Was The World Much Safer With The End Of The Cold War?

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WAS THE WORLD MUCH SAFER WITH THE END OF THE COLD WAR?

Was the world much safer with the end of the Cold War?

Was the World Much Safer With The End Of The Cold War?

Introduction

The 21st century has begun much as the 20th century ended: in war and armed conflict. Conflicts of many types, old and new, are under way in war zones such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sri Lanka, Colombia, Lebanon, Chechnya, and Sudan. The threat of war remains, but the nature of warfare is changing in tandem with often unforeseen geopolitical, technological, economic, and ethnic changes. According to the studies performed since 2005 by the Human Security Centre at the University of British Columbia, violence is in decline: In the past dozen years, there has been a significant decrease in violence as measured by the number of wars, genocides, and human rights violations (Michael, 1992, pp 12-34).

Discussion and Analysis

The End of the Cold War

The 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe had been a historical event of multiple resonances. On the one hand, was the collapse of communist systems built after 1945, on the other, meant the loss of the zone of influence that the USSR had built after his victory against Nazism and many do not hesitate to call "the Soviet empire?"

The Cold War, the confrontation that had characterized international relations since the end of the Second World War will end in a way that nobody would have dared predict a few years before the collapse and disintegration of one of the contenders. The end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union are two parallel phenomena that will radically change the world.

Since the end of the Cold War, the number of armed conflicts has fallen by about 40% from about 50 in 1991 to about 30 in 2004. High-intensity conflicts (those that cause more than 1,000 battle-related deaths per year) are down 80%, also down are civil wars (80%), genocides (80%), and major and minor terrorist attacks (50%), the number of refugees (45%), coups and attempted coups (60%), and international crises (70%). More than 100 conflicts have ended, including 70% of secessionist conflicts, and the average number of battle deaths per armed conflict decreased by 98%, from 38,000 in 1950 to 600 in 2002. (Iraq since 2003 is an exception to the trend.) There were 20,000 battle deaths in all wars combined in 2003, compared with 700,000 in 1950. In the 1990s, the ratio of battle deaths to population was a third of what it had been in the 1970s. However, these positive developments were mitigated by continued strife in some regions, particularly in Africa, where war is claiming more victims than on all other continents combined. But even in Africa, there are fewer armed conflicts today (about 10 compared with 15 per year 5 years ago). The number of African countries torn by armed conflict has therefore dropped by a third. During the same period, direct battle deaths have ...
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