Rachel Kleinfeld - A Savage Order: How the World’s Deadliest Countries Can Forge a Path to Security

Three kinds of carnage kill four times as many people as the battle deaths in all current wars put together.

VIOLENT DEATHS IN 2016 BY CAUSE

(Dotted lines indicate severely underreported statistics.)

With a handful of exceptions, the most violent countries in the world today are not at war but are buckling under a maelstrom of gang warfare, organized crime, state brutality, and murders by paramilitaries, death squads, and ordinary people. This is the violence devastating Central America, the cocktail that has made Venezuela the most deadly country in the world. It adds to the death toll in some countries formally in conflict like Afghanistan and creates fertile soil for terrorists like ISIS. War grabs the headlines. But the security problem of our time is boiling over from countries caught in a vortex of internal violence.

Violence devastates lives and destroys countries. Its effects can last for generations. In Central America, children get recruited to join gangs or are raped by gang members starting at around age thirteen. Altered genes, of course, can be passed to future generations.

The United States has a particular interest in this problem. In 2011, New Orleanss homicide rate (the number of deaths per 100,000) was on par with the rate for all violent death in Afghanistan. The U.S. homicide rate remains four to five times higher than that of Australia, Canada, or Europe. Americans like to imagine that our gang warfare, police brutality, and inner-city predation stand apart from the problems faced by developing countries. But they are far more similar than we like to admit.

Violence feels like an intractable problem. That sense of hopelessness has altered global politics. Over half a century ago, creative leaders forged the European Union to unite a continent where two world wars had killed millions; now, the idea of European world war is unimaginable. Fifty years ago, the United States sent men to the moon. Today, we send women and children back to countries where they are being hunted by gangs.

Every country for itself, demands the new Western zeitgeist. Refugees fleeing violence, from Central America to the Middle East, are igniting political backlash on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, neither the more militaristic policies of President George W. Bush nor the lighter touch of Barack Obama have been able to stanch the bleeding around the globe. Indeed, both tactics poured fuel on the conflagration. Europes leaders have done no better. Crowded schools, strained public services, and fears about immigration and Islam have fueled movements to shut down borders. Britains Brexit is a nostalgic demand for a return to a little England that hasnt existed for decades. The leader of the rising Alternative for Germany party declared that border guards might need to aim their guns on illegal frontier crossers. Austrias Freedom Party, which campaigned under the slogan Austria First, is part of the governing coalition in charge of the Defense, Interior, and Foreign Ministries. It demands tighter borders just as Americas president calls for higher walls.