What does war cost, and what keeps a people at peace?
War has always been among the ways that peoples settle their quarrels, and always among their worst afflictions. What does it cost, who bears the cost, and what keeps the peace?
The picture
What the numbers show, read from the Data library each time the page opens.
How to read the chart above, and the words it uses (for deaths in armed conflicts).
How to read the data
The figure counts deaths in a year that are recorded as caused by armed conflict between states or within them. Counts of this kind are estimates, and in the worst years they are the least certain, because the fighting itself prevents counting.
Key terms
Armed conflict
Fighting in which organised forces use weapons, between states or between a state and armed groups.
Battle-related death
A death caused directly by fighting, as distinct from deaths from hunger or disease that war brings.
Estimate
A best judgement from incomplete records, shown as a single figure.
Who has a stake
Each interest, then readings from the Catholic library and the Classics library that bear on it, oldest first. Choose a group to read.
To live and bring up their children without being made the target or the price of other people’s quarrels.
To be sent only for a cause that is just, to be treated as persons and not as instruments, and to be able to come home.
To protect their people and their rights against force, with the authority to decide and the duty to answer for it.
That the order between nations holds, so that trade, travel and ordinary life can go on, and that the wounded find shelter.
For discussion
The Athenians at Melos said right is in question only between equals. How would Augustine’s order of peace answer them?
Aquinas lists conditions for a just war and Kant wanted standing armies abolished. How might both bear on those who are sent to fight?
The Council said modern weapons make total war a matter for a new attitude. What does that ask of those who decide, and of the neighbours who must live beside the result?
