Historical quantification of violence

Auchswitz

In a recent conference that I heard, the speaker said that in recent times violence in the world has decreased a lot. She added that many people have the feeling that it is the other way around, that we have now more violence than ever before. Is what she said true, or is what people think true?

Let’s start by defining violence. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines it like this: An act of physical force that causes or is intended to cause harm.

Pitirim Sorokin

If we limit ourselves to the most intense type of violence, that which causes the death of other people, there are three main types of violence: two of them are collective: on the one hand, war; on the other, revolutions and internal conflicts of a country. But there are also acts of individual violence, such as murder, terrorism, martyrdom because of religious persecution, and induced abortion.

In his work Social and Cultural Dynamics, Pitirim Sorokin analyzes quantitatively the first two types of violence over 2500 years, using several measures, among which the following figures indicate the number of deaths in war actions in the Greco-Roman and Western civilizations.

The numbers of deaths in wars are expressed in thousands. The 20th century appears as the champion, with 15 million deaths, although Sorokin did this study in 1937, and could only include the First World War, but not the Second. It doesn’t appear that we’re really getting much better.

To complete Sorokin's figures with another century, I have used data from Wikipedia to obtain the following figure, which indicates the number of deaths in wars around the world, by decades, from 1910 to 2020.

The highest value corresponds to the 1940s, the decade of the Second World War. But let's not fool ourselves: the apparently lower values of the seven successive decades are not as small as they seem. In the 1960s, the 1970s and the 1990s, there were more than seven million deaths each. More than in all of Europe in a whole century before the 20th century.

And we need to add deaths due to internal conflicts and individual violence, which in the 20th century have reached huge values. Let’s look at the most important conflicts in the next table (there are more), which also includes some of the wars considered above:

Conflict	Dates	Death toll (millions)
First World War	1914-1918	10-20
Civil war in Russia	1919-1922	10-15
Víctims of Stalin in URSS	1926-1939	15-20
Chinese civil war	1928-1936	2
Spanish civil war	1936-1939	0,5-1
Scond World War	1939-1945	60-80
Chinese civil war	1945-1949	1,2
Korean War	1950-1953	2,5-3,5
War of indep. Argelia	1954-62	1,2
War of Vietnam	1957-1975	2-6,3
Chinese Cultural Revolution	1966-1976	10
Biafran War	1967-1970	1-3
Genocide in Cambodia	1975-1979	1,5-2
Civil war in Angola	1975-2003	0,5-1,5
Civil war in Mozambique	1977-1992	1
Afghanistan Conflict	1979-2021	1,5-2,5
Iran-Irak war	1980-1988	0,5-1,5
Civil war in Sudan	1983-2005	1-2
Civil war in Rwanda	1990-1994	0,8-1
Civil war in Somalia	1991-	0,3-0,5
Civil war in Congo	1996-2003	3-6,2
War of Iraq	2003-2011	0,4-0,6
Civil war in Syria	2011-	0,6
Russian invasion of Ukraine	2022-	0,3
TOTAL	1910-2020	130-180

In the case of the Greco-Roman civilization, we need to add the 300,000 Christians martyred between the 1st and 4th centuries. And in the 20th-21st centuries, the victims of induced abortion, which between 1990 and today are estimated at about 75 million per decade. Is it true that our era is much less violent than other times? One must be blind, not to see that, on the contrary, ours is one of the most violent epochs in history, and the supposed progressive improvement of humanity, in this context, is a simple illusion.

The same post in Spanish

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Manuel Alfonseca