We may be living through one of the most dangerous moments in modern history. In 2024, the number of armed conflicts across the world reached a historic high, according to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program at Uppsala University. The war in Ukraine alone caused around 76,000 battle-related deaths that year. In West Asia, violence involving Gaza and clashes with Hezbollah in Lebanon accounted for tens of thousands of casualties, many of them civilians.With the Iran war, the list of flash points continues to grow.
In a world where conflict increasingly feels normalised, the tragedy is not merely the loss of life; it is the numbing of our collective conscience. That is why anti-war literature matters. It restores the human face to conflict and reminds us of a simple truth: war should always be the last resort of humanity, never its first instinct.
Few books have shaken the world’s conscience like 'Hiroshima' by John Hersey. First published in 1946 in The New Yorker, it is widely regarded as one of the most influential works of twentieth-century journalism. John, instead of analysing military strategy or political justification, offers a different lens: six ordinary survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. John wrote with remarkable restraint, in almost clinical prose, and yet it was precisely this that made the horror unbearable.
Long before modern wars filled our television screens, Mark Twain wrote a short piece that remains disturbingly relevant today: 'The War Prayer'. Written around 1904, the story unfolds inside a church where a congregation’s prayer for victory in battle is interrupted by a mysterious stranger who calmly explains that if they pray for their soldiers to triumph, they are unwittingly praying for the enemy’s young men to die, for their homes to burn, for their mothers to grieve and their children to starve. Every prayer for victory contains an unspoken prayer for destruction.
War is not always fought with armies. Sometimes it grows quietly within societies — through fear, memory, and the stories we tell ourselves about identity. 'In The Shadow Lines', Amitav Ghosh explores this unsettling idea with extraordinary subtlety. At the heart of the novel lies a haunting metaphor: “shadow lines” – the borders drawn by politics and history, lines that divide people who once shared language, culture, and memories.
'The Things They Carried' by Tim O'Brien is a modern classic about the Vietnam War. O’Brien writes about what soldiers carry into battle – physical objects and mementos such as photographs and letters from home, and also the invisible weight of fear, guilt, and longing. War becomes a psychological burden that soldiers endure long after the guns fall silent.
A more recent book is 'Gaza: The Story of a Genocide' edited by Fatima Bhutto and Sonia Faleiro. A joint investigation by The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call revealed that 83 per cent of the dead in Gaza were civilians. In 2024, UNICEF compared two sets of numbers of known child amputees – in Ukraine after two years of war, and Gaza after two months. In Ukraine, 30 cases; in Gaza, 1,000 – the largest group of child amputees in modern history.
Fatima and Sonia present 20 contributions from a wide range of Palestinian perspectives on the world’s first live-streamed “genocide” – a term Israel and its allies continue to dispute although Amnesty International presents indisputable facts about how Israel has imposed conditions of life calculated to wipe out Palestinians in Gaza.
Anti-war literature does not end wars, it refuses to let us look away. In times of conflict, propaganda simplifies reality into heroes and villains, victories and losses. Literature complicates that narrative. It asks uncomfortable questions. Most importantly, it restores empathy.
Perhaps the most radical act in an age of conflict is simply to read, to feel, to refuse indifference, and to recognise that every war, no matter how it begins, eventually becomes a story of loss.