a flowery toilet seat.

The political scientists James Fearon and David Laitin have backed up such vignettes with data confirming that civil wars today are fought by small numbers of lightly armed men who use their knowledge of the local landscape to elude national forces and intimidate informants and government sympathizers. These insurgencies and rural guerrilla wars may have any number of pretexts, but at heart they are less ethnic, religious, or ideological contests than turf battles between street gangs or Mafiosi. In a regression analysis of 122 civil wars between 1945 and 1999, Fearon and Laitin found that, holding per capita income constant (which they interpret as a proxy for government resources), civil wars were not more likely to break out in countries that were ethnically or religiously diverse, that had policies which discriminated against minority religions or languages, or that had high levels of income inequality. Civil wars were more likely to break out in countries that had large populations, mountainous terrain, new or unstable governments, significant oil exports, and (perhaps) a large proportion of young males. Fearon and Laitin conclude, "Our theoretical interpretation is more Hobbesian than economic. Where states are relatively weak and capricious, both fears and opportunities encourage the rise of local would-be rulers who supply a rough justice while arrogating the power to 'tax' for themselves and, often, a larger cause."

The transition required an ideological change as well, not just in the affected countries but in the wider international community. The historian Gérard Prunier has noted that in 1960s Africa, independence from colonial rule became a messianic ideal. New nations made it a priority to adopt the trappings of sovereignty, such as airlines, palaces, and nationally branded institutions. Many were influenced by "dependency theorists" who advocated that third-world governments disengage from the global economy and cultivate self-sufficient industries and agrarian sectors, which most economists today consider a ticket to penury. Often economic nationalism was combined with a romantic militarism that glorified violent revolution, symbolized in two icons of the 1960s, the soft-color portrait of a glowing Mao and the hard-edged graphic of a dashing Che. When dictatorships by glorious revolutionaries lost their cachet, democratic elections became the new elixir. No one found much romance in the frumpy institutions of the Civilizing Process, namely a competent government and police force and a dependable infrastructure for trade and commerce. Yet history suggests that these institutions are necessary for the reduction of chronic violence, which is a prerequisite to every other social good.

Just as the uptick in civil warfare arose from the decivilizing anarchy of decolonization, the recent decline may reflect a recivilizing process in which competent governments have begun to protect and serve their citizens rather than preying on them. Many African nations have traded in their Bokassa-style psychopaths for responsible democrats and, in the case of Nelson Mandela, one of history's greatest statesmen.

During the past two decades the great powers, donor nations, and intergovernmental organizations (such as the African Union) have begun to press the point. They have ostracized, penalized, shamed, and in some cases invaded states that have come under the control of incompetent tyrants. Measures to track and fight government corruption have become more common, as has the identification of barriers that penalize developing nations in global trade. Some combination of these unglamorous measures may have begun to reverse the governmental and social pathologies that had loosed civil wars on the developing world from the 1960s through the early 1990s.

Decent governments tend to be reasonably democratic and market-oriented, and several regression studies have looked at datasets on civil conflict for signs of a Liberal Peace like the one that helps explain the avoidance of wars between developed nations. We have already seen that the first leg of the peace, democracy, does not reduce the number of civil conflicts, particularly when it comes in the rickety form of an anocracy. But it does seem to reduce their severity. The political scientist Bethany Lacina has found that civil wars in democracies have fewer than half the battle deaths of civil wars in nondemocracies, holding the usual variables constant. In his 2008 survey of the Liberal Peace, Gleditsch concluded that "democracies rarely experience large-scale civil wars." The second leg of the Liberal Peace is even stronger. Openness to the global economy, including trade, foreign investment, aid with strings attached, and access to electronic media, appears to drive down both the likelihood and the severity of civil conflict.

This burst of peace coincides with a burst of peacekeepers. Figure 6-6 shows that beginning in the late 1980s the international community stepped up its peacekeeping operations and, more importantly, staffed them with increasing numbers of peacekeepers so they could do their job properly. The end of the Cold War was a turning point, because at last the great powers were more interested in seeing a conflict end than in seeing their proxy win. The rise of peacekeeping is also a sign of the humanist times. War is increasingly seen as repugnant, and that includes wars that kill black and brown people.

The theory of the Kantian Peace places the weight of peace on three legs, the third of which is international organizations. One type of international organization in particular can claim much of the credit for driving down civil wars: international peacekeeping forces. In the postcolonial decades civil wars piled up not so much because they broke out at an increasing rate but because they broke out at a higher rate than they ended (2.2 outbreaks a year compared to 1.8 terminations), and thus began to accumulate. By 1999 an average civil war had been going on for fifteen years! That began to change in the late 1990s and 2000s, when civil wars started to fizzle out faster than new ones took their place. They also tended to end in negotiated settlements, without a clear victor, rather than being fought to the bitter end. Formerly these embers would smolder for a couple of years and then flare up again, but now they were more likely to die out for good.

Peacekeeping is one of the things that the United Nations, for all its foibles, does well. (It doesn't do so well at preventing wars in the first place.) In Does Peacekeeping Work? the political scientist Virginia Page Fortna answers the question in her title with "a clear and resounding yes." Fortna assembled a dataset of 115 cease-fires in civil wars from 1944 to 1997 and examined whether the presence of a peacekeeping mission lowered the chances that the war would reignite. The dataset included missions by the UN, by permanent organizations such as NATO and the African Union, and by ad hoc coalitions of states. She found that the presence of peacekeepers reduced the risk of recidivism into another war by 80 percent. This doesn't mean that peacekeeping missions are always successful -- the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda are two conspicuous failures -- just that they prevent wars from restarting on average. Peacekeepers need not be substantial armies. Just as scrawny referees can pull apart brawling hockey players, lightly armed and even unarmed missions can get in between militias and induce them to lay down their weapons. And even when they don't succeed at that, they can serve as a tripwire for bringing in the bigger guns. Nor do peacekeepers have to be blue-helmeted soldiers. Functionaries who scrutinize elections, reform the police, monitor human rights, and oversee the functioning of bad governments also make a difference.

Why does peacekeeping work? The first reason comes right out of Leviathan: the larger and better-armed missions can retaliate directly against violators of a peace agreement on either side, raising the costs of aggression. The imposed costs and benefits can be reputational as well as material. A member of a mission commented on what led Afonso Dhlakama and his RENAMO rebel force to sign a peace agreement with the government of Mozambique: "For Dhlakama, it meant a great deal to be taken seriously, to go to cocktail parties and be treated with respect. Through the UN he got the government to stop calling RENAMO 'armed bandits.' It felt good to be wooed."

FIGURE 6-6: Growth of peacekeeping, 1948-2008

Source: Graph from Gleditsch, 2008, based on research by Siri Rustad.

Even small missions can be effective at keeping a peace because they can free the adversaries from a Hobbesian trap in which each side is tempted to attack out of fear of being attacked first. The very act of accepting intrusive peacekeepers is a costly (hence credible) signal that each side is serious about not attacking. Once the peacekeepers are in place, they can reinforce this security by monitoring compliance with the agreement, which allows them to credibly reassure each side that the other is not secretly rearming. They can also assume everyday policing activities, which deter the small acts of violence that can escalate into cycles of revenge. And they can identify the hotheads and spoilers who want to subvert the agreement. Even if a spoiler does launch a provocative attack, the peacekeepers can credibly reassure the target that it was a rogue act rather than the opening shot in a resumption of aggression.

Peacekeeping initiatives have other levers of influence. They can try to stamp out the trade in contraband that finances rebels and warlords, who are often the same people. They can dangle pork-barrel funding as an incentive to leaders who abide by the peace, enhancing their power and electoral popularity. As one Sierra Leonean said of a presidential candidate, "If Kabbah go, white man go, UN go, money go." Also, since third-world soldiers (like premodern soldiers) are often paid in opportunities to plunder, the money can be applied to "demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration" programs that aim to draw General Butt Naked and his comrades back into civil society. With guerrillas who have more of an ideological agenda, the fact that the bribes come from a neutral party rather than a despised enemy allows them to feel they have not sold out. Leverage can also be applied to force political leaders to open their governments to rival political or ethnic groups. As with the financial sweeteners, the fact that the concessions are made to a neutral party rather than to the hated foe provides the conceder with an opportunity to save face. Desmond Malloy, a UN worker in Sierra Leone, observed that "peacekeepers create an atmosphere for negotiations. [Concessions] become a point of pride -- it's a human trait. So you need a mechanism that allows negotiations without losing dignity and pride."

For all these encouraging statistics, news readers who are familiar with the carnage in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Sudan, and other deathtraps may not be reassured. The PRIO/UCDP data we have been examining are limited in two ways. They include only state-based conflicts: wars in which at least one of the sides is a government. And they include only battle-related deaths: fatalities caused by battlefield weapons. What happens to the trends when we start looking for the keys that don't fall under these lampposts?

The problem with nonstate conflicts is that until recently war buffs just weren't interested in them. No one kept track, so there's nothing to count, and we cannot plot the trends. Even the United Nations, whose mission is to prevent "the scourge of war," refuses to keep statistics on intercommunal violence (or on any other form of armed conflict), because its member states don't want social scientists poking around inside their borders and exposing the violence that their murderous governments cause or their inept governments fail to prevent.

The first exclusion consists of the nonstate conflicts (also called intercommunal violence), in which warlords, militias, mafias, rebel groups, or paramilitaries, often affiliated with ethnic groups, go after each other. These conflicts usually occur in failed states, almost by definition. A war that doesn't even bother to invite the government represents the ultimate failure of the state's monopoly on violence.

Nonetheless, a broad look at history suggests that nonstate conflicts today must be far fewer than they were in decades and centuries past, when less of the earth's surface was controlled by states. Tribal battles, slave raids, pillagings by raiders and horse tribes, pirate attacks, and private wars by noblemen and warlords, all of them nonstate, were scourges of humanity for millennia. During China's "warlord era" from 1916 to 1928, more than 900,000 people were killed by competing military chieftains in just a dozen years.

It was only in 2002 that nonstate conflicts began to be tabulated. Since then the UCDP has maintained a Non-State Conflict Dataset, and it contains three revelations. First, nonstate conflicts are in some years as numerous as state-based conflicts -- which says more about the scarcity of war than about the prevalence of intercommunal combat. Most of them, not surprisingly, are in sub-Saharan Africa, though a growing number are in the Middle East (most prominently, Iraq). Second, nonstate conflicts kill far fewer people than conflicts that involve a government, perhaps a quarter as many. Again, this is not surprising, since governments almost by definition are in the violence business. Third, the trend in the death toll from 2002 to 2008 (the most recent year covered in the dataset) has been mostly downward, despite 2007's being the deadliest year for intercommunal violence in Iraq. So as best as anyone can tell, it seems unlikely that nonstate conflicts kill enough people to stand as a counterexample to the decline in the worldwide toll of armed conflict that constitutes the New Peace.

A more serious challenge is the number of indirect deaths of civilians from the hunger, disease, and lawlessness exacerbated by war. One often reads that a century ago only 10 percent of the deaths in war were suffered by civilians, but that today the figure is 90 percent. Consistent with this claim are new surveys by epidemiologists that reveal horrendous numbers of "excess deaths" (direct and indirect) among civilians. Rather than counting bodies from media reports and nongovernmental organizations, surveyors ask a sample of people whether they know someone who was killed, then extrapolate the proportion to the population as a whole. One of these surveys, published in the medical journal Lancet in 2006, estimated that 600,000 people died in the war in Iraq between 2003 and 2006-- overwhelmingly more than the 80,000 to 90,000 battle deaths counted for that period by PRIO and by the Iraq Body Count, a respected nongovernmental organization. Another survey in the Democratic Republic of the Congo put the death toll from its civil war at 5.4 million -- about thirty-five times the PRIO battle-death estimate, and more than half of the total of all the battle deaths it has recorded in all wars since 1946. Even granting that the PRIO figures are intended as lower bounds (because of the stringent requirements that deaths be attributed to a cause), this is quite a discrepancy, and raises doubts about whether, in the big picture, the decline in battle deaths can really be interpreted as an advance in peace.

Casualty figures are always moralized, and it's not surprising that these three numbers, which have been used to indict, respectively, the 20th century, Bush's invasion of Iraq, and the world's indifference to Africa, have been widely disseminated. But an objective look at the sources suggests that the revisionist estimates are not credible (which, needless to say, does not imply that anyone should be indifferent to civilian deaths in wartime).

First off, the commonly cited 10-percent-to-90-percent reversal in civilian casualties turns out to be completely bogus. The political scientists Andrew Mack (of HSRP), Joshua Goldstein, and Adam Roberts have each tried to track down the source of this meme, since they all knew that the data needed to underpin it do not exist. They also knew that the claim fails basic sanity checks. For much of human history, peasants have subsisted on what they could grow, producing little in the way of a surplus. A horde of soldiers living off the land could easily tip a rural population into starvation. The Thirty Years' War in particular saw not only numerous massacres of civilians but the deliberate destruction of homes, crops, livestock, and water supplies, adding up to truly horrendous civilian death tolls. The American Civil War, with its blockades, crop-burnings, and scorched-earth campaigns, caused an enormous number of civilian casualties (the historical reality behind Scarlett O'Hara's vow in Gone With the Wind: "As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again"). During World War I the battlefront moved through populated areas, raining artillery shells on towns and villages, and each side tried to starve the other's civilians with blockades. And as I have mentioned, if one includes the victims of the 1918 flu epidemic as indirect deaths from the war, one could multiply the number of civilian casualties many times over. World War II, also in the first half of the 20th century, decimated civilians with a holocaust, a blitz, Slaughterhouse-Five-like firebombings of cities in Germany and Japan, and not one but two atomic explosions. It seems unlikely that today's wars, however destructive to civilians, could be substantially worse.

The most widely noted of the recent epidemiological estimates is the Lancet study of deaths in Iraq. A team of eight Iraqi health workers went door to door in eighteen regions and asked people about recent deaths in the family. The epidemiologists subtracted the death rate for the years before the 2003 invasion from the death rate for the years after, figuring that the difference could be attributed to the war, and multiplied that proportion by the size of the population of Iraq. This arithmetic suggested that 655,000 more Iraqis died than if the invasion had never taken place. And 92 percent of these excess deaths, the families indicated, were direct battle deaths from gunshots, airstrikes, and car bombs, not indirect deaths from disease or starvation. If so, the standard body counts would be underestimates by a factor of around seven.

Goldstein, Roberts, and Mack traced the meme to a chain of garbled retellings in which different kinds of casualty estimates were mashed up: battle deaths in one era were compared with battle deaths, indirect deaths, injuries, and refugees in another. Mack and Goldstein estimate that civilians suffer around half of the battle deaths in war, and that the ratio varies from war to war but has not increased over time. Indeed, we shall see that it has recently decreased by a substantial margin.

Another team of epidemiologists extrapolated from retrospective surveys of war deaths in thirteen countries to challenge the entire conclusion that battle deaths have declined since the middle of the 20th century. Spagat, Mack, and their collaborators have examined them and shown that the estimates are all over the map and are useless for tracking war deaths over time.

Without meticulous criteria for selecting a sample, though, extrapolations to an entire population can be wildly off. A team of statisticians led by Michael Spagat and Neil Johnson found these estimates incredible and discovered that a disproportionate number of the surveyed families lived on major streets and intersections -- just the places where bombings and shootings are most likely. An improved study conducted by the World Health Organization came up with a figure that was a quarter of the Lancet number, and even that required inflating an original estimate by a fudge factor of 35 percent to compensate for lying, moves, and memory lapses. Their unadjusted figure, around 110,000, is far closer to the battle-death body counts.

What about the report of 5.4 million deaths (90 percent of them from disease and hunger) in the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo? It also turns out to be inflated. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) got the number by taking an estimate of the prewar death rate that was far too low (because it came from sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, which is better off than the DRC) and subtracting it from an estimate of the rate during the war that was far too high (because it came from areas where the IRC was providing humanitarian assistance, which are just the areas with the highest impact from war). The HSRP, while acknowledging that the indirect death toll in the DRC is high -- probably over a million -- cautions against accepting estimates of excess deaths from retrospective survey data, since in addition to all of their sampling pitfalls, they require dubious conjectures about what would have happened if a war had not taken place.

Amazingly, the HSRP has collected evidence that death rates from disease and hunger have tended to go down, not up, during the wars of the past three decades. It may sound like they are saying that war is healthy for children and other living things after all, but that is not their point. Instead, they document that deaths from malnutrition and hunger in the developing world have been dropping steadily over the years, and that the civil wars of today, which are fought by packs of insurgents in limited regions of a country, have not been destructive enough to reverse the tide. In fact, when medical and food assistance is rushed to a war zone, where it is often administered during humanitarian cease-fires, the progress can accelerate.

How is this possible? Many people are unaware of what UNICEF calls the Child Survival Revolution. (The revolution pertains to adult survival too, though children under five are the most vulnerable population and hence the ones most dramatically helped.) Humanitarian assistance has gotten smarter. Rather than just throwing money at a problem, aid organizations have adapted discoveries from the science of public health about which scourges kill the most people and which weapon against each one is the most cost-effective. Most childhood deaths in the developing world come from four causes: malaria; diarrheal diseases such as cholera and dysentery; respiratory infections such as pneumonia, influenza, and tuberculosis; and measles. Each is preventable or treatable, often remarkably cheaply. Mosquito nets, antimalarial drugs, antibiotics, water purifiers, oral rehydration therapy (a bit of salt and sugar in clean water), vaccinations, and breast-feeding (which reduces diarrheal and respiratory diseases) can save enormous numbers of lives. Over the last three decades, vaccination alone (which in 1974 protected just 5 percent of the world's children and today protects 75 percent) has saved 20 million lives. Ready-to-use therapeutic foods like Plumpy'nut, a peanutbutterish goop in a foil package that children are said to like, can make a big dent in malnutrition and starvation.

It's not easy to see the bright side in the developing world, where the remnants of war continue to cause tremendous misery. The effort to whittle down the numbers that quantify the misery can seem heartless, especially when the numbers serve as propaganda for raising money and attention. But there is a moral imperative in getting the facts right, and not just to maintain credibility. The discovery that fewer people are dying in wars all over the world can thwart cynicism among compassion-fatigued news readers who might otherwise think that poor countries are irredeemable hellholes. And a better understanding of what drove the numbers down can steer us toward doing things that make people better off rather than congratulating ourselves on how altruistic we are. Among the surprises in the statistics are that some things that sound exciting, like instant independence, natural resources, revolutionary Marxism (when it is effective), and electoral democracy (when it is not) can increase deaths from violence, and some things that sound boring, like effective law enforcement, openness to the world economy, UN peacekeepers, and Plumpy'nut, can decrease them.

Together these measures have slashed the human costs of war and belied the worry that an increase in indirect deaths has canceled or swamped the decrease in battle deaths. The HSRP estimates that during the Korean War about 4.5 percent of the population died from disease and starvation in every year of the four-year conflict. During the DRC civil war, even if we accept the overly pessimistic estimate of 5 million indirect deaths, it would amount to 1 percent of the country's population per year, a reduction of more than fourfold from Korea.