As this graph makes clear, the predominant form of conflict today is not old-fashioned wars between states, but civil wars. As a postdoc at Penn State working on the Correlates of War Project, specifically addressing civil war, I've found that civil wars are increasingly common, increasingly deadly on a per-capita basis, much more lengthy than interstate wars (33 months on average as opposed to only 18), are increasingly internationalized through outside military intervention (at least half of civil wars since 1945 have led other countries to send troops to fight in them), are harder to resolve through negotiation (about 1/8 of the time for civil wars vs 2/3 of interstate wars), and are more likely to be followed by massacres and/or genocide. For several years in the 1990s, the ONLY wars in the world were civil wars. In short, looking at the "statistics of deadly quarrels" without including civil wars is like looking at cancer without including tumors.
Slashdot Mirror
As this graph makes clear, the predominant form of conflict today is not old-fashioned wars between states, but civil wars. As a postdoc at Penn State working on the Correlates of War Project, specifically addressing civil war, I've found that civil wars are increasingly common, increasingly deadly on a per-capita basis, much more lengthy than interstate wars (33 months on average as opposed to only 18), are increasingly internationalized through outside military intervention (at least half of civil wars since 1945 have led other countries to send troops to fight in them), are harder to resolve through negotiation (about 1/8 of the time for civil wars vs 2/3 of interstate wars), and are more likely to be followed by massacres and/or genocide. For several years in the 1990s, the ONLY wars in the world were civil wars. In short, looking at the "statistics of deadly quarrels" without including civil wars is like looking at cancer without including tumors.