We hear about war all the time in the news. Afghanistan. Iraq. Israel/Palestine. And lots of random little wars in Africa and Asia. So, surrounded by news of conflict, I assumed that there are more wars today than there have been in a while, or at the very least, lots more people die or get hurt now than they used to.
Turns out I’m wrong.
Counting a war as something that kills 1000 or more people a year, we’ve fallen from 11 to 5 wars between 2000 and 2008 (the latest year for which data is available), according the Uppsala data set, an international database of conflicts.
If we add in smaller conflicts, of which there were 26 in 2007, and 31 in 2008, we still end up with less conflict than back in 2000 – 36 to 37.
Or, looking at it as an image, courtesy of the UCDP over a longer period of time, we can see that there’s been a trend since the end of the cold war to fewer conflicts:
For a slightly more subtle view of conflict – beyond wars – you can check out the Failed States Index that leading journal Foreign Policy have developed with the Fund for Peace. It tracks how ‘at risk’ different countries are of falling apart. As a bit of a thought experiment, I crunched some numbers using the Failed States Index, as I wanted to see what the relationship was between poverty and state failure.
Because poverty statistics aren’t easily comparable, I used the most recent GDP figures per person (the higher the GDP, the richer), and plotted them against scores on the failed states index (the higher score, the more failing your country). The graph with all the dots showing different countries is rather confusing, so I stuck on a trendline (r2 = 0.601 for the nerds out there), shaded the ‘risk zones’ – less than $1000 per person, and a failed state score of 96 or above – and dropped a couple of countries back in to illustrate the point.
The trend is clear – poorer countries tend to be failing.
A graph like this is just a snapshot into what is an extensive field of research on conflict and development. It’s a field that I think is best summarized by English economist Paul Collier, who calls conflict ‘development in reverse.’ We know that when countries get sucked into conflict, it hurts the poor first, and sets the country back decades.
So, as we look forward to the next decade, it’s great that there are fewer conflicts than before, but we know that the risks are still there. Unless more countries are able to lift themselves out of poverty, they’re going to see conflict as a continued challenge. To address this, we need to support countries to build strong and capable states that can support their citizens to prosper.
For those countries that are embroiled in conflict, we know that the road to peace is a long and hard one. The risks for falling back into conflict are significant for about 10 years once the guns have been laid down, as we’ve seen in a place like Timor-Leste, which has just celebrated ten years since independence and the end of conflict. And, it’s with Timor-Leste that I’d like to end – this ten minute film from Al Jazeera shows just how far the country has come, but how far it still has to go. To find out more about conflict and extreme poverty, you can click here.
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