Welcome to World Peace

Why study terrorism? To many the answer might seem all too obvious, but in fact terrorist attacks are relatively rare events that kill relatively few people – far fewer than civil wars, homicides or traffic accidents. The social disruptions generated by terrorist attacks are largely due to the disproportionate attention we devote to them. Indeed, a truly dispassionate cost-benefit calculation might conclude that in a world of big problems and limited resources to address them, the best response to terrorism could be to ignore it.

So why devote a special section of Social Forces to the issue? We propose three related reasons to take the study of terrorism seriously. One is that the form of organized, politically motivated violence that has long interested activists and scholars the most – inter-state war – is in decline. Students of political violence are thus shifting their attention to non-state actors, who assume a new importance in an era of relative peace and stability. Second, non-state actors have returned over the past quarter century to terrorist methods, using seemingly random violence and the pulpit afforded by global media coverage to press their political agendas. Third, terrorism has become such a potent political issue in many countries that the academic study of terrorism has important ramifications for electoral competition and public policy.

World Peace and Non-State Violence

Hard as it may be to believe, given constant headlines about conflict in Iraq and elsewhere, we live in a time of world peace. The ancient scourge of war has disappeared, at least in the sense of governments fighting one another with armies. As of this writing in early 2006, there are no wars between states, and there have been none since 2003, when the United States and its allies removed Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq, and India and Pakistan instituted a ceasefire.

The present interlude of world peace is the culmination of a steady decline in interstate war in the aftermath of the Cold War. Since World War II, the number of interstate wars with 20 or more deaths per year rose to nine in 1987, then dropped to one in 2002, two in 2003, and zero in 2004, according to the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO) (see Figure 1).¹ This trend has not gone unnoticed among scholars of international relations, who have engaged in a lively debate about the decline of war and its causes. It is noteworthy that their analyses often involve factors that are unlikely to be reversed in the near future: increased world trade, the spread of democracy, growing international norms against war, a set of international institutions that mediate disputes and discourage conflict, and the emergence of a single hegemonic military power (Keohane and Nye 1977; Doyle 1983; Mueller 1989; Jervis 1991; Ruggie 1998). If any of these explanations are correct, we may not see a sudden increase in the incidence of interstate war anytime soon.

Equally dramatic is the decline in the number of civil wars, which rose steadily throughout the Cold War, peaked in 1991 at 51, and then dropped to 30 in the last year of the data, 2002, according to PRIO data (Figure 1). Analogous trends are visible in other counts (Fearon and Laitin 2003; Marshall and Gurr 2005). This trend has not been well explained, or even widely noted. An uptick in civil wars after the end of the Cold War led many analysts to conclude that

Figure 1.

Wars, 1946-2002

we were entering an era of increased intra-state violence (Holsti 1996; Kaplan 2000). Yet this gloomy prediction appears to have been premature: unlike interstate war, civil wars have not disappeared entirely, but they are in decline.

The reduction of war has been particularly pronounced in the "Western world," where military-related fatalities are far fewer in number than other causes of death (Mueller 2004b). According to mortality statistics from the World Health Organization, war operations in the 78 countries for which complete data is available resulted in only 206 deaths per year on average during the period...