The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (71 page)
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Authors: Steven Pinker
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BOOK: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
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For all these encouraging statistics, news readers who are familiar with the carnage in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Sudan, and other deathtraps may not be reassured. The PRIO/UCDP data we have been examining are limited in two ways. They include only state-based conflicts: wars in which at least one of the sides is a government. And they include only battle-related deaths: fatalities caused by battlefield weapons. What happens to the trends when we start looking for the keys that don’t fall under these lampposts?
The first exclusion consists of the nonstate conflicts (also called intercommunal violence), in which warlords, militias, mafias, rebel groups, or paramilitaries, often affiliated with ethnic groups, go after each other. These conflicts usually occur in failed states, almost by definition. A war that doesn’t even bother to invite the government represents the ultimate failure of the state’s monopoly on violence.
The problem with nonstate conflicts is that until recently war buffs just weren’t interested in them. No one kept track, so there’s nothing to count, and we cannot plot the trends. Even the United Nations, whose mission is to prevent “the scourge of war,” refuses to keep statistics on intercommunal violence (or on any other form of armed conflict), because its member states don’t want social scientists poking around inside their borders and exposing the violence that their murderous governments cause or their inept governments fail to prevent .
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Nonetheless, a broad look at history suggests that nonstate conflicts today must be far fewer than they were in decades and centuries past, when less of the earth’s surface was controlled by states. Tribal battles, slave raids, pillagings by raiders and horse tribes, pirate attacks, and private wars by noblemen and warlords, all of them nonstate, were scourges of humanity for millennia. During China’s “warlord era” from 1916 to 1928, more than 900,000 people were killed by competing military chieftains in just a dozen years.
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It was only in 2002 that nonstate conflicts began to be tabulated. Since then the UCDP has maintained a Non-State Conflict Dataset, and it contains three revelations. First, nonstate conflicts are in some years as numerous as state-based conflicts—which says more about the scarcity of war than about the prevalence of intercommunal combat. Most of them, not surprisingly, are in sub-Saharan Africa, though a growing number are in the Middle East (most prominently, Iraq). Second, nonstate conflicts kill far fewer people than conflicts that involve a government, perhaps a quarter as many. Again, this is not surprising, since governments almost by definition are in the violence business. Third, the trend in the death toll from 2002 to 2008 (the most recent year covered in the dataset) has been mostly downward, despite 2007’s being the deadliest year for intercommunal violence in Iraq.
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So as best as anyone can tell, it seems unlikely that nonstate conflicts kill enough people to stand as a counterexample to the decline in the worldwide toll of armed conflict that constitutes the New Peace.
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So as best as anyone can tell, it seems unlikely that nonstate conflicts kill enough people to stand as a counterexample to the decline in the worldwide toll of armed conflict that constitutes the New Peace.
A more serious challenge is the number of indirect deaths of civilians from the hunger, disease, and lawlessness exacerbated by war. One often reads that a century ago only 10 percent of the deaths in war were suffered by civilians, but that today the figure is 90 percent. Consistent with this claim are new surveys by epidemiologists that reveal horrendous numbers of “excess deaths” (direct and indirect) among civilians. Rather than counting bodies from media reports and nongovernmental organizations, surveyors ask a sample of people whether they know someone who was killed, then extrapolate the proportion to the population as a whole. One of these surveys, published in the medical journal
Lancet
in 2006, estimated that 600,000 people died in the war in Iraq between 2003 and 2006—overwhelmingly more than the 80,000 to 90,000 battle deaths counted for that period by PRIO and by the Iraq Body Count, a respected nongovernmental organization.
64
Another survey in the Democratic Republic of the Congo put the death toll from its civil war at 5.4 million—about thirty-five times the PRIO battle-death estimate, and more than half of the total of
all
the battle deaths it has recorded in all wars since 1946.
65
Even granting that the PRIO figures are intended as lower bounds (because of the stringent requirements that deaths be attributed to a cause), this is quite a discrepancy, and raises doubts about whether, in the big picture, the decline in battle deaths can really be interpreted as an advance in peace.
Lancet
in 2006, estimated that 600,000 people died in the war in Iraq between 2003 and 2006—overwhelmingly more than the 80,000 to 90,000 battle deaths counted for that period by PRIO and by the Iraq Body Count, a respected nongovernmental organization.
64
Another survey in the Democratic Republic of the Congo put the death toll from its civil war at 5.4 million—about thirty-five times the PRIO battle-death estimate, and more than half of the total of
all
the battle deaths it has recorded in all wars since 1946.
65
Even granting that the PRIO figures are intended as lower bounds (because of the stringent requirements that deaths be attributed to a cause), this is quite a discrepancy, and raises doubts about whether, in the big picture, the decline in battle deaths can really be interpreted as an advance in peace.
Casualty figures are always moralized, and it’s not surprising that these three numbers, which have been used to indict, respectively, the 20th century, Bush’s invasion of Iraq, and the world’s indifference to Africa, have been widely disseminated. But an objective look at the sources suggests that the revisionist estimates are not credible (which, needless to say, does not imply that anyone should be indifferent to civilian deaths in wartime).
First off, the commonly cited 10-percent-to-90-percent reversal in civilian casualties turns out to be completely bogus. The political scientists Andrew Mack (of HSRP), Joshua Goldstein, and Adam Roberts have each tried to track down the source of this meme, since they all knew that the data needed to underpin it do not exist.
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They also knew that the claim fails basic sanity checks. For much of human history, peasants have subsisted on what they could grow, producing little in the way of a surplus. A horde of soldiers living off the land could easily tip a rural population into starvation. The Thirty Years’ War in particular saw not only numerous massacres of civilians but the deliberate destruction of homes, crops, livestock, and water supplies, adding up to truly horrendous civilian death tolls. The American Civil War, with its blockades, crop-burnings, and scorched-earth campaigns, caused an enormous number of civilian casualties (the historical reality behind Scarlett O’Hara’s vow in
Gone With the Wind:
“As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again”).
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During World War I the battlefront moved through populated areas, raining artillery shells on towns and villages, and each side tried to starve the other’s civilians with blockades. And as I have mentioned, if one includes the victims of the 1918 flu epidemic as indirect deaths from the war, one could multiply the number of civilian casualties many times over. World War II, also in the first half of the 20th century, decimated civilians with a holocaust, a blitz,
Slaughterhouse-Five
–like firebombings of cities in Germany and Japan, and not one but two atomic explosions. It seems unlikely that today’s wars, however destructive to civilians, could be substantially worse.
66
They also knew that the claim fails basic sanity checks. For much of human history, peasants have subsisted on what they could grow, producing little in the way of a surplus. A horde of soldiers living off the land could easily tip a rural population into starvation. The Thirty Years’ War in particular saw not only numerous massacres of civilians but the deliberate destruction of homes, crops, livestock, and water supplies, adding up to truly horrendous civilian death tolls. The American Civil War, with its blockades, crop-burnings, and scorched-earth campaigns, caused an enormous number of civilian casualties (the historical reality behind Scarlett O’Hara’s vow in
Gone With the Wind:
“As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again”).
67
During World War I the battlefront moved through populated areas, raining artillery shells on towns and villages, and each side tried to starve the other’s civilians with blockades. And as I have mentioned, if one includes the victims of the 1918 flu epidemic as indirect deaths from the war, one could multiply the number of civilian casualties many times over. World War II, also in the first half of the 20th century, decimated civilians with a holocaust, a blitz,
Slaughterhouse-Five
–like firebombings of cities in Germany and Japan, and not one but two atomic explosions. It seems unlikely that today’s wars, however destructive to civilians, could be substantially worse.
Goldstein, Roberts, and Mack traced the meme to a chain of garbled retellings in which different kinds of casualty estimates were mashed up: battle deaths in one era were compared with battle deaths, indirect deaths, injuries, and refugees in another. Mack and Goldstein estimate that civilians suffer around half of the battle deaths in war, and that the ratio varies from war to war but has not increased over time. Indeed, we shall see that it has recently decreased by a substantial margin.
The most widely noted of the recent epidemiological estimates is the
Lancet
study of deaths in Iraq.
68
A team of eight Iraqi health workers went door to door in eighteen regions and asked people about recent deaths in the family. The epidemiologists subtracted the death rate for the years before the 2003 invasion from the death rate for the years after, figuring that the difference could be attributed to the war, and multiplied that proportion by the size of the population of Iraq. This arithmetic suggested that 655,000 more Iraqis died than if the invasion had never taken place. And 92 percent of these excess deaths, the families indicated, were direct battle deaths from gunshots, airstrikes, and car bombs, not indirect deaths from disease or starvation. If so, the standard body counts would be underestimates by a factor of around seven.
Lancet
study of deaths in Iraq.
68
A team of eight Iraqi health workers went door to door in eighteen regions and asked people about recent deaths in the family. The epidemiologists subtracted the death rate for the years before the 2003 invasion from the death rate for the years after, figuring that the difference could be attributed to the war, and multiplied that proportion by the size of the population of Iraq. This arithmetic suggested that 655,000 more Iraqis died than if the invasion had never taken place. And 92 percent of these excess deaths, the families indicated, were direct battle deaths from gunshots, airstrikes, and car bombs, not indirect deaths from disease or starvation. If so, the standard body counts would be underestimates by a factor of around seven.
Without meticulous criteria for selecting a sample, though, extrapolations to an entire population can be wildly off. A team of statisticians led by Michael Spagat and Neil Johnson found these estimates incredible and discovered that a disproportionate number of the surveyed families lived on major streets and intersections—just the places where bombings and shootings are most likely.
69
An improved study conducted by the World Health Organization came up with a figure that was a quarter of the
Lancet
number, and even that required inflating an original estimate by a fudge factor of 35 percent to compensate for lying, moves, and memory lapses. Their unadjusted figure, around 110,000, is far closer to the battle-death body counts.
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An improved study conducted by the World Health Organization came up with a figure that was a quarter of the
Lancet
number, and even that required inflating an original estimate by a fudge factor of 35 percent to compensate for lying, moves, and memory lapses. Their unadjusted figure, around 110,000, is far closer to the battle-death body counts.
70
Another team of epidemiologists extrapolated from retrospective surveys of war deaths in thirteen countries to challenge the entire conclusion that battle deaths have declined since the middle of the 20th century.
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Spagat, Mack, and their collaborators have examined them and shown that the estimates are all over the map and are useless for tracking war deaths over time.
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Spagat, Mack, and their collaborators have examined them and shown that the estimates are all over the map and are useless for tracking war deaths over time.
72
What about the report of 5.4 million deaths (90 percent of them from disease and hunger) in the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo?
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It also turns out to be inflated. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) got the number by taking an estimate of the prewar death rate that was far too low (because it came from sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, which is better off than the DRC) and subtracting it from an estimate of the rate during the war that was far too high (because it came from areas where the IRC was providing humanitarian assistance, which are just the areas with the highest impact from war). The HSRP, while acknowledging that the indirect death toll in the DRC is high—probably over a million—cautions against accepting estimates of excess deaths from retrospective survey data, since in addition to all of their sampling pitfalls, they require dubious conjectures about what would have happened if a war had not taken place.
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It also turns out to be inflated. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) got the number by taking an estimate of the prewar death rate that was far too low (because it came from sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, which is better off than the DRC) and subtracting it from an estimate of the rate during the war that was far too high (because it came from areas where the IRC was providing humanitarian assistance, which are just the areas with the highest impact from war). The HSRP, while acknowledging that the indirect death toll in the DRC is high—probably over a million—cautions against accepting estimates of excess deaths from retrospective survey data, since in addition to all of their sampling pitfalls, they require dubious conjectures about what would have happened if a war had not taken place.
74
Amazingly, the HSRP has collected evidence that death rates from disease and hunger have tended to go
down
, not up, during the wars of the past three decades.
75
It may sound like they are saying that war is healthy for children and other living things after all, but that is not their point. Instead, they document that deaths from malnutrition and hunger in the developing world have been dropping steadily over the years, and that the civil wars of today, which are fought by packs of insurgents in limited regions of a country, have not been destructive enough to reverse the tide. In fact, when medical and food assistance is rushed to a war zone, where it is often administered during humanitarian cease-fires, the progress can accelerate.
down
, not up, during the wars of the past three decades.
75
It may sound like they are saying that war is healthy for children and other living things after all, but that is not their point. Instead, they document that deaths from malnutrition and hunger in the developing world have been dropping steadily over the years, and that the civil wars of today, which are fought by packs of insurgents in limited regions of a country, have not been destructive enough to reverse the tide. In fact, when medical and food assistance is rushed to a war zone, where it is often administered during humanitarian cease-fires, the progress can accelerate.
How is this possible? Many people are unaware of what UNICEF calls the Child Survival Revolution. (The revolution pertains to adult survival too, though children under five are the most vulnerable population and hence the ones most dramatically helped.) Humanitarian assistance has gotten smarter. Rather than just throwing money at a problem, aid organizations have adapted discoveries from the science of public health about which scourges kill the most people and which weapon against each one is the most cost-effective. Most childhood deaths in the developing world come from four causes: malaria; diarrheal diseases such as cholera and dysentery; respiratory infections such as pneumonia, influenza, and tuberculosis; and measles. Each is preventable or treatable, often remarkably cheaply. Mosquito nets, antimalarial drugs, antibiotics, water purifiers, oral rehydration therapy (a bit of salt and sugar in clean water), vaccinations, and breast-feeding (which reduces diarrheal and respiratory diseases) can save enormous numbers of lives. Over the last three decades, vaccination alone (which in 1974 protected just 5 percent of the world’s children and today protects 75 percent) has saved 20 million lives.
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Ready-to-use therapeutic foods like Plumpy’nut, a peanutbutterish goop in a foil package that children are said to like, can make a big dent in malnutrition and starvation.
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Ready-to-use therapeutic foods like Plumpy’nut, a peanutbutterish goop in a foil package that children are said to like, can make a big dent in malnutrition and starvation.
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