Peace Is Spreading... But Why?

[NATO AIR]

good question

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/...1802.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2005/09/18/ixop.html

Peace is spreading: the troubling thing is, we don't really know why
By Niall Ferguson
(Filed: 18/09/2005)

Is the world becoming a more peaceful place? After a week of carnage in Iraq that may seem a rather idiotic question. And yet there is strong evidence that the amount of conflict in the world as a whole is going down.

There are significantly fewer wars in the world today than there were 10 years ago. After a peak in around 1990 - when the end of the Cold War seemed to have unleashed a New World Disorder - the number of wars in progress has fallen to just 20. And many of these are rather small-scale affairs.

According to the University of Maryland's Centre for International Development and Conflict Management (CIDCM), "global warfare has decreased by over 60 per cent since peaking in the mid-1980s, falling… to its lowest level since the late 1950s". In the past three years alone, 11 wars have ended, in countries ranging from Indonesia and Sri Lanka in Asia, to Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Angola and Liberia in sub-Saharan Africa.

The two most striking features of war in our time have been, first, the decline of traditional inter-state warfare and, second, the rise and fall of civil war. Since the end of the Cold War there have been just a handful wars between separate states, and most of these were of very short duration: Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent war to liberate it; the border war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, and the various American-led interventions to topple "rogue regimes" in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq.

CONTINUE ARTICLE @ LINK

 

[USViking]

good question

Ten year trends are not nearly long enough
to mean anything, assuming such a trend
has been correctly identified.

I had a row on another board with an admirer
of Niall Ferguson.

I took issue with Ferguson's views that the
UK should have not intervened in WW1, and
that the present US system of alliances
constituted an "empire".

 

[USMCDevilDog]

It ain't gonna last, we all know that.

 

[theHawk]

Could be the calm before the storm...

 

[dilloduck]

bullet and bomb wars may have decreased but all the others are doing quite nicely.