By Charles Kurzman and Neil Englehart -- Christian Science Monitor
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. AND BOWLING GREEN, OHIO -- Aug. 30, 2006 -- World peace was not supposed to look like this. It was supposed to be more -- well, more peaceful. But a remarkable global phenomenon is being obscured by headlines about bombs and conflict in the Middle East. The ancient scourge of war has disappeared, at least in the sense of one government's army doing battle with another.
Last week marked 1,000 consecutive days with no wars between nations anywhere in the world, since the night in November 2003 when India and Pakistan instituted a cease-fire. This is the longest episode of interstate peace in more than half a century.
Other sorts of conflicts still rage around the world, but these are not wars of government against government. In this summer's bloodletting in Israel and Lebanon, for example, the Lebanese government took no military action to defend its territory, even as some of its bases came under fire. In Iraq, no government in the world has sent troops to support the insurgency. The interstate phase of the war for Iraq ended more than three years ago, when the United States and its allies removed Saddam Hussein's government. Despite the brutality in Darfur and elsewhere, even civil wars have become rarer. After rising steadily for half a century, the number of civil conflicts dropped by a third or more in the late 1990s. The world is far more peaceful than a dozen years ago, when slaughters in Rwanda and the Balkans led to gloomy predictions of rampant civil war.
Despite this outbreak of world peace, we remain fixated on international conflict. For example, the United Nations called for a traditional Olympic truce during the Winter Games in Turin, Italy, despite the fact that no countries were actually fighting one another.
It may seem hard to reconcile the concept of world peace with the bloody campaigns of jihad and the war on terror. Yet according to political scientist John Mueller, a leading scholar of the subject, the political violence that we see today is but the "remnants of war," generally involving small gangs of thugs, mercenaries, and terrorists.
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