Wars Since 1900 - Statistics
How many died of wars in the 20th and 21st centuries? The simple answer is that it is impossible to know. But these totals from my war database may give a hint of the magnitude of the death toll. Please note that these numbers only includes battle-related deaths (see the new faq for definitions) for the whole period. It does not include "excess" deaths from famine or disease. It partly includes onesided organized violence against civilians (incl. genocides, democides etc.) from 1989-2012 but only some of the major onesided atrocities before 1989. Please note that the list of wars from which these numbers are aggregated is a work in progress.
NEW! How many wars per nation in the 20th and 21st centuries? The list is further down.
Numbers of wars in the database: 268
Battle deaths, including civilans
Battle deaths, best: 76,193,824
Battle deaths, low: 71,937,721
Battle deaths, high: 116,489,136
Deaths from onesided violence (since 1989)
Onesided violence, best: 3,547,481
Onesided violence, low: 1,358,641
Onesided violence, high: 13,440,023
Battle-deaths in non-state wars (since 1989)
Non-state, best: 117,545
Non-state, low: 109,052
Non-state, high: 163,490
Sum of best estimations above
Total deaths: 79,858,850
This is aggregated "live" data which is updated whenever numbers for a single conflict are updated.
It's quite interesting to note that my stats compare quite well with Matthew White's estimate for military and collateral deaths in the 20th century, which he puts at 64 million.
NATIONS AND WARS (beta)
How many wars per nation in the 20th and 21st centuries? I often get the question how many wars a specific country have been involved in, and here's the list. DISCLAIMER: Please, take the list with a bushel of salt. See it as an indication rather than the truth. It's not free from errors. Information may be missing.
Also remember that this information is pretty random. Some wars are part of longer historical conflicts while wars with a long timespan may be a series of wars. It says little about the willingness of a nation to go to war.
My criteria for including a nation is if that nation had "troops on the ground" in a particular conflict (sending observers, training personell, sponsoring or financing the conflict don't count). Click a link to get to the wars for that nation.