Will humankind ever learn to survive and coexist peacefully on this planet?

Google failed me this morning. It could not provide a precise answer to a simple question that had troubled me throughout the night.

I am not an alarmist. The Iranian missiles that still rain down on Gulf nations have not unnerved me. What truly unsettles me is a deeper question — whether humankind will ever learn to survive and coexist peacefully on this planet.

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That thought gives me shivers.

How many Trumps must the world endure in the ages to come? Will there still be a Trump in the time of my great-great-great grandchild?

Puzzled by a basic question—why humans remain perpetually hostile to one another—I tried to mine the Internet to know how many wars have been fought between 1960 and 2026, the span of my lifetime so far.

“How many wars have happened between 1960 and 2026?” I quizzed Google.

The truth is that the world has fought so many wars and conflicts, large and small, that even Google seemed to throw up its hands, unable to provide an exact number.

“Between 1960 and early 2026,” it said, “there have been hundreds, if not thousands, of armed conflicts worldwide — ranging from large-scale interstate wars to civil wars, proxy battles and regional uprisings.”

Still, it offered a revealing estimate. The number of active state-based conflicts each year between 1960 and 2024 has generally ranged from 30 to 60.

And as of early 2026, more than 120 armed conflicts are ongoing around the world, involving over 60 states and about 120 non-state armed groups across roughly 35 countries.

The search for a reliable number eventually leads to the Uppsala Conflict Data Programme, run by the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University, a public research university in Uppsala, Sweden. Founded in 1477, it is the oldest university in Sweden and in the Nordic countries.

My heart skipped a beat or two as I stared at Uppsala’s graphical chart of conflict fatalities across the globe. The world map looked like a body riddled with thousands of bullets, bleeding from every corner. Is this truly the place we call home?

And that brings me back to a question I have asked myself — and my parents and teachers — ever since I first began reading newspapers: Why do humans kill one another?

I grew up reading about the Cambodian genocide carried out by the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot, the civil wars in Peru, Angola, Liberia, Sudan and Ethiopia, the Soviet-Afghan war and the Vietnam War, to name just a few that come to mind. Newspapers seemed to almost glorify — more than chronicle — death. I kept quizzing my dad but my brain was too small to understand what he said about communism.

By then, my own country was slowly turning into a little killing field. People killed in the name of politics, in the name of religion, in the name of honour, in the name of love, in the name of colour, in the name of what you eat, what you wear, whom you befriend, and the language you speak.

Every death I handled in the newsroom — like a mortician at his table — hammered another nail into my faith in humanity.

Tens, dozens, hundreds, thousands…

The tally kept rising as I aged, and as civilisation marched on.

Communism, humanism, capitalism, socialism, fascism, liberalism — there has never been a shortage of isms or political philosophies. Yet the killing has never paused. The more educated humanity became, the more uncivilised and barbaric it often appeared.

My passage from campus to newsroom was abrupt. One day I was reading theories of civilisation and science; the next, I was counting bodies.

And the numbers never stopped coming.

I performed the editorial embalming of assassinated leaders — Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Olof Palme, Rafic Hariri, Benazir Bhutto, Yitzhak Rabin, Muammar Gaddafi, Ali Abdullah Saleh, Shinzo Abe, Ranasinghe Premadasa and many others — along with thousands of ordinary people killed across the globe in acts of terror and political or religious violence. Then there were the killings of figures such as Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, LTTE supremo Velupillai Prabhakaran and Iran’s spiritual leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei — deaths that are rarely called assassinations, often for the sake of political correctness.

Journalism, for me, has since become a never-ending funeral procession, with no pause for catharsis. My heart bleeds alongside the corpses that bleed.

Nearly 20,000 Gazan children killed since October 2023 in the Israeli assault on Gaza, and the 168 girls reportedly killed when an American Tomahawk missile struck Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab in southern Iran on February 28, will forever haunt the conscience of the world — and rob me of sleep.

Iran too bears its share of responsibility. Behaving at times like a rabid power, it lashes out beyond the battlefield. Showering missiles on neighbouring states that are not party to the conflict — killing innocent foreign workers and damaging vital installations — cannot be justified. Nor can blockading and mining one of the world’s most critical waterways, effectively punishing the entire global economy. When absolute power rests in the hands of a few narcissistic authoritarians indifferent to the human cost of war, the very progress of civilisation is put at risk. Science, technology, pragmatism and reason are pushed aside as collective punishment is inflicted on nations that fall outside their favour.

The consequences go far beyond the battlefield. Cuts in US aid alone risk causing more than 14 million preventable deaths in developing countries by 2030. A March 2026 study by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine warns that, in a worst-case scenario of tuberculosis funding cuts, more than 40 million households could face catastrophic health costs.

Why do they persist with such policies when the world already knows that aid cuts by wealthy nations are silent killers?

When nearly 33.7 million Sudanese — almost two-thirds of the population — require humanitarian aid in 2026, and about 6.5 million people in Somalia — roughly one-third of the population — face severe acute hunger, I find myself stepping into the shoes of photographer Kevin Carter.

His Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a starving Sudanese child, with a vulture waiting in the background, became both his triumph and his torment. Haunted by what he had witnessed — and perhaps by the world’s indifference to it — Carter took his own life a few months later, overwhelmed by despair and depression.

So I return to the basic question: Why do we keep killing one another, despite humans being among the most sociable creatures on the planet?

“It all goes back to our roots — to tribalism. Long before we left Africa, certain instincts evolved to keep us safe and thriving. One was suspicion of anyone we did not personally know; another was the defence of our family and food territory,” writes Nicola Bjork, a former nuclear engineering project administrator in the United States, on the platform Quora.

“In those days it was every man for himself, every tribe for itself. We fought for food and territory, we fought for power over weaker tribes, and we fought in defence. Humans have always fought — just as rival packs of wolves fight, territorial birds fight, rival prides of lions fight, and troops of monkeys fight — almost always over the same things: food, power and survival.

“Today’s political wars are about the same things, though often disguised as ideology, altruism or idealism. It is part of human nature, and it will always be with us, no matter how optimistically futurists paint a rosy, science-fiction vision of humanity.”

Perhaps he is right.

In the end it comes down to power, greed, suspicion — and the stubborn tribalism that still runs in our blood.

So to the generations yet to come — Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and beyond — there may be no easy escape.

Until I’m Done — A Gazan dream

Suresh Pattali

Let it rain, let it shine,

Let it hail, let it snow,

Let it breeze, let it blow—

Call me not until I’m done.

Let the Alps melt, the Aegean boil,

Let the Amazon burn, the Sahara sear,

Let the Eiffel fall, the Pisa lean—

Stop me not until I’m done.

Let spring pass, summer come,

Let the sun set, day break,

Let flowers bloom, leaves fall—

Miss me not until I’m done.

Let my food rot, sleep be lost,

Let hair fall, stubble grey,

Let fingers ache, heart burn—

Touch me not until I’m done.

Let my tears flow, sweat roll,

Let anger rise, agony swell,

Let words freeze, silence clot—

Calm me not until I’m done.

Let my body stoop, will grow faint,

Let soul sob, sores bleed,

Let steps sway, lungs wheeze—

Hug me not until I’m done.

Let my cries ring, wails surge,

Let eyes blur, ears fail,

Let lips quiver, skin fold—

Kiss me not until I’m done.

Love me not until the Gazans

Are free to live, learn and rest,

And kids play, pray, and plant 

Olives of love in their homeland.

The writer is executive editor of Khaleej Times

Written by

Suresh Pattali