World peace breaking out?

“Armed conflict has declined in large part because armed conflict has fundamentally changed,”  writes Joshua Goldstein in Foreign Policy this month.

“Today’s asymmetrical guerrilla wars may be intractable and nasty, but they will never produce anything like the siege of Leningrad.”

We hope.

Goldstein takes on seven myths about 21 st century conflict.

• The World Is a More Violent Place Than It Used to Be.
• America Is Fighting More Wars Than Ever.
• War Has Gotten More Brutal for Civilians.
• Wars Will Get Worse in the Future.
• A More Democratic World Will Be a More Peaceful One.
• Peacekeeping Doesn’t Work.
• Some Conflicts Will Never End.

In fact, the world is less violent, peacekeeping does work, and some conflicts are wrapping up, Goldstein says.

“The late peace researcher Randall Forsberg in 1997 foresaw “a world largely without war,” one in which “the vanishing risk of great-power war has opened the door to a previously unimaginable future — a future in which war is no longer socially-sanctioned and is rare, brief, and small in scale.”

We may be headed there, he says.

But the larger question  Goldstein doesn’t ask is whether the structural violence that creates conflict has actually been minimized or, rather, has been put on hold for reasons that have nothing to do with solutions.