Worse than War: The Global Costs of Violence

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 analyze 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. By contrast, almost all countries have rates of homicide and nonfatal assault, particularly of women and children, that far exceed the global average rates of death and injury in wars and terrorism.