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Annual Review of Political Science

Volume 28, 2025

Is War in Decline?

  • Tanisha M. Fazal1
  • Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA; email: [email protected]
  • Vol. 28:57-73 (Volume publication date June 2025)
  • First published as a Review in Advance on January 02, 2025
  • Copyright © 2025 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

Abstract

The claim that war is in decline has gained considerable traction among analysts and policy makers. This review surveys the empirical data as well as the theoretical arguments for a decline of war. It concludes that, while great power wars have declined since 1945, war in general is not necessarily in decline. Critiques of the claim that war is in decline range from the statistical to the anthropological. While war is not necessarily in decline, though, it has changed. Specifically, a major driver of the putative decline of war—international norms, laws, and institutions—has done more to change how war is discussed and presented than whether it is prosecuted. Stronger theories of change are needed in international relations to understand whether these somewhat superficial changes could deepen in ways that produce a true decline in war.

Keyword(s): armed conflict, civil war, decline of war, international norms, interstate war
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2025-06-17
2025-06-20
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Is War in Decline?
Annual Review of Political Science 28, 57 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-041923-115351
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-polisci-041923-115351
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-polisci-041923-115351
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