Dan Smith - The State of the World Atlas: Tenth Edition

The State of the World Atlas is something else an occasion of wit and an act of subversion These are the bad dreams of the modern world, given color and shape and submitted to a grid that can be grasped instantaneously. The New York Times Unique and uniquely beautiful ... a discerning eye for data and a flair for the most sophisticated techniques of stylized graphic design; the atlas succeeds in displaying the geopolitical subtleties of global affairs in a series of dazzling color plates tells us more about the world today than a dozen statistical abstracts or scholarly tomes. Los Angeles Times Coupled with an unusual non-distorting map projection and a series of brilliant cartographic devices, this gives a positively dazzling set of maps. It deserves to be widely used. New Society A super book that will not only sit on your shelf begging to be used, but will also be a good read. To call this book an atlas is like calling Calvados, applejack it may be roughly accurate, but it conveys nothing of the richness and flavour of the thing. Its inventive brilliance deserves enormous rewards. New Scientist Outspoken cataloguing of global oppressions and inequities, painstakingly sourced. The Independent on Sunday Packed with fascinating facts and figures on everything from the international drugs industry to climate change. Evening Standard A political reference book which manages to translate hard, boring statistics into often shocking visual statements ... required reading. NME

PENGUIN BOOKS THE STATE OF THE WORLD ATLAS Dan Smith OBE is the Director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and has been writing on peace and security for forty years. He has held fellowships at the Norwegian Nobel Institute and Hellenic Foundation for Foreign and European Policy and chaired the Advisory Group for the UN Peacebuilding Fund and the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. He was awarded an OBE in 2002 and blogs at dansmithsblog.com.

the State of the World atlas tenth edition dan Smith PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhouse.com This tenth edition first published in Penguin Books 2021 Copyright 2020 by Myriad Editions Limited Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.Previous edition published under the title Produced for Penguin Books by Myriad Editions, An imprint of New Internationalist Publications, The Old Music Hall, 106108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JE, United Kingdom LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Maps and graphics copyright Myriad Editions Limited, 2020T.p. verso. | Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 9780525506737 (kindle edition) | ISBN 9780525506744 (nook edition) ISBN 9780143135074 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525506720 (ebook) | DDC 912dc23 Based on an original design by Caroline Beavon

Contents Introduction Who we are 13 Rights 65 and respect War and 95 peace and militia Health of the planet 167 Sources 198 Wealth and 41 poverty Health of 133 the people Index 207

Introduction The first step in trying to understand the state of the world is to recognize the simple yet not-so-simple fact that the world is always changing. Big or small, sudden or slowly building, soon over or with a lasting impact, alterations in the situation and condition of the world and its people are constant. A lot of that change is progress of one sort or another. Some of what we sometimes call progress is of little worth or merit useless technological baubles that are modish for a while. And some of it when seen in larger context is downright dangerous a contribution to global heating or the crisis of air pollution. But in even larger context, human progress is real. More people live longer, healthier lives than ever. Fewer live in extreme poverty than 20 or 30 years ago. The store of human knowledge continues to enlarge. Human rights are respected now in a way that was not dreamed of 200 years ago. And in the first two decades of the 21st century, warfare has taken far fewer human lives than it did in the first two decades of the 20th.Amid multiple world problems and perhaps especially writing in 2020 as we wonder what the full effects of the Covid-19 pandemic will be the point is worth stressing. Human progress has been real over the last century and a half, despite world wars, despite colonialism, despite environmental crises. It has been real and because of that we know that further progress is possible.It is important to hang onto that because it is also true that a lot of the change we experience is not progress at all. If progress is a journey, it is not about rolling along a smooth path or gliding through space. It is more like lurching in and out of massive potholes in the road or, if you prefer the space metaphor, from one big astral collision to another, juddering all the while under the impact of an unending, randomized shower of meteorites. One thing that matters in trying to understand the state of the world and gauge its progress or regress at any time is to distinguish between the big collisions and the meteorites.The past 30 years the passage of time normally associated with one human generation has seen four big moments of change, approximately once a decade. The first came in the years 1989 to 1991, as the Cold War between East and West, between the USSR and its allies on the one side, and the USA and its much richer and larger alliance on the other, came to an end. Not

only did the confrontation between the USSR and USA terminate but so also the USSR itself. As the 1990s began, the world order changed, along with the possibilities for what the United Nations could do. Agreements were reached to dismantle tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, military spending started to fall, and the number of countries with a functioning democracy grew throughout the decade. It was not by any means painless. The transition to democracy is often fraught with danger and the first half of the 1990s saw an increase in the number of armed conflicts. The second big change came in 2001 in the York and Washington, DC. The peace dividend of the 1990s started to look less peaceful, the long war in Afghanistan that had begun with the Soviet invasion in December 1979 took on a new form as the USA and its allies intervened, and at the same time headed towards war on and then in Iraq. The third change was the financial crash of 2008 to 2009, which became a general economic crisis in 2009 and 2010. The depth of the crash was different in different countries; economic output recovered but in many of the richer countries in the world, the sense of economic well-being that marked most of the previous two decades has gone for good.And the fourth big change has come with the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 not just the pandemic itself but the economic impact associated with it. At the time of completing this atlas in mid-2020, it is not possible to know what the full impact will be. Though we live in an age that wants instant everything, it remains true that historical significance can only be gauged once the event is well in the past. And even then it is an art rather than a science to understand what it all meant. Nonetheless, the economic impact of the Covid-19 lockdowns the crash in production, consumption, trade and travel even though in some aspects recovery may also be equally dramatic, seems likely to be profound and long-lasting.These events have had a dramatic and lasting impact (or will do in the case of the current pandemic) not simply because of their sheer weight as big events, but also because they interact with other, slower-moving combinations of events. These are the unfolding trends that form the backdrop to the immediate drama. Here we encounter issues such as climate change and todays many-sided environmental crisis. Here is rising inequality in most countries over the past 40-plus years, demographic developments including both population growth and, more important than the global numbers, where it is concentrated and urbanization. We see economic growth and seemingly unending technological innovation. And relations between people change, with something closer to gender equality in many countries, with greater acceptance of the rights of LGBTQ+ people, with assumptions about freedoms and responsibilities altering, and with contestation about the rights of different races and ethnic and religious groups within a country.