P R E FAC E
This book is about what may be the most important thing that has ever happened
in human history. Believe it or not—and I know that most people
do not—violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may
be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence. The decline, to
be sure, has not been smooth; it has not brought violence down to zero; and it
is not guaranteed to continue. But it is an unmistakable development, visible
on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars to the spanking of
children.
No aspect of life is untouched by the retreat from violence. Daily existence
is very different if you always have to worry about being abducted, raped, or
killed, and it’s hard to develop sophisticated arts, learning, or commerce if the
institutions that support them are looted and burned as quickly as they are
built.
The historical trajectory of violence affects not only how life is lived but
how it is understood. What could be more fundamental to our sense of meaning
and purpose than a conception of whether the strivings of the human race
over long stretches of time have left us better or worse off? How, in particular,
are we to make sense of modernity—of the erosion of family, tribe, tradition,
and religion by the forces of individualism, cosmopolitanism, reason, and
science? So much depends on how we understand the legacy of this transition:
whether we see our world as a nightmare of crime, terrorism, genocide, and
war, or as a period that, by the standards of history, is blessed by unprecedented
levels of peaceful coexistence.
The question of whether the arithmetic sign of trends in violence is positive
or negative also bears on our conception of human nature. Though theories
of human nature rooted in biology are often associated with fatalism about
violence, and the theory that the mind is a blank slate is associated with progress,
in my view it is the other way around. How are we to understand the
natural state of life when our species first emerged and the processes of history
began? The belief that violence has increased suggests that the world we
made has contaminated us, perhaps irretrievably. The belief that it has
xxi
xxii Preface
decreased suggests that we started off nasty and that the artifices of civilization
have moved us in a noble direction, one in which we can hope to continue.
This is a big book, but it has to be. First I have to convince you that violence
really has gone down over the course of history, knowing that the very idea
invites skepticism, incredulity, and sometimes anger. Our cognitive faculties
predispose us to believe that we live in violent times, especially when they
are stoked by media that follow the watchword “If it bleeds, it leads.” The
human mind tends to estimate the probability of an event from the ease with
which it can recall examples, and scenes of carnage are more likely to be
beamed into our homes and burned into our memories than footage of people
dying of old age.1
No matter how small the percentage of violent deaths may
be, in absolute numbers there will always be enough of them to fill the evening
news, so people’s impressions of violence will be disconnected from the actual
proportions.
Also distorting our sense of danger is our moral psychology. No one has
ever recruited activists to a cause by announcing that things are getting better,
and bearers of good news are often advised to keep their mouths shut lest they
lull people into complacency. Also, a large swath of our intellectual culture is
loath to admit that there could be anything good about civilization, modernity,
and Western society. But perhaps the main cause of the illusion of ever-present
violence springs from one of the forces that drove violence down in the first
place. The decline of violent behavior has been paralleled by a decline in attitudes
that tolerate or glorify violence, and often the attitudes are in the lead.
By the standards of the mass atrocities of human history, the lethal injection
of a murderer in Texas, or an occasional hate crime in which a member of an
ethnic minority is intimidated by hooligans, is pretty mild stuff. But from a
contemporary vantage point, we see them as signs of how low our behavior
can sink, not of how high our standards have risen.
In the teeth of these preconceptions, I will have to persuade you with numbers,
which I will glean from datasets and depict in graphs. In each case I’ll
explain where the numbers came from and do my best to interpret the ways
they fall into place. The problem I have set out to understand is the reduction
in violence at many scales—in the family, in the neighborhood, between tribes
and other armed factions, and among major nations and states. If the history
of violence at each level of granularity had an idiosyncratic trajectory, each
would belong in a separate book. But to my repeated astonishment, the global
trends in almost all of them, viewed from the vantage point of the present,
point downward. That calls for documenting the various trends between a
single pair of covers, and seeking commonalities in when, how, and why they
have occurred.
Too many kinds of violence, I hope to convince you, have moved in the same
direction for it all to be a coincidence, and that calls for an explanation. It is
natural to recount the history of violence as a moral saga—a heroic struggle
Preface xxiii
of justice against evil—but that is not my starting point. My approach is scientific
in the broad sense of seeking explanations for why things happen. We may
discover that a particular advance in peacefulness was brought about by moral
entrepreneurs and their movements. But we may also discover that the explanation
is more prosaic, like a change in technology, governance, commerce, or
knowledge. Nor can we understand the decline of violence as an unstoppable
force for progress that is carrying us toward an omega point of perfect peace.
It is a collection of statistical trends in the behavior of groups of humans in
various epochs, and as such it calls for an explanation in terms of psychology
and history: how human minds deal with changing circumstances.
A large part of the book will explore the psychology of violence and nonviolence.
The theory of mind that I will invoke is the synthesis of cognitive
science, affective and cognitive neuroscience, social and evolutionary psychology,
and other sciences of human nature that I explored in How the Mind Works,
The Blank Slate, and The Stuff of Thought. According to this understanding, the
mind is a complex system of cognitive and emotional faculties implemented
in the brain which owe their basic design to the processes of evolution. Some
of these faculties incline us toward various kinds of violence. Others—“the
better angels of our nature,” in Abraham Lincoln’s words—incline us toward
cooperation and peace. The way to explain the decline of violence is to identify
the changes in our cultural and material milieu that have given our peaceable
motives the upper hand.
Finally, I need to show how our history has engaged our psychology. Everything
in human affairs is connected to everything else, and that is especially
true of violence. Across time and space, the more peaceable societies also tend
to be richer, healthier, better educated, better governed, more respectful of their
women, and more likely to engage in trade. It’s not easy to tell which of these
happy traits got the virtuous circle started and which went along for the ride,
and it’s tempting to resign oneself to unsatisfying circularities, such as that
violence declined because the culture got less violent. Social scientists distinguish
“endogenous” variables—those that are inside the system, where they
may be affected by the very phenomenon they are trying to explain—from the
“exogenous” ones—those that are set in motion by forces from the outside.
Exogenous forces can originate in the practical realm, such as changes in technology,
demographics, and the mechanisms of commerce and governance. But
they can also originate in the intellectual realm, as new ideas are conceived
and disseminated and take on a life of their own. The most satisfying explanation
of a historical change is one that identifies an exogenous trigger. To the
best that the data allow it, I will try to identify exogenous forces that have
engaged our mental faculties in different ways at different times and that
thereby can be said to have caused the declines in violence.
The discussions that try to do justice to these questions add up to a big
book—big enough that it won’t spoil the story if I preview its major
xxiv Preface
conclusions. The Better Angels of Our Nature is a tale of six trends, five inner
demons, four better angels, and five historical forces.
Six Trends (chapters 2 through 7). To give some coherence to the many developments
that make up our species’ retreat from violence, I group them into
six major trends.
The first, which took place on the scale of millennia, was the transition from
the anarchy of the hunting, gathering, and horticultural societies in which
our species spent most of its evolutionary history to the first agricultural civilizations
with cities and governments, beginning around five thousand years
ago. With that change came a reduction in the chronic raiding and feuding
that characterized life in a state of nature and a more or less fivefold decrease
in rates of violent death. I call this imposition of peace the Pacification Process.
The second transition spanned more than half a millennium and is best
documented in Europe. Between the late Middle Ages and the 20th century,
European countries saw a tenfold-to-fiftyfold decline in their rates of homicide.
In his classic book The Civilizing Process, the sociologist Norbert Elias attributed
this surprising decline to the consolidation of a patchwork of feudal territories
into large kingdoms with centralized authority and an infrastructure of commerce.
With a nod to Elias, I call this trend the Civilizing Process.
The third transition unfolded on the scale of centuries and took off around
the time of the Age of Reason and the European Enlightenment in the 17th
and 18th centuries (though it had antecedents in classical Greece and the
Renaissance, and parallels elsewhere in the world). It saw the first organized
movements to abolish socially sanctioned forms of violence like despotism,
slavery, dueling, judicial torture, superstitious killing, sadistic punishment,
and cruelty to animals, together with the first stirrings of systematic pacifism.
Historians sometimes call this transition the Humanitarian Revolution.
The fourth major transition took place after the end of World War II. The
two-thirds of a century since then have been witness to a historically unprecedented
development: the great powers, and developed states in general, have
stopped waging war on one another. Historians have called this blessed state
of affairs the Long Peace.2
The fifth trend is also about armed combat but is more tenuous. Though it
may be hard for news readers to believe, since the end of the Cold War in 1989,
organized conflicts of all kinds—civil wars, genocides, repression by autocratic
governments, and terrorist attacks—have declined throughout the world. In
recognition of the tentative nature of this happy development, I will call it the
New Peace.
Finally, the postwar era, symbolically inaugurated by the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights in 1948, has seen a growing revulsion against
aggression on smaller scales, including violence against ethnic minorities,
women, children, homosexuals, and animals. These spin-offs from the concept
Preface xxv
of human rights—civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, gay rights,
and animal rights—were asserted in a cascade of movements from the late
1950s to the present day which I will call the Rights Revolutions.
Five Inner Demons (chapter 8). Many people implicitly believe in the Hydraulic
Theory of Violence: that humans harbor an inner drive toward aggression
(a death instinct or thirst for blood), which builds up inside us and must periodically
be discharged. Nothing could be further from a contemporary scientific
understanding of the psychology of violence. Aggression is not a single
motive, let alone a mounting urge. It is the output of several psychological
systems that differ in their environmental triggers, their internal logic, their
neurobiological basis, and their social distribution. Chapter 8 is devoted to
explaining five of them. Predatory or instrumental violence is simply violence
deployed as a practical means to an end. Dominance is the urge for authority,
prestige, glory, and power, whether it takes the form of macho posturing
among individuals or contests for supremacy among racial, ethnic, religious,
or national groups. Revenge fuels the moralistic urge toward retribution, punishment,
and justice. Sadism is pleasure taken in another’s suffering. And ideology
is a shared belief system, usually involving a vision of utopia, that
justifies unlimited violence in pursuit of unlimited good.
Four Better Angels (chapter 9). Humans are not innately good (just as they are
not innately evil), but they come equipped with motives that can orient them
away from violence and toward cooperation and altruism. Empathy (particularly
in the sense of sympathetic concern) prompts us to feel the pain of others
and to align their interests with our own. Self-control allows us to anticipate
the consequences of acting on our impulses and to inhibit them accordingly.
The moral sense sanctifies a set of norms and taboos that govern the interactions
among people in a culture, sometimes in ways that decrease violence,
though often (when the norms are tribal, authoritarian, or puritanical) in ways
that increase it. And the faculty of reason allows us to extricate ourselves from
our parochial vantage points, to reflect on the ways in which we live our lives,
to deduce ways in which we could be better off, and to guide the application
of the other better angels of our nature. In one section I will also examine the
possibility that in recent history Homo sapiens has literally evolved to become
less violent in the biologist’s technical sense of a change in our genome. But
the focus of the book is on transformations that are strictly environmental:
changes in historical circumstances that engage a fixed human nature in different
ways.
Five Historical Forces (chapter 10). In the final chapter I try to bring the psychology
and history back together by identifying exogenous forces that favor
our peaceable motives and that have driven the multiple declines in violence.
xxvi Preface
The Leviathan, a state and judiciary with a monopoly on the legitimate use of
force, can defuse the temptation of exploitative attack, inhibit the impulse for
revenge, and circumvent the self-serving biases that make all parties believe
they are on the side of the angels. Commerce is a positive-sum game in which
everybody can win; as technological progress allows the exchange of goods
and ideas over longer distances and among larger groups of trading partners,
other people become more valuable alive than dead, and they are less likely
to become targets of demonization and dehumanization. Feminization is the
process in which cultures have increasingly respected the interests and values
of women. Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower
women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely
to breed dangerous subcultures of rootless young men. The forces of cosmopolitanism
such as literacy, mobility, and mass media can prompt people to
take the perspective of people unlike themselves and to expand their circle of
sympathy to embrace them. Finally, an intensifying application of knowledge
and rationality to human affairs—the escalator of reason—can force people to
recognize the futility of cycles of violence, to ramp down the privileging of
their own interests over others’, and to reframe violence as a problem to be
solved rather than a contest to be won.
As one becomes aware of the decline of violence, the world begins to look
different. The past seems less innocent; the present less sinister. One starts to
appreciate the small gifts of coexistence that would have seemed utopian to
our ancestors: the interracial family playing in the park, the comedian who
lands a zinger on the commander in chief, the countries that quietly back away
from a crisis instead of escalating to war. The shift is not toward complacency:
we enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were
appalled by the violence in their time and worked to reduce it, and so we
should work to reduce the violence that remains in our time. Indeed, it is a
recognition of the decline of violence that best affirms that such efforts are
worthwhile. Man’s inhumanity to man has long been a subject for moralization.
With the knowledge that something has driven it down, we can also treat
it as a matter of cause and effect. Instead of asking, “Why is there war?” we
might ask, “Why is there peace?” We can obsess not just over what we have
been doing wrong but also over what we have been doing right. Because we
have been doing something right, and it would be good to know what, exactly,
it is.
Many people have asked me how I became involved in the analysis of violence.
It should not be a mystery: violence is a natural concern for anyone who studies
human nature. I first learned of the decline of violence from Martin Daly
and Margo Wilson’s classic book in evolutionary psychology, Homicide, in
which they examined the high rates of violent death in nonstate societies and
the decline in homicide from the Middle Ages to the present. In several of my
Preface xxvii
previous books I cited those downward trends, together with humane developments
such as the abolition of slavery, despotism, and cruel punishments
in the history of the West, in support of the idea that moral progress is compatible
with a biological approach to the human mind and an acknowledgment
of the dark side of human nature.3
I reiterated these observations in response
to the annual question on the online forum www.edge.org, which in 2007 was
“What Are You Optimistic About?” My squib provoked a flurry of correspondence
from scholars in historical criminology and international studies who
told me that the evidence for a historical reduction in violence is more extensive
than I had realized.4
It was their data that convinced me that there was
an underappreciated story waiting to be told.
My first and deepest thanks go to these scholars: Azar Gat, Joshua Goldstein,
Manuel Eisner, Andrew Mack, John Mueller, and John Carter Wood. As
I worked on the book, I also benefited from correspondence with Peter Brecke,
Tara Cooper, Jack Levy, James Payne, and Randolph Roth. These generous
researchers shared ideas, writings, and data and kindly guided me through
fields of research that are far from my own specialization.
David Buss, Martin Daly, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, David Haig, James
Payne, Roslyn Pinker, Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington, and Polly Wiessner read
most or all of the first draft and offered immeasurably helpful advice and
criticism. Also invaluable were comments on particular chapters offered by
Peter Brecke, Daniel Chirot, Alan Fiske, Jonathan Gottschall, A. C. Grayling,
Niall Ferguson, Graeme Garrard, Joshua Goldstein, Capt. Jack Hoban, Stephen
Leblanc, Jack Levy, Andrew Mack, John Mueller, Charles Seife, Jim Sidanius,
Michael Spagat, Richard Wrangham, and John Carter Wood.
Many other people responded to my inquiries with prompt explanations
or offered suggestions that were incorporated into the book: John Archer, Scott
Atran, Daniel Batson, Donald Brown, Lars-Erik Cederman, Christopher Chabris,
Gregory Cochran, Leda Cosmides, Tove Dahl, Lloyd deMause, Jane
Esberg, Alan Fiske, Dan Gardner, Pinchas Goldschmidt, Cmdr. Keith Gordon,
Reid Hastie, Brian Hayes, Judith Rich Harris, Harold Herzog, Fabio Idrobo,
Tom Jones, Maria Konnikova, Robert Kurzban, Gary Lafree, Tom Lehrer,
Michael Macy, Steven Malby, Megan Marshall, Michael McCullough, Nathan
Myhrvold, Mark Newman, Barbara Oakley, Robert Pinker, Susan Pinker, Ziad
Obermeyer, David Pizarro, Tage Rai, David Ropeik, Bruce Russett, Scott Sagan,
Ned Sahin, Aubrey Sheiham, Francis X. Shen, Lt. Col. Joseph Shusko, Richard
Shweder, Thomas Sowell, Håvard Strand, Ilavenil Subbiah, Rebecca Sutherland,
Philip Tetlock, Andreas Forø Tollefsen, James Tucker, Staffan Ulfstrand,
Jeffrey Watumull, Robert Whiston, Matthew White, Maj. Michael Wiesenfeld,
and David Wolpe.
Many colleagues and students at Harvard have been generous with their
expertise, including Mahzarin Banaji, Robert Darnton, Alan Dershowitz,
James Engell, Nancy Etcoff, Drew Faust, Benjamin Friedman, Daniel Gilbert,
xxviii Preface
Edward Glaeser, Omar Sultan Haque, Marc Hauser, James Lee, Bay McCulloch,
Richard McNally, Michael Mitzenmacher, Orlando Patterson, Leah Price,
David Rand, Robert Sampson, Steve Shavell, Lawrence Summers, Kyle
Thomas, Justin Vincent, Felix Warneken, and Daniel Wegner.
Special thanks go to the researchers who have worked with me on the data
reported in these pages. Brian Atwood carried out countless statistical analyses
and database searches with precision, thoroughness, and insight. William
Kowalsky discovered many pertinent findings from the world of public opinion
polling. Jean-Baptiste Michel helped develop the Bookworm program, the
Google Ngram Viewer, and the Google Books corpus and devised an ingenious
model for the distribution of the magnitude of wars. Bennett Haselton carried
out an informative study of people’s perceptions of the history of violence.
Esther Snyder assisted with graphing and bibliographic searches. Ilavenil Subbiah
designed the elegant graphs and maps, and over the years has provided
me with invaluable insight about the culture and history of Asia.
John Brockman, my literary agent, posed the question that led to the writing
of this book and offered many helpful comments on the first draft. Wendy
Wolf, my editor at Penguin, offered a detailed analysis of the first draft that
did much to shape the final version. I’m enormously grateful to John and
Wendy, together with Will Goodlad at Penguin UK, for their support of the
book at every stage.
Heartfelt thanks go to my family for their love and encouragement: Harry,
Roslyn, Susan, Martin, Robert, and Kris. My greatest appreciation goes to
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, who not only improved the book’s substance
and style but encouraged me with her belief in the value of the project, and
who has done more than anyone to shape my worldview. This book is dedicated
to my niece, nephews, and stepdaughters: may they enjoy a world in
which the decline of violence continues.
6
THE NEW PEACE

Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes,
even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of
Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no
ideology.
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
You would think that the disappearance of the gravest threat in the history
of humanity would bring a sigh of relief among commentators on world
affairs. Contrary to expert predictions, there was no invasion of Western
Europe by Soviet tanks, no escalation of a crisis in Cuba or Berlin or the Middle
East to a nuclear holocaust.1
The cities of the world were not vaporized;
the atmosphere was not poisoned by radioactive fallout or choked with debris
that blacked out the sun and sent Homo sapiens the way of the dinosaurs. Not
only that, but a reunified Germany did not turn into a fourth reich, democracy
did not go the way of monarchy, and the great powers and developed nations
did not fall into a third world war but rather a long peace, which keeps getting
longer. Surely the experts have been acknowledging the improvements in the
world’s fortunes from a few decades ago.
But no—the pundits are glummer than ever! In 1989 John Gray foresaw “a
return to the classical terrain of history, a terrain of great power rivalries . . .
and irredentist claims and wars.”2
A New York Times editor wrote in 2007 that
this return had already taken place: “It did not take long [after 1989] for the
gyre to wobble back onto its dependably blood-soaked course, pushed along
by fresh gusts of ideological violence and absolutism.”3
The political scientist
Stanley Hoffman said that he has been discouraged from teaching his course
on international relations because after the end of the Cold War, one heard
“about nothing but terrorism, suicide bombings, displaced people, and geno­
cides.”4
The pessimism is bipartisan: in 2007 the conservative writer Norman
Podhoretz published a book called World War IV (on “the long struggle against
Islamofascism”), while the liberal columnist Frank Rich wrote that the world
was “a more dangerous place than ever.”5
If Rich is correct, then the world was
295
296 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
more dangerous in 2007 than it was during the two world wars, the Berlin
crises of 1949 and 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and all the wars in the Middle
East. That’s pretty dangerous.
Why the gloom? Partly it’s the result of market forces in the punditry business,
which favor the Cassandras over the Pollyannas. Partly it arises from
human temperament: as David Hume observed, “The humour of blaming the
present, and admiring the past, is strongly rooted in human nature, and has
an influence even on persons endowed with the profoundest judgment and
most extensive learning.” But mainly, I think, it comes from the innumeracy of
our journalistic and intellectual culture. The journalist Michael Kinsley recently
wrote, “It is a crushing disappointment that Boomers entered adulthood with
Americans killing and dying halfway around the world, and now, as Boomers
reach retirement and beyond, our country is doing the same damned thing.”6
This assumes that 5,000 Americans dying is the same damned thing as 58,000
Americans dying, and that a hundred thousand Iraqis being killed is the same
damned thing as several million Vietnamese being killed. If we don’t keep an
eye on the numbers, the programming policy “If it bleeds it leads” will feed
the cognitive shortcut “The more memorable, the more frequent,” and we will
end up with what has been called a false sense of insecurity.7
This chapter is about three kinds of organized violence that have stoked
the new pessimism. They were given short shrift in the preceding chapter,
which concentrated on wars among great powers and developed states. The
Long Peace has not seen an end to these other kinds of conflict, leaving the
impression that the world is “a more dangerous place than ever.”
The first kind of organized violence embraces all the other categories of
war, most notably the civil wars and wars between militias, guerrillas, and
paramilitaries that plague the developing world. These are the “new wars” or
“low-intensity conflicts” that are said to be fueled by “ancient hatreds.”8
Familiar
images of African teenagers with Kalashnikovs support the impression
that the global burden of war has not declined but has only been displaced
from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere.
The new wars are thought to be especially destructive to civilians because
of the hunger and disease they leave in their wake, which are omitted from
most counts of war dead. According to a widely repeated statistic, at the beginning
of the 20th century 90 percent of war deaths were suffered by soldiers
and 10 percent by civilians, but by the end of the century these proportions
had reversed. Horrifying estimates of fatalities from famines and epidemics,
rivaling the death toll of the Nazi Holocaust, have been reported in war-torn
countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The second kind of organized violence I will track is the mass killing of
ethnic and political groups. The hundred-year period from which we have
recently escaped has been called “the age of genocide” and “a century of genocide.”
Many commentators have written that ethnic cleansing emerged with
THE NEW PEACE 297
modernity, was held at bay by the hegemony of the superpowers, returned with
a vengeance with the end of the Cold War, and today is as prevalent as ever.
The third is terrorism. Since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United
States, the fear of terrorism has led to a massive new bureaucracy, two foreign
wars, and obsessive discussion in the political arena. The threat of terrorism
is said to pose an “existential threat” to the United States, having the capacity
to “do away with our way of life” or to end “civilization itself.”9
Each of these scourges, of course, continues to take a toll in human lives.
The question I will ask in this chapter is exactly how big a toll, and whether it
has increased or decreased in the past few decades. It’s only recently that
political scientists have tried to measure these kinds of destruction, and now
that they have, they have reached a surprising conclusion: All these kinds of
killing are in decline.10
The decreases are recent enough—in the past two decades
or less—that we cannot count on them lasting, and in recognition of their
tentative nature I will call this development the New Peace. Nonetheless the
trends are genuine declines of violence and deserve our careful attention.
They are substantial in size, opposite in sign to the conventional wisdom, and
suggestive of ways we might identify what went right and do more of it in the
future.
THE TRAJECTORY OF WAR IN THE REST OF THE WORLD
What was the rest of the world doing during the six hundred years when the
great powers and European states went through their Ages of Dynasties, Religions,
Sovereignty, Nationalism, and Ideology; were racked by two world
wars; and then fell into a long peace? Unfortunately the Eurocentric bias of
the historical record makes it impossible to trace out curves with any confidence.
Before the advent of colonialism, large swaths of Africa, the Americas,
and Asia were host to predation, feuding, and slave-raiding that slunk beneath
the military horizon or fell in the forest without any historian hearing them.
Colonialism itself was implemented in many imperial wars that the great
powers waged to acquire their colonies, suppress revolts, and fend off rivals.
Throughout this era there were plenty of wars. For the period from 1400
through 1938, Brecke’s Conflict Catalog lists 276 violent conflicts in the Americas,
283 in North Africa and the Middle East, 586 in sub-Saharan Africa, 313
in Central and South Asia, and 657 in East and Southeast Asia.11
Historical
myopia prevents us from plotting trustworthy trends in the frequency or
deadliness of the wars, but we saw in the preceding chapter that many were
devastating. They included civil and interstate wars that were proportionally
(and in some cases absolutely) more lethal than anything taking place in
Europe, such as the American Civil War, the Taiping Rebellion in China, the
War of the Triple Alliance in South America, and the conquests of Shaka Zulu
in southern Africa.
298 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
In 1946, just when Europe, the great powers, and the developed world
started racking up their peaceful zeroes, the historical record for the world as
a whole snaps into focus. That is the first year covered in a meticulous dataset
compiled by Bethany Lacina, Nils Petter Gleditsch, and their colleagues at the
Peace Research Institute of Oslo called the PRIO Battle Deaths Dataset.12
The
dataset includes every known armed conflict that killed as few as twenty-five
people in a year. The conflicts that rise to the level of a thousand deaths a year
are promoted to “wars,” matching the definition used in the Correlates of War
Project, but they are otherwise given no special treatment. (I will continue to
use the word war in its nontechnical sense to refer to armed conflicts of all
sizes.)
The PRIO researchers aim for criteria that are as reliable as possible, so that
analysts can compare regions of the world and plot trends over time using a
fixed yardstick. Without strict criteria—when analysts use direct battlefield
deaths for some wars but include indirect deaths from epidemics and famines
in others, or when they count army-against-army wars in some regions but
throw in genocides in others—comparisons are meaningless and are too easily
used as propaganda for one cause or another. The PRIO analysts comb
through histories, media stories, and reports from government and human
rights organizations to tally deaths from war as objectively as possible. The
counts are conservative; indeed, they are certainly underestimates, because
they omit all deaths that are merely conjectured or whose causes cannot be
ascertained with confidence. Similar criteria, and overlapping data, are used
in other conflict datasets, including those of the Uppsala Conflict Data Project
(UCDP), whose data begin in 1989; the Stockholm International Peace Research
Institute (SIPRI), which uses adjusted UCDP data; and the Human Security
Report Project (HSRP), which draws on both the PRIO and UCDP datasets.13
Like Lewis Richardson, the new conflict-counters have to deal with failures
of thinginess, and so they divide the conflicts into categories using obsessivecompulsive
criteria.14
The first cut distinguishes three kinds of mass violence
that vary in their causes and, just as importantly, in their countability. The
concept of “war” (and its milder version, “armed conflict”) applies most naturally
to multiple killing that is organized and socially legitimated. That invites
a definition in which a “war” must have a government on at least one side,
and the two sides must be contesting some identifiable resource, usually a
territory or the machinery of government. To make this clear, the datasets call
wars in this narrow sense “state-based armed conflicts,” and they are the only
conflicts for which data go all the way back to 1946.
The second category embraces “nonstate” or “intercommunal” conflict, and
it pits warlords, militias, or paramilitaries (often aligned with ethnic or religious
groups) against each other.
The third category has the clinical name “one-sided violence” and embraces
genocides, politicides, and other massacres of unarmed civilians, whether
THE NEW PEACE 299
perpetrated by governments or by militias. The exclusion of one-sided violence
from the PRIO dataset is in part a tactical choice to divide violence into categories
with different causes, but it is also a legacy of historians’ long-standing
fascination with war at the expense of genocide, which only recently has been
recognized as more destructive of human life.15
Rudolph Rummel, the political
scientist Barbara Harff, and the UCDP have collected datasets of genocides,
which we will examine in the next section.16
The first of the three categories, state-based conflicts, is then subdivided
according to whom the government is fighting. The prototypical war is the
interstate war, which pits two states against each other, such as the Iran-Iraq
War of 1980–88. Then there are extrastate or extrasystemic wars, in which a government
wages war on an entity outside its borders that is not a recognized
state. These are generally imperial wars, in which a state fights indigenous
forces to acquire a colony, or colonial wars, in which it fights to retain one, such
as France in Algeria from 1954 to 1962.
Finally there are civil or intrastate wars, in which the government fights an
insurrection, rebellion, or secessionist movement. These are further subdivided
into civil wars that are completely internal (such as the recently concluded
war in Sri Lanka between the government and the Tamil Tigers) and
the internationalized intrastate wars in which a foreign army intervenes, usually
to help a government defend itself against the rebels. The wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq both began as interstate conflicts (the United States and its allies
against Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and the United States and its
allies against Baathist-controlled Iraq), but as soon as the governments were
toppled and the invading armies remained in the country to support the new
governments against insurgencies, the conflicts were reclassified as internationalized
intrastate conflicts.
Now there’s the question of which deaths to count. The PRIO and UCDP
datasets tally direct or battle-related deaths—the people who are shot, stabbed,
clubbed, gassed, blown up, drowned, or deliberately starved as part of a contest
in which the perpetrators themselves have to worry about getting hurt.17
The victims may be soldiers, or they may be civilians who were caught in the
crossfire or killed in “collateral damage.” The battle-related death statistics
exclude indirect deaths arising from disease, starvation, stress, and the breakdown
of infrastructure. When indirect deaths are added to direct deaths to
yield the entire toll attributable to the war, the sum may be called excess deaths.
Why do the datasets exclude indirect deaths? It’s not to write these kinds of
suffering out of the history books, but because direct deaths are the only ones
that can be counted with confidence. Direct deaths also conform to our basic
intuition of what it means for an agent to be responsible for an effect that it
causes, namely that the agent foresees the effect, intends for it to happen, and
makes it happen via a chain of events that does not have too many uncontrollable
intervening links.18
The problem with estimating indirect deaths is that it
300 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
requires us to undertake the philosophical exercise of simulating in our imagination
the possible world in which the war didn’t occur and estimating the
number of deaths that took place in that world, which then is used as a baseline.
And that requires something close to omniscience. Would a postwar famine
have taken place even if the war had not broken out because of the ineptitude
of the overthrown government? What if there was a drought that year—should
the famine deaths be blamed on the war or on the weather? If the rate of death
from hunger was going down in the years before a war, should we assume that
it would have declined even further if the war hadn’t occurred, or should we
freeze it at its level in the last year before the war? If Saddam Hussein had not
been deposed, would he have gone on to kill more political enemies than the
number of people who died in the intercommunal violence following his defeat?
Should we add the 40 to 50 million victims of the 1918 influenza pandemic to
the 15 million who were killed in World War I, because the flu virus would
not have evolved its virulence if the war hadn’t packed so many troops into
trenches?19
Estimating indirect deaths requires answering these sorts of questions
in a consistent way for hundreds of conflicts, an impossible undertaking.
Wars, in general, tend to be destructive in many ways at once, and the ones
that kill more people on the battlefield also generally lead to more deaths from
famine, disease, and the disruption of services. To the extent that they do,
trends in battle deaths can serve as a proxy for trends in overall destructiveness.
But they don’t in every case, and later in the chapter we will ask whether
developing nations, with their fragile infrastructure, are more vulnerable to
knock-on effects than advanced nations, and whether this ratio has changed
over time, making battle deaths a misleading index of trends in the human
toll of conflict.
Now that we have the precision instrument of conflict datasets, what do they
tell us about the recent trajectory of war in the entire world? Let’s begin with
the bird’s-eye view of the 20th century in figure 6–1. The viewing was arranged
by Lacina, Gleditsch, and Russett, who retrofitted numbers from the Correlates
of War Project from 1900 to 1945 to the PRIO dataset from 1946 to 2005, and
divided the numbers by the size of the world’s population, to yield an individual’s
risk of dying in battle over the century.
The graph reminds us of the freakish destructiveness of the two world wars.
They were not steps on a staircase, or swings of a pendulum, but massive
spikes poking through a bumpy lowland. The drop-off in the rate of battle
deaths after the early 1940s (peaking at 300 per 100,000 people per year) has
been precipitous; the world has seen nothing close to that level since.
Eagle-eyed readers will spot a decline within the decline, from some small
peaks in the immediate postwar decade to the low-lying flats of today. Let’s
zoom in on this trend in figure 6–2, while also subdividing the battle deaths
according to the type of war that caused them.
1946
1949
1952
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2006
THE NEW PEACE 301
Battledeathsper100,000peopleperyear
300

250

200

150

100

50

0

1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000

FIGURE 6–1. Rate of battle deaths in state-based armed conflicts, 1900–2005

Source: Graph from Russett, 2008, based on Lacina, Gleditsch, & Russett, 2006.
0
5
10
15
20
Battledeathsper100,000peopleperyear
Civil
Internationalized civil
Interstate
Colonial
FIGURE 6–2. Rate of battle deaths in state-based armed conflicts, 1946–2008

Civilian and military battle deaths in state-based armed conflicts, divided by world population.
Sources: UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset; see Human Security Report Project, 2007, based on
data from Lacina & Gleditsch, 2005, updated in 2010 by Tara Cooper. “Best” estimate used when
available; otherwise the geometric mean of the “High” and “Low” estimates is used. World population
figures from U.S. Census Bureau, 2010c. Population data for 1946–49 were taken from McEvedy
& Jones, 1978, and multiplied by 1.01 to make them commensurable with the rest.
302 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
This is an area graph, in which the thickness of each layer represents the
rate of battle deaths for a particular kind of state-based conflict, and the height
of the stack of layers represents the rate for all the conflicts combined. First take
a moment to behold the overall shape of the trajectory. Even after we have
lopped off the massive ski-jump from World War II, no one could miss another
steep falloff in the rate of getting killed in battle that has taken place over the
past sixty years, with a paper-thin laminate for the first decade of the 21st century
at the end. This period, even with thirty-one ongoing conflicts in that
mid-decade (including Iraq, Afghanistan, Chad, Sri Lanka, and Sudan), enjoyed
an astoundingly low rate of battle deaths: around 0.5 per 100,000 per year, falling
below the homicide rate of even the world’s most peaceable societies.20
The
figures, granted, are lowballs, since they include only reported battle deaths,
but that is true for the entire time series. And even if we were to multiply the
recent figures by five, they would sit well below the world’s overall homicide
rate of 8.8 per 100,000 per year.21
In absolute numbers, annual battle deaths have
fallen by more than 90 percent, from around half a million per year in the late
1940s to around thirty thousand a year in the early 2000s. So believe it or not,
from a global, historical, and quantitative perspective, the dream of the 1960s
folk songs has come true: the world has (almost) put an end to war.
Let’s take our jaws off the table and look more closely at what happened
category by category. We can start with the pale patch at the bottom left, which
represents a kind of war that has vanished off the face of the earth: the
extrastate or colonial war. Wars in which a great power tried to hang on to a
colony could be extremely destructive, such as France’s attempts to retain
Vietnam between 1946 and 1954 (375,000 battle deaths) and Algeria between
1954 and 1962 (182,500 battle deaths).22
After what has been called “the greatest
transfer of power in world history,” this kind of war no longer exists.
Now look at the black layer, for wars between states. It is bunched up in three
large patches, each thinner than its predecessor: one which includes the Korean
War from 1950 to 1953 (a million battle deaths spread over four years), one which
includes the Vietnam War from 1962 to 1975 (1.6 million battle deaths spread over
fourteen years), and one which includes the Iran-Iraq War (645,000 battle deaths
spread over nine years).23
Since the end of the Cold War, there have been only
two significant interstate wars: the first Gulf War, with 23,000 battle deaths, and
the 1998–2000 war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, with 50,000. By the first decade
of the new millennium, interstate wars had become few in number, mostly brief,
and relatively low in battle deaths (India-Pakistan and Eritrea-Djibouti, neither
of which counts as a “war” in the technical sense of having a thousand deaths a
year, and the quick overthrow of the regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq). In 2004,
2005, 2006, 2007, and 2009, there were no interstate conflicts at all.
The Long Peace—an avoidance of major war among great powers and
developed states—is spreading to the rest of the world. Aspiring great powers
no longer feel the need to establish their greatness by acquiring an empire or
1946
1949
1952
1955
1958
1961
1964
1967
1970
1973
1976
1979
1982
1985
1988
1991
1994
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2003
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2009
THE NEW PEACE 303
picking on weaker countries: China boasts of its “peaceful rise” and Turkey
of a policy it calls “zero problems with neighbors”; Brazil’s foreign minister
recently crowed, “I don’t think there are many countries that can boast that
they have 10 neighbors and haven’t had a war in the last 140 years.”24
And East
Asia seems to be catching Europe’s distaste for war. Though in the decades
after World War II it was the world’s bloodiest region, with ruinous wars in
China, Korea, and Indochina, from 1980 to 1993 the number of conflicts and
their toll in battle deaths plummeted, and they have remained at historically
unprecedented lows ever since.25
As interstate war was being snuffed out, though, civil wars began to flare
up. We see this in the enormous dark gray wedge at the left of figure 6–2,
mainly representing the 1.2 million battle deaths in the 1946–50 Chinese Civil
War, and a fat lighter gray bulge at the top of the stack in the 1980s, which
contains the 435,000 battle deaths in the Soviet Union–bolstered civil war in
Afghanistan. And snaking its way through the 1980s and 1990s, we find a
continuation of the dark gray layer with a mass of smaller civil wars in countries
such as Angola, Bosnia, Chechnya, Croatia, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala,
Iraq, Liberia, Mozambique, Somalia, Sudan, Tajikistan, and Uganda.
But even this slice tapers down in the 2000s to a slender layer.
To get a clearer picture of what the numbers here are telling us, it helps to
disaggregate the death tolls into the two main dimensions of war: how many
there were, and how lethal each kind was. Figure 6–3 shows the raw totals of
0
10
20
30
40
50
60 Civil
Internationalized civil
Interstate
Colonial
Numberofconflicts
FIGURE 6–3. Number of state-based armed conflicts, 1946–2009
Sources: UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset; see Human Security Report Project, 2007, based on
data from Lacina & Gleditsch, 2005, updated in 2010 by Tara Cooper.
InterstateIntl.civil
Intl.civil
Intl.civil
Intl.civil
Intl.civil
Intl.civil
CivilInterstate
CivilInterstate
CivilInterstate
CivilInterstate
CivilInterstate
Civil
304 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
the conflicts of each kind, disregarding their death tolls, which, recall, can be
as low as twenty-five. As colonial wars disappeared and interstate wars were
petering out, internationalized civil wars vanished for a brief instant at the
end of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union and the United States stopped
supporting their client states, and then reappeared with the policing wars in
Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. But the big news was an explosion
in the number of purely internal civil wars that began around 1960,
peaked in the early 1990s, and then declined through 2003, followed by a slight
bounce.
Why do the sizes of the patches look so different in the two graphs? It’s
because of the power-law distribution for wars, in which a small number of
wars in the tail of the L-shaped distribution are responsible for a large percentage
of the deaths. More than half of the 9.4 million battle deaths in the 260
conflicts between 1946 and 2008 come from just five wars, three of them
between states (Korea, Vietnam, Iran-Iraq) and two within states (China and
Afghanistan). Most of the downward trend in the death toll came from reeling
in that thick tail, leaving fewer of the really destructive wars.
In addition to the differences in the contributions of wars of different sizes
to the overall death tolls, there are substantial differences in the contributions
of the wars of different kinds. Figure 6–4 shows the second dimension of war,
how many people an average war kills.
70,000 1950s
60,000
1960s 1970s
50,000
40,000
30,000 1980s
20,000
1990s 2000s
10,000
0
Battledeathsperconflictperyear
FIGURE 6–4. Deadliness of interstate and civil wars, 1950–2005
Sources: UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset, Lacina & Gleditsch, 2005; adapted by the Human
Security Report Project; Human Security Centre, 2006.
THE NEW PEACE 305
Until recently the most lethal kind of war by far was the interstate war. There
is nothing like a pair of Leviathans amassing cannon fodder, lobbing artillery
shells, and pulverizing each other’s cities to rack up truly impressive body
counts. A distant second and third are the wars in which a Leviathan projects
its might in some other part of the world to prop up a beleaguered government
or keep a grip on its colonies. Pulling up the rear are the internal civil
wars, which, at least since the Chinese slaughterhouse in the late 1940s, have
been far less deadly. When a gang of Kalashnikov-toting rebels harasses the
government in a small country that the great powers don’t care about, the
damage they do is more limited. And even these fatality rates have decreased
over the past quarter-century.26
In 1950 the average armed conflict (of any
kind) killed thirty-three thousand people; in 2007 it killed less than a thou­
sand.27
How can we make sense of the juddering trajectory of conflict since the end
of World War II, easing into the lull of the New Peace? One major change has
been in the theater of armed conflict. Wars today take place mainly in poor
countries, mostly in an arc that extends from Central and East Africa through
the Middle East, across Southwest Asia and northern India, and down into
Southeast Asia. Figure 6–5 shows ongoing conflicts in 2008 as black dots, and
shades in the countries containing the “bottom billion,” the people with the
lowest income. About half of the conflicts take place in the countries with the
poorest sixth of the people. In the decades before 2000, conflicts were scattered
in other poor parts of the world as well, such as Central America and West
Africa. Neither the economic nor the geographic linkage with war is a constant
of history. Recall that for half a millennium the wealthy countries of Europe
were constantly at each other’s throats.
The relation between poverty and war in the world today is smooth but
highly nonlinear. Among wealthy countries in the developed world, the risk
of civil war is essentially zero. For countries with a per capita gross domestic
product of around $1,500 a year (in 2003 U.S. dollars), the probability of a new
conflict breaking out within five years rises to around 3 percent. But from there
downward the risk shoots up: for countries with a per capita GDP of $750, it
is 6 percent; for countries whose people earn $500, it is 8 percent; and for those
that subsist on $250, it is 15 percent.28
A simplistic interpretation of the correlation is that poverty causes war
because poor people have to fight for survival over a meager pool of resources.
Though undoubtedly some conflicts are fought over access to water or arable
land, the connection is far more tangled than that.29
For starters, the causal
arrow also goes in the other direction. War causes poverty, because it’s hard
to generate wealth when roads, factories, and granaries are blown up as fast
as they are built and when the most skilled workers and managers are constantly
being driven from their workplaces or shot. War has been called
306 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
FIGURE6–5.Geographyofarmedconflict,2008
Countriesindarkgraycontainthe“bottombillion”ortheworld’spoorestpeople.Dotsrepresentsitesofarmedconflictin2008.Sources:DatafromHåvard
StrandandAndreasForøTollefsen,PeaceResearchInstituteofOslo(PRIO);adaptedfromamapbyHalvardBuhaugandSiriRustadinGleditsch,2008.
THE NEW PEACE 307
“development in reverse,” and the economist Paul Collier has estimated that
a typical civil war costs the afflicted country $50 billion.30
Also, neither wealth nor peace comes from having valuable stuff in the
ground. Many poor and war-torn African countries are overflowing with gold,
oil, diamonds, and strategic metals, while affluent and peaceable countries
such as Belgium, Singapore, and Hong Kong have no natural resources to
speak of. There must be a third variable, presumably the norms and skills of
a civilized trading society, that causes both wealth and peace. And even if
poverty does cause conflict, it may do so not because of competition over scarce
resources but because the most important thing that a little wealth buys a
country is an effective police force and army to keep domestic peace. The fruits
of economic development flow far more to a government than to a guerrilla
force, and that is one of the reasons that the economic tigers of the developing
world have come to enjoy a state of relative tranquillity.31
Whatever effects poverty may have, measures of it and of other “structural
variables,” like the youth and maleness of a country’s demographics, change
too slowly to fully explain the recent rise and fall of civil war in the developing
world.32
Their effects, though, interact with the country’s form of governance.
The thickening of the civil war wedge in the 1960s had an obvious
trigger: decolonization. European governments may have brutalized the
natives when conquering a colony and putting down revolts, but they generally
had a fairly well-functioning police, judiciary, and public-service infrastructure.
And while they often had their pet ethnic groups, their main concern
was controlling the colony as a whole, so they enforced law and order fairly
broadly and in general did not let one group brutalize another with too much
impunity. When the colonial governments departed, they took competent
governance with them. A similar semianarchy burst out in parts of Central
Asia and the Balkans in the 1990s, when the communist federations that had
ruled them for decades suddenly unraveled. One Bosnian Croat explained
why ethnic violence erupted only after the breakup of Yugoslavia: “We lived
in peace and harmony because every hundred meters we had a policeman to
make sure we loved each other very much.”33
Many of the governments of the newly independent colonies were run by
strongmen, kleptocrats, and the occasional psychotic. They left large parts
of their countries in anarchy, inviting the predation and gang warfare we
saw in Polly Wiessner’s account of the decivilizing process in New Guinea in
chapter 3. They siphoned tax revenue to themselves and their clans, and their
autocracies left the frozen-out groups no hope for change except by coup or
insurrection. They responded erratically to minor disorders, letting them build
up and then sending death squads to brutalize entire villages, which only
inflamed the opposition further.34
Perhaps an emblem for the era was JeanBédel
Bokassa of the Central African Empire, the name he gave to the small
country formerly called the Central African Republic. Bokassa had seventeen
308 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
wives, personally carved up (and according to rumors, occasionally ate) his
political enemies, had schoolchildren beaten to death when they protested
expensive mandatory uniforms bearing his likeness, and crowned himself
emperor in a ceremony (complete with a gold throne and diamond-studded
crown) that cost one of the world’s poorest countries a third of its annual
revenue.
During the Cold War many tyrants stayed in office with the blessing of the
great powers, who followed the reasoning of Franklin Roosevelt about Nicara­
gua’sAnastasioSomoza:“Hemaybeasonofabitch,buthe’soursonofabitch.”35
The Soviet Union was sympathetic to any regime it saw as advancing the worldwide
communist revolution, and the United States was sympathetic to any
regime that kept itself out of the Soviet orbit. Other great powers such as France
tried to stay on the good side of any regime that would supply them with oil and
minerals. The autocrats were armed and financed by one superpower, insurrectionists
who fought them were armed by the other, and both patrons were
more interested in seeing their client win than in seeing the conflict come to an
end. Figure 6–3 reveals a second expansion of civil wars around 1975, when Portugal
dismantled its colonial empire and the American defeat in Vietnam
emboldened insurrections elsewhere in the world. The number of civil wars
peaked at fifty-one in 1991, which, not coincidentally, is the year the Soviet Union
went out of existence, taking the Cold War–stoked proxy conflicts with it.
Only a fifth of the decline in conflicts, though, can be attributed to the disappearance
of proxy wars.36
The end of communism removed another source
of fuel to world conflict: it was the last of the antihumanist, struggle-glorifying
creeds in Luard’s Age of Ideologies (we’ll look at a new one, Islamism, later in
this chapter). Ideologies, whether religious or political, push wars out along
the tail of the deadliness distribution because they inflame leaders into trying
to outlast their adversaries in destructive wars of attrition, regardless of the
human costs. The three deadliest postwar conflicts were fueled by Chinese,
Korean, and Vietnamese communist regimes that had a fanatical dedication
to outlasting their opponents. Mao Zedong in particular was not embarrassed
to say that the lives of his citizens meant nothing to him: “We have so many
people. We can afford to lose a few. What difference does it make?”37
On one
occasion he quantified “a few”—300 million people, or half the country’s population
at the time. He also stated that he was willing to take an equivalent
proportion of humanity with him in the cause: “If the worse came to the worst
and half of mankind died, the other half would remain while imperialism
would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist.”38
As for China’s erstwhile comrades in Vietnam, much has been written,
often by the chastened decision-makers themselves, about the American miscalculations
in that war. The most fateful was their underestimation of the
ability of the North Vietnamese and Vietcong to absorb casualties. As the
war unfolded, American strategists like Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara
THE NEW PEACE 309
were incredulous that a backward country like North Vietnam could resist
the most powerful army on earth, and they were always confident that the
next escalation would force it to capitulate. As John Mueller notes:
If battle death rate as a percentage of pre-war population is calculated for
each of the hundreds of countries that have participated in international
and colonial wars since 1816, it is apparent that Vietnam was an extreme
case. . . . The Communist side accepted battle death rates that were about
twice as high as those accepted by the fanatical, often suicidal, Japanese in
World War II, for example. Furthermore, the few combatant countries that
did experience loss rates as high as that of the Vietnamese Communists were
mainly those such as the Germans and Soviets in World War II, who were
fighting to the death for their national existence, not for expansion like the
North Vietnamese. In Vietnam, it seems, the United States was up against
an incredibly well-functioning organization—patient, firmly disciplined,
tenaciously led, and largely free from corruption or enervating selfindulgence.
Although the communists often experienced massive military
setbacks and periods of stress and exhaustion, they were always able to refit
themselves, rearm, and come back for more. It may well be that, as one
American general put it, “they were in fact the best enemy we have faced in
our history.”39
Ho Chi Minh was correct when he prophesied, “Kill ten of our men and we
will kill one of yours. In the end, it is you who will tire.” The American democracy
was willing to sacrifice a tiny fraction of the lives that the North Vietnamese
dictator was willing to forfeit (no one asked the proverbial ten men
how they felt about this), and the United States eventually conceded the war
of attrition despite having every other advantage. But by the 1980s, as China
and Vietnam were changing from ideological to commercial states and easing
their reigns of terror over their populations, they were less willing to inflict
comparable losses in unnecessary wars.
A world that is less invigorated by honor, glory, and ideology and more
tempted by the pleasures of bourgeois life is a world in which fewer people
are killed. After Georgia lost a five-day war with Russia in 2008 over control
of the tiny territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Georgia’s president
Mikheil Saakashvili explained to a New York Times writer why he decided not
to organize an insurgency against the occupation:
We had a choice here. We could turn this country into Chechnya—we had
enough people and equipment to do that—or we had to do nothing and stay
a modern European country. Eventually we would have chased them away,
but we would have had to go to the mountains and grow beards. That would
have been a tremendous national philosophical and emotional burden.40
310 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
The explanation was melodramatic, even disingenuous—Russia had no intention
of occupying Georgia—but it does capture one of the choices in the developing
world that lies behind the New Peace: go to the mountains and grow
beards, or do nothing and stay a modern country.
Other than the end of the Cold War and the decline of ideology, what led to
the mild reduction in the number of civil wars during the past two decades,
and the steep reduction in battle deaths of the last one? And why do conflicts
persist in the developing world (thirty-six in 2008, all but one of them civil
wars) when they have essentially disappeared in the developed world?
A good place to start is the Kantian triangle of democracy, open economies,
and engagement with the international community. Russett and Oneal’s statistical
analyses, described in the preceding chapter, embrace the entire world, but
they include only disputes between states. How well does the triad of pacifying
factors apply to civil wars within developing countries, where most of today’s
conflicts take place? Each variable, it turns out, has an important twist.
One might think that if a lot of democracy is a good thing in inhibiting war,
then a little democracy is still better than none. But with civil wars it doesn’t
work that way. Earlier in the chapter (and in chapter 3, when we examined
homicide across the world), we came across the concept of anocracy, a form of
rule that is neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic.41
Anocracies are also
known among political scientists as semidemocracies, praetorian regimes,
and (my favorite, overheard at a conference) crappy governments. These are
administrations that don’t do anything well. Unlike autocratic police states,
they don’t intimidate their populations into quiescence, but nor do they have
the more-or-less fair systems of law enforcement of a decent democracy.
Instead they often respond to local crime with indiscriminate retaliation on
entire communities. They retain the kleptocratic habits of the autocracies from
which they evolved, doling out tax revenues and patronage jobs to their clansmen,
who then extort bribes for police protection, favorable verdicts in court,
or access to the endless permits needed to get anything done. A government
job is the only ticket out of squalor, and having a clansman in power is the
only ticket to a government job. When control of the government is periodically
up for grabs in a “democratic election,” the stakes are as high as in any
contest over precious and indivisible spoils. Clans, tribes, and ethnic groups
try to intimidate each other away from the ballot box and then fight to overturn
an outcome that doesn’t go their way. According to the Global Report on Conflict,
Governance, and State Fragility, anocracies are “about six times more likely than
democracies and two and one-half times as likely as autocracies to experience
new outbreaks of societal wars” such as ethnic civil wars, revolutionary wars,
and coups d’état.42
Figure 5–23 in the preceding chapter shows why the vulnerability of anocracies
to violence has become a problem. As the number of autocracies in the
THE NEW PEACE 311
world began to decline in the late 1980s, the number of anocracies began to
increase. Currently they are distributed in a crescent from Central Africa
through the Middle East and West and South Asia that largely coincides with
the war zones in figure 6–5.43
The vulnerability to civil war of countries in which control of the government
is a winner-take-all jackpot is multiplied when the government controls
windfalls like oil, gold, diamonds, and strategic minerals. Far from being a
blessing, these bonanzas create the so-called resource curse, also known as
the paradox of plenty and fool’s gold. Countries with an abundance of nonrenewable,
easily monopolized resources have slower economic growth, crappier
governments, and more violence. As the Venezuelan politician Juan Pérez
Alfonzo put it, “Oil is the devil’s excrement.”44
A country can be accursed by
these resources because they concentrate power and wealth in the hands of
whoever monopolizes them, typically a governing elite but sometimes a
regional warlord. The leader becomes obsessed with fending off rivals for his
cash cow and has no incentive to foster the networks of commerce that enrich
a society and knit it together in reciprocal obligations. Collier, together with
the economist Dambisa Moyo and other policy analysts, has called attention
to a related paradox. Foreign aid, so beloved of crusading celebrities, can be
another poisoned chalice, because it can enrich and empower the leaders
through whom it is funneled rather than building a sustainable economic
infrastructure. Expensive contraband like coca, opium, and diamonds is a
third curse, because it opens a niche for cutthroat politicians or warlords to
secure the illegal enclaves and distribution channels.
Collier observes that “the countries at the bottom coexist with the 21st century,
but their reality is the 14th century: civil war, plague, ignorance.”45
The
analogy to that calamitous century, which stood on the verge of the Civilizing
Process before the consolidation of effective governments, is apt. In The Remnants
of War, Mueller notes that most armed conflict in the world today no
longer consists of campaigns for territory by professional armies. It consists
instead of plunder, intimidation, revenge, and rape by gangs of unemployable
young men serving warlords or local politicians, much like the dregs rounded
up by medieval barons for their private wars. As Mueller puts it:
Many of these wars have been labeled “new war,” “ethnic conflict,” or, most
grandly, “clashes of civilizations.” But in fact, most, though not all, are more
nearly opportunistic predation by packs, often remarkably small ones, of
criminals, bandits, and thugs. They engage in armed conflict either as mercenaries
hired by desperate governments or as independent or semiindependent
warlord or brigand bands. The damage perpetrated by these
entrepreneurs of violence, who commonly apply ethnic, nationalist, civilizational,
or religious rhetoric, can be extensive, particularly to the citizens
who are their chief prey, but it is scarcely differentiable from crime.46
312 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
Mueller cites eyewitness reports that confirm that the infamous civil wars
and genocides of the 1990s were largely perpetrated by gangs of drugged or
drunken hooligans, including those in Bosnia, Colombia, Croatia, East Timor,
Kosovo, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Zimbabwe, and other countries
in the African-Asian conflict crescent. Mueller describes some of the
“soldiers” in the 1989–96 Liberian Civil War:
Combatants routinely styled themselves after heroes in violent American
action movies like Rambo, Terminator, and Jungle Killer, and many went under
such fanciful noms de guerre as Colonel Action, Captain Mission Impossible,
General Murder, Young Colonel Killer, General Jungle King, Colonel
Evil Killer, General War Boss III, General Jesus, Major Trouble, General Butt
Naked, and, of course, General Rambo. Particularly in the early years, rebels
decked themselves out in bizarre, even lunatic attire: women’s dresses, wigs,
and pantyhose; decorations composed of human bones; painted fingernails;
even (perhaps in only one case) headgear made of a flowery toilet seat.47
The political scientists James Fearon and David Laitin have backed up such
vignettes with data confirming that civil wars today are fought by small numbers
of lightly armed men who use their knowledge of the local landscape to
elude national forces and intimidate informants and government sympathizers.
These insurgencies and rural guerrilla wars may have any number of
pretexts, but at heart they are less ethnic, religious, or ideological contests than
turf battles between street gangs or Mafiosi. In a regression analysis of 122
civil wars between 1945 and 1999, Fearon and Laitin found that, holding per
capita income constant (which they interpret as a proxy for government
resources), civil wars were not more likely to break out in countries that were
ethnically or religiously diverse, that had policies which discriminated against
minority religions or languages, or that had high levels of income inequality.
Civil wars were more likely to break out in countries that had large populations,
mountainous terrain, new or unstable governments, significant oil
exports, and (perhaps) a large proportion of young males. Fearon and Laitin
conclude, “Our theoretical interpretation is more Hobbesian than economic.
Where states are relatively weak and capricious, both fears and opportunities
encourage the rise of local would-be rulers who supply a rough justice while
arrogating the power to ‘tax’ for themselves and, often, a larger cause.”48
Just as the uptick in civil warfare arose from the decivilizing anarchy of decolonization,
the recent decline may reflect a recivilizing process in which competent
governments have begun to protect and serve their citizens rather than
preying on them.49
Many African nations have traded in their Bokassa-style
psychopaths for responsible democrats and, in the case of Nelson Mandela,
one of history’s greatest statesmen.50
THE NEW PEACE 313
The transition required an ideological change as well, not just in the affected
countries but in the wider international community. The historian Gérard
Prunier has noted that in 1960s Africa, independence from colonial rule became
a messianic ideal. New nations made it a priority to adopt the trappings of
sovereignty, such as airlines, palaces, and nationally branded institutions. Many
were influenced by “dependency theorists” who advocated that third-world
governments disengage from the global economy and cultivate self-sufficient
industries and agrarian sectors, which most economists today consider a ticket
to penury. Often economic nationalism was combined with a romantic militarism
that glorified violent revolution, symbolized in two icons of the 1960s, the
soft-color portrait of a glowing Mao and the hard-edged graphic of a dashing
Che. When dictatorships by glorious revolutionaries lost their cachet, democratic
elections became the new elixir. No one found much romance in the
frumpy institutions of the Civilizing Process, namely a competent government
and police force and a dependable infrastructure for trade and commerce. Yet
history suggests that these institutions are necessary for the reduction of
chronic violence, which is a prerequisite to every other social good.
During the past two decades the great powers, donor nations, and intergovernmental
organizations (such as the African Union) have begun to press
the point. They have ostracized, penalized, shamed, and in some cases invaded
states that have come under the control of incompetent tyrants.51
Measures to
track and fight government corruption have become more common, as has
the identification of barriers that penalize developing nations in global trade.
Some combination of these unglamorous measures may have begun to reverse
the governmental and social pathologies that had loosed civil wars on the
developing world from the 1960s through the early 1990s.
Decent governments tend to be reasonably democratic and market-oriented,
and several regression studies have looked at datasets on civil conflict for signs
of a Liberal Peace like the one that helps explain the avoidance of wars between
developed nations. We have already seen that the first leg of the peace, democracy,
does not reduce the number of civil conflicts, particularly when it comes
in the rickety form of an anocracy. But it does seem to reduce their severity.
The political scientist Bethany Lacina has found that civil wars in democracies
have fewer than half the battle deaths of civil wars in nondemocracies, holding
the usual variables constant. In his 2008 survey of the Liberal Peace,
Gleditsch concluded that “democracies rarely experience large-scale civil
wars.”52
The second leg of the Liberal Peace is even stronger. Openness to the
global economy, including trade, foreign investment, aid with strings attached,
and access to electronic media, appears to drive down both the likelihood and
the severity of civil conflict.53
The theory of the Kantian Peace places the weight of peace on three legs, the
third of which is international organizations. One type of international
314 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
organization in particular can claim much of the credit for driving down civil
wars: international peacekeeping forces.54
In the postcolonial decades civil
wars piled up not so much because they broke out at an increasing rate but
because they broke out at a higher rate than they ended (2.2 outbreaks a year
compared to 1.8 terminations), and thus began to accumulate.55
By 1999 an
average civil war had been going on for fifteen years! That began to change in
the late 1990s and 2000s, when civil wars started to fizzle out faster than new
ones took their place. They also tended to end in negotiated settlements, without
a clear victor, rather than being fought to the bitter end. Formerly these
embers would smolder for a couple of years and then flare up again, but now
they were more likely to die out for good.
This burst of peace coincides with a burst of peacekeepers. Figure 6–6 shows
that beginning in the late 1980s the international community stepped up its
peacekeeping operations and, more importantly, staffed them with increasing
numbers of peacekeepers so they could do their job properly. The end of the
Cold War was a turning point, because at last the great powers were more
interested in seeing a conflict end than in seeing their proxy win.56
The rise of
peacekeeping is also a sign of the humanist times. War is increasingly seen as
repugnant, and that includes wars that kill black and brown people.
Peacekeeping is one of the things that the United Nations, for all its foibles,
does well. (It doesn’t do so well at preventing wars in the first place.) In Does
Peacekeeping Work? the political scientist Virginia Page Fortna answers the
question in her title with “a clear and resounding yes.”57
Fortna assembled a
Percentageof1990level
600
500
400
300
200
100
0
Peacekeepers
Peacekeeping
operations
1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005
FIGURE 6–6. Growth of peacekeeping, 1948–2008
Source: Graph from Gleditsch, 2008, based on research by Siri Rustad.
THE NEW PEACE 315
dataset of 115 cease-fires in civil wars from 1944 to 1997 and examined whether
the presence of a peacekeeping mission lowered the chances that the war
would reignite. The dataset included missions by the UN, by permanent organizations
such as NATO and the African Union, and by ad hoc coalitions of
states. She found that the presence of peacekeepers reduced the risk of recidivism
into another war by 80 percent. This doesn’t mean that peacekeeping
missions are always successful—the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda are two
conspicuous failures—just that they prevent wars from restarting on average.
Peacekeepers need not be substantial armies. Just as scrawny referees can pull
apart brawling hockey players, lightly armed and even unarmed missions can
get in between militias and induce them to lay down their weapons. And even
when they don’t succeed at that, they can serve as a tripwire for bringing in
the bigger guns. Nor do peacekeepers have to be blue-helmeted soldiers. Functionaries
who scrutinize elections, reform the police, monitor human rights,
and oversee the functioning of bad governments also make a difference.
Why does peacekeeping work? The first reason comes right out of Leviathan:
the larger and better-armed missions can retaliate directly against violators
of a peace agreement on either side, raising the costs of aggression. The
imposed costs and benefits can be reputational as well as material. A member
of a mission commented on what led Afonso Dhlakama and his RENAMO
rebel force to sign a peace agreement with the government of Mozambique:
“For Dhlakama, it meant a great deal to be taken seriously, to go to cocktail
parties and be treated with respect. Through the UN he got the government
to stop calling RENAMO ‘armed bandits.’ It felt good to be wooed.”58
Even small missions can be effective at keeping a peace because they can
free the adversaries from a Hobbesian trap in which each side is tempted to
attack out of fear of being attacked first. The very act of accepting intrusive
peacekeepers is a costly (hence credible) signal that each side is serious about
not attacking. Once the peacekeepers are in place, they can reinforce this
security by monitoring compliance with the agreement, which allows them
to credibly reassure each side that the other is not secretly rearming. They can
also assume everyday policing activities, which deter the small acts of violence
that can escalate into cycles of revenge. And they can identify the hotheads
and spoilers who want to subvert the agreement. Even if a spoiler does launch
a provocative attack, the peacekeepers can credibly reassure the target that it
was a rogue act rather than the opening shot in a resumption of aggression.
Peacekeeping initiatives have other levers of influence. They can try to
stamp out the trade in contraband that finances rebels and warlords, who are
often the same people. They can dangle pork-barrel funding as an incentive
to leaders who abide by the peace, enhancing their power and electoral popularity.
As one Sierra Leonean said of a presidential candidate, “If Kabbah go,
white man go, UN go, money go.”59
Also, since third-world soldiers (like premodern
soldiers) are often paid in opportunities to plunder, the money can
316 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
be applied to “demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration” programs
that aim to draw General Butt Naked and his comrades back into civil society.
With guerrillas who have more of an ideological agenda, the fact that the bribes
come from a neutral party rather than a despised enemy allows them to feel
they have not sold out. Leverage can also be applied to force political leaders
to open their governments to rival political or ethnic groups. As with the
financial sweeteners, the fact that the concessions are made to a neutral party
rather than to the hated foe provides the conceder with an opportunity to save
face. Desmond Malloy, a UN worker in Sierra Leone, observed that “peacekeepers
create an atmosphere for negotiations. [Concessions] become a point
of pride—it’s a human trait. So you need a mechanism that allows negotiations
without losing dignity and pride.”60
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.61
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.62
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
THE NEW PEACE 317
revelations. First, nonstate conflicts are in some years as numerous as statebased
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.63
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.
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
318 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
down the source of this meme, since they all knew that the data needed to
underpin it do not exist.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.
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
THE NEW PEACE 319
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.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.71
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?73
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.
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
320 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
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.76
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.
Together these measures have slashed the human costs of war and belied
the worry that an increase in indirect deaths has canceled or swamped the
decrease in battle deaths. The HSRP estimates that during the Korean War
about 4.5 percent of the population died from disease and starvation in every
year of the four-year conflict. During the DRC civil war, even if we accept the
overly pessimistic estimate of 5 million indirect deaths, it would amount to
1 percent of the country’s population per year, a reduction of more than fourfold
from Korea.77
It’s not easy to see the bright side in the developing world, where the remnants
of war continue to cause tremendous misery. The effort to whittle down
the numbers that quantify the misery can seem heartless, especially when the
numbers serve as propaganda for raising money and attention. But there is a
moral imperative in getting the facts right, and not just to maintain credibility.
The discovery that fewer people are dying in wars all over the world can
thwart cynicism among compassion-fatigued news readers who might otherwise
think that poor countries are irredeemable hellholes. And a better understanding
of what drove the numbers down can steer us toward doing things
that make people better off rather than congratulating ourselves on how altruistic
we are. Among the surprises in the statistics are that some things that
sound exciting, like instant independence, natural resources, revolutionary
Marxism (when it is effective), and electoral democracy (when it is not) can
increase deaths from violence, and some things that sound boring, like effective
law enforcement, openness to the world economy, UN peacekeepers, and
Plumpy’nut, can decrease them.
THE TRAJECTORY OF GENOCIDE
Of all the varieties of violence of which our sorry species is capable, genocide
stands apart, not only as the most heinous but as the hardest to comprehend.
We can readily understand why from time to time people enter into deadly
quarrels over money, honor, or love, why they punish wrongdoers to excess,
and why they take up arms to combat other people who have taken up arms.
But that someone should want to slaughter millions of innocents, including
THE NEW PEACE 321
women, children, and the elderly, seems to insult any claim we may have to
comprehend our kind. Whether it is called genocide (killing people because
of their race, religion, ethnicity, or other indelible group membership), politicide
(killing people because of their political affiliation), or democide (any
mass killing of civilians by a government or militia), killing-by-category targets
people for what they are rather than what they do and thus seems to flout
the usual motives of gain, fear, and vengeance.78
Genocide also shocks the imagination by the sheer number of its victims.
Rummel, who was among the first historians to try to count them all, famously
estimated that during the 20th century 169 million people were killed by their
governments.79
The number is, to be sure, a highball estimate, but most atrocitologists
agree that in the 20th century more people were killed by democides
than by wars.80
Matthew White, in a comprehensive overview of the published
estimates, reckons that 81 million people were killed by democide and another
40 million by man-made famines (mostly by Stalin and Mao), for a total of 121
million. Wars, in comparison, killed 37 million soldiers and 27 million civilians
in battle, and another 18 million in the resulting famines, for a total of 82
million deaths.81
(White adds, though, that about half of the democide deaths
took place during wars and may not have been possible without them.)82
Killing so many people in so short a time requires methods of mass production
of death that add another layer of horror. The Nazis’ gas chambers and
crematoria will stand forever as the most shocking visual symbols of genocide.
But modern chemistry and railroads are by no means necessary for highthroughput
killing. When the French revolutionaries suppressed a revolt in
the Vendée region in 1793, they hit upon the idea of packing prisoners into
barges, sinking them below the water’s surface long enough to drown the
human cargo, and then floating them up for the next batch.83
Even during the
Holocaust, the gas chambers were not the most efficient means of killing.
The Nazis killed more people with their Einsatzgruppen, or mobile firing squads,
which were foreshadowed by other teams of quick-moving soldiers with projectile
weapons such as Assyrians in chariots and Mongols on horses.84
During
the genocide of Hutus by Tutsis in Burundi in 1972 (a predecessor of the reverse
genocide in Rwanda twenty-two years later), a perpetrator explained:
Several techniques, several, several. One can gather two thousand persons
in a house—in a prison, let us say. There are some halls which are large. The
house is locked. The men are left there for fifteen days without eating, without
drinking. Then one opens. One finds cadavers. Not beaten, not anything.
Dead.85
The bland military term “siege” hides the fact that depriving a city of food
and finishing off the weakened survivors is a time-honored and cost-effective
form of extermination. As Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn point out in The
322 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
History and Sociology of Genocide, “The authors of history textbooks hardly ever
reported what the razing of an ancient city meant for its inhabitants.”86
One
exception is the Book of Deuteronomy, which offers a backdated prophecy
that was based on the Assyrian or Babylonian conquest:
In the desperate straits to which the enemy siege reduces you, you will eat
the fruit of your womb, the flesh of your sons and daughters whom the LORD
your God has given you. Even the most refined and gentle of men among
you will begrudge food to his own brother, to the wife whom he embraces,
and to the last of his remaining children, giving to none of them any of the
flesh of his children whom he is eating, because nothing else remains to
him, in the desperate straits to which the enemy siege will reduce you in all
your towns. She who is the most refined and gentle among you, so gentle
and refined that she does not venture to set the sole of her foot on the ground,
will begrudge food to the husband whom she embraces, to her own son, and
to her own daughter, begrudging even the afterbirth that comes out from
between her thighs, and the children that she bears, because she will eat
them in secret for lack of anything else, in the desperate straits to which the
enemy siege will reduce you in your towns.87
Apart from numbers and methods, genocides sear the moral imagination
by the gratuitous sadism indulged in by the perpetrators. Eyewitness accounts
from every continent and decade recount how victims are taunted, tormented,
and mutilated before being put to death.88
In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky
commented on Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria during the Russo-Turkish War of
1877–78, when unborn children were ripped from their mothers’ wombs and
prisoners were nailed by their ears to a fence overnight before being hanged:
“People speak sometimes about the ‘animal’ cruelty of man, but that is terribly
unjust and offensive to animals. No animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so
artfully, so artistically cruel. A tiger simply gnaws and tears, that is all he can
do. It would never occur to him to nail people by their ears overnight, even if
he were able to do it.”89
My own reading of histories of genocide has left me
with images to disturb sleep for a lifetime. I’ll recount two that lodge in the
mind not because of any gore (though such accounts are common enough) but
because of their cold-bloodedness. Both are taken from the philosopher Jonathan
Glover’s Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century.
During the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966–75, Mao encouraged
marauding Red Guards to terrorize “class enemies,” including teachers, managers,
and the descendants of landlords and “rich peasants,” killing perhaps
7 million.90
In one incident:
Young men ransacking an old couple’s house found boxes of precious French
glass. When the old man begged them not to destroy the glass, one of the
THE NEW PEACE 323
group hit him in the mouth with a club, leaving him spitting out blood and
teeth. The students smashed the glass and left the couple on their knees
crying.91
During the Holocaust, Christian Wirth commanded a slave labor compound
in Poland, where Jews were worked to death sorting the clothes of their
murdered compatriots. Their children had been taken from them and sent to
the death camps.
Wirth allowed one exception. . . . One Jewish boy around ten was given
sweets and dressed up as a little SS man. Wirth and he rode among the
prisoners, Wirth on a white horse and the boy on a pony, both using machineguns
to kill prisoners (including the boy’s mother) at close range.92
Glover allows himself a comment: “To this ultimate expression of contempt
and mockery, no reaction of disgust and anger is remotely adequate.”
How could people do these things? Making sense of killing-by-category, insofar
as we can do so at all, must begin with the psychology of categories.93
People sort other people into mental pigeonholes according to their affiliations,
customs, appearances, and beliefs. Though it’s tempting to think of
this stereotyping as a kind of mental defect, categorization is indispensable
to intelligence. Categories allow us to make inferences from a few observed
qualities to a larger number of unobserved ones. If I note the color and shape
of a fruit and classify it as a raspberry, I can infer that it will taste sweet, satisfy
my hunger, and not poison me. Politically correct sensibilities may bridle at
the suggestion that a group of people, like a variety of fruit, may have features
in common, but if they didn’t, there would be no cultural diversity to celebrate
and no ethnic qualities to be proud of. Groups of people cohere because they
really do share traits, albeit statistically. So a mind that generalizes about
people from their category membership is not ipso facto defective. African
Americans today really are more likely to be on welfare than whites, Jews
really do have higher average incomes than WASPs, and business students
really are more politically conservative than students in the arts—on average.94
The problem with categorization is that it often goes beyond the statistics.
For one thing, when people are pressured, distracted, or in an emotional state,
they forget that a category is an approximation and act as if a stereotype
applies to every last man, woman, and child.95
For another, people tend to
moralize their categories, assigning praiseworthy traits to their allies and condemnable
ones to their enemies. During World War II, for example, Americans
thought that Russians had more positive traits than Germans; during the Cold
War they thought it was the other way around.96
Finally, people tend to essentialize
groups. As children, they tell experimenters that a baby whose parents
324 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
have been switched at birth will speak the language of her biological rather
than her adoptive parents. As they get older, people tend to think that members
of particular ethnic and religious groups share a quasi-biological essence,
which makes them homogeneous, unchangeable, predictable, and distinct
from other groups.97
The cognitive habit of treating people as instances of a category gets truly
dangerous when people come into conflict. It turns Hobbes’s trio of violent
motives—gain, fear, and deterrence—from the bones of contention in an individual
quarrel to the casus belli in an ethnic war. Historical surveys have
shown that genocides are caused by this triad of motives, with, as we shall
see, two additional toxins spiked into the brew.98
Some genocides begin as matters of convenience. Natives are occupying a
desirable territory or are monopolizing a source of water, food, or minerals,
and invaders would rather have it for themselves. Eliminating the people is
like clearing brush or exterminating pests, and is enabled by nothing fancier
in our psychology than the fact that human sympathy can be turned on or off
depending on how another person is categorized. Many genocides of indigenous
peoples are little more than expedient grabs of land or slaves, with the
victims typed as less than human. Such genocides include the numerous
expulsions and massacres of Native Americans by settlers or governments in
the Americas, the brutalization of African tribes by King Leopold of Belgium
in the Congo Free State, the extermination of the Herero by German colonists
in South-West Africa, and the attacks on Darfuris by government-encouraged
Janjaweed militias in the 2000s.99
When conquerors find it expedient to suffer the natives to live so that they
can provide tribute and taxes, genocide can have a second down-to-earth
function. A reputation for a willingness to commit genocide comes in handy
for a conqueror because it allows him to present a city with an ultimatum to
surrender or else. To make the threat credible, the invader has to be prepared
to carry it out. This was the rationale behind the annihilation of the cities of
western Asia by Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes.
Once the conquerors have absorbed a city or territory into an empire, they
may keep it in line with the threat that they will come down on any revolt like
a ton of bricks. In 68 CE the governor of Alexandria called in Roman troops to
put down a rebellion by the Jews against Roman rule. According to the historian
Flavius Josephus, “Once [the Jews] were forced back, they were unmercifully
and completely destroyed. Some were caught in the open field, others forced
into their houses, which were plundered and then set on fire. The Romans
showed no mercy to the infants, had no regard for the aged, and went on in the
slaughter of persons of every age, until all the place was overflowed with blood,
and 50,000 Jews lay dead.”100
Similar tactics have been used in 20th-century
counterinsurgency campaigns, such as the ones by the Soviets in Afghanistan
and right-wing military governments in Indonesia and Central America.
THE NEW PEACE 325
When a dehumanized people is in a position to defend itself or turn the
tables, it can set a Hobbesian trap of group-against-group fear. Either side may
see the other as an existential threat that must be preemptively taken out. After
the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Serbian nationalists’ genocide of Bosnians
and Kosovars was partly fueled by fears that they would be the victims
of massacres themselves.101
If members of a group have seen their comrades victimized, have narrowly
escaped victimization themselves, or paranoically worry they have been targeted
for victimization, they may stoke themselves into a moralistic fury and
seek vengeance on their perceived assailants. Like all forms of revenge, a
retaliatory massacre is pointless once it has to be carried out, but a welladvertised
and implacable drive to carry it out, regardless of its costs at the
time, may have been programmed into people’s brains by evolution, cultural
norms, or both as a way to make the deterrent credible.
These Hobbesian motives don’t fully explain why predation, preemption,
or revenge should be directed against entire groups of people rather than
the individuals who get in the way or make trouble. The cognitive habit of
pigeonholing may be one reason, and another is explained in The Godfather:
Part II when the young Vito Corleone’s mother begs a Sicilian don to spare the
boy’s life:
Widow: Don Francesco. You murdered my husband, because he would not
bend. And his oldest son Paolo, because he swore revenge. But Vitone is
only nine, and dumb-witted. He never speaks.
Francesco: I’m not afraid of his words.
Widow: He is weak.
Francesco: He will grow strong.
Widow: The child cannot harm you.
Francesco: He will be a man, and then he will come for revenge.
And come for revenge he does. Later in the film the grown Vito returns to
Sicily, seeks an audience with the don, whispers his name into the old man’s
ear, and cuts him open like a sturgeon.
The solidarity among the members of a family, clan, or tribe—in particular,
their resolve to avenge killings—makes them all fair game for someone with
a bone to pick with any one of them. Though equal-sized groups in frequent
contact tend to constrain their revenge to an-eye-for-an-eye reciprocity,
repeated violations may turn episodic anger into chronic hatred. As Aristotle
wrote, “The angry man wishes the object of his anger to suffer in return; hatred
wishes its object not to exist.”102
When one side finds itself with an advantage
in numbers or tactics, it may seize the opportunity to impose a final solution.
Feuding tribes are well aware of genocide’s practical advantages. The anthropologist
Rafael Karsten worked with the Jivaro of Amazonian Ecuador (a tribe
326 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
that contributed one of the long bars to the graph of rates of death in warfare in
figure 2–2) and recounts their ways of war:
Whereas the small feuds within the sub-tribes have the character of a private
blood-revenge, based on the principle of just retaliation, the wars between
the different tribes are in principle wars of extermination. In these there is
no question of weighing life against life; the aim is to completely annihilate
the enemy tribe. . . . The victorious party is all the more anxious to leave no
single person of the enemy’s people, not even small children, alive, as they
fear lest these should later appear as avengers against the victors.103
Half a world away, the anthropologist Margaret Durham offered a similar
vignette from an Albanian tribe that ordinarily abided by norms for measured
revenge:
In February 1912 an amazing case of wholesale justice was reported to
me. . . . A certain family of the Fandi bairak [subtribe] had long been notorious
for evil-doing—robbing, shooting, and being a pest to the tribe. A gathering
of all the heads condemned all the males of the family to death. Men
were appointed to lay in wait for them on a certain day and pick them off;
and on that day the whole seventeen of them were shot. One was but five
and another but twelve years old. I protested against thus killing children
who must be innocent and was told: “It was bad blood and must not be further
propagated.” Such was the belief in heredity that it was proposed to
kill an unfortunate woman who was pregnant, lest she should bear a male
and so renew the evil.104
The essentialist notion of “bad blood” is one of several biological metaphors
inspired by a fear of the revenge of the cradle. People anticipate that if they
leave even a few of a defeated enemy alive, the remnants will multiply and
cause trouble down the line. Human cognition often works by analogy, and
the concept of an irksome collection of procreating beings repeatedly calls to
mind the concept of vermin.105
Perpetrators of genocide the world over keep
rediscovering the same metaphors to the point of cliché. Despised people are
rats, snakes, maggots, lice, flies, parasites, cockroaches, or (in parts of the world
where they are pests) monkeys, baboons, and dogs.106
“Kill the nits and you
will have no lice,” wrote an English commander in Ireland in 1641, justifying
an order to kill thousands of Irish Catholics.107
“A nit would make a louse,”
recalled a Californian settler leader in 1856 before slaying 240 Yuki in revenge
for their killing of a horse.108
“Nits make lice,” said Colonel John Chivington
before the Sand Creek Massacre, which killed hundreds of Cheyenne and
Arapaho in 1864.109
Cankers, cancers, bacilli, and viruses are other insidious
biological agents that lend themselves as figures of speech in the poetics of
THE NEW PEACE 327
genocide. When it came to the Jews, Hitler mixed his metaphors, but they were
always biological: Jews were viruses; Jews were bloodsucking parasites; Jews
were a mongrel race; Jews had poisonous blood.110
The human mind has evolved a defense against contamination by biological
agents: the emotion of disgust.111
Ordinarily triggered by bodily secretions,
animal parts, parasitic insects and worms, and vectors of disease, disgust
impels people to eject the polluting substance and anything that looks like it
or has been in contact with it. Disgust is easily moralized, defining a continuum
in which one pole is identified with spirituality, purity, chastity, and
cleansing and the other with animality, defilement, carnality, and contamina­
tion.112
And so we see disgusting agents as not just physically repellent but
also morally contemptible. Many metaphors in the English language for a
treacherous person use a disease vector as their vehicle—a rat, a louse, a worm,
a cockroach. The infamous 1990s term for forced displacement and genocide
was ethnic cleansing.
Metaphorical thinking goes in both directions. Not only do we apply disgust
metaphors to morally devalued peoples, but we tend to morally devalue
people who are physically disgusting (a phenomenon we encountered in chapter
4 when considering Lynn Hunt’s theory that a rise in hygiene in Europe
caused a decline in cruel punishments). At one pole of the continuum, whiteclad
ascetics who undergo rituals of purification are revered as holy men and
women. At the other, people living in degradation and filth are reviled as
subhuman. The chemist and writer Primo Levi described this spiral during
the transport of Jews to the death camps in Germany:
The SS escort did not hide their amusement at the sight of men and women
squatting wherever they could, on the platforms and in the middle of the
tracks, and the German passengers openly expressed their disgust: people
like this deserve their fate, just look how they behave. These are not Menschen,
human beings, but animals, it’s clear as the light of day.113
The emotional pathways to genocide—anger, fear, and disgust—can occur
in various combinations. In Worse than War, a history of 20th-century genocide,
the political scientist Daniel Goldhagen points out that not all genocides have
the same causes. He classifies them according to whether the victim group is
dehumanized (a target of moralized disgust), demonized (a target of moralized
anger), both, or neither.114
A dehumanized group may be exterminated like
vermin, such as the Hereros in the eyes of German colonists, Armenians in
the eyes of Turks, black Darfuris in the eyes of Sudanese Muslims, and many
indigenous peoples in the eyes of European settlers. A demonized group, in
contrast, is thought to be equipped with the standard human reasoning faculties,
which makes them all the more culpable for embracing a heresy or rejecting
the one true faith. Among these modern heretics were the victims of
328 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
communist autocracies, and the victims of their opposite number, the rightwing
dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Indonesia, and El Salvador. Then there
are the out-and-out demons—groups that manage to be both repulsively subhuman
and despicably evil. This is how the Nazis saw the Jews, and how Hutus
and Tutsis saw each other. Finally, there may be groups that are not reviled as
evil or subhuman but are feared as potential predators and eliminated in
preemptive attacks, such as in the Balkan anarchy following the breakup of
Yugoslavia.
So far I have tried to explain genocide in the following way. The mind’s habit
of essentialism can lump people into categories; its moral emotions can be
applied to them in their entirety. The combination can transform Hobbesian
competition among individuals or armies into Hobbesian competition among
peoples. But genocide has another fateful component. As Solzhenitsyn pointed
out, to kill by the millions you need an ideology.115
Utopian creeds that submerge
individuals into moralized categories may take root in powerful
regimes and engage their full destructive might. For this reason it is ideologies
that generate the outliers in the distribution of genocide death tolls. Divisive
ideologies include Christianity during the Crusades and the Wars of Religion
(and in an offshoot, the Taiping Rebellion in China); revolutionary romanticism
during the politicides of the French Revolution; nationalism during the
genocides in Ottoman Turkey and the Balkans; Nazism in the Holocaust; and
Marxism during the purges, expulsions, and terror-famines in Stalin’s Soviet
Union, Mao’s China, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia.
Why should utopian ideologies so often lead to genocide? At first glance it
seems to make no sense. Even if an actual utopia is unattainable for all kinds
of practical reasons, shouldn’t the quest for a perfect world at least leave us
with a better one—a world that is 60 percent of the way to perfection, say, or
even 15 percent? After all, a man’s reach must exceed his grasp. Shouldn’t we
aim high, dream the impossible dream, imagine things that never were and
ask “why not”?
Utopian ideologies invite genocide for two reasons. One is that they set up
a pernicious utilitarian calculus. In a utopia, everyone is happy forever, so its
moral value is infinite. Most of us agree that it is ethically permissible to divert
a runaway trolley that threatens to kill five people onto a side track where it
would kill only one. But suppose it were a hundred million lives one could
save by diverting the trolley, or a billion, or—projecting into the indefinite
future—infinitely many. How many people would it be permissible to sacrifice
to attain that infinite good? A few million can seem like a pretty good bargain.
Not only that, but consider the people who learn about the promise of a
perfect world yet nonetheless oppose it. They are the only things standing in
the way of a plan that could lead to infinite goodness. How evil are they? You
do the math.
THE NEW PEACE 329
The second genocidal hazard of a utopia is that it has to conform to a tidy
blueprint. In a utopia, everything is there for a reason. What about the people?
Well, groups of people are diverse. Some of them stubbornly, perhaps essentially,
cling to values that are out of place in a perfect world. They may be
entrepreneurial in a world that works by communal sharing, or bookish in a
world that works by labor, or brash in a world that works by piety, or clannish
in a world that works by unity, or urban and commercial in a world that has
returned to its roots in nature. If you are designing the perfect society on a
clean sheet of paper, why not write these eyesores out of the plans from the
start?
In Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta
to Darfur, the historian Ben Kiernan notes another curious feature of utopian
ideologies. Time and again they hark back to a vanished agrarian paradise,
which they seek to restore as a healthful substitute for prevailing urban
decadence. In chapter 4 we saw that after the Enlightenment had emerged
from the intellectual bazaar of cosmopolitan cities, the German counterEnlightenment
romanticized the attachment of a people to their land—the
blood and soil of Kiernan’s title. The ungovernable metropolis, with its fluid
population and ethnic and occupational enclaves, is an affront to a mindset
that envisions a world of harmony, purity, and organic wholeness. Many of
the nationalisms of the 19th and early 20th centuries were guided by utopian
images of ethnic groups flourishing in their native homelands, often based on
myths of ancestral tribes who settled the territory at the dawn of time.116
This
agrarian utopianism lay behind Hitler’s dual obsessions: his loathing of Jewry,
which he associated with commerce and cities, and his deranged plan to
depopulate Eastern Europe to provide farmland for German city-dwellers to
colonize. Mao’s massive agrarian communes and Pol Pot’s expulsion of Cambodian
city-dwellers to rural killing fields are other examples.
Commercial activities, which tend to be concentrated in cities, can themselves
be triggers of moralistic hatred. As we shall see in chapter 9, people’s intuitive
sense of economics is rooted in tit-for-tat exchanges of concrete goods or services
of equivalent value—say, three chickens for one knife. It does not easily grasp
the abstract mathematical apparatus of a modern economy, such as money,
profit, interest, and rent.117
In intuitive economics, farmers and craftsmen produce
palpable items of value. Merchants and other middlemen, who skim off a
profit as they pass goods along without causing new stuff to come into being,
are seen as parasites, despite the value they create by enabling transactions
between producers and consumers who are unacquainted or separated by distance.
Moneylenders, who loan out a sum and then demand additional money
in return, are held in even greater contempt, despite the service they render by
providing people with money at times in their lives when it can be put to the
best use. People tend to be oblivious to the intangible contributions of merchants
and moneylenders and view them as bloodsuckers. (Once again the metaphor
330 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
comes from biology.) Antipathy toward individual middlemen can easily transfer
to antipathy to ethnic groups. The capital necessary to prosper in middlemen
occupations consists mainly of expertise rather than land or factories, so it is
easily shared among kin and friends, and it is highly portable. For these reasons
it’s common for particular ethnic groups to specialize in the middleman niche
and to move to whatever communities currently lack them, where they tend to
become prosperous minorities—and targets of envy and resentment.118
Many
victims of discrimination, expulsion, riots, and genocide have been social or
ethnic groups that specialize in middlemen niches. They include various bourgeois
minorities in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia, the Indians in East
Africa and Oceania, the Ibos in Nigeria, the Armenians in Turkey, the Chinese
in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam, and the Jews in Europe.119
Democides are often scripted into the climax of an eschatological narrative,
a final spasm of violence that will usher in millennial bliss. The parallels
between the utopian ideologies of the 19th and 20th centuries and the apocalyptic
visions of traditional religions have often been noticed by historians of
genocide. Daniel Chirot, writing with the social psychologist Clark McCauley,
observes:
Marxist eschatology actually mimicked Christian doctrine. In the beginning,
there was a perfect world with no private property, no classes, no
exploitation, and no alienation—the Garden of Eden. Then came sin, the
discovery of private property, and the creation of exploiters. Humanity was
cast from the Garden to suffer inequality and want. Humans then experimented
with a series of modes of production, from the slave, to the feudal,
to the capitalist mode, always seeking the solution and not finding it. Finally
there came a true prophet with a message of salvation, Karl Marx, who
preached the truth of Science. He promised redemption but was not heeded,
except by his close disciples who carried the truth forward. Eventually,
however, the proletariat, the carriers of the true faith, will be converted by
the religious elect, the leaders of the party, and join to create a more perfect
world. A final, terrible revolution will wipe out capitalism, alienation, exploitation,
and inequality. After that, history will end because there will be
perfection on earth, and the true believers will have been saved.120
Drawing on the work of the historians Joachim Fest and George Mosse,
they also comment on Nazi eschatology:
It was not an accident that Hitler promised a Thousand Year Reich, a millennium
of perfection, similar to the thousand-year reign of goodness promised
in Revelation before the return of evil, the great battle between good
and evil, and the final triumph of God over Satan. The entire imagery of his
Nazi Party and regime was deeply mystical, suffused with religious, often
THE NEW PEACE 331
Christian, liturgical symbolism, and it appealed to a higher law, to a mission
decreed by fate and entrusted to the prophet Hitler.121
Finally, there are the job requirements. Would you want the stress and
responsibility of running a perfect world? Utopian leadership selects for monumental
narcissism and ruthlessness.122
Its leaders are possessed of a certainty
about the rectitude of their cause and an impatience for incremental reforms
or on-the-fly adjustments guided by feedback from the human consequences
of their grand schemes. Mao, who had his image plastered all over China and
his little red book of sayings issued to every citizen, was described by his
doctor and only confidant Li Zhisui as voracious for flattery, demanding of
sexual servicing by concubines, and devoid of warmth and compassion.123
In
1958 he had a revelation that the country could double its steel production in
a year if peasant families contributed to the national output by running backyard
smelters. On pain of death for failing to meet the quotas, peasants melted
down their woks, knives, shovels, and doorknobs into lumps of useless metal.
It was also revealed to him that China could grow large quantities of grain on
small plots of land, freeing the rest for grasslands and gardens, if farmers
planted the seedlings deep and close together so that class solidarity would
make them grow strong and thick.124
Peasants were herded into communes of
50,000 to implement this vision, and anyone who dragged his feet or pointed
out the obvious was executed as a class enemy. Impervious to signals from
reality informing him that his Great Leap Forward was a great leap backward,
Mao masterminded a famine that killed between 20 million and 30 million
people.
The motives of leaders are critical in understanding genocide, because the
psychological ingredients—the mindset of essentialism; the Hobbesian
dynamic of greed, fear, and vengeance; the moralization of emotions like disgust;
and the appeal of utopian ideologies—do not overcome an entire population
at once and incite them to mass killing. Groups that avoid, distrust, or
even despise each other can coexist without genocide indefinitely.125
Think,
for example, of African Americans in the segregated American South, Palestinians
in Israel and the occupied territories, and Africans in South Africa
under apartheid. Even in Nazi Germany, where anti-Semitism had been
entrenched for centuries, there is no indication that anyone but Hitler and a
few fanatical henchmen thought it was a good idea for the Jews to be extermi­
nated.126
When a genocide is carried out, only a fraction of the population,
usually a police force, military unit, or militia, actually commits the murders.127
In the 1st century CE, Tacitus wrote, “A shocking crime was committed on
the unscrupulous initiative of a few individuals, with the blessing of more,
and amid the passive acquiescence of all.” According to the political scientist
Benjamin Valentino in Final Solutions, that division of labor applies to the
genocides of the 20th century as well.128
A leader or small clique decides that
332 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
the time for genocide is right. He gives the go-ahead to a relatively small force
of armed men, made up a mixture of true believers, conformists, and thugs
(often recruited, as in medieval armies, from the ranks of criminals, drifters,
and other unemployable young men). They count on the rest of the population
not to get in their way, and thanks to features of social psychology that we
will explore in chapter 8, they generally don’t. The psychological contributors
to genocide, such as essentialism, moralization, and utopian ideologies, are
engaged to different degrees in each of these constituencies. They consume
the minds of the leaders and the true believers but have to tip the others only
enough to allow the leaders to make their plans a reality. The indispensability
of leaders to 20th-century genocide is made plain by the fact that when the
leaders died or were removed by force, the killings stopped.129
If this analysis is on the right track, genocides can emerge from toxic reactions
among human nature (including essentialism, moralization, and intuitive
economics), Hobbesian security dilemmas, millennial ideologies, and the
opportunities available to leaders. The question now is: how has this interaction
changed over the course of history?
It’s not an easy question to answer, because historians have never found
genocide particularly interesting. Since antiquity the stacks of libraries have
been filled with scholarship on war, but scholarship on genocide is nearly
nonexistent, though it killed more people. As Chalk and Jonassohn point out
of ancient histories, “We know that empires have disappeared and that cities
were destroyed, and we suspect that some wars were genocidal in their results;
but we do not know what happened to the bulk of the populations involved
in these events. Their fate was simply too unimportant. When they were mentioned
at all, they were usually lumped together with the herds of oxen, sheep,
and other livestock.”130
As soon as one realizes that the sackings, razings, and massacres of past
centuries are what we would call genocide today, it becomes utterly clear that
genocide is not a phenomenon of the 20th century. Those familiar with classical
history know that the Athenians destroyed Melos during the 5thcentury-BCE
Peloponnesian War; according to Thucydides, “the Athenians
thereupon put to death all who were of military age and made slaves of the
women and children.” Another familiar example is the Romans’ destruction
of Carthage and its population during the Third Punic War in the 3rd century
BCE, a war so total that the Romans, it was said, sowed salt into the ground
to make it forever unfarmable. Other historical genocides include the real-life
bloodbaths that inspired the ones narrated in the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the
Hebrew Bible; the massacres and sackings during the Crusades; the suppression
of the Albigensian heresy; the Mongol invasions; the European witch
hunts; and the carnage of the European Wars of Religion.
The authors of recent histories of mass killing are adamant that the idea of
THE NEW PEACE 333
an unprecedented “century of genocide” (the 20th) is a myth. On their first
page Chalk and Jonassohn write, “Genocide has been practiced in all regions
of the world and during all periods in history,” and add that their eleven case
studies of pre-20th-century genocides “are not intended to be either exhaustive
or representative.”131
Kiernan agrees: “A major conclusion of this book is
that genocide indeed occurred commonly before the twentieth century.” One
can see what he means with a glance at the first page of his table of contents:
Part One: Early Imperial Expansion
1. Classical Genocide and Early Modern Memory
2. The Spanish Conquest of the New World 1492–1600
3. Guns and Genocide in East Asia 1400–1600
4. Genocidal Massacres in Early Modern Southeast Asia
Part Two. Settler Colonialism
5. The English Conquest of Ireland, 1565–1603
6. Colonial North America, 1600–1776
7. Genocidal Violence in Nineteenth-Century Australia
8. Genocide in the United States
9. Settler Genocides in Africa, 1830–1910132
Rummel has fitted a number to his own conclusion that “the mass murder
by emperors, kings, sultans, khans, presidents, governors, generals, and other
rulers of their own citizens or of those under their protection or control is very
much part of our history.” He counts 133,147,000 victims of sixteen democides
before the 20th century (including ones in India, Iran, the Ottoman Empire,
Japan, and Russia) and surmises that there may have been 625,716,000 democide
victims in all.133
These authors did not compile their lists by indiscriminately piling up every
historical episode in which a lot of people died. They are careful to note, for
example, that the Native American population was decimated by disease
rather than by a program of extermination, while particular incidents were
blatantly genocidal. In an early example, Puritans in New England exterminated
the Pequot nation in 1638, after which the minister Increase Mather
asked his congregation to thank God “that on this day we have sent six hundred
heathen souls to Hell.”134
This celebration of genocide did not hurt his
career. He later became president of Harvard University, and the residential
house with which I am currently affiliated is named after him (motto: Increase
Mather’s Spirit!).
Mather was neither the first nor the last to thank God for genocide. As we
saw in chapter 1, Yahweh ordered the Hebrew tribes to carry out dozens of
them, and in the 9th century BCE the Moabites returned the favor by massacring
the inhabitants of several Hebrew cities in the name of their god,
334 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
Ashtar-Chemosh.135
In a passage from the Bhagavad-Gita (written around 400
CE), the Hindu god Krishna upbraids the mortal Arjuna for being reluctant to
slay an enemy faction that included his grandfather and tutor: “There is no
better engagement for you than fighting on religious principles; and so there
is no need for hesitation. . . . The soul can never be cut to pieces by any weapon,
nor burned by fire. . . . [Therefore] you are mourning for what is not worthy of
grief.”136
Inspired by the conquests of Joshua, Oliver Cromwell massacred every
man, woman, and child in an Irish town during the reconquest of Ireland, and
explained his actions to Parliament: “It has pleased God to bless our endeavour
at Drogheda. The enemy were about 3,000 strong in the town. I believe we put
to the sword the whole number.”137
The English Parliament passed a unanimous
motion “that the House does approve of the execution done at Drogheda as an
act of both justice to them and mercy to others who may be warned of it.”138
The shocking truth is that until recently most people didn’t think there was
anything particularly wrong with genocide, as long as it didn’t happen to
them. One exception was the 16th-century Spanish priest Antonio de Montesinos,
who protested the appalling treatment of Native Americans by the
Spanish in the Caribbean—and who was, in his own words, “a voice of one
crying in the wilderness.”139
There were, to be sure, military codes of honor,
some from the Middle Ages, that ineffectually attempted to outlaw the killing
of civilians in war, and occasional protests by thinkers of early modernity such
as Erasmus and Hugo Grotius. But only in the late 19th century, when citizens
began to protest the brutalization of peoples in the American West and the
British Empire, did objections to genocide become common.140
Even then we
find Theodore Roosevelt, the future “progressive” president and Nobel Peace
laureate, writing in 1886, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians
are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like
to inquire too closely in the case of the tenth.”141
The critic John Carey documents
that well into the 20th century the British literary intelligentsia viciously
dehumanized the teeming masses, whom they considered to be so vulgar and
soulless as not to have lives worth living. Genocidal fantasies were not uncommon.
In 1908, for example, D. H. Lawrence wrote:
If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace,
with a military band playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly;
then I’d go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them in, all the
sick, the halt, and the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would
smile me a weary thanks; and the band would softly bubble out the “Hallelujah
Chorus.”142
During World War II, when Americans were asked in opinion polls what
should be done with the Japanese after an American victory, 10 to 15 percent
volunteered the solution of extermination.143
THE NEW PEACE 335
The turning point came after the war. The English language did not even
have a word for genocide until 1944, when the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin
coined it in a report on Nazi rule in Europe that would be used a year later to
brief the prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials.144
In the aftermath of the Nazi
destruction of European Jewry, the world was stunned by the enormity of the
death toll and by horrific images from the liberated camps: assembly-line gas
chambers and crematoria, mountains of shoes and eyeglasses, bodies stacked
up like cordwood. In 1948 Lemkin got the UN to approve a Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and for the first time
in history genocide, regardless of who the victims were, was a crime. James
Payne notes a perverse sign of progress. Today’s Holocaust deniers at least feel
compelled to deny that the Holocaust took place. In earlier centuries the perpetrators
of genocide and their sympathizers boasted about it.145
No small part in the new awareness of the horrors of genocide was a willingness
of Holocaust survivors to tell their stories. Chalk and Jonassohn note
that these memoirs are historically unusual.146
Survivors of earlier genocides
had treated them as humiliating defeats and felt that talking about them would
only rub in history’s harsh verdict. With the new humanitarian sensibilities,
genocides became crimes against humanity, and survivors were witnesses for
the prosecution. Anne Frank’s diary, which recorded her life in hiding in Nazioccupied
Amsterdam before she was deported to her death in Bergen-Belsen,
was published by her father shortly after the war. Memoirs of deportations
and death camps by Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi were published in the 1960s,
and today Frank’s Diary and Wiesel’s Night are among the world’s most widely
read books. In the years that followed, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Anchee Min,
and Dith Pran shared their harrowing memories of the communist nightmares
in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia. Soon other survivors—Armenians,
Ukrainians, Gypsies—began to add their stories, joined more recently by Bosnians,
Tutsis, and Darfuris. These memoirs are a part of a reorientation of our
conception of history. “Throughout most of history,” Chalk and Jonassohn
note, “only the rulers made news; in the twentieth century, for the first time,
it is the ruled who make the news.”147
Anyone who grew up with Holocaust survivors knows what they had to
overcome to tell their stories. For decades after the war they treated their
experiences as shameful secrets. On top of the ignominy of victimhood, the
desperate straits to which they were reduced could remove the last traces of
their humanity in ways they could be forgiven for wanting to forget. At a family
occasion in the 1990s, I met a relative by marriage who had spent time in
Auschwitz. Within seconds of meeting me he clenched my wrist and recounted
this story. A group of men had been eating in silence when one of them
slumped over dead. The others fell on his body, still covered in diarrhea, and
pried a piece of bread from his fingers. As they divided it, a fierce argument
broke out when some of the men felt their share was an imperceptible crumb
336 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
smaller than the others’. To tell a story of such degradation requires extraordinary
courage, backed by a confidence that the hearer will understand it as
an accounting of the circumstances and not of the men’s characters.
Though the abundance of genocides over the millennia belies the centuryof-genocide
claim, one still wonders about the trajectory of genocide before,
during, and since the 20th century. Rummel was the first political scientist to
try to put some numbers together. In his duology Death by Government (1994)
and Statistics of Democide (1997) he analyzed 141 regimes that committed democides
in the 20th century through 1987, and a control group of 73 that did not.
He collected as many independent estimates of the death tolls as he could find
(including ones from pro- and antigovernment sources, whose biases, he
assumed, would cancel each other out) and, with the help of sanity checks,
chose a defensible value near the middle of the range.148
His definition of
“democide” corresponds roughly to the UCDP’s “one-sided violence” and to
our everyday concept of “murder” but with a government rather than an individual
as the perpetrator: the victims must be unarmed, and the killing deliberate.
Democides thus include ethnocides, politicides, purges, terrors, killings
of civilians by death squads (including ones committed by private militias to
which the government turns a blind eye), deliberate famines from blockades
and confiscation of food, deaths in internment camps, and the targeted bombing
of civilians such as those in Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.149
Rummel excluded the Great Leap Forward from his 1994 analyses, on the
understanding that it was caused by stupidity and callousness rather than
malice.150
Partly because the phrase “death by government” figured in Rummel’s
definition of democide and in the title of his book, his conclusion that almost
170 million people were killed by their governments during the 20th century
has become a popular meme among anarchists and radical libertarians. But
for several reasons, “governments are the main cause of preventable deaths”
is not the correct lesson to draw from Rummel’s data. For one thing, his definition
of “government” is loose, embracing militias, paramilitaries, and warlords,
all of which could reasonably be seen as a sign of too little government
rather than too much. White examined Rummel’s raw data and calculated that
the median democide toll by the twenty-four pseudo-governments on his list
was around 100,000, whereas the median death toll caused by recognized
governments of sovereign states was 33,000. So one could, with more justification,
conclude that governments, on average, cause three times fewer deaths
than alternatives to government.151
Also, most governments in recent periods
do not commit democides at all, and they prevent a far greater number of
deaths than the democidal ones cause, by promoting vaccination, sanitation,
traffic safety, and policing.152
But the main problem with the anarchist interpretation is that it isn’t
THE NEW PEACE 337
governments in general that kill large numbers of people but a handful of
governments of a specific type. To be exact, three-quarters of all the deaths
from all 141 democidal regimes were committed by just four governments,
which Rummel calls the dekamegamurderers: the Soviet Union with 62 million,
the People’s Republic of China with 35 million, Nazi Germany with
21 million, and 1928–49 nationalist China with 10 million.153
Another 11 percent
of the total were killed by eleven megamurderers, including Imperial Japan
with 6 million, Cambodia with 2 million, and Ottoman Turkey with 1.9 million.
The remaining 13 percent of the deaths were spread out over 126 regimes.
Genocides don’t exactly fall into a power-law distribution, if for no other reason
than that the smaller massacres that would go into the tall spine tend not
to be counted as “genocides.” But the distribution is enormously lopsided,
conforming to an 80:4 rule—80 percent of the deaths were caused by 4 percent
of the regimes.
Also, deaths from democide were overwhelmingly caused by totalitarian
governments: the communist, Nazi, fascist, militarist, or Islamist regimes that
sought to control every aspect of the societies they ruled. Totalitarian regimes
were responsible for 138 million deaths, 82 percent of the total, of which 110
million (65 percent of the total) were caused by the communist regimes.154
Authoritarian regimes, which are autocracies that tolerate independent social
institutions such as businesses and churches, came in second with 28 million
deaths. Democracies, which Rummel defines as governments that are open,
competitive, elected, and limited in their power, killed 2 million (mainly in
their colonial empires, together with food blockades and civilian bombings
during the world wars). The skew of the distribution does not just reflect the
sheer number of potential victims that totalitarian behemoths like the Soviet
Union and China had at their disposal. When Rummel looked at percentages
rather than numbers, he found that totalitarian governments of the 20th century
racked up a death toll adding up to 4 percent of their populations. Authoritarian
governments killed 1 percent. Democracies killed four tenths of
1 percent.155
Rummel was one of the first advocates of the Democratic Peace theory,
which he argues applied to democides even more than to wars. “At the
extremes of Power,” Rummel writes, “totalitarian communist governments
slaughter their people by the tens of millions; in contrast, many democracies
can barely bring themselves to execute even serial murderers.”156
Democracies
commit fewer democides because their form of governance, by definition, is
committed to inclusive and nonviolent means of resolving conflicts. More
important, the power of a democratic government is restricted by a tangle of
institutional restraints, so a leader can’t just mobilize armies and militias on
a whim to fan out over the country and start killing massive numbers of citizens.
By performing a set of regressions on his dataset of 20th-century regimes,
Rummel showed that the occurrence of democide correlates with a lack of
1900
1905
1910
1915
1920
1925
1930
1935
1940
1945
1950
1955
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
2005
338 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
democracy, even holding constant the countries’ ethnic diversity, wealth, level
of development, population density, and culture (African, Asian, Latin American,
Muslim, Anglo, and so on).157
The lessons, he writes, are clear: “The problem
is Power. The solution is democracy. The course of action is to foster
freedom.”158
What about the historical trajectory? Rummel tried to break down his 20thcentury
democides by year, and I’ve reproduced his data, scaled by world
population, in the gray upper line in figure 6–7. Like deaths in wars, deaths in
democides were concentrated in a savage burst, the midcentury Hemoclysm.159
This blood-flood embraced the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin’s purges, the Japanese
rape of China and Korea, and the wartime firebombings of cities in Europe
and Japan. The left slope also includes the Armenian genocide during World
War I and the Soviet collectivization campaign, which killed millions of Ukrainians
and kulaks, the so-called rich peasants. The right slope embraces the
killing of millions of ethnic Germans in newly communized Poland, Czechoslovakia,
and Romania, and the victims of forced collectivization in China.
It’s uncomfortable to say that there’s anything good in the trends shown in
the graph, but in an important sense there is. The world has seen nothing close
0
50
100
150
200
250
300
350
400
Deathsper100,000peopleperyear
Rummel’s estimates
PITF estimates
Armenian
genocide
Soviet
collectivization
Soviet
great terror
Nazi, Soviet, & Japanese
genocides
Communization of
Eastern Europe
China's land reform
Chinese collectivization
Pakistan genocide
Cambodian genocide
Rwanda
FIGURE 6–7. Rate of deaths in genocides, 1900–2008
Sources: Data for the gray line, 1900–1987, from Rummel, 1997. Data for the black line, 1955–2008, from
the Political Instability Task Force (PITF) State Failure Problem Set, 1955–2008, Marshall, Gurr, &
Harff, 2009; Center for Systemic Peace, 2010. The death tolls for the latter were geometric means of
the ranges in table 8.1 in Harff, 2005, distributed across years according to the proportions in the
Excel database. World population figures from U.S. Census Bureau, 2010c. Population figures for
the years 1900–1949 were taken from McEvedy & Jones, 1978, and multiplied by 1.01 to make them
commensurable with the rest.
THE NEW PEACE 339
to the bloodletting of the 1940s since then; in the four decades that followed,
the rate (and number) of deaths from democide went precipitously, if lurchingly,
downward. (The smaller bulges represent killings by Pakistani forces
during the Bangladesh war of independence in 1971 and by the Khmer Rouge
in Cambodia in the late 1970s.) Rummel attributes the falloff in democide since
World War II to the decline of totalitarianism and the rise of democracy.160
Rummel’s dataset ends in 1987, just when things start to get interesting
again. Soon communism fell and democracies proliferated—and the world
was hit with the unpleasant surprise of genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda. In
the impression of many observers, these “new wars” show that we are still
living, despite all we should have learned, in an age of genocide.
The historical thread of genocide statistics has recently been extended by
the political scientist Barbara Harff. During the Rwanda genocide, some
700,000 Tutsis were killed in just four months by about 10,000 men with
machetes, many of them drunkards, addicts, ragpickers, and gang members
hastily recruited by the Hutu leadership.161
Many observers believe that this
small pack of génocidaires could easily have been stopped by a military intervention
by the world’s great powers.162
Bill Clinton in particular was haunted
by his own failure to act, and in 1998 he commissioned Harff to analyze the
risk factors and warning signs of genocide.163
She assembled a dataset of 41
genocides and politicides between 1955 (shortly after Stalin died and the process
of decolonization began) and 2004. Her criteria were more restrictive than
Rummel’s and closer to Lemkin’s original definition of genocide: episodes of
violence in which a state or armed authority intends to destroy, in whole or in
part, an identifiable group. Only five of the episodes turned out to be “genocide”
in the sense in which people ordinarily understand the term, namely an
ethnocide, in which a group is singled out for destruction because of its ethnicity.
Most were politicides, or politicides combined with ethnocides, in which
members of an ethnic group were thought to be aligned with a targeted political
faction.
In figure 6–7 I plotted Harff’s PITF data on the same axes with Rummel’s.
Her figures generally come in well below his, especially in the late 1950s, for
which she included far fewer victims of the executions during the Great Leap
Forward. But thereafter the curves show similar trends, which are downward
from their peak in 1971. Because the genocides from the second half of the
20th century were so much less destructive than those of the Hemoclysm, I’ve
zoomed in on her curve in figure 6–8. The graph also shows the death rates
in a third collection, the UCDP One-Sided Violence Dataset, which includes
any instance of a government or other armed authority killing at least twentyfive
civilians in a year; the perpetrators need not intend to destroy the group
per se.164
The graph shows that the two decades since the Cold War have not seen a
recrudescence of genocide. On the contrary, the peak in mass killing (putting
340 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
Deathsper100,000peopleperyear
50
40
30
20
10
0
PITF estimates
UCDP estimates
1956 1961 1966 1971 1976 1981 1986 1991 1996 2001 2006
FIGURE 6–8. Rate of deaths in genocides, 1956–2008
Sources: PITF estimates, 1955–2008: same as for figure 6–7. UCDP, 1989–2007: “High Fatality” estimates
from http://www.pcr.uu.se/research/ucdp/datasets/ (Kreutz, 2008; Kristine & Hultman, 2007)
divided by world population from U.S. Census Bureau, 2010c.
aside China in the 1950s) is located in the mid-1960s to late 1970s. Those fifteen
years saw a politicide against communists in Indonesia (1965–66, “the year of
living dangerously,” with 700,000 deaths), the Chinese Cultural Revolution
(1966–75, around 600,000), Tutsis against Hutus in Burundi (1965–73, 140,000),
Pakistan’s massacre in Bangladesh (1971, around 1.7 million), north-againstsouth
violence in Sudan (1956–72, around 500,000), Idi Amin’s regime in
Uganda (1972–79, around 150,000), the Cambodian madness (1975–79, 2.5 million),
and a decade of massacres in Vietnam culminating in the expulsion of
the boat people (1965–75, around half a million).165
The two decades since the
end of the Cold War have been marked by genocides in Bosnia from 1992 to
1995 (225,000 deaths), Rwanda (700,000 deaths), and Darfur (373,000 deaths
from 2003 to 2008). These are atrocious numbers, but as the graph shows, they
are spikes in a trend that is unmistakably downward. (Recent studies have
shown that even some of these figures may be overestimates, but I will stick
with the datasets.)166
The first decade of the new millennium is the most
genocide-free of the past fifty years. The UCDP numbers are restricted to a
narrower time window and, like all their estimates, are more conservative,
but they show a similar pattern: the Rwanda genocide in 1994 leaps out from
all the other episodes of one-sided killing, and the world has seen nothing
like it since.
Harff was tasked not just with compiling genocides but with identifying
their risk factors. She noted that virtually all of them took place in the
THE NEW PEACE 341
aftermath of a state failure such as a civil war, revolution, or coup. So she
assembled a control group with 93 cases of state failure that did not result in
genocide, matched as closely as possible to the ones that did, and ran a logistic
regression analysis to find out which aspects of the situation the year before
made the difference.
Some factors that one might think were important turned out not to be.
Measures of ethnic diversity didn’t matter, refuting the conventional wisdom
that genocides represent the eruption of ancient hatreds that inevitably explode
when ethnic groups live side by side. Nor did measures of economic development
matter. Poor countries are more likely to have political crises, which
are necessary conditions for genocides to take place, but among the countries
that did have crises, the poorer ones were no more likely to sink into actual
genocide.
Harff did discover six risk factors that distinguished the genocidal from the
nongenocidal crises in three-quarters of the cases.167
One was a country’s previous
history of genocide, presumably because whatever risk factors were in
place the first time did not vanish overnight. The second predictor was the
country’s immediate history of political instability—to be exact, the number
of regime crises and ethnic or revolutionary wars it had suffered in the preceding
fifteen years. Governments that feel threatened are tempted to eliminate
or take revenge on groups they perceive to be subversive or contaminating,
and are more likely to exploit the ongoing chaos to accomplish those goals
before opposition can mobilize.168
A third was a ruling elite that came from an
ethnic minority, presumably because that multiplies the leaders’ worries about
the precariousness of their rule.
The other three predictors are familiar from the theory of the Liberal Peace.
Harff vindicated Rummel’s insistence that democracy is a key factor in preventing
genocides. From 1955 to 2008 autocracies were three and a half times
more likely to commit genocides than were full or partial democracies, holding
everything else constant. This represents a hat trick for democracy: democracies
are less likely to wage interstate wars, to have large-scale civil wars, and
to commit genocides. Partial democracies (anocracies) are more likely than
autocracies to have violent political crises, as we saw in Fearon and Laitin’s
analysis of civil wars, but when a crisis does occur, the partial democracies
are less likely than autocracies to become genocidal.
Another trifecta was scored by openness to trade. Countries that depend
more on international trade, Harff found, are less likely to commit genocides,
just as they are less likely to fight wars with other countries and to be riven by
civil wars. The inoculating effects of trade against genocide cannot depend,
as they do in the case of interstate war, on the positive-sum benefits of trade
itself, since the trade we are talking about (imports and exports) does not consist
in exchanges with the vulnerable ethnic or political groups. Why, then,
should trade matter? One possibility is that Country A might take a communal
342 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
or moral interest in a group living within the borders of Country B. If B wants
to trade with A, it must resist the temptation to exterminate that group. Another
is that a desire to engage in trade requires certain peaceable attitudes, including
a willingness to abide by international norms and the rule of law, and a
mission to enhance the material welfare of its citizens rather than implementing
a vision of purity, glory, or perfect justice.
The last predictor of genocide is an exclusionary ideology. Ruling elites that
are under the spell of a vision that identifies a certain group as the obstacle to
an ideal society, putting it “outside the sanctioned universe of obligation,” are
far more likely to commit genocide than elites with a more pragmatic or eclectic
governing philosophy. Exclusionary ideologies, in Harff’s classification,
include Marxism, Islamism (in particular, a strict application of Sharia law),
militaristic anticommunism, and forms of nationalism that demonize ethnic
or religious rivals.
Harff sums up the pathways by which these risk factors erupt into genocide:
Almost all genocides and politicides of the last half-century were either
ideological, exemplified by the Cambodian case, or retributive, as in Iraq
[Saddam Hussein’s 1988–91 campaign against Iraqi Kurds]. The scenario
that leads to ideological genocide begins when a new elite comes to power,
usually through civil war or revolution, with a transforming vision of a new
society purified of unwanted or threatening elements. Retributive genopoliticides
occur during a protracted internal war . . . when one party, usually
the government, seeks to destroy its opponent’s support base [or] after a
rebel challenge has been militarily defeated.169
The decline of genocide over the last third of a century, then, may be traced
to the upswing of some of the same factors that drove down interstate and
civil wars: stable government, democracy, openness to trade, and humanistic
ruling philosophies that elevate the interests of individuals over struggles
among groups.
For all the rigor that a logistic regression offers, it is essentially a meat grinder
that takes a set of variables as input and extrudes a probability as output. What
it hides is the vastly skewed distribution of the human costs of different
genocides—the way that a small number of men, under the sway of a smaller
number of ideologies, took actions at particular moments in history that caused
outsize numbers of deaths. Shifts in the levels of the risk factors certainly pushed
around the likelihood of the genocides that racked up thousands, tens of thousands,
and even hundreds of thousands of deaths. But the truly monstrous
genocides, the ones with tens of millions of victims, depended not so much on
gradually shifting political forces as on a few contingent ideas and events.
THE NEW PEACE 343
The appearance of Marxist ideology in particular was a historical tsunami
that is breathtaking in its total human impact. It led to the dekamegamurders
by Marxist regimes in the Soviet Union and China, and more circuitously, it
contributed to the one committed by the Nazi regime in Germany. Hitler read
Marx in 1913, and although he detested Marxist socialism, his National Socialism
substituted races for classes in its ideology of a dialectical struggle toward
utopia, which is why some historians consider the two ideologies “fraternal
twins.”170
Marxism also set off reactions that led to politicides by militantly
anticommunist regimes in Indonesia and Latin America, and to the destructive
civil wars of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s stoked by the Cold War superpowers.
The point is not that Marxism should be morally blamed for these
unintended consequences, just that any historical narrative must acknowledge
the sweeping repercussions of this single idea. Valentino notes that no small
part of the decline of genocide is the decline of communism, and thus “the
single most important cause of mass killing in the twentieth century appears
to be fading into history.”171
Nor is it likely that it will come back into fashion.
During its heyday, violence by Marxist regimes was justified with the saying
“You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”172
The historian Richard
Pipes summarized history’s verdict: “Aside from the fact that human beings
are not eggs, the trouble is that no omelet has emerged from the slaughter.”173
Valentino concludes that “it may be premature to celebrate ‘the end of history,’
but if no similarly radical ideas gain the widespread applicability and acceptance
of communism, humanity may be able to look forward to considerably
less mass killing in the coming century than it experienced in the last.”174
On top of that singularly destructive ideology were the catastrophic decisions
of a few men who took the stage at particular moments in the 20th century.
I have already mentioned that many historians have joined the chorus
“No Hitler, no Holocaust.”175
But Hitler was not the only tyrant whose obsessions
killed tens of millions. The historian Robert Conquest, an authority on
Stalin’s politicides, concluded that “the nature of the whole Purge depends in
the last analysis on the personal and political drives of Stalin.”176
As for China,
it is inconceivable that the record-setting famine of the Great Leap Forward
would have occurred but for Mao’s harebrained schemes, and the historian
Harry Harding noted of the country’s subsequent politicide that “the principal
responsibility for the Cultural Revolution—a movement that affected tens of
millions of Chinese—rests with one man. Without a Mao, there could not have
been a Cultural Revolution.”177
With such a small number of data points causing
such a large share of the devastation, we will never really know how to
explain the most calamitous events of the 20th century. The ideologies prepared
the ground and attracted the men, the absence of democracy gave them
the opportunity, but tens of millions of deaths ultimately depended on the
decisions of just three individuals.
344 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
THE TRAJECTORY OF TERRORISM
Terrorism is a peculiar category of violence, because it has a cockeyed ratio of
fear to harm. Compared to the number of deaths from homicide, war, and
genocide, the worldwide toll from terrorism is in the noise: fewer than 400
deaths a year since 1968 from international terrorism (where perpetrators from
one country cause damage in another), and about 2,500 a year since 1998 from
domestic terrorism.178
The numbers we have been dealing with in this chapter
have been at least two orders of magnitude higher.
But after the September 11, 2001, attacks, terrorism became an obsession.
Pundits and politicians turned up the rhetoric to eleven, and the word existential
(generally modifying threat or crisis) had not seen as much use since the
heyday of Sartre and Camus. Experts proclaimed that terrorism made the
United States “vulnerable” and “fragile,” and that it threatened to do away
with the “ascendancy of the modern state,” “our way of life,” or “civilization
itself.”179
In a 2005 essay in The Atlantic, for example, a former White House
counterterrorism official confidently prophesied that by the tenth anniversary
of the 9/11 attacks the American economy would be shut down by chronic
bombings of casinos, subways, and shopping malls, the regular downing of
commercial airliners by shoulder-launched missiles, and acts of cataclysmic
sabotage at chemical plants.180
The massive bureaucracy of the Department of
Homeland Security was created overnight to reassure the nation with such
security theater as color-coded terrorist alerts, advisories to stock up on plastic
sheeting and duct tape, obsessive checking of identification cards (despite
fakes being so plentiful that George W. Bush’s own daughter was arrested for
using one to order a margarita), the confiscation of nail clippers at airports,
the girding of rural post offices with concrete barriers, and the designation of
eighty thousand locations as “potential terrorist targets,” including Weeki
Wachee Springs, a Florida tourist trap in which comely women dressed as
mermaids swim around in large glass tanks.
All this was in response to a threat that has killed a trifling number of
Americans. The nearly 3,000 deaths from the 9/11 attacks were literally off the
chart—way down in the tail of the power-law distribution into which terrorist
attacks fall.181
According to the Global Terrorism Database of the National
Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (the major
publicly available dataset on terrorist attacks), between 1970 and 2007 only
one other terrorist attack in the entire world has killed as many as 500 people.182
In the United States, Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of a federal office building
in Oklahoma City in 1995 killed 165, a shooting spree by two teenagers at Columbine
High School in 1999 killed 17, and no other attack has killed as many
as a dozen. Other than 9/11, the number of people killed by terrorists on
American soil during these thirty-eight years was 340, and the number killed
after 9/11—the date that inaugurated the so-called Age of Terror—was 11.
THE NEW PEACE 345
While some additional plots were foiled by the Department of Homeland
Security, many of their claims have turned out to be the proverbial elephant
repellent, with every elephant-free day serving as proof of its effectiveness.183
Compare the American death toll, with or without 9/11, to other preventable
causes of death. Every year more than 40,000 Americans are killed in
traffic accidents, 20,000 in falls, 18,000 in homicides, 3,000 by drowning (including
300 in bathtubs), 3,000 in fires, 24,000 from accidental poisoning, 2,500 from
complications of surgery, 300 from suffocation in bed, 300 from inhalation of
gastric contents, and 17,000 by “other and unspecified nontransport accidents
and their sequelae.”184
In fact, in every year but 1995 and 2001, more Americans
were killed by lightning, deer, peanut allergies, bee stings, and “ignition or
melting of nightwear” than by terrorist attacks.185
The number of deaths from
terrorist attacks is so small that even minor measures to avoid them can increase
the risk of dying. The cognitive psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has estimated
that in the year after the 9/11 attacks, 1,500 Americans died in car accidents
because they chose to drive rather than fly to their destinations out of fear of
dying in a hijacked or sabotaged plane, unaware that the risk of death in a
plane flight from Boston to Los Angeles is the same as the risk of death in a
car trip of twelve miles. In other words the number of people who died by
avoiding air travel was six times the number of people who died in the airplanes
on September 11.186
And of course the 9/11 attacks sent the United States
into two wars that have taken far more American and British lives than the
hijackers did, to say nothing of the lives of Afghans and Iraqis.
The discrepancy between the panic generated by terrorism and the deaths
generated by terrorism is no accident. Panic is the whole point of terrorism,
as the word itself makes clear. Though definitions vary (as in the cliché “One
man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”), terrorism is generally
understood as premeditated violence perpetrated by a nonstate actor against
noncombatants (civilians or off-duty soldiers) in pursuit of a political, religious,
or social goal, designed to coerce a government or to intimidate or convey a
message to a larger audience. The terrorists may want to extort a government
into capitulating to a demand, to sap people’s confidence in their government’s
ability to protect them, or to provoke massive repression that will turn people
against their government or bring about violent chaos in which the terrorist
faction hopes to prevail. Terrorists are altruistic in the sense of being motivated
by a cause rather than by personal profit. They act by surprise and in secrecy;
hence the ubiquitous appellation “cowardly.” And they are communicators,
seeking publicity and attention, which they manufacture through fear.
Terrorism is a form of asymmetrical warfare—a tactic of the weak against
the strong—which leverages the psychology of fear to create emotional damage
that is disproportionate to its damage in lives or property. Cognitive psychologists
such as Tversky, Kahneman, Gigerenzer, and Slovic have shown
that the perceived danger of a risk depends on two mental hobgoblins.187
The
346 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
first is fathomability: it’s better to deal with the devil you know than the devil
you don’t. People are nervous about risks that are novel, undetectable, delayed
in their effects, and poorly understood by the science of the day. The second
contributor is dread. People worry about worst-case scenarios, the ones that
are uncontrollable, catastrophic, involuntary, and inequitable (the people
exposed to the risk are not the ones who benefit from it). The psychologists
suggest that the illusions are a legacy of ancient brain circuitry that evolved
to protect us against natural risks such as predators, poisons, enemies, and
storms. They may have been the best guide to allocating vigilance in the prenumerate
societies that predominated in human life until the compilation of
statistical databases within the past century. Also, in an era of scientific ignorance
these apparent quirks in the psychology of danger may have brought a
secondary benefit: people exaggerate threats from enemies to extort compensation
from them, to recruit allies against them, or to justify wiping them out
preemptively (the superstitious killing discussed in chapter 4).188
Fallacies in risk perception are known to distort public policy. Money and
laws have been directed at keeping additives out of food and chemical residues
out of water supplies which pose infinitesimal risks to health, while measures
that demonstrably save lives, such as enforcing lower highway speeds, are
resisted.189
Sometimes a highly publicized accident becomes a prophetic allegory,
an ominous portent of an apocalyptic danger. The 1979 accident at the
Three Mile Island nuclear power plant killed no one, and probably had no
effect on cancer rates, but it halted the development of nuclear power in the
United States and thus will contribute to global warming from the burning
of fossil fuels for the foreseeable future.
The 9/11 attacks also took on a portentous role in the nation’s consciousness.
Large-scale terrorist plots were novel, undetectable, catastrophic (compared
to what had come before), and inequitable, and thus maximized both
unfathomability and dread. The terrorists’ ability to gain a large psychological
payoff for a small investment in damage was lost on the Department of
Homeland Security, which outdid itself in stoking fear and dread, beginning
with a mission statement that warned, “Today’s terrorists can strike at any
place, at any time, and with virtually any weapon.” The payoff was not lost
on Osama bin Laden, who gloated that “America is full of fear from its north
to its south, from its west to its east,” and that the $500,000 he spent on the
9/11 attacks cost the country more than half a trillion dollars in economic
losses in the immediate aftermath.190
Responsible leaders occasionally grasp the arithmetic of terrorism. In an
unguarded moment during the 2004 presidential campaign, John Kerry told
a New York Times interviewer, “We have to get back to the place we were, where
terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance. As a former
law-enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re
never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organized
THE NEW PEACE 347
crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise. It isn’t threatening people’s lives every
day, and fundamentally, it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not
threatening the fabric of your life.”191
Confirming the definition of a gaffe in
Washington as “something a politician says that is true,” George Bush and
Dick Cheney pounced on the remark, calling Kerry “unfit to lead,” and he
quickly backpedaled.
The ups and downs of terrorism, then, are a critical part of the history of
violence, not because of its toll in deaths but because of its impact on a society
through the psychology of fear. In the future, of course, terrorism really could
have a catastrophic death toll if the hypothetical possibility of an attack with
nuclear weapons ever becomes a reality. I will discuss nuclear terrorism in
the next section but for now will stick to forms of violence that have actually
taken place.
Terrorism is not new. After the Roman conquest of Judea two millennia ago,
a group of resistance fighters furtively stabbed Roman officials and the Jews
who collaborated with them, hoping to force the Romans out. In the 11th century
a sect of Shia Muslims perfected an early form of suicide terrorism by
getting close to leaders who they thought had strayed from the faith and stabbing
them in public, knowing they would immediately be slain by the leader’s
bodyguards. From the 17th to the 19th century, a cult in India strangled tens
of thousands of travelers as a sacrifice to the goddess Kali. These groups did
not accomplish any political change, but they left a legacy in their names: the
Zealots, the Assassins, and the Thugs.192
And if you associate the word anarchist
with a black-clad bomb-thrower, you are recalling a movement around the
turn of the 20th century that practiced “propaganda of the deed” by bombing
cafés, parliaments, consulates, and banks and by assassinating dozens of political
leaders, including Czar Alexander II of Russia, President Sadi Carnot of
France, King Umberto I of Italy, and President William McKinley of the United
States. The durability of these eponyms and images is a sign of the power of
terrorism to lodge in cultural consciousness.
Anyone who thinks that terrorism is a phenomenon of the new millennium
has a short memory. The romantic political violence of the 1960s and 1970s
included hundreds of bombings, hijackings, and shootings by various armies,
leagues, coalitions, brigades, factions, and fronts.193
The United States had the
Black Liberation Army, the Jewish Defense League, the Weather Underground
(who took their name from Bob Dylan’s lyric “You don’t need a weatherman
to know which way the wind blows”), the FALN (a Puerto Rican independence
group), and of course the Symbionese Liberation Army. The SLA contributed
one of the more surreal episodes of the 1970s when they kidnapped newspaper
heiress Patty Hearst in 1974 and brainwashed her into joining the group,
whereupon she adopted “Tanya” as her nom de guerre, helped them rob a
bank, and posed for a photograph in a battle stance with beret and machine
348 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
gun in front of their seven-headed cobra flag, leaving us one of the iconic
images of the decade (together with Richard Nixon’s victory salute from the
helicopter that would whisk him from the White House for the last time, and
the blow-dried Bee Gees in white polyester disco suits).
Europe, during this era, had the Provisional Irish Republican Army and
the Ulster Freedom Fighters in the U.K., the Red Brigades in Italy, the BaaderMeinhof
Gang in Germany, and the ETA (a Basque separatist group) in Spain,
while Japan had the Japanese Red Army and Canada had the Front de Libération
du Québec. Terrorism was so much a backdrop to European life that it
served as a running joke in Luis Buñuel’s 1977 love story That Obscure Object
of Desire, in which cars and stores blow up at random and the characters barely
notice.
Where are they now? In most of the developed world, domestic terrorism has
gone the way of the polyester disco suits. It’s a little-known fact that most terrorist
groups fail, and that all of them die.194
Lest this seem hard to believe, just
reflect on the world around you. Israel continues to exist, Northern Ireland is
still a part of the United Kingdom, and Kashmir is a part of India. There are no
sovereign states in Kurdistan, Palestine, Quebec, Puerto Rico, Chechnya, Corsica,
Tamil Eelam, or Basque Country. The Philippines, Algeria, Egypt, and Uzbekistan
are not Islamist theocracies; nor have Japan, the United States, Europe, and
Latin America become religious, Marxist, anarchist, or new-age utopias.
The numbers confirm the impressions. In his 2006 article “Why Terrorism
Does Not Work,” the political scientist Max Abrahms examined the twentyeight
groups designated by the U.S. State Department as foreign terrorist organizations
in 2001, most of which had been active for several decades. Putting
aside purely tactical victories (such as media attention, new supporters, freed
prisoners, and ransom), he found that only 3 of them (7 percent) had attained
their goals: Hezbollah expelled multinational peacekeepers and Israeli forces
from southern Lebanon in 1984 and 2000, and the Tamil Tigers won control
over the northeastern coast of Sri Lanka in 1990. Even that victory was reversed
by Sri Lanka’s rout of the Tigers in 2009, leaving the terrorist success rate at
2 for 42, less than 5 percent. The success rate is well below that of other forms
of political pressure such as economic sanctions, which work about a third of
the time. Reviewing its recent history, Abrahms noted that terrorism occasionally
succeeds when it has limited territorial goals, like evicting a foreign power
from land it had gotten tired of occupying, such as the European powers who
in the 1950s and 1960s withdrew from their colonies en masse, terrorism or no
terrorism.195
But it never attains maximalist goals such as imposing an ideology
on a state or annihilating it outright. Abrahms also found that the few
successes came from campaigns in which the groups targeted military forces
rather than civilians and thus were closer to being guerrillas than pure terrorists.
Campaigns that primarily targeted civilians always failed.
In her book How Terrorism Ends, the political scientist Audrey Cronin
THE NEW PEACE 349
examined a larger dataset: 457 terrorist campaigns that had been active since
1968. Like Abrahms, she found that terrorism virtually never works. Terrorist
groups die off exponentially over time, lasting, on average, between five and
nine years. Cronin points out that “states have a degree of immortality in the
international system; groups do not.”196
Nor do they get what they want. No small terrorist organization has ever
taken over a state, and 94 percent fail to achieve any of their strategic aims.197
Terrorist campaigns meet their end when their leaders are killed or captured,
when they are rooted out by states, and when they morph into guerrilla or
political movements. Many burn out through internal squabbling, a failure of
the founders to replace themselves, and the defection of young firebrands to
the pleasures of civilian and family life.
Terrorist groups immolate themselves in another way. As they become frustrated
by their lack of progress and their audiences start to get bored, they escalate
their tactics. They start to target victims who are more newsworthy because
they are famous, respected, or simply numerous. That certainly gets people’s
attention, but not in the way the terrorists intend. Supporters are repulsed by
the “senseless violence” and withdraw their money, their safe havens, and their
reluctance to cooperate with the police. The Red Brigades in Italy, for example,
self-destructed in 1978 when they kidnapped the beloved former prime minister
Aldo Moro, kept him in captivity for two months, shot him eleven times, and
left his body in the trunk of a car. Earlier the FLQ overplayed its hand during
the October Crisis of 1970 when it kidnapped Québec labor minister Pierre
Laporte and strangled him with his rosary, also leaving his body in a trunk.
McVeigh’s killing of 165 people (including 19 children) in the bombing of a federal
building in Oklahoma City in 1995 took the stuffing out of the right-wing
antigovernment militia movement in the United States. As Cronin puts it, “Violence
has an international language, but so does decency.”198
Attacks on civilians can doom terrorists not just by alienating potential
sympathizers but by galvanizing the public into supporting an all-out crackdown.
Abrahms tracked public opinion during terrorist campaigns in Israel,
Russia, and the United States and found that after a major attack on civilians,
attitudes toward the group lurched downward. Any willingness to compromise
with the group or to recognize the legitimacy of their grievance evaporated.
The public now believed that the terrorists were an existential threat
and supported measures that would snuff them out for good. The thing about
asymmetric warfare is that one side, by definition, is a lot more powerful than
the other. And as the saying goes, the race may not be given to the swift, nor
the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet.
Though terrorist campaigns have a natural arc that bends toward failure, new
campaigns can spring up as quickly as old ones fizzle. The world contains an
unlimited number of grievances, and as long as the perception that terrorism
350 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
works stays ahead of the reality, the terrorist meme may continue to infect the
aggrieved.
The historical trajectory of terrorism is elusive. Statistics begin only around
1970, when a few agencies began to collect them, and they differ in their recording
criteria and their coverage. It can be hard, even in the best of times, to
distinguish terrorist attacks from accidents, homicides, and disgruntled
individuals going postal, and in war zones the line between terrorism and
insurgency can be fuzzy. The statistics are also heavily politicized: various
constituencies may try to make the numbers look big, to sow fear of terrorism,
or small, to trumpet their success in fighting terrorism. And while the whole
world cares about international terrorism, governments often treat domestic
terrorism, which kills six to seven times as many people, as no one else’s business.
The most comprehensive public dataset we have is the Global Terrorism
Database, an amalgamation of many of the earlier datasets. Though we can’t
interpret every zig or zag in the graphs at face value, because some may represent
seams and overlaps between databases with different coding criteria,
we can try to get a general sense of whether terrorism really has increased in
the so-called Age of Terror.199
The safest records are those for terrorist attacks on American soil, if for no
other reason than that there are so few of them that each can be scrutinized.
Figure 6–9 shows all of them since 1970, plotted on a logarithmic scale because
0
0.001
0.01
0.1
1.0
Deathsper100,000peopleperyear
1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005
FIGURE 6–9. Rate of deaths from terrorism, United States, 1970–2007
Source: Global Terrorism Database, START (National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and
Responses to Terrorism, 2010, http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/), accessed on April 6, 2010. The figure
for 1993 was taken from the appendix to National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and
Responses to Terrorism, 2009. Since the log of 0 is undefined, years with no deaths are plotted at the
arbitrary value 0.0001.
THE NEW PEACE 351
otherwise the line would be a towering spike for 9/11 poking through a barely
wrinkled carpet. With the lower altitudes stretched out by the logarithmic
scale, we can discern peaks for Oklahoma City in 1995 and Columbine in 1999
(which is a dubious example of “terrorism,” but with a single exception, noted
below, I never second-guess the datasets when plotting the graphs). Apart
from this trio of spikes, the trend since 1970 is, if anything, more downward
than upward.
The trajectory of terrorism in Western Europe (figure 6–10) illustrates the
point that most terrorist organizations fail and all of them die. Even the spike
from the 2004 Madrid train bombings cannot hide the decline from the glory
years of the Red Brigades and the Baader-Meinhof Gang.
What about the world as a whole? Though Bush administration statistics
released in 2007 seemed to support their warnings about a global increase in
terrorism, the HSRP team noticed that their data include civilian deaths from
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which would be classified as civil war casualties
if they had taken place anywhere else in the world. The picture is different
when the criteria are kept consistent and these deaths are excluded.
Figure 6–11 shows the worldwide annual rate of death from terrorism (as usual,
per 100,000 population) without these deaths. The death tolls for the world as
a whole have to be interpreted with caution, because they come from a hybrid
dataset and can float up and down with differences in how many news sources
0.12
0.10
0.08
0.06
0.04
0.02
0.00
1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005
FIGURE 6–10. Rate of deaths from terrorism, Western Europe, 1970–2007
Source: Global Terrorism Database, START (National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and
Responses to Terrorism, 2010, http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/), accessed on April 6, 2010. Data for
1993 are interpolated. Population figures from UN World Population Prospects (United Nations, 2008),
accessed April 23, 2010; figures for years not ending in 0 or 5 are interpolated.
Deathsper100,000peopleperyear
352 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
0.00
0.05
0.10
0.15
0.20
0.25
Deathsper100,000peopleperyear
1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005
FIGURE 6–11. Rate of deaths from terrorism, worldwide, except Afghanistan 2001– and
Iraq 2003–
Source: Global Terrorism Database, START (National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and
Responses to Terrorism, 2010, http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/), accessed on April 6, 2010. Data for
1993 are interpolated. World population figures from U.S. Census Bureau, 2010c; the population
estimate for 2007 is extrapolated.
were consulted in each of the contributing datasets. But the shapes of the
curves turn out to be the same when they include only the larger terrorist
events (those with death tolls of at least twenty-five), which are so newsworthy
that they are likely to have been included in all the subdatasets.
Like the graphs we have seen for interstate wars, civil wars, and genocides,
this one has a surprise. The first decade of the new millennium—the dawn of
the Age of Terror—does not show a rising curve, or a new plateau, but a
decrease from peaks in the 1980s and early 1990s. Global terrorism rose in the
late 1970s and declined in the 1990s for the same reasons that civil wars and
genocides rose and fell during those decades. Nationalist movements sprang
up in the wake of decolonization, drew support from superpowers fighting
the Cold War by proxy, and died down with the fall of the Soviet empire. The
bulge in the late 1970s and early 1980s is mainly the handiwork of terrorists
in Latin America (El Salvador, Nicaragua, Peru, and Colombia), who were
responsible for 61 percent of the deaths from terrorism between 1977 and 1984.
(Many of these targets were military or police forces, which the GTD includes
in its database as long as the incident was intended to gain the attention of an
audience rather than to inflict direct damage.)200
Latin America kept up its
contribution in the second rise from 1985 to 1992 (about a third of the deaths),
joined by the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka (15 percent) and groups in India, the
Philippines, and Mozambique. Though some of the terrorist activity in India
THE NEW PEACE 353
and the Philippines came from Muslim groups, only a sliver of the deaths
occurred in Muslim countries: around 2 percent of them in Lebanon, and
1 percent in Pakistan. The decline of terrorism since 1997 was punctuated by
peaks for 9/11 and by a recent uptick in Pakistan, mainly as a spillover from
the war in Afghanistan along their nebulous border.
The numbers, then, show that we are not living in a new age of terrorism.
If anything, aside from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are enjoying a
decline in terrorism from decades in which it was less big a deal in our collective
consciousness. Nor, until recently, has terrorism been a particularly Muslim
phenomenon.
But isn’t it today? Shouldn’t we expect the suicide terrorists from Al Qaeda,
Hamas, and Hezbollah to be picking up the slack? And what are we hiding
by taking the civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of them victims
of suicide bombers, out of the tallies? Answering these questions will require
a closer look at terrorism, especially suicide terrorism, in the Islamic world.
Though 9/11 did not inaugurate a new age of terror, a case could be made that
it foretold an age of Islamist suicide terror. The 9/11 hijackers could not have
carried out their attacks had they not been willing to die in the process, and
since then the rate of suicide attacks has soared, from fewer than 5 per year in
the 1980s and 16 per year in the 1990s to 180 per year between 2001 and 2005.
Most of these attacks were carried out by Islamist groups whose expressed
motives were at least partly religious.201
According to the most recent data
from the National Counterterrorism Center, in 2008 Sunni Islamic extremists
were responsible for almost two-thirds of the deaths from terrorism that could
be attributed to a terrorist group.202
As a means of killing civilians, suicide terrorism is a tactic of diabolical
ingenuity. It combines the ultimate in surgical weapon delivery—the precision
manipulators and locomotors called hands and feet, controlled by the human
eyes and brain—with the ultimate in stealth—a person who looks just like
millions of other people. In technological sophistication, no battle robot comes
close. The advantages are not just theoretical. Though suicide terrorism
accounts for a minority of terrorist attacks, it is responsible for a majority of
the casualties.203
This bang for the buck can be irresistible to the leaders of a
terrorist movement. As one Palestinian official explained, a successful mission
requires only “a willing young man . . . nails, gunpowder, a light switchand
a short cable, mercury (readily obtainable from thermometers), acetone. . . . 
The most expensive item is transportation to an Israelitown.”204
The only real
technological hurdle is the willingness of the young man. Ordinarily a human
being is unwilling to die, the legacy of half a billion years of natural selection.
How have terrorist leaders overcome this obstacle?
People have exposed themselves to the risk of dying in wars for as long as
there have been wars, but the key term is risk. Natural selection works on
354 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
averages,soawillingnesstotakeasmallchanceofdyingaspartofanaggressive
coalition that offers a large chance of a big fitness payoff—more land, more
women, or more safety—can be favored over the course of evolution.205
What
cannot be favored is a willingness to die with certainty, which would take any
genes that allow such willingness along with the dead body. It’s not surprising
that suicide missions are uncommon in the history of warfare. Foraging bands
prefer the safety of raids and ambushes to the hazards of set-piece battles, and
even then warriors are not above claiming to have had dreams and omens that
conveniently keep them out of risky encounters planned by their comrades.206
Modern armies cultivate incentives for soldiers to increase the risk they
take on, such as esteem and decorations for bravery, and disincentives for them
to reduce the risk, such as the shaming or punishment of cowards and the
summary execution of deserters. Sometimes a special class of soldier called
file closers trails behind a unit with orders to kill any soldier who fails to
advance. The conflicts of interest between war leaders and foot soldiers leads
to the well-known hypocrisy of military rhetoric. Here is how a British general
waxed about the carnage of World War I: “Not a man shirked going through
the extremely heavy barrage, or facing the machine gun and rifle fire that
finally wiped them out. . . . I have never seen, indeed could never have imagined,
such a magnificent display of gallantry, discipline, and determination.”
A sergeant described it differently: “We knew it was pointless, even before we
went over—crossing open ground like that. But you had to go. You were
between the devil and the deep blue sea. If you go forward, you’ll likely be
shot. If you go back, you’ll be court-martialed and shot. What can you do?”207
Warriors may accept the risk of death in battle for another reason. The evolutionary
biologist J.B.S. Haldane, when asked whether he would lay down
his life for his brother, replied, “No, but for two brothers or eight cousins.” He
was invoking the phenomenon that would later be known as kin selection,
inclusive fitness, and nepotistic altruism. Natural selection favors any genes
that incline an organism toward making a sacrifice that helps a blood relative,
as long as the benefit to the relative, discounted by the degree of relatedness,
exceeds the cost to the organism. The reason is that the genes would be helping
copies of themselves inside the bodies of those relatives and would have a
long-term advantage over their narrowly selfish alternatives. Critics who are
determined to misunderstand this theory imagine that it requires that organisms
consciously calculate their genetic overlap with their kin and anticipate
the good it will do their DNA.208
Of course it requires only that organisms be
inclined to pursue goals that help organisms that are statistically likely to be
their genetic relatives. In complex organisms such as humans, this inclination
is implemented as the emotion of brotherly love.
The small-scale bands in which humans spent much of their evolutionary
history were held together by kinship, and people tended to be related to their
neighbors. Among the Yanomamö, for example, two individuals picked at
THE NEW PEACE 355
random from a village are related almost as closely as first cousins, and people
who consider each other relatives are related, on average, even more closely.209
The genetic overlap tilts the evolutionary payoff toward taking greater risks
to life and limb if the risky act might benefit one’s fellow warriors. One of the
reasons that chimpanzees, unlike other primates, engage in cooperative raiding
is that the females, rather than the males, disperse from the troop at sexual
maturity, so the males in a troop tend to be related.210
As with all aspects of our psychology that have been illuminated by evolutionary
theory, what matters is not actual genetic relatedness (it’s not as if
hunter-gatherers, to say nothing of chimpanzees, send off cheek swabs to a
genotyping service) but the perception of relatedness, as long as the perception
was correlated with the reality over long enough spans of time.211
Among the
contributors to the perception of kinship are the experience of having grown
up together, having seen one’s mother care for the other person, commensal
meals, myths of common ancestry, essentialist intuitions of common flesh and
blood, the sharing of rituals and ordeals, physical resemblance (often enhanced
by hairdressing, tattoos, scarification, and mutilation), and metaphors such
as fraternity, brotherhood, family, fatherland, motherland, and blood.212
Military
leaders use every trick in the book to make their soldiers feel like genetic
relatives and take on the biologically predictable risks. Shakespeare made this
clear in the most famous motivational speech in the literary history of war,
when Henry V addresses his men on St. Crispin’s Day:
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be rememberèd—
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother.
Modern militaries too take pains to group soldiers into bands of brothers—
the fire teams, squads, and platoons of half a dozen to several dozen soldiers
that serve as a crucible for the primary emotion that moves men to fight in
armies, brotherly love. Studies of military psychology have discovered that
soldiers fight above all out of loyalty to their platoonmates.213
The writer William
Manchester reminisced about his experience as a Marine in World War II:
Those men on the line were my family, my home. They were closer to me
than I can say, closer than any friends had been or ever would be. They had
never let me down, and I couldn’t do it to them. . . . I had to be with them,
rather than let them die and me live with the knowledge that I might have
saved them. Men, I now knew, do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine
Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another.214
356 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
Two decades later, another Marine-turned-author, William Broyles, offered
a similar reflection on his experience in Vietnam:
The enduring emotion of war, when everything else has faded, is comradeship.
A comrade in war is a man you can trust with anything, because you
trust him with your life. . . . Despite its extreme right-wing image, war is the
only utopian experience most of us ever have. Individual possessions and
advantage count for nothing: the group is everything. What you have is
shared with your friends. It isn’t a particularly selective process, but a love
that needs no reasons, that transcends race and personality and education—
all those things that would make a difference in peace.215
Though in extremis a man may lay down his life to save a platoon of virtual
brothers, it’s rarer for him to calmly make plans to commit suicide at some
future date on their behalf. The conduct of war would be very different if he
did. To avoid panic and rout (at least in the absence of file closers), battle plans
are generally engineered so that an individual soldier does not know that he
has been singled out for certain death. At a bomber base during World War II,
for example, strategists calculated that pilots would have a higher probability
of survival if a few of them who drew the short straws in a lottery would fly
off to certain death on one-way sorties rather than all of them taking their
chances in the fuel-laden planes needed for round trips. But they opted for
the higher risk of an unpredictable death over the lower risk of a death that
would be preceded by a lengthy period of doom.216
How do the engineers of
suicide terrorism overcome this obstacle?
Certainly an ideology of an afterlife helps, as in the posthumous Playboy
Mansion promised to the 9/11 hijackers. (Japanese kamikaze pilots had to make
do with the less vivid image of being absorbed into a great realm of the spirit.)
But modern suicide terrorism was perfected by the Tamil Tigers, and though
the members grew up in Hinduism with its promise of reincarnation, the
group’s ideology was secular: the usual goulash of nationalism, romantic militarism,
Marxism-Leninism, and anti-imperialism that animated 20th-century
third-world liberation movements. And in accounts by would-be suicide terrorists
of what prompted them to enlist, anticipation of an afterlife, with or
without the virgins, seldom figures prominently. So while expectation of a
pleasant afterlife may tip the perceived cost-benefit ratio (making it harder to
imagine an atheist suicide bomber), it cannot be the only psychological driver.
Using interviews with failed and prospective suicide terrorists, the anthropologist
Scott Atran has refuted many common misconceptions about them.
Far from being ignorant, impoverished, nihilistic, or mentally ill, suicide terrorists
tend to be educated, middle class, morally engaged, and free of obvious
psychopathology. Atran concluded that many of the motives may be found in
nepotistic altruism.217
THE NEW PEACE 357
The case of the Tamil Tigers is relatively easy. They use the terrorist equivalent
of file closers, selecting operatives for suicide missions and threatening
to kill their families if they withdraw.218
Only slightly less subtle are the methods
of Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups, who hold out a carrot
rather than a stick to the terrorist’s family in the form of generous monthly
stipends, lump-sum payments, and massive prestige in the community.219
Though in general one should not expect extreme behavior to deliver a payoff
in biological fitness, the anthropologists Aaron Blackwell and Lawrence Sugiyama
have shown that it may do so in the case of Palestinian suicide terrorism.
In the West Bank and Gaza many men have trouble finding wives because
their families cannot afford a bride-price, they are restricted to marrying parallel
cousins, and many women are taken out of the marriage pool by polygynous
marriage or by marriage up to more prosperous Arabs in Israel. Blackwell
and Sugiyama note that 99 percent of Palestinian suicide terrorists are male,
that 86 percent are unmarried, and that 81 percent have at least six siblings, a
larger family size than the Palestinian average. When they plugged these and
other numbers into a simple demographic model, they found that when a terrorist
blows himself up, the financial payoff can buy enough brides for his
brothers to make his sacrifice reproductively worthwhile.
Atran has found that suicide terrorists can also be recruited without these
direct incentives. Probably the most effective call to martyrdom is the opportunity
to join a happy band of brothers. Terrorist cells often begin as gangs of
underemployed single young men who come together in cafés, dorms, soccer
clubs, barbershops, or Internet chat rooms and suddenly find meaning in their
lives by a commitment to the new platoon. Young men in all societies do foolish
things to prove their courage and commitment, especially in groups, where
individuals may do something they know is foolish because they think that
everyone else in the group thinks it is cool.220
(We will return to this phenomenon
in chapter 8.) Commitment to the group is intensified by religion, not
just the literal promise of paradise but the feeling of spiritual awe that comes
from submerging oneself in a crusade, a calling, a vision quest, or a jihad.
Religion may also turn a commitment to the cause into a sacred value—a good
that may not be traded off against anything else, including life itself.221
The
commitment can be stoked by the thirst for revenge, which in the case of
militant Islamism takes the form of vengeance for the harm and humiliation
suffered by any Muslim anywhere on the planet at any time in history, or for
symbolic affronts such as the presence of infidel soldiers on sacred Muslim
soil. Atran summed up his research in testimony to a U.S. Senate subcommittee:
When you look at young people like the ones who grew up to blow up trains
in Madrid in 2004, carried out the slaughter on the London underground in
2005, hoped to blast airliners out of the sky en route to the United States in
2006 and 2009, and journeyed far to die killing infidels in Iraq, Afghanistan,
358 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia; when you look at whom they idolize, how they
organize, what bonds them and what drives them; then you see that what
inspires the most lethal terrorists in the world today is not so much the Koran
or religious teachings as a thrilling cause and call to action that promises
glory and esteem in the eyes of friends, and through friends, eternal respect
and remembrance in the wider world that they will never live to enjoy. . . . 
Jihad is an egalitarian, equal-opportunity employer: . . . fraternal, fastbreaking,
thrilling, glorious, and cool. Anyone is welcome to try his hand
at slicing off the head of Goliath with a paper cutter.222
The local imams are of marginal importance in this radicalization, since
young men who want to raise hell rarely look to community elders for guidance.
And Al Qaeda has become more a global brand inspiring a diffuse social
network than a centralized recruiting organization.
The up-close look at suicide terrorists at first seems pretty depressing, because
it suggests we are fighting a multiheaded hydra that cannot be decapitated by
killing its leadership or invading its home base. Remember, though, that all
terrorist organizations follow an arc toward failure. Are there any signs that
Islamist terrorism is beginning to burn out?
The answer is a clear yes. In Israel, sustained attacks on civilians have
accomplished what they accomplish everywhere else in the world: erase all
sympathy for the group, together with any willingness to compromise with
it.223
After the Second Intifada began, shortly after Yasir Arafat’s rejection of
the Camp David accords in 2000, the Palestinians’ economic and political
prospects steadily deteriorated. In the long run, Cronin adds, suicide terrorism
is a supremely idiotic tactic because it makes the target nation unwilling
to tolerate members of the minority community in their midst, never knowing
which among them may be a walking bomb. Though Israel has faced international
condemnation for building a security barrier, other countries faced with
suicide terrorism, Cronin notes, have taken similar measures.224
The Palestinian
leadership on the West Bank has, more recently, disavowed violence and
turned its energies toward competent governance, while Palestinian activist
groups have turned to boycotts, civil disobedience, peaceful protests, and
other forms of nonviolent resistance.225
They have even enlisted Rajmohan
Gandhi (grandson of Mohandas) and Martin Luther King III for symbolic
support. It’s too soon to know whether this is a turning point in Palestinian
tactics, but a retreat from terrorism would not be historically unprecedented.
The bigger story, though, is the fate of Al Qaeda. Marc Sageman, a former CIA
officer who has been keeping tabs on the movement, counted ten serious plots
on Western targets in 2004 (many inspired by the invasion of Iraq) but just three
in 2008.226
Not only has Al Qaeda’s base in Afghanistan been routed and its leadership
decimated (including bin Laden himself in 2011), but in the world of
THE NEW PEACE 359
Muslim opinion its favorables have long been sinking, and its negatives have
been rising.227
In the past six years Muslims have become repulsed by what they
increasingly see as nihilistic savagery, consistent with Cronin’s remark that
decency, not just violence, has an international language. The movement’s stra­
tegicgoals—apan-Islamiccaliphate,thereplacementofrepressiveandtheocratic
regimes by even more repressive and theocratic regimes, the genocidal killing
ofinfidels—begintolosetheirappealoncepeoplestartthinkingaboutwhatthey
really mean. And Al Qaeda has succumbed to the fatal temptation of all terrorist
groups: to stay in the limelight by mounting ever bloodier attacks on ever more
sympathetic victims, which in Al Qaeda’s case includes tens of thousands of fellow
Muslims. Attacks in the mid-2000s on a Bali nightclub, a Jordanian wedding
party, an Egyptian resort, the London underground, and cafés in Istanbul and
Casablanca massacred Muslims and non-Muslims alike for no discernible purpose.
The franchise of the movement known as Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) proved
tobeevenmoredepraved,bombingmosques,marketplaces,hospitals,volleyball
games,andfunerals,andbrutalizingresisterswithamputationsandbeheadings.
The jihad against the jihadis is being fought at many levels. Islamic states
such as Saudi Arabia and Indonesia that once indulged Islamist extremists
have decided that enough is enough and have begun to crack down. The movement’s
own gurus have also turned on it. In 2007 one of bin Laden’s mentors,
the Saudi cleric Salman al-Odah, wrote an open letter accusing him of “fostering
a culture of suicide bombings that has caused bloodshed and suffering,
and brought ruin to entire Muslim communities and families.”228
He was not
afraid to get personal: “My brother Osama, how much blood has been spilt?
How many innocent people, children, elderly, and women have been killed . . .
in the name of Al Qaeda? Will you be happy to meet God Almighty carrying
the burden of these hundreds of thousands or millions on your back?”229
His
indictment struck a chord: two-thirds of the postings on Web sites of Islamist
organizations and television networks were favorable, and he has spoken to
enthusiastic crowds of young British Muslims.230
The grand mufti of Saudi
Arabia, Abdulaziz al Ash-Sheikh, made it official, issuing a fatwa in 2007 forbidding
Saudis to join foreign jihads and condemning bin Laden and his
cronies for “transforming our youth into walking bombs to accomplish their
own political and military aims.”231
That same year another sage of Al Qaeda,
the Egyptian scholar Sayyid Imam Al Sharif (also known as Dr. Fadl), published
a book called Rationalization of Jihad because, he explained, “Jihad . . .
was blemished with grave Sharia violations during recent years. . . . Now there
are those who kill hundreds, including women and children, Muslims and
non-Muslims in the name of Jihad!”232
The Arab street agrees. In a 2008 online Q&A on a jihadist Web site with
Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s day-to-day leader, one participant asked,
“Excuse me, Mr. Zawahiri, but who is it who is killing, with Your Excellency’s
blessing, the innocents in Baghdad, Morocco, and Algeria?”233
Public opinion
360 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
polls throughout the Islamic world have tapped the outrage. Between 2005
and 2010, the number of respondents in Jordan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Saudi
Arabia, and Bangladesh who endorse suicide bombing and other violence
against civilians has sunk like a stone, often to around 10 percent. Lest even
this figure seem barbarically high, the political scientist Fawaz Gerges (who
compiled the data) reminds us that no fewer than 24 percent of Americans tell
pollsters that “bombing and other attacks intentionally aimed at civilians are
often or sometimes justified.”234
More important is public opinion in the war zones in which the terrorists
rely on the support of the population.235
In the North-West Frontier Province
in Pakistan, support for Al Qaeda plummeted from 70 percent to 4 percent
in just five months in late 2007, partly in reaction to the assassination of former
prime minister Benazir Bhutto by a suicide bomber. In elections that
year Islamists won 2 percent of the national vote—a fivefold decrease since
2002. In a 2007 ABC/BBC poll in Afghanistan, support for jihadist militants
nosedived to 1 percent.236
In Iraq in 2006 a large majority of Sunnis and an
overwhelming majority of Kurds and Shias rejected AQI, and by December
2007 the opposition to their attacks on civilians had reached a perfect 100
percent.237
Public opinion is one thing, but does it translate into a reduction of violence?
Terrorists depend on popular support, so it’s highly likely that it does. The
year 2007, the turning point in attitudes toward terrorism in the Islamic world,
was also a turning point in suicide attacks in Iraq. The Iraq Body Count has
documented that vehicle bombs and suicide attacks declined from 21 a day
in 2007 to fewer than 8 a day in 2010—still too many, but a sign of progress.238
Changes in Muslim attitudes do not deserve all the credit; the surge of American
soldiers in the first half of 2007 and other military adjustments helped
as well. But some of the military developments themselves depended on a
shift in attitudes. Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, a Shia militia, declared a
cease-fire in 2007, and in what has been called the Sunni Awakening tens of
thousands of young men have defected from an insurgency against the
American-supported government and are participating in the suppression of
Al Qaeda in Iraq.239
Terrorism is a tactic, not an ideology or a regime, so we will never win the
“War on Terror,” any more than we will achieve George W. Bush’s larger goal
(announced in the same post-9/11 speech) to “rid the world of evil.” In an age
of global media, there will always be an ideologue nursing a grievance somewhere
who is tempted by the spectacular return on investment of terrorism—
a huge windfall in fear from a trifling outlay in violence—and there will
always be bands of brothers willing to risk everything for the comradeship
and glory it promises. When terrorism becomes a tactic in a large insurgency,
it can do tremendous damage to people and to civil life, and the hypothetical
threat of nuclear terrorism (to which I will turn in the final section) gives new
THE NEW PEACE 361
meaning to the word terror. But in every other circumstance history teaches,
and recent events confirm, that terrorist movements carry the seeds of their
own destruction.
WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD
The New Peace is the quantitative decline in war, genocide, and terrorism that
has proceeded in fits and starts since the end of the Cold War more than two
decades ago. It has not been around for as long as the Long Peace, is not as
revolutionary as the Humanitarian Revolution, and has not swept a civilization
in the manner of the Civilizing Process. An obvious question is whether
it will last. Though I am reasonably confident that during my lifetime France
and Germany will not go to war, that cat-burning and the breaking wheel will
not make a comeback, and that diners will not routinely stab each other with
steak knives or cut off each other’s noses, no prudent person could express a
similar confidence when it comes to armed conflict in the world as a whole.
I am sometimes asked, “How do you know there won’t be a war tomorrow
(or a genocide, or an act of terrorism) that will refute your whole thesis?” The
question misses the point of this book. The point is not that we have entered
an Age of Aquarius in which every last earthling has been pacified forever. It
is that substantial reductions in violence have taken place, and it is important
to understand them. Declines in violence are caused by political, economic,
and ideological conditions that take hold in particular cultures at particular
times. If the conditions reverse, violence could go right back up.
Also, the world contains a lot of people. The statistics of power-law distributions
and the events of the past two centuries agree in telling us that a small
number of perpetrators can cause a great deal of damage. If somewhere among
the world’s six billion people there is a zealot who gets his hands on a stray
nuclear bomb, he could single-handedly send the statistics through the roof.
But even if he did, we would still need an explanation of why homicide rates
fell a hundredfold, why slave markets and debtors’ prisons have vanished,
and why the Soviets and Americans did not go to war over Cuba, to say nothing
of Canada and Spain over flatfish.
The goal of this book is to explain the facts of the past and present, not to
augur the hypotheticals of the future. Still, you might ask, isn’t it the essence
of science to make falsifiable predictions? Shouldn’t any claim to understanding
the past be evaluated by its ability to extrapolate into the future? Oh, all
right. I predict that the chance that a major episode of violence will break out
in the next decade—a conflict with 100,000 deaths in a year, or a million deaths
overall—is 9.7 percent. How did I come up with that number? Well, it’s small
enough to capture the intuition “probably not,” but not so small that if such
an event did occur I would be shown to be flat-out wrong. My point, of course,
is that the concept of scientific prediction is meaningless when it comes to a
362 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
single event—in this case, the eruption of mass violence in the next decade. It
would be another thing if we could watch many worlds unfold and tot up the
number in which an event happened or did not, but this is the only world
we’ve got.
The truth is, I don’t know what will happen across the entire world in the
coming decades, and neither does anyone else. Not everyone, though, shares
my reticence. A Web search for the text string “the coming war” returns two
million hits, with completions like “with Islam,” “with Iran,” “with China,”
“with Russia,” “in Pakistan,” “between Iran and Israel,” “between India and
Pakistan,” “against Saudi Arabia,” “on Venezuela,” “in America,” “within the
West,” “for Earth’s resources,” “over climate,” “for water,” and “with Japan”
(the last dating from 1991, which you would think would make everyone a bit
more humble about this kind of thing). Books with titles like The Clash of
Civilizations, World on Fire, World War IV, and (my favorite) We Are Doomed boast
a similar confidence.
Who knows? Maybe they’re right. My aim in the rest of this chapter is to
point out that maybe they’re wrong. This isn’t the first time we’ve been warned
of certain ruin. The experts have predicted civilization-ending aerial gas
attacks, global thermonuclear war, a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, a
Chinese razing of half of humanity, nuclear powers by the dozen, a revanchist
Germany, a rising sun in Japan, cities overrun by teenage superpredators, a
world war fought over diminishing oil, nuclear war between India and Pakistan,
and weekly 9/11-scale attacks.240
In this section I’ll look at four threats to
the New Peace—a civilizational clash with Islam, nuclear terrorism, a nuclear
Iran, and climate change—and for each one make the case for “maybe, but
maybe not.”
The Muslim world, to all appearances, is sitting out the decline of violence.
More than two decades of headlines have shocked Westerners with acts of
barbarity in the name of Islam. Among them are the 1989 clerical death threat
against Salman Rushdie for portraying Muhammad in a novel, the 2002 sentencing
of an unmarried pregnant woman in Nigeria to execution by stoning,
the fatal stabbing in 2004 of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh for producing
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s film about the treatment of women in Islamic countries, the
lethal 2005 riots after a Danish newspaper printed editorial cartoons that were
disrespectful to the prophet, the jailing and threat of flogging of a British
schoolteacher in Sudan who allowed her class to name a teddy bear Muhammad,
and of course the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in which nineteen Muslims killed
almost three thousand civilians.
The impression that the Muslim world indulges kinds of violence that the
West has outgrown is not a symptom of Islamophobia or Orientalism but is
borne out by the numbers. Though about a fifth of the world’s population is
Muslim, and about a quarter of the world’s countries have a Muslim majority,
THE NEW PEACE 363
more than half of the armed conflicts in 2008 embroiled Muslim countries or
insurgencies.241
Muslim countries force a greater proportion of their citizens
into their armies than non-Muslim countries do, holding other factors con­
stant.242
Muslim groups held two-thirds of the slots on the U.S. State Department’s
list of foreign terrorist organizations, and (as mentioned) in 2008 Sunni
terrorists killed nearly two-thirds of the world’s victims of terrorism whose
perpetrators could be identified.243
In defiance of the rising tide of democracy, only about a quarter of Islamic
countries elect their governments, and most of them are only dubiously dem­
ocratic.244
Their leaders receive farcically high percentages of the vote, and they
exercise the power to jail opponents, outlaw opposition parties, suspend parliament,
and cancel elections.245
It’s not just that Islamic countries happen to
have risk factors for autocracy, such as being larger, poorer, or richer in oil.
Even in a regression analysis that holds these factors constant, countries with
larger proportions of Muslims have fewer political rights.246
Political rights are
very much a matter of violence, of course, since they amount to being able to
speak, write, and assemble without being dragged off to jail.
The laws and practices of many Muslim countries seem to have missed out
on the Humanitarian Revolution. According to Amnesty International, almost
three-quarters of Muslim countries execute their criminals, compared to a
third of non-Muslim countries, and many use cruel punishments such as ston­
ing,branding,blinding,amputationoftonguesorhands,andevencrucifixion.247
Every year more than a hundred million girls in Islamic countries have their
genitals mutilated, and when they grow up they may be disfigured with acid
or killed outright if they displease their fathers, their brothers, or the husbands
who have been forced upon them.248
Islamic countries were the last to abolish
slavery (as recently as 1962 in Saudi Arabia and 1980 in Mauritania), and a
majority of the countries in which people continue to be trafficked are Muslim.249
In many Muslim countries, witchcraft is not just on the books as a crime but
is commonly prosecuted. In 2009, for example, Saudi Arabia convicted a man
for carrying a phone booklet with characters in an alphabet from his native
Eritrea, which the police interpreted as occult symbols. He was lashed three
hundred times and imprisoned for more than three years.250
Violence is sanctioned in the Islamic world not just by religious superstition
but by a hyperdeveloped culture of honor. The political scientists Khaled Fattah
and K. M. Fierke have documented how a “discourse of humiliation” runs
through the ideology of Islamist organizations.251
A sweeping litany of
affronts—the Crusades, the history of Western colonization, the existence of
Israel, the presence of American troops on Arabian soil, the underperformance
of Islamic countries—are taken as insults to Islam and used to license indiscriminate
vengeance against members of the civilization they hold responsible,
together with Muslim leaders of insufficient ideological purity. The
radical fringe of Islam harbors an ideology that is classically genocidal: history
364 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
is seen as a violent struggle that will culminate in the glorious subjugation of
an irredeemably evil class of people. Spokesmen for Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah,
and the Iranian regime have demonized enemy groups (Zionists, infidels,
crusaders, polytheists), spoken of a millennial cataclysm that would usher
in a utopia, and justified the killing of entire categories of people such as Jews,
Americans, and those felt to insult Islam.252
The historian Bernard Lewis is not the only one who has asked, “What went
wrong?” In 2002 a committee of Arab intellectuals under the auspices of the
United Nations published the candid Arab Human Development Report, said to
be “written by Arabs for Arabs.”253
The authors documented that Arab nations
were plagued by political repression, economic backwardness, oppression of
women, widespread illiteracy, and a self-imposed isolation from the world of
ideas. At the time of the report, the entire Arab world exported fewer manufactured
goods than the Philippines, had poorer Internet connectivity than
sub-Saharan Africa, registered 2 percent as many patents per year as South
Korea, and translated about a fifth as many books into Arabic as Greece translates
into Greek.254
It wasn’t always that way. During the Middle Ages, Islamic civilization was
unquestionably more refined than Christendom. While Europeans were
applying their ingenuity to the design of instruments of torture, Muslims were
preserving classical Greek culture, absorbing the knowledge of the civilizations
of India and China, and advancing astronomy, architecture, cartography,
medicine, chemistry, physics, and mathematics. Among the symbolic legacies
of this age are the “Arabic numbers” (adapted from India) and loan words
such as alcohol, algebra, alchemy, alkali, azimuth, alembic, and algorithm. Just as the
West had to come from behind to overtake Islam in science, so it was a laggard
in human rights. Lewis notes:
In most tests of tolerance, Islam, both in theory and in practice, compares
unfavorably with the Western democracies as they have developed during
the last two or three centuries, but very favorably with most other Christian
and post-Christian societies and regimes. There is nothing in Islamic history
to compare with the emancipation, acceptance, and integration of otherbelievers
and non-believers in the West; but equally, there is nothing in
Islamic history to compare with the Spanish expulsion of Jews and Muslims,
the Inquisition, the Auto da fé’s, the wars of religion, not to speak of more
recent crimes of commission and acquiescence.255
Why did Islam blow its lead and fail to have an Age of Reason, an Enlightenment,
and a Humanitarian Revolution? Some historians point to bellicose
passages in the Koran, but compared to our own genocidal scriptures,
they are nothing that some clever exegesis and evolving norms couldn’t spindoctor
away.
THE NEW PEACE 365
Lewis points instead to the historical lack of separation between mosque
and state. Muhammad was not just a spiritual leader but a political and military
one, and only recently have any Islamic states had the concept of a distinction
between the secular and the sacred. With every potential intellectual
contribution filtered through religious spectacles, opportunities for absorbing
and combining new ideas were lost. Lewis recounts that while works in philosophy
and mathematics had been translated from classical Greek into Arabic,
works of poetry, drama, and history were not. And while Muslims had a
richly developed history of their own civilization, they were incurious about
their Asian, African, and European neighbors and about their own pagan
ancestors. The Ottoman heirs to classical Islamic civilization resisted the adoption
of mechanical clocks, standardized weights and measures, experimental
science, modern philosophy, translations of poetry and fiction, the financial
instruments of capitalism, and perhaps most importantly, the printing press.
(Arabic was the language in which the Koran was written, so printing it was
considered an act of desecration.)256
In chapter 4 I speculated that the Humanitarian
Revolution in Europe was catalyzed by a literate cosmopolitanism,
which expanded people’s circle of empathy and set up a marketplace of ideas
from which a liberal humanism could emerge. Perhaps the dead hand of religion
impeded the flow of new ideas into the centers of Islamic civilization,
locking it into a relatively illiberal stage of development. As if to prove the
speculation correct, in 2010 the Iranian government restricted the number of
university students who would be admitted to programs in the humanities,
because, according to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini, study of the
humanities “promotes skepticism and doubt in religious principles and
beliefs.”257
Whatever the historical reasons, a large chasm appears to separate Western
and Islamic cultures today. According to a famous theory from the political
scientist Samuel Huntington, the chasm has brought us to a new age in the
history of the world: the clash of civilizations. “In Eurasia the great historic
fault lines between civilizations are once more aflame,” he wrote. “This is
particularly true along the boundaries of the crescent-shaped Islamic bloc of
nations, from the bulge of Africa to Central Asia. Violence also occurs between
Muslims, on the one hand, and Orthodox Serbs in the Balkans, Jews in Israel,
Hindus in India, Buddhists in Burma and Catholics in the Philippines. Islam
has bloody borders.”258
Though the dramatic notion of a clash of civilizations became popular
among pundits, few scholars in international studies take it seriously. Too
large a proportion of the world’s bloodshed takes place within and between
Islamic countries (for example, Iraq’s war with Iran in the 1980s, and its invasion
of Kuwait in 1990), and too large a proportion takes place within and
between non-Islamic countries, for the civilizational fault line to be an accurate
summary of violence in the world today. Also, as Nils Petter Gleditsch and
366 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
Halvard Buhaug have pointed out, even though an increasing proportion of
the world’s armed conflicts have involved Islamic countries and insurgencies
over the past two decades (from 20 to 38 percent), it’s not because those conflicts
have increased in number. As figure 6–12 shows, Islamic conflicts continued
at about the same rate while the rest of the world got more peaceful, the
phenomenon I have been calling the New Peace.
Most important, the entire concept of “Islamic civilization” does a disservice
to the 1.3 billion men and women who call themselves Muslims, living in
countries as diverse as Mali, Nigeria, Morocco, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh,
and Indonesia. And cutting across the divide of the Islamic world into
continents and countries is another divide that is even more critical. Westerners
tend to know Muslims through two dubious exemplars: the fanatics who
grab headlines with their fatwas and jihads, and the oil-cursed autocrats who
rule over them. The beliefs of the hitherto silent (and frequently silenced)
majority make less of a contribution to our stereotypes. Can 1.3 billion Muslims
really be untouched by the liberalizing tide that has swept the rest of the world
in recent decades?
Part of the answer may be found in a massive Gallup poll conducted
between 2001 and 2007 on the attitudes of Muslims in thirty-five countries
representing 90 percent of the world’s Islamic population.259
The results confirm
that most Islamic states will not become secular liberal democracies anytime
soon. Majorities of Muslims in Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, and Bangladesh
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Numberofconflicts
All intrastate conflicts
Islamic conflicts
1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006
FIGURE 6–12. Islamic and world conflicts, 1990–2006
Source: Data from Gleditsch, 2008. “Islamic conflicts” involve Muslim countries or Islamic opposition
movements or both. Data assembled by Halvard Buhaug from the UCDP⁄PRIO conflict dataset
and his own coding of Islamic conflicts.
THE NEW PEACE 367
told the pollsters that Sharia, the principles behind Islamic law, should be the
only source of legislation in their countries, and majorities in most of the
countries said it should be at least one of the sources. On the other hand, a
majority of Americans believe that the Bible should be one of the sources of
legislation, and presumably they don’t mean that people who work on Sunday
should be stoned to death. Religion thrives on woolly allegory, emotional
commitments to texts that no one reads, and other forms of benign hypocrisy.
Like Americans’ commitment to the Bible, most Muslims’ commitment to
Sharia is more a symbolic affiliation with moral attitudes they associate with
the best of their culture than a literal desire to see adulteresses stoned to death.
In practice, creative and expedient readings of Sharia for liberal ends have
often prevailed against the oppressive fundamentalist readings. (The Nigerian
woman, for example, was never executed.) Presumably that is why most Muslims
see no contradiction between Sharia and democracy. Indeed, despite their
professed affection for the idea of Sharia, a large majority believe that religious
leaders should have no direct role in drafting their country’s constitution.
Though most Muslims distrust the United States, it may not be out of a
general animus toward the West or a hostility to democratic principles. Many
Muslims feel the United States does not want to spread democracy in the Muslim
world, and they have a point: the United States, after all, has supported
autocratic regimes in Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, rejected the
election of Hamas in the Palestinian territories, and in 1953 helped overthrow
the democratically elected Mossadegh in Iran. France and Germany are viewed
more favorably, and between 20 and 40 percent say they admire the “fair political
system, respect for human values, liberty, and equality” of Western culture.
More than 90 percent would guarantee freedom of speech in their nation’s
constitution, and large numbers also support freedom of religion and freedom
of assembly. Substantial majorities of both sexes in all the major Muslim countries
say that women should be allowed to vote without influence from men,
to work at any job, to enjoy the same legal rights as men, and to serve in the
highest levels of government. And as we have seen, overwhelming majorities
of the Muslim world reject the violence of Al Qaeda. Only 7 percent of the
Gallup respondents approved the 9/11 attacks, and that was before Al Qaeda’s
popularity cratered in 2007.
What about mobilization for political violence? A team from the University
of Maryland examined the goals of 102 grassroots Muslim organizations in
North Africa and the Middle East and found that between 1985 and 2004 the
proportion of organizations that endorsed violence dropped from 54 to 14
percent.260
The proportion committed to nonviolent protests tripled, and the
proportion that engaged in electoral politics doubled. These changes helped
drive down the terrorism death curve in figure 6–11 and are reflected in the
headlines, which feature far less terrorist violence in Egypt and Algeria than
we read about a few years ago.
368 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
Islamic insularity is also being chipped at by a battery of liberalizing forces:
independent news networks such as Al-Jazeera; American university campuses
in the Gulf states; the penetration of the Internet, including social networking
sites; the temptations of the global economy; and the pressure for women’s
rights from pent-up internal demand, nongovernmental organizations, and
allies in the West. Perhaps conservative ideologues will resist these forces and
keep their societies in the Middle Ages forever. But perhaps they won’t.
In early 2011, as this book was going to press, a swelling protest movement
deposed the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt and was threatening the regimes in
Jordan, Bahrain, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. The outcome is unpredictable, but
the protesters have been almost entirely nonviolent and non-Islamist, and are
animated by a desire for democracy, good governance, and economic vitality
rather than global jihad, the restoration of the caliphate, or death to infidels.
Even with all these winds of change, it is conceivable that an Islamist tyrant
or radical revolutionary group could drag an unwilling populace into a cataclysmic
war. But it seems more probable that “the coming war with Islam”
will never come. Islamic nations are unlikely to unite and challenge the West:
they are too diverse, and they have no civilization-wide animus against us.
Some Muslim countries, like Turkey, Indonesia, and Malaysia, are well on the
way to becoming fairly liberal democracies. Some will continue to be ruled
by SOBs, but they’ll be our SOBs. Some will try to muddle through the oxymoron
of a Sharia democracy. None is likely to be governed by the ideology
of Al Qaeda. This leaves three reasonably foreseeable dangers to the New
Peace: nuclear terrorism, the regime in Iran, and climate change.
Though conventional terrorism, as John Kerry gaffed, is a nuisance to be
policed rather than a threat to the fabric of life, terrorism with weapons of
mass destruction would be something else entirely. The prospect of an attack
that would kill millions of people is not just theoretically possible but consistent
with the statistics of terrorism. The computer scientists Aaron Clauset
and Maxwell Young and the political scientist Kristian Gleditsch plotted the
death tolls of eleven thousand terrorist attacks on log-log paper and saw them
fall into a neat straight line.261
Terrorist attacks obey a power-law distribution,
which means they are generated by mechanisms that make extreme events
unlikely, but not astronomically unlikely.
The trio suggested a simple model that is a bit like the one that Jean-Baptiste
Michel and I proposed for wars, invoking nothing fancier than a combination
of exponentials. As terrorists invest more time into plotting their attack, the
death toll can go up exponentially: a plot that takes twice as long to plan can
kill, say, four times as many people. To be concrete, an attack by a single suicide
bomber, which usually kills in the single digits, can be planned in a few days or
weeks.The2004Madridtrainbombings,whichkilledaroundtwohundred,took
six months to plan, and 9/11, which killed three thousand, took two years.262
THE NEW PEACE 369
But terrorists live on borrowed time: every day that a plot drags on brings the
possibility that it will be disrupted, aborted, or executed prematurely. If the
probability is constant, the plot durations will be distributed exponentially.
(Cronin, recall, showed that terrorist organizations drop like flies over time,
falling into an exponential curve.) Combine exponentially growing damage
with an exponentially shrinking chance of success, and you get a power law,
with its disconcertingly thick tail. Given the presence of weapons of mass
destruction in the real world, and religious fanatics willing to wreak untold
damage for a higher cause, a lengthy conspiracy producing a horrendous death
toll is within the realm of thinkable probabilities.
A statistical model, of course, is not a crystal ball. Even if we could extrapolate
the line of existing data points, the massive terrorist attacks in the tail
are still extremely (albeit not astronomically) unlikely. More to the point, we
can’t extrapolate it. In practice, as you get to the tail of a power-law distribution,
the data points start to misbehave, scattering around the line or warping
it downward to very low probabilities. The statistical spectrum of terrorist
damage reminds us not to dismiss the worst-case scenarios, but it doesn’t tell
us how likely they are.
So how likely are they? What do you think the chances are that within the
next five years each of the following scenarios will take place? (1) One of the
heads of state of a major developed country will be assassinated. (2) A nuclear
weapon will be set off in a war or act of terrorism. (3) Venezuela and Cuba will
join forces and sponsor Marxist insurrection movements in one or more Latin
American countries. (4) Iran will provide nuclear weapons to a terrorist group
that will use one of them against Israel or the United States. (5) France will
give up its nuclear arsenal.
I gave fifteen of these scenarios to 177 Internet users on a single Web page
and asked them to estimate the probability of each. The median estimate that
a nuclear bomb would be set off (scenario 2) was 0.20; the median estimate
that a nuclear bomb would be set off in the United States or Israel by a terrorist
group that obtained it from Iran (scenario 4) was 0.25. About half the respondents
judged that the second scenario was more likely than the first. And in
doing so, they committed an elementary blunder in the mathematics of probability.
The probability of a conjunction of events (A and B both occurring)
cannot be greater than the probability of either of them occurring alone. The
probability that you will draw a red jack has to be lower than the probability
that you will draw a jack, because some jacks you might draw are not red.
Yet Tversky and Kahneman have shown that most people, including statisticians
and medical researchers, commonly make the error.263
Consider the
case of Bill, a thirty-four-year-old man who is intelligent but also unimaginative,
compulsive, and rather dull. In school he was strong in mathematics but
undistinguished in the arts and humanities. What are the chances that Bill
plays jazz saxophone? What are the chances that he is an accountant who plays
370 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
jazz saxophone? Many people give higher odds to the second possibility, but
the choice is nonsensical, because there are fewer saxophone-playing accountants
than there are saxophone players. In judging probabilities, people rely
on the vividness of their imaginations rather than thinking through the laws.
Bill fits the stereotype of an accountant but not of a saxophonist, and our intuitions
go with the stereotype.
The conjunction fallacy, as psychologists call it, infects many kinds of reasoning.
Juries are more likely to believe that a man with shady business dealings
killed an employee to prevent him from talking to the police than to
believe that he killed the employee. (Trial lawyers thrive on this fallacy, adding
conjectural details to a scenario to make it more vivid to a jury, even though
every additional detail, mathematically speaking, ought to make it less probable.)
Professional forecasters give higher odds to an unlikely outcome that is
presented with a plausible cause (oil prices will rise, causing oil consumption
to fall) than to the same outcome presented naked (oil consumption will fall).264
And people are willing to pay more for flight insurance against terrorism than
for flight insurance against all causes.265
You can see where I’m going. The mental movie of an Islamist terrorist
group buying a bomb on the black market or obtaining it from a rogue state
and then detonating it in a populated area is all too easy to play in our mind’s
eye. Even if it weren’t, the entertainment industry has played it for us in nuclear
terrorist dramas like True Lies, The Sum of All Fears, and 24. The narrative is so
riveting that we are apt to give it a higher probability than we would if we
thought through all the steps that would have to go right for the disaster to
happen and multiplied their probabilities. That’s why so many of my survey
respondents judged an Iran-sponsored nuclear terrorist attack to be more
probable than a nuclear attack. The point is not that nuclear terrorism is impossible
or even astronomically unlikely. It is just that the probability assigned to
it by anyone but a methodical risk analyst is likely to be too high.
What do I mean by “too high”? “With certainty” and “more probable than
not” strike me as too high. The physicist Theodore Taylor declared in 1974 that
by 1990 it would be too late to prevent terrorists from carrying out a nuclear
attack.266
In 1995 the world’s foremost activist on the risks of nuclear terrorism,
Graham Allison, wrote that under prevailing circumstances, a nuclear attack
on American targets was likely before the decade was out.267
In 1998 the counterterrorism
expert Richard Falkenrath wrote that “it is certain that more and
more non-state actors will become capable of nuclear, biological, and chemical
weapons acquisition and use.”268
In 2003 UN ambassador John Negroponte
judged that there was a “high probability” of an attack with a weapon of mass
destruction within two years. And in 2007 the physicist Richard Garwin estimated
that the chance of a nuclear terrorist attack was 20 percent per year, or
about 50 percent by 2010 and almost 90 percent within a decade.269
Like television weather forecasters, the pundits, politicians, and terrorism
THE NEW PEACE 371
specialists have every incentive to emphasize the worst-case scenario. It is
undoubtedly wise to scare governments into taking extra measures to lock
down weapons and fissile material and to monitor and infiltrate groups that
might be tempted to acquire them. Overestimating the risk, then, is safer than
underestimating it—though only up to a point, as the costly invasion of Iraq
in search of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction proves. The professional
reputations of experts have proven to be immune to predictions of disasters
that never happen, while almost no one wants to take a chance at giving the
all-clear and ending up with radioactive egg on his face.270
A few brave analysts, such as Mueller, John Parachini, and Michael Levi,
have taken the chance by examining the disaster scenarios component by
component.271
For starters, of the four so-called weapons of mass destruction,
three are far less massively destructive than good old-fashioned explosives.272
Radiological or “dirty” bombs, which are conventional explosives wrapped
in radioactive material (obtained, for example, from medical waste), would
yield only minor and short-lived elevations of radiation, comparable to moving
to a city at a higher altitude. Chemical weapons, unless they are released
in an enclosed space like a subway (where they would still not do as much
damage as conventional explosives), dissipate quickly, drift in the wind, and
are broken down by sunlight. (Recall that poison gas was responsible for a
tiny fraction of the casualties in World War I.) Biological weapons capable of
causing epidemics would be prohibitively expensive to develop and deploy,
as well as dangerous to the typically bungling amateur labs that would
develop them. It’s no wonder that biological and chemical weapons, though
far more accessible than nuclear ones, have been used in only three terrorist
attacks in thirty years.273
In 1984 the Rajneeshee religious cult contaminated
salad in the restaurants of an Oregon town with salmonella, sickening 751
people and killing none. In 1990 the Tamil Tigers were running low on ammunition
while attacking a fort and opened up some chlorine cylinders they
found in a nearby paper mill, injuring 60 and killing none before the gas
wafted back over them and convinced them never to try it again. The Japanese
religious cult Aum Shinrikyo failed in ten attempts to use biological weapons
before releasing sarin gas in the Tokyo subways, killing 12. A fourth attack,
the 2001 anthrax mailings that killed 5 Americans in media and government
offices, turned out to be a spree killing rather than an act of terrorism.
It’s really only nuclear weapons that deserve the WMD acronym. Mueller
and Parachini have fact-checked the various reports that terrorists got “just
this close” to obtaining a nuclear bomb and found that all were apocryphal.
Reports of “interest” in procuring weapons on a black market grew into
accounts of actual negotiations, generic sketches morphed into detailed blueprints,
and flimsy clues (like the aluminum tubes purchased in 2001 by Iraq)
were overinterpreted as signs of a development program.
Each of the pathways to nuclear terrorism, when examined carefully, turns
372 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
out to have gantlets of improbabilities. There may have been a window of
vulnerability in the safekeeping of nuclear weapons in Russia, but today most
experts agree it has been closed, and that no loose nukes are being peddled
in a nuclear bazaar. Stephen Younger, the former director of nuclear weapons
research at Los Alamos National Laboratory, has said, “Regardless of what is
reported in the news, all nuclear nations take the security of their weapons
very seriously.”274
Russia has an intense interest in keeping its weapons out of
the hands of Chechen and other ethnic separatist groups, and Pakistan is just
as worried about its archenemy Al Qaeda. And contrary to rumor, security
experts consider the chance that Pakistan’s government and military command
will fall under the control of Islamist extremists to be essentially nil.275
Nuclear weapons have complex interlocks designed to prevent unauthorized
deployment, and most of them become “radioactive scrap metal” if they are
not maintained.276
For these reasons, the forty-seven-nation Nuclear Security
Summit convened by Barack Obama in 2010 to prevent nuclear terrorism concentrated
on the security of fissile material, such as plutonium and highly
enriched uranium, rather than on finished weapons.
The dangers of filched fissile material are real, and the measures recommended
at the summit are patently wise, responsible, and overdue. Still, one
shouldn’t get so carried away by the image of garage nukes as to think they
are inevitable or even extremely probable. The safeguards that are in place or
will be soon will make fissile materials hard to steal or smuggle, and if they
went missing, it would trigger an international manhunt. Fashioning a workable
nuclear weapon requires precision engineering and fabrication techniques
well beyond the capabilities of amateurs. The Gilmore commission,
which advises the president and Congress on WMD terrorism, called the challenge
“Herculean,” and Allison has described the weapons as “large, cumbersome,
unsafe, unreliable, unpredictable, and inefficient.”277
Moreover, the path
to getting the materials, experts, and facilities in place is mined with hazards
of detection, betrayal, stings, blunders, and bad luck. In his book On Nuclear
Terrorism, Levi laid out all the things that would have to go right for a terrorist
nuclear attack to succeed, noting, “Murphy’s Law of Nuclear Terrorism: What
can go wrong might go wrong.”278
Mueller counts twenty obstacles on the path
and notes that even if a terrorist group had a fifty-fifty chance of clearing every
one, the aggregate odds of its success would be one in a million. Levi brackets
the range from the other end by estimating that even if the path were strewn
with only ten obstacles, and the probability that each would be cleared was
80 percent, the aggregate odds of success facing a nuclear terrorist group
would be one in ten. Those are not our odds of becoming victims. A terrorist
group weighing its options, even with these overly optimistic guesstimates,
might well conclude from the long odds that it would better off devoting its
resources to projects with a higher chance of success. None of this, to repeat,
THE NEW PEACE 373
means that nuclear terrorism is impossible, only that it is not, as so many
people insist, imminent, inevitable, or highly probable.
If current pundits are to be believed, then as you are reading these words the
New Peace will already have been shattered by a major war, perhaps a nuclear
war, with Iran. At the time of this writing, tensions have been rising over the
country’s nuclear energy program. Iran is currently enriching enough uranium
to fashion a nuclear arsenal, and it has defied international demands
that it allow inspections and comply with other provisions of the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty. The president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has
taunted Western leaders, supported terrorist groups, accused the United States
of orchestrating the 9/11 attacks, denied the Holocaust, called for Israel to be
“wiped off the map,” and prayed for the reappearance of the Twelfth Imam,
the Muslim savior who would usher in an age of peace and justice. In some
interpretations of Shi’a Islam, this messiah will show up after a worldwide
eruption of war and chaos.
All this is, to say the least, disconcerting, and many writers have concluded
that Ahmadinejad is another Hitler who will soon develop nuclear weapons
and use them on Israel or furnish them to Hezbollah to do so. Even in less dire
scenarios, he could blackmail the Middle East into acceding to Iranian hegemony.
The prospect might leave Israel or the United States no choice but to
bomb its nuclear facilities preemptively, even if it invited years of war and
terrorism in response. A 2009 editorial in the Washington Times spelled it out:
“War with Iran is now inevitable. The only question is: Will it happen sooner
or later?”279
This chilling scenario of a nuclear attack by Iranian fanatics is certainly
possible. But is it inevitable, or even highly likely? One can be just as contemptuous
of Ahmadinejad, and just as cynical about his motives, while imagining
less dire alternatives for the world ahead. John Mueller, Thomas Schelling,
and many other foreign affairs analysts have imagined them for us and have
concluded that the Iranian nuclear program is not the end of the world.280
Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and Ahmadinejad
has repeatedly declared that Iran’s nuclear program is intended only for
energy and medical research. In 2005 Supreme Leader Khameini (who wields
more power than Ahmadinejad) issued a fatwa declaring that nuclear weapons
are forbidden under Islam.281
If the government went ahead and developed
the weapons anyway, it would not be the first time in history that national
leaders have lied through their teeth. But having painted themselves into this
corner, the prospect of forfeiting all credibility in the eyes of the world (including
major powers on whom they depend, like Russia, China, Turkey, and
Brazil) might at least give them pause.
Ahmadinejad’s musings about the return of the Twelfth Imam do not
374 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
necessarily mean that he plans to hasten it along with a nuclear holocaust. Two
of the deadlines by which writers confidently predicted that he would set off
the apocalypse (2007 and 2009) have already come and gone.282
And for what
it’s worth, here is how he explained his beliefs in a 2009 television interview
with NBC correspondent Ann Curry:
Curry: You’ve said that you believe that his arrival, the apocalypse, would
happen in your own lifetime. What do you believe that you should do to
hasten his arrival?
Ahmadinejad: I have never said such a thing. . . . I was talking about peace. . . . 
What is being said about an apocalyptic war and—global war, things of
that nature. This is what the Zionists are claiming. Imam . . . will come
with logic, with culture, with science. He will come so that there is no
more war. No more enmity, hatred. No more conflict. He will call on
everyone to enter a brotherly love. Of course, he will return with Jesus
Christ. The two will come back together. And working together, they
would fill this world with love. The stories that have been disseminated
around the world about extensive war, apocalyptic wars, so on and so
forth, these are false.283
As a Jewish atheist, I can’t say I find these remarks completely reassuring.
But with one obvious change they are not appreciably different from those
held by devout Christians; indeed, they are milder, as many Christians do
believe in an apocalyptic war and have fantasized about it in bestselling novels.
As for the speech containing the phrase that was translated as “wiping
Israel off the map,” the New York Times writer Ethan Bronner consulted Persian
translators and analysts of Iranian government rhetoric on the meaning of the
phrase in context, and they were unanimous that Ahmadinejad was daydreaming
about regime change in the long run, not genocide in the days ahead.284
The perils of translating foreign bombast bring to mind Khrushchev’s boast
“We will bury you,” which turned out to mean “outlive” rather than “entomb.”
There is a parsimonious alternative explanation of Iran’s behavior. In 2002
George W. Bush identified Iraq, North Korea, and Iran as the “axis of evil” and
proceeded to invade Iraq and depose its leadership. North Korea’s leaders saw
the writing on the wall and promptly developed a nuclear capability, which
(as they no doubt anticipated) has put an end to any musings about the United
States invading them too. Shortly afterward Iran put its nuclear program into
high gear, aiming to create enough ambiguity as to whether it possesses
nuclear weapons, or could assemble them quickly, to squelch any thought of
an invasion in the mind of the Great Satan.
If Iran does become a confirmed or suspected nuclear power, the history
of the nuclear age suggests that the most likely outcome would be nothing. As
we have seen, nuclear weapons have turned out to be useless for anything but
THE NEW PEACE 375
deterrence against annihilation, which is why the nuclear powers have repeatedly
been defied by their nonnuclear adversaries. The most recent episode of
proliferation bears this out. In 2004 it was commonly predicted that if North
Korea acquired a nuclear capability, then by the end of the decade it would
share it with terrorists and set off a nuclear arms race with South Korea, Japan,
and Taiwan.285
In fact, North Korea did acquire a nuclear capability, the end
of the decade has come and gone, and nothing has happened. It’s also unlikely
that any nation would furnish nuclear ammunition to the loose cannons of a
terrorist band, thereby giving up control over how they would be used while
being on the hook for the consequences.286
In the case of Iran, before it decided to bomb Israel (or license Hezbollah to
do so in an incriminating coincidence), with no conceivable benefit to itself,
its leaders would have to anticipate a nuclear reprisal by Israeli commanders,
who could match them hothead for hothead, together with an invasion by a
coalition of powers enraged by the violation of the nuclear taboo. Though the
regime is detestable and in many ways irrational, one wonders whether its
principals are so indifferent to continuing their hold on power as to choose to
annihilate themselves in pursuit of perfect justice in a radioactive Palestine
or the arrival of the Twelfth Imam, with or without Jesus at his side. As Thomas
Schelling asked in his 2005 Nobel Prize lecture, “What else can Iran accomplish,
except possibly the destruction of its own system, with a few nuclear
warheads? Nuclear weapons should be too precious to give away or to sell,
too precious to waste killing people when they could, held in reserve, make
the United States, or Russia, or any other nation, hesitant to consider military
action.”287
Though it may seem dangerous to consider alternatives to the worst-case
scenario, the dangers go both ways. In the fall of 2002 George W. Bush warned
the nation, “America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing
clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—
that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” The “clear evidence” led
to a war that has cost more than a hundred thousand lives and almost a trillion
dollars and has left the world no safer. A cocksure certainty that Iran will
use nuclear weapons, in defiance of sixty-five years of history in which authoritative
predictions of inevitable catastrophes were repeatedly proven wrong,
could lead to adventures with even greater costs.
These days one other gloomy scenario is on people’s minds. Global temperatures
are increasing, which in the decades ahead could lead to a rising sea
level, desertification, droughts in some regions, and floods and hurricanes in
others. Economies will be disrupted, leading to a competition for resources,
and populations will migrate out of distressed regions, leading to friction
with their unwelcoming hosts. A 2007 New York Times op-ed warned, “Climate
stress may well represent a challenge to international security just as
376 THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
dangerous—and more intractable—than the arms race between the United
States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War or the proliferation of nuclear
weapons among rogue states today.”288
That same year Al Gore and the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
for their call to action against global warming because, according to the citation,
climate change is a threat to international security. A rising fear lifts all
the boats. Calling global warming “a force multiplier for instability,” a group
of military officers wrote that “climate change will provide the conditions that
will extend the war on terror.”289
Once again it seems to me that the appropriate response is “maybe, but
maybe not.” Though climate change can cause plenty of misery and deserves
to be mitigated for that reason alone, it will not necessarily lead to armed
conflict. The political scientists who track war and peace, such as Halvard
Buhaug, Idean Salehyan, Ole Theisen, and Nils Gleditsch, are skeptical of the
popular idea that people fight wars over scarce resources.290
Hunger and
resource shortages are tragically common in sub-Saharan countries such as
Malawi, Zambia, and Tanzania, but wars involving them are not. Hurricanes,
floods, droughts, and tsunamis (such as the disastrous one in the Indian Ocean
in 2004) do not generally lead to armed conflict. The American dust bowl in
the 1930s, to take another example, caused plenty of deprivation but no civil
war. And while temperatures have been rising steadily in Africa during the
past fifteen years, civil wars and war deaths have been falling. Pressures on
access to land and water can certainly cause local skirmishes, but a genuine
war requires that hostile forces be organized and armed, and that depends
more on the influence of bad governments, closed economies, and militant
ideologies than on the sheer availability of land and water. Certainly any connection
to terrorism is in the imagination of the terror warriors: terrorists tend
to be underemployed lower-middle-class men, not subsistence farmers.291
As
for genocide, the Sudanese government finds it convenient to blame violence
in Darfur on desertification, distracting the world from its own role in tolerating
or encouraging the ethnic cleansing.
In a regression analysis on armed conflicts from 1980 to 1992, Theisen found
that conflict was more likely if a country was poor, populous, politically unstable,
and abundant in oil, but not if it had suffered from droughts, water shortages,
or mild land degradation. (Severe land degradation did have a small
effect.) Reviewing analyses that examined a large number (N) of countries
rather than cherry-picking one or two, he concluded, “Those who foresee
doom, because of the relationship between resource scarcity and violent internal
conflict, have very little support in the large-N literature.” Salehyan adds
that relatively inexpensive advances in water use and agricultural practices
in the developing world can yield massive increases in productivity with a
constant or even shrinking amount of land, and that better governance can
mitigate the human costs of environmental damage, as it does in developed
THE NEW PEACE 377
democracies. Since the state of the environment is at most one ingredient in a
mixture that depends far more on political and social organization, resource
wars are far from inevitable, even in a climate-changed world.
No reasonable person would prophesy that the New Peace is going to be a
long peace, to say nothing of a perpetual peace. There will certainly be wars
and terrorist attacks in the decades to come, possibly large ones. On top of the
known unknowns—militant Islamism, nuclear terrorists, environmental
degradation—there are surely many unknown unknowns. Perhaps new leaders
in China will decide to engulf Taiwan once and for all, or Russia will swallow
a former Soviet republic or two, provoking an American response. Maybe
an aggressive Chavismo will spill out of Venezuela and incite Marxist insurgencies
and brutal counterinsurgencies throughout the developing world.
Perhaps at this very moment terrorists from some liberation movement no one
has heard of are plotting an attack of unprecedented destruction, or an eschatological
ideology is fermenting in the mind of a cunning fanatic who will
take over a major country and plunge the world back into war. As the Saturday
Night Live news analyst Roseanne Roseannadanna observed, “It’s always
something. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.”
But it is just as foolish to let our lurid imaginations determine our sense of
the probabilities. It may always be something, but there can be fewer of those
things, and the things that happen don’t have to be as bad. The numbers tell
us that war, genocide, and terrorism have declined over the past two decades—
not to zero, but by a lot. A mental model in which the world has a constant
allotment of violence, so that every cease-fire is reincarnated somewhere else
as a new war, and every interlude of peace is just a time-out in which martial
tensions build up and seek release, is factually mistaken. Millions of people
are alive today because of the civil wars and genocides that did not take place
but that would have taken place if the world had remained as it was in the
1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The conditions that favored this happy outcome—
democracy, prosperity, decent government, peacekeeping, open economies,
and the decline of antihuman ideologies—are not, of course, guaranteed to
last forever. But nor are they likely to vanish overnight.
Of course we live in a dangerous world. As I have emphasized, a statistical
appreciation of history tells us that violent catastrophes may be improbable,
but they are not astronomically improbable. Yet that can also be stated in a
more hopeful way. Violent catastrophes may not be astronomically improbable,
but they are improbable.