An award-winning expert on international affairs and military history reveals the astounding truth about war: Peacekeeping is working.
Read the newspapers, and you'll be convinced war is worse than it's ever been: more civilian deaths, more rapes, more armed conflicts all around the world. But as leading scholar and writer Joshua Goldstein shows in this vivid, dramatic book, the reality is just the opposite. The commonly quoted statistic that a century ago 90 percent of war deaths were military, but nowadays 90 percent are civilian" is based on one error in a little-read, twenty-year-old report. The truth is that the military-civilian death ratio has remained at around 50–50 for centuries. Most amazingly, we are in the midst of a general decline in armed conflict that is truly extraordinary in human history.
Winning the War on War is filled with startling observations, including:
• 2010 had one of the lowest death rates from war, relative to population, of any year,…
