To many Americans, it feels as if the world is becoming a more violent place. Besieged nightly with video of conflicts across the Afghanistan, Nigeria, the Middle East, and Ukraine, it would be easy to draw that conclusion.
Surprisingly, perhaps, the opposite is true: fewer people die in wars than ever before.
The World Is Getting More Peaceful
The newly released “Positive Peace" report from the Institute for Economics and Peace, which measures and communicates the “economic value of peace,” for example, documents conflict in 162 countries covering 99 percent of the world’s population. It defines positive peace as “the presence of the attitudes, institutions, and structures that create and sustain peaceful societies. Well-developed positive peace represents ’the capacity that a society has to meet the needs of citizens, reduce the number of grievances that arise, and resolve remaining disagreements without the use of violence.'”
Using a variety of measures, the report’s authors conclude that things have consistently improved in the last decade. This is especially true in what they term “the developing world.” In that time, 118 countries improved, only 44 got worse.
Of course, many of those 44 places have gravely worsened—like Syria.
