ABSTRACT
The key premise of this book is that our perception of the state of conflict in the world is distorted, such that while we are overly focused on certain conflicts (which are very often comparatively minor in scale), the majority of major conflicts are almost entirely hidden from our view. Before we can even begin to arrive at such a conclusion, however, we need an objective starting point, some kind of a yardstick, against which we can compare our perceptions, and thereby observe how far removed our image of the state of world conflict is from the reality. With a view to doing so, this chapter first discusses the issues surrounding the objective measurement of conflict scale. Using the death toll as the key indicator, it goes on to compare the scale of the world’s conflicts that have occurred since the end of the Cold War, providing summaries of these conflicts in order of scale. Finally, it looks at some general trends in the scale and nature of conflict: where in the world conflict is concentrated, and the characteristics that conflicts appear to have in common.
