In some wars they are secondary to these other motives. Standing, by contrast, is responsible for 62 wars as a primary or secondary motive. Revenge, also a manifestation of the spirit, is implicated in another There can be little doubt that the spirit is the principal cause of war across the centuries, and that it and its consequences have been almost totally ignored in the international relations literature.
The character and robustness of domestic, regional and international societies and ideas about the efficacy of war determine the relative importance of various motives for war and its overall frequency. Interest shows a sharp decline once mercantilism gave way to more sophisticated understandings of wealth.
Security-motivated wars show no similar decline by century but come in clusters associated with bids for hegemony by great or dominant powers.
The most recent clusters of security-related wars were associated with the run up and conduct of the two world wars of the twentieth century. They were in turn a product of the dislocations brought about of modernisation in an environment where great power competition and the drive for hegemony were conducted primarily by violent means. Now that this era has passed in Europe and is receding in much of the Pacific Rim, and hegemony achieved by force is no longer considered a legitimate ambition, the security requirements and fears of great powers should decline.
Wars of standing can also be expected to decline. During the post-war era, and even more since the end of that conflict, war and standing have become increasingly disengaged in the sense that successful war initiation no longer enhances standing. The Anglo-American intervention in Iraq—a war in which territorial conquest was not an issue—is a case in point. Changing values and norms encourage rational leaders to find other, peaceful ways of claiming standing.
To the extent that this happens, the frequency of war involving either rising or great powers can be expected to diminish sharply. I contend that three shifts in thinking have dramatically affected the frequency of war and its associated motives. The first concerns the nature of wealth. When political elites learned that wealth could be augmented by the division of labour, mechanical sources of energy and economies of scale, and economic cooperation, war increasingly came to be seen as detrimental to wealth.
This recognition all but put an end to wars of material aggrandisement. The second shift concerns collective versus unilateral pursuit of security. Alliances assumed new meaning at the Congress of Vienna as they had the goal of conflict prevention. Later congresses helped great powers ease regional tensions through agreements and moral persuasion. Following World War I, the League of Nations was given the more ambitious task of preventing war by means of collective security, but failed miserably.
The principle of collective security endured and the United Nations, established in , made it the principal mission of the Security Council. It and other international groupings have played a prominent and arguably successful role in keeping the peace or terminating wars in the post-Cold War world.
Collective security has become the norm and an important source of regional and international stability. The third and most recent shift in thinking concerns the nature of standing in international affairs. Historically, military success was the principal means of gaining standing and recognition as a great power. Pushing the moral boundaries. Institutions governing legal and moral restraints on the conduct of war or controlling proliferation date from an era when massively destructive technology was reserved to a small, distinct set of actors — mostly states or people acting under state sponsorship.
For example, the private sector has invested more in AI research and development in five years than governments have since AI research first started. The fact that the trajectory of research — and much of the infrastructure critical to security — are in private hands need not be a problem if state actors were able to exercise oversight through traditional means such as norms development, regulation and law-making.
However, the pace and intensity of innovation, and difficulty of predicting what new capabilities will be unleashed as new technologies intersect, makes it difficult for states to keep up.
State-centric institutions for maintaining international security have failed to develop a systematic approach to address the possible long-term security implications of advances in areas as diverse as nanotechnology, synthetic biology, big data and machine learning.
Nor have industry-led measures yet filled the gap. Expanding domains of conflict. Domains of potential conflict such as outer space, the deep oceans, and the Arctic — all perceived as gateways to economic and strategic advantage — are expanding via new technologies and materials that can overcome inhospitable conditions.
Like cyberspace, these are less well-governed than the familiar domains of land, sea and air: their lack of natural borders can make them difficult to reconcile with existing international legal frameworks, and technological development is both rapid and private sector-driven, which makes it hard for governance institutions to keep up.
Access to the technology needed to reach and exploit space, for example, allows belligerents to compromise the effectiveness of defensive measures that rely on satellites for communications, navigation, command and control technology.
Even a very limited strike on a satellite would likely cause space debris, damaging systems used by the wider community. What is physically possible becomes likely. History suggests that any technology — even one that gives moral pause - will eventually be developed in order to be used as a weapon.
Policy-makers can argue that because non-state actors, terrorist and criminal groups can access new technology, they are obliged to pursue weaponization, in order to prepare an adequate defence. Public disquiet can also be bypassed by conducting research in secret; we now know from de-classified accounts of Cold War studies that soldiers were used as guinea pigs to research the effects of new weapons, and military experiments may well be underway today in areas such as human enhancement.
The tendency for the logic of conflict to drive the development of technology beyond what is considered acceptable by society under normal conditions is one more reason to pay closer attention to trends in this field. International Security is destabilised at the institutional level by the way the 4th Industrial Revolution is empowering the individual through technology, and the way that blurs the lines between war and peace, military and civilian, domestic and foreign, public and private, and physical and digital.
Consider the implications for democratic control over armed force when technologies like big data analytics, machine learning, behavioural science and chatbots are fully enlisted in the battle over perceptions and control of the narrative. But is it ultimately the responsibility of the state or of corporations to prevent or deter the kind of attack experienced by Sony Pictures? What is the appropriate response? When does an attack on a private company constitute an act of war? Little by little, the responsibility for defending citizens is effectively shifting away from the state and towards the private sector.
In return, the state expects respect for its laws. This can undermine mechanisms for global governance, which consist of inter-state institutions that rely on state power for their effectiveness. Could the relative loss of state power fatally undermine the system of international security? Several well-known tech entrepreneurs have talked in ways that suggest they see national governments not as a leader in norms development, but as an unnecessary inconvenience.
Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel has floated the idea of establishing a sea colony to literally offshore himself from government regulation. Elon Musk has talked about colonising Mars. There is serious interest in businesses formulating their own foreign policy. These are interesting ideas, but until there is a credible rival the state for the role of main international security actor to meet the challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the character of state action on security will need to adapt to the new environment, re-position itself to accommodate other actors, and renegotiate relations across a widespread network of partnerships.
As attitudes adapt to the new distribution of security responsibility between individuals, companies and institutions of governance, there is a need for a new approach to international security. There is plenty of room for debate about how that approach should look, but the baseline can be drawn through three points: it will need to be able to think long-term, adapt rapidly to the implications of technological advances, and work in a spirit of partnership with a wide range of stakeholders.
Institutional barriers between civilian and military spheres are being torn down. Outreach to Silicon Valley is a feature of current US Defence policy, for example, as are invitations to hackers to help the Department of Defence to maintain its advantage in the digital domain.
Such is the speed, complexity and ubiquity of innovation today, we need a regulation process that looks ahead to how emerging technologies could conceivably be weaponized, without holding back the development of those technologies for beneficial ends. This will need to proactively anticipate and adapt to not only technological changes, but also macro-cultural ones, which are a lot harder to predict. States and other security actors need to start exploring with each other some of the concepts and modes of operation that would make such a networked approach sustainable, legitimate and fit for the ultimate purpose of maintaining stability and promoting peaceful coexistence in the emerging international security landscape.
Instead of meeting each other in court, as the FBI met the Apple Corporation to settle their dispute about encryption, security providers could meet across a table, under new forms of public oversight and agile governance, as partners in a common endeavour.
Instead of struggling along in denial, or wasting energy trying to fight the inevitable, stakeholders who have been working in parallel siloes can learn to collaborate for a safer world. What cast of actors populate this wider security ecosystem? What are shared priorities in terms of risks? What are some of the potential models for peer to peer security? How can the 4th Industrial Revolution be used to give citizens a stronger sense of control over choices of governance, or to deny space to criminal organizations and corrupt practices?
But there are also large differences. Most noticeably, there is a large jump in — marking the Rwandan genocide — which is present in some series, but absent from others. If you hover over the datapoints, you can see the exact figures: the highest figure for a given year is typically well more than double the lowest.
Discrepancies between different sources of conflict deaths data are partly to do with the differences in how the underlying source information — for instance newswires, death registers, government or NGO reports, or indeed other conflict databases — are selected and interpreted. Below we relate some of the differences visible in the chart above in terms of some key conceptual differences lying along three dimensions: Who , How and What.
The Correlates of War series aims to include only deaths of military personnel, whereas the other sources capture — at least to some extent — civilian deaths too. As we would expect then, the Correlates of War figures are generally lower than the others. In addition to those deaths caused directly by violence — for instance those from gunshot or explosions — a significant proportion of lives lost in conflict are indirect , due to disease, starvation or exposure.
This is particularly true where conflicts lead to famine or outbreaks of disease among the civilian population. But historically, such indirect deaths were also a major cause of military fatalities.
The Conflict Catalogue series running to only tries to include indirect deaths of both the military and civilian populations. Peter Brecke, the author of the dataset, however acknowledges that the degree to which this is in fact achieved varies considerably across conflicts. While indirect deaths represent a substantial proportion of the social costs of conflict, t here is a conceptual difficulty in drawing a consistent boundary between indirect deaths attributable to the conflict and those due to other factors.
For instance, whilst famines are often triggered by conflicts, many factors contribute to their onset and severity, such as the level of sanitation or the transportation infrastructure present. Brecke does not attempt to provide a clear-cut definition, and this conceptual boundary has been largely dictated by the available primary sources he used in each estimate.
Nevertheless, as we would expect, the death rates reported in the Conflict Catalogue do come out the highest. Across the various sources there three broad kinds of violent event distinguished: state-based conflict, non-state conflict and one-sided violence.
The kind of event depends on the type of actors involved. Non-state actors are those that demonstrate a degree of coordinated military organisation but whose identity falls short of statehood. Non-state conflicts are those between two or more non-state actors, with no state involvement. It is for this reason that they do not show the jump in that marks the Rwandan genocide.
There are two major projects that gather on wars on a global scale for the post-war period and make their finding publicly available:. This data set is the base for the annual publication of the Human Security Project and for most of the data in this post. Data on on civil conflicts for the period —99 was collected by Fearon and Laitin and can be found here.
Draft version We are currently working on a dataset of war and large-scale violent events over the long run. All our charts on War and Peace Battle-related deaths in state-based conflicts since Battle-related deaths in state-based conflicts since , by world region Conflict and terrorism deaths IHME, GBD to Conflict deaths per ,, World various sources Death rates from conflict and terrorism Deaths from conflict and terrorism IHME, GBD to GDP per capita vs State fragility Incidents of conflict and one-sided violence since Rate of violent deaths in conflicts and one-sided violence per , since State-based battle-related deaths per , since State-based conflicts since Terrorism deaths vs.
The past was not peaceful.
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