WORSE THAN WAR

Civil wars, interstate wars, and terrorism receive a great deal of media and policy attention, for good reasons. By contrast, the major forms of interpersonal violence – homicide, intimate partner violence, and severe physical punishment of children – generally have a much lower profile. In Worse than War, Anke Hoeffler and James Fearon assemble and analyse the data on the global prevalence and costs of collective and interpersonal violence. They show that interpersonal violence is vastly more widespread and imposes far greater societal costs than collective violence. Wars tend to be concentrated in a small number of countries, and often relatively small areas within them.