Trends in International Warfare

Project lead: Bear Braumoeller

The idea that war has been going out of style has become conventional wisdom in recent years, but there are good reasons to question it. This project explores trends in conflict initiation, the lethality of war, and the potency of the causes of war, and it finds few reasons for optimism. In particular, it concludes that extremely lethal wars are no less likely today than they were in the 1930s. It does find, however, that rates of conflict initiation are strongly influenced by patterns of international order—an observation that gave rise to the rest of the lab's projects, which in one way or another explore the relationship between order and international conflict.

Publications:

Braumoeller, Bear F. 2019. Only the Dead: The Persistence of War in the Modern Age. New York: Oxford University Press.

Replication archive: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/Q90FOB

Braumoeller, Bear F. 2019. “Systemic Trends in War and Peace.” In The Causes of Peace: What We Now Know---Nobel Symposium 161, eds. Asle Toje and Bård Nikolas Vik Steen. Oslo, Norway: The Norwegian Nobel Institute.

Braumoeller, Bear F. 2020. "World War II was 75 years ago. But big wars can still happen." Washington Post.

Braumoeller, Bear F. 2021. “Trends in Interstate Conflict.” In What Do We Know About War?, eds. Sara McLaughlin Mitchell and John A. Vasquez. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 272–90.

Lopate, Michael Z., and Bear F. Braumoeller. 2022. "Western Leaders Ought to Take the War On Ukraine Seriously." War on the Rocks.