Syria, Israel, Ukraine - A New Decade of War

10 years ago, in 2014, we asked if war was over. Based on long-term trends in the last century, it seemed violent conflict was on the decline and the world more peaceful than ever. Our video began with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the war between Hamas and Israel, and well, a decade later we could start this video exactly the same way. But is the world as a whole more violent today?

In a nutshell, we made seven claims in 2014. One, we have less conflict deaths than ever. Two, there were almost no more wars between countries. Three, democracies don't fight each other. Four, borders are mostly fixed. Five, most conflicts are in areas that were under foreign control, either by colonial states or Soviet dictatorships. Six, more civil wars are ending by diplomacy. Seven, we're in the most peaceful period of history.

So let's see how our video has held up. First, let's get an overview of conflicts in the last decade. Some of the deadliest conflicts that were glowing hot in 2014 have since ended or significantly cooled down. The war in Afghanistan ended with the victory of the Taliban, while the civil wars in Yemen and Libya are all still ongoing; they turned mostly into stalemates. The proto-state of ISIS in Iraq and Syria has been wiped out. Breaking news: the rebels just won the war in Syria last week.

The extremely destructive civil war in South Sudan ended in a fragile peace agreement, despite violence still flaring up in the devastated young country. Sadly, the last decade saw a bunch of new conflicts arise or old unresolved issues turn violent. One of the main claims of our video ten years ago was that wars today are not between countries, and this is still largely true. Civil wars are by far the most common type of state-based conflict in the world.

We wager that most of you have never heard about one of the deadliest civil wars in the decade: the 2020 Tigray war in Ethiopia. It ended in 2022 with the victory of the Ethiopian and Eritrean government forces against rebel groups. Exact death tolls are unknown, but they may exceed half a million, mostly civilians. Aside from Tigray, a number of new civil wars have broken out since 2014, although "new" is a bit misleading, since the underlying issues were brooding at a smaller scale for a long time.

The deadliest have been the Sudan civil war, the civil war in Yemen, and the civil war in Myanmar. Multiple nations in Africa like Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, Burkina Faso, and Mozambique are suffering from Islamist insurgencies that destabilize countries and have cost tens of thousands of civilian lives. Lastly, there are nearly 60 smaller unresolved state-based conflicts around the world, many going on for decades that are smoldering but have a relatively low death toll in comparison.

Maybe the worst news is that we've been seeing interstate wars again. There was the short-lived 2020 war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, which redrew contested borders. Then there's the latest war between Israel and Hamas that turned into a regional crisis. What is certainly the most disturbing new development is the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

It's the first large-scale interstate war in 20 years, and the first war since World War II where a major power is trying to conquer territory and to subjugate another state. It followed an 8-year conflict that started with the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbas. Exact casualty rates for the war since 2022 are hard to verify, but they go as high as hundreds of thousands.

Okay, so what about our 2014 claims? If we add up the numbers, we see a few things. Roughly between 2004 and 2014, there were about 350,000 deaths from state-based conflicts worldwide. They were going down from 2014 to 2019 and then rose sharply in 2021. In total, from 2014 to 2024, we saw about 1.2 million deaths. If we include all violent conflicts, like the Mexican drug war, the number rises to 1.5 million, three times higher than the previous decade.

Actually, 2022 had the highest death toll from violent conflict since the Rwandan genocide in 1994. The Tigray war and the war in Ukraine alone were responsible for the majority of lives lost, as both wars involved armies of hundreds of thousands of soldiers sometimes thrown against entrenched positions in human wave attacks. So, the last three years have been unusually violent.

But if we zoom out a bit more, we can put those numbers into perspective: a terrible thing, but nowhere near how bad it can get when the world goes to war. In the grand scheme of things, we are still living in relatively peaceful times. But the next decade will show if the trend will reverse or if the last few years were an anomaly.

Unfortunately, there have been proper wars between states again, so our prediction on wars between countries didn't hold up. What is as true today as in 2014 is that almost all armed conflicts in the world are in countries that were under foreign occupation in the 20th century, either by colonialism or by the expansive Soviet dictatorship. Ethnic groups were split apart or forced together by arbitrary borders, resources unequally distributed, or power vacuums created, which led to conflicts that are in many cases still unresolved.

There have also been no wars between democracies, who seem uniquely unwilling to fight each other. So compared to the last century, it's still true that war between nations is still an exception rather than the rule. On the other hand, we see fewer civil wars end by diplomacy; instead, there's an increase in either victories or stalemates. These often aren't permanent resolutions to the conflict, only pauses in the fighting because the underlying causes haven't been solved.

For our claim about borders, we can see that most international borders in the world still hold up and are not challenged. But there are still a few dozen territorial disputes in the world, most of them in Africa and Asia, and some are getting hotter, like the border clash between India and China over Aksai Chin and Arunachal Pradesh, China’s claim to Taiwan, or Venezuela threatening to annex part of Guyana’s oil-rich province Essequibo.

One thing that makes wars so deadly is that they're often supported by external powers. Many countries are providing support or arming up different sides or factions, like the competition between Saudi Arabia and Iran for hegemony, with Iran being the main supporter for the Houthis, Hezbollah, or Hamas, or in the Ukrainian war with the West supporting Ukraine while China, Iran, and North Korea support Russia.

But it's not just countries. External powers keeping conflicts alive can also be Islamist groups like ISIS or criminal networks, or even local elites that benefit from their own country being torn apart and effectively prevent conflicts from ending.

The end of the rules-based world: there's a lot of debate among experts about what factors make the world more or less peaceful, but there are no easy answers. One of the major reasons the world has seen less conflict was that after the end of the Cold War, many countries expected a sort of rules-based world order. And for a time, this worked somewhat, but things have been changing in the last few years.

The world has become multipolar, with new alliances forming, and the idea of a rules-based world is being challenged. China's manufacturing capacity is now as big as the US and Europe's combined. With its massive economic development, a new superpower has risen. It's common knowledge that the US spends more on its military than any place in the world, but this may no longer reflect the true balance of power.

China doesn't report all of its military spending like the US does, and it gets a lot more done with each equivalent dollar spent. Recent estimates trying to account for these differences tell us China's effective military budget is now a significant portion of the United States' budget. And with Russia breaking the taboo of launching the first war of conquest by a major power in almost 80 years, Europe has begun the process of rearming.

It is slow because, well, Europe is slow, but it is happening. We're in the transition to a multipolar world again, with different nations and alliances claiming spheres of power they want to dominate. In this climate, tensions and conflicts between states have been rising, even if most of them have not turned into wars yet.

So is war over? The clear answer is no, and the direction we're headed in doesn't seem great. But with all the gloom, it's also true that we are still in a peaceful period of world history, and the deaths by war are still at historic lows. The world is at a crossroads.

We'll do another update video in 2034. Let's all hope we'll have better news for you then.

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