Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

It’s not just the great powers that have stopped fighting each other. War in the classic sense of an armed conflict between the uniformed armies of two nation-states appears to be obsolescent.⁵ There have been no more than three in any year since 1945, none in most years since 1989, and none since the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the longest stretch without an interstate war since the end of World War II.⁶ Today, skirmishes between national armies kill dozens of people rather than the hundreds of thousands or millions who died in the all-out wars that nation-states have fought throughout history. The Long Peace has certainly been tested since 2011, such as in conflicts between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Russia and Ukraine, and the two Koreas, but in each case the belligerents backed down rather than escalating into all-out war. This doesn’t, of course, mean that escalation to major war is impossible, just that it is considered extraordinary, something that nations try to avoid at (almost) all costs.

The geography of war also continues to shrink. In 2016 a peace agreement between the government of Colombia and Marxist FARC guerrillas ended the last active political armed conflict in the Western Hemisphere, and the last remnant of the Cold War. This is a momentous change from just decades before.⁷ In Guatemala, El Salvador, and Peru, as in Colombia, leftist guerrillas battled American-backed governments, and in Nicaragua it was the other way around (American-backed contras battling a left-wing government), in conflicts that collectively killed more than 650,000 people.⁸ The transition of an entire hemisphere to peace follows the path of other large regions of the world. Western Europe’s bloody centuries of warfare, culminating in the two world wars, have given way to more than seven decades of peace. In East Asia, the wars of the mid-20th century took millions of lives—in Japan’s conquests, the Chinese Civil War, and the wars in Korea and Vietnam. Yet despite serious political disputes, East and Southeast Asia today are almost entirely free from active interstate combat.

The world’s wars are now concentrated almost exclusively in a zone stretching from Nigeria to Pakistan, an area containing less than a sixth of the world’s population. Those wars are civil wars, which the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) defines as an armed conflict between a government and an organized force which verifiably kills at least a thousand soldiers and civilians a year. Here we find some recent cause for discouragement. A precipitous decline in the number of civil wars after the end of the Cold War—from fourteen in 1990 to four in 2007—went back up to eleven in 2014 and 2015 and to twelve in 2016.⁹ The flip is driven mainly by conflicts that have a radical Islamist group on one side (eight of the eleven in 2015, ten of the twelve in 2016); without them, there would have been no increase in the number of wars at all. Perhaps not coincidentally, two of the wars in 2014 and 2015 were fueled by another counter-Enlightenment ideology, Russian nationalism, which drove separatist forces, backed by Vladimir Putin, to battle the government of Ukraine in two of its provinces.

The worst of the ongoing wars is in Syria, where the government of Bashar al-Assad has pulverized his country in an attempt to defeat a diverse set of rebel forces, Islamist and non-Islamist, with the assistance of Russia and Iran. The Syrian civil war, with 250,000 battle deaths as of 2016 (conservatively estimated), is responsible for most of the uptick in the global rate of war deaths shown in figure 11-2.¹⁰

Figure 11-2: Battle deaths, 1946–2016

Sources: Adapted from Human Security Report Project 2007. For 1946–1988: Peace Research Institute of Oslo Battle Deaths Dataset 1946–2008, Lacina & Gleditsch 2005. For 1989–2015: UCDP Battle-Related Deaths Dataset version 5.0, Uppsala Conflict Data Program 2017, Melander, Pettersson, & Themnér 2016, updated with information from Therese Pettersson and Sam Taub of UCDP. World population figures: 1950–2016, US Census Bureau; 1946–1949, McEvedy & Jones 1978, with adjustments. The arrow points to 2008, the last year plotted in fig. 6–2 of Pinker 2011.