The world is more violent than at any point since 1945. The numbers are not ambiguous.
A new report from the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), drawing on figures from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program at Uppsala University, has documented 65 state-based armed conflicts in 2025, the highest number recorded in a single year since World War II. The previous record was set in 2024. The record before that was set in 2023. The trend line is heading in one direction only.
The report, published Tuesday, also found that approximately 244,600 people were killed in battle in 2025, making it the third deadliest year since the end of the Cold War. Only 1994, the year of the Rwandan genocide, and 2021, when the war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region reached its peak, were worse.
“This year it’s shocking, the numbers,” said Siri Aas Rustad, a PRIO researcher who worked on the study.
The headline number, 65 state-based conflicts, includes everything from full-scale interstate wars to internal civil conflicts in which at least one state is a party. The number of interstate conflicts doubled from 2024 to eight, with India and Pakistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Cambodia and Thailand joining the existing list of state-on-state wars, which includes Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
But the more troubling finding is the complexity. Some 35 countries were involved in fighting in 2025, but less than half of them were fighting only one conflict at a time. Israel, the report notes, was simultaneously party to conflicts in Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and against the Houthi rebels in Yemen. The country was fighting five distinct armed conflicts at once.
“This trend points to a growing complexity in conflict dynamics, with more actors involved, which has important implications for how we analyze and respond to conflict,” the report said.
The geographic spread is equally stark. Africa was the continent most affected by state-based conflict in 2025, followed by Asia, the Middle East, the Americas, and Europe. The PRIO/UCDP data breaks organized violence into three categories: state-based conflicts, non-state conflicts such as intercommunal violence, and one-sided violence against civilians. The numbers across all three categories are rising.
The one-sided violence category, violence deliberately directed at civilians, reached its highest level in Africa since the Rwandan genocide, driven largely by massacres in El Fasher, Sudan, where the Rapid Support Forces and allied militias have been waging a brutal campaign against civilians in the Darfur region. The RSF’s siege of El Fasher, capital of North Darfur, has claimed thousands of civilian lives since fighting erupted in 2023.
The report does not offer predictions. It does not need to. The data speaks for itself: the world is entering a period of sustained, elevated conflict that has no modern parallel. The post-Cold War peace dividend is gone. The era of great-power competition, proxy wars, and failing states has produced a security environment in which violence is not an aberration but a baseline condition.
For Europe, the war in Ukraine remains the dominant concern. The conflict has now been running for over three years, with no end in sight and battle deaths continuing to mount. But the PRIO data also shows that Europe’s relative stability is an exception: while the continent has seen a sharp increase in defense spending and NATO force posture changes, it remains the least conflict-affected region in the world.
The Middle East, by contrast, has become a violence-generating engine running on multiple cylinders. The Iran war, the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, the Israel-Hezbollah confrontation in Lebanon, the Houthi campaign in the Red Sea, and the continuing instability in Syria and Yemen have turned the region into a single sprawling battlefield where local conflicts routinely escalate into regional ones.
The fact that the report covers only 2025 means it does not capture the Apache helicopter downing over the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. strikes on Iran that followed, or the Israel-Iran missile exchange of the past weekend. Those events belong to 2026, and they will appear in next year’s numbers as further entries in the same ledger.
The PRIO report is a catalog, not a verdict. But the catalog tells a story that no amount of diplomatic language can soften: there are more wars, involving more countries, killing more people, than at any time in the last 80 years. And the trend shows no sign of reversing.