Statistics on War & Conflict

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Content:

1. Arms trade
2. Military spending
3. Wars
4. Child soldiers

1. Arms trade

The estimated financial value of the international arms trade varies between $25 and 35 billion, which represents about 0.5 % of world trade. After a downward trend following the end of the Cold War, trade has increased during the last decade:

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The U.S. is the top supplier of weapons to other countries, accounting for around 35% of worldwide weapons sales, followed by Russia, the U.K., Germany, France and China. The main buyers of arms are China, India, and the United Arab Emirates.

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This covers only international transfers. We should also include domestic sales of arms. Many industrialized countries have a domestic arms industry to supply their own military forces, and a domestic trade in weapons for use by their citizens. Dwight D. Eisenhower coined the phrase “military-industrial complex”, where the armed forces, industry and politics become closely linked and encourage each other’s hunger for arms.

We see a similar increase in data on arms production. According to SIPRI,

arms sales by the 100 largest arms-producing companies in the world (excluding China) – the SIPRI Top 100 – amounted to $315 billion in 2006, an increase of 9 per cent in nominal terms and 5 per cent in real terms.

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Arms exports are often used, not only for the benefit of the national economy, but also to influence other countries.

Over 600 million items of small arms are in circulation. According to Oxfam, around 500.000 individuals die in small arms-conflicts every year, approximately one death per minute.

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2. Military spending

According to SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the governments of the world spent $1.4 billion on arms and the military in 2007, an increase of almost 50% compared to a decade ago. This is 2.5% of world gross domestic product (GDP) and $202 for each person in the world. (Compare: only 0.3% of world GDP is spent on development aid).

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The champion of military spending is the U.S., which accounted for 45 % world total in 2007, followed by the U.K., China, France and Japan, with 4–5 % each. The U.S., however, did not substantially increase its spending over the last decades (the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have led to an increase but not a lot beyond historic levels). In fact, measured as a share of its GDP, its spending decreased somwhat (it’s now about 5% of its GDP, still double of world average):

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Western Europe has seen the lowest increase in spending, but the levels of spending vary a lot between countries:

China is a particular worry given its substantial increases in spending and the lack of transparency in its budgets:

This is a ranking of the biggest spenders:

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The U.S., Russia, China, the U.K., France, India, Pakistan, North-Korea and Israel together have more than 25.000 nuclear arms.

From the Telegraph newspaper, the map of the world modified according to the number of nuclear arms per country:

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3. Wars

Since the beginning of recorded history, around 3600 BC, over 14.500 major wars have killed close to four billion people, a number that not so long ago equaled the whole of humanity. Since the Second World War, there have been on average about 30 armed conflicts ongoing every year. 90 per cent of casualties in these conflicts have been civilians, compared to 50 per cent in the Second World War and 10 per cent in the First.

However, recently there has been a drop in the number of wars and in their intensity in terms of their deadliness. This graph gives the number of armed conflicts since the Second World War, including inter-state wars, intra-state wars (civil wars) and colonial wars:

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The exception is, as often, Sub-Saharan Africa, where the trend continues upward.

The following graph splits this out into the three categories of war mentioned before. As one can see, civil wars are by far the most common kind:

(The conflicts shown in these figures resulted in at least 25 battle-related deaths a year. In all cases one of the warring parties was a state. The graph does not include ethnic or other conflicts where neither warring party was a state, nor does it include cases of “one-sided” violence such as genocide.

The second figure is a “stacked graph”, meaning that the number of conflicts in each category is indicated by the depth of the band of color. The top line indicates the total of number of conflicts of all types in each year, corresponding to the first figure).

Also the intensity of wars, measured in terms of their deadliness, has declined, even before the number of conflicts started to fall:

The regional distribution of battle deaths shows a clear concentration in East and South-East Asia, which was the bloodiest region. Recently, however, battle-deaths occur mainly in Africa:

Also when the number of battle-deaths is related to the total of the world’s population do we see a clear improvement over the last decades:

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4. Child soldiers

The numbers of child soldiers are constantly fluctuating given the evolution of different armed conflicts. So it’s difficult to estimate, a difficulty compounded by the secrecy of the often shady recruiters and the wartime conditions. Human Rights Watch estimates that 200,000 to 300,000 children are currently serving as soldiers for both rebel groups and government forces in armed conflicts. This graph shows the countries where there were child soldiers active in armed conflict in 1998:

And this graph is a bit more specific on the African situation since Africa has without any doubt the largest number of child soldiers (Myanmar in Asia also does it’s “best”):

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