Why Wars End

Niall Ferguson article relating to why the world has seen a decline in armed conflicts world-wide.

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.

The most interesting conclusion he makes is:

Yet maybe there's a third explanation for the recent peace "wave". Maybe local people, regardless of foreign intervention, are simply opting for peace because they're sick to death of fighting each other. War, after all, is attractive only to a minority of people: bored young men and the cynical politicians who see violence as a route to power and its perquisites. That's why only a handful of the post-1989 civil wars lasted longer than seven years.

An interesting read.