However, the reality is that since the end of the Cold War, armed conflict and nearly all other forms of political violence have decreased. The world is far more peaceful than it was.
Why has this change attracted so little attention? In part because the global media give more coverage to wars that start than to those that quietly end, but also because no agency collects global or regional data on any form of political violence.
The Human Security Report, an independent study funded by five countries, presents a portrait of global security sharply at odds with conventional wisdom, revealing that after five decades of inexorable increase, the number of armed conflicts started to fall worldwide in the early 1990s. The decline has continued.
By 2003, there were 40 per cent fewer conflicts than in 1992. The deadliest conflicts - those with 1000 or more battle deaths - fell by some 80 per cent. The number of genocides and other mass slaughters of civilians also dropped by 80 per cent, while core human rights abuses have declined in five out of six regions of the developing world since the mid-1990s. International terrorism is the only type of political violence that has increased.
What accounts for the extraordinary improvement in global security over the past dozen years? The end of the Cold War, which had driven at least a third of all conflicts since World War II, appears to have been the single most critical factor.
In the late 1980s, Washington and Moscow stopped fuelling "proxy wars" in the developing world, and the United Nations was liberated to play the global security role its founders intended. Freed from the paralysing stasis of Cold War geopolitics, the Security Council initiated unprecedented activism designed to stop ongoing wars and prevent new ones.
The number of UN peacekeeping operations and missions to prevent and stop wars have increased by more than 400 per cent since the end of the Cold War. As this upsurge of international activism grew in scope and intensity through the 1990s, the number of crises, wars and genocides declined.
There have been some horrific and much publicised failures - the failures to stop genocide in Rwanda, Srebrenica and Darfur being the most egregious. But the quiet successes - in Namibia, El Salvador, Mozambique, Eastern Slovenia, East Timor and elsewhere - went largely unheralded.
A study by the Rand Corp found that UN peace-building operations had a two-thirds success rate. What the UN calls "peacemaking" - using diplomacy to end wars - has been even more successful. About half of all the peace agreements negotiated between 1946 and 2003 have been signed since the end of the Cold War.
In the wake of the global summit at the UN in September, many critics wrote the UN off as an institution so deeply flawed that it was beyond salvation. The analysis and the carefully collated data in the Human Security Report reveal something very different: an organisation that, despite its failures and creaking bureaucracy, has played a critical role in enhancing global security.
The Washington Post
Andrew Mack was director of the strategic planning unit in the executive office of the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, between 1998 and 2001.