Global Conflicts

I had a discussion this weekend with a friend about the current era vs The Rennaissance. I think his point was that when you look back at our time, it will be recognized as a time of technological growth, but not of the growth of society or the improvement of mankind. Unfortunately, my memory is bad, so I can't get much further than that.

What I do remember is that a central part of his point of view was that global conflicts are increasing, and that the world is becoming more militarized. I wasn't sure that this was a logical progression, as I wasn't sure that global conflicts were actually increasing. I think it would be hard to deny that the nature of conflicts are becoming more global than they've been - beyond 400 years ago there simply wasn't much global contact between nations, so any conflicts must have been local. However, I don't think this means that the quantity or severity of conflicts is going up.

So I googled "number of world conflicts," and discovered the following helpful links:
World becomes slightly safer as number of violent conflicts falls
The number of armed conflicts has dropped 40% since 1992.
Issues: UN Funding and Peacekeeping

This one is actually derisive in it's denial that things are getting worse:
WW4? Don’t Flatter Them

This link, while slightly off topic, puts the number of American military deaths in perspective:
U.S. Abortion Deaths Compared to U.S. War Deaths

This link tries to document the number of war deaths for a couple of hundred years:
Military and Civilian War Related Deaths Through the Ages

I put together a little chart from what I could get from this site:


But when I was putting this together, things didn't seem to add up. I tried to reconstruct the chart with numbers from Wikipedia, but, well, it's hard.

Since I consider myself a realist, not someone who makes up facts or someone who ignores inconvenient truths, here's a site that claims that some international conflicts are not reported:
The Balkans War Reigns But World Conflicts Rage

So, he may be right that history will judge us as shallow and empty, but I think he's wrong in that we're becoming increasingly warlike.