It’s often claimed that we’re living in the most peaceful time in history. That even if news reports of violent incidents are clearly going up, it’s only because of a wider dissemination of information through smartphones and social media than any real rise in violence. While it sounds intuitive, this school of thought is actually based on just one book by a popular Harvard psychologist, Steven Pinker, published in 2011.
It’s not entirely inaccurate, though it’s still a far-reaching conclusion based on a narrow reading of the data. According to one study published in Current Anthropology, while violence-related deaths may have gone down as a part of the population, they’re still increasing at an alarming rate compared to other species in nature, or even hunter-gatherer societies in the past. The number of violence-related deaths should actually go down with a rise in the population, which doesn’t seem to be the case at all.
More importantly, a lot has happened since 2011. While we’re not sure if society has statistically grown more peaceful over the past few centuries or not, the number of wars that’re ongoing right now doesn’t seem to be getting any lower. In fact, some of them are in their most intense phases, threatening the safety and well-being of a vast part of the human population.
10. Tigray Revolt
The Ethiopian government is currently fighting a bloody civil war in its northernmost state of Tigray. As of April, 2022, the conflict that began in November, 2020 has killed over half a million people and displaced close to two million, making it one of the largest conflicts in Africa’s history.
Apart from the usual horrors of war, the region is also facing an acute famine. Human rights groups say that over 90% of the population may be in urgent need of humanitarian assistance. The fighting is far from over, however, and it only seems to be escalating at this point. It’s a multi-faceted conflict with a lot of different actors participating in various ways – especially neighboring Eritrea.
Ethiopia claims that it’s a separatist war aimed at the formation of a Tigray state, though the rebels see it as a struggle for self determination. Ethiopia considers the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) a terrorist organization and regularly carries out operations to pacify the rebellion, though that has done little to stop the violence. Human rights groups have reported gross war crimes from both sides, though most of them remain independently unverified and unknown due to the fog of war.
9. Second World War
Yes, you read that right. And no, World War II is not “little known.” But the fact that it’s still ongoing? Well, that’s a little less common knowledge.
Kuril Islands are a Russian-controlled group of islands off the northern coast of Japan, though they’re also claimed by Japan, known in the country as the Northern Territories. Occupied during the Second World War, the islands were originally inhabited by the Ainu people, though they were eventually displaced by Japanese settlers over the centuries. Red Army forces occupied it in the last stages of the war in 1945, and expelled all of its Japanese inhabitants in 1946.
Thanks to this dispute, Japan and Russia have still not signed an official peace treaty, which means that the Second World War is still ongoing. Many would see it as just a technicality, though Japan still considers the islands a part of its territories. Moreover, tensions between the two countries have been on the rise since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, and Russia has explicitly used it to deny any possibility of peace talks over the islands.
8. Colombian Civil War
The current Colombian civil war has been going on since 1964, and while a peace deal was signed in 2016, the violence still continues in many parts across the country. It’s difficult to point out exactly who is fighting whom here, as the war has so far involved a variety of different actors. That includes far-right paramilitary groups, private death squads hired by corporations, drug cartels, communist organizations like FARC and ELN, and governments of multiple nations, including the USA.
While the situation has improved in the past few years, the conflict is still quite active. Much of the violence has been directed against the native population suspected of being involved with one of the many armed groups involved in the fighting, with rampant cases of war crimes like rapes, forced dissaperances, torture, and murder reported since its beginning. Complicating the entire situation is the ongoing global war on drugs, as Colombia is the largest producer of cocaine in the world.
Until now, over 220,000 people have died in the conflict, though the actual number is suspected to be far higher.
7. Kashmir Insurgency
The insurgency in the Indian part of Kashmir began in 1989, when members of the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) kidnapped the daughter of the Home Minister of India. They demanded an exchange of a number of their own militants; a request that was eventually granted. The kidnapping was followed by a series of protests across the state, resulting in a brutal counter-insurgent crackdown by Indian security forces.
That one event is often cited as the trigger for the Kashmir insurgency in the Indian part of Kashmir – easily one of the longest running active insurgencies in the world. That was followed by different armed insurgent groups – some of them extremists – springing up across the region in the 90s; a problem made worse by the situation in Afghanistan.
While Kashmir already held a complicated geo-political status at the time – as it was controlled in part by India, Pakistan, and China since the British withdrawal in 1947 – this was the beginning of the armed, violent rebellion that has till now killed up to 70,000 people, though the real number could be way higher. While its worst phases are long over, the violence is still ongoing in the form of clashes with the local forces and counter-terrorist raids in villages across Kashmir.
6. Somali Civil War
The ongoing civil war in Somalia dates back to the fall of President Said Barre’s government in 1991, when a bloody rebellion waged by various armed groups ejected him from power. Since then, the entire country has been devastated by what is easily one of the longest ongoing wars in the world. Over 2.6 million Somalis have been displaced by the conflict that has killed anywhere between 450,000 to 1.5 million till now, due to factors like famine, open conflict, terrorist raids, disease, and piracy on its northern shores, among many others.
The rebelling groups include extremist organizations like al-Shabaab, which has often resulted in a heavy-handed response from the government’s forces, making the situation worse for civilians. Many different countries have been involved in the conflict, further complicating it, including the forces of Ethiopia, Kenya, USA, and the African Union, along with mercenaries and undocumented fighters from around the world, like Al-Qaeda. Reports of war crimes and atrocities against civilians are rampant from all sides, though international efforts to stop the war have so far proven inadequate.
5. Afghanistan – Islamic State War
The withdrawal of US and allied forces from Afghanistan has left parts of the country in a tenuous situation. As the Taliban seeks to stabilize the situation across the war-torn country – as ridiculous as that might sound – it’s threatened by an increasingly-intense civil war with extremist groups, primarily the Afghanistan branch of the Islamic State.
Known to Afghanis as Daesh, attacks by the global terrorist organization have increased in both frequency and death count since th withdrawal, particularly around Jalalabad. While Taliban and ISIS have always been at odds with each other, Taliban is now in power in Afghanistan, with control over its assets and military. The conflict is in its early phases and restricted to certain regions of the country around Jalalabad, though it could spiral out of control any time. Attacks have come in the form of armed raids on government installations, along with massive terrorist attacks that have already killed hundreds of civilians across the country.
4. Boko Haram Insurgency
Boko Haram is an extremist, Islamist group operating across central and west-central Africa. While it’s sometimes called the West African chapter of the Islamic State, the two groups are in fact different, even if ideologically allied with similar goals of establishing a global Islamic state.
Along with terrorizing the civilian population, Boko Haram is also in open, armed revolt against the Nigerian government since 2009 – a conflict that has so far killed over 35,000 people. In recent years, violence has also spread to neighboring nations like Chad, Cameroon and Niger, and may even have far-reaching consequences beyond Africa by the time its over.
The humanitarian cost has been particularly high for Nigeria. Since 2009, the group has carried out kidnappings, murders, organized pogroms, bombings of government infrastructure, and many other atrocities aimed at destabilizing the government’s control over Nigeria.
3. Libyan Civil War
The Libyan Civil War was one of the bloodiest conflicts during the wave of revolts across the Middle East and North Africa known as the Arab Spring. Beginning in 2011, it was also one of the first conflicts fought in the age of information, or more precisely, disinformation. At its peak, social media was flooded with what many now call ‘fake news’ from both sides, making it difficult to get a clearer idea on the ground, right up until Gaddafi’s grisly execution in October 2011.
Now, independent researchers and human rights organizations have a much clearer view of the situation. Far from the stability and peace that the rebellion promised – at least in theory – Libya is now controlled by a variety of factions and warlords in open conflict with each other and the state, many of them radical extremists. Apart from the ravages of war, Libya has also turned into a haven for slavers from across the region. It’s perhaps the only country with an open slave market, as reported by human rights groups and international observers.
2. Mexican Drug War
The Mexican drug war could be seen as a part of the larger War on Drugs in the region, though it has taken its own horrifying form in the past few years. Since 2006, armed factions of drug cartels have been waging a brutal war against the Mexican state. Far from being over, the conflict has often spilled over to the neighboring regions, and has so far resulted in over 300,000 homicides across Mexico.
Mexican cartels control almost the entire drug trade in the region, and many of them are in open conflict with each other, too. Civilians suspected of collaboration with rival gangs have been often subjected to inhumane methods of torture and execution. While Mexican security forces have been successful at apprehending or eliminating leaders of major gangs – including the infamous arrest of El Chapo in 2014 – that has done little to address the root causes of the conflict.
1. Houthi Rebellion
The war in Yemen started out as an armed revolt against the state by the Houthis – a large Shiite clan from the northwestern Sa’dah province – though by now, it has taken the form of a large proxy war not unlike the one in Syria. While the conflict goes back way further, the current phase began in 2014, when rebels seized control of the capital and largest city of Yemen, Sana’a, along with the presidential palace.
In March of the same year, a coalition of 10 countries – including the other gulf countries, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, and Pakistan, along with arms and logistics support from the US – conducted a massive operation to retake the city. While it did nothing to dislodge the rebels, it did result in a humanitarian catastrophe for the civilian population, something that has come to characterize this conflict to this day. What started as a localized rebellion against rising prices and corruption has since turned into a proxy war involving nations from around the world, with no seeming end in sight.
While the movement has been termed extremist by its opponents – and it is in many ways, too – it’s more modeled on the Iranian Islamic revolution than, say, Al-Qaeda’s. Speaking of which, Al-Qaeda is also involved in the fighting, along with the Islamic State, who oppose both the government and the rebels.