World May Be Safer Than You Think

The news media makes its living telling us how terrible things are and creating a perpetual state of anxiety among their listeners. Do you think that maybe, just maybe, they're overblowing things just a bit? A new study seems to suggest that the world is not quite the mess that you'd think it is if you listened to all the media reports:

Widespread fears about a world in a perpetual state of war are unfounded, a study says today. It emphasises that the number of conflicts between nations, civil wars, battle deaths, coups and genocides has been falling steeply for more than a decade.
While the authors note that bloody wars continue in Iraq, Afghanistan and Congo, they argue that there are substantial grounds for optimism.

The first Human Security Report, written by academics led by Andrew Mack, of the University of British Columbia, cites popular notions that war is becoming more common and deadlier, that genocide is rising and that terrorism poses the greatest threat to humanity.

"Not one of these claims is based on reliable data," it says. "All are suspect; some are demonstrably false. Yet they are widely believed because they reinforce popular assumptions."

The authors say there are 40 per cent fewer armed conflicts than in the early 1990s. Between 1991 and last year 28 wars for self-determination began but 43 were ended or contained.

Certainly the current state of the world is no Sunday School picnic, but when you think back to the kind of stuff that went on routinely in the mid-20th century, the 21st century doesn't look quite so bad.