It is if you're a liberal
Excerpt from this NPR interview.
NPR.org » War And Violence On The Decline In Modern Times
Now, in the international arena, of course, we don't have a global leviathan, a world government, but Joshua Goldstein points out how the international peacekeepers, which are a kind of soft, rough equivalent, the closest that the world has to an international police force, have, contrary to impressions, been effective.
CONAN: Effective, Joshua Goldstein?
GOLDSTEIN: Yes, way more effective than people credit. I think there are three big reasons for the decline of war in the international system, one of which is this shift of norms that Steven Pinker has referred to. Things like dueling or human sacrifice just aren't cool anymore.
The second is the rise of prosperity and interdependence so that you don't get rich by conquering territory anymore, you get rich by trade, and war doesn't work for that.
But the third, which I focus on primarily, is the rise of the United Nations and peacekeeping, which has given the international community a way to manage and reduce conflicts, not to bring about world peace in one big gulp but to go into war zones where formerly ceasefires would break down more than half of the time.
But now most of them stick. Ninety percent stick because peacekeepers are able to provide that security. Now, this has been a very - as we all know, a challenging job for the United Nations and one that hasn't always been successful. But over the last decades, the U.N. has gotten better at peacekeeping, has gotten more effective at peacekeeping, and it's really cheap.
