262 CHAPTER EigHT ■ War and Strife
(the founding of the League of Nations) led American diplomatic historians and
legal scholars to create a new discipline called international relations. Since that
time, prominent scholars in this field have addressed many of the critical and vex-
ing issues surrounding war— its causes, its conduct, its consequences, its preven-
tion, and even the possibility of its elimination. This attention to war and security is
clearly warranted. Of all human values, physical security— security from vio lence,
starvation, and the ele ments— comes first. All other human values that are crucially
impor tant to the quality of our lives— good government, economic development, a
clean environment— presuppose a minimal level of physical security. Consider the
difficulties the United States and its NATO allies have had in Af ghan i stan in trying to
revive the economy, establish legal authority, and guarantee human rights, espe-
cially for women. in the absence of a minimum level of physical security (in this case,
security from vio lence), these impor tant goals have proven elusive.
Yet history suggests that a minimum level of security has not always been attain-
able. Historians have recorded approximately 14,500 armed strug gles over time, with
about 3.5 billion people dying either as a direct or an indirect result. Since 1816,
between 224 and 559 international and intrastate wars have occurred, depending on
how war is defined. As more and more states became industrialized, interstate war
became more lethal and less controllable, and it engaged ever- wider segments of
belligerents’ socie ties. This new real ity of interstate war culminated in two horrific
convulsions: World Wars i (1914–18) and ii (1939–45).
However, following the world wars and the Korean War (1950–53), and perhaps
due to their destructiveness and potential to escalate to nuclear war, both the fre-
quency and intensity of interstate war began a slow decline. The average number of
interstate wars has shrunk every year: more than six in the 1950s and less than one in
the 2000s. That is impor tant since those wars often kill more people on average than
civil wars. From the 1950s to the end of the Cold War, the total number of armed
conflicts of all kinds has increased three times over, but most are low- intensity wars
with a modest number of fatalities. Since the beginning of the 1990s to 2015, overall
conflict numbers have declined by about 40 percent, while conflicts that have killed
at least 1,000 persons a year have declined by more than half.^1 Yet, because our con-
temporary understanding of war remains incomplete, many international relations
scholars worry that this trend could reverse itself. War therefore remains perhaps
the most compelling issue in world politics, and theorists continue to analyze why
international and intrastate conflicts occur.