We live in violent times

Saturday 28 February 2026

We flatter ourselves that we inhabit an enlightened age. We possess instantaneous communications, international institutions, the rhetoric of universal human rights, and arsenals capable of annihilating civilisation in a single afternoon. Yet the headlines speak of invasion and insurgency, massacre and repression, cities reduced to rubble and families scattered across continents. One cannot easily escape the impression that we live in violent times.

But are we uniquely violent? Or does our sense of living at the edge of catastrophe derive from other, subtler forces — technological, political and psychological — that amplify every act of brutality into a global spectacle?

To ask why we live in violent times is not to surrender to fatalism. It is to examine the conditions that make violence recurrent, contagious and, in certain contexts, politically rewarding.

The erosion of post-Cold War illusions

In 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, many in Europe persuaded themselves that large-scale war on the continent had been banished to history. The European Union expanded; NATO expanded; markets integrated; supply chains intertwined. War appeared economically irrational. It was assumed that interdependence would tame ambition.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 shattered that illusion. When Russia crossed the border into a sovereign neighbour, she demonstrated that economic rationality does not necessarily restrain imperial grievance. The language of civilisation coexisted comfortably with artillery.

Similarly the attacks by Hamas upon Israel on 7 October 2023 — and the devastating war in Gaza that followed — revealed that unresolved historical traumas do not fade simply because they are diplomatically inconvenient. In both theatres, violence was not an aberration; it was the instrument through which political objectives were pursued when other avenues were exhausted or distrusted.

The post-Cold War order did not eliminate violence; it suppressed it in certain geographies while outsourcing it to others. Conflicts in Syria, Yemen, the Sahel and Myanmar did not feel central to European consciousness — until refugee flows, terrorism, and geopolitical rivalry made them impossible to ignore. Violence did not vanish. It relocated.

Technology without moral restraint

We live in an era in which the tools of violence have become simultaneously more precise and more accessible. A commercial drone can be adapted into a weapon. A cyber-attack can disable infrastructure without a single shot fired. Artificial intelligence can identify targets at speeds beyond human cognition.

Yet technology does not create violence; it accelerates and scales it. The ethical frameworks required to govern these tools lag behind their deployment. International humanitarian law was drafted for a world of uniformed armies and clearly demarcated battlefields. Contemporary conflict unfolds in hybrid forms — cyber operations, sabotage, disinformation, deniable militias — where attribution is murky and accountability elusive.

Moreover violence has become performative. A drone strike filmed from above, a missile impact captured by a mobile telephone, a hostage video broadcast on social media — all are designed not merely to defeat an enemy but to shape narratives. In this sense violence is no longer confined to territory; it occupies the psychological space of millions.

Political incentives for brutality

Violence persists because, for certain actors, it works.

Authoritarian regimes often rely upon repression as a mechanism of survival. A leadership that fears electoral defeat or elite fragmentation may discover that external war consolidates internal unity. National humiliation, whether real or constructed, can be used as a tool to justify expansion or retaliation.

In fragile states armed groups may calculate that violence yields bargaining power. The spectacle of disruption attracts attention. Attention attracts leverage. Leverage attracts concessions.

Even democratic societies are not immune. Polarised politics can normalise aggressive rhetoric. When language becomes dehumanising, the threshold for physical violence lowers. The assault upon democratic institutions — whether through insurrection, targeted intimidation, or systemic disinformation — constitutes a form of violence against the constitutional order itself.

Economic anxiety and demographic strain

The early twenty-first century has been marked by profound economic dislocation. Globalisation generated wealth, but unevenly. Regions ruined by deindustrialisation have experienced resentment and alienation. Youth bulges in parts of Africa and the Middle East confront limited employment opportunities. Climate change intensifies resource scarcity, displacing populations and fuelling competition over land and water.

In such contexts violence can appear as a distorted form of agency. Armed movements promise dignity to those who feel excluded. Nationalist leaders promise restoration to those who perceive decline. The language of grievance becomes combustible when combined with economic precariousness.

Climate change, in particular, acts as a threat multiplier. Drought contributes to rural collapse; rural collapse contributes to urban instability; instability contributes to radicalisation. While climate does not cause war in isolation, it interacts with existing tensions in ways that make violence more likely.

The psychology of permanent crisis

Perhaps what distinguishes our age is not the quantity of violence but its visibility. Through social media and twenty-four-hour news cycles, we experience wars in real time. Images from Kharkiv, Gaza City or Khartoum appear on our screens alongside domestic political scandals and celebrity gossip. The juxtaposition is disorienting.

This saturation creates a sense of omnipresent danger. It also risks desensitisation. When every week brings a new outrage, outrage becomes routine. The moral shock that once accompanied mass violence dulls.

At the same time, algorithmic platforms reward emotional intensity. Anger travels faster than nuance. Conspiracy travels faster than correction. The architecture of contemporary information systems amplifies polarisation — and polarisation, in turn, makes compromise appear as weakness.

A multipolar world without stable rules

The relative stability of the Cold War rested upon a paradox: two superpowers with existential weapons were cautious because they feared mutual destruction. Today’s emerging multipolarity lacks that clarity. The United States, China, Russia, the European Union, India and regional powers pursue overlapping ambitions. Alliances are fluid. Red lines are ambiguous.

In such an environment miscalculation becomes more probable. Limited wars risk escalation. Proxy conflicts proliferate. Sanctions regimes fragment global trade into rival blocs.

When institutions fail to mediate disputes effectively, states revert to coercion. The United Nations Security Council, paralysed by vetoes, struggles to respond to major crises. International law remains powerful as a normative framework, but weak as an enforcement mechanism.

Violence in this context becomes a language — a means of signalling resolve where diplomacy appears stalled.

Are we truly more violent?

It is worth remembering that the twentieth century witnessed two world wars, the Holocaust, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, genocides in Armenia, Cambodia and Rwanda, and innumerable civil wars. By some statistical measures interstate war has declined since 1945.

Yet statistics cannot fully capture the qualitative experience of insecurity. The diffusion of lethal capability to non-state actors, the erosion of clear battlefronts and the entanglement of civilian infrastructure in military strategy create a pervasive sense of vulnerability.

We live in violent times not necessarily because violence is unprecedented, but because it is intimate. It intrudes into our homes via screens. It disrupts global supply chains. It influences elections. It migrates.

What is to be done?

If violence is sustained by grievance, opportunity and impunity, then its reduction requires addressing all three.

Grievance must be mitigated through inclusive economic policies and credible political representation.

Opportunity must be constrained through effective arms control, cyber norms and technological governance.

Impunity must be challenged through international accountability mechanisms and domestic rule of law.

None of this is simple. None offers immediate relief. But the alternative — resignation — concedes the terrain to those who treat violence as destiny.

We do not live in uniquely violent times. We live in an era in which violence is visible, technologically enhanced and politically instrumentalised. The task is not to lament modernity but to discipline it — to ensure that power, however amplified by innovation, remains subject to law and conscience.

Violence is a human choice. So too is restraint.