Note: This is a part of the background research for a talk about AI. The datasets are in graph form here. Never Again. You may ask what post-1945 global conflicts have to do with artificial intelligence, but there again, you might conclude, when you read this, that humanity needs all the help it can get :-). However, the connection between AI and human conflict is equivocal; it’s potentially a force for good but also clearly a force for ill.
“Never Again”, The Human Cost of Armed Conflict Since 1945
This material has been compiled with the help of ChatGPT 5.5 and Claude 4.7 Adaptive. The data sources are now in their 69th iteration; compiling them has not been easy. I have personally checked many, though not all, of the sources. They are set out below so that you may consult them if you wish.
Several questions are raised by the data presented here. Are human beings, by nature, incorrigibly aggressive animals? A reasonable answer would be yes. The second move is one of framing: we may apply various cultural, social, anthropological, or religious lenses to account for genocidal and war-making behaviour. Viewed from a faith perspective, one might conclude that human beings are inherently evil and in need of religion. Or one might simply lapse into pessimism, without any hope of salvation, in whatever form that salvation might be imagined.
Alternatively, we might conclude that, although humans are naturally aggressive, the degree to which that aggression is expressed or suppressed is a matter of choice, determined by how we construct what we call society. On this view, civilisation is a worked-for state, an achievement: peaceful coexistence is learned within developed social, cultural, political, and economic boundaries. A fourth conclusion, by extension, is that the principal means, methods, systems, and technologies we have so far evolved — especially our national and geopolitical systems — are ruinously, completely, and tragically inadequate. We need all the help we can get.
Whether AI can play any helpful role in that inadequacy is a separate question, and a contested one. The same technologies that might be marshalled for prevention are already being marshalled for the opposite: targeting in Gaza, autonomous and semi-autonomous drone warfare in Ukraine, the surveillance infrastructure of authoritarian states, and the industrialisation of disinformation. Several of the conflicts catalogued below now run on machine-assisted decision loops. Whether AI contributes to a more humane order or accelerates the existing one will depend on what we ask of it, who builds it, and within what constraints. The question is not “can AI help?” but “under what conditions?”
A Promise Made
In April 1945, as Allied forces liberated the Nazi concentration camps, prisoners at Buchenwald displayed signs bearing the words Never Again in multiple languages. It is worth being precise about who these prisoners were. Buchenwald was not principally a death camp for European Jews; it was a camp predominantly for political prisoners - German communists, social democrats, trade unionists, Spanish Republicans, French and Austrian politicians, Soviet prisoners of war, and many others — alongside Jewish prisoners. The first known uses of the phrase came from this anti-fascist resistance, and what they meant by it was specific: fascism - never again. Jewish survivors of the wider camp system more often invoked the parallel imperative never forget — a commitment to the murdered, not yet to a universal political programme. These two strands later merged, and a third - universalist, humanitarian, addressed to all peoples — emerged through the legal architecture built in the years that followed.
Within months, the Nuremberg war crimes trials would lay bare the full horror of Nazi crimes against humanity. Within three years, the moral force of “never again” — across all its strands — 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" has carried more than one meaning since 1945, and the meanings have not always agreed. The anti-fascist meaning was given its modern shape at Buchenwald, among political prisoners, and held that the political and social system which produced the camps must never return. The specific Jewish meaning, formed in the years that followed, held that the Jewish people must never again be left defenceless against persecution, and must never forget. And the universalist meaning — that genocide and mass atrocity should never again be tolerated anywhere, against anyone — was the meaning the Genocide Convention enshrined in law. The anti-fascist strand has the deepest German genealogy: Nie Wieder Krieg — never again war — was a central slogan of Weimar-era mass rallies in the 1920s, and many of the German political prisoners who survived Buchenwald would have known it from that earlier life. Each strand remains in circulation. None is wrong; what changes is which moral commitment is being invoked, and by whom.
Seventy years after the Convention, in Geneva in September 2018, Adama Dieng — UN Under-Secretary-General and Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide — addressed a high-level panel marking its anniversary. 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 recurrence looks like.
The Convention has not failed in every respect. The International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, the International Criminal Court, the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, and a small number of completed prosecutions all flow from the legal architecture put in place in 1948. These are partial achievements, and they exist in tension with the routine failures of enforcement, the use of the Security Council veto to prevent referrals (most starkly over Syria), and the forty-five non-ratifications.
War is not genocide. International law draws a clear distinction, and that distinction matters in courtrooms and treaty texts. The phrase Never Again, in its origin, addressed genocide and the political conditions that produced it; it did not, in its founding moment, address war as such. The dataset that follows widens the frame deliberately. 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 legal classification is a nicety. The human consequences of armed conflict — death, injury, displacement, the destruction of everything that sustains a life — are largely 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. The widening is intentional. It is not complete.
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
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. You may wish to argue the details; the pattern is incontrovertible.
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. I am soon to update it with the Partition = the 1947 India/Pakistan partition of British India. For that reason alone, it’s an underestimate.
Addendum: The Camp, Its Prisoners, and the Phrases Used Here
A note on the historical material at the head of this page, and on the phrase Never Again.
Buchenwald was established in July 1937, one of the first Nazi concentration camps inside the pre-war German borders. From its founding, it was predominantly a camp for political prisoners — German communists, social democrats, trade unionists, Spanish Republicans, French and Austrian politicians, Soviet prisoners of war, and many others — alongside Jewish prisoners, whose numbers rose significantly after Kristallnacht in November 1938 and again in early 1945, when Auschwitz evacuees were marched in. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is unambiguous on the point: most early inmates were political prisoners, and these “politicals” went on to play a central role in the camp’s internal organisation through the Communist-led International Camp Committee. Britannica, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Historical Society, and the Buchenwald Memorial Foundation all corroborate the picture.
The camp was liberated on 11 April 1945, having been seized in part by the prisoners themselves. Eight days later, on 19 April, around 21,000 surviving prisoners assembled on the muster ground for the first memorial service for the dead and swore what is now known as the Oath of Buchenwald. Its operative phrasing — “The destruction of Nazism, down to its roots, is our motto. To build a new world of peace and freedom is our ideal” — is explicitly anti-fascist, drafted under the leadership of the International Camp Committee. The Oath is held in primary form by the Buchenwald Memorial Foundation.
The phrase Never Again is related to but distinct from the Oath. Cultural-studies scholars Diana I. Popescu (Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, Birkbeck, University of London) and Tanja Schult (Stockholm University) have established that, in its earliest post-war use, the phrase belonged above all to political prisoners and to the anti-fascist commitment they expressed at and after liberation. Jewish survivors of the wider camp system more often invoked the parallel imperative Never Forget — a commitment to the murdered. The two strands later merged, alongside a third, universalist meaning addressed to all peoples, which was eventually given legal form in the 1948 Genocide Convention. Hans Kellner’s essay “‘Never Again’ Is Now” remains the standard analysis of the phrase’s semantics. Both Kellner’s article and Popescu, D. I. and Schult, T., “Performative Holocaust commemoration in the 21st century,” are available online.
Sources for this note
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Buchenwald.” encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/buchenwald
• Britannica, “Buchenwald.” britannica.com/place/Buchenwald
• Yad Vashem, “Buchenwald Concentration Camp and the Rescue of Jews.” yadvashem.org/righteous/stories/buchenwald-historical-background.html
• Holocaust Historical Society, “Buchenwald.” holocausthistoricalsociety.org.uk
• Buchenwald Memorial Foundation, “The Oath of Buchenwald,” 19 April 1945. liberation.buchenwald.de/en/otd1945/the-oath-of-buchenwald
• Popescu, D. I. and Schult, T. (eds.), Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the Post-Witness Era, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
• Popescu, D. I. and Schult, T., “Performative Holocaust commemoration in the 21st century,” Holocaust Studies, 2019. doi.org/10.1080/17504902.2019.1578452
• Kellner, H., “‘Never Again’ Is Now,” History and Theory, 33(2).
You can find the whole data set here.
And here is something else I am working on. CoffeeIntelligence II
You can contact me here.