Slides for Public Lecture on the arguments for and against a "decline of war". Presents evidence from Steven Pinker's "Better Angles of Our Nature" and then challenges that evidence with latest scholarship.
3. "Violence has been in decline over long stretches of
time and we may be living in the most peaceful time
in our species' existence.“
-- Steven Pinker
4. Basis for Pinker’s Claim
“The problem I have set out to understand is the reduction
of violence at many scales – in the family, in the
neighborhood, between tribes and other armed factions,
and among major nations and states….[T]he global
trends in almost all of them, viewed from the vantage
point of the present, point downward.”
7. From Woods and Baltzly….
“Let us turn at once to the most generalized of our
results…that certainly there is a falling-off of war”
- Woods and Baltzly 1915, 28
22. Number of Officially Designated Wars
Between 1816 and 2010: No year did not witness a war (International, civil, or colonial)
Note: Does not include recent wars such as Ukraine, Yemen, Libya, Syria, etc
23. 3) Technological Criticisms
Battlefield fatalities are lower due to….
Better Battlefield Medicine
Better Battlefield Sanitation
Better Battlefield Nutrition
27. “Fighting Germany, Austria and Drink, and as far as I can see
the greatest of these three deadly foes is Drink”
-- David Lloyd George, British minister for
munitions (became Prime Minister in 1916),
Feb 1915.
This is probably why war is a prominent feature in the news today….
Source of Slides on next several slides: These are Pinker’s own slides from https://www.edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker
Notes: Use High Value UCDP battle deaths because of suggestion by Erik Melander of UCDP here:
https://twitter.com/ProfPaulPoast/status/1071820440828633095
Namely, UCDP measures are conservative. The UCDP “High Battle Death” figures more closely match PRIO’s measurement methodology.
The point made by these scholar is that the dips in the red circle are not large enough (and, by the way, the blue line is questionable, even by UCDP’s own standards) or have not been sustained long enough to be a “statistically significant” deviation from the trend line.
What if we instead use simply the conflicts that the Correlates of War project identifies as “wars”?
In that case, see above.
First two images from (Crimea War ambulance and then WWI ambulance): https://wellcomecollection.org/works?query=CRIMEA%20CRIMEAN%20WAR&page=3
Nice summary article of medical advances: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-15771688
Source of images: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
Source of trench image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trench_warfare
