

The 2010s were also a period of high battle-deaths, driven by the conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. We see three marked peaks in war deaths since the end of World War II: the Korean War (early 1950s), the Vietnam War (around 1970), and the Iran-Iraq and Afghanistan wars (1980s). The decline of the absolute number of battle deaths can be seen in the first visualization here that shows global battle deaths per year by world region, which pulls together data from two sources: more recent data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) and older data from the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO).

In recent years, the annual death toll tends to be less than 100,000. In some years in the early post-war era, around half a million people died through direct violence in wars. The absolute number of war deaths has been declining since 1946.
