Daily Times

Just as cannibalism and chattel slavery are mostly extinct in the modern world, it is possible that other forms of violence, such as terrorism, wars between countries, could one day disappear soon. Violence reduction might be like other types of technological progress that is, not linear and not exorable, but highly likely over the long run. Last year may be remembered for barrel bombs, beheadings and the Bataclan theatre massacre, but analysts believe that long term downward trend in violence is continuing. In the past five years alone, conflicts have ended in Chad, Peru, Iran, India, Sri Lanka and Angola, and if Syria peace talks are a success, war may well vanish from the hemisphere.

Anyone who has followed the news knows that this does not appear to be a particularly peaceful time. The reports have been relentless: Ukraine crisis, ISIS, terrorist attacks in Europe and South East Asia, war in Syria, deaths in Aleppo, and riots and police violence in the United States. Whether we believe the world is more peaceful depends on our frame of reference and statistical choices. Last year 180,000 people were killed in internal conflicts, a number 3.5 times higher than it was in 2010. Deaths from terrorism have risen fivefold over the past 15 years, killing more than 36,000 people in 2015. UNHCR estimates that almost 60 million people are now either refugees or internally displaced because of conflict and violence. This is the highest it has been since the Second World War and equates to almost one per cent of the world’s current population.

Pinker, whose 2011 book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature” documented how war, homicide, and other forms of violence have fallen over the course of human history, said that despite appearances, that downward trajectory has not let up. Data from the past five years show that the decline of violence has been reversed in only one area. The number of civil wars, after peaking at 26 in the 1990s, fell to four in the first decade of this century, but ticked up to 11 in 2014. Among those conflicts, all but one involving radical Islam or Russia, have wiped out 14 years of progress in the decline of civil wars.

Historically, previous wars spanned the globe, and there were 30 wars between 1945 and 1990 that killed 100,000 people or more, including wars in Greece, China, Mozambique, Algeria, Tibet, Guatemala, Uganda, and East Timor. With the exception of the ongoing Syrian civil war and the war in Afghanistan, the zone of war has contracted to a crescent from central Africa through the Middle East into South Asia and almost every other kind of violence, including murders, capital punishment, domestic violence, torture and hunting, has fallen sharply. It is argued that while the daily news conveys a world beset by horrific acts of terrorism, brutal civil war, and frequent mass shootings, global violence is actually in decline. On a global basis the past decade has seen a consistent reduction in violent crimes.

At least in the UK, reported levels of violent crime, surveys of violence and presentations to health services for assault have shown largely consistent downward trends. Overall expansion of democracy, continuing reductions in homicides, wider abolition of the death penalty, and decline in violence against women and children have been reported. Globally, however, while violence rates have fallen in high-income countries, the same reductions have not been seen in low-income and middle-income countries where the vast majority of global violence occurs.

Moreover, although the reports and trends in violence are available for many countries, the underlying rates of non-fatal violence are poorly recorded; especially for types of interpersonal violence such as child abuse and neglect, elder maltreatment and gender based violence. For instance new global estimates suggest that around one billion children (aged 2-17 years) have been physically abused in the last 12 months; the vast majority of whom are never formally reported.

Certain categories of violence could continue to see statistical increase in low income countries, including homicide, domestic violence, and rape. But others, notably high-publicity violence such as terrorism and rampage shootings, may hold on to current levels both in high and low income countries far into the future.

What might be the driving differences between high-income and lower middle-income countries, and what international activities are being developed to tackle a global epidemic of violence still remains largely hidden from view. Such trends show that the distribution of peace across the globe is mirroring wealth. Peaceful countries are becoming more peaceful while the most violent are becoming more violent. Considering that more than two billion people live in the 20 least peaceful countries in the world, the net effect of this widening peace gap is disproportionately skewed to the negative.

A worry for the present and the future is the global trends in violence and threats to state security, separately or interacting, that could end the exceptional period of peace to which we have grown accustomed. If we think that peace is automatic, we are likely to be complacent about the factors that bring it about.

Isolated from their respective historical contexts, the uses of violence on a political stage can do none other than confuse and appal. The maiming, the murders, the destruction of property on a massive scale, these in of themselves do not allow even the thoughtful room for debate. The avatars of threatened ideology can bend over backwards to reduce them or to define them for posterity but it would take just so much more than counter violence to finish the naked evil.

Those who suffer daily the violence inflicted on them by a western power abroad have little use for the ballot box. Likewise those at home without the resources to support their rights are likely to be invoking the concept of revenge in doing so. Even the informal variety of petitions and the more radical kind of rallies that eschew the gathering for a show of bodies in the streets in an impressive and tangible display are rituals often more cathartic than effectual.

Recognition of this inertia, embedded in culture and the structures of institutions leads very easily to the conclusion that any alteration of society in favour of the oppressed must be done manually. Anything less than the material disruption of those mechanisms by which a society maintains and reproduces itself will leave it in the same shape, with it’s oppressed none the better. The question then becomes one of tactics, of what to do, how to do it, and when. Whether this includes or even necessitates the use of violence will be a moral decision for some and a tactical one for others.

The writer is a professor of Psychiatry and consultant Forensic Psychiatrist in the UK. He can be contacted at fawad_shifa@yahoo.com