More and more countries are democracies
In the 1970s, autocracies outnumbered democracies by a considerable margin. Soviet bloc countries were uniformly dictatorial, but the US didn't make democracy promotion a particular priority in the Cold War either, allying with a number of brutal dictatorships from South Korea to Chile to Greece. But after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Communist dictatorships almost all vanished, and most of the Eastern European ones were replaced with democratic systems. US-backed military governments in Latin America lost power, and a number of African dictators fell. The result was that in 2013, the average world Polity IV score — a measure used by political scientists to track the prevalence of democracy — was higher than it's ever been.
gave up their arms.