This is a holding page for a presentation I’m preparing for the RSA. You can find the datasets here. Never Again.

This material has been compiled with the help of ChatGPT 5.4 and Claude Opus 4.6. The data sources are in their 69th iteration; compilation is not easy. I have personally checked many, but all the sources. They are given below, in order that you may check them. One can draw several conclusions from the data presented here. The first is that human beings are, by nature, incorrigibly aggressive animals. The second is a matter of framing — you can apply whatever cultural, social, anthropological, or religious lens you wish. If you look at the data from a faith perspective, you’ll conclude that human beings are inherently evil and salvation is required. There are many roads to the many brands of salvation. The third is the constructivist or anthropological position: that human behaviour is learned, not innate. The fourth, and perhaps the most uncomfortable, is that the principal means, methods, systems, and technologies that we have evolved to date — especially our political systems — are inadequate. Ruinously, completely, and tragically inadequate.

The Human Cost of Armed Conflict Since 1945

The origin of a broken promise

In April 1945, as Allied forces liberated the Nazi concentration camps, survivors at Buchenwald displayed signs bearing the words “Never Again” in multiple languages. The phrase emerged not from politicians or lawyers but from the camps themselves — from the people who had endured what was supposed to be unimaginable and who were determined that it should never occur again in human history. Within months, the Nuremberg war crimes trials would lay bare the full horror of Nazi crimes against humanity. Within three years, the phrase’s moral force would be given the weight of international law. On 9 December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide — the first human rights treaty in the UN’s history. Its preamble recognised “that at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity” and declared the contracting parties “convinced that, in order to liberate mankind from such an odious scourge, international co-operation is required.” Article I committed every signatory to confirm “that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.” The Convention was adopted just one day before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Together, these two instruments were meant to be the legal architecture of a world in which the horrors of 1933–1945 could not recur.

The Trials

The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg opened on 20 November 1945 at the Palace of Justice on Fürther Straße. The city was chosen not only because its courthouse was one of the few in Germany still standing, with a large prison attached, but for its symbolism: Nuremberg was where the Nazi Party had staged its vast annual rallies and where the 1935 racial laws had been proclaimed. The trials would be held on the Nazis’ own ceremonial stage.

Twenty-two senior Nazi officials stood accused of crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The US chief prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, opened his case on 21 November with words that have echoed through the decades since: “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilisation cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.” Jackson framed the proceedings not merely as a trial of the defeated but as a statement of principle — that those who commit atrocities, regardless of rank or office, could be held to account. The main trial concluded in October 1946 with twelve death sentences and seven prison terms. Twelve subsequent trials, running until 1949, prosecuted a further 184 defendants, including physicians, judges, industrialists, and military commanders. Twenty-four more were sentenced to death. Courtroom 600, where the main trial took place, is now a museum — the Memorium Nuremberg Trials — though the building remains an active courthouse to this day.

The Crimes

The crimes that prompted these trials were without precedent in their scale and systematic nature. The Nazi regime and its collaborators murdered approximately six million Jewish men, women, and children — roughly two-thirds of Europe’s pre-war Jewish population. But the regime’s murderous ideology reached far beyond the Jewish community. The Roma and Sinti people suffered a parallel genocide, now known as the Porajmos, in which historians estimate between 250,000 and 500,000 were killed. An estimated 275,000 people with physical or mental disabilities were murdered under the T-4 programme, which began in 1939 and served as a prototype for the later extermination camps — its methods of gas chamber killing were subsequently adopted on an industrial scale. Over three million Soviet prisoners of war perished through deliberate starvation, exposure, and execution. Nearly two million ethnic Poles were killed. Homosexual men, Jehovah’s Witnesses, political opponents, trade unionists, and others deemed undesirable by the regime were imprisoned, tortured, and killed in numbers that remain difficult to establish precisely. In total, the broader programme of Nazi persecution claimed an estimated 11 to 17 million lives, depending on which categories of victim are included.

Never Again

The phrase “never again” carried a double power from the beginning. In its first and most immediate sense, it was a determination by the Jewish people, and by survivors of the camps, that they should never again be left defenceless against persecution. But it also carried a wider, universal force: that genocide and mass atrocity should never again be tolerated anywhere, against anyone. It was this universalist meaning that the Genocide Convention enshrined in law.

Seventy years later, in Geneva in September 2018, Adama Dieng — the UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide — spoke at a commemoration marking the anniversary of the Convention. His assessment was blunt: the often quoted sentiment of “never again,” he said, had become “time and again.” Forty-five member states had still not ratified the Convention. The dataset that follows documents what that failure looks like — and its scope extends beyond genocide alone.

War is not genocide. International law draws a clear distinction, and that distinction matters in courtrooms and treaty texts. But to the mother carrying her children across a border, to the family burying its dead in a city reduced to rubble, to the millions living in refugee camps with no prospect of return, the distinction is a nicety. The human consequences of armed conflict — death, injury, displacement, the destruction of everything that sustains a life — are the same whether the violence is classified as genocide, civil war, insurgency, or invasion. For that reason, this dataset records not only genocidal acts but all significant armed conflicts and their effects on human beings since 1945.

What this data shows

Drawing on sources including the UNHCR, the Peace Research Institute Oslo, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, the Lancet, the Brown University Costs of War project, the Iraq Body Count, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, various national truth commissions, and other academic and humanitarian sources, we have compiled mid-range estimates for 113 armed conflicts from 1945 to 2025. The dataset includes inter-state wars, civil wars, insurgencies, occupations, and genocides — every significant episode of organised violence that produced large-scale death or displacement in the post-war period.

The data Never Again tracks three dimensions of each conflict:

Deaths — direct and indirect. Direct deaths are those caused by combat: soldiers, fighters, and the civilians caught in the violence, which American military doctrine euphemistically termed “collateral damage.” Indirect deaths are those caused by the destruction of the systems that keep people alive: hospitals, water supplies, food production, sanitation, and transport. In many modern conflicts, indirect deaths vastly outnumber direct ones. In the two Congo wars of 1996–2003, for example, the vast majority of an estimated nine million deaths were caused by disease and malnutrition in the aftermath of fighting, not by the fighting itself.

Displacement — refugees and internally displaced persons. Displacement is probably the single largest human consequence of war and organised violence. When people flee, they lose homes, livelihoods, communities, and often family members. The data distinguishes between refugees — those who cross an international border — and internally displaced persons (IDPs), who flee but remain within their own country. IDPs consistently outnumber refugees, often by a factor of three or four to one, yet they receive far less international attention and support.

Time — the duration and decade of each conflict. The chart groups conflicts by the decade in which they began, revealing patterns that are not visible when conflicts are considered individually.

What the patterns reveal

The decade-by-decade view tells a story that confounds easy narrative.

Deaths peaked in the 1950s (the Korean War), the 1970s (Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Vietnam), and the 1990s (the Congo wars, Rwanda, the Yugoslav wars). Since 2000, the death toll from armed conflict has declined — though it remains measured in millions, not thousands.

Displacement, however, has moved in the opposite direction. The 2010s and 2020s have produced the highest displacement totals of any decade since 1945, driven by Syria (approximately 13 million displaced), Ukraine (approximately 11 million), Sudan, Yemen, and the ongoing crisis in Gaza. In the 1950s, displacement was roughly double the death toll. By the 2020s, it was sixteen times greater. Wars are killing proportionally fewer people but uprooting vastly more.

The total figures are stark. Across 113 conflicts since 1945, the mid-range estimates are approximately 52 million dead and 217 million displaced. Twenty-three of these conflicts remain ongoing.

These are order-of-magnitude estimates. The true numbers are unknowable. Many deaths go unrecorded. Many displaced people are never counted. The dataset is honest about its gaps — 23 conflicts still lack reliable displacement figures and are excluded from the totals rather than assigned false precision.

Why causation matters

A number of these conflicts have roots in the competition for natural resources — oil, minerals, water, and arable land. The dataset includes a resource drivers field precisely because the link between energy, extractive industries, and armed conflict is well documented but often obscured. The wars in Sudan, the Congo, Iraq, and Nigeria, among others, cannot be understood without understanding what lies beneath the ground being fought over. Future analysis will map these resource connections alongside the human cost.

Sources

The dataset draws on the following principal sources. Where individual conflict estimates diverge between sources, mid-range figures have been adopted. All figures are subject to the inherent uncertainties of conflict data collection.

International organisations and databases

  • United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Global Trends reports, country operations portals, and refugee statistics. unhcr.org.

  • International Organisation for Migration (IOM). Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM) country reports. iom.int.

  • United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Situation reports and humanitarian response plans.

  • Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). Battle Deaths Dataset and Armed Conflict Database. Lacina, B. and Gleditsch, N.P. (2005), “Monitoring Trends in Global Combat: A New Dataset of Battle Deaths.” European Journal of Population, 21(2–3), 145–166.

  • Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). Uppsala University Department of Peace and Conflict Research. ucdp.uu.se.

  • Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC). Global Report on Internal Displacement, annual editions. internal-displacement.org.

Conflict-specific academic and institutional studies

  • Hagopian, A. et al. (2013). “Mortality in Iraq Associated with the 2003–2011 War and Occupation.” PLOS Medicine, 10(10). The University Collaborative Iraq Mortality Study. An estimated ~461,000 excess deaths.

  • Iraq Body Count (IBC). Documented civilian deaths from violence, 2003 onwards. iraqbodycount.org.

  • Crawford, N.C. and Lutz, C. (2021). “Human Cost of Post-9/11 Wars.” Costs of War Project, Watson Institute, Brown University. costsofwar.watson.brown.edu.

  • International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Case documentation and demographic analyses. Tabeau, E. and Bijak, J. (2005), “War-related Deaths in the 1992–1995 Armed Conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina.”

  • Humanitarian Law Centre (HLC), Belgrade. Kosovo Memory Book and Bosnia-Herzegovina war casualty databases.

  • Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH). Guatemala: Memory of Silence. Report of the Commission for Historical Clarification, 1999. Estimated ~200,000 killed, ~1.5 million displaced.

  • International Rescue Committee (IRC). Mortality surveys in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 2000–2007. Estimated excess mortality of ~5.4 million.

  • Rummel, R.J. (1997). Death by Government and Statistics of Democide. University of Hawai’i. Estimates for the Vietnam War, Chinese Civil War, and other 20th-century conflicts.

Holocaust and Nuremberg sources

  • United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Holocaust Encyclopedia: “Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution.” encyclopedia.ushmm.org.

  • The National WWII Museum, New Orleans. “The Holocaust” and “The Genocide of the Roma.” nationalww2museum.org.

  • Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Centre. Victim databases and historical documentation. yadvashem.org.

  • PBS American Experience. The Nuremberg Trials. pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/nuremberg.

  • Popescu, D.I. and Schult, T. (eds). Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the Post-Witness Era. On the origins and evolution of the phrase “never again.”

  • Kellner, H. “Never Again is Now.” History and Theory, 33(2). On the semantics of the phrase.

Displacement and refugee-specific sources

  • UNHCR Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2024. Published June 2025. 123.2 million forcibly displaced worldwide at end of 2024.

  • Brookings Institution. “Iraq’s Displaced: Where to Turn?” and related policy briefs on displacement in Iraq, 2007–2009.

  • Robinson, W. Courtland (1998). Terms of Refuge: The Indochinese Exodus and the International Response. UNHCR/Zed Books. Comprehensive data on Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian refugee flows 1975–1997.

  • Wilson Centre Cold War International History Project. “New Evidence on North Korean War Losses.” North Korean census data and Soviet ambassador reports on Korean War casualties and displacement.

Additional References

  • Council on Foreign Relations. Global Conflict Tracker. cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker. Ongoing conflict summaries and casualty estimates.

  • Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). Field reports from conflict zones including DRC, Sudan, Syria, Yemen.

  • Al Jazeera (2023). “Iraq War, 20 Years On: Visualising the Impact of the Invasion.” Data visualisation and UNHCR displacement figures.

  • Britannica. Entries on the Korean War, Vietnam War, and other major conflicts. Consulted for cross-referencing casualty estimates.

  • Wikipedia conflict articles (used for cross-referencing only, not as primary sources). Source chains verified against PRIO, UCDP, UNHCR, and academic literature. 

Data: conflicts_GLOBAL_master_v69. Compiled 2024–2025. All figures are mid-range estimates from published academic, humanitarian, and governmental sources. This is a living dataset — corrections and additional sourcing are ongoing.