All the Wars

I don’t really know how to introduce this other than to say what it’s not. This is not a “you should care more about these people” post. It’s also not a “you should care less about those people” post. I don’t think there’s an easy prescription for how much you should care about people halfway across the world. It differs depending who you are, where you are in life, and how much human connection you feel to them. It differs depending on how affected you are, how affected your loved ones are, how affected your life could theoretically be. We’re not here to care-shame. Overall, though, I would say that as a society right now, the sort of people who read (and write) our sort of blog care more about stupid sociopolitical drama than we really want to, and we care less about people undergoing immense terror and death than we want to. We want to care more about our fellow people than we do. Instead, we get all fired up about Elon Musk, or about Hunter Biden, or about Meghan Markle.

So, here are the wars going on right now, along with the estimated number of people killed by them in 2022.

Information is taken from Wikipedia’s morosely convenient “List of ongoing armed conflicts.” Where the death toll has a range, we take the average. We round to the nearest thousand. We exclude conflicts with fewer than one thousand deaths in 2022. This list notably does not include the burgeoning civil war in Sudan, which appears likely to soon pass that thousand-death threshold and appears to be only in its very early stages.