Interesting report on war

[Skye]

http://www.humansecurityreport.info

The most interesting point made is that since WWII war deaths have generally been in decline, especially when measured per capita. There's been a shift to lower intensity conflict. This is put down to the end of colonialism, the end of the cold war, democratisation and increased activity by the UN.

 

The colonialism side is interesting, particularly that the countries that top the list in the number of international armed conflicts from 1946 to 2003 are the UK and France.

 

Terrorism, on the other hand, has risen fairly sharply since the eighties, although the actual numbers are much lower than for war.

[ecoli]

Maybe it is merely our definition of war that has changed. Terrorism is, I think, a war tactic waged by a political group, but not necessarily with the backing of the gov't. If we count terrorist movements as wars, then war may have less casualties per battle, but there are many more battles drawn out for long periods of time.

[Mokele]

I'd attribute it to nuclear weapons and increasing technological gaps between the militaries of various countries. It's gotten to the point that anything approximating a large scale war like WW2 has become anything from a horribly bad idea to downright suicidal for the weaker country. Two evenly matched countries with nukes won't go to war, because they realize it'll mean everyone loses, and if one side has nukes and the other doesn't, the weaker will avoid conflict at all costs. Only guerilla warfare pits evenly-matched sides together because the fundamental unit (the human) hasn't changed nor become different between locations, and thus that's the only scenario any country can challenge any significant world power and hope to not get obliterated.

 

Mokele, with my usual cynicism