War in the Time of Global Disorder

The gods of war would surely be pleased with 2025 and 2026. According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, the number of active armed conflicts has reached unprecedented levels (65 ongoing conflicts) and the official number of conflict deaths in 2025 — 244,600 — was greater than any year since the Rwanda genocide. Military spending is also at historical highs: more than USD 2.8 trillion per year according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Behind these headlines, democratic backsliding and social polarisation have set the stage for rising levels of political violence and political repression, in places such as Iran, Chad, Haiti, Myanmar, Nepal and elsewhere.

From Mars to Ares

No doubt today Ares is ascendant, as the wars in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine perfectly illustrate, with war crimes, civilian victimisation, unattainable war aims and violent stalemates. The Roman war god Mars was a disciplined defender of the state and reflected martial virtues; by contrast, the Greek war god Ares exemplified the disorder, chaos and savage brutality of war. No doubt today Ares is ascendant, as the wars in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine perfectly illustrate, with war crimes, civilian victimisation, unattainable war aims and violent stalemates. Given this, can we make any sense of the wide array of forms of violence and armed conflict that we see today and what the future might hold? At least three important forces are at play.

Victory is elusive

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is now in its fifth year — or more if we consider that the invasion of Crimea took place in 2014. Palestinians continue to die in Gaza, three years after the 7 October Hamas attacks in Israel. The warring factions in Sudan have been locked in violence since 2023 (another in the long history of armed conflict in Sudan), and a civil war that has killed more than 80,000 people ebbs and flows in Myanmar since 2021. And the 2026 American-Iranian war has no clear end point. So “victory” (whatever this means) remains elusive in today’s wars due to military stalemates where technological (US-Iran) and personnel (Russia-Ukraine) advantages are offset by strong defensive strategies. The temptation of “cheap and easy” victory that both Presidents Putin and Trump fell prey to displays the hubris of power — and the tenacity of adversaries. In other conflicts (Sudan, Myanmar), external parties have provided critical support (financial, military) that prolongs the fighting and reduces incentives for negotiation. This will not change: as the Uppsala project demonstrates, many of today’s wars (perhaps up to one-third) are “internationalised”, with significant foreign involvement key to battlefield dynamics.

The Economic Paradox and Technological Change

At the same time as military spending reaches all-time highs in state budgets, the “barriers to entry” for violent entrepreneurs have declined. Small arms and light weapons (including militarised drones) are now readily available and circulate relatively easily in many regions, as the work of the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey has amply documented. Armed drone attacks by state forces, private military contractors and gangs are widespread in Port-au-Prince Haiti, while in Myanmar, both the army and armed groups rely on drone warfare, often with inexpensive and modified commercial technology.

Aside from the low costs associated with mobilising for violence, current technology appears to favour the weaker side. The so-called “offense-defence balance” compares the cost of conquering and attacking an adversary versus the cost of defending against attacks. Inexpensive drones costing tens of thousands of dollars can destroy much more expensive equipment, as is happening to Russian forces in Ukraine. Of course, the technological balance shifts over time, but the “drone revolution” (including all sorts of uncrewed systems, large and small), coupled with the growing threat of “lethal autonomous weapons systems” (UN language for AI-supported weapons with limited human control) suggests that we are facing a 21st century “revolution in military affairs” akin to that of the Industrial Revolution, or the invention of gunpowder and artillery, in which old ways of organising for, and waging, war become obsolete. Of course, armed forces in advanced industrial states are slow to adapt or evolve, and we should expect that this “revolution” takes some time to emerge in military structures and deployments — although the lessons of the Ukrainian defence against Russia aggression are being closely observed in NATO and elsewhere.

“No Rules” is the New Rule

International humanitarian law (IHL) and the laws of war were designed to channel violence in ways that states found acceptable (no killing of prisoners, no deliberate targeting of civilians, etc.). While never strongly respected (remember the use of napalm by the United States in Vietnam, or Russia’s war crimes in Chechnya and Ukraine), they provided at least a framework for accountability. International humanitarian law is today widely disregarded, with mass atrocities and blatant disregard of any norms of restraint, by both state and non-state armed actors in places such as Gaza or Sudan.  But IHL is today widely disregarded, with mass atrocities and blatant disregard of any norms of restraint, by both state and non-state armed actors in places such as Gaza or Sudan. The Geneva Academy’s War Watch portal chillingly documents widespread civilian victimisation and violations of IHL in more than 20 conflicts in 2024–25; a reminder that the law is failing to protect the most vulnerable. A growing sense of impunity, despite indictments from the International Criminal Court, is difficult to dispel, and can only encourage further violations.

A peaceful or more violent future?

Predictions are best left to oracles. But at least we can firmly reject the idea, popularised by Harvard Professor Steven Pinker more than ten years ago, that we are progressively moving towards a more peaceful order, both within and between states. Aside from the liberal hubris in his argument, this is not just a question of the trends in conflict — which can also go down as well as up — but of the underlying conditions that reduce the risk of violent conflict between human groups. Three conditions made peace possible over the past 150 years: 1) cheap energy that allowed rapid economic growth, including bringing millions of people out of poverty; 2) few or no resource constraints since land and water were abundant and frontiers were opening, and 3) population growth that did not (until recently) over-stretch the Earth’s capacity. Of course, the warning signs were visible as long ago as the Club of Rome’s 1972 report Limits to Growth, but the implications of this are now crystal clear: intense competition at the global and local levels over scarce resources, rising inequality between the haves and the “have-nots,” demographic pressures, and the crossing of many of the sustainable planetary boundaries beyond just the climate crisis.

Scarcity, inequality and intense competition are breeding grounds for conflict. When the political and social institutions and mechanisms for channelling conflicts towards peaceful resolutions (courts, negotiation, informal agreements) break down, then the resort to violent means becomes almost inevitable. Ares is ascendant, and a peaceful order an ever more distant dream.