The world is becoming more violent, and our capacity to contain that violence is diminishing.
There are currently about 60 wars going on in the world that involve at least one government. This is the highest number since serious record-keeping began in the 1980s. The number of people killed in war is also increasing. There were about 130,000 battle deaths last year, and this year’s total is likely to be higher.
While there’s a lot of concern about individual wars, such as Ukraine or Gaza, and some terrible wars – such as Myanmar or Sudan – get far less attention, the rise of war itself seems to be flying completely under the radar.
Why war in general gets so little attention is not well understood. It may be because there are now so many wars that war itself has become normalised, or it may be that war is no longer the only existential threat to life on Earth.
Either way, it’s a problem because, beyond the specific rights and wrongs of any particular war, war is a system. War is contagious and it is hard to defuse once it sets in. How likely a country is to be touched by war is strongly correlated to how close it is to other wars and to whether there has been a war there before. The spread of war is rarely linear: Tensions within a system grow, and then it tips into catastrophe – gradually, then suddenly.
Making things still more dangerous, the boundaries between war and no-war have become less and less clear. A whole range of “non-kinetic hostile actions” has emerged, including aggressive encounters at sea, the cutting of undersea cables, the use of drones to disrupt civil aviation, cyberattacks against critical civilian infrastructure, social media “influence operations” designed to undermine the trust and cohesion that open societies require, and more.
What’s going on?
Essentially, the system put in place by the victors of World War II is crumbling. That system was embodied in the UN Charter, which laid down a set of rules designed “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”.
The main rule was that you weren’t allowed to invade other countries any more, except with the permission of the UN Security Council. You were allowed to defend yourself, and collective defence was expressly permitted, but states had to “refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state”.
Another key rule was that “non-self-governing territories” – a euphemism for colonies, in which most of the world’s people lived – should be able to “develop self-government” and “free political institutions”.
It was a remarkably successful system. Interstate warfare almost disappeared from the international system, warfare fell over the coming decades to its lowest level ever, and, although huge inequities persisted, billions of people went from being the subjects of colonial empires to being citizens of independent countries.
The system never functioned as well as it could have because the five veto-wielding powers that had won the war – China, France, the UK, the US, and the USSR – quickly fell out among themselves, and were therefore unable to police their own rules. But, despite that, it still worked much more than it didn’t.
And now the system has broken down. The bedrock prohibition on the invasion of foreign states wobbled seriously at the turn of the millennium: NATO invaded Serbia to detach Kosovo in 1999, and the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. And then it collapsed entirely in 2022 with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Since then, the US has made threats against Canada, Greenland, and Panama. Israel attacked Iran hoping for regime change and may annex the West Bank.
It is very unlikely that the post-World War II “rules-based order” will be restored. Historically, when interstate security arrangements collapse, nothing new can be put in their place until there’s a new crisis in the system, until a new set of winners resets the rules.
So what do we do?
There are a number of emerging alternatives to the system that has kept the world reasonably peaceful for 80 years.
A range of smaller-but-wealthy countries that benefit from international order are stepping up their efforts to fill the gap. In addition to Switzerland and Norway, Qatar has planted its standard as a mediator.
China has launched a new mediation platform called IOMed under an international agreement with a range of states (mainly from the Global South) and based in Hong Kong.
The best we can hope for, and which we need to work towards, is a hybrid system.
Some new approaches are also being tried. Ad hoc “mini-lateral” deals are being made among interested groups of states that have found it difficult to work in more formal arrangements.
And unusual combinations of actors are working together. The Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (HD), the organisation I lead, launched the Black Sea grain initiative in 2022 that eventually involved not just Russia and Ukraine, but also Türkiye and the UN, as well as the African Union, China, and even a range of private insurance actors.
But none of these efforts – at least by themselves – are going to replace the system put in place by the UN Charter in 1945. The best we can hope for, and which we need to work towards, is a hybrid system.
First, the UN – even its degraded form – is irreplaceable, and should be reinforced. Its critics are right that the UN has taken on many things that could have been done better by others, and that it needs reform. But for some things, such as collective action against common existential threats, including war, the UN remains indispensable.
Second, the emerging mediators should be embraced. Until recently, it seemed that it would be regional organisations – such as the EU and the African Union – that would take on the mantle of mediation in armed conflict. But it is individual states that have been most nimble and have the main roles here, and they should be encouraged. Israel’s bombing of the Hamas negotiators in the mediators’ capital city was an attack on mediation itself, and must be condemned.
Third, the non-state actors should be supported. Citizens’ groups have played important roles in ending conflict in West Africa. The Catholic church and other faith-based groups have done valuable work in ending conflicts in Central America and elsewhere. The private sector, like it or not, is now a key player in war and peace, as we have seen with StarLink in Ukraine.
It will be messy. But there is no alternative: There is no going back to the world of 1945, and there will be no new system without a disruptive event that the world might not survive. We have to make the mess work.
