To answer the question of how many people die in conflicts today, and how this has changed over time, we can turn to a number of different datasets. Comparing the charts for this later period, we see that the regional breakdowns are very similar across the two approaches used to attribute conflicts to regions.

This ‘geo-referenced’ data is available only in the UCDP data from 1989. In a second chart here, we show a similar breakdown but where the region is defined exclusively in terms of where the fighting actually took place. But in some cases it refers to the region where the armed forces fighting in the conflict have come from. In most instances, the region attributed to the conflict will be the same region as where the fighting took place. Within the sources on which this chart draws, the region of the conflict has been coded in quite a particular way, relating to the source’s methodology for identifying and distinguishing conflicts. The 2010s were also a period of high battle-deaths, driven by the conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. We see three marked peaks in war deaths since the end of World War II: the Korean War (early 1950s), the Vietnam War (around 1970), and the Iran-Iraq and Afghanistan wars (1980s).

The decline of the absolute number of battle deaths can be seen in the first visualization here that shows global battle deaths per year by world region, which pulls together data from two sources: more recent data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) and older data from the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). In recent years, the annual death toll tends to be less than 100,000. In some years in the early post-war era, around half a million people died through direct violence in wars. The absolute number of war deaths has been declining since 1946.

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