Ever catch yourself scrolling social media or the news and feeling like there’s more conflict and violence than there used to be?
Well, that’s because there is. Not since the end of the Second World War have we seen so many armed conflicts raging around the globe at once. The Uppsala Conflict Data Program recorded 65 major armed conflicts in 2025, eight of them involving direct fighting between the armed forces of different states.
When the last global war ended in 1945, tens of millions lay dead, whole cities were reduced to rubble and economies were shattered. In response, we created the United Nations, military alliances, international law and economic integration—measures designed to resolve and settle conflicts before guns and bombs had to.
Of course, conflicts continued, some of them brutal, but fighting between major powers all but disappeared. For many people, especially in the West, this relative peace gave way to a dangerous illusion: that war is a primitive habit humanity is learning to outgrow. As it turns out, we’re still the same advanced apes, slaves to our basic instincts and capacity for violence. We just have access to smartphones, cryptocurrency and military drones.
Here are five factors that help explain why so much of the world—from Ukraine and Gaza to Ethiopia and Myanmar—is at war once again.
The World Order Is Changing
In 2023, researchers at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) counted just two active armed conflicts fought directly between states: Russia against Ukraine, and Iran against Israel. The latter may sound surprising, but many researchers have classified Iran-Israel as an interstate conflict since 2018 on the basis of Israeli attacks on Iranian military personnel and installations in Syria.
Two years later, there were eight—the highest number since 1946.
That sharp reversal coincides with a tectonic shift in the global order. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the U.S. enjoyed its so-called “unipolar moment” as the sole, undisputed world power. For the rest of the decade and well into the 2000s, America boasted unparalleled military and economic might along with enormous political and diplomatic leverage over the globe, while Russia endured its post-Soviet transformation and China was cultivating economic power of its own.
This hardly made the world peaceful, and America itself fought plenty of wars. It did, however, leave regional powers less room to pursue their ambitions. A government considering invading a neighbor or overturning an established border had fewer powerful patrons to turn to for weapons, money or diplomatic cover.
That lopsided arrangement is falling apart. America, under Donald Trump, is openly retreating from its role as global policeman to secure its dominance of the Western Hemisphere. Russia is openly challenging the European security order in Ukraine, China has become a second superpower that can offer countries an alternative economic and diplomatic pole, and increasingly assertive regional powers have more options for finding partners and resisting outside pressure.
Meanwhile, the institutions built to referee our conflicts are creaking. Rivalries among permanent members have increasingly hamstrung the U.N. Security Council, and no new U.N.-led peacekeeping mission has been created since 2014.
The rules have become easier to challenge and the punishment for breaking them less certain. For governments willing to gamble, war is looking like an attractive option again.
Local Wars Are Going Global
The same competition for influence that teases states into conflict with one another also pulls external powers into wars raging beyond their borders. Money, weapons and fighters pour in; refugees, economic disruption and instability spill back out.
Yemen is a perfect example. This broken nation is not only wracked by civil war, but has become a petri dish for larger regional players to achieve their own aims.
Saudi Arabia backs Yemeni government forces, while the UAE has supported factions of its own and Iran has spent years arming and assisting the Houthis. The rebel movement's ability to threaten commercial shipping through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait prompted repeated American and British airstrikes. Now the Houthis are directly striking Saudi infrastructure; their conflict has become intertwined with the wider U.S.-Israeli confrontation with Iran, and this relatively small, non-state actor retains outsized leverage over one of the world's busiest shipping routes.
Every new patron adds another set of interests to satisfy before the shooting can stop. A war that begins as a fight for political power in one country can rapidly become a much larger contest over resources, supply chains, trade routes and regional influence. This in turn compounds the damage inside already fragile states and creates the conditions for them to fracture even further.
The number of these internationalized, intrastate conflicts has increased 175 percent since 2010, according to the 2026 Global Peace Index.
Weak States Are Splintering
The 65 state-based conflicts that researchers in Uppsala recorded last year unfolded in just 35 countries. Many states are either fighting or playing host to several wars at once.
Myanmar is currently the battlefield of five separate conflicts. The military government is fighting the pro-democracy People's Defense Forces, alongside a patchwork of ethnic armed organizations, each with their own territory, leadership and political objectives.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is even more crowded. Government forces and loosely organized Wazalendo militias are facing off against the M23 rebel group. All of those players are battling the Allied Democratic Forces, whose name belies their connection to the Islamic State.
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This bleak trend stretches across Africa in both directions from the DRC. To the east, Sudan is experiencing one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises as a result of the ongoing civil war stoked by international players. Ethiopia’s shaky 2022 peace deal with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front has broken down, and troops from neighboring Eritrea have reportedly entered the conflict. Nearby Somalia is beset by a slow, grinding conflict between African Union-supported federal troops and the jihadist al-Shabaab insurgency.
Northwest of the DRC, Nigeria is contending with jihadist insurgencies, communal violence, separatist movements and heavily armed gangs, while the military juntas of Mali and Burkina Faso fight off al-Qaeda and Islamic State affiliates with the help of Russia’s state-controlled Africa Corps.
Militias, insurgent groups and even gangs now command enough firepower and funding to challenge government forces worldwide. That leads us to our next problem.
War Has Never Been Cheaper, or Easier
An airstrike that not long ago required a fighter jet or advanced missile system operated by several skilled soldiers can now be pulled off by a couple of militiamen armed with basic explosives and a commercial drone.
Cheap unmanned systems have leveled the playing field for armed groups that were previously limited to guerrilla warfare, and allow smaller military forces to resist far larger, more well-equipped adversaries. The Global Peace Index calculates that recorded drone attacks increased 11,540 percent between 2018 and 2025.
Much of that increase has been driven by Ukraine, whose armed forces and defense industry have mounted an incredible resistance built primarily around the rapid innovation, manufacturing and deployment of unmanned technology. Yemen's Houthis—a non-state movement in one of the world's poorest countries—now possess an aerial arsenal capable of striking energy infrastructure in one of the region's richest.
Drones are only part of it; AI is lowering the technical barrier even further. U.S. AI lab Anthropic revealed last month that users operating in Houthi-controlled northern Yemen had used its Claude system to write guidance and navigation software for guided rockets and proposed ballistic missiles. The company blocked most of the requests, but the users still managed to test-fire a prototype weapon and tried to use AI to troubleshoot its failure.
The development of blockchain and cryptocurrencies means money moves more easily, too. Chainalysis’ Crypto crime report has found that Iran-aligned groups, including Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis, have leveraged crypto to continue funding their activities despite military action and sanctions crippling traditional financial networks.
Weapons, expertise, communications and financing that were once the reserve of powerful militaries and wealthy nations are increasingly available off the shelf, or online.
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Politics Is Becoming Existential
Poverty and inequality alone are poor predictors of war; plenty of desperately unequal societies remain peaceful. But researchers find a much higher likelihood of conflict when inequality runs between identifiable groups divided by ethnicity, religion, region or political identity.
Grievances over access to political power, land, natural resources, security and justice exist everywhere, but become far more dangerous when one community comes to believe it is systematically losing out while another enjoys the spoils of power.
Ethiopia is among the clearest contemporary examples. The country is a federation built around distinct ethnolinguistic regions, with politics historically organized along many of the same lines. The Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) was the dominant force inside a political coalition that ruled Ethiopia from 1991 until 2018, even as Tigrayans made up a relatively small share of the population. Years of discontent, particularly in the much larger Oromo and Amhara regions, helped propel Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia's first Oromo prime minister, to power in 2018.
His arrival triggered the biggest redistribution of political capital in decades. Abiy reorganized the old ruling coalition into the Prosperity Party, which the TPLF refused to join, and when national elections were postponed during the pandemic in 2020, Tigray held its own vote in defiance of the prime minister.
Before long, the federal and regional governments began questioning each other’s legitimacy, and the bickering quickly devolved into a horrific two-year war that saw some 600,000 people killed. A 2022 ceasefire solved the fighting but not the underlying tension, and now the TPLF and Ethiopian government forces are at war once again.
When political, social and economic standing is tied to communal identity, losing power can mean losing place in the country.