The Waning of War is Real: A Response to

A number of recent studies argue that there is decline in armed conflict within and between nations. Gohdes and Price run against the grain in arguing that there is no evidence for a decrease in battle deaths in armed conflicts after World War II and that the trend reported in our earlier articles is spurious. However, they do not plausibly justify this thesis. We reexamine the argument for a decline, exploring nonlinearities in the data and potential biases due to measurement error. We find that very strong assumptions must hold in order for measurement errors to explain the trend in battle deaths. Keywords War death, battle death, conflict trend, conflict data Several high-profile books have recently argued that both civil and interstate con-flicts are in decline (Goldstein 2011; HSRP 2011; Pinker 2011).1 Such trends in con-flict are of much wider interest than an esoteric academic dispute about data. Thus, it is important, for both theory and policy, that flawed analysis not be allowed t