On: How We Learned to Kill

[meric]

If that's true, I'd mark the start date for such a period at the end of the Cultural Revolution.

List of conflicts with over 1 million deaths:

        1850-1864 Taiping Rebellion: 20 million deaths.
        1914-1918 World War 1: 37 million deaths.
        1917-1922 Russian Civil war: 9 million deaths.
        1928-1936 Chinese Civil War: 2 million deaths
        1937-1945 Second Sino-Japanese War: ~25 million deaths.
        1939-1945 World War 2: 60 million deaths.
        1945-1949 Chinese Civil War: 6 million deaths.
        1950-1953 Korean War: 4 million deaths.
        1966-1971 Chinese Cultural Revolution: 30 million deaths.
        1955-1975 Vietnam War: 3 million deaths.
        1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War: 1 million deaths.
        1998-2003 Second Congo War 1-5 million deaths.

Defining a non-violent period as "a period in which there are no conflicts with more than 1 million deaths",

The previous violent period lasted from 1914 to 1971. The current non-violent period has lasted 54 years since 1971. The previous non-violent period close to this long lasted from 1864 to 1914, which is 50 years.

Sure, as the world population grew, the size of conflicts haven't been growing to match, but in absolute terms I think there is good chance there will be at least several million+ deaths conflicts upcoming in the current century.

[bjelkeman-again → meric]

Looking at those numbers, I hadn't realised that from the Chinese civil war [1928] to the Korean War [1953], which is nearly a historical continuum, adds up to nearly 100 million deaths.

[dredmorbius → meric]

Your 54 year period since 1971 would account for Japan's lost decade of productivity.

Though I suspect an arithmetic error.