November 22, 2005
JUST GOTTA MOP UP THE LAST ISM AND SOME COMMUNIST REMNANTS:
The dogs that never barked: International peacekeeping efforts have gone largely unnoticed despite successes. (Gareth Evans, November 22, 2005, LA Times)
Contrary to what just about everybody instinctively believes, there has been a dramatic decrease in the number of conflicts, down 40% since the early 1990s. There were just 25 armed secessionist conflicts underway in 2004, the lowest number since 1976, according to the meticulously documented Human Security Report 2005, a new multi-government study (www.humansecurityreport.info).The number of mass killings has fallen 80% since the late 1980s, according to the report. And around the world, there has been a spectacular increase in the number of civil conflicts resolved — as in Indonesia's separatist Aceh province this year — not by force but by negotiation.
There are many reasons for these turnarounds. They include the end of the era of colonialism, the aftermath of which generated two-thirds or more of all wars from the 1950s to the 1980s. The end of the Cold War meant no more proxy wars fueled by Washington or Moscow, and it also hastened the demise of a number of authoritarian governments that each side had been propping up and that had generated significant internal resentment and resistance.
But the best explanation is the one that stares us in the face: the huge increase in international efforts to prevent, manage and resolve conflicts.
The world recognized History had Ended fifteen years ago and the Soviet Union ("the focus of evil in the modern world") with it, so how could conflicts not decline? Posted by Orrin Judd at November 22, 2005 7:36 AM
Absolute drivel, and a shocking insult to the memory of those who died horrifically while the UN stood by impotently. If there is any truth to his argument that conflicts have declined, it is because the world has learned the U.S. won't shy away from intervening. Hyperpower saves lives.
Posted by: Peter B at November 22, 2005 9:05 AMThere's no USSR to fund evil any longer.
Posted by: oj at November 22, 2005 9:09 AM"The end of the Cold War meant no more proxy wars fueled by Washington or Moscow,"
I call B$, moral equivalence. It was Moscow that was the agressor.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at November 22, 2005 10:29 AM"the huge increase in international efforts to prevent, manage and resolve conflicts."
Prevent? Name one.
Manage? I suppose they've done that. Whether conflicts should be "managed" is a question left to the reader...
Resolve? Huh? The different factions in Yugoslavia living in peace & harmony yet?
Posted by: b at November 22, 2005 11:32 AMThis column is based on two studies, one Canadian, the other from the University of Maryland, that chart the decline in both international and internal conflicts since 1990. The LA Times article simply reproduces the conclusions of the Canadian study, which was financed by the UN and conducted by former UN officials. It found that the decrease in violence was due to the efforts of international organizations like the UN. The Maryland study came to rather different conclusions -- that the decline in violence was to some extent due to the spread of democracy and the expansion of US power since the collapse of the Soviet Union. I blogged these studies and previous articles based on them at these sites:
http://lightseekinglight.blogspot.com/2005/11/more-peaceful-world-redux.html
http://lightseekinglight.blogspot.com/2005/09/peaceful-planet.html
http://lightseekinglight.blogspot.com/2005/10/domestication-of-war-this-is-huge.html
Posted by: D. B. Light at November 23, 2005 10:33 AM