Name: Is The World Getting More Violent?
Uploaded: 2026-01-14T17:29:14.000Z
Duration: 12 min 57 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The second conditional

Ten years ago, in 2014, we asked if war was over.

Based on long term trends in the last century, it seemed violent conflict was on the decline and the world more peaceful than ever.

Adverbs of manner

Our video began with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the war between Hamas and Israel and well, a decade later we could start this video exactly the same way.

But is the world as a whole more violent today?

In a NutShell, we made seven claims in 2014 1.

There were almost no more wars between countries.

Most conflicts are in areas that were under foreign control, either by colonial states or Soviet dictatorships.

7 We're in the most peaceful period of history.

First, let's get an overview of conflicts in the last decade.

Some of the deadliest conflicts that were glowing hot in 2014 have since ended or significantly cooled down.

The war in Afghanistan ended with the victory of the Taliban, while the civil wars in Yemen and Libya are all still ongoing.

The proto state of ISIS in Iraq and Syria has been wiped out.

And breaking news, the rebels just won the war in Syria last week.

The extremely destructive civil war in South Sudan ended in a fragile peace agreement, despite violence still flaring up in the devastated young country.

Sadly, the last decade saw a bunch of new conflicts erupt or old unresolved issues turn violent.

One of the main claims of our video 10 years ago was that wars today are not between countries, and

Civil wars are by far the most common type of state based conflict in the world.

We'd wager that most of you have never heard about one of the deadliest civil wars in decades, the 2020 Tigray War in Ethiopia.

It ended in 2022 with the victory of the Ethiopian and Eritrean government forces against rebel groups.

Exact death tolls are unknown, but they may exceed half a million, mostly civilians.

Aside from Tigray, a number of new civil wars have broken out since 2014.

Although new is a bit misleading since the underlying issues were brooding at a smaller scale for a long time.

The deadliest have been the Sudan civil war, the civil war in Yemen and the civil war in Myanmar.

Multiple nations in Africa like Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, Burkina Faso and Mozambique are suffering from Islamist insurgencies that destabilize countries and have cost tens of thousands of civilian lives.

Lastly, There are nearly 60 smaller unresolved state based Conflicts around the world, many going on for decades, that are smouldering, but

have a relatively low death toll in comparison.

Maybe the worst news is that we've been seeing interstate wars again.

There was the short lived 2020 war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, which redrew contested borders.

Then there's the latest war between Israel and Hamas that turned into a regional crisis.

What is certainly the most disturbing new development is the full scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

It's the first large scale interstate war in 20 years, and

the first war since World War II where a major power is trying to conquer territory and to subjugate another state.

It followed an eight year conflict that started with the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbas.

Exact casualty rates for the war since 2022 are hard to verify, but

they go as high as hundreds of thousands.

If we add up the numbers, we see a few things.

Roughly between 2004 and 2014, there were about 350,000 deaths from state based conflicts worldwide.

They were going down from 2014 to 2019 and then rose sharply in 2021.

In total, from 2014 to 2024, we saw about 1.2 million deaths.

If we include all violent conflicts like the Mexican drug war, the number rises to 1.5 million, three times higher than the previous decade.

Actually, 2022 had the highest death toll from violent conflict since the rwandan genocide in 1994.

The Tigray War and the war in Ukraine alone were responsible for the majority of lives lost, as both wars involved armies of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, sometimes thrown against entrenched positions in human wave attacks.

So the last three years have been unusually violent.

But if we zoom out a bit more, we can put those numbers into perspective.

A terrible thing, but nowhere near how bad it can get when the world goes to war.

In the grand scheme of things, we are still living in relatively peaceful times.

But the next decade will show if the trend will reverse or if the last few years were an anomaly.

Unfortunately, there have been proper wars between states again, so our prediction on wars between countries didn't hold up.

What is as true today as in 2014 is that almost all armed conflicts in the world are in countries that were under foreign occupation in the 20th century, either by colonialism or by the expansive Soviet dictatorship.

Ethnic groups were split apart or forced together by arbitrary borders, resources unequally distributed or power vacuums created, which led to conflicts that are in many cases still unresolved.

There have also been no wars between democracies who seem uniquely unwilling to fight each other.

So compared to the last century, it's still true that war between nations is still an exception rather than the rule.

On the other hand, we see fewer civil wars end by diplomacy.

Instead there's an increase in either victories or stalemates.

These often aren't permanent resolutions to the conflict, only pauses in the fighting because the underlying causes haven't been solved.

For our claim about borders, we can see that most international borders in the world still hold up and are not challenged.

But there are still a few dozen territorial disputes in the world, most of them in Africa and Asia.

Like the border clash between India and China over Aksai Chin and Arunachal Pradesh.

China's claim to Taiwan or Venezuela threatening to annex part of Guyana's oil rich province Essequibo.

One thing that makes wars so deadly is that they're often supported by external powers.

Many countries are providing support or arming up different sides or factions.

Like the competition between Saudi Arabia and Iran for hegemony, with Iran being the main supporter for the Houthis, Hezbollah or Hamas.

Or in the Ukrainian war, with the west supporting Ukraine, while China, Iran and North Korea support Russia.

External powers keeping conflicts alive can also be Islamist groups like ISIS or criminal networks, or even local elites that benefit from their own country being torn apart and effectively prevent conflicts from ending.

The End of the Rules Based World There's a lot of debate among experts about what factors make the world more or less peaceful.

One of the major reasons the world has seen less conflict was that after the end of the Cold War, many countries expected a sort of rules based world order.

But things have been changing in the last few years.

The world has become multipolar, with new alliances forming and the idea of a rules based world is being challenged.

China's manufacturing capacity is now as big as the US and Europe's.

Combined with its massive economic development, a new superpower has risen.

It's common knowledge that the US spends more on its military than any place in the world.

But this may no longer reflect the true balance of power.

China doesn't report all of its military spending like the US does, and

it gets a lot more done with each equivalent dollar spent.

Recent estimates trying to account for these differences tell us China's effective military budget is now a significant portion of the United States budget.

And with Russia breaking the taboo of launching the first war effort of conquest by a major power in almost 80 years, Europe has begun the process of rearming.

It is slow because, well, Europe is slow, but it is happening.

We're in the transition to a multipolar world again, with different nations and alliances claiming spheres of power they want to dominate.

In this climate, tensions and conflicts between states have been rising, even if most of them have not turned into wars yet.

The clear answer is no, and the direction we're headed in doesn't seem great.

But with all the gloom, it's also true that we are still in a peaceful period of world history, and

the deaths by war are still at historic lows.