© Darius A. Irani, 2020
If we define a war as a conflict between two or more groups of combatants resulting in at least 30,000 casualties we will find that during the 20th Century a total of 51 wars were fought. As most of them spanned a number of years, there was not a single year in the entire century when we were not killing each other in large numbers somewhere in our world.
Admittedly, many of these conflicts are obscure. For example, how many of us know anything about the Second Italo-Ethiopian war during 1935 and 1936 (or the first one for that matter)? Yet it happened and 278,000 lives were lost.
A conservative estimate of the final tally for all of the war related deaths for the entire century is over 133 Million.
Two (almost) global attempts were made to try and resolve our conflicts in a less violent manner. The first was the League of Nations. President Wilson’s brainchild at the end of WWI. As part of Germany’s punishment, it was not included in this league which, together with the draconian provisions of the treaty of Versailles, almost guaranteed a second war. Worse still, on returning to the US after signing the treaty in 1919, isolationists in Congress bluntly told Wilson that they were not getting involved in Europe’s squabbles and refused to join the league. Consequently, the only great power with the will and the ability to stop the tyranny that would follow remained “uninvolved” until it was too late.
The second is the United Nations. Formed in October of 1945, it was hoped to be the Phoenix of peace, arising from the ashes of WWII. For a number of reasons, it has been totally ineffectual in preventing either wars or genocide in the second half of the century. From 1900 to its formation, 14 wars were fought. After that there were 37 wars (almost three times as many as before it was founded), with 21 million casualties.
During the century we had had 16 civil wars, and at the end of the Century we were dealing with 14 lingering conflicts and 11 active wars. In the face of such mutual hatred, maybe Divided Nations would be a better name for the body purporting to maintain peace in our civilization.
Notes:
1. To see the complete list of all the century’s wars click on the “Download the full PDF” icon at the very bottom.
2. No estimate for any war casualties is exact. There is always a low estimate, a high one and dozens in between. Most historians use the mean of the low and high estimates, this is as accurate as it can get.
3. The list of the wars is not my original work. A few Google searches will provide the same information to anyone interested in the topic.
4. This article does not address the casualties of Democide/Genocide. It appears that the numbers involved here are also in the tens of millions, and deserves its own separate discussion.
5. In the table below, each row represents the year a war started, its duration and its casualties. An adjacent column of the same color spans the years of its duration. It is a pictorial representation of the concurrency of the conflicts.
6. The 20th century is interesting if not unique in the number of unfinished conflicts. Starting with the Iraqi-Kurdish conflict in 1918, there were a total of 14 unresolved and ongoing wars by the end of the century. They are all lumped together into the one yellow column.
7. The appalling legacy of European colonization is clearly evident in the turmoil on the African continent in the second half of the century, especially in the Congo.
