Arquila's Summary

War has been recurring throughout history that various countries have been trying since WWI to create organizations and coalitions to prevent the happenings of violence and bloodshed, be it with the League of Nations post-World War One, The United Nations post-World War Two among other less international organizations. The question, however, remains: are these organizations doing what they were created to accomplish or are they contributing to the world’s demise rather than the celebration and acceptance of differences among countries’ various civilizations?

According to Arquila’s article for the foreign policy, one of the simplest approaches to recognize the patterns of War’s domination over time is observing statistics that portray the patterns of armed conflict all over the world. Statistics show a clear oscillation in the occurrence of armed conflict over the years, with an evident increase prior to the main world wars and decreases post-wars. Despite the evidence, the numbers of armed conflicts are at a steady increase and are almost double what they were recorded to be in the late 1950s.

Thus, Arquila correctly concludes that describing a world where war is around the corner, as peaceful, is obviously inaccurate. Arquila also
Pinker then gives himself credibility by mentioning his focus on a single criterion when referring to stats of wars and deaths in a specific interval of time. Moreover, he points to what he calls the Long Peace and the New Peace, the former referring to the decline in the number of wars post-WWII and the latter to the decline in deaths due to war post- the Cold War. He does acknowledge, however, that the lasting of such grace periods is controversial. (Pinker