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WINNING THE WAR ON WAR: THE DECLINE OF ARMED CONFLICT WORLDWIDE Joshua S. Goldstein Plume Reprint, 2012 400 pp., paper, $17.00
WORLDS APART: BOSNIAN LESSONS FOR GLOBAL SECURITY Swanee Hunt Duke University Press, 2011 296 pp., hardcover, $32.95
In his book Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide, Goldstein refutes the popular myths about wars in the twentieth century. In particular, he contests the claim that the twentieth century was the bloodiest on record. On the contrary, as he points out, the current wars are rather fewer in number and smaller in scale (p. 5). In that sense, Goldstein argues that we are "winning the war on war" through persistent efforts of peacekeepers, diplomats, peace movements and other organizations. Goldstein does not attribute the decline in the number of wars to the essentially peaceful nature of human beings (p. 6), nor does he propose that such a decline is somehow inevitable. Instead, he stresses the importance of an international body that is capable of easily deploying peacekeepers to conflict areas in order to provide the stability necessary for any concerted efforts to end violence and implement peace agreements. In his analysis, Goldstein undertakes an extensive foray into history in an attempt to demonstrate that humans have gotten better at preventing and ending wars. According to Goldstein, one of the chief reasons for such a positive trend is the establishment of the UN with the specific aim of reducing the prevalence of conflicts across the world (p. 44).
Goldstein suggests that we need to think of wars in a more nuanced way, by placing them on continuums from bad to worse, and from small to large. While he does not downplay the smaller, localized conflicts (such as small civil wars or isolated terrorist attacks (p. 3), he asks readers to consider the bigger picture. He claims that the advanced information technology, which instantly spreads news across the world, has created an overwhelming feeling in many of us that only bad things are happening in the world and that the world is going backwards. Goldstein argues that the media bears responsibility for such a distorted picture, since news reports tend to focus only on bad news and on highly isolated cases of violence...