Andrew Mack Quotations

Until the 1990s, the international community did little to stop wars. Now it does lots.

We no longer have huge wars with huge armies, major engagements, heavy conventional weapons.

People say to us, look, it may well be the case that there are fewer wars and fewer genocides, but surely more people are being killed. But when we look at this, the number of people killed in wars involving a state every year, all the wars, and you can see there's a high point, that's the Korean war, and it keeps on going down and down and down. If you look at the average number of people killed per conflict per year, it goes from 37-thousand in 1950 to just 600 in 2002.

For many people in the U.N., the 1990s was the worst decade the organization experienced. This was the decade of Somalia, Srebrenica, of Rwanda and so forth, and yet the reality is, during this period, although there were these awful conflicts, the overall number of wars had gone down.

Warfare in the 21st century is far less deadly than it was half a century ago. The wars that dominated the headlines of the 1990s were real -- and brutal -- enough. But the global media have largely ignored the 100-odd conflicts that have quietly ended since 1988. During this period, more wars stopped than started.

As is often the case with criminal violence, there is a huge disjuncture between what people believe is the case and what is actually the case,

For many people in the U.N., the 1990s was the worst decade the organization experienced. This was the decade of Somalia, Srebrenica, of Rwanda and so forth, and yet the reality is, during this period, although there were these awful conflicts, the overall number of wars had gone down.

By 2002, it was 600 ? an extraordinary change.

But you see a major increase in the deadliness of the attacks and a major increase in attacks that kill large numbers of people.