Fluent Essays

3 pages double spaces MLAMake sure you use readings and real world examples Please make sure you read everything below carefully, do not misunderstanding the requirements again.You can check the example and rubric. The lecture and reading are in the folder. The tone and content should be directed towards a public audience, so you don’t have to use academic jargon.This week’s readings center around the question of whether people are naturally violent or not and whether, despite what it may seem like when reading the news, the world is getting less violent. The authors of several of the readings disagree with one another, and public debate on this issue has been very prominent in the last several years.Based on the readings, your assignment is to write an op-ed/blog post ofmaking an argument for why the world is OR is not getting less violent, (Pick your side) and how this should shape our thinking about the world and/or policy prescriptions that you think should be adopted by governments, non-governmental organizations (like Oxfam or the International Rescue Committee), or international organizations (like the UN). The tone and content should be directed towards a public audience, so you don’t have to use academic jargon.Your piece should 1. Present your own argument 2. Summarize key elements of the debate 3. Provide evidence to support your argument from readings and real-world examples 4. Offer clear takeaway points or prescriptions for thinking or policy based on your argument 5. Cite pieces example_op_eds_on_if_violence_and_war_are_declining.pdf global_197_w20_blog_post_rubric.pdf is_the_world_getting_less_violent__20200119.zip Unformatted Attachment Preview Opinion | OP-ED COLUMNIST Are We Getting Nicer? Nicholas Kristof NOV. 23, 2011 https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/24/opinion/kristof-are-we-getting-nicer.html It’s pretty easy to conclude that the world is spinning down the toilet. So let me be contrary and offer a reason to be grateful this Thanksgiving. Despite the gloomy mood, the historical backdrop is stunning progress in human decency over recent centuries. War is declining, and humanity is becoming less violent, less racist and less sexist — and this moral progress has accelerated in recent decades. To put it bluntly, we humans seem to be getting nicer. That’s the central theme of an astonishingly good book just published by Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard. It’s called “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” and it’s my bet to win the next Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. “Today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence,” Pinker writes, and he describes this decline in violence as possibly “the most important thing that has ever happened in human history.” He acknowledges: “In a century that began with 9/11, Iraq, and Darfur, the claim that we are living in an unusually peaceful time may strike you as somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene.” Still, even in a 20th century notorious for world war and genocide, only around 3 percent of humans died from such man-made catastrophes. In contrast, a study of Native-American skeletons from hunter-gather societies found that some 13 percent had died of trauma. And in the 17th century, the Thirty Years’ War reduced Germany’s population by as much as one-third. Wars make headlines, but there are fewer conflicts today, and they typically don’t kill as many people. Many scholars have made that point, most notably Joshua S. Goldstein in his recent book “Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide.” Goldstein also argues that it’s a myth that civilians are more likely to die in modern wars. Look also at homicide rates, which are now far lower than in previous centuries. The murder rate in Britain seems to have fallen by more than 90 percent since the 14th century. Then there are the myriad forms of violence that were once the banal backdrop of daily life. One game in feudal Europe involved men competing to head-butt to death a cat that had been nailed alive to a post. One reason this was considered so entertaining: the possibility that it would claw out a competitor’s eye. Think of fairy tales and nursery rhymes. One academic study found that modern children’s television programs have 4.8 violent scenes per hour, compared with nursery rhymes with 52.2. The decline in brutality is true of other cultures as well. When I learned Chinese, I was startled to encounter ideographs like the one of a knife next to a nose: pronounced “yi,” it means “cutting off a nose as punishment.” That’s one Chinese character that students no longer study. Pinker’s book rang true to me partly because I often report on genocide and human rights abuses. I was aghast that Darfur didn’t prompt more of an international response from Western governments, but I was awed by the way American university students protested on behalf of a people who lived half a world away. That reflects a larger truth: There is global consensus today that slaughtering civilians is an outrage. Governments may still engage in mass atrocities, but now they hire lobbyists and public relations firms to sanitize the mess. In contrast, until modern times, genocide was simply a way of waging war. The Bible repeatedly describes God as masterminding genocide (“thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth” — Deuteronomy 20:16), and European-Americans saw nothing offensive about exterminating Native Americans. One of my heroes, Theodore Roosevelt, later a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, was unapologetic: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely in the case of the tenth.” The pace of moral progress has accelerated in the last few decades. Pinker notes that on issues such as civil rights, the role of women, equality for gays, beating of children and treatment of animals, “the attitudes of conservatives have followed the trajectory of liberals, with the result that today’s conservatives are more liberal than yesterday’s liberals.” The reasons for these advances are complex but may have to do with the rise of education, the decline of chauvinism and a growing willingness to put ourselves in the shoes (increasingly, even hooves) of others. Granted, the world still faces brutality and cruelty. That’s what I write about the rest of the year! But let’s pause for a moment to acknowledge remarkable progress and give thanks for the human capacity for compassion and moral growth. The Big Kill Sorry, Steven Pinker, the world isnt getting less violent. John Arquilla https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/12/03/the-big-kill/ | December 3, 2012, 10:56 PM ANDREY SMIRNOV/AFP/Getty Images Writing their Lessons of History in the tumultuous year 1968, Will and Ariel Durant observed that in the last 3,421 years of recorded history, only 268 have seen no war. The 44 years since they made this observation have added not a single year of peace to that meager total. Yet a number of remarkably hopeful studies published recently suggest war is on the wane. The Human Security Report arrived at this conclusion, which former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan affirmed in its foreword as offering proof that [t]he world has become much less insecure over the past 20 years. At Harvard, psychology professor Steven Pinker has taken a very long view, finding that our era is far less brutal than ancient, medieval, or even early modern times. The Human Security Report bases its conclusion on some key trends. First, the number of ongoing conflicts in a given year in which more than 1,000 people die in battle has declined, if a bit choppily, from 25 in the mid-80s to five in 2006. (In 2012, the total I see is back up to about 10.) In addition to this, the number of battle deaths per year, worldwide, has dropped since the end of World War II — with just a few spikes largely explained by the Korean War (1950-1953), Vietnam from the mid-‘60’s to mid-‘70s, and the strife in the Balkans and among former-Soviet republics in the ‘90s. In his Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker goes a little further, noting that over the past 70-plus years the number of battle deaths per 100,000 people has fallen dramatically — with no spikes, just a couple of blips. The problem with the conclusions reached in these studies is their reliance on battle death statistics. The pattern of the past century — one recurring in history — is that the deaths of noncombatants due to war has risen, steadily and very dramatically. In World War I, perhaps only 10 percent of the 10 million-plus who died were civilians. The number of noncombatant deaths jumped to as much as 50 percent of the 50 million-plus lives lost in World War II, and the sad toll has kept on rising ever since. Perhaps the worst, but hardly the only, terrible example of this trend can be seen in the Congo war — flaring up again right now — in which over 90 percent of the several million dead were noncombatants. As to Pinker’s battle-death ratios, they are somewhat skewed by the fact that overall populations have exploded since 1940; so even a very deadly war can be masked by a per 100,000 of population stat. There are better ways to parse the problem of war’s prevalence and its patterns over time. One approach would be simply to look at the number of armed conflicts under way at any given time. The Human Security Report actually does this for the period 1946-2008, its compelling graphic showing a steady rise to over 50 wars per year in the early 1990s. The rest of that decade saw a drop of about 40 percent — to a great extent driven by the winding down of the Balkan and post- Soviet wars — and then a rising pattern once again post-9/11. Yes, the number of wars is down by over a third since the peak 20 years ago, but ongoing conflicts today are still more than double the totals seen in the years from the end of World War II until the mid-1950s, and are equal to the numbers of wars ongoing during the Vietnam era. It is hard to describe this as a world in which war is on the wane. The argument that the world has become more peaceful is even harder to sustain if one focuses on the patterns of the most destructive wars of the past few centuries. In my own work, I chose to search for what I call big-kill wars, during which a million or more die — soldiers and civilians. From 1800-1850, only the Napoleonic Wars surpassed the million-death mark. In the latter half of the 19th century, there were two such wars: the Taiping Rebellion, during which 20 million or more Chinese died; and the Lopez War between Paraguay and its neighbors. The latter conflict resulted in only a million deaths, but Paraguay lost roughly 80 percent of military-age males during this war, which had a shattering societal effect. Between 1900 and 1950, the number of big-kill wars doubled, if one is willing to accept the view of some that the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) reached a million deaths. About the two world wars there is no doubt. The same is true of the civil war in China that ultimately brought Mao Zedong to power. And if one wants to consider the forced collectivization of farms that Stalin pursued as a form of internal war — which also saw the deaths of millions — then the total for this period would rise to five. The troubling rise in big-kill wars in the first half of the 20th century was followed by an even more disturbing pattern in the second half: they doubled once again. There was nothing of the magnitude of World War II in sheer numbers of dead, but the million-mark in war deaths was steadily surmounted, mostly in societies in which such losses had staggering effects. Six of these wars occurred in Africa. In rough chronological order they took place in Biafra, Sudan, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Rwanda, and Congo. Some debate whether the Rwandan genocide reached a million or fell slightly below, and the Human Security Project asserts that the International Red Cross’s estimate that five million people have died in the Congo war (an estimate echoed by many other reporting agencies) is a bit high — but both wars clearly fit the big-kill category in terms of percentages of the populations that have died from these wars and their societal effects. Besides, the more common historical pattern in the statistics of deadly quarrels has been to under-report deaths, so Rwanda and Congo should be kept in the count. The other four big-kill wars occurred in Asia: Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Afghanistan — the last just counting the Russian war there (1979-1989), not the civil strife of the ‘90s and the American intervention over the past decade. All four easily surpassed the million-mark in war deaths. There is debate about whether the Iran-Iraq War during the 1980s reached this level — though there is little doubt about the profound effect of the conflict on both countries. The rising number of the deadliest conflicts over the past two centuries belies both the conclusions of the Human Security Report and those of Professor Pinker. However, since 2000 there has been only one big-kill war: the one in Congo, which now has the dubious distinction of suffering seven-figure war deaths both before and just after the turn the century. But I don’t see much prospect for yet another doubling of big-kill wars during the first half of this century. The most likely scenario for a war causing massive loss of life would be a second Korean war. Does the dearth of new million-death conflicts mean that war has finally begun to wane? I don’t think so. For there is another alarming trend that has been getting under way alongside the big-kill wars: the rise of smaller conflicts that nevertheless cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands. The Balkan wars of the 1990s fit this pattern. As does the Chechen resistance to Russia, both before and since the millennium. The civil war in Burundi (1993-2005) and Somalia (ongoing) fit this bill as well. The same goes for the strife in Darfur, and Syria is on the edge of entering this category as well. Most of the conflicts that fall into this category will occur in failed or failing states — see this magazine’s Failed States Index as a guide to where the next disaster may occur. The red zones of critical concern are massive. No, war is not on the wane. The second horseman of the Apocalypse remains with us. Indeed, it seems he may even have found a fresh mount. The decline of war and violence By Joshua S. Goldstein and Steven Pinker, April 15, 2016, 2:56 p.m. https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/04/15/the-decline-war-andviolence/lxhtEplvppt0Bz9kPphzkL/story.html Quietly, amid the carnage and chaos in the daily news, 2016 is shaping up as a good year for peace in the world. You read that right. A significant escalation of war over the past few years is, at the moment, abating. For nearly two-thirds of a century, from 1945 to 2011, war had been in overall decline. The global death rate had fallen from 22 per 100,000 people to 0.3. But then the Syrian civil war became the bloodiest conflict in a generation, with hundreds of thousands killed, millions displaced, and multiple foreign powers joining the fight or supporting their proxies. The UN Security Council deadlocked on what to do about it, and eventually ISIS carved out a territory and enlarged it into Iraq and beyond. New wars cropped up elsewhere. The world’s youngest country, South Sudan, fell into grotesque tribal violence. Nigeria lost territory to Boko Haram, with its penchant for kidnapping girls and other ways of brutalizing civilians. A Christian-Muslim divide in the Central African Republic devolved into a horrific civil war. Russia grabbed Crimea from Ukraine in flagrant violation of international law. An inept Saudi bombing campaign has devastated Yemen, while Libya has split into pieces controlled by armed groups including ISIS. To top it off, in several countries, Islamist militants carry out spectacles of bombing and shooting. By 2014 (the most recent year with complete data), the death rate had climbed to 1.4 per 100,000 — still far lower than in the Cold War years, but a troubling U-turn from the world’s peaceward course. Because most of these wars have not yet ended, and because lurid terrorism continues in many parts of the world, almost nobody has noticed a happy development that wafted in during the first quarter of 2016: The level of war violence has fallen markedly. The big event is the partial cease-fire in Syria, which has now lasted for six weeks. Fighting with ISIS and the Nusra Front continues, and violations recur, but much of the country is breathing a sigh of relief, and humanitarian access has expanded substantially. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the rate of killing has dropped by nearly half since the cease-fire began. That means that around 2,000 lives were spared in the first month. Since Syria is by far the world’s largest war, this reduction takes a big bite out of the global rate of war deaths as well. In Ukraine, a cease-fire in effect since last year has been violated regularly, but at a small scale, far below the earlier levels of bloodshed. In South Sudan, the recent formation of a unity government brings hope, even if some fighting continues. In the Central African Republic, the civil war has ended and a presidential election was completed successfully. In Nigeria, Boko Haram has been driven from its main territories, though it continues to perpetrate smaller-scale attacks. In Pakistan, despite ongoing terrorism, the major fighting of a few years ago has abated. And a cease-fire in Yemen just took effect, with a prisoner exchange already accomplished and peace talks scheduled for the coming weeks. All of this progress is shaky and incomplete. Even longstanding cease-fires can break down, as we have recently seen in Mozambique and Azerbaijan. An apparent decrease in Iraqi deaths this year is too uncertain to celebrate, while the war in Afghanistan drags on with no signs of respite. But, mercifully, as the major wars have died down, new ones have not sprung up in their place. Of special note is the continuing absence of wars between the world’s uniformed national armies. These forces exceed 20 million soldiers and are armed to the teeth. Yet the last sustained war between these armies was in 2003, in Iraq. Today’s skirmishes between countries, such as the recent Armenia-Azerbaijan flare-up, the Turkish downing of a Russian plane, and the incidents between North and South Korea, kill dozens of people rather than the hundreds of thousands, or millions, that died in the all-out wars that nation-states have fought throughout history, such as the Iran-Iraq and India-Pakistan wars. The geography of war is also shrinking. This year’s cease-fire between Colombia and the FARC guerrillas ended the last active political armed conflict in the Western Hemisphere. The Americas thus join Western Europe and East Asia as major regions of the globe that have moved from pervasive war to enduring peace. In fact, virtually all the war in the world is now confined to an arc stretching from Nigeria to Pakistan, which contains less than a sixth of the world’s population. We are hardly, as pessimists like to say, a “world at war.” Of course, the world continues to suffer from other forms of violence: terrorist bombings that kill dozens, drug gangs that kill thousands, and homicides that kill hundreds of thousands. But the latest inroads against a major category of violence — war — after five years in which it had lurched in the wrong direction, deserves our attention and gratitude. Today’s glimmers of hope might fade as fast as they emerged. But the recent cease-fires and peace talks are, as mathematicians like to say, an existence proof that the violence of war can be reduced. By redoubling our efforts to make them stick, the international community just might make 2016 the year when the war fever of the past half-decade finally breaks. Joshua S. Goldstein is emeritus professor of international relations at American University and a research scholar at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Steven Pinker is the Johnstone professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.” Violent disorder is on the rise. Is inequality to blame? 04 Jan 2019 Robert Muggah Principal, SecDev Group Clionadh Raleigh Professor of Political Geography and Conflict, University of Sussex https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/01/violent-disorder-is-on-the-rise-is-inequality-to-blame/ Is the world becoming less violent? The answer is yes and no. The world is less deadly, but more disorderly. Notwithstanding massive bloodshed in Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen, the incidence of large-scale warfare has declined compared with the past. Today there are fewer cross-border and civil wars and far less people violently killed compared with the 20th century. Yet contemporary armed conflicts seem to be harder than ever to resolve. They come in multiple shapes and sizes, and it is precisely these alternative manifestations that are increasing and contributing to disorder. At a time when most countries have experienced overall improvements in development, what accounts for this peculiar state of affairs? One reason for the persistence of low-intensity armed conflict is the fragmentation and proliferation of armed groups. Tod ... Purchase answer to see full attachment