ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how statistics of battle deaths prove that East Asia has become more peaceful than before, and more peaceful that most other regions in the world, but it also looks at other indicators of violence to see how broadly based peace is in East Asia. This examination excludes the possibility that the long peace of East Asia is an illusion caused by our narrow focus on battle deaths of standard conflicts. The chapter also explores that violence has not grown in other categories in a way that would undermine the spectacular decline in the number of battle deaths in standard conflicts. The nature of East Asian peace can be examined on the one hand by looking at high estimates, low estimates, and best estimates of various data sources of conflict fatalities. When looking at battle deaths it focuses on perhaps the most used dataset program, the Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO) Battle Deaths Data set released in 2005.
