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The decades since 1945 represent history's longest stretch without great-power war. Nuclear deterrence is the leading explanation — but close calls like the Cuban Missile Crisis reveal just how contingent that peace has been.

One of the most reliable empirical patterns in political science: democracies almost never fight each other. Democratic Peace Theory tries to explain why — and what happens when the theory meets messy reality.

Violence looks easy from the outside. Randall Collins spent decades studying it up close and found the opposite: most people freeze, bluster, or flee. The rare ones who don't follow a sociology, not a psychology.

Johan Galtung asked: if people are dying of preventable causes when the resources to save them exist, is that violence? His concept of structural violence — harm built into systems rather than wielded by individuals — reframed what counts as harm and who bears responsibility.

Steven Pinker says violence is down. Nassim Taleb says the math is wrong. When catastrophic events follow fat-tailed distributions, long stretches of calm tell you almost nothing about what's coming. This is a fight about statistics as much as history.

The data is surprising: per capita, you were far more likely to die violently in medieval Europe than in the 20th century's world wars. Steven Pinker's 'Better Angels' builds the empirical case that moral progress is real — and asks what's actually driving it.

The claim seems counterintuitive given the headlines: violence, measured properly, is at historic lows. But critics from Taleb to Gray argue the methodology is flawed and the lull is temporary. Here's what the best evidence actually shows.