a Short Piece on the Long Peace

Goya’s The Third of May 1808

The Long Peace – An alluring concept that continues to draw many an eminent thinker. Major powers of our world have not gone to war for two generations and they aren’t anywhere close to doing so. Economic integration & inter dependencies have stitched nations into a sort of a fabric where war is mutually destructive & a mostly unattractive proposition. Our age almost mirrors that only other extraordinary period of peace & stability – The Pax Romana.

Some intellectuals go as far to argue that we as a race are more enlightened, empathetic & even altruistic than ever before.

The phrase, ‘The Long Peace’, was first brought into our parlance in 1986 by Prof. John Gaddis – distinguished Yale professor, author on military strategy & advisor to the Bush family. While he attributes this long peace to the transparent balance of power during the Cold War created by nuclear weapons, bipolarity & a grudging sense of fear that withheld the powers from serious direct confrontation.

This concept is attractive as this era follows two World Wars. To search for a remarkable explanation for it is understandable & it’s need essential. As Seamus McLeod puts it, “what could be more remarkable than the greatest accumulation of destructive technology humanity has ever known during a period of international stability.”

While many an intellectual has tried to research & articulate this phenomenon, I find the work of Harvard Professor, Steven Pinker to be the most eloquent.  My mind goes back to the euphoria following the launch of his seminal work, The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011). Here, while noting our era to be far less violent than ancient, medieval, or even early modern times, he says that over the past 70+ years, the number of battle deaths per 100,000 people has fallen dramatically — with no spikes, just a couple of “blips.”  A summary of his point of view can be found here (saving you of reading the book of a thousand plus pages!)

An alternate point of view came in from NYU professor Nassim Taleb (I loved his book that I am yet to complete, The Black Swan). Strongly critiquing Pinker’s theory of “declining war” to be based on incorrect assumptions, incomplete data & poor research. The debate between these intellectuals raged on & their critique of each other’s work continues to evoke interest.

While the primary focus of The Long Peace theorists is the declining fatalities in the battlefield & shrinking theaters of war, the oft overlooked fact is the steadily increasing deaths of non-combatants – 90% of the 500,000+ deaths in the Syrian civil war were civilians & 2.3% of its pre-war population has been wiped out, 77% of the 174,000 casualties in Iraq since its invasion were civilians. Intellectuals heralding the growing influence of enlightenment are blind sighted to those unheralded genocides – a million Tutsi’s killed in 100 days of Rwandan war, another million either rendered homeless or dead in the last year of Sri-Lankan civil war & the present Rohingya crisis. Hence while it is true that war has changed, it has not become less destructive.

The catastrophe in Syria

If great powers have avoided direct armed conflict, they have fought one another in many proxy wars or used their might against lesser states in covert ways. Neocolonial terror led by the French in south-east Asia, the ideology driven wars in Korea, Angola & Vietnam, the 70 year Chinese assault on Tibet, the crazy attempts of the Soviets to usurp power in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, the Iran-Iraq war, the largely unreported catastrophes of the Balkans & Chechnya, the post 9/11 invasions in Asia, the UN approved terror in Libya incl. usage of airpower against civilians – these are only some more famous theaters where great powers have been involved in warfare against each other while avoiding direct military conflict. There are more indirect yet equally sinister engagements – like the chaos created by the powers that led to the Khmer Rouge assuming power in Cambodia & the subsequent bloodbath (which curiously took over 40 yrs to be declared a genocide). The ongoing strife in Yemen that has caused the deaths of some 80,000 children.

In today’s realities, rather than a contest between well-organised states who can at some point negotiate peace, conflicts are often a many-sided affair involving collapsing or pseudo states that no one has real control over or the power to end. The actors are armed irregulars, some of them killing and being killed for the sake of an idea or faith, fear or a desire for revenge. An almost untold story is the growing influence of mercenaries. Their numbers are swelling and are today an approved arm of most developed nations. For these mercenaries, attacks on civilian populations are an acceptable aspect of war. The ferocious conflict in Syria, in which methodical starvation and the systematic destruction of urban environments are deployed as strategies, is an example of this type of warfare. The brutal operations of state sponsored mercenaries in Apartheid South Africa are appalling to say the least. A strange fact is that the largest mercenary army in the world today is the well-known security company that may be guarding your office – G4S!

Theater sof Russian mercenary operations today

It may be true that the modern state’s monopoly of security has led, to declining rates of violent death. But it is also true that the power of the modern state has been used for mass killing in its own territory, i.e. state terror. Today’s research suggests that the “Holocaust by bullets” – the mass shootings of Jews in Stalin’s Soviet Union – was on an even larger scale than previously realized. Stalin’s other purges & the Soviet’s forced agricultural collectivization caused what could be termed a large-scale genocide – deaths due result of starvation, deportation to uninhabitable places, military-aided brutal subjugation of its rural populace. Deaths at the hands of Mao’s ill-fated programmes are put at 65 million & his Great Leap Forward alone purged 4 million in one go. Similar tragedies in Congo, Chile, the Central Asian autocracies make us view the discourse around ‘The Long Peace’ to be a concept failing inside the state let alone between states!

Further, estimating the numbers of those who die from violence involves complex questions of cause and effect. There are many kinds of lethal force that do not produce immediate death.

• Are those who die of hunger or disease during war or its aftermath counted among the casualties?
• Do refugees whose lives are cut short appear in the count?
• The abundant torture used in war – will its victims figure in the footnotes of data visualizations if they succumb years later from the physical and mental damage inflicted on them?
• Do infants who are born to brief and painful lives because of exposure to chemical agents find their tiny feet embossed on this landscape of this statistic?
• If women who have been raped as part of a military strategy, revenge or at the hands of the so-called ‘unrestrained soldier’, will their wrecked bodies feature any calculation?

The rise of nationalism (this piece from the 1990s fits right into today’s context), myopic leadership, the withdrawal of globalization, tensions arising from the refugee crisis & large scale migration, problems of narcotics, proliferation of small arms, the withering of true democracies & the cancer of the far right are emergent & very real threats to the notion of a ‘Long Peace’ in the near future.

Going back to Prof. Gaddis, who ironically quotes (in the same work where he introduced this celebrated phrase) – “This period… has seen… a whole series of protracted and devastating limited wars, an abundance of revolutionary, ethnic, religious, and civil violence, as well as some of the deepest and most intractable ideological rivalries in human experience… Is it not stretching things a bit… to… call it peace”.

I couldn’t have put it any better to end my argument but leave with a prayer for peace & human betterment!

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Notes

To this list, I would add the  loss of privacy & unscrupulous surveillance of  our data as a lesser but noteworthy aspect of malicious state & non-state violence.

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Image Credits

The BBC – Image from Syrian urban destruction

The Economist – Current state of democracy

Harvard University Press – Pinker’s stats on fatalities

Image of Goya’s masterpiece sourced from Wikicommons