1. This one is very in the weeds, but I was very confused about some conflicting results Pinker and Braumoeller get in testing for the hypothesis of a break in war incidence after 1945. Pinker (2011: 252) writes: “Taking the frequency of wars between great powers from 1495 to 1945 as a baseline, the chance that there would be a sixty-five year stretch with only a single great power war (the marginal case of the Korean War) is one in a thousand. Even if we take 1815 as our starting point, which biases the test against us by letting the peaceful post-Napoleonic 19th century dominate the base rate, we find that the probability that the postwar era would have at most four wars involving a great power is less than 0.004, and the probability that it would have at most one war between European states (the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956) is 0.0008.” Braumoeller (2019: 27-8) gets different results by modelling the onset of great power war in a given year as a binomial distribution with p = 0.02, based on the rate of great power war in the last five centuries: “the probability of observing seven continuous decades of peace …. is 24.3%.” (28) He also writes: “it would still take about 150 years of uninterrupted peace for us to reject conclusively the claim that the underlying probability of systemic war remains unchanged.” (28) Both Pinker and Braumoeller are relying primarily on Levy ([War in the Modern Great Power System] 1983) to estimate the rate of great power war, so I don’t understand why they get such radically different results. What’s going on?
2. Battlefield deaths generally do not count civilians killed directly or indirectly as a result of military conflict. Apparently, it is extremely difficult to reliably measure total excess mortality due to war, and as a result battlefield deaths are used as the standard measure (Pinker 2011: 299-300; Braumoeller 2019: 101). At the same time, authors like Kaldor ([New and Old Wars] 1999) argue that civilian deaths have increased significantly as a share of all war deaths, with civilians now typically the majority of those killed as a result of war, and Roberts [‘Lives and statistics’] records estimates that roughly 40% of casualties in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1991-5 were civilians, and between 75-83% in the Second Gulf War. Given that we do not have reliable data for so important a part of the overall picture, are contemporary debates on trends in the severity/intensity/prevalence of battle deaths of the kind between Pinker and Braumoeller actually telling us very much at all about whether wars are getting better or worse as a ‘public health problem’?
3. Braumoeller (2019: 179) asserts that “[t]he four decades following the Napoleonic Wars were, by a significant margin, the most peaceful period on record in Europe.” I didn’t feel he said very much to explain the grounds of this assertion in the book. On what basis can it be said that the period between the Congress of Vienna and the outbreak of the Crimean War was significantly more peaceful than that between the end of World War II and Perestroika? I don’t know the former period well, but just looking at the list of conflicts in Europe during these periods from Wikipedia, this didn’t seem to me especially plausible. (Possibly I’m just misunderstanding what he’s saying, and the claim is that the decades after the Napoleonic Wars were a lot more peacefully than any before then.)
1. This one is very in the weeds, but I was very confused about some conflicting results Pinker and Braumoeller get in testing for the hypothesis of a break in war incidence after 1945. Pinker (2011: 252) writes: “Taking the frequency of wars between great powers from 1495 to 1945 as a baseline, the chance that there would be a sixty-five year stretch with only a single great power war (the marginal case of the Korean War) is one in a thousand. Even if we take 1815 as our starting point, which biases the test against us by letting the peaceful post-Napoleonic 19th century dominate the base rate, we find that the probability that the postwar era would have at most four wars involving a great power is less than 0.004, and the probability that it would have at most one war between European states (the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956) is 0.0008.” Braumoeller (2019: 27-8) gets different results by modelling the onset of great power war in a given year as a binomial distribution with p = 0.02, based on the rate of great power war in the last five centuries: “the probability of observing seven continuous decades of peace …. is 24.3%.” (28) He also writes: “it would still take about 150 years of uninterrupted peace for us to reject conclusively the claim that the underlying probability of systemic war remains unchanged.” (28) Both Pinker and Braumoeller are relying primarily on Levy ([War in the Modern Great Power System] 1983) to estimate the rate of great power war, so I don’t understand why they get such radically different results. What’s going on?
2. Battlefield deaths generally do not count civilians killed directly or indirectly as a result of military conflict. Apparently, it is extremely difficult to reliably measure total excess mortality due to war, and as a result battlefield deaths are used as the standard measure (Pinker 2011: 299-300; Braumoeller 2019: 101). At the same time, authors like Kaldor ([New and Old Wars] 1999) argue that civilian deaths have increased significantly as a share of all war deaths, with civilians now typically the majority of those killed as a result of war, and Roberts [‘Lives and statistics’] records estimates that roughly 40% of casualties in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1991-5 were civilians, and between 75-83% in the Second Gulf War. Given that we do not have reliable data for so important a part of the overall picture, are contemporary debates on trends in the severity/intensity/prevalence of battle deaths of the kind between Pinker and Braumoeller actually telling us very much at all about whether wars are getting better or worse as a ‘public health problem’?
3. Braumoeller (2019: 179) asserts that “[t]he four decades following the Napoleonic Wars were, by a significant margin, the most peaceful period on record in Europe.” I didn’t feel he said very much to explain the grounds of this assertion in the book. On what basis can it be said that the period between the Congress of Vienna and the outbreak of the Crimean War was significantly more peaceful than that between the end of World War II and Perestroika? I don’t know the former period well, but just looking at the list of conflicts in Europe during these periods from Wikipedia, this didn’t seem to me especially plausible. (Possibly I’m just misunderstanding what he’s saying, and the claim is that the decades after the Napoleonic Wars were a lot more peacefully than any before then.)