THE DECLINE OF WAR SINCE 1950: NEW EVIDENCE
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-030-31589-4_11.pdf
Submitted: NA
Accepted: NA
For issues replicating the results contact me via email: vanweezel (at) pm.me.
Abstract:
For the past 70 years, there has been a downward trend in war sizes, butthe idea of an enduring‘long peace’remains controversial. Some recent contri-butions suggest that observed war patterns, including the long peace, could haveresulted from a long-standing and unchanging war-generating process, an idearooted in Lewis F Richardson’s pioneering work on war. Focusing on thehypothesis that the war sizes after the Second World War are generated by the samemechanism that generated war sizes before the Second World War, recent workfailed to reject this‘no-change’hypothesis. In this chapter, we transform thewar-size data into units of battle deaths per 100,000 of world population rather thanabsolute battle deaths–units appropriate for investigating the probability that arandom person will die in a war. This change tilts the evidence towards rejectingno-change hypotheses. We also show that sliding the candidate break point slightlyforward in time, to 1950 rather than 1945, leads us further down the path towardformal rejection of a large number of no-change hypotheses. We expand the rangeof wars considered to include not just inter-state wars, as is commonly done, butalso intra-state wars. Now we do formally reject many versions of the no-changehypothesis. Finally, we show that our results do not depend on the choice of wardataset.
Citation:
@article{spagat2020decline,
title = {The decline of war since 1950: New evidence},
author = {Spagat, Michael and van Weezel, Stijn},
year = 2020,
journal = {Lewis Fry Richardson: His Intellectual Legacy and Influence in the Social Sciences},
publisher = {Springer, Cham},
pages = 129
}