Bastian Herre Profile picture
Sep 21 10 tweets 4 min read
Today is World #PeaceDay. How far have we come in our quest for a peaceful world?

Conflicts have become more common, but less deadly since World War II. But in recent years more people have died in conflicts than in prior decades.

A 🧵with some key charts: Image
The number of conflicts involving at least one government has increased.

But conflicts between states have almost disappeared.

It is conflicts between governments and parts of their population that have become more common — especially those with foreign involvement. Image
Importantly, while there are now more conflicts than in the past, many fewer people die in them.

Shortly after the World Wars, almost half a million people died in conflicts in any given year.

In recent decades, the number was almost always lower than 100,000 people per year. Image
Historically, most people died in Asia & Oceania. Recently, deaths have been concentrated in the Middle East.

Relatively fewer people have died in conflicts in the Americas and Europe. Image
The world population has grown a lot recently. Accounting for that, we see that the share of people dying in conflicts has declined even more.

We also see that in the past, many people died in conflicts between states. Now most people die in conflicts within countries. Image
Looking also at deaths from conflicts where no government is involved, we see that most people still die in state-based conflicts.

The major exception is the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Image
Finally, we see that the number of people dying in conflicts in the last decade has increased, after being much lower in the 2000s.

The fight for a more peaceful world is therefore far from over. Image
If you now would like to read more about peace and conflict, visit our topic page:

ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace

It has all the charts from above, additional visualizations, and writing on how researchers deal with the many challenges of measuring conflicts and the deaths from them.
I am grateful to the many researchers who create the conflict data we use across our work @OurWorldInData.

Special thanks to @UCDP, whose data we use for our main visualizations, and my colleague @JoeHasell for creating the charts themselves.
If you think this thread could be interesting to others: like it, retweet it, or tell them about it!

Do you have any questions or suggestions? Then please send me a message here or email me at bastian@ourworldindata.org.

I look forward to hearing from you!

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More from @bbherre

Sep 15
Today is International Democracy Day. So let’s check in on the development and state of democracy in the world.

The world has become much more democratic over the last centuries. But some of this progress has recently been reversed.

A 🧵with some key charts: Image
In the 19th century, there were few countries one could call democracies.

Today there are around 90 democracies, about half of all countries. Image
Two centuries ago, everyone lacked democratic rights.

Now, billions of people have them.

ourworldindata.org/democratic-rig… Image
Read 11 tweets
Jul 5
Would you like to learn more about democracy?

Try our new Democracy Data Explorer!

ourworldindata.org/explorers/demo…

It provides several hundred interactive visualizations from eight leading democracy datasets.

A 🧵about what it includes:
Democracy data can be difficult to access and understand.

The Democracy Data Explorer therefore provides and explains data from eight datasets: RoW, V-Dem, the Lexical Index, Boix-Miller-Rosato, Polity, Freedom House, EIU and BTI.
To help you in choosing which dataset may be best to answer your questions, I have written a brief explainer that summarizes and compares all approaches here: ourworldindata.org/democracies-me…
Read 18 tweets
Feb 3
In my new article for @OurWorldInData, I look at how old democracies are across the world.

In most countries, democracy is a recent achievement. Dictatorship is far from a distant memory:
ourworldindata.org/democracies-age
To some young (and even older) people living in democracies, authoritarianism may seem like a long-forgotten part of their country’s history.

But this impression does not match people’s experiences across the world.
To put a date on how old democracies are worldwide, I use the Regimes of the World-classification from @AnnaLuehrmann, @mtannenberg, and @StaffanILindber and data from @vdeminsitute, going as far back as 1789. I describe this data in another article: bit.ly/3DoqhyV
Read 8 tweets
Dec 22, 2021
🚨New Dataset Alert!🚨

What economic ideologies do political leaders have around the world?

A 🧵 on what we learn from the Global Leader Ideology dataset (GLI) I have built over the last four years, and why it matters.

#polisciresearch #socsciresearch
Social scientists have long studied — and often found — that leftist governments pursue different policies than rightist governments (read a recent summary here: bit.ly/3yNHzVn). But this research has mainly focused on OECD countries, neglecting other parts of the world.
This focus on OECD countries in part is because researchers often use off-the-shelf datasets which only provide data on the ideologies of leaders and parties in OECD countries. This is where my GLI dataset comes in.
Read 31 tweets

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