Ethics Newsline®

VANCOUVER
Last week’s incendiary congressional debate in Washington about the Iraq war may suggest, to some, that the United States is entering a fractious period of public discussion about war and peace. Lest you think that presages a return to the 1960s, however, here’s a pop quiz for the globally minded. Answer true or false:

• The number of armed conflicts around the world is increasing.
• Wars are getting deadlier.
• Genocide is on the rise.
• Terrorism is the gravest threat to human security.

Sensationalists have so peppered us with their ain’t-it-awful view of the world that we may find ourselves nodding sagely in agreement. In fact, each of these statements is false. Instead, since the Cold War ended in the early 1990s:

• The number of armed conflicts around the world has dropped by more than 40 percent.
• In 1950, the typical armed conflict killed 38,000 people per year; the figure for 2002 was 600, a 98 percent decline.
• By 2001, despite horrors such as Rwanda and Srebrenica, genocide had fallen 80 percent from its post-World War II high in 1988.
• While international terrorism may be rising, it has killed fewer than 1,000 people a year, on average, since the mid-1970s.

These numbers are still plenty bad. But unless we put them in context, we’ll miss one of the world’s most remarkable ethical trends: the steady, deliberate, and intentional amelioration of violent conflict. How, despite all we’re hearing about Iraq, Africa, and other hot spots, could this be so? What’s caused this turnaround?

According to the authors of the “Human Security Report” from which these figures are drawn — released last month by the Human Security Centre at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and funded by the governments of Canada, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom — the causes appear to be threefold.

First, the Cold War effectively ended in the early 1990s. That change halted the proxy wars fomented by superpower antagonists. Result: fewer, less intense, and less heavily funded wars. Those that remain typically are fought not by massive armies with heavy weapons but, as Professor Andrew Mack and his colleagues write in their report, by “weak government forces” fighting “small, ill-trained rebel forces equipped with small arms.”

Second, the European colonialism that had been “a major driver of warfare around the world — one that had caused 81 wars since 1816 — simply ceased to exist” by the early 1980s. With it went the struggles for liberation that underlay almost all international wars since 1950.

Third, the United Nations, freed from the paralysis of Cold War politics, suddenly came alive. Since the early 1990s the U.N. has “spearheaded a veritable explosion of conflict-prevention, peacemaking, and post-conflict peace-building activities” — aided by the World Bank, nation states, and an upsurge of global non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

These trends are no cause for complacency. Terrorists may acquire more dangerous weaponry. The floods of refugees and the perils of indirect deaths from war-related famines still abound. And wars, like forest fires, can be temporarily extinguished only to restart if their smoldering roots aren’t handled properly.

But even the arrival of fresh data from Iraq, unavailable as this report went to press, probably won’t change the overall picture. For all their grimness, the Iraq numbers don’t add up to anything like the casualty figures from earlier decades. While the forthcoming data may well be “open to dispute,” UBC research Eric Nicholls told me, “the global trends are not.” Iraq, he noted, “is an anomaly. We don’t think it is the kind of war that will happen frequently.”

It’s not surprising that we may have missed these trends: They’re counterintuitive. But so, at times, is ethics. What comes through this report, however, is the persistence and deliberateness with which these trends have been reversed. The steady diplomatic grind of transforming apparent détente into real peace, the ongoing faith in the United Nations despite its considerable flaws, and the remarkable outpouring of personal passion and volunteer effort in the creation of thousands of NGOs dedicated to conflict resolution — these are signs of a values-driven global culture that cares about doing right.

“Last night I had the strangest dream,” says Ed McCurdy’s hallmark song about how the world “had all agreed to put an end to war.” What seemed only visionary and poetic in the 1950s now seems practical and demonstrable. War may not end anytime soon, but we seem to be agreeing that it ought to — and proving that we can make a start.

©2005 Institute for Global Ethics