The world is not a peaceful place.

Top of mind for much of the world right now are the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine. Wanna be US presidential hopeful Donald Trump said there was peace under his administration and that he would solve the two most pressing conflicts before even taking office.? Well truth be told, as the New York Times reported in 2003 the world has only been at peace for 268 years, or about 8 percent of recorded history. A significant chunk of that relatively peaceful period was the Pax Romana starting in 27 B.C. when the Roman Empire flourished and made a deliberate decision to limit its own expansion.

Not much has changed since that NYT story.

The 2024 Global Peace Index published by The Institute for Economics & Peace covers 99.7% of the world. That report says there are currently 56 active conflicts and that 92 countries are engaged in conflicts outside their national borders. Our current global state is considered less peaceful than it has been for the last 16 years.

?At the end of the Trump Presidency the 2020 Index noted that global peacefulness had deteriorated for the 9th time in the previous 12 years. In that 2020 Index Canada was ranked 6th among the most peaceful countries and the United States ranked 121st. Russia was 154th. As for actual deployment of US troops, as of September 2022 ?there were 171,736 active-duty military troops deployed across 178 countries, but the totals could be higher because the US military does not share all the details.

The human cost of war has its own story to tell. Before the Israeli conflict started ?940,000 people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan alone. A Guardian story in June said that since 2021 the overall number of conflict-related deaths, including civilians, had risen to the highest world-wide level in 30 years. Some estimates have put the total number of deaths in wars and conflicts during the 20th century at 231 million. The UN says that 90% of war time casualties are civilians (that estimate comes before the Gaza and Ukraine casualties).

Given the global state of affairs over a few thousand years, no one can take any credit for creating a more peaceful world – because it isn’t. ?

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