I’m afraid I’m going to have to disagree. There are several problems with the statement that “war is declining.”

Deaths from war are declining in the official statistics. But the definition of war does not include the following (overlapping) categories:

— Undeclared wars (Assamese independence movement guerillas in India)

— “War on Drugs” and other “internal” wars (the crackdown in Turkey, the American “War on Drugs,” the cartel wars in Mexico and Brazil)

— Drone warfare

— Acts of terrorism (one could argue that drone warfare is an act of terrorism)

— Border skirmishes (Kashmir)

— Occupations (the West Bank by Israel)

— Civil wars between corporate interests (the cartels and civilians, paid goons who murder and torch houses on Sioux reservations because they’re sitting on top of oil or uranium)

— Atrocities committed by governments against their people (this would include police shootings, mass detention, ethnic cleansing)

It also doesn’t take into account that medicine has improved (so wounds are more “survivable”) but social services have not. Soldiers and civilians are surviving their wounds but are facing long recuperation and therapy periods, and horrible employment situations when being discharged. This affects their families, and the entire community around them.

It doesn’t take into account the use of “non-fatal” means to perpetrate war — rape, destruction of property, amputation of limbs, slavery, destruction of civil institutions. The civil war in Sierra Leone (1990s-early 2000s) resulted in a large number of people getting non-fatal amputations, something they will have to live with their entire lives. Darfur militias specialized in raping civilians as a means of getting families to move. Decapitate one family in a village and you can get the entire village to leave. Yazidi women in ISIS-held territory are being sold as sex slaves. These have always been a part of warfare, and are sometimes cheaper than rounds of bullets.

The “war is bad for trade” argument is not really accurate. War affects trade, but not always in a negative way —corporations profit from war directly (through sales of munitions, insurance, manufacturing, aid, slave labor-based exports) and indirectly (high oil prices are great news if you’re on the board of Exxon). Some wars (the aforementioned war in Sierra Leone, the 27+ year war in Angola, the Mexican cartel border war) are directly the result of corporate profiteering (for diamonds, oil, and cocaine, respectively). Linking democracy and “free trade” is the classic neoliberal trick, and it’s resulted in more smaller-scale wars.

We also have to look at the long-term results of war —the sex slave trade and indenture of civilians by governments, the refugees who are living on bread and water, the environmental effects, the mass incarceration that resulted from the “War on Drugs” that denies voting rights to many black and brown Americans and turns them into modern-day slaves (prison labor is grossly underpaid or unpaid), the economic and social destruction of entire villages, cities, countries, cultures, etc.

For example, we are still cleaning up the mess of a century of “modern” warfare — mines and other unexploded munitions from “old” wars are still killing and maiming people across the globe. Toxic waste from biological and nuclear weapons research has to be stored for decades if not centuries. Refugees often become ghettoized for generations in their new countries.

Can we really say that war is “declining” in any meaningful way?