MAY 2025

If the 20th century is remembered as the bloodiest in human history, with two World Wars, genocides, and nuclear devastation, then the 21st century is well on its way to inheriting that grim legacy.

But the character of violence has changed. This is not an age of trench warfare or national armies locked in global conflict.

Instead, it is defined by asymmetric wars, civil strife, insurgencies, and foreign interventions. In nearly every case, the people who pay the highest price are civilians.

•  युद्ध की भीषण कीमत: नागरिक और सैनिक, कब्रिस्तानों को आबाद करते हुए 

From Afghanistan and Iraq to Ukraine, Ethiopia, and Myanmar, modern warfare has turned cities into rubble, families into refugees, and entire generations into collateral damage.

The sobering truth is this: war today is not fought in the name of liberty or strategy alone. It is increasingly sustained by ego, power projection, and the impunity with which civilian suffering is dismissed.

The Arithmatics of Civilian Deaths

In theory, contemporary international norms, enshrined in the Geneva Conventions and human rights treaties, are supposed to limit the harm inflicted on non-combatants. 

In practice, these safeguards are routinely ignored.

Modern warfare is less about battlefield bravery and more about strategic bombings, economic sieges, and urban warfare, all of which disproportionately affect the unarmed.

The Costs of War Project by Brown University’s Watson Institute provides the most comprehensive accounting of post-9/11 conflict fatalities. 

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In nearly every case, the people who pay the highest price are civilians

According to its estimates, U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere have directly killed over 900,000 people, including civilians and combatants.

But when indirect deaths, those caused by war-induced hunger, disease, water scarcity, and medical infrastructure collapse, are included, the toll soars to between 4.5 and 4.7 million lives.

These numbers are not abstractions. They represent children buried in mass graves, families that have starved, pregnant women who died in makeshift hospitals without power.

They represent the cost of treating war as a policy instrument long after its human costs became unignorable.

Ukraine: A Return to Large-Scale Warfare

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, many believed this to be a throwback to the era of conventional war, a clash of tanks, armies, and defined battle lines.

But what has transpired since is something far more insidious: the sustained targeting of civilian populations and infrastructure, often under the guise of military necessity.

As of April 2025, the United Nations has confirmed over 13,000 civilian deaths and more than 31,000 injuries in Ukraine. 

These are conservative figures, constrained by the fog of war and limited access to frontline zones.

The real toll is likely far higher.

Russian strikes have targeted power grids, water supplies, apartment blocks, hospitals, and schools, despite repeated condemnations. 

• युद्ध की भीषण कीमत: नागरिक और सैनिक, कब्रिस्तानों को आबाद करते हुए 

Ukrainian responses have at times escalated the suffering, especially in contested regions.

Cities like Mariupol, Kharkiv, and Bakhmut have become synonymous with destruction.

Millions have fled.

According to UNHCR, over 8 million Ukrainians are now refugees across Europe, while another 5 million remain internally displaced. The economic collapse is profound, the trauma immeasurable.

For a child born in Donetsk today, normalcy is a distant dream.

Ethiopia’s Tigray War: Silence Amid Slaughter

Far from the European spotlight, another horror unfolded in Ethiopia’s Tigray region from 2020 onward. 

What began as a political standoff between the federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) quickly spiralled into a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe.

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As of April 2025, the United Nations has confirmed over 13,000 civilian deaths and more than 31,000 injuries in Ukraine

According to estimates compiled by human rights groups and aid organizations, between 300,000 and 500,000 people may have died during the conflict, many not from bullets or bombs, but from famine, disease, and medical shortages worsened by blockades.

These figures have not received the kind of sustained international scrutiny or outrage that similar numbers might elicit elsewhere. 

This disparity speaks volumes about global inequality, not just in resources, but in empathy.

Humanitarian access was repeatedly denied.

Sexual violence was weaponized on all sides. Civilians bore the brunt of ethnic targeting and retributive massacres. 

Today, while the guns have mostly fallen silent, the wounds, physical, psychological, and economic, remain gaping.

Myanmar: A Nation in Perpetual Conflict

Since the February 2021 military coup in Myanmar, the country has descended into a civil war that continues to worsen.

Protesters have been gunned down, journalists jailed, and entire villages razed under “clearance operations” aimed at ethnic minorities and dissidents.

According to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), more than 50,000 people have been killed since the coup, with over 2 million displaced. 

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It is the wholesale shattering of civil society

The junta’s aerial bombings of civilian areas and the burning of Rohingya and Chin villages are stark reminders of how state power can be turned inward with devastating effect.

Here again, the victims are rarely the political elites or armed actors. 

It is the children who miss years of schooling, the elderly who lose access to medicine, the farmers whose crops are confiscated or incinerated.

It is the wholesale shattering of civil society.

War’s Unseen Casualties: The Collapse of Systems

Modern warfare does not only kill through violence. It kills through systemic collapse. In Iraq, decades of war, sanctions, and occupation have destroyed the healthcare system.

In Yemen, a Saudi-led coalition blockade turned a poor country into one of the worst humanitarian crises of our time.

In Gaza, the recent escalation has left hospitals without power and water, even as bombs continue to fall. 40,000 innocent women and children have been killed, and the city of Gaza is pile of rubble.

• युद्ध की भीषण कीमत: नागरिक और सैनिक, कब्रिस्तानों को आबाद करते हुए 

Even when the fighting stops, the death toll continues to climb. Children die of malnutrition. Pregnant women die during childbirth. Diabetics die without insulin.

The war outlives the ceasefire because it has gutted the systems that sustain life.

This is the cost that rarely features in political speeches or security briefings. It is not a line item in military budgets. But it is real, and perhaps more enduring than any battlefield victory.

The Illusion of Military Solutions

Military interventions are often presented as necessary evils, justified as last resorts to restore peace or eliminate tyranny.

Yet history repeatedly demonstrates that military occupations or armed responses rarely result in long-term stability.

The United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003 is a case in point. Intended to disarm weapons of mass destruction and build democracy, it instead gave rise to sectarian chaos, violent insurgencies, and groups like ISIS.

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The war outlives the ceasefire because it has gutted the systems that sustain life

Similarly, the two-decade war in Afghanistan, backed by vast financial and military investments, ended with the Taliban’s return to power in 2021, an outcome that mocked the original objectives.

Violence begets violence. It fuels revenge, displaces political agency, and entrenches grievances.

Even when military action is swift and technically successful, it fails to heal wounds or address the structural injustices that underlie most conflicts.

War in the Age of Information and Illusion

Today, war is not only fought with drones and missiles but also with hashtags, disinformation, and televised spectacles. Nationalist fervour is stoked through slogans and narratives that dehumanize the “other.”

In many democracies, war becomes a political theatre, a diversion from internal failures or a tool for electoral consolidation. 

India and Pakistan are a classic cases of using warmongering as a political tool to gain nationalism propelled votes.

Media outlets, often complicit, glorify airstrikes with dramatic visuals and catchy jingles, reducing complex geopolitical realities to binary frames of heroism and villainy.

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 India and Pakistan are a classic cases of using warmongering as a political tool to gain nationalism propelled votes

The danger is not only that war becomes sanitized but that it becomes palatable, even desirable, to the public.

Yet the human body, be it Ukrainian, Palestinian, Sudanese, or Kashmiri, does not bleed hashtags. It bleeds blood. And no algorithm, no doctrine of deterrence, can undo the loss of a child to a bomb.

The Psychological Toll: A Generation Traumatised

There is another kind of casualty in these wars: the mental health of survivors. Studies from post-conflict zones indicate staggering levels of PTSD, depression, anxiety, and suicide.

Children who grow up surrounded by violence are more likely to struggle in school, more prone to aggression, and more vulnerable to recruitment by militant groups.

In Kashmir and Afghanistan, where nearly 40 years of continuous war or war like situation, have produced one of the youngest populations in the world, trauma is intergenerational.

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No peace agreement can hold if people are too wounded to trust again

Many children in these places cannot remember a time without war or violent conflict.

In Syria, entire neighbourhoods of orphans have been raised in camps, learning more about artillery than arithmetic.

Healing from such damage is not only a psychological imperative, it is a political one. No peace agreement can hold if people are too wounded to trust again.

The Case for Political Solutions

There is no substitute for politics. War, no matter how advanced the weaponry or noble the rhetoric, eventually finds itself dependent on political negotiation. 

If this is the inevitable destination, why not begin there?

Effective political solutions can include Inclusive dialogue where the Peace processes bring all stakeholders, especially marginalized and disenfranchised groups, to the table.

International mediation with Institutions such as the United Nations, the African Union, and neutral third-party nations can play robust roles in conflict resolution. 

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Take the Colombian Peace Accord of 2016, which ended decades of civil war with FARC rebels

Though not successful in its entirety, still it provides a good chance of open dialogue. Not everyone is in favour of these institutions, as they themselves have been a mute spectator in all the major wars of 20th and 21st century.

Truth commissions, reparations, and transitional justice systems can address past wrongs without resorting to violence. 

These justice mechanisms are still nascent but there are voices around to make involvement of peace makers more prevalent.

• युद्ध की भीषण कीमत: नागरिक और सैनिक, कब्रिस्तानों को आबाद करते हुए 

Take the Colombian Peace Accord of 2016, which ended decades of civil war with FARC rebels.

Though imperfect, it was a political achievement rooted in years of negotiation, amnesty provisions, rural reform, and inclusive policymaking. 

The durability of such peace hinges on the state’s commitment to fulfilling its promises, not on the barrel of a gun.

A Call for a New Global Ethics

Ultimately, the data and stories from Ukraine, Ethiopia, Myanmar, and beyond converge on one brutal fact: the modern world has not found a moral vocabulary strong enough to stop the killing of civilians.

Condemnations abound. Declarations are issued. Resolutions are passed. And yet, the bombs continue to fall. 

Gaza conflict has more paper piles of international condemnations than the piles of bodies buried. Yet, the world continues to witness the horrors of war there.

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We need journalism that does not only tally the dead but tells their stories

What we need is a new global ethic, one that centers the dignity and rights of ordinary people above the ambitions of political leaders.

We need journalism that does not only tally the dead but tells their stories.

We need governance structures that put humanitarian principles ahead of geopolitical convenience.

Above all, we need public pressure, from citizens, civil society, and voters, that insists war is not inevitable. That human lives are not expendable. 

That a child in Sana’a, Gaza is no less worthy of protection than a child in Kyiv or New York City.

War is not glorious. War is not cinematic. War is brutal, disproportionate, and most devastating for the poor.

The only real victors in modern warfare are defense contractors and politicians. 

The global military-industrial complex is now worth an astonishing $2.46 trillion, dwarfing even the pharmaceutical ($1.6 trillion) and oil ($750 billion) industries.

War today is about contracts, not conscience, about optics, not outcomes.

And even if we accept that violence is woven into the fabric of human history, we must also recognize that no political conflict has ever been truly solved by war.

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War today is about contracts, not conscience, about optics, not outcomes

Every modern war begets another crisis, another radicalization, another generation of grief.

What we are witnessing today across continents is not war in its classical sense. It is the collapse of human dignity. It is the unravelling of societies, the breaking of futures, and the silencing of dreams.

Unless the international community reorients its priorities, away from strategic dominance and towards human survival, the 21st century may well become as dark, if not darker, than the one that preceded it.

War is not an inevitability. It is a choice, sometimes made in fear, sometimes in arrogance, too often in ego.

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If humanity has the technology to colonize Mars, it has the capacity to resolve disputes without colonizing graveyards

In the 21st century, we must demand more from our leaders than impulse and pride. We must insist on the slow, imperfect, but just processes of political negotiation, diplomacy, and reconciliation.

If humanity has the technology to colonize Mars, it has the capacity to resolve disputes without colonizing graveyards.

Let us not wait for another million lives to be lost before we realise that true strength lies not in conquest, but in restraint. The future will judge us not by the wars we won, but by the peace we dared to build.

We must act, not just with urgency, but with compassion. Because if we cannot protect the innocent in times of war, then peace itself becomes a hollow word.