By Gustavo de Arístegui, as published by LA RAZÓN.
28 October 2025
The World Is Multibelic, Not Multipolar
The paradox of 61 conflicts in a metastasizing international community
Gustavo de Arístegui
The Second World War caused approximately 85 million deaths, according to the United Nations (20 million soldiers and 60–65 million civilians), and 100 million displaced persons, according to National Geographic. By contrast, since 1945, the cumulative number of victims of all subsequent conflicts—including those in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, or the civil wars in Lebanon, Syria, and more recently Ukraine—amounts to barely 5% of that total.
The international order that emerged in 1945, underpinned by the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)and permanent nuclear deterrence, has been largely responsible for preventing the self-destruction of the world. This does not mean, however, that the world has lived in peace.
On the contrary, while we have dramatically reduced the number of victims caused by humanity’s innate tendency toward war, we have almost exponentially multiplied the number of conflicts. This is, in itself, the great paradox of the 21st century.
While we may applaud the drastic reduction in human casualties, it would be immoral to ignore the instability, cruelty, and expansion of the 59–61 conflicts currently ravaging humanity. These conflicts could well become the sparks that ignite an apocalyptic global conflagration of regional wars, ultimately culminating in new world wars.
The paradox we face is real, cold, and terrifying. For decades, we lived under the influence of a school of thought popularized by academics such as Steven Pinker, who argued that thanks to the Enlightenment, reason, and commerce, human violence was in irreversible historical decline.
The data from the Second World War, compared with the post-1945 era, seemed to confirm this optimistic view. However, this complacency has blinded us to a far subtler and more dangerous mutation of conflict. We have confused the absence of a Third World War with peace.
The reality—documented by institutions such as the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP)—is that in 2024 the world registered 61 active armed conflicts. This is not merely a figure; it is a historic record. Never before, not even in 1946, had so many conflicts been recorded simultaneously. What we are witnessing is not peace, but the metastasis of war.
The character of conflict has shifted from large, concentrated wars (such as the Second World War) to dozens of smaller, prolonged conflicts, extending throughout the geopolitical body and consuming enormous political, economic, and human energy.
Political scientist Mary Kaldor coined the term “New Wars” to describe this phenomenon: conflicts that blur the boundaries between peace and war; involving state actors (regular armies and militias), terrorist groups, and global criminal networks; financed through transnational illicit economies; where the objective is no longer classical military victory but control of populations through terror and economic predation.
These 61 conflicts are, for the most part, “new wars”: civil wars, insurgencies, counterterrorism campaigns, and wars against organized crime that have revived dynamics we believed had been buried with the horrors of the Holocaust. We have accepted a permanent state of war as the background “noise” of civilization.
Anatomy of the Inferno
To understand the gravity of the situation, we must dissect the map of horror. Although the overall number is alarming due to its scale, the intensity is concentrated in a core group of conflicts whose lethality rivals that of conventional wars.
1. The return of Clausewitz (conventional war).
The Russo-Ukrainian war (more than 77,000 deaths in 2024 alone; over 250,000 military casualties and 100,000–150,000 Ukrainian civilian deaths) represents the return of the 19th century to haunt Europe. It is a war of territorial conquest, attrition, and industrial-scale violence that has shattered the illusion of perpetual peace.
2. State failure.
Sudan’s civil war (more than 16,500 deaths annually) is a Hobbesian war of all against all, driven by the struggle for control of resources within a collapsed state, contested between rebel forces and the RSF (the infamous and brutal Rapid Support Forces).
3. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
A conflict without precedent in its duration, and with unprecedented figures since 2023 (more than 30,000 deaths in 2024). It is the archetype of modern conflict, combining conventional warfare (Israel), terrorist actions (Hamas), and regional proxy warfare (Hezbollah, Houthi militias, Iraqi militias), threatening to drag the entire Middle East into chaos.
4. Jihadist metastasis (transnational war).
International terrorism in the Sahel (more than 20,000 deaths in 2024) does not remain confined within national borders. It spreads across a dozen countries (Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Chad…). This war against terrorist organizations such as ISWAP-Daesh and Al-Qaeda (Boko Haram) erases colonial borders and thrives in power vacuums.
5. The hell of Myanmar’s civil war (more than 19,000 deaths annually), one of the quintessential “forgotten wars.”
6. The wars of the African Great Lakes.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi. This region has endured almost uninterrupted violence since 1996. The 1994 genocide alone claimed between 600,000 and one million lives, followed by the Congo wars (1994–1998 and 1998–2003), with over 5.4 million deaths. These chronic conflicts are driven by ethnic divisions but, above all, by competition for resources vital to Western and Chinese technological revolutions.
7. The collapse of civilization (ethnic war).
Ethiopia’s civil war, which recently ended after causing more than 100,000 deaths in 2024 alone, remains unresolved in regions such as Amhara and Oromia, revealing the fragility of multi-ethnic states.
8. Narco-states and narco-terrorism (the war of the 21st century).
Mexico’s drug war (more than 11,000 deaths annually), along with Colombia, represents a new type of conflict. It is neither ideological nor religious; it is a war for territorial control waged by brutal cartels with greater firepower than national armies, destroying state sovereignty from within.
Of the eight most lethal conflicts, only two dominate headlines; the remaining 53 remain invisible. This is the paradox of the 21st century: the true metastasis of violence occurs where we least look.
We Are Not Witnessing Peace, but the Metastasis of War
Power has shifted from states to non-state actors in the 21st century.
Today, terrorist groups, drug cartels, and criminal militias can acquire drones, sophisticated weapons, and global financing networks with an ease unimaginable thirty years ago. The result is a world with 61 conflicts that, while unlikely to trigger nuclear apocalypse, will devastate entire regions for decades.
These are not isolated outbreaks, but metastatic nodes: the Sahel, Colombia, parts of Mexico, Gaza, Haiti, Port-au-Prince, and many others function as proliferating Petri dishes for terrorism, organized crime, and instability.
Here we return to the initial warning: these 61 “sparks” are not isolated. They are interconnected. We have numbed ourselves to a world burning slowly from within. This is the perfect and terrifying contradiction of the new wars.
The real danger of this metastasis is that these local conflicts are gradually becoming the chessboard of a new great-power competition. The world is multibelic, not multipolar: if allowed to continue, these conflicts will become the prelude to the next global conflagration.
Since 1945, the great powers have prioritized stability above all else—even at the cost of injustice. The result has not been geopolitical stability, but chronic chaos. We have committed the irreparable error of accepting metastasis as the price to avoid global war, without understanding that it is the ideal breeding ground for the next one.
As Henry Youngman once quipped about the Cadillac:
“We’re not watching how it’s being driven; we’re discovering—too late—that we’re all riding in it.”
Photo caption
A Sudanese soldier raises his hand next to a destroyed building following fighting in southern Omdurman.