Is the world safer?

The world’s a better place than it used to be, writes Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek.

In an extract from The Post-American World, a book that was published earlier this month, the journalist says that a series of positive trends have created an international climate of unprecedented peace and prosperity. His conclusions are, at best, Panglossian. At worst, they are weasel words. Fewer people are dying as the result of conflict, yet there is just as much war as there has ever been.

Peace in our time?

Zakaria cites Peace and Conflict, a University of Maryland study that tracks deaths caused by organised violence:

He claims the data show that wars of all kinds have been declining since the mid-1980s and that we are now at the lowest levels of global violence since the 1950s.
Zakaria admits deaths from terrorism have risen in recent years, but argues that 80% of those casualties come from Afghanistan and Iraq, which are "war zones with ongoing insurgencies."
He cites Harvard professor Steven Pinker, who speculates that we are probably living "in the most peaceful time of our species' existence."
He argues that 24-hour media hype makes the world feel more violent than it really is, writing that as violence has been ebbing, information has been exploding.

Peace and Conflict 2008 -- which has updated data until 2005 -- says the magnitude of armed conflict may have declined when judged by falling numbers of internal wars and their average death tolls over the last 20 years. Yet judging by the number of countries engaged in armed conflicts -- either their own or multilateral wars as in Iraq and Afghanistan -- the long-term trend is up. This bears elaboration:

International crises, which in the past often led to armed conflict within and among states, have declined in number since the mid-1980s.
Yet new armed conflicts have been erupting at roughly the same pace for the past 60 years. An unusually large number of ‘new’ conflicts began in 2005–06, and some were born from the failure of past peace processes, as in Sri Lanka and Azerbaijan.
The average lethality of war has declined for those caught up in combat, but not for civilians in guerrilla wars. Of 81 states that fought large-scale insurgencies from 1945 to 2000, one in three resorted to mass killing of civilians thought to support the rebels.

Cold statistics

The story of the decline in fatalities has two parts: one that applies to major wars and another that applies to less intense, but more common, armed conflicts. The first graph shows that fatalities from armed conflict have been declining steadily since the end of World War II. However, the downward trend is driven entirely by the impact of five particularly lethal conflicts representing just 2% of all the conflicts that have occurred since 1946: the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Afghan Civil War, and the Iran–Iraq War. As seen in the lower graph, in the other 98% of the conflicts, there is no discernible upward or downward trend.

Is the world safer than it used to be?