This week, the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London published the latest edition of its authoritative annual Armed Conflict Survey, and it’s not predicting much peace for the holidays. It paints a grim picture of rising violence in in many regions, of wars chronically resistant to broking of peace. The survey — which addresses regional conflicts rather than the superpower confrontation between China, Russia, the US and its allies — documents 183 conflicts for 2023, the highest number in three decades.
It highlights “intractability as the defining feature of the contemporary global conflict landscape.” Nonstate armed groups, of which Hamas in Gaza is only the most immediately conspicuous, play a baleful role. In many places these forces are supported by disruptive major powers, notably Russia and Iran.
Although the world is not immediately threatened by a great war, such as those of 1914-18 and 1939-45, tensions are rising, especially between the US and China. I would identify an issue that seems to me, as a historian, especially important and dangerous. One of the primary reasons Europe went to war in 1914 is that none of the big players were as frightened as they should have been, of conflict as a supreme human catastrophe. After a century in which the continent had experienced only limited wars, from which Prussia had been an especially conspicuous profiteer, too many statesmen viewed war as a usable instrument of policy, which proved a catastrophic misjudgment.
An authoritative new study from the International Institute for Strategic Studies finds there are 183 regional and local conflicts underway in 2023, the highest number in three decades, Sir Max Hastings writes https://t.co/CeckeihcVY via @opinion
— Bloomberg (@business) December 10, 2023