Millions Have Died

this graph was created in OurDataWorld:

Many people live in countries that have been free from conflict for decades and have lived relatively safe lives as a result. But people in other countries have endured large-scale and long-term conflict. In countries like Syria, hundreds of thousands have died from conflict over recent decades, and millions more have been displaced.

People also experience very different types of conflict. Ukrainians endure a war with another country, Russia. Ethiopians suffer from conflicts between their government and rebel groups. Mexicans are caught between non-state armed groups while their government is absent. And Rwandans became the target of their government and non-state armed groups in the 1994 genocide.

To reduce the deaths and suffering caused by armed conflicts, we need to understand these differences. In this article, I explore where people die in armed conflicts, and what fighting this entails.
Breaking down conflict deaths by region and conflict type demonstrates which parts of the world are most affected and which forms of organized violence claim the most lives.

The chart shows the total number of conflict deaths for each region and conflict type.

More than half of conflict deaths since 1989 have occurred in Africa
The first bar shows that globally, an estimated 3.3 million people — combatants and civilians — died due to fighting in armed conflicts between 1989 (the first year for which data is available) and 2022.

This number comes from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), which uses news reports, other contemporary sources, and academic research to count the deaths in armed conflicts worldwide.1

The data does not include deaths due to disease and starvation resulting from conflicts, which can make the death toll much larger.

The chart’s second bar shows that more than half of these deaths occurred in Africa, where 1.7 million people were killed.

The Middle East and Asia were the next most affected regions, with approximately 650,000 and 570,000 deaths.

Europe and the Americas saw the fewest deaths, with around 210,000 and 170,000 deaths, respectively.2

You can explore the data by year in this chart.

When we consider that some regions have larger populations than others, we see that Africa and the Middle East have had the highest death rates: theirs are ten times higher than rates in other world regions.

A closer look at the countries with the highest number of deaths shows that almost 800,000 of the deaths occurred in Rwanda alone, followed by more than 400,000 in Syria and more than 320,000 in Afghanistan.3