(Not) Peace In Our Time

 

An often repeated cliche is that we are living through the most peaceful time in history which may seem a bit strange considering what we are seeing on the news each evening from Gaza, Haiti, Yemen, Sudan and Ukraine and a graph from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program in Norway shows depressingly that you would be right to disagree because if anything war is back in fashion.
The data from Uppsala shows that up to 2010 there was an average of approximately 80 worldwide conflicts each year but then from 2010 the numbers climb into the 160-180 range and with the rise in battles comes the inevitable rise in deaths, 2022 with its 204,000 war deaths making it the deadliest year since the 1940s and ominously they think 2023 may well be challenging it.
The obvious question is why are there more conflicts now and one suggestion is that in such an interconnected World, nations have much to lose economically and any benefits of war are outweighed by the costs to the nations economy, Russia being very much the case in point with the multitude of sanctions forced upon them after their invasion of Ukraine.
Another suggestion is the 1980's theory of MAD or Mutually Assured Destruction which means that the big players with the nuclear arsenals are hesitant to get involved directly so Russia and China kept out of it when America invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and America are staying behind the lines with Russia with their invasion of Ukraine, preferring the proxy war where they provide the arms but it is someone elses boot's on the ground.  
The changing weapons of war is another theory with the much cheaper drones being the preferred choice of attack compared to a million pound a time missile which were beyond the means of most nations and smaller groups within countries can afford. A US study found that 38 nations now have armed drones at their disposal and it is not just nation-states that have them at their disposal, militant groups also have them in large numbers such as the Houthis in Yemen who have been attacking shipping in the Red Sea with them almost daily since November 2023.
The Uppsala report concludes that it is too early to understand if the uptick in war is a long-term or a short-term thing but unfortunately war will never go away proving that there is nothing really damn stupid that humans won’t do.