I saw an article today talking about the falling tendency for political collectivities to go to war against each other. I had heard the same argument before from Steven Pinker (who is actually referenced toward the end) and on a slightly more academic level from John Mueller (whose new stuff is poorly referenced). And I thought to myself, "Sweet! Everybody is jumpin' on board. Pretty soon this will be a big, unstoppable idea! Violence is over! Hooray!" This elation was predictably short-lived.
Of course war is becoming less common. An old reason for war, conquest, doesn't fly anymore. Ch. 1, Art. 2 of the UN Charter is pretty clear on this: political settlements are the only legitimate means to gain territory. There are some tricky questions remaining about national self-determination in different corners of the world, such as northern Sri Lanka, Tibet, S.E. Turkey, and Quebec, but the geopolitical map of the world is fairly stable as far as conquest is concerned. Ideology is also slowly harmonizing, which was another big cause of war, and international and colonial wars are just generally out of fashion. I'll leave it to you to decide whether going into a failed state without a proper government counts, as was the case with Ethiopia's incursion into Somalia and NATO's invasion of Afghanistan. Still, it seems that international wars are becoming less common, and fewer are dying in the wars that do happen.
So why am I not rejoicing. Well, I ran into this article that snapped me back into reality. There's still a lot of violence going on inside borders. Granted, the male rapes in Congo they mention happen in Kivu, and that's not exactly the pinnacle of civilization. It's been a miserable corner of the world at least since its neighbour, Rwanda, tore itself apart in 1994, and it has experienced other rough periods too. The recent domestic violence in Iran, Pakistan, Xinjiang and Nigeria mustn't be forgotten either. There is still plenty of room in the world for violence at a national level.
Well, I thought further, at least modern democracies should be free of the scourge of violence. I mean, sure there is going to be some level of hockey fights, crime and accidents in any society, but we can at least get close. Their views would also be especially important because they (who'm I kidding - we) tend to be rich and make most of the rules for the rest. Before I jumped on this hopeful new train of thought, I reckoned it might be a good idea to find an indicator of attitudes toward violence in these modern democracies. Just as I was giving up hope, not having access to the means to launch a big international survey and evaluate the results, a proxy landed in my lap. The Economist printed this graph
that shows attitudes toward torture in several countries, many of which are modern democracies. I figured that the practices I was worried about were fairly similar to torture - at least at the level of attitudes. I mean, by granting that "some degree of torture should be allowed", you're essentially saying "other things being equal, it's okay sometimes for some person I've never met to do nasty violence on some other person I've never met for some unspecified purpose." If that's a fair extrapolation, it just might be the indicator I was looking for!
So what does the graph tell us? It's hard to say, which also means it's hard to be optimistic. The western Europeans are predictably anti-torture (peaceful). They're modern democracies, so points for optimism. On the other hand, the figures for the US are close enough to be poll results from a post-convention presidential race, and Turkey and India, which are also modern democracies (seven times out of ten in months with an "r") actually favour using some torture.
As a pleasant surprise, China's figure is lower than expected, as is Russia's. Even Egypt's is lower than I would have expected. My enthusiasm in these cases is muted because these countries have particularly unresponsive governments that take the attitude of "like it, or we'll beat you up!" If you can't get your preferences into a judicial system and make them stick, they lose normative potency.
I suppose the take home message is that you can sleep soundly that you are less likely to die or be harmed in an international war than your grandparents, but watch out for your neighbours and officials if you live outside the EU (and maybe Canada). And it started out so wonderful.
Of course war is becoming less common. An old reason for war, conquest, doesn't fly anymore. Ch. 1, Art. 2 of the UN Charter is pretty clear on this: political settlements are the only legitimate means to gain territory. There are some tricky questions remaining about national self-determination in different corners of the world, such as northern Sri Lanka, Tibet, S.E. Turkey, and Quebec, but the geopolitical map of the world is fairly stable as far as conquest is concerned. Ideology is also slowly harmonizing, which was another big cause of war, and international and colonial wars are just generally out of fashion. I'll leave it to you to decide whether going into a failed state without a proper government counts, as was the case with Ethiopia's incursion into Somalia and NATO's invasion of Afghanistan. Still, it seems that international wars are becoming less common, and fewer are dying in the wars that do happen.
So why am I not rejoicing. Well, I ran into this article that snapped me back into reality. There's still a lot of violence going on inside borders. Granted, the male rapes in Congo they mention happen in Kivu, and that's not exactly the pinnacle of civilization. It's been a miserable corner of the world at least since its neighbour, Rwanda, tore itself apart in 1994, and it has experienced other rough periods too. The recent domestic violence in Iran, Pakistan, Xinjiang and Nigeria mustn't be forgotten either. There is still plenty of room in the world for violence at a national level.
Well, I thought further, at least modern democracies should be free of the scourge of violence. I mean, sure there is going to be some level of hockey fights, crime and accidents in any society, but we can at least get close. Their views would also be especially important because they (who'm I kidding - we) tend to be rich and make most of the rules for the rest. Before I jumped on this hopeful new train of thought, I reckoned it might be a good idea to find an indicator of attitudes toward violence in these modern democracies. Just as I was giving up hope, not having access to the means to launch a big international survey and evaluate the results, a proxy landed in my lap. The Economist printed this graph
that shows attitudes toward torture in several countries, many of which are modern democracies. I figured that the practices I was worried about were fairly similar to torture - at least at the level of attitudes. I mean, by granting that "some degree of torture should be allowed", you're essentially saying "other things being equal, it's okay sometimes for some person I've never met to do nasty violence on some other person I've never met for some unspecified purpose." If that's a fair extrapolation, it just might be the indicator I was looking for!So what does the graph tell us? It's hard to say, which also means it's hard to be optimistic. The western Europeans are predictably anti-torture (peaceful). They're modern democracies, so points for optimism. On the other hand, the figures for the US are close enough to be poll results from a post-convention presidential race, and Turkey and India, which are also modern democracies (seven times out of ten in months with an "r") actually favour using some torture.
As a pleasant surprise, China's figure is lower than expected, as is Russia's. Even Egypt's is lower than I would have expected. My enthusiasm in these cases is muted because these countries have particularly unresponsive governments that take the attitude of "like it, or we'll beat you up!" If you can't get your preferences into a judicial system and make them stick, they lose normative potency.
I suppose the take home message is that you can sleep soundly that you are less likely to die or be harmed in an international war than your grandparents, but watch out for your neighbours and officials if you live outside the EU (and maybe Canada). And it started out so wonderful.
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