How many wars have there been

Since President Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party were against the expansion of slavery, the southern states declared their secession from the Union. This war was the deadliest in American history.

The Union won, the Confederate armies surrendered in , and the war ended the practice of slavery. The war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in August, The war ended with the victory of the Allied Powers in New nations were formed.

The war ended with the capitulation of Germany and Japan in The Korean conflict ended in The Korean Demilitarized Zone was established. The war was fought between Iraq and the coalition forces of 34 nations that were authorized by the UN, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

The war ended with the coalition victory, and Kuwait was liberated. The conflict continued for nearly a decade, as insurgent fighters resisted the occupying forces and the post-invasion Iraq government. In , following a decline in insurgent violence, the U. They are conducted without regard for civilian lives, the Geneva conventions regulating armed conflict, or the interests of host populations in whose name they are fought.

Great moral crusades, famous causes and genuine ideological struggles are few and far between. Modern wars are mostly about power and treasure.

And they go on, and on, and on. Libya is a classic case of a state of chaos deliberately fed and manipulated by external powers, in this instance Turkey, Qatar, Russia, Egypt and the UAE.

As long as these aims remain unmet, they show scant interest in peace. Ambitious states have always sought to dominate neighbours in the way China, for example, is doing now. One reason this happens more frequently today, and more anarchically, is declining American engagement. In the Middle East and Africa , the US — no longer a global policeman — is focused on supporting Israel, squeezing Iran and selling arms, to the exclusion of almost all else.

In Asia, it is in retreat. Donald Trump, desperate for a Nobel peace prize, offered to mediate the year-old North Korea-South Korea stand-off. Few take him seriously. Otherwise, his administration has shown zero interest in global conflict resolution. A related factor is the collapse of the western-led consensus favouring multilateral, collaborative approaches to international problems.

This is matched by the parallel rise of authoritarian and populist regimes that prioritise narrow national interest over perceptions of the common good. This trend, a regression to the pre era of competing European nation-states, undermines the authority of the UN and cooperative regional platforms such as the EU and African Union. Unsupported, UN peace envoys from Syria to Myanmar and peacekeeping operations across Africa struggle to make headway.

Ineffective international law enforcement, symbolised by the inability of the International Criminal Court to deliver justice to war zones such as Iraq and Ukraine, helps freeze or perpetuate conflicts rather than justly resolve them.

Demographic and physical causes also contribute to chronic instability. Conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Sahel and Sudan is fuelled by the fact that millions of young men in Africa, where the median age is Long-running inter-state or intra-state violence is also rooted in the climate crisis and resulting resource scarcity, poverty and dislocation.

New technologies and weapons such as drones and cyber warfare are lowering the up-front cost of conflict while enlarging potential theatres of war. Global warming is turning the newly accessible Arctic into a vast, pristine battleground.

Outer space presents infinite possibilities for violence. Conflicts related to the expansion or defence of colonial empires ended with decolonisation.

Conflicts between states have almost ceased to exist. For this reason, statistics on the number of wars need to be interpreted alongside data on the size of these conflicts. The increase in the number of wars is predominantly an increase of smaller and smaller conflicts.

This follows from the previously shown facts that the number of war victims declined while the number of conflicts increased. The decreasing deadliness of conflicts can be seen in the bar chart. To answer the question of how many people die in conflicts today, and how this has changed over time, we can turn to a number of different datasets.

There are certainly similarities across the different sources. Overall they show a decline in conflict deaths into the s, followed by an increase this decade. 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.