Decline in wars more due to inability of nations than willingness to wage: Study

A recent study has revealed that conflict between nations have declined over the past few years, but it is happening more because of their inability to fight rather than their unwillingness to do so.

Bear Braumoeller, author of the study and associate professor of political science at The Ohio State University, said that the ability of the nations to fight have diminished due to fragmentation of the empires into smaller, and farther apart countries.

Once you control their ability to fight each other, the tendency to go to war hasn't really changed over the last two centuries.

Steven Pinker in his 2011 book "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined" had claimed that war was declining

However, Braumoeller claims that Pinker's way of measurement pointing to a decline in war deaths per capita was flawed.

He said that Pinker's method accurately reflects the average citizen's risk from death in war, but countries' calculations in war were more complicated than that.

Moreover, since population grows exponentially, it would be hard for war deaths to keep up with the booming number of people in the world.

The study suggests a better measure of calculating the prospects of war by checking out the frequency of use of force, such as missile strikes or armed border skirmishes, against other countries, because any one of these uses of force could conceivably start a war

Hence, their frequency was a good indication of how war prone one country was at any particular time.

Meanwhile, just looking at the number of conflicts per pair of countries was misleading because countries won't go to war if they aren't "politically relevant" to each other.

Military power and geography plays a big role in relevance, the study showed.

It was unlikely that a small, weak country in South America would start a war with a small, weak country in Africa, it added.