At the century’s end, there were 120, and almost two-thirds of the people in the world could cast a meaningful ballot. As for the bloodshed and chaos that many people claim to see rising all around us, it just isn’t so. “War between countries is much less likely than ever and civil war is less likely than at any time since 1960,” Monty Marshall of George Mason University told The New York Times in 2005. A major study released later that year by the Human Security Centre at the University of British Columbia confirmed and expanded on that happy conclusion.
