Armies and Governments Are No Longer Our Biggest Threats to Peace
>The argument that we are now a less violent world is compelling, but it raises more questions than it provides answers. In Australia, while murder rates have been steady for decades, assaults are on the rise – from 623 per 100,000 in 1996 to 840 per 100,000 in 2007. More young women are appearing before the courts than ever before for violent offences, and domestic violence has seen a resurgence despite the media awareness surrounding the issue.
>In NSW, the problem of street violence has been brought to the fore recently by a number of high profile cases in the media. Young men who have either been killed (in the case of Thomas Kelly, who was fatally punched in Sydney’s Kings Cross in July 2012) or put into comas after being “king hit”, illustrate the extent to which street violence is prevalent in some areas in Australia’s major urban centres.
>The statistics tell us about the immediate causes of the violence, but very little about the mindset of the young perpetrators, usually men, and why they ultimately become violent.
>There is a complex relation between violence and public drinking, which is embedded in Australia’s history and culture. Regular violence in public drinking locations cannot simply be blamed on rowdy patrons or excused as something natural and unstoppable, and nor can it simply be blamed on irresponsible drinking. The drinking environment is an evolving historical and cultural product, which can be left unchanged, or altered for the better through education and legislation.
>The outcry against these indiscriminate acts of violence demonstrates that the wider public finds them unacceptable. Attitudes towards violence are constantly changing, but not always in a positive direction. In the cultural domain, for example, schlock horror movies are more explicit than ever before and leave films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction - both of which caused a stir in their day - looking very mild in comparison.
>Conversely, what one generation may have accepted as perfectly banal (corporal punishment against children in the 1950s, for instance) may shock another, later generation.
https://archive.is/uKNd6
> Four key components of peace got worse in the 2014 Index, which gives us a picture of world peacefulness in the year prior. Domestic terrorism has increased significantly in many parts of the world since the start of the Iraq War. In the past year, the number of people killed by conflict inside their own country, including civilians, has also risen. More people were displaced within their countries or fled as refugees this past year than the year before. And in the 2014 Index, the score for ongoing wars has gotten worse—but that includes internal and external conflicts and so the data behind this indicator is likely to be consistent with the shift away from international conflicts.
>Looking at more than just the last year, the same trend holds true. The GPI report includes a section on trends in peacefulness from 2008 to 2014, which demonstrates that what the IEP calls “internal peacefulness” is getting worse. The largest changes have been observed in weapons imports and weapons exports—both measures of “external peace.” But factors like each country’s number of heavy and nuclear weapons and of armed service personnel have improved, showing that external peace as a whole is getting better. Levels of internal conflict have varied, but it is really safety and security, more so than war, that’s driving the decline in world peace. Terrorist activity has gotten worse. Homicide rates improved in 2014, but because of data collection challenges the IEP reports that the long-term trend of increasing homicides and violent crime is more reliable than any single year figure. And perceptions of criminality, the likelihood of violent demonstrations, incarceration, and access to small arms have worsened as well.
>In short, the nature of peace is changing. Breakdowns in peacefulness are becoming more decentralized, and peacefulness relies more heavily on social structures and non-state actors as opposed to exclusively governments and formal militaries. Peace is becoming more democratic, if you will.
>Given the severity of organized, inter-state conflict in the 20th century, the trend of declining militarization and international war implies that we have made progress in solving 20th-century problems.
But is even that true?
There is a bias that ignores all the wars in the ""third world"" and all the ethnic conflicts from immigration.
https://archive.is/SIe0X