The World at War: Mapping 2026's Armed Conflicts, Their Costs, and the Questions They Raise

The Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) recorded 61 active state-based conflicts in 2024, the highest number since systematic tracking began in 1946 [1]. Nearly 160,000 people died in organized violence that year—the fourth-deadliest year since the 1994 Rwandan genocide [1]. ACLED, which uses a broader definition capturing political violence events below the state-conflict threshold, recorded over 205,000 violent events and approximately 244,700 fatalities worldwide in the twelve months through November 2025 [2]. Government forces were directly involved in 74% of those events, the highest share since ACLED achieved global coverage [2].

These numbers demand context. What counts as a "conflict" depends on who is counting. UCDP defines an armed conflict as a contested incompatibility between a government and an opposition group, or between two states, that produces at least 25 battle-related deaths per year. A conflict reaches the threshold of "war" at 1,000 battle-related deaths annually [1]. ACLED tracks a wider category—all forms of political violence including riots, protests, and attacks on civilians—without a minimum death threshold [2]. Both datasets show the same directional trend: more conflict, in more places, killing more people than a decade ago.

Counting the Conflicts: Trends Since the Cold War

The trajectory is stark. In 2010, UCDP recorded 31 state-based conflicts worldwide. By 2024, that number had nearly doubled to 61, with 11 reaching the level of war—the highest count since 2016 [1]. Fatalities from organized violence in 2024 were nearly five times the 2010 level, though sharply down from the peak year of 2022, when the first year of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine drove global deaths to their highest point since the Rwandan genocide [1].

For historical benchmarks: in 1995, UCDP recorded 35 state-based conflicts. In 2005, the count was 32. By 2015, it had risen to 52, driven by the Syrian civil war, the rise of the Islamic State, and the outbreak of conflict in Yemen and South Sudan [1]. The current count of 61 represents a sustained upward trend, not a sudden spike.

Source: Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP)

Data as of Jun 11, 2025CSV

The geographic distribution has shifted. Sub-Saharan Africa now hosts the largest number of active conflicts. The Sahel region—Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger—has become a new belt of instability where jihadist insurgencies, military coups, and intercommunal violence overlap. Sudan's civil war, which erupted in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, has produced what the UN calls the world's worst displacement crisis [3]. Myanmar's post-coup civil war, in its fourth year, has seen resistance forces take control of an estimated 42% of the country's territory while the junta retains major urban centers [4].

The Human Cost: Displacement at Record Levels

As of mid-2025, 117.3 million people worldwide had been forcibly displaced—roughly one in every 70 people on Earth [5]. This figure includes 42.5 million refugees who crossed international borders, 67.8 million internally displaced persons (IDPs), and 8.42 million asylum seekers [5].

The five largest displacement crises account for a disproportionate share. Sudan leads with 13.4 million refugees, asylum seekers, and IDPs combined [5]. Syria, despite a reduction in active fighting in some areas, still accounts for 6.1 million refugees and 7.4 million IDPs [5]. Ukraine's displacement crisis includes 3.7 million IDPs and an estimated 6.7 million refugees across Europe [6]. Afghanistan's decades of conflict have produced roughly 6.4 million refugees, the majority in Pakistan and Iran [5]. The Democratic Republic of Congo rounds out the top five, with over 7 million internally displaced [5].

Prolonged displacement is the norm, not the exception. UNHCR data show that two-thirds of refugees come from just five countries—Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, South Sudan, and Myanmar—and the average duration of displacement exceeds five years for the majority of refugee populations [5]. The Syrian refugee crisis is now in its fourteenth year. Afghan displacement has been continuous since the 1979 Soviet invasion, with successive waves driven by the Taliban takeover in 2021 producing a GDP contraction of 20.7% that year [7].

Death Tolls and the Problem of Counting

Ukraine

The Russia-Ukraine war remains the deadliest active conflict by combatant deaths. UCDP recorded approximately 76,000 battle-related deaths in 2024 alone [1]. Total military casualties since February 2022 are heavily contested. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) estimated in December 2025 that Russia had suffered up to 1.2 million casualties including 325,000 killed, while Ukraine had seen 500,000 to 600,000 casualties including up to 140,000 killed [8]. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stated in February 2026 that 55,000 Ukrainian troops had died [8]. The BBC Russian/Mediazona verification project, which relies on open-source obituaries and court records, had verified 152,142 Russian military deaths by late 2025—a figure its authors describe as a floor, not a ceiling [8].

UN monitors documented that 2025 was the deadliest year for Ukrainian civilians since 2022, with civilian casualties reaching a three-year monthly high in July 2025 [9].

Gaza

The Gaza conflict, which began after Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, has produced a casualty count that is itself a battleground. As of February 2026, the Gaza Ministry of Health reported at least 75,227 killed [10]. Independent surveys tell a different story about scale. A peer-reviewed study published in The Lancet estimated 75,200 violent deaths and 8,540 excess non-violent deaths between October 2023 and January 2025, suggesting the Ministry's figures may undercount by roughly 35-39% [10]. A November 2025 study by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research estimated total violent deaths between 100,000 and 126,000, with 27% being children under 15 [10].

The civilian-to-combatant ratio is fiercely disputed. Israel has at various points claimed a roughly 1:1 ratio. A leaked Israeli military report in August 2025 concluded that more than 80% of those killed were civilians [10]. UCDP recorded approximately 26,000 deaths in Israel's wars in Gaza and against Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2024, with 94% being civilians or of unknown identity [1].

The methodological controversy deserves direct engagement. The Gaza Ministry of Health operates under Hamas's institutional control, which critics cite as grounds for skepticism. Independent analyses, including by the UN and Lancet researchers, have validated the Ministry's historical accuracy in prior conflicts while noting that its current methodology—which shifted from named identification to statistical estimation after infrastructure collapse—introduced greater uncertainty [10]. The debate over these numbers has itself become a propaganda instrument: dismissing the figures serves Israeli interests in minimizing perceived civilian harm, while inflating them serves Hamas's interests in maximizing international sympathy. The most rigorous independent estimates consistently exceed, rather than fall below, the Ministry's official count [10].

Sudan

Sudan's war may ultimately prove the deadliest of the current cycle. The former U.S. envoy for Sudan has suggested as many as 400,000 have been killed since April 2023 [3]. ACLED recorded over 28,700 reported fatalities by the end of November 2024, including over 7,500 civilians killed in direct attacks—figures widely acknowledged as significant undercounts given the collapse of reporting infrastructure [3]. In the first half of 2025 alone, an estimated 3,384 civilians were killed in documented incidents [3]. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification estimated in September 2025 that 21.2 million people—45% of Sudan's population—faced acute food insecurity, with 375,000 experiencing famine-level conditions [3].

This conflict receives a fraction of the media and diplomatic attention devoted to Ukraine or Gaza, a disparity that researchers and African Union officials have repeatedly criticized [3].

Source: World Bank Open Data

Data as of Feb 24, 2026CSV

The Arms Buildup: $2.7 Trillion and Counting

Global military expenditure reached $2.718 trillion in 2024, a 9.4% increase in real terms over 2023—the steepest single-year rise since at least the end of the Cold War [11]. For comparison, global military spending was $1.917 trillion in 2019 [12]. That represents a nominal increase of roughly $800 billion, or approximately 37% in inflation-adjusted terms over the decade from 2015 to 2024 [11].

The increases are concentrated but widespread. Ukraine's military spending as a share of GDP went from 4.07% in 2019 to 34.48% in 2024—a wartime economy in the fullest sense [13]. Russia's rose from 3.86% to 7.05% over the same period [13]. Israel's jumped from 5.07% to 8.78% following the Gaza war [13]. Germany's climbed from 1.24% to 1.89%, reflecting the post-2022 "Zeitenwende" rearmament [13]. Saudi Arabia has maintained spending above 7% of GDP throughout [13].

The United States, at $916 billion in 2024, remains the largest military spender in absolute terms, accounting for roughly a third of global military expenditure [11]. China's spending, while growing in absolute terms, has remained relatively stable as a share of GDP at around 1.7% [13].

Source: World Bank / SIPRI

Data as of Feb 24, 2026CSV

The arms trade follows the money. NATO member states now account for over 80% of global arms exports [14]. The United States alone supplied 43% of all major arms exports in the 2020-2024 period, followed by France at 9.6% [14]. Russia's arms exports collapsed by 64% between the 2015-2019 and 2020-2024 periods, a consequence of both sanctions and the diversion of production to its own war effort [14]. Ukraine became the world's largest arms importer, with volumes increasing nearly 100-fold compared to 2015-2019 [14].

The Realist-Liberal Debate on Intervention

Whether military intervention produces stability or more conflict is among the most consequential disagreements in international relations, and the evidence does not clearly resolve it.

The Realist Case

John Mearsheimer, the University of Chicago offensive realist, argues that the Ukraine war is fundamentally a product of NATO's eastward expansion, which crossed well-established Russian security red lines [15]. In this framework, Western intervention—through arms supplies, economic integration, and the prospect of NATO membership—provoked exactly the conflict it was meant to deter. Mearsheimer's view, shared by Stephen Walt and the Defense Priorities think tank, holds that great powers will always resist encirclement by rival alliances, and that the failure to acknowledge this dynamic produced a preventable war [15].

Elbridge Colby, a former Pentagon official, extends this logic to argue that the United States should reduce its force posture in Europe and concentrate military resources on the Asia-Pacific, where China represents the more consequential strategic challenge [15]. From this perspective, European security should be primarily a European responsibility, and American overextension across multiple theaters weakens deterrence where it matters most.

Chinese scholars largely adopt what researchers describe as a "realist-geopolitical" framework for analyzing the Ukraine conflict, viewing it through the lens of great power competition rather than democratic values versus authoritarianism [15].

The Liberal Internationalist Case

Critics of the realist position, including scholars at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, argue that it amounts to granting Russia a veto over the sovereign choices of its neighbors [15]. The liberal internationalist framework holds that the rules-based international order—including the principle that borders cannot be changed by force—is a public good worth defending, and that failing to respond to Russian aggression would invite further revisionism, including a potential Chinese move against Taiwan.

Research on peacekeeping supports a more nuanced picture. UN peacekeeping operations reduce violence approximately 60% of the time when deployed in civil war settings [16]. Two-thirds of completed post-Cold War peacekeeping missions successfully implemented their mandates before departing [16]. Negotiated settlements backed by external security guarantees survive at a rate of 68% over five years, compared to 32% for those without such guarantees [16]. Mediation, rather than military force, appears to be the primary mechanism for halting hostilities, with peacekeeping serving a complementary role in sustaining agreements already reached [16].

However, current UN leadership acknowledges that wars are becoming more complex and protracted, and negotiated settlements have grown harder to achieve in recent years [16].

Sanctions: The Mixed Record

Economic sanctions represent the primary non-military tool of Western foreign policy, and the evidence on their effectiveness is decidedly mixed.

Against Russia, sanctions have imposed measurable costs. Following expanded sanctions on Russian energy companies in January 2025, Chinese imports of Russian oil fell 9.1% compared to 2024 [17]. Russia's GDP contracted in the early months of the invasion. But adaptive responses have blunted the impact: Russia redirected energy exports to India and China, developed parallel financial infrastructure, and maintained sufficient revenue to fund continued military operations [17].

Iran presents a similar pattern. Despite reimposed U.S. sanctions in 2018 that damaged the Iranian economy, Iran's oil export volumes in 2025 did not differ significantly from 2024, suggesting adaptation to sanctions pressure [17]. Sanctions have pushed Iran toward deeper economic integration with Russia, China, and India—the opposite of isolation [17].

North Korea exemplifies the limits of sanctions against a regime willing to impose extreme costs on its own population. Despite comprehensive international sanctions, North Korea stole over $2 billion in cryptocurrency in 2025 to fund weapons development and tested new intercontinental ballistic missiles with hypersonic delivery vehicles [17][18].

Cooperation among sanctioned states has itself become a force multiplier for evasion. China facilitates sanctions circumvention on behalf of Russia, Iran, and North Korea through parallel payment systems, transshipment networks, and technology transfer [17]. Russia's ruble-backed A7A5 stablecoin processed $93.3 billion in transactions within a year of its mid-2024 launch [17].

Defenders of sanctions argue that without them, Russia's military capacity would be greater and its war in Ukraine further advanced. Critics counter that sanctions impose humanitarian costs on civilian populations—particularly visible in Iran, where public health outcomes have deteriorated—while failing to change regime behavior on the issues that triggered them [17].

Non-State Armed Groups: Governance Without Recognition

Several non-state armed groups now govern populations numbering in the millions, operating taxation systems, courts, and public services without international recognition.

The Taliban governs the entirety of Afghanistan's 40 million people, having reimposed their interpretation of Islamic law after the U.S. withdrawal in 2021 [19]. Afghanistan's GDP contracted by 20.7% in 2021 and a further 6.2% in 2022 before stabilizing [7]. The Taliban collect taxes, administer courts, and maintain security forces. Reports on governance quality are mixed: some areas have seen reduced corruption and improved road security compared to the previous government, while women's exclusion from education and employment represents a systematic denial of rights affecting half the population [19].

The Houthis (Ansar Allah) control Yemen's capital Sana'a and much of the country's northwest, governing an estimated 13 million people [19]. They operate a formal taxation system, judiciary, and military. Researchers describe their domestic governance model as a "theocratic police state" characterized by repression, militarization, and systemic social control [19]. Their naval blockade of Red Sea shipping in solidarity with Gaza from late 2023 demonstrated the capacity of a non-state actor to disrupt global trade routes.

Al-Shabaab controls significant territory in southern and central Somalia, running a parallel taxation system that generates an estimated $100 million annually [19]. ISIS, while no longer controlling the territorial caliphate that spanned Iraq and Syria at its 2015 peak, maintains operational capacity through its West Africa Province (IS-WA), which UN sanctions monitors estimate has 8,000 to 12,000 fighters and leads all ISIS branches in claimed attacks [19].

Climate, Resources, and Conflict

The relationship between climate change and armed conflict is the subject of a growing but still contested body of research.

Recent findings published in Nature Communications project that without mitigation and adaptation measures, nearly 40% of global transboundary river basins could face potential water-scarcity-driven conflicts by 2041-2050, with hotspots in Africa, southern and central Asia, the Middle East, and North America [20]. The same study found that intra-basin cooperation could reduce this proportion to less than 10% [20].

The mechanism linking climate to conflict operates primarily through economic channels. In countries heavily dependent on agriculture, climate-induced declines in productivity reduce economic growth, exacerbate food insecurity, and intensify competition over limited resources [20]. Research on pastoral communities in the Sahel shows that droughts disrupt traditional cooperative relationships between herders and farmers, triggering violence when pastoralists move into agricultural zones before crops are harvested [20].

The Syrian case is frequently cited: a severe drought from 2006-2010, exacerbated by climate change, drove large-scale rural-to-urban migration that contributed to social tensions preceding the 2011 uprising [20]. Turkey's dam construction on the Tigris-Euphrates system has reduced Iraq's water supply from these rivers by 80% since 1975, a slow-moving resource conflict with no military dimension but significant destabilizing effects [20].

Skeptics, including political scientists Halvard Buhaug and Ole Magnus Theisen, argue that the climate-conflict link is overstated—that political institutions, governance quality, and ethnic divisions are far stronger predictors of conflict than environmental variables, and that climate factors at most amplify pre-existing vulnerabilities rather than independently causing wars. The evidence supports correlation more strongly than direct causation [20].

Source: FRED / U.S. Energy Information Administration

Data as of Mar 20, 2026CSV

The Burden of Hosting: Who Bears the Cost

The distribution of refugee hosting is starkly unequal. Countries with collectively just 27% of global wealth hosted 80% of the world's refugees in 2024 [21]. Low- and lower-middle-income countries hosted 37% of all refugees, while high-income countries—holding nearly two-thirds of global wealth—hosted 29% [21].

Turkey, Colombia, Germany, Iran, and Uganda hosted over one-third of the world's refugees and people in need of international protection [21]. Jordan and Lebanon, with populations of 11 million and 5.5 million respectively, host refugee populations that represent significant percentages of their total residents—a per-capita burden with no equivalent in wealthier nations.

Official Development Assistance for refugees in low- and middle-income countries amounted to $27.7 billion for 2022-2023, but overall ODA funding declined in 2024 and is projected to fall further in 2025 [21]. Resettlement quotas for 2025 were expected to be the lowest since 2003, below even COVID-19 pandemic levels [21]. The international community set a target of resettling just 120,000 refugees for 2026—a fraction of the 2.9 million UNHCR identifies as needing resettlement [21].

The African Union has been vocal about the disproportionate burden on African nations, particularly given that African conflicts—Sudan, the DRC, Somalia, the Sahel—generate displacement that is overwhelmingly absorbed by neighboring countries with limited resources. Uganda, which hosts over 1.7 million refugees under one of Africa's most progressive refugee policies (allowing refugees to work and own land), receives international support that falls far short of actual costs [21].

Nuclear Risk: The Clock at 85 Seconds

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds to midnight in January 2026—the closest it has ever been to the symbolic point of catastrophe [18]. The assessment cited military operations in three theaters under the shadow of nuclear weapons, the impending expiration of New START (the last major strategic arms treaty between the United States and Russia), and North Korea's continued nuclear buildup [18].

The specific concern is not that any leader intends to use nuclear weapons, but that the conditions for miscalculation or escalation have multiplied. Russia has issued repeated nuclear threats over Ukraine. Israel's undeclared nuclear arsenal shadows every calculation in the Middle East. North Korea tested new delivery systems throughout 2025. And no new arms control framework is under negotiation to replace the expiring agreements [18].

Historical Perspective: Is This an Exceptionally Violent Era?

The answer depends on what you measure and against what baseline.

In absolute numbers, battle deaths and conflict counts are elevated compared to the post-Cold War optimism of the 1990s and 2000s. The current 61 state-based conflicts far exceed the 31 recorded in 2010 [1]. Total fatalities from organized violence are at levels not consistently seen since the early 1990s.

Measured as a percentage of world population, the picture changes. Steven Pinker's thesis in The Better Angels of Our Nature—that violence has declined over centuries as a share of the human population—remains broadly supported by the data even with recent increases. Battle deaths per 100,000 people remain well below Cold War-era averages and orders of magnitude below World War II or the wars of earlier centuries [1].

Interstate wars—conflicts between recognized states—remain rare. The Russia-Ukraine war is the most significant interstate conflict since the 2003 Iraq invasion. Most current conflicts are intrastate, involving governments fighting non-state armed groups, often with external backers. This pattern is consistent with post-1945 trends, not a departure from them.

The counterargument, advanced by scholars like Tanisha Fazal and Bear Braumoeller, is that declining death rates reflect improved medical care and faster evacuation rather than less violence, and that the frequency and intensity of conflict onset have not declined. Braumoeller's analysis shows that the initiation of militarized disputes between states has not decreased, and that any given year's probability of a major war remains essentially unchanged from historical baselines.

Both positions have merit. The data do not support the claim that we are living in an unprecedentedly violent era, nor do they support confident assertions that the "long peace" thesis remains intact. What the data show clearly is that the post-Cold War decline in conflict has reversed, that more people are affected by organized violence than at any point in the past two decades, and that the institutional frameworks designed to prevent and manage conflict—the UN Security Council, arms control treaties, international humanitarian law—are under greater strain than at any point since their creation.

Oil, Resources, and the Economics of War

Oil prices both reflect and influence the dynamics of conflict. WTI crude prices declined from the mid-$60s in late 2025 to the high $50s by year's end before spiking sharply in early March 2026 to over $91 per barrel [22]. Resource competition remains a factor in multiple conflicts: control of oil infrastructure is central to Libya's fragmentation, oil revenues fund both sides in Sudan's war, and the Houthis' Red Sea campaign directly targeted global energy supply chains.

The relationship runs in both directions. High oil prices fund military spending for petrostates involved in conflicts—Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran—while supply disruptions caused by conflicts drive prices higher, creating feedback loops that benefit belligerents with oil reserves [22].

What the Data Leave Unresolved

The factual record assembled here supports competing conclusions. Realists see confirmation that great power competition is the irreducible driver of global conflict, and that attempts to impose liberal norms through intervention and alliance expansion provoke rather than prevent wars. Liberal internationalists see evidence that the erosion of rules-based institutions and the appeasement of authoritarian revisionism have emboldened aggression. Both can point to data in their favor; neither can claim the evidence settles the argument.

The 117 million displaced people, the 160,000 dead in organized violence in 2024 alone, and the $2.7 trillion spent on militaries exist independent of which framework you find more persuasive. What does not exist is consensus—among scholars, policymakers, or the public—on whether more intervention, less intervention, more deterrence, or more negotiation would reduce these numbers. The Doomsday Clock sits at 85 seconds to midnight, but the disagreement is not about whether the dangers are real. It is about what caused them and what, if anything, can reverse the trend.