Is the World Getting More Dangerous?

Many people feel that global violence is increasing, given the shocking images we see daily in the media: children wounded in Syria’s civil war, innocent victims of Mexico’s ruthless drug cartels, terrorist attacks in the Middle East and Europe, ongoing fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. But away from the cameras, violence has ebbed in many other places: The Asian nation of Sri Lanka is thriving after a quarter century of civil war finally ended in 2009; in Africa, Sierra Leone and Liberia are rebuilding, following brutal civil wars that lasted until 2002 and 2003, respectively; and in South America, Colombia is trying to finalize a peace deal that would end five decades of civil war.  

So is global violence on the rise overall or not? Two experts weigh in. 

There are two basic ways to measure whether the world is becoming a more dangerous place: counting the number of conflicts and assessing how deadly they are. Neither of these approaches offers much room for optimism.

In the last six years, the number of wars has increased by a third—from 31 to 41. Even worse, the last two years have seen the highest levels of violently inflicted deaths in armed conflicts since the the Cold War ended in 1991. Many wars—even those that result in relatively small numbers of battle deaths—occur in countries with poor infrastructure and few resources. That means that the number of indirect deaths because of disease and starvation has soared as well.

Then there’s terrorism. Simply put, 15 years after the 9/11 attacks, the “global war on terror” that President George W. Bush proclaimed has morphed into terror’s war on the world. There were just under 2,000 terrorist attacks worldwide in 2001 that resulted in a total of 14,000 deaths and injuries. By 2015 that number had risen to nearly 15,000 attacks and more than 80,000 deaths and injuries. That’s a sevenfold increase in incidents and a fivefold jump in casualties.

While it’s true that armed conflict and terrorism in our time don’t approach the carnage of the 20th century’s two world wars, that’s not how we should judge: Wars like that are relatively rare in human history. And given worldwide concerns about the need to prevent conflicts from escalating into nuclear war, we’re unlikely to see these kinds of grand-scale wars again. But that doesn’t mean that today’s wars are any less devastating. In fact, for those caught up in the fighting, these conflicts are extremely deadly: Consider the case of Syria, where close to 500,000 people have been killed since its civil war began in 2011.

Nearly 60 years ago, the political theorist Kenneth Waltz made a wise prediction: “The mutual fear of big weapons may produce, instead of peace, a spate of smaller wars.” He was right, as the rising tide of war and terror proves.

—JOHN ARQUILLA,

Professor, U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California

“The world is less violent than it has ever been,” President Obama said last May. It might seem difficult to reconcile this statement with daily horrors in the Middle East, terrorist attacks, and other media-hyped doom and gloom. But he’s right. Though violent conflicts still happen around the world, the broad trend lines are all in the right direction: toward less violence. 

From 1990 to 2014, the number of conflicts in the world—between states and within them—fell by 20 percent. During the 1980s, many countries in Latin America—including Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua—were involved in armed conflicts. Today, those countries are all at peace or, in the case of Colombia, working out a peace deal. And while there will always be extreme cases, like the violence in Syria, today’s conflicts are, in general, not as violent as previous ones. In 1950, there were about 24 battle deaths per 100,000 people worldwide; by 2015, that number had fallen to 1 per 100,000. 

Perhaps more important, modern wars tend to be small and localized; the most destructive and costly kind of war—a major conflict between great power states—hasn’t occurred for more than 60 years. The last devastating war of that sort was World War II (1939-45). Even terrorism is far less of a concern than many assume, particularly for those outside war zones. For an American, the odds of dying in a terrorist attack are an astronomically unlikely 1 in 45 million.

To be sure, there are still intractable conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere. Diplomats have so far been unable to resolve conflicts in Syria, Yemen, and Ukraine. It’s clear that these cases will be difficult to resolve: Studies show that the average civil war lasts about 10 years and can be worsened by the involvement of external states, which helps explain the Syrian quagmire. But these contemporary conflicts simply cannot compare to the carnage of the two World Wars, or the Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation. 

Over the long term, President Obama is right. The world is trending away from violence.

—EMMA ASHFORD,

Research Fellow, Cato Institute, Washington, D.C.