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STRESS OF WAR, CONFLICT AND DISASTER

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STRESS OF WAR, CONFLICT AND DISASTER Editor-in-Chief

GEORGE FINK

Professorial Research Fellow (formerly Director) Mental Health Research Institute of Victoria Parkville, Melbourne, Victoria Australia Formerly Director, MRC Brain Metabolism Unit Edinburgh, Scotland UK

Amsterdam • Boston • Heidelberg • London • New York • Oxford Paris • San Diego • San Francisco • Singapore • Sydney • Tokyo Academic Press is an imprint of Elsevier

Academic Press is an imprint of Elsevier 525 B Street, Suite 1900, San Diego, California 92101-4495, USA Linacre House, Jordan Hill, Oxford, OX2 8DP, UK Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved Material in the work originally appeared in Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, and Conflict, 2nd edition (2008), Encyclopedia of Stress, 2nd edition (2007), Comprehensive Psychiatry 49, Medical Hypotheses 73, Annals of Epidemiology 19, Lancet 367, Lancet 373, The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance 49, Psychological Bulletin 136 No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher Permissions may be sought directly from Elsevier’s Science & Technology Rights Department in Oxford, UK: phone (+44) (0) 1865 843830; fax (+44) (0) 1865 853333; email: [email protected]. Alternatively you can submit your request online by visiting the Elsevier web site at http://elsevier.com/locate/permissions, and selecting Obtaining permission to use Elsevier material Notice No responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions or ideas contained in the material herein. Because of rapid advances in the medical sciences, in particular, independent verification of diagnoses and drug dosages should be made British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stress of war, conflict and disaster/editor-in-chief, George Fink. – 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-12-381381-7 (alk. paper) 1. Stress (Physiology) 2. Stress (Psychology) I. Fink, George. QP82.2.S8S884 2010 616.9’8–dc22 2010024875 ISBN: 978-0-12-381381-7 For information on all Elsevier publications visit our website at elsevierdirect.com Printed and bound in China 10 11 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

INTRODUCTION

‘‘There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs." Dwight Eisenhower (1890–1969)

The Twenty-first Millennium will forever be remembered for its cataclysmic beginning. On the sunny autumn morning of September 11, 2001, an unprovoked suicide attack by al-Qaeda was carried out upon the United States. ‘‘9/11’’ triggered costly US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and a new phase in the ideological clash of ‘‘fundamentalisms.’’ The subtext to 9/11 is the human drive for ideological supremacy, territory and wealth in the form of oil and other resources. According to James Waller (Becoming Evil: New York: OUP, 2007), since the Napoleonic Wars, we have fought an average of six international wars and six civil wars per decade. The four decades after the end of World War II saw 150 wars and only 26 days of world peace. Buried in the midst of all of our progress in the twentieth century are well over a hundred million persons who met a violent death at the hands of their fellow human beings. To this may be added the many deaths, serious injuries and crippling long-lasting ill-heath, poverty, and devastation caused by major natural and man-made disasters. The present work, a sequel to Stress Science: Neuroendocrinology and Stress Consequences: Mental, Neuropsychological and Socioeconomic, is comprised of articles that review the stressful effects and outcomes of war, conflict and disaster. The work also details the way in which stress and aggression, the substrates for violence, conflict and war, are closely linked. Our understanding of stress and aggression has increased exponentially in recent years because of major technical advances in human brain imaging, genomics, genetics and molecular and behavioral neuroscience. The present work attempts to provide a cohesive explanation of the neural, psychological and behavioral substrates for aggression, psychopathy and sociopathy that trigger the widespread killing and maiming of fellow humans. In tandem, the work also reviews the financial, ideological, religious, social and political drivers for the initiation and prosecution of war. Stress of War, Conflict and Disaster begins with an introduction to human nature and the evolution of the stress response and violence, followed by a brief section on the neurobiology of aggression that is reviewed in greater detail in the earlier volumes on Stress Science and Stress Consequences. Preceded by up-to-date accounts of the psychological, sociological, behavioral and anthropological determinants of violence and aggression, the stress-causal centre-piece sections on ‘‘War Precursors,’’ ‘‘Wars’’ and ‘‘Terrorism’’ cover most key conflicts that have occurred during the last 100 years. There follow sections on combat reaction, posttraumatic stress disorder and prisoners of war and torture. Section VII on posttraumatic stress disorder ends with articles on the controversy of the gulf war syndrome. Briefly, it seems that while the 1991 gulf war was followed by a ‘‘gulf war syndrome,’’ the cause of the syndrome is still not established, and in UK troops involved in the 2003 Iraq war there has been no recrudescence of symptoms redolent of those associated with the 1991 gulf war syndrome. Section IX, which deals with the impact of war on civilians, is subdivided into a general section, which begins with a chapter on the response of indigenous peoples to conquest, and a specific section on holocaust survivors and refugees.

v

vi

Introduction

The economics and costs of war (Section X) are of seminal interest, as is the role of communications (Section XI), both in possibly promoting violence (although this is challenged by the last article in Section XI) and in serving to mediate an end to conflict. Section XII on ‘‘Disasters’’ is followed by a final section (XIII) on Altruism and Cooperation, which might help to prevent man’s self-destruction. That is, in addition to innate aggression, humans and most living creatures exhibit altruism and cooperation that facilitate survival of the species, subspecies, family, tribe, and nation. This is illustrated, for example, by the free gift of blood for transfusion in the United Kingdom (Titmuss, 1970) and the establishment of organizations such as the UN and the EU that seek to promote cooperation and prevent conflict. Altruism and the propensity to cooperate under appropriate/necessary conditions, especially within kin, would appear, like aggression, to be an innate property that reflects expression of the embryonic ‘‘Bauplan’’ for the nervous system. The plasticity of the nervous system is essential for learning and memory, and inter alia facilitates the impact of cultural and social factors on behavior. That is, in humans, cultural influences and social mores and pressures can override the default state and suppress altruism as well as our innate aggressive drive (exemplified in the chapter on ‘‘Peaceful Societies’’ by Karolina Baszarkiewicz and Douglas Fry). The interplay of Altruism and spite, aggression and cooperation, and war and peace is the subject of much analysis and debate especially in relation to Charles Darwin’s ‘‘On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.’’ Readers interested in this theme will find some relevant publications in the bibliography.

Acknowledgments I am grateful to Ann Elizabeth Fink for her patience and indulgence of yet more stress, and for her helpful professional anthropological insights and advice regarding several of the themes covered by the work, especially Altruism and Peaceful Societies. Signe Howell, Professor of Anthropology at Oslo University, first introduced me to the concept of ‘‘Societies at Peace’’ when we were all at Edinburgh (S Howell and R Willis Eds Routledge, London 1989). Finally, production and publication of this volume were made possible by the continuing support of Mica Haley, Elsevier Neuroscience Acquisitions Editor.

Bibliography Bell, A. V., Richerson, P. J., and McElreath, R. (2009). Culture rather than genes provides greater scope for the evolution of large-scale human prosociality. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 106, 17671–17674. Choi, J. -K. and Bowles, S. (2007). The coevolution of parochial altruism and war. Science 318, 636–640. Fehr, E. and Fischbacher, U. (2003). The nature of human altruism. Nature 425, 785–791. Fowler, J. H. (2005). Altruistic punishment and the origin of cooperation. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 102, 7047–7049. Santos, M. and Szathma´ry, E. (2008). Genetic hitchhiking can promote the initial spread of strong altruism. BMC Evolutionary Biology 8, 281. http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/8/281 Titmuss, R. M. (1970). The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy. London: George Allen & Unwin. West, S. A. and Gardner, A. (2010). Altruism, spite, and greenbeards. Science 327, 1341–1344.

George Fink March 2010

CONTENTS

v–vi

Introduction

vii–xi

Contents

xiii–xvii

List of Contributors

I.

INTRODUCTION – EVOLUTION – ANTHROPOLOGY

HUMAN NATURE, VIEWS OF

3

James C Davies

EVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS AND FUNCTIONS OF THE STRESS RESPONSE E A Young EVOLUTION OF VIOLENCE

II.

11 17

Jukka-Pekka Takala

ANTHROPOLOGY OF VIOLENCE AND CONFLICT, OVERVIEW THEORIES OF CONFLICT

R M Nesse, S Bhatnagar and

Andrew J Strathern and Pamela J Stewart

Ho-Won Jeong and Eleftherios Michael

28 39

NEUROBIOLOGY, NEUROCHEMISTRY – ANIMAL MODELS

BIOCHEMICAL FACTORS IN AGGRESSION AND VIOLENCE Chawki Benkelfat and Robert O Pihl ANIMAL BEHAVIORAL STUDIES, NON-PRIMATES ANIMAL BEHAVIORAL STUDIES, PRIMATES

David LeMarquand, Peter N S Hoaken,

Hanna Kokko Irwin S Bernstein

51 65 74

III. PSYCHOLOGICAL, SOCIOLOGICAL AND BEHAVIORAL SUBSTRATES FOR CONFLICT, VIOLENCE AND WAR AGGRESSION, PSYCHOLOGY OF

Leonard Berkowitz

NEUROPSYCHOLOGY OF MOTIVATION FOR GROUP AGGRESSION AND MYTHOLOGY Jordan B Peterson SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF VIOLENCE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF VIOLENCE

Daniel Christie and Michael Wessells Rajni Kothari

SOCIAL THEORIZING ABOUT WAR AND PEACE STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE

IV.

Hans Joas

Kathleen M Weigert

85 94 105 113 119 126

WAR PRECURSORS

WARRIORS, ANTHROPOLOGY OF GANGS

Andrew Sanders

Glen D Curry and Scott H Decker

137 146

vii

viii

Contents

CLAN AND TRIBAL CONFLICT GENDER STUDIES

Keith F Otterbein

153

Lynne M Woehrle and Donna Engelmann

161

RITUAL AND SYMBOLIC BEHAVIOR FOLKLORE

Sanja Magdalenic

WEAPONRY, EVOLUTION OF CIVIL SOCIETY

177 186

Dave Grossman

200

Martin Shaw

MILITARY CULTURE

V.

171

Philip Smith and Brad West

209

James Burk

WARS

WARFARE, TRENDS IN

225

James K Wither

ECONOMIC CAUSES OF WAR AND PEACE CIVIL WARS

236

Jon D Wisman

248

Errol A Henderson

WORLD WAR I

Daniel Marc Segesser

256

WORLD WAR II

Charles S Thomas

269

GENOCIDE AND DEMOCIDE CHEMICAL WARFARE

302

J Berberich

CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL WARFARE NUCLEAR WARFARE

281

Allen D Grimshaw

306

Howard S Levie

314

Dean A Wilkening

HIROSHIMA BOMBING, STRESS EFFECTS OF NUCLEAR WARFARE, THREAT OF

328

R J Lifton

332

J Thompson

PERSIAN GULF WAR, STRESS EFFECTS OF KOREAN CONFLICT, STRESS EFFECTS OF

S M Southwick, D Vojvoda, C A Morgan III and D Lipschitz C A Goguen and M J Friedman

NORTHERN IRELAND, POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER IN GUERRILLA WARFARE WOMEN AND WAR

VI.

340 342 346

Anthony James Joes

358

Annick T R Wibben and Jennifer Turpin

TERRORISM

TERRORISM

373

P Bell

SUICIDE TERRORISM, GENESIS OF

H Livingston and M Livingston

OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBING, STRESS EFFECTS OF 9/11, RELIGION AND STRESS

COMBATING BIOTERRORISM

C Piotrowski and SJ Vodanovich

385 389 391

S. Packer

RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS, VIOLENCE AND NONVIOLENCE WAR, SUICIDE AND SACRIFICE

376

A Speckhard

LOCKERBIE AIR CRASH, STRESS EFFECTS OF

VII.

P Bell

335

Michael J McClymond and David N Freedman 397

V Hazboun Dean A Wilkening

407 412

COMBAT REACTION AND POSTTRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER

COMBAT STRESS REACTION COMBAT, ACUTE REACTIONS TO

M Dobson R H Rahe

427 432

Contents

COMBAT REACTION, CHRONIC

435

R H Rahe

PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF COMBAT

ix

440

Dave Grossman and Bruce K Siddle

SELF-REPORTED COMBAT STRESS INDICATORS AMONG TROOPS DEPLOYED TO IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN: AN EPIDEMIOLOGICAL STUDY Mark S Riddle, John W Sanders, James J Jones and Schuyler C Webb

450

VIETNAM VETERANS, POSTWAR EXPERIENCES AND HEALTH OUTCOMES

455

J A Boscarino

TRAUMATIC STRESS AND POSTTRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER, THE ISRAELI EXPERIENCE E Klein and J Zohar WAR STRESS IN THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA

€ M Flogel, S Sˇupraha Goreta and G Lauc

WAR-RELATED POSTTRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER, TREATMENT OF PEACEKEEPING

463 468

L B Slone and M J Friedman

472 475

B Litz and S Maguen

A MODEL OF SUICIDAL BEHAVIOR IN WAR VETERANS WITH POSTTRAUMATIC MOOD DISORDER Leo Sher

478

IS THERE AN EPIDEMIC OF SUICIDES AMONG CURRENT AND FORMER U.S. MILITARY PERSONNEL? Han K Kang and Tim A Bullman

484

GULF WAR SYNDROME, PSYCHOLOGICAL AND CHEMICAL STRESSORS

487

H Soreq

IS THERE AN IRAQ WAR SYNDROME? COMPARISON OF THE HEALTH OF UK SERVICE PERSONNEL AFTER THE GULF AND IRAQ WARS O Horn, L Hull, M Jones, D Murphy, T Browne, N T Fear, M Hotopf, R J Rona and S Wessely

494

GULF WAR ILLNESSES

500

VIII.

Simon Wessely, N Greenberg, C Woodhead and N T Fear

PRISONERS OF WAR AND TORTURE

PRISONERS OF WAR

CAPTIVITY, ADAPTATION TO CAPTIVITY, RECOVERY FROM TORTURE

A.

509

R H Rahe

513

R H Rahe

517

I Genefke, H Marcussen and O V Rasmussen

TORTURE (STATE)

IX.

505

C Tennant

523

Raymond R Corrado and Irwin M Cohen

IMPACT OF WAR ON CIVILIANS INDIGENOUS AND CIVILIAN POPULATIONS

534

INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ RESPONSES TO CONQUEST

HEALTH CONSEQUENCES OF WAR AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE

Anthony B Zwi, 558

James Garbarino, Lauren Zurenda and Joseph A Vorrasi

POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER, TRAUMA AND MENTAL DISORDERS Richard A Bryant and Derrick Silove TRAUMATOLOGY

548

Nigel Hunt

HEALTH SERVICES, EFFECTS OF WAR AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE ON Antonio Ugalde and Patricia Richards LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF WAR ON CHILDREN

535

Franke Wilmer

Angela Nickerson, 580 588

Charles R Figley

IMPACT OF TERRORISM ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF MENTAL HEALTH SYMPTOMS SUICIDE AND OTHER VIOLENCE TOWARD THE SELF

568

R Yehuda

David Lester and Karolina E Krysinska

598 601

x Contents

B.

HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS – REFUGEES

CONCENTRATION CAMP SURVIVORS

609

HOLOCAUST, STRESS EFFECTS OF

SURVIVOR GUILT

X.

613

P Valent

HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS, EXPERIENCES OF REFUGEES, STRESS IN

610

J D Kinzie

620

J D Kinzie

623

P Valent

ECONOMICS AND COSTS OF WAR

ECONOMIC COSTS AND CONSEQUENCES OF WAR

629

Carlos Seiglie

ECONOMICS OF WAR AND PEACE, OVERVIEW

635

Dietrich M Fischer

ON THE DYNAMICS OF THE ISRAELI–ARAB ARMS RACE

XI.

618

P Valent

Aamer S Abu-Qarn and Suleiman Abu-Bader

COMMUNICATIONS – RELEVANCE FOR WAR Howard Giles and Daniel Linz Emily Moyer-Guse,

COMMUNICATION STUDIES, OVERVIEW LANGUAGE OF WAR AND PEACE, THE

MEDIATION AND NEGOTIATION TECHNIQUES MASS MEDIA, GENERAL VIEW

C D Mortensen

682 693

Jacob Bercovitch

701

Edward Donnerstein

TELEVISION PROGRAMMING AND VIOLENCE, INTERNATIONAL

Barrie Gunter

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING: THE MISESTIMATION AND OVERINTERPRETATION OF VIOLENT VIDEO GAME EFFECTS IN EASTERN AND WESTERN NATIONS: COMMENT ON ANDERSON ET AL. (2010) Christopher J Ferguson and John Kilburn

710

723

DISASTERS

AIRLINE ACCIDENTS

731

G Li

CHERNOBYL, STRESS EFFECTS OF

A Tønnessen and L Weisæth

735

M Livanou and M Bas¸oglu

739

EARTHQUAKES, STRESS EFFECTS OF FLOODS, STRESS EFFECTS OF

744

J O Brende

HURRICANE KATRINA DISASTER, STRESS EFFECTS OF MOTOR VEHICLE ACCIDENTS, STRESS EFFECTS OF THREE MILE ISLAND, STRESS EFFECTS OF DISASTER SYNDROME

C Piotrowski T C Buckley and E B Blanchard

A L Dougall and A Baum

EMERGENCY PERSONNEL, STRESS IN FIREFIGHTERS, STRESS IN

750 753 756 759

P Valent

DISASTERS AND MASS VIOLENCE, PUBLIC, EFFECTS OF

XIII.

659 670

William C Gay

LINGUISTIC CONSTRUCTIONS OF VIOLENCE, PEACE, AND CONFLICT

XII.

647

G Stevens, B Raphael and M Dobson

D S Weiss

T L Guidotti

761 770 775

ALTRUISM – COOPERATION

AGGRESSION AND ALTRUISM PEACEFUL SOCIETIES

Douglas P Fry

Karolina Baszarkiewicz and Douglas P Fry

781 795

Contents

PEACE CULTURE

COOPERATION, COMPETITION, AND CONFLICT Subject Index

808

Elise Boulding

CONFLICT MANAGEMENT AND RESOLUTION

xi

Ho-Won Jeong, Charles Lerche and Silvia Susnjic Sheldon G Levy

822 833 849


LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Suleiman Abu-Bader Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel

Elise Boulding Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

Aamer S Abu-Qarn Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel

J O Brende Mercer University School of Medicine, Macon, GA, USA

M Bas¸og˘lu King’s College London, London, UK and Istanbul Center for Behavior Research and Therapy, Istanbul, Turkey

T Browne King’s Centre for Military Health Research, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, London SE5 9RJ, UK

Karolina Baszarkiewicz A˚bo Akademi University, Vasa, Finland A Baum University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA P Bell South and East Belfast Health and Social Services Trust, Belfast, UK Chawki Benkelfat McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada J Berberich Agentase, Pittsburgh, PA, USA Jacob Bercovitch University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand Leonard Berkowitz University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, USA Irwin S Bernstein University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA S Bhatnagar University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA E B Blanchard University at Albany–State University of New York, Albany, NY, USA J A Boscarino Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, NY and Geisinger Health System, Danville, PA, USA

Richard A Bryant University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia T C Buckley Boston VA Medical Center and Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, MA, USA Tim A Bullman James Burk Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA Daniel Christie Ohio State University, Marion, OH, USA Irwin M Cohen University-College of the Fraser Valley, Abbotsford, BC, Canada Raymond R Corrado Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada Glen D Curry University of Missouri, St. Louis, MO, USA James C Davies Eugene, OR, USA Scott H Decker University of Missouri, St. Louis, MO, USA M Dobson Centre for Mental Health, New South Wales, Australia M Dobson New South Wales Health Department, North Sydney, Australia

xiii

xiv


Edward Donnerstein University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

S Sˇupraha Goreta University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia

A L Dougall University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Howard Giles University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

Donna Engelmann Alverno College, Milwaukee, WI, USA

N Greenberg Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, De Crespigny Park, London SE5 8AF, UK

N T Fear Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, De Crespigny Park, London SE5 8AF, UK N T Fear King’s Centre for Military Health Research, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, London SE5 9RJ, UK Christopher J Ferguson Texas A&M International University USA Charles R Figley Florida State University Traumatology Institute, Tallahassee, FL, USA Dietrich M Fischer European University Center for Peace Studies, Stadtschlaining, Austria M Flo¨gel University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia David N Freedman University of California, San Diego, CA, USA M J Friedman Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA M J Friedman National Center for PTSD, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and Dartmouth Medical School, White River Junction, VT, USA Douglas P Fry A˚bo Akademi University, Vasa, Finland James Garbarino Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA William C Gay University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA

Allen D Grimshaw Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA Dave Grossman Arkansas State University, Jonesboro, AR, USA T L Guidotti George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA Barrie Gunter University of Leicester, Leicester, UK Emily Moyer-Guse´ University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA V Hazboun Guidance and Training Center for the Child and Family, Bethlehem, Palestine Errol A Henderson Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA Peter N S Hoaken The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada O Horn King’s Centre for Military Health Research, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, London SE5 9RJ, UK M Hotopf King’s Centre for Military Health Research, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, London SE5 9RJ, UK L Hull King’s Centre for Military Health Research, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, London SE5 9RJ, UK Nigel Hunt Institute of Work, Health and Organisations, University of Nottingham, UK

I Genefke International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims, Copenhagen, Denmark

Ho-Won Jeong Centreville, VA, USA

C A Goguen National Center for PTSD, USA

Ho-Won Jeong George Mason University, Centreville, VA, USA


Hans Joas University of Erfurt, Erfurt, Germany; The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA Anthony James Joes Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia, PA, USA James J Jones U.S. Army Forces Central Command, Troop Medical Clinic, Doha, Qatar M Jones King’s Centre for Military Health Research, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, London SE5 9RJ, UK Han K Kang U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 810 Vermont Ave., NW, Washington CE 20420 John Kilburn Texas A&M International University USA J D Kinzie Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, OR, USA J D Kinzie Oregon Health and Sciences University, Portland, OR, USA E Klein Faculty of Medicine Technion, Haifa, Israel Hanna Kokko University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland Rajni Kothari Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, India Karolina E Krysinska Australian Institute for Suicide Research and Prevention, Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD, Australia G Lauc University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia David LeMarquand Regional Mental Health Care London, London, ON, Canada Charles Lerche Norwich University David Lester Center for the Study of Suicide, Blackwood, NJ, USA Howard S Levie Saint Louis University Law School, St. Louis, MO, USA

xv

Sheldon G Levy Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA G Li Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA R J Lifton Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance, Cambridge MA, USA Daniel Linz University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA D Lipschitz Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA B Litz VA Boston Healthcare System, Massachusetts Veterans Epidemiology Research and Information Center (MAVERIC), and Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, MA, USA M Livanou King’s College London, London, UK and Hellenic Institute of Psychotraumatology, Athens, Greece H Livingston Dykebar Hospital, Paisley, UK M Livingston Southern General Hospital, Glasgow, UK Sanja Magdalenic´ Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden S Maguen VA Boston Healthcare System, Massachusetts Veterans Epidemiology Research and Information Center (MAVERIC), and Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, MA, USA H Marcussen International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims, Copenhagen, Denmark Michael J McClymond Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO, USA Eleftherios Michael George Mason University, Centreville, VA, USA C A Morgan III Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA C D Mortensen University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA D Murphy King’s Centre for Military Health Research, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, London SE5 9RJ, UK

xvi


R M Nesse University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA Angela Nickerson University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia Keith F Otterbein State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA S. Packer New School for Social Research, New York, NY, USA Jordan B Peterson University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada Robert O Pihl McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada C Piotrowski University of West Florida, Pensacola, FL, USA R H Rahe University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, WA, USA B Raphael Centre for Mental Health, New South Wales, Australia O V Rasmussen International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims, Copenhagen, Denmark Patricia Richards University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

Leo Sher Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University, New York State Psychiatric Institute, 1051 Riverside Drive, Suite 2917, Box 42, New York, NY 10032, USA Derrick Silove University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia Bruce K Siddle PPCT Management Systems, Belleville, IL, USA L B Slone National Center for PTSD, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and Dartmouth Medical School, White River Junction, VT, USA Philip Smith Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA H Soreq Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel S M Southwick Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA A Speckhard Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC, USA G Stevens Centre for Mental Health, New South Wales, Australia Pamela J Stewart University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA Andrew J Strathern University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Mark S Riddle U.S. Naval Medical Research Unit No. 3, Cairo, Egypt

Silvia Susnjic George Mason University

R J Rona King’s Centre for Military Health Research, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, London SE5 9RJ, UK

Jukka-Pekka Takala National Council of Crime Prevention, Helsinki, Finland

Andrew Sanders University of Ulster, Coleraine, Londonderry John W Sanders U.S. Naval Medical Research Unit No. 3, Cairo, Egypt Daniel Marc Segesser University of Berne, Berne, Switzerland

C Tennant University of Sydney, St. Leonards, Australia Charles S Thomas Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA, USA J Thompson University College London, London, UK

Carlos Seiglie Rutgers University, Newark, NJ, USA

A Tønnessen National Competence Centre on Traumatic Stress, Oslo, Norway

Martin Shaw University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

Jennifer Turpin University of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA

List of Contributors xvii

Antonio Ugalde University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

Brad West Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia

P Valent Melbourne, Australia

Annick T R Wibben University of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA

P Valent Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Dean A Wilkening Centre for International Security and Cooperation Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

S J Vodanovich University of West Florida, Pensacola, FL, USA D Vojvoda Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA Joseph A Vorrasi Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA Schuyler C Webb Naval Medical Research Center, Silver Spring, MD 20910, USA Kathleen M Weigert Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA D S Weiss University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA

Franke Wilmer Montana State University, Bozeman, MT, USA Jon D Wisman American University, Washington, DC, USA James K Wither George C Marshall European Center for Security Studies, Germany Lynne M Woehrle Mount Mary College, Milwaukee, WI, USA C Woodhead Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, De Crespigny Park, London SE5 8AF, UK R Yehuda Bronx VA Medical Center, New York, NY, USA

L Weisæth National Competence Centre on Traumatic Stress, Oslo, Norway

E A Young University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Michael Wessells Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

J Zohar Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

Simon Wessely Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, De Crespigny Park, London SE5 8AF, UK

Lauren Zurenda Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

S Wessely King’s Centre for Military Health Research, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, London SE5 9RJ, UK

Anthony B Zwi London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK


I. INTRODUCTION – EVOLUTION – ANTHROPOLOGY


Human Nature, Views of James C Davies, Eugene, OR, USA Published by Elsevier Inc.

Introduction Some Earlier, Mostly Philosophical Views of Human Nature Innate, that is, Natural Sources of Tension

Some Research in the Neurophysiology of Assertive and Violent Behavior From Here, Where? Further Reading

Introduction

A practical definition of human nature is seldom offered: natural scientists say that it is vague definition and then offer nothing specific. Let this definition serve as a basis for discussing views of it. Human nature is the set of determinants of behavior that generate within the human organism and ultimately within the genes. It is very, very difficult to separate out, to abstract, these determinants because of two factors: the genetically established organism is influenced even before birth by several neurochemicals that pass through not only the placenta but also the blood–brain barrier. These prenatal influences, perhaps the earliest experiences, cannot be regarded as innate, but they so affect the developing fetus that they quite surely are permanent. Infants whose mothers took heavy doses of narcotics like heroin as at young adults became hooked themselves. Such prenatal influences may be called second nature, but as the fetus becomes an infant and grows through childhood to adulthood, it is most unlikely ever to become conscious that these prenatal events are not genetic. In one experiment a pregnant rat was injected with testosterone. Its female pups became more aggressive than females not subjected to infusion of abnormal, unnatural amounts of prenatal testosterone. In addition to prenatal influences, there is a steady stream of influences that commences with the first contacts with mothers, fathers, family, neighborhood, etc., and continues throughout life. Even though they may seem natural they are not but can be clearly described as second nature.

People’s views of human nature are part of their general attitude toward their fellow beings. The general attitude derives more from experiences than from formal learning. The experiences that produce views on this very basic matter begin at birth and continue through childhood, adolescence, and at least early maturity. One’s religion, one’s political orientation, and one’s attitude toward his or her fellow beings are very stable. The durability of these influences is confirmed by the persistence of opposing, incompatible views on religion, politics, and human nature. Millions of people are Christian or Muslim or Confucian or Buddhist and few of them ever move from one of these religions to another. The same is true in politics. And the same is true in views of human nature. It is important to appreciate that the systematic or casual views people have of human nature are altogether a product of experience. That is, views of human nature are not themselves innate and thus are subject to change. But they change very slowly. If individuals start life in families and neighborhoods that are high in violence and later experience nonviolent interactions in solving problems, they may change to a less violent view of human nature. If individuals start life with minimal domestic violence and later experience violent interactions, they may more easily retain or re-establish a less violent view of human nature. Individuals from a stable, relatively nonviolent culture may go to war and kill. These killers are not usually regarded as dangerous when they return to civilian life. It is important to appreciate these aspects of attitude formation because the attitudes are so important. Violence is often a life-or-death matter, and the wrong attitude can be deadly. Furthermore, these views involve both objective and subjective influences and inevitably involve considerations of moral right and wrong. The distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ is very hard to define and harder to realize. People maintain confidence that their views of religion, politics, and human nature are both correct and morally right. Realization of these problems is a necessary first step to moving beyond the illconsidered views of human nature that are so seldom revised after childhood.

Some Earlier, Mostly Philosophical Views of Human Nature Not all the writers mentioned in this section described themselves as philosophers. Indeed some of them – notably Hobbes and Freud – scorned the term. Nonetheless, they are here included as philosophers on the assumption that their observations arose mainly from their individual experience rather than scientific investigation, experimentation, and validation. This is not to say that these viewers of human nature were wrong but that, in their views of human nature, they were not acting as scientists.

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Aristotle, in a relatively peaceful time in Athens, looked at violence causally though he used somewhat different language than is used today. He concluded that revolution is caused by subjective inequality: ‘‘when inferior, people enter into strife in order that they may be equal, and when equal, in order that they may be greater.’’ Aristotle was the tutor of one of the most successfully violent rulers of all time: Alexander the Great. Nonetheless, his statement (Aristotle, Politics, p. 379) anticipated by more than two millennia of George Orwell’s succinct aphorism about life in the very unjust Animal Farm. In that anti-Utopia the ruling elite had total control of both power and ideology: everyone is equal, the elite said, but some are more equal than others. It is perhaps more accurate to describe Aristotle or Orwell not as prescient but as intuitively basic in his analysis. They both said that human beings naturally expect to be regarded as equals, if not more so: as it would now be expressed, and as Lasswell put it, people want dignity and power. Thomas Hobbes provides an example of environmental influences that profoundly affected his view of violence. He was in exile from the persistent and frightful wars of the Protestant Reformation in seventeenthcentury England. He was thus a participant observer in this very violent century in England’s history. He viewed human nature as inherently, innately violent and said this tendency is controllable only if people surrendered their power of self-rule to the sovereign. Hobbes did not work into his system recognition that people want other things in addition to power. The inevitable implication of his conclusion is that self-rule is impossible, and he did not consider that in the English Reformation, people who lacked power were forcibly demanding it and – if they won enough battles – taking it. That is, Hobbes did not consider that people want equality, in power and other things, and that they turn violent, when they are denied equality and power. Plato, also more than two millennia before Hobbes, proposed government by the guardians, by vesting total power in the active intellectual elite. Unlike his successor Aristotle but like his successor Hobbes, Plato did not adequately address the problem of who governs the governors. Both philosophers avoided logically facing the fact that rulers also are human beings and so much appraise their own violent tendencies. They viewed human beings from their philosophically elitist standpoints and assumed that ordinary human beings and elitists who were denied power did not want it: they just wanted to fight. Sigmund Freud’s greatest contribution to the science of human behavior was his insistence that unconscious influences not only exist but also are very powerful. He brilliantly applied and used his contribution mainly in the analysis of childhood experiences as they affected adult sexual behavior. He was less successful in applying his study of the unconscious to nonsexual behavior (and he tended to sexualize the nonsexual) and he did not clearly

distinguish sexual from other forms of love, like, for example, agape. Freud experienced World War I, the meatgrinder of millions of soldiers on both sides, from the viewpoint of Germany and the Central Powers. One of his sons saw military service. His early reaction during that war was to say that as German victories extended, they would spread German culture more broadly throughout the world. His later reaction was to observe with growing horror the enormous violence and to conclude that violence is an innate tendency. He elevated it in his theoretical system so that in addition to the positive, life-producing (sex) instinct in his earlier theorizing, there was a murderous death instinct that produced destruction not only of others but of the self. In 1933, he collaborated with Albert Einstein in an exchange published as Why war. In it Freud chided some presumptions of Einstein, noting that all sciences have their unexamined first assumptions. And Freud did not well examine either his own assumptions or their origins. The here-significant facts are that Freud was influenced by his (adult) experience and that this influenced, indeed determined, the construction of his basic orientation. If the world war served only as a reminder and not a determinant, it speaks ill of Freud that he was unable to include a death instinct before the war. If violence indeed is an innate tendency, it is quite an oversight in Freud not to see such an elemental tendency among Homo sapiens. World War II produced a similar spate of writing that likewise concluded that mankind are innately aggressive, innately violent. Perhaps among the most noteworthy writers was Konrad Lorenz, whose book On aggression (1966) was enormously popular following its original publication, two decades after Lorenz served as a medical doctor in the Germany wartime army in German as Das sogenannte Bo¨se in 1963. His conclusion was the same as Freud’s, though not in the same language: mankind are naturally aggressive, presumably with the exception of Lorenz. Similarly, in two superbly written books, African genesis (1961) and The territorial imperative (1966), an American writer, Robert Ardrey, likewise proposed and concluded that mankind are naturally aggressive. In the popular discussion of these postwar books, M. F. Ashley Montagu, an anthropologist, was a dissenting voice. He lambasted natural aggressionists for declaring that the violent behavior that is common in war is natural. The discussion, perhaps starting with the Biblical slaying of Abel by his brother Cain, has been endlessly inconclusive. One cannot satisfactorily demonstrate that general observations are false because they are a product of experience with war. However, one can question the verity of the conclusion by noting a couple of (in)conclusions. The first is an assumption that rather evidently underlies the conclusion that mankind are naturally aggressive

Human Nature, Views of 5

(or have a death instinct). The unexamined assumption is that human beings have a natural need to survive ‘and have no other natural needs’ – except possibly to form groups, to associate. This assumption can be derived from too simple a reading of Darwin’s emphasis on the struggle for survival and the desire to perpetuate the species. But to assume that because they want to survive, people have a natural desire to aggress avoids consideration of the means–end relationship between aggression and survival. It seems clear that survival is pursed for its own sake, but it seems also clear that aggression is undertaken as a means to achieve not only survival but also other natural ends like the solidity, the integrity, of various groups with which individuals identify; and perhaps the pursuit of equal dignity. It is no more reasonable to ignore the fact that equality was given as a major reason in 1776 for Americans to throw off the British colonial yoke than it is to ignore the inclusion of equality that was included in France as a justification for its revolution. In sum, a few philosophers and theorists have made without examining it a large assumption that survival is the only natural need. They have tended to ignore the fact that human beings have enormously developed brains that furnish the potential not simply to develop an understanding of natural phenomena but also to identify and empathize with ever-wider segments of their conspecifics. Does this tendency to identify come altogether from the environment? There is a tendency among some philosophers and social scientists to separate themselves from the rest of humanity. Almost universally, people seem to prefer activity – even at times turbulence – to stasis. But they do not seem to prefer violence. If violence is pursued naturally and for its own sake, then the best humankind could maximize everyone’s opportunity to engage in it: to have, as Hobbes observed, a perpetual war of each against all. If violence nevertheless is undertaken as a means of achieving things that have inherent value and producing inherent satisfaction, then it is important to probe deeper into both definition and examination of human nature. Its discussion need no longer be left to philosophers or to theorists in psychology. Because it is possible to learn more about human nature by scientific investigation, it is possible to diminish the use of violence as a last-resort means of accomplishing ends that are naturally desired and that provide inherent satisfaction. The problem is akin to that facing global explorers and navigators in the fifteenth century: if you no longer suppose the Earth is flat, it is much easier to get around the globe. The problem is also akin to cosmic navigation: if you no longer suppose that space and time are independent factors, it is much easier to try to explain the universe. Describing and evaluating views of human nature is a grievous problem, because views of it are very much the product of experience, and experience varies widely and people cling to their views stubbornly. Even people who

are well educated and those without formal education have their view. The major difference between those without formal education and the rest is that literate people are better able to articulate their view, but they are not much better at appraising human nature. The reasons for such a view of views of human nature are elemental: from birth onward, each individual is influenced by events that impinge directly on each individual. If these earliest events include violent experiences, there is a great likelihood that violence will be considered natural, just as if these earliest events include supportive, affectionate interactions, the individual will incline toward a benign and amicable view of others. If those who readily engage in violence are close to a very young observer, a child, it is more likely to regard violence as innate to all people. If others – ranging from neighbors to nearby communities to other nations – are less likely to engage in it, violence is more likely to be regarded as an acquired rather than as an innate tendency. These seemingly speculative generalizations are, in other contexts, not regarded so speculatively. Social scientists do not often question why they are more likely to find immediate interpersonal violence among people who have been raised in violent families. And they are more likely to find violence on the grand, international scale among a people who feel threatened with violence by people of other nations. When such grand-scale violence strikes home, in the form of an air raid by the enemy or by the loss of a family member, the inclination to regard violence as an innate tendency is increased. What seems to be fundamental to these speculations is that views of violence are a function of experience with it, whether in childhood or adulthood, whether the violence is perpetrated by a family member, a local community, or a nation. And fundamental to regarding violence as innate or not is the fact that it threatens injury and even death: that is, views of violence are in part a function of the experience of threat to survival. In sum, the very earliest environmental influences underlie everyone’s view of human nature and these early imprinted influences become so ingrained as to become second nature. Views of violence become second nature. And few people are willing to believe that their view of human nature is highly subjective and imprinted rather than innate. Each person believes that his or her view of human nature, whether or not it includes violent tendencies, is an objective judgment about reality. If these speculative observations are not wrong, then the process of describing and evaluating views of violence is very difficult indeed. If they are not wrong, then the unconscious, imprinted origins must be looked at, in order to approximate somewhat closer a scientific view of the innateness of violent tendencies. A start toward understanding aggression and violence as they relate to views of human nature can be made by


defining them. There has been critical vagueness in defining aggression. Lorenz uses the term agonistic behavior, and so do J. P. Scott and others. It is used to get around the knotty problem of defining intent. Agonism means forceful action against some part of the environment. Agonism avoids considering intent and avoids judging whether agonistic behavior is bad. There would be no problem for humankind and for perpetrators and victims of agonistic action if they were merely forceful interactors. We would be dealing in the realm of competition and perhaps with action that is heedless of its consequences. Forceful interaction may be undertaken with the intent of helping the object. A surgeon wielding a knife is engaging in forceful interaction, in agonistic interaction. But his or her action is readily acknowledged to be opposite to that of a person using a knife to injure or kill. Perpetrators of violence are not free of intent and we cannot avoid judging whether actions are harmful. In this article, the term agonistic is avoided because it does not consider whether an action harms or helps its object and whether an action is intended to harm or help its object. The term aggression is defined as action whose intent is to harm its object and which does harm its object. So defining aggression maintains the distinction that is lost in the term agonism, because aggression does not include action whose intent is to help. The question whether aggressive action is justified or not, is good or bad, remains open. In analysis of national action, it is both necessary and difficult to appraise national aggressive action, but the elemental unit of analysis must be the individual human being. If he or she is not naturally aggressive, then it is hard to conclude that aggression for its own sake is natural to the species. Aggression covers the action of a person who is attacking another person or an object, whether as an initiated action or as a defense against the attack of another. It only muddles things to say that a person defending him- or herself against another who is bent on homicide is not as aggressive as the attacker. If the defender is successful against the attacker, the defender will survive and the attacker may die. If a nation, say Czechoslovakia, is attacked and occupied in one decade by Nazi Germany and in the next by the Communist Soviet Union, no one save the attacking nation is going to say that Czechs have no right to defend themselves. But, in the historic cases, both Germany and the Soviet Union argued that they were defending their interests against wanton aggression. In a 1975 resolution the United Nations adopted a definition of aggressive war that specified the invasion of another nation’s territory but avoided the question of harmful intent. While the UN definition avoids the issue of culpability, and so avoids the problem inherent in the term agonism, it leaves indefinite the issue of harmful intent. This indefinition does not help appraise the action

of a nation or the UN that intervenes in a domestic dispute within another nation. In the former Yugoslavia, intervention by UN or in the name of the UN remains unappraised and unjustified. Needs that are innate characteristically are chronically, regularly, satisfied over decades, if not lifetimes. People must always eat. From birth, they have an undying desire for affection. And they develop, early on, a seemingly insatiable desire to be recognized, to be dignified, and to fulfill themselves. Neither infants nor children nor adults like to be ignored or humiliated or denied recognition for doing self-fulfilling work. There is only consensual rather than objective evidence that the desire to kill, maim, or destroy is innate. People may even be thrilled by it, but the desire seems to pass quickly among at least most people. They admire bravery in others and themselves. They admire the sacrifice that must occur when individuals forsake their private lives, put on uniforms, and learn the skills of killing, but then abandon these desires then they return to civilian life. Except for brief periods, they would rather be doing something else. A sense of guilt lingers, even when the killing results in vanquishing the enemy. Attempts to suppress guilt and forget the horror of violent conflict – products of very brief personal experience in combat – linger on for years and may never be lost from the unconscious. One seldom feels guilt for eating, for giving and receiving affection, for being dignified, and for creating a poem, writing a story, or fixing a broken chair. One is likely to feel guilt in such circumstances only if he or she realizes that eating deprives another, loving betrays another, or ignoring another may humiliate the person ignored. It is also evident that aggressive behavior is perhaps always the consequence of the frustration of needs, drives, expectations that quite surely are innate. Even the aggression that occurs within families and neighborhoods involves a previous frustration. A child denied food or affection within its family may in consequence turn violent. A child or young adult as an alienated member of an extra-familial group that is denied recognition may turn violent, as have thousands of individuals who identify themselves as members of a minority and are so identified. Nations that are enormously ambitious for recognition and power but have been denied these goods may launch very violent wars, as did Germany and Japan in the late 1930s and early 1940s. But to say that these transitory periods of enormous violence represent an innate human produces a few problems in the explanation. Although it is very common to say that aggressive acts are unprovoked, where are these acts to be found? When a member of a national majority expresses bafflement at the violence of minorities, has he or she satisfactorily determined that nothing is upsetting the minority? He or she might ask a minority member


rather than come to conclusions about the innateness of violence. Justifiably or not, people do persuade themselves that their enemy – interpersonal or international – is claiming their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. They do not make these claims when they are threatened by something as relatively minor as not being able to see the sunrise, the cows come home, or the villain in a television program get his or her comeuppance.

Innate, that is, Natural Sources of Tension Views of human nature have become more complex in this century. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, notably in the writings of John Locke and Rousseau, two conclusions have, with scant analysis, been attributed to those who heavily emphasize the environment as a determinant of behavior. One is that people are naturally good and get damaged by bad experience. The other is that the mind is pretty much a blank sheet, on which the environment can write pretty much what it wants. That is, Locke, Rousseau, and Marx are credited also with making the moral judgment that it is institutions, both social and political, that are responsible for failing to let human beings achieve what they naturally want to achieve. Early in the twentieth century, perhaps partly because of the strong, worldwide influence of Marx, environmentalism flourished. Ivan Pavlov did brilliant new work in conditioning responses in dogs, making them drool when they had established a relationship between a bell ringing or a light turning on and the reward of food. This work was elementally consistent with the Marxist assumptions of the revolutionary government after 1917 in Russia and got strong support from the communist regimes. Similar work got established in the United States, first by J. B. Watson, who said that if he were given an infant, he could make out of him virtually any kind of skilled human being – butcher, baker, and candlestick maker. B. F. Skinner extended the work of Pavlov by getting pigeons to respond to a conditioning stimulus of light or whatever. Extrapolating from pigeons to human beings, he proposed establishing a good society by operant conditioning, which he declared was the responsibility of psychologists. It was not clear whether Skinner was influenced by Plato’s proposal in group l to put the intellectual elite of guardians, but the implication was again clear: that a small group of specialists could manipulate the bulk of humankind in the best interests of both the specialists and humankind. Heavy emphasis on environment not only frees individuals of responsibility for the existence and the development of institutions. It also produces a dead end in scientific pursuit of understanding: if human nature does not generate needs, demands, expectations, then where do they come from? The problem logically is like that in

which Plato and others believing in a supra-human aristocracy have avoided the question as to who guards the guardians. What institutions spontaneously generate what internal tensions in human nature? If people want to eat, what institutions established that natural desire? If people need to get together, be together, and stay together, what institutions generate these social needs? If people want dignity – want to be recognized as distinct beings meriting deference and respect – what institutions elicit or establish that natural desire? Are the needs for food, association, and deference mere excogitations of philosophers, who implant these needs in infants and children but ignore adulthood manifestations of these needs? Investigators have faced the problem of the content of human nature only partially. Behavioral science for the most part has recognized that human beings share with all other life-forms a desire to be fed and to associate. But behavioral science has shied away from considering that human beings have – at least in larger measure than other life-forms, even other vertebrates – a natural desire for deference and respect or any other nonphysical need, unassociated with the need for food and for sex regarded solely as a means of species perpetuation. Working mainly with insects, E. O. Wilson established a novel way of looking at behavior. He found that in the interests of perpetuating if not the species, at least the hive, ants were quite willing to sacrifice themselves. Without falling into a trap of saying that human beings should sacrifice themselves to perpetuate the species, Wilson clearly broadened the assumption of many investigators who followed Darwin’s views even more strictly than Darwin did. Wilson said that there was, in addition to the innate desire of individuals to survive, a desire of individuals to participate in making the species survive. Wilson’s frame of reference has evolved in the trend called ‘evolutionary psychology’, whose assumptions include an innate desire to survive but also a desire to associate and to associate amicably. If progress has been made in conceptualizing human nature, perhaps some consensus exists that human beings are born with more than the desire to survive: that they wish also to associate. Early work in the desire or the trend to associate was elementally addressed by ‘the cat at the U. of Chicago’, who examined not only the tendency of trees to associate but also of a wide variety of animal life. It now seems widely accepted that survival and the social needs are innate. Other tensions, needs, drives, are less accepted, except perhaps more or less by oversight. A great pioneer in political behavior, Harold Lasswell, posited that there was a natural need for deference and that governments had to address that need. The implications for democratic as distinct from aristocratic or plutocratic government are obvious. And behind Lasswell’s positing of a natural need for deference lie the ‘self-evident’ truths of Jefferson


about human beings: that they have a natural right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Jefferson’s assumptions have origins in Locke and perhaps in a nearcontemporary of Jefferson: Rousseau, whose two principal works, The Social contract and Emile, were published about 15 years before Jefferson composed the Declaration of Independence. It is this assumption of innate drives beyond self- and species-survival that needs to be addressed directly. It is not possible to say we have one or more useful models of human nature until we have systematically included metasurvival needs. Psychologists since Darwin who have assumed or stated more complex models of human nature have been remarkably neglected, in favor of the more simple, easy-to-conceptualize models of optimistic environmentalists, Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, Marx, Watson, and Skinner. But the lineage is there. William James was perhaps the first to systematize a model of human needs that included drives beyond survival. He was followed by Freud, a pessimistic view of innate needs beyond survival. And after Freud came Henry Alexander Murray, who in his Explorations in personality (1938) produced a model of human nature that went beyond both James and Freud to include a long set of mental needs that included the desire not to be degraded (‘infavoidance’), not to be ignored or depreciated. Murray avoided classifying the long list as being innate or involving early conditioning. After Murray, Abraham Maslow developed a rather rigorous set of elemental needs and placed them in a hierarchy. He said that after the physical needs for food, good health, etc., people wanted security, love, self-esteem, and self-actualization – and they wanted them pretty much in that order. There has been resistance and indifference to the idea of positing some elemental needs that are beyond survival and sex, and resistance to the idea of establishing any priority among elemental needs. Some investigators have acknowledged that human beings have innate physical and love needs, but are not so confident that they also naturally want dignity and freedom to do their thing. There is some acceptance of the idea that (equal) dignity is innate, but skepticism about its naturalness may be related to the fact that philosophers – including Jefferson – may have called it innate, but not psychologists aside from James, Murray, and Maslow. That is, criticism may derive from the fact that dignity has not been very systematically or deliberately subjected to psychological analysis. Investigators have remained largely constrained by the very dubious assumption that the only innate needs relate to self- and species-survival. An additional argument is that the need for (equal) dignity is generated by – that is, originates in – childhood experience and longterm conditioning to values provided by moralists and religious leaders who have developed institutions that protect equality and that welcome efforts to dignify humankind.

The inescapable problem with environmental determinism which limits innate drives to survival is to explain how metasurvival values got generated in the first place. Have theories of philosophers and moralists emerged spontaneously out of cosmic black holes, without their generators (natural rights theorists like Locke, Rousseau, and Jefferson; and moralists like Buddha, Jesus, and Mahomet) sensing within themselves and people they observed a profound and universal demand? Such speculations are perhaps unnecessarily argumentative. Rather than continuing a discussion that can be endless, it seems more appropriate to pursue experiments in which determinants that are innate can be more clearly separated from those that are purely products of conditioning or are at least contaminated by it. Such investigations are possible but they still present problems. If an electrode is implanted in a particular part of the brain where a certain behavior pattern is supposed to generate, is it an innate force if it requires the electrode to be activated? That is, how can an innate force exist if it requires a stimulus to function? One answer to this basic problem in causation is to recognize that there can be no behavior that is not the product of the interaction between the organism and the environment. This is not to say that there are not areas in the brain with rather specific and specialized functions that are innate and have the potential of producing a specific, specialized response. A look at some experiments undertaken by neurophysiologists will show the progress that has been made in delimiting innate components in the interaction between organism and environment. Some of the research has been reported elsewhere in this encyclopedia but implications of the research merit examination in light of what it says about the innateness of violence.

Some Research in the Neurophysiology of Assertive and Violent Behavior The unique complexity of the human brain warns us that any findings about it can at best be only partial and tentative. Nonetheless, the complexity need deter us no more than natural scientists are faced with the considerably simpler working of the universe and of elemental, subatomic particles. Astrophysicists and nuclear physicists have progressed enormously on the foundations of Newton, Einstein, and other fundamentalists. We can quite confidently say that time and space are so intertwined that we cannot explain elemental phenomena if we consider them separately. We can say that light travels at a certain speed, but only for practical purposes like establishing just how long is an hour, a day, a century, and a millennium. We can accept as fact that energy has mass, though the difference in mass between energy and more palpable forms of mass like lead or water vapor is truly enormous.


Correlatively, we can say that behaviors like a search for food or affection or for dignity have innate components, without thereby settling the dispute over the innateness of aggression, violence, dominance, or subservience. We have noted that theorists about human nature differ in their belief that violence is innate. Freud, Lorenz, and Ardrey build their basic theses on the assumption that aggression is innate. Other writers, notably Locke, Rousseau, and Jefferson, suppose that it is not. We can get at better bases for addressing the question if we look systematically at the way brain researchers organize their less-certain, lessdefinitive conclusions about human nature. The Triune Brain A physiologist, Paul MacLean, had divided the brain into three basic parts: the reptilian, paleomammalian, and neomammalian. The reptilian part is so named by MacLean because in it are contained behavioral functions that humans share with reptiles. That is, reptiles have been found to manifest these and other behaviors: (1) the establishment and marking of territory; (2) defense of territory; (3) fighting; (4) the formation of groups; (5) the establishment of social hierarchy; (6) courtship; (7) mating; (8) the breeding and sometimes the care of offspring. An anthropocentric view would describe these behaviors of reptiles as humanoid. MacLean’s nomenclature reminds us better of the continuity between the behavior of human beings and those of some of the lowest vertebrates. Between the most primitive, reptilian part and the most advanced, neomammalian part of the brain (otherwise called the neocortex, the ‘new’ cortex, where information is processed and decisions are made) lies the part which is most critical for our analysis: the limbic system. More than any other part, it is the seat of the emotions. The limbic system was ‘discovered’ by Paul Broca, in France in 1878. Its major parts are the hypothalamus, amygdala, hippocampus, and the septal area. In reptiles it is most of the brain. In Homo sapiens, it is a much smaller portion and is covered, wrapped around, by the very large neocortex, the thinking and feeling brain. Following Broca and Papez (1937), MacLean (1972), Delgado (1969), and many others have done extensive research within the limbic system, some of which are discussed here. To the extent that conflict behavior involves emotion, the limbic system is involved, and it is hard to conceive of emotion-free conflict behavior. However, it must always be borne in mind that bundles of nerves connect the limbic system with the neocortex and with the most primitive, ‘reptilian’ parts of the brain. One implication of these interties is that – physiologically speaking – there are probably few behaviors that are quite free of either the information-processing and decisionmaking functions of the neocortex or the most primitive

‘instincts’ of the sort that MacLean listed for reptiles. Another implication is that, to the extent that the primitive and the limbic systems ‘dominate’ overt behavior, people may not be totally aware and in control of their reasons for behaving as they do, notably in times of stress. Research in Nerves The brain’s activity is so complex and so interactive, both internally and with the environment, that the role of various factors can best be looked at by categories. Neural research is one of two major categories: neural and endocrine. Nerves and hormones interact continuously in the brain and in parts of the rest of the body that are directly under the brain’s control. A pinch or a stab wound may produce an immediate and violent response against the person who pinched or stabbed. This is primarily a neural response. The same stimuli also involve activation of hormonal response: the person pinched or stabbed experiences a surge of noradrenaline or norepinephrine (NE) and adrenaline or epinephrine (E), and this surge may cause the whole organism, the whole person, to respond violently. The neural part of the brain’s activity does not act alone; neither does the hormonal part. The master, most universally controlling, gland in the brain is the pituitary, the hypophysis. It is the size of a pea. The pituitary is physically divided into a part that is composed of a tiny set of nerves, the neurohypophysis, and another part consisting of a tiny sac of hormones, the adenohypophysis. Functionally, the pituitary’s two separate parts themselves are in continuous interaction. First, let us examine research whose emphasis has been on nerves. One of the great early investigators was Walter Cannon, who did experiments with dogs, by ablating different parts of the brain or cutting connections between them. He found that when a main trunk of nerves high in the brain (connecting the neocortex with the limbic system) was cut, the animals became veritable engines of destruction, sizing up in a coordinated way whoever was near and waiting for the first opportunity to strike. The neocortex no longer inhibited a response that could be called rage or selfdefense. When the cut was made lower, the animals became snarling, growling, uncontrolled, and undangerous animals. That is, the less involved the forebrain, the neocortex, the less controlled was the response behavior. Electrodes implanted in the brains of various vertebrates have again helped map the paths involved in violence. When electrodes were put in the brainstems (part of the ‘reptilian’ brain) of chickens and an electrical charge was fed into the electrode, the chickens, which previously had been friendly with their human attendants, pecked viciously at them. It is well to note that the chickens were not naturally, normally, hostile but the electrical charge made them so. It served the same function as ablation and cutting in the brains of Cannon’s dogs.

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Human Nature, Views of

Reis and co-workers in 1973 implanted electrodes in nine gentle cats, in a part of the brain immediately adjacent to the limbic system. When a current of 40 mA was introduced, the cats merely became alert. When it was increased to 50 mA, the cats started to groom them. When it was increased to 60 mA, five of the nine cats started to eat. When the current was increased to 70 mA, seven of the nine cats savagely attacked a rat placed in their cages. When the current was turned off, they stopped their attacks, and when it was turned on again they attacked again. In 1969, in an experiment with a group of monkeys housed in a single cage, Delgado noted unsurprisingly that the alpha male monkey, the top monkey, was, if not aggressive, at least assertive. He was the first to eat and sat wherever he wanted to. Delgado implanted an electrode in the caudate nucleus, a part of the limbic system, and on the cage wall he put an electrical switch that could send a current to the implanted electrode by remote control. The switch could be operated by any of the monkeys. One of the female monkeys discovered that by pressing the switch, she could stop the alpha’s dominant behavior. After pressing the switch, she could do what no subordinate monkey would dare do to an alpha: she looked him straight in the eye. After the effect had worn off, the alpha male was boss again. There is no evidence that the clever female had read the Declaration of Independence, but clearly she preferred at least equal deference and equal power. An idiosyncratic case emphasizes the role of the limbic system, the emotional brain, in determining behavior. A mentally healthy attorney started to take offense at offenses that for him became major crises. He got very angry at cocktail parties, pursued and tried to punish drivers who were rude or careless on freeways. He was getting short-tempered with his wife. Persistence and intensity of symptoms led to brain surgery. A tumor surrounded his hypothalamus, a major part of the limbic system. He died in the hospital. A young woman who had stabbed someone in the heart with a knife was put in hospital. She attacked a nurse with scissors. Brain surgery took the form of cauterizing and thus destroying the amygdala, another major part of the limbic system. It can confidently be said that the behavior of both the attorney and the young woman was violent: at least on the surface, overt evidence indicated conscious attacks on objects these two people considered appropriate. And it cannot be said with any confidence that either the attorney or the girl was responsible for his or her behavior. There are dozens of hormones – neurochemicals or endocrines – that interact with the nervous system as they control behavior. Their interaction is so reciprocal that one cannot confidently say that nerves control hormonal secretions or vice versa. But there are two categories of hormones that most directly relate to aggressive and violent behavior: the catecholamines and the steroids.

The principal catecholamines relevant to aggressive behavior are NE and E. The sequence of production of these hormones is from dopamine to NE to E. The sequence of production has distinct significance for the kind of behavior each helps produce. Dopamine tends to produce interaction rather basically and positively. Nurses administering dopamine have been the objects of amorous advances from their patients. NE tends to produce broad, unspecified response to protect the organism from threat: ‘destroy that attacker or get me out of here’. E, the metabolite of NE, tends to produce specific, deliberated response: the best way to destroy that attacker is to put him on trial, convict him or her, and then hang him or her. The ratio of NE varies from species to species. In chickens, lions, and whales, there is more NE than E. In human beings the ratio of NE to E is about 1 to 3. That is, human beings have more of the deliberative kind and other vertebrates more of the generalized kind. The second category of hormones relating to aggressive behavior is the steroids or sex hormones. The two kinds of steroids are the estrogens and androgens. Both males and females have both kinds: females have more estrogens than androgens and more estrogens than males, who have more androgens than estrogens. Both are metabolites of (are made from) cholesterol. Estrogen is associated with many kinds of behavior, but one of them is nurturance. Androgen is similarly implicated in producing overt behavior, but a principal one is assertive and aggressive behavior. The production of the steroids increases at puberty and at menopause the proportions change as between males and females. After menopause, women have less estrogen than androgen and have less estrogen than men. One indicator of these changes is that women often have facial hair that they never had before menopause; one indicator in men as they age may get less aggressive and more nurturant. That is, more nurturant than they were – and in some instances more nurturant than women. It is perhaps more difficult to separate out the behavioral consequences of different catecholamines than, perhaps, to isolate the effect of ingesting too much or too little salt, or too much or too little fatty food. But, without attributing physiological wisdom to the Roman Stoics, with their prescription, ‘nothing to excess’, it does appear that there is a normal range of amounts of catecholamines which, when it is not present, produces abnormal behavior. And that some of this abnormal behavior is clearly assertive and may be aggressive. Furthermore, variation in amounts of catecholamines may be partly under conscious control of the individual human being. And they can take various drugs to control the effect of catecholamines and steroids: among the commonest are alcohol, cocaine, and heroin. People do not need to know the physiology to enjoy or suffer from the effects of drugs on the natural production and effect of hormones. Research of this kind shows the behavioral consequences of direct intervention in the limbic system.

Evolutionary Origins and Functions of the Stress Response 11

The findings establish physiologically what Freud established psychologically: namely, that unconscious and often uncontrolled forces within human beings are major determinants of behavior. Freud discovered the unconscious origins of adult mental conflict in the (ontogenetic) development of humans as infants and children. What Broca, Papez, MacLean, and many others have done is to establish the similarities of brain structure and function between humans and lower vertebrates. They thereby have indicated that the emotional and some of the cognitive capacities of humans are phylogenetically rooted in the development of all vertebrate and, perhaps ultimately, all sensate species. Some later research illustrates the point by showing the interaction among neural structures, sex hormones, and various environmental factors in a species of lizard. These combine to produce certain complicated sex behaviors. We can infer that the neural structure of the lizard’s limbic system, its sex hormones, and various environmental factors interact within this reptilian brain in ways comparable to their functioning in human beings.

From Here, Where? Hitherto in this article, first a definition of human nature that may indicate the area of focus that is appropriate for seeking forces within the human organism that relate to political peace and violence has been offered. Then some research that helps explain political violence has been cited. This kind of research is in its infancy: most relevant research has been evidently undertaken for other purposes than explaining violence. So the relevant fields

of political psychology are hard to specify. We are about where Columbus was before he left on his first voyage. A major obstacle still remains the fact that most social scientists have not considered the need to get familiar with physiology as a step beyond social psychology. Another obstacle is the often scornful rejection of social science by natural scientists. Social science may be about where natural science was before Isaac Newton, but little is gained by arguing the matter. At least social science does not depreciate systematic investigation, however deficient it is in practicing it. But natural science can help enormously if it helps social science become more scientific, not just in its methods but also in the foci of its investigations.

Further Reading Davies, J. C. (1967). Aggression: Some definition and some physiology. Politics and the Life Sciences 6(1), 27–57. Dollard, J. L., Miller, N. E., Mowrer, O. H., and Sears, R. R. (1939). Frustration and aggression. London: Yale University Press. Einstein, A. and Freud, S. (1933). Why war? Paris: International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation. MacLean, P. (1972). The brain in relation to empathy and medical education. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 144, 374–382. Papez, J. W. (1937). A proposed mechanism of emotion. Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 38, 725–743. Rackham, H. (trans.) (1932). Aristotle: Politics. London: Heinemann. Skinner, B. F. (1971). Beyond freedom and dignity. New York: A. A. Knopf. Von Holst, E. and von St. Paul, U. (1960). Von wirkungsgefu¨ge der triebe. Die Naturwissenschften 18, 409–422. Von Holst, E. and von St. Paul, U. (1962). Electrically controlled behavior. Scientific American 206(3), 150–159 (A less complete report of the research originally published in 1960).

Evolutionary Origins and Functions of the Stress Response R M Nesse, S Bhatnagar, and E A Young, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA ã 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Utility of the Stress Response Phylogeny of the Stress Response How Does the Stress Response Help? Adaptive Regulation of Stress Responsiveness

Glossary Defense A trait that is latent until aroused by threatening situations in which it is useful.

This article is a revision of the previous edition article by R M Nesse, S Bhatnagar and E A Young, volume 2, pp 79–83, ã 2000, Elsevier Inc.

Mismatch between Ancestral and Modern Environments Further Reading

Natural Selection The process by which genes that provide a fitness advantage become more common from generation to generation and those that decrease

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Evolutionary Origins and Functions of the Stress Response

fitness become less common, thus shaping adaptive traits, including defenses. Phylogeny The evolutionary history of a trait or a species.

Evolution is the process in which traits such as the capacity for the stress response are shaped by natural selection. Understanding the evolutionary history of a trait, how it gives a selective advantage, and the costs it imposes can help to illuminate its design and regulation and can guide research into its mechanisms and control. The stress response has been shaped by natural selection to increase the ability of organisms to cope with situations that require action or defense. Stress-related mechanisms emerged early in the history of life. Like all traits, they have costs as well as benefits. Because the stress response is so often associated with negative events, its utility has often been neglected. In particular, the release of glucocorticoids, which is often thought to be the hallmark of the stress response, may in fact exist, in part, to protect against other aspects of defensive systems.

Utility of the Stress Response The vast bulk of research on stress has investigated its causes, mechanisms, and effects. An evolutionary approach instead addresses two very different and relatively neglected questions: (1) How does the stress system give a selective advantage and (2) what is the evolutionary history of the stress system? The answers to these questions provide a foundation in Darwinian medicine for understanding why the stress response is the way it is and why it causes so much suffering and disease. The first and most important contribution of an evolutionary perspective on stress is a clear focus on its utility. The stress system is a complex, sophisticated, and carefully regulated adaptation that has been shaped by natural selection because it gives a selective advantage. That advantage must be substantial in order to outweigh its huge costs. The idea that stress is useful is by no means new. In fact, the very phrase Hans Selye chose to describe it, the general adaptation syndrome, emphasizes its utility. Despite this early emphasis on its benefits, as the idea of stress entered the popular imagination there was a tendency to emphasize its dangers so that the fundamental fact of the utility of the stress response was often forgotten. Stress and Other Defenses Other defenses are also often confused with the problems they protect against. The capacities for pain, fever, vomiting,

Trade-Offs The fitness costs and benefits of a trait whose net effects yield a selective advantage.

cough, and inflammation are often thought of as medical problems, although a moment’s thought reveals that they are useful protective reactions. The ubiquity of the illusion that defenses are abnormalities arises from several sources. First, defenses are often associated with some kind of suffering and therefore seem maladaptive. Unfortunately, however, discomfort is itself probably one aspect of a mechanism that makes it useful. Second, they are reliably associated with disadvantageous situations, so the association bias makes it seem as if they are the problem. Finally, it is possible to use drugs to block the expression of many defenses with very little harm, completing the illusion that defenses are useless. In fact, blocking a defense can be harmful. For instance, suppressing cough in a patient with pneumonia makes it harder to clear the infection and may lead to death, and stopping the diarrhea of a person with a serious intestinal infection may lead to complications. Blocking fever, however, usually has little effect on the speed of recovery from a cold. When blocking a defense is not dangerous, this is because the body has backup protective mechanisms and because the regulation mechanism seems to be set to a hair trigger that expresses the defense at the slightest hint of danger. Situations in Which Stress Is Useful Stress, like fever and pain, is useful only in certain situations. Such traits lie latent until aroused by the particular circumstances in which they are useful. This means that the evolutionary explanation for such traits cannot be summarized in a single function. Instead, the inducible defenses give an advantage by changing multiple aspects of the body that increase its ability to cope effectively with the adaptive challenges that arise in a particular situation. One defense may have many aspects that serve many functions. So, the first step in understanding the adaptive value of stress is not to try to specify its function but to understand the exact situations in which the stress response is useful. To do that, we need to go back to the very origins of complex life forms 600 million years ago. If a very primitive organism had only two states, what are they? The answer is quite straightforward: activity and rest. This is a fundamental divide, one that is maintained even in our biochemical and nervous systems. Biochemical pathways are divided into the catabolic, in which energy is used, and the anabolic, in which energy is stored and tissues


are repaired. Parallel to this division are the two arms of the autonomic nervous system. The sympathetic system, which is activated as part of the stress response, increases arousal, blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory rate, and physical activity and institutes other endocrine and physiological changes necessary for action. The other half of the autonomic nervous system, the parasympathetic, inhibits muscular activity, stores energy, and shunts blood to digestion and bodily repair. Is stress, then, the same as arousal for action? Not exactly. As soon as a generic state of arousal was well established, natural selection probably began to differentiate it into subtypes to better meet the demands of different kinds of challenges. Here again, the main bifurcation is quite clear. Arousal is useful in two different situations: threats and opportunities. This division is also represented in our nervous systems. As Gray and others have pointed out, the brain seems to have moderately distinct systems for behavioral inhibition and for reward seeking. The corresponding behaviors are said to be defensive or appetitive and are associated with feelings of fear/pain or pleasure. In psychology, the same division is recognized in the distinct cognitive states promotion versus prevention.

Phylogeny of the Stress Response Cross-Species Comparisons Comparisons among different species can help to reconstruct the phylogeny of the stress response. All vertebrates have the proopiomelanocortin (POMC) molecule that gives rise not only to adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) but also to opiate-like peptides. It is intriguing to note that these molecules, with their related functions, are derived from the same parent molecule. All vertebrates also make corticosteroids. Peptide sequences very similar to those of human ACTH are found not only in mammals but also in amphibians and reptiles and even in insects, mollusks, and marine worms. Interestingly they are usually associated with immune cells, equivalent to macrophages, where they set defensive processes in motion. ACTH has long been closely associated with other signaling molecules such as corticotropin releasing hormone (CRH), biogenic amines such as epinephrine and norepinephrine, steroids such as cortisol, cytokines such as interleukin-1, and nitric oxide. All these substances are crucial to defensive systems. The remarkable thing is that genetic sequences for these molecules have not only been conserved over hundreds of millions of years but they continue to serve closely related defensive functions. Why have they changed so little? If a single molecule has several essential functions, this creates a strong selective force against mutations that change the sequence. By contrast, mutations that result in the differentiation of

different classes of receptors in target tissues can slowly specialize the responses of that tissue to the signal molecule. And they have, judging from the proliferating classes and subclasses of receptors that are now being discovered. Cost–Benefit Trade-Offs Why is the stress system not better? It could provide more effective protection against danger – but only at a still greater cost. Drosophila have been bred to resist the stress of food shortage. After 60 generations of such selection, the new strain is 80% more resistant to starvation. However, the larvae are more likely to die, and development is slowed. Similar results have been found for selection of resistance to other stressors and in other species. Like everything else in the body, stress responses are shaped by trade-offs, sometimes with benefits and costs occurring in different parts of the life cycle. The mechanisms that regulate the responsiveness of the stress system are shaped by the trade-off between the long-term costs and the immediate benefits of a relatively quick or intense or prolonged stress response. It has been hypothesized that the individuals who are most resilient or resistant to the effects of stress on physiology or behavior are the ones least vulnerable to stress-related diseases. However, are these individuals resilient to all stressrelated disorders, or are there situations in which resilience to some disorders means vulnerability to others? The answer is not known, but given the large number of physiological systems affected by stress and/or glucocorticoids, it is unlikely that resilience to one stress-related disorder necessarily protects against all. Another trade-off reflects the benefits and costs of habituation. For instance, rats exposed to some repeated stressors, particularly those that are mild and cognitive in nature, habituate to that stressor. The hypothalamicpituitary-adrenal (HPA) response is lower to the nth exposure than to the first exposure. Such habituation seems adaptive for most situations; if the stressor is known and can be easily coped with, then the HPA response should be moderated. Such habituation would, at the very least, conserve resources. However, it would be maladaptive to habituate to stressors that do present some danger. These trade-offs have shaped the brain mechanisms that regulate habituation. There are interesting sex differences in the habituation of the stress response, with some evidence indicating that habituation occurs in male but not in female rats. Such findings suggest that the selection forces acting on male and female rats may have differed enough to shape distinctly different patterns of habituation. Research is now addressing whether habituation occurs with some stressors in males but with others in females.

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Stress responses in adult animals are profoundly affected by early environmental events such as prenatal stress and variations in maternal care. The effects of variations in maternal care are transmitted across generations, with offspring that experience high maternal care exhibiting lower stress responses and providing high maternal care themselves. Such effects seem adaptive in that offspring are likely to experience an environment similar to that of their parents. So, for example, mothers providing low maternal care have high stress responses and so do their offspring when they become adults. However, when cross-fostered to other mothers, the offspring show patterns of stress responsivity similar to that of their foster mother and not their biological mother. Such results suggest that stress responsivity and maternal care are not simply genetically transmitted but are also regulated by early experiences. Such regulation is seen in other mammals and even plants. Some of such transmission across generations may arise from facultative mechanisms that evolved to adjust the system based on early life experiences, and some may arise from more general learning mechanisms. Difficulties in Defining Stress The human mind seems wired to try to make neat categories with sharp boundaries, perhaps because we communicate with words and this requires dividing the world up into categories even when that is unnatural. This leads to a tendency to try to make sharp distinctions between different states that may, in fact, overlap considerably. States of defensive arousal, for instance, are different from states of arousal for seeking food, but there is no reason to expect that the differentiation is complete. For instance, cortisol secretion is aroused by opportunities as well as threats. In fact, cortisol is even involved in reward mechanisms. Thus, any attempt to define the stress response in terms of cortisol arousal is doomed. For that matter, any attempt to define stress or the stress response is liable to be an exercise in frustration for the evolutionary reason that the system does not have sharp boundaries or a single function. The closest we can come to a defining characteristic is the kinds of situations in which stress has given a selective advantage, and those situations are not sharply defined. The stress system was, after all, not designed by an engineer but shaped by a process of tiny tinkering changes. The long unsatisfying history of attempts to define stress and the wish, expressed by many researchers, that the term would go away, arise from this difficulty. Even after defensive arousal was differentiated considerably from appetitive arousal, there were undoubtedly advantages to further differentiating subtypes of stress responses to match specific challenges. Thus, different situations – a predator, a high place, injury,

infection, starvation, loss of a status battle, and speaking in public – all seem to have shaped somewhat different defensive responses. These responses are only partially differentiated from a more generic response, so they have overlapping characteristics with functions in common. Attempts to sharply distinguish different kinds of anxiety disorders are as frustrating as attempts to define stress itself and for the same reasons. New attempts to study anxiety disorders in the context of normal anxiety will be helpful.

How Does the Stress Response Help? Immediate Response These difficulties notwithstanding, a stress response is a coordinated pattern of changes that is useful in situations in which the organism is faced with possible damage or a loss of resources. The next question is: How is it useful? Even before Selye, Walter Cannon provided some answers. In situations that might require fight or flight, he observed the utility of increased heart rate and contractility to speed circulation, increased rate and depth of breathing to speed gas exchange, sweating to cool the body and make it slippery, increased glucose synthesis to provide energy, shunting of blood from gut and skin to muscles, increased muscle tension to increase strength and endurance, and increased blood clotting in preparation for possible tissue damage. More recently, others have demonstrated faster reaction times and cognitive benefits as a result of sympathetic arousal. These immediate responses are mostly mediated by the sympathetic nervous system and the associated release of epinephrine from the adrenal medulla. Adrenal Cortical Response However, the stress system also includes a more delayedresponse release of cortisol from the adrenal cortex, although this system does have more rapid effects (such as fast negative feedback) that are probably mediated by putative membrane steroid receptors. This is initiated by neural signals to the hypothalamus, which releases CRH, which in turn results in the secretion of ACTH from the anterior pituitary gland on the bottom of the brain. The ACTH induces cortisol synthesis and release from the adrenal gland. The whole system is called the HPA system because the signal acts via the hypothalamus, the pituitary, and the adrenal glands. Many actions of the HPA system seem, like those of the sympathetic system, well designed for acute action. It changes physiology so the liver breaks down glycogen into glucose, and it alters cells so glucose can get in more readily. Through different populations, CRH not only releases ACTH, but it also directly increases anxiety


and arousal and activates cells in the locus coreleus, the brain center where the cell bodies for most noradrenergic neurons are located. All in all, the system seems admirably designed to get the organism ready for action. Indeed, both branches of the system are readily aroused by exercise, and trained athletes, far from having low levels of cortisol, have chronic high levels – just the thing for a person who frequently exerts him- or herself. Association with Negative Events So, why should the stress system as a whole be associated so closely with bad events instead of positive ones? To answer that question, we need to understand why the components of the stress system are carefully packaged. If the stress is so useful, why is stress not expressed all the time? There are at least three good reasons why it is not. First, it is expensive in terms of calories. No organism can afford to waste effort. Second, it interferes with other adaptive behaviors. A vigilant organism has less time for finding food and eating, to say nothing of mating. Finally, and most important, some changes that give an advantage in the face of threats may also cause tissue damage. For this reason, they need to be carefully sequestered, except in those few circumstances in which the costs are outweighed by the benefits. This helps to explain why some aspects of the stress response are associated more with negative than positive arousal. The benefits of a stress response that increases the likelihood of catching prey may sometimes be worth it, but if a stress response prevents being caught as prey, this is always worth it, even if substantial damage results from the stress response itself. This helps to explain why the stress response, despite its costs, is so ubiquitous. An optimal regulatory mechanism will express a stress response whenever, on average, it is worth it. Given the uncertainties of environmental cues and the potential life-saving effects of the stress response, there will be many instances where the expression of stress is worthwhile, even though there is only a small chance that danger is actually present. The global conclusion is that the damage caused by stress responses is not necessarily from abnormal stress. Some components of the stress response may be a part of the response specifically because they are too damaging to be expressed except when they protect against great danger. There is every reason to think that normal stress, like every other bodily trait, has costs as well as benefits. This idea is expressed in the concept of allostasis, as proposed by McEwen and colleagues, which emphasizes the short-term benefits and the longterm costs. That a normal stress response might be crucial for optimal physiological functioning has implications for recent notions about pharmacological therapies for reducing perceived stress. For example, if a drug such as a

CRH inhibitor blocks all stress response at the brain level, then how does the body react to what may be real requirements for increases in energy use and how do systems that are generally opposed in functions to those of glucocorticoids, counterregulatory systems such as the regulation of insulin release, stay in check? Furthermore, there are many indications in both human and animal studies of mismatches between perceived stress or behavioral indices of stress and HPA activation. The extreme of an absent stress response is, of course, Addison’s disease. Thus, although the cognitive nature of many current human stressors results in costs disproportionate to actual threats, from an evolutionary point of view the general inhibition of stress responses is by no means optimal. It would be ironic as well as tragic if the history of the excessive use of cortisone were to repeat itself with a new generation of drugs that block the stress response. Cortisol as Protection against Other Aspects of Stress If some aspects of the stress response cause harm, has selection shaped systems to protect against this damage? In 1984, Munck and colleagues reviewed the actions of cortisol and said, ‘‘We propose that stress-induced increases in glucocorticoids levels protect, not against the source of stress itself, but rather against the body’s normal reactions to stress, preventing those reactions from overshooting and themselves threatening homeostasis.’’ They noted that many inflammatory diseases had been attributed to overproduction of cortisol until 1941, when adrenal steroids were shown to decrease inflammation. Subsequent demonstrations showed that steroids inhibit the production of cytokines, prostaglandins, and other mediators of the immune response, thus decreasing immune function. This is just the opposite of what would make sense as protection from danger, but it is entirely consistent with a role in protecting against damage from immune system activation induced by other changes. It is now clear that the effects of glucocorticoids on immune function are much more complicated than originally thought. Added to this are recent novel findings regarding the effects of glucocorticoids on the brain versus the body on the regulation of energy balance and fat deposition that suggest that our assumptions about the physiological and neural functions of glucocorticoids will continue to be significantly challenged.

Adaptive Regulation of Stress Responsiveness The recognition that a moderately responsive stress system is optimal is quickly leading to a consideration of

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the adaptive significance of variations in stress responsiveness. Several lines of thinking addresses the adaptive significance of innate individual differences in stress responsiveness. The first attempts to explain the growing evidence for a bimodal pattern of stress response in some organisms, with some individuals responding quickly and strongly and others showing a much more restrained response. It has been suggested that these distinct patterns reflect distinct patterns of adaptation,: a hawk pattern that is optimal in crowded situations and a dove pattern that is optimal when population density is low. The different strategies are hypothesized to be the products of frequency-dependent selection. There is also increasing evidence that maternal effects on an offspring’s stress responsiveness may be adaptive. Mothers exposed to stressful environments give birth to offspring with especially responsive stress systems that may give them an advantage in harsh environments. The same evolutionary forces may have shaped mechanisms that explain the connection between early abuse or neglect and increased stress vulnerability.

Mismatch between Ancestral and Modern Environments Much has been made of the differences between our environment and that of our ancestors. In the case of stress, this argument comes in several flavors. Some suggest that life is more stressful now than it was for our predecessors. Special aspects of our environment do cause new kinds of stress. Working in a bureaucracy is tedious and political at best. Driving to work, living in a ghetto, running a corporation, working in a factory – these all arouse the stress system. Despite the amount of stress we experience, however, our ancestors almost certainly experienced more. With no police, no food reserves, no medicine, no laws, rampant infections, and prevalent predators, danger could come at any time. True, social groups were closer, kin networks were stronger, and people spent all their time with one another and none alone reading books. Still, life was hard. Perhaps in that environment, where stressors were more often physical, the stress response was more useful than it is now. Today, we mainly face social and mental threats, so the actions of the HPA system may yield net costs. This is plausible and supports the many efforts to reduce stress and to find drugs that block the stress response. This brings us back to the very concept of stress as a mismatch between the demands made on an individual and that individual’s ability to meet those demands. We think of these demands as coming from

the outside, and sometimes they do, as when we are attacked by the proverbial tiger. But most stresses in modern life arise not from physical dangers or deficiencies but from our tendency to commit ourselves to personal goals that are too many and too high and to ruminate about them. When our efforts to accomplish these goals are thwarted or when we cannot pursue all the goals at once and must give something up, the stress reaction is expressed. In short, much stress arises, ultimately, not from a mismatch between our abilities and the environment’s demands, but from a mismatch between what we desire and what we can have.

Further Reading Bhatnagar, S., Lee, T., and Vining, C. (2005). Prenatal stress differentially affects habituation to repeated restraint in adult male and female rats. Hormones and Behavior 47(4), 430–438. Cannon, W. B. (1929). Bodily changes in pain, hunger, fear, and rage: researches into the function of emotional excitement. New York: Harper and Row. Charney, D. S. (2004). Psychobiological mechanisms of resilience and vulnerability: implications for successful adaptation to extreme stress. American Journal of Psychiatry 161(2), 195–216. Dallman, M. F. (2003). Fast glucocorticoid feedback favors ‘‘the munchies.’’ Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism 14(9), 394–396. Frankenhauser, M. (1976). The role of peripheral catecholamines in adaptation to understimulation and overstimulation. In Serban, G. (ed.) Psychopathology and human adaptation, pp. 173–191. New York: Plenum. Gray, J. A. (1987). Fear and stress, 2nd edn. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Higgins, E. T. (1997). Beyond pleasure and pain. American Psychologist 52(12), 1280–1300. Marks, I. M. and Nesse, R. M. (1994). Fear and fitness: an evolutionary analysis of anxiety disorders. Ethology and Sociobiology 15(5–6), 247–261. McEwen, B. S. (2003). Interacting mediators of allostasis and allostatic load: towards an understanding of resilience in aging. Metabolism 10(supplement 2), 10–16. Munck, A., Guyre, P. M., and Holbrook, N. J. (1984). Physiological functions of glucocorticoids in stress and their relation to pharmacological actions. Endocrine Review 5(l), 25–44. Korte, S. M., Koolhaas, J. M., Wingfield, J. C., et al. (2005). The Darwinian concept of stress: benefits of allostasis and costs of allostatic load and the trade-offs in health and disease. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Review 29, 3–38. Nesse, R. M. (2005). Natural selection and the regulation of defenses: a signal detection analysis of the smoke detector principle. Evolution and Human Behavior 26, 88–105. Nesse, R. M. and Williams, G. C. (1994). Why we get sick: the new science of Darwinian medicine. New York: Times Books. Rosen, J. B. and Schulkin, J. (1998). From normal fear to pathological anxiety. Psychological Review 105(2), 325–350. Young, E. and Vasquez, D. (1996). Hypercortisolemia, hippocampal glucocorticoid receptors, and fast feedback. Molecular Psychiatry 1(2), 149–159. Zhang, T. Y., Parent, C., Weaver, I., et al. (2004). Maternal programming of individual differences in defensive responses in the rat. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1032, 85–103.

Evolution of Violence 17

Evolution of Violence Jukka-Pekka Takala, National Council of Crime Prevention, Helsinki, Finland ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Evolutionary Point of View Adaptations to Violence and Conflict Conflicts with Kin and Nonkin Conflicts over Resources for Survival and Reproduction

Glossary Adaptation A process of natural selection operating upon heritable variation by which an organism becomes fitted to its environment; any of the evolved fitnessenhancing characteristics that are functional in solving specific problems. Allele Any alternative form of a gene. Altruism In everyday language, altruism means selfless concern for the welfare of others. In evolutionary theory altruism strictly defined denotes increasing the fitness of another individual at the expense of the actor’s fitness. By-Products Side consequences of evolutionary adaptations. For instance, male nipples may be nonadaptive by-products of the design that produced female nipples that clearly have adaptive value. Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA) The environment in which a species evolved to solve the recurring problems posed by that environment. When the environment changes, existing adaptations may no longer be adaptive. Evolutionary Psychology Study of the mind in the light of evolutionary theory and current knowledge about the processes that created the mind. Used also more narrowly to designate an approach emphasizing the study of adaptations and problem-solving modules. Fitness The success of an organism’s genes relative to their alleles within a population. Gene Usually defined as a section of DNA that codes for one protein, but other definitions have been suggested also. Inclusive Fitness Total of an individual’s personal reproductive success and its influence on the fitness of relatives, the latter adjusted by the degree of their relatedness.

Evolution of Sexual Violence Conclusion Further Reading

Kin Selection A concept referring to the fact that natural selection works on inclusive fitness (qv). An individual may help to propagate the frequency of a trait in a population even if this reduces the individual’s personal fitness, provided the reduction is outweighed by increase in the fitness of individuals related to the actor. Kin selection explains why apparent altruism and self-sacrifice may be adaptive. Parental Investment Anything a parent does to increase an offspring’s reproductive success at a cost to the parent’s capacity to invest in other offspring. Parent–Offspring Conflict Conflict based on the fact that the genomes of parents and offspring are not identical; typically, it is in the parents’ genetic interest to invest more or sooner in other progeny than the focal offspring’s genetic interest would dictate. Paternity Confidence, Paternal Certainty The degree to which a male is confident that he is the father of a child. Reciprocal Altruism A pattern of behavior in which an individual provides benefits to another without immediate payment and the recipient reciprocates with benefits to the donor when a chance arises. Both increase their fitness when benefits are given at a time when they cost little to the provider and may be very valuable to the recipient and the needs and resources of the individuals vary. Reproductive Success (RS) Passing of genes to next generation. A quantitative estimate of success is often expressed as the number of one’s surviving offspring that are able to reproduce. Sexual Selection Intrasexual competition for access to the opposite sex and intersexual mate choice. Darwin held sexual selection to be a form different from natural selection but today it is usually considered to be a type of natural selection.

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Evolution of Violence

The Evolutionary Point of View Introduction This article presents ideas and findings on the evolution of violence. First, the evolutionary point of view is sketched emphasizing natural selection and mentioning circumstances that might favor the evolution of a capacity to use aggression. It is neither claimed that the evolutionary view is the only relevant approach in explaining and understanding violence nor that violence is the only relevant aspect of human behavior that the evolutionary approach can illuminate. It is claimed, however, that in many cases evolutionary theory could be a fruitful part of the approach of looking at violence, particularly when looking for comprehensive and accurate explanations for the patterns of aggression. The article then reviews attempts at evolutionary explanations of some aspects of violence and aggression, as well as some empirical findings that have been inspired by evolutionary theorizing. The section, ‘Conflicts with kin and nonkin’, discusses how the fact that close relatives share, on average, a much greater part of their genetic heritance seems to be linked to the patterns of the selection of victims and allies of violent acts. The next main section looks at the possibility of seeing conflicts over resources for survival reproduction as an ultimate source of many kinds of fairly common types of violence. The section also includes discussion of gender differences in aggression that seem to be linked to sex differences in reproduction. The final section before conclusion looks more closely at possibilities of understanding and explaining aspects of sexual violence by using evolutionary theory. The article necessarily touches upon many controversies (and often heated) over specific theories and hypotheses regarding violence. Many of the quarrels seem to spring from an overall rejection of the relevance of evolutionary theory to explanation and understanding of human behavior. However, controversies are found also among those researchers who basically welcome the evolutionary framework. Some of the concerns regarding the possible moral and legal implications will be discussed in the concluding section of this article. The evolutionary approach has by no means resulted in a homogeneous field, but is one where several somewhat different approaches compete with each other, sometimes to the extent that one can discern different ‘schools’. The debates are many and often too long in technical detail to be dwelt upon in length here. The references to some sources of the debates might help those who wish to learn more of the issues involved. Evolution by Natural Selection Evolution by natural selection, as first described by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in 1858, is a result of a few simple processes. First, living beings tend to produce more offspring than the environment can carry. This means

that there is competition for resources – be it overt or covert. Violence is one means of resolving conflicts over resources that have a bearing on survival and reproduction. Second, individuals of a population show variability in traits that are at least partly heritable. Traits that have to do with violence are heritable in many species. Third, the survival and reproductive success (RS) of different heritable variants is not random; some properties systematically enhance their bearers’ ability to survive and reproduce. For instance, if a species lives in an environment where competition for critical resources is part of everyday life, and it is possible to exclude competitors by force from resources, it is unlikely that a variant that is unable to defend resources would thrive. Finally, in the course of many generations, differential reproduction leads to an increase of the successful variants and a decrease or elimination of the less successful ones. Natural selection has no goal or purpose, but it will produce organisms that seem purposefully crafted to their environments. A variant that can better utilize a resource of the environment or better defend a resource against competitors emerges by chance, but once it has appeared, its chances of survival and reproduction are better than those of other variants. Hence, it can be expected that adaptations that emerge in the process of natural selection will help in competition. Competition can be indirect. For instance, one individual or group may be able to secure resources without others even noticing this fact (and only suffering from more limited options). However, competition can also be direct and open, so that more than one party confront each other at a time and place where the distribution of the limited resources is decided. Again, such a situation may proceed without the use of violence (or even its threat). In some cases, the situation may turn out to be even a cooperative win-win situation. However, some circumstances have tenaciously a zero-sum game character. The use or threat of violence is one possibility to decide the outcome of direct conflicts in many cases. Evolutionary theory views the evolution of violence in the context of its costs and benefits measured ultimately in terms of RS. It is, however, not about a single individual but about the average success of certain design features. An adaptation for aggression can be advantageous to the survival of copies of the genes that lie on its basis even if some individuals perish because of it. Evolutionary theory is also different from the outdated idea that selection would optimize the good of the species. The 1960s discovery of kin selection, the fact that selection operates on the combined or ‘inclusive’ fitness of the focal individual and its relatives, has led to new hypotheses and findings of the patterns of conflict, competition, violence, peace, and altruism. When these insights are applied to humans, many patterns of violence turn out to be consistent with the assumption that humans have evolved to be effective competitors and kin benefactors or ‘nepotists’.


The potential rewards of violence include achieving (or preventing loss of) resources such as food, a favored nesting site, or access to a mate, but this comes with potential cost, such as increased risk of injury or death – often because of counterviolence. Hence, evolutionary variants that would aggress indiscriminately, without paying heed to the costs of aggression, would be less likely to succeed than those capable of calibrating their responses and aggressing only when benefits are likely to be higher than costs. Thus, we should expect that psychological decision mechanisms would have evolved that are sensitive to the prospects of success and the size of risks involved in different behavioral options. The basic options are often attack (or counterattack), submission, or flight. An oft-posed question about all evolutionary analyses of adaptation is: Are they testable? Is it not tautological to argue that particular traits of behavior or morphology are an ‘adaptation’ molded by natural and sexual selection to help its carrier to better survive and reproduce if the purpose of that ‘adaptation’ is inferred from the very features in question? The problem is real enough but can be largely avoided by deriving testable predictions from adaptation hypotheses. The adaptationist framework helps researchers to ‘predict’ missing pieces of a puzzle and to test assumed finds. Very often the design or even the existence of a proposed adaptive mechanism is unknown prior to investigation. For instance, inclusive fitness theory suggests that, other things being equal, people should use violence less readily against close genetic relatives than against nonrelatives. This theoretically derived hypothesis has led to surprising empirical findings that in many ways have supported the prediction (if also raised new questions). When a theory leads to the discovery of a fact that was unknown until it was predicted by the theory, it is not a tautological post hoc explanation. Another direction is to search for a function for a known mechanism, similar to how William Harvey discovered the circulation of blood after having started to wonder why there were one-way valves in the veins. Complementary Levels of Explanation for Behavior Explanations for a behavior, such as aggression, can be sought at different levels. First, one can look for immediate or proximate factors at play in situations that lead to aggression. They may be emotional (e.g., frustration), chemical (e.g., the status of hormones or neurotransmitters), or relate to aspects in the immediate social situation. Second, one can look at ontogeny, the development of individuals during their lives and try to find experiences – such as the behavior and example of parents or the gender roles proffered by the prevailing culture – that might influence the individuals’ aggressive and peaceful inclinations in adulthood. Third, one can delineate the evolutionary

history of a behavioral trait to arrive at a phylogenetic explanation. Finally, and this is the focus of evolutionary adaptationist analysis, one can look at behaviors such as aggression as expressions of a set of propensities that have been selected by evolution because they served the individual’s ancestors’ (inclusive) fitness. These types of explanations are called ultimate or distal explanations. Rather than contradictory, these four approaches are aspects of a potentially unified, comprehensive explanation, in principle at least. For example, one essential part of the proximate explanation for why red deer stags go to their regular mating grounds and prepare for fighting is an increased level of the male hormone testosterone. This is known because red deer stags given testosterone in experiments behave like that; they also lose the velvet covering on their antlers in preparation for territorial battles, even in the absence of females. However, from the evolutionary point of view, there is no point for red deer stags to head for their mating grounds and prepare for fighting just because of a surge of testosterone. The ultimate selectional causation of a trait is an account of how it helps to solve a (recurrent) problem related to survival and reproduction. The red deer stag is programmed, as it were, to head to the mating grounds at the time of the year when the hinds in estrus also gather there to select their mates. Once this breeding system was in place, any stag that failed to go there and fight may have preserved his life and limb longer but had fewer chances of passing on his genes. Gene-Based Evolutionary Theory and Inclusive Fitness As mentioned above, modern evolutionary theory has abandoned the idea that natural selection is for the ‘good of the species’ or a social group as a whole. It has also importantly tempered the notion of individual fitness. Thus, using expressions such as ‘selfish genes’ or the ‘gene’s perspective’, evolutionary theorists stress that selection ultimately acts not on the group nor on one individual, but on the alleles that are passed on to future generations. In a sexually reproducing species, individual genotypes are unique – apart from monozygotic offspring and artificial clones – and they cannot be passed on to future genotypes. However, alleles can be passed on, and near kin can also be helpful in this process. In humans (and other vertebrates), on average one-half of an individual’s genes are identical by descent with those of a full sibling or with his or her child. Grandparents and their grandchildren share one quarter, the same as an individual with a full sibling’s child. This number is called the coefficient of relatedness. For the reproduction of these genes, it does not matter whether they are passed on to the next generation via self or a relative. Reasoning like this is summarized in the notion ‘inclusive fitness’, which is defined as the total of an individual’s individual fitness (direct descendants) plus its

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contribution to the fitness of its relatives discounted by the coefficient of relatedness. Inclusive fitness explains how traits that help relatives at the expense of self can be selected. It also suggests that – other things being equal – an individual is less likely to behave aggressively toward its relatives than toward other conspecifics, because hostility toward relatives lowers one component of its inclusive fitness. Cooperation and Conflict Since Darwin published his work on the origin of species, there has been an ongoing – if partly unilluminating – discussion on whether natural selection and evolution ‘really’ mean struggle and conflict or whether the role of cooperation, harmony, and symbiosis have been underestimated. However, it seems that both struggle and cooperation are integral parts of life. Both exist and both can be fitness enhancing. William Hamilton’s kin selection theory gave a plausible account of why closely related organisms should help each other and cooperate. Robert Trivers’ theory of the evolution of reciprocal altruism between nonkin, and related theories on reciprocal relations, have interesting things to say about conflict, violence, and peace. Trivers’ model implied that selection, under some circumstances, discriminates against those who fail to reciprocate, the ‘cheaters’. This happens if cheating has later adverse affects on the cheater’s life that outweigh the benefit of not reciprocating. ‘‘This may happen if the altruist responds to the cheating by curtailing all future possible altruistic gestures to this individual.’’ Game-theoretical work by Robert Axelrod and others has shown that a reciprocating strategy is evolutionarily stable in the sense that it can be preserved by natural selection. In a computer simulation modeling a competition of various behavioral strategies in a series of recurring situations to choose either ‘cooperation’ or ‘defection’, a strategy called ‘tit for tat’ was the most successful, measured by the RS over generations. The strategy is simple: ‘Cooperate the first time and then match your opponent’s last move’. Later work has shown that a mild element of ‘forgiveness’ makes the strategy even more robust. However, it does not obviate the need to ‘punish’ a cheater. Rather, indiscriminate ‘forgiveness’, or all-out altruism, promotes cheaters. If reciprocal altruism develops, also strategies that take advantage of altruists develop easily, unless altruists develop counterstrategies, cheater detection, and punishment of nonreciprocators. Trivers termed such punishment ‘‘moralistic aggression’’ and assumed that it was selected to counteract cheating. ‘‘Much of human aggression has moral overtones,’’ Trivers observed. ‘‘Injustice, unfairness, and lack of reciprocity often motivate human aggression and indignation.’’ He added that moralistic aggression ‘‘often seems out of all proportion to the offenses committed . . . . But since small inequities repeated many times over a lifetime may exact a heavy toll in relative fitness, selection may favor a strong show of aggression when the cheating

tendency is discovered.’’ Sociologist Donald Black has reviewed convincing evidence that even a great proportion of crimes are moralistic: many crimes are reprisals for an experienced wrongdoing, often cheating.

Adaptations to Violence and Conflict It is improbable that random aggressiveness and violence in general would be adaptive. However, there are many recurrent situations in the life course of different animals where measured violence (or threat thereof) is most likely adaptive. Many animals exhibit complex species-typical morphological and behavioral traits that look very much like adaptations for violence. The stag’s antlers serve in competition over access to females, the male stickleback violently defends his young. Individuals that appear timid in other contexts aggressively defend their vital reproductive resources – such as food, territory, and offspring against threat of usurpation or harm. Some animals are quick to grab any resources that they have a chance to hold. Furthermore, they fight over access to mates. Aggression easily occurs where resources are scarce – or potentially scarce – so that some groups or individuals can deny others access to them by claiming ownership of them. Humans, for instance, have fought bitterly over ownership of cattle and arable land but far less over access to oxygen. Ecology has thus great potential influence on the level of aggressiveness. Many animals do kill conspesifics. When observation times are long enough, these instances are observed. Compared to humans, many apes and monkeys are violent. Nevertheless, one can say that animals (and people) often settle fights in a ‘ritualized’ way, or at least without all-out violence. It is the contestants’ own interest to settle the fight with as little cost as possible. This implies that the ability to assess the relative fighting power of the adversary would have been favored by selection. Actual fights carry big risks for the weaker party, but they are risky for the stronger as well. Even if an individual wins, a wound may have reduced his fitness.

Conflicts with Kin and Nonkin A central idea of applying modern gene-based evolutionary theory to the study of violence is to think of whose genetic interests may be served and whose interests harmed by a violent act. For instance, modern gene-based evolutionary theory predicts that – other things being equal – conflicts will be the more prevalent and intense the more the reproductive interests of different individuals, and groups differ. The closer genetic relatives two individuals are, the less intense conflict there should be, on average. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson and others have tested this idea in a series of studies since early 1980s and have found that it holds remarkably well.


Relatives harm and sometimes kill each other. However, they also have many chances to do so, and once you control opportunity – say, look only at people who share a home – the picture changes. One of Daly and Wilson’s studies looked at the relative risk of homicide by relationship in co-residing people in a US city. Co-residing persons who were not genetic relatives experienced a homicide rate 11 times greater than relatives living together. Relatives are more likely to be conspirators in murder than targets. The coefficient of relatedness for victim–offender pairs is lower than it is for cooffending partners in many societies and historical periods. Even an analysis of kinship in Icelandic sagas revealed that murderers were seldom genetic relatives of their victims; and when they were, the stakes tended to be high. The notion of inclusive fitness, of course, does not say that it would never enhance one’s fitness to harm or kill a relative; it only says that the fitness gain from such an act ought to be greater than the relative’s fitness loss multiplied by the coefficient of relatedness. More fitness is lost than gained by killing a brother for a hazelnut, but killing for an autocratic kingdom with ensuing access to numerous wives might be a different matter. A woman and a man who have shared offspring, such as a married or cohabiting couple with one or more children, are not (usually) related to each other. However, they both have a genetic interest in their offspring that carries both of their genes. This is a basis (an ultimate basis, if you will) for their cooperation and mutual support. It is a sort of a common venture setup for the good of both of their genes that are carried forward by their shared offspring. Nevertheless, from this ultimate genes’ point of view, their relationship is much more dependent on the success or failure of their cooperation than is the case with genetic relatives who always share a considerable proportion of genes with each other whether they get along with each other or not. As Heikki Sarmaja has noted, humans do not abandon their own child so as to be able to adopt a more beautiful or gifted child from next door, even if the new child would be more beautiful and gifted, while many have found a new spouse next door. Breakups of married couples tend to be more dramatic and more irreversible than those between genetic relatives. During the relationship, both partner A and B may be tempted to try to make the other partner expend more resources in raising the children than they themselves are willing to. Likewise, it is possible that partner A tries to set up and advance other reproductive projects with a third partner C and in those projects invest resources that could have been used in A and B’s joint project. The Cinderella Effect and Conflicts of Reproduction As an example of evolutionary findings and discussions, the question of maltreatment by stepparents or the socalled Cinderella effect will be taken up here. According

to a now-famous study by Daly and Wilson, Canadian children who lived with a natural parent and a stepparent had 40 times higher abuse rates than children living with both natural parents. The risk of newborns to 2-year-olds of being killed differed even more, 70-fold. Results supporting the assumption that stepfamilies posit a greater risk of violent victimization to children than do families of two genetic parents have received support in many studies in various places. For instance, an Australian study found that 36% of the offenders in child-abuse deaths were nongenetic fathers, while only 3.8% of dependent children live with a male stepparent. However, some other studies do suggest nonsignificant or at least smaller excess risk to stepchildren. Temrin and co-workers found that in Sweden the risk of children to be killed in stepfamilies was indeed greater than in families with two biological parents, but some of the victims were in fact killed not by the stepparent but by the biological parent. Once those cases were removed, the excess risk from stepparents did not reach statistical significance. Of course, also the finding that the risk of being killed by the biological parent is higher in a stepfamily than in an intact family is consistent with evolutionary predictions. Similar to conditions that tend to accompany infanticides, the biological parent may be lacking social support for the raising of the child. Furthermore, the finding that the youngest children seem to have the highest excess risk of maltreatment in stepfamilies is in line with predictions from parental investment theory. The younger the child, the longer the time over which it requires care. Note that it is not only that the very youngest children are at a higher risk of being killed than somewhat older ones irrespective of the family type, but that even taking that into account, the additional relative risk in stepfamilies is greatest at the very early ages. Temrin’s results show that the excess risk to children from stepparents can vary considerably from country to country. Comparing the low excess-risk Sweden with US and other countries where the difference is greater, one might hypothesize that the difference may at least partly have to do with the societal support policies for families and children and how they might prevent or ease tensions in stepfamilies. Recently, in a noted book and related articles, David Buller has questioned Daly and Wilson’s theory and findings on stepchildren’s relatively higher abuse risks. One of Buller’s claims is that the image of overrepresentation of stepparents among perpetrators of abuse and murder is based on biased reporting. Daly and Wilson have responded. Based on the exchange, it seems to the present author that while it is possible that there is bias that increases reporting of stepparents as suspects, it is not plausible that the bias would be large enough to explain the results, particularly in the case of Canadian homicides against children. Buller also repeats another criticism of the evolutionary explanation for the high risk of stepchildren. This asks

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why adoptive children do not seem to suffer similarly high abuse rates. After all, they also have no genetic relation to their adoptive parents. However, Daly and Wilson did not predict that adopted children would be at greater risks, and they had good reasons not to. For one, while stepfamilies and adoptions by relatives have presumably been recurrent phenomena in our ancestral environments, adoption by unrelated persons most likely has been very rare. In modern societies adoptions are a result of a positive desire to raise the child, adoptive parents are screened, couples are usually financially stable, and the child can be returned if the arrangements do not work out. Furthermore, as the child is unrelated to either parent the promotion of one partner’s genetic interest does not exploit the efforts of the other, as may happen in a stepfamily. Also, to get a more complete picture one should look at those children who are put in foster homes or institutional settings. While those institutions are also screened and overseen in developed societies, there are reports that abuse of children is sometimes frequent. Again, there is the confounder that some children were put in these settings because they had some problems, but one cannot ignore the fact that they are taken care of by adults who are neither genetic relatives nor their adoptive parents. Parent–Offspring and Mother–Infant Conflicts An interesting projection from the gene-based evolutionary theory is the concept of parent–offspring conflict, suggested by Robert Trivers. When a parent nurtures its child, its own inclusive fitness is raised as long as the cost is not too high. Alternatively, both the child and the parent may gain in fitness if the parent produces another child. However, they would time a new child differently. To maximize the parent’s inclusive fitness, it should invest in a new child as soon as the new child’s fitness gain is greater than that of the extant child. From the point of view of the extant child’s fitness, however, a new full sibling should appear only when its fitness gain is twice that of the extant child because it must be discounted by one-half (and a half-sibling should wait even longer). Hence, extant mammal offspring tends to be ‘programmed’ to resist weaning and other expressions of diminished parental investment in itself. Trivers’ theory has shed light not only on sibling rivalry or the weaning conflict but also on complications of pregnancy, or the so-called mother–fetus conflict. However, the variables of parental offspring can also be seen in the patterns of very lethal conflicts between mothers and their infants. Killing one’s own child seems to fly in the face of evolutionary theory, because it seems to prevent rather than help the parent get his or her genes into the next generation. This seems particularly true of mothers killing their babies – not only because of our cultural image of mothers as caring for their babies above everything else, but also because of the evolutionary-informed

observation that unlike putative fathers, women giving birth can (or could in our evolutionary environment) always be sure that they are the mother of the baby. However, maternal infanticide is universally found in preindustrial societies and is a part of human motherhood. Since caring for a new child makes it more difficult for the woman to invest in other children (extant or future), in terms of her RS, a woman in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA) was better off abandoning a nonviable infant as soon as possible. The situations in which women commit infanticide – and in which cases it is sometimes even condoned by cultural norms in various societies – agree with evolutionary reasoning. Daly and Wilson noticed that in many cultures the following reasons are given for infanticide: deformity or perinatal illness in the child, birth too soon after previous child or twins (when food is scarce, trying to raise both twins may lead to both of them dying while abandoning one and concentrating efforts on the other one of the twins may give a higher survival rate on average). Absence of male support is another factor that increases the likelihood of infanticide, particularly when other social support is also poor or absent. The rates of infanticide decline with the mother’s age: this fits the evolutionary observation that older mothers have fewer chances to try and reproduce at a more suitable time in the future. Compared with historical rates of infanticide, killing of babies is now very rare in advanced industrial societies. Better economic conditions and the lesser stigma for unwed mothers and birth control are cited as some of the reasons for the decline, but another reason certainly is abortion that has resulted in lower rates of unwanted babies. However, one can note that abortions are most common in situations similar in which infanticides were usually found: very young mother, lack of support from the father or other social network, uncertainty of the child’s father, and, indications of the poor health of the fetus.

Conflicts over Resources for Survival and Reproduction Competition is not only about food and other such resources that enable individuals to grow and survive. Very importantly, there is also intense competition for other kinds of opportunities and resources to reproduce. In sexually reproducing species, reproduction requires successful mating. This opens up a competition over mating opportunities and high-quality mates. Traits that help in this competition become potential targets of evolution. If the capacity to use violence helps in this competition it may be selected for. Sex Differences in Reproductive Opportunities In sexually reproducing species, the contexts and targets of competition for reproductive opportunities tend to be


somewhat different for the different sexes. Both males and females would be helped by joining their gametes with the best available gametes of the other sex. In many respects, however, their situations differ. Particularly in mammals, the use of female reproductive resources is very costly. Individual eggs are huge compared to sperms but, more importantly, pregnancy and lactation greatly increase the parental investment that is required at a minimum to produce offspring. The minimum obligatory male investment can be as little as a single ejaculation. During pregnancy, the female cannot invest in producing other offspring of her own. Mating with many partners does not have much impact on the number of a female mammal’s offspring (although in some cases it may bring other benefits), while a male, whose body is not tied up in gestation or suckling, can theoretically multiply the number of his offspring by mating with many partners. Another asymmetry is that a mammal female can always ‘know’ for sure that the offspring she gives birth to are hers, while the male’s degree of confidence that a child is his can vary a great deal and depends on many circumstances. Thus, when males and females best promote their own RS in differing ways, they face different selection pressures, affecting their approaches to mate selection and parental investment, including the use of violence. It should be noted that while there are controversies over how these principles are applied, the main idea of differential parental investment is widely accepted. For instance, Stephen J. Gould, a well-known evolutionist very critical of what he considered ultra-adaptationism in evolutionary psychology, agreed that ‘‘this principle of differential ‘parental investment’ makes Darwinian sense and probably does underlie some different, and broadly general, emotional propensities of human males and females.’’ Similarly, another critical biology professor, Anne Fausto-Sterling, accepts ‘‘that males and females are likely to have evolved different approaches to courting, mating and infant care. Furthermore, those approaches may come into direct conflict.’’ Humans are a mildly polygynous species, meaning that although most people reproduce in monogamous marriages, the variance of male RS is greater than that of females – there are more childless men than women and there are more men with very high numbers of offspring than women. In effectively polygynous species males are usually bigger than females (effectively polyandrous species tend to exhibit the reverse). The more polygynous the species, the larger the size difference between the sexes tends to be. Human sexual size dimorphism is mild, lower than in the polygynous gorilla but higher than in the monogamous gibbon. Gender differences in traits that are relevant for fighting are larger than the average size difference. Men have almost twice as much strength in their shoulders, arms, and hands as females and have longer arms. Men are usually also more skillful in fighting, throwing objects, and using weapons.

The relative importance of genes and differential upbringing of girls and boys in bringing about this difference is controversial. Nevertheless, there is some evidence that males are also more spontaneously interested in learning to fight. To the extent that skill in use of violence is a trait that enhances a male’s fitness and if the development of the trait partially depends on childhood practice, then selection would favor males who have a robust appetite for such activities since childhood. This does of course not exclude other male strategies: for instance, peaceful, caring males with good story-telling abilities can also be favored by selection. A capacity to assess the social situation of one’s formative years and choose the best strategy regarding violent behavior would thus also be favored by selection. Females whose obligatory parental investment is large, such as mammal females, tend to be on average more peaceful and violence avoidant than males. In humans, the level of violence varies highly between different societies, but in every particular society males are more violent than the females of the same society, even if those females may be more violent than males elsewhere. Their offspring survival and success is presumably best helped when the mothers stay alive and healthy thus having better chances of carrying them to term, lactating, and giving them whatever shelter and nurture they require to grow into maturity. Males, on the other hand, may more often be in a position where they must face heavy competition from other males for the opportunity to mate in the first place. In this competition, violence is often used. For males, properties that predict success in sexual selection may simultaneously make life more risky in other respects. While in all human cultures females do most of the child care, humans are atypical mammals in that men contribute considerably to the care of children. This typically biparental care may create or exacerbate conflicts that are rare or nonexistent in other mammals. In principle, either parent can try to make the other spouse take an unfairly large share of this responsibility – and maybe allocate more of their own resources to serve competing reproductive projects, perhaps with another partner. Furthermore, unlike those mammal males that contribute nothing but sperm to their offspring, human males can end up being cuckolded, that is, contributing heavily, either knowingly or unknowingly, to the care and raising of children that are fathered by someone else. This is a role that cannot be favored by natural selection (unless caring for another man’s children somehow also raised the number or quality of his own biological children). On the contrary, based on selectionist and adaptationist reasoning, one would expect that males would have evolved to be vigilant against this possibility. This constellation is the basis for some typical conflicts over RS in which violence is often used.

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Types of Violence Linked to Conflicts over Reproduction Gendered parental investment seems to be part of the ultimate explanation for some types of violence, most conspicuously rape and intimate partner violence. Rape is overwhelmingly committed by men against women (and disproportionately against women of reproductive age). Furthermore, despite the controversy over the gender distribution of victimization to intimate partner violence (whether physical violence against intimate partners, all forms and degrees considered, is gender symmetric or asymmetric) most experts on all sides agree that women are much more likely to be victims of partner violence with the most serious consequences. A commonly cited motive for much domestic violence is jealousy. In most cases of jealous violence, the context is consistent with an interpretation of a conflict over reproduction. Typically, the man suspects, accurately or inaccurately, his wife or girlfriend of sexual infidelity or of planning to abandon him – all scenarios that probably would threaten to lower his RS. Also typically, some women use violence against their male partners when they suspect them of having extra-pair affairs – something that, would threaten the females’ fitness, for instance, by decreasing support to her offspring. In addition to male–female rape and intimate partner violence between the spouses, also much of male–male violence can be seen as ultimately based in reproductive conflicts: it may be fairly direct competition over women or it may be fight over material resources or social status, for example, reputation, that are important criteria in mate selection. The use or threat of violence may discourage other men from competition. There is anecdotal evidence that some women are attracted to men with a violent reputation; for instance, many convicted murderers get surprising amounts of romantic letters from women. Skillful use of violence may also boost a man’s status in the social hierarchy and through this enhance his success in competition for women. In societies condoning polygyny, successful males may have a large number of wives and other female sexual partners resulting in huge numbers of children, while many men father no children. Female–female physical violence is much less frequent than male–female and male–male violence – particularly when looking at serious bodily harm – but it also happens and can often be seen as an element in female–female competition over desirable male partners, or as competition for success of the women’s respective children. Male–Male Competition The different reproductive opportunities of males and females seem to be part of the ultimate, evolutionary explanation of some stable patterns in distribution of violence. Men are in most respects physically more aggressive than females, as are males of other effectively polygynous

species. Human males do not fight each other as conspicuously over females as stags on traditional mating grounds or like black grouse males at a lek, but much of human intermale violence seems to relate either directly or indirectly to competition over women. High status could be gained by prowess in various skills, including fighting, and that in turn could be turned into RS. High-ranking men have more wives, more concubines, and more access to other men’s wives than men of low social rank. Young, low-status men often have no other means of challenging higher-status men than violence. Furthermore, many observations suggest that in many kinds of societies strength and skill in fighting have contributed to men’s reputation and their success – RS included. The data, however, are fragmentary and the issue is somewhat controversial. Females compete with other females over access to desirable males, but the payoffs, in terms of fitness, vary far more in intermale competition than in interfemale competition. Thus, intermale competition is expected to be fiercer. Greater variation selects for readiness to take greater risks. The male/female differences in reproductive options during human evolution seem to be an important part of the ultimate explanation for the universal overrepresentation of males in perpetrators of violent and predatory crimes. In virtually all jurisdictions from which there are data, males commit far more crimes of violence and serious theft than do females. Male representation is greater, the more serious the crime. For instance, males typically commit 90% or more of robberies and burglaries, while their share of shoplifting is much smaller. Daly and Wilson suggest that ‘‘the chronic competitive situation among [human] males is ultimately responsible for that sex’s greater felt need for surplus resources with which to quell rivals and attract mates.’’ The Yanomamo¨ Killers One oft-cited piece of data of a link between violence and RS is that reported by Napoleon Chagnon of the Yanomamo¨ people of the Amazon and Orinoco area. The Yanomamo¨ accord a special title for men who have participated in killing a human being: they are unokais. According to Chagnon’s data, unokais had significantly more children than other men in all four age groups of his data. Ignoring those under 25 years of age, few of whom were unokais or had children, the unokais had 1.2–1.8 times more children than other men. (The often made claim that unokais had three times more children is misleading since it refers to the total numbers irrespective of the men’s age and thus overlooks the fact that older men have had more time to have become both fathers and unokais.) On the face of it, this would seem like good evidence that in one society killers have more children than nonkillers. However, there are further problems in the data.


The report includes no data on the mortality of the unokais and nonunokais; yet, if the unokais’ mortality were higher, their reproductive edge would go down or disappear. Furthermore, Chagnon’s age control of the fertility rates is not very strong; his age groups are wide and, as Douglas Fry has pointed out, the unokais likely have higher mean age than other men also within the age categories. Taking this into account will make the unokais’ reproductive advantage narrower, but (based on the present author’s calculation) does not seem to make it disappear. According to Chagnon ‘‘the higher reproductive success of unokais is mainly due to their greater success in finding mates, either by appropriating them forcibly from others, or by customary marriage alliance arrangements in which they seem to be more attractive as mates than nonunokais.’’ The unokais are also more often headmen than nonunokais are, and in many societies high status is known to help men find wives. If their violent capability helped them become headmen then it also indirectly may have contributed to their RS. The Yanomamo¨ are horticulturalists and are thus not very representative of the human hunter-gatherer EEA. Nevertheless, this study and other information from various societies suggests that at least some readiness for and ability in aggression may often have promoted men’s RS. Quite likely, in most human societies, high-ranking men have had more children and their children have survived better than those of low rank. If controlled aggression has helped these men to gain and retain their status, it seems that aggression has helped men to have more offspring in many kinds of societies, be they foraging, pastoral, horticultural, or state societies. Why Are Women On Average More Risk Averse? One might think that women’s lesser violence does not need a special ultimate explanation once the ultimate causes that drive men’s greater tendency to violence have been elucidated. Nevertheless, Anne Campbell has argued that females are more violence averse than males (also) for good reasons of their own. It is not just the absence of masculine inclination to risk-taking violence but is a part of a positive female adaptation that goes back to, in Campbell’s words, ‘‘the critical importance of the mother’s survival for her own reproductive success.’’ Mother is more important than father for the survival of children. Among the Ache of Paraguay, mother’s death increases age-specific child mortality rate by a factor of five compared to a threefold increase when the father died. If the mother died when the child was under 1 year, the child always died. There are similar findings from other societies as well. ‘‘If a mother wants her children to survive, then she must be equally concerned with her own survival.’’ Similarly, the mother’s injuries and illnesses might be great risks to her children.

Detlef Fetchenhauer and Bram Buunk’s evolutionary argument for why women are more fearful of crime than men while they are less-often victimized supports Campbell’s views. In their study of Dutch high-school students and their parents, female respondents were consistently more fearful than males regarding a variety of events, both criminal and noncriminal, that involved the risk of physical injury, such as robbery, assault, and car accident. Women also judged every single event to be more harmful. The findings suggest that women are in general more fearful of all kinds of events that might imply a physical injury. They concluded that the observed gender differences may be the result of sexual selection that favored risk taking and status fights among males, and being cautious and protecting one’s offspring among females.

Evolution of Sexual Violence Human sexual violence, particularly penile–vaginal rape, seems like a prime candidate for an evolutionary analysis looking at conflicts over RS, because rape is obviously closely related to the possibility of pregnancy. There are observations from many species, ranging from orangutans and dolphins to mallard ducks and scorpion flies, of cases that can reasonably be described as coerced sex. Forced intercourse appears to be the only way that very small orangutan males can breed. However, in general fairly little is known of the reproductive economics of coerced sex in any species, humans included. And the species from which rape has been reported are relatively few and often only remotely related. A human rape victim who becomes pregnant will have a large amount of her reproductive resources tied up in a project that has been forced on her. This would at least postpone and often also otherwise complicate her chances of getting children with a partner or partners of her own choosing. Furthermore, in human societies where the father and his family often support the child in an important way, a child conceived in rape would have lower chances of getting support. Thus, a rape victim’s RS would likely decrease. This could be an important part of the ultimate explanation of the great pain and suffering of rape victims, particularly the finding that victims of sexual coercion seem to sustain worse trauma than victims of other types of physical assaults when controlling for the degree of physical severity of the assaults. Rape would also hurt the inclusive fitness of the victim’s relatives and that of the victim’s spouse, which would help to explain the vindictive rage that the victim’s husband and kin often feel. For the rapist, on the other hand, sexual coercion may bring an increase of RS in a situation where nonviolence would not lead to this result. Of course, the effect on the rapist’s RS depends not only on whether the victim gets

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pregnant but also on his ability to escape retaliation which might drastically reduce his RS. Since rape seems so costly to human females in terms of RS it seems worth asking whether women have evolved mechanisms that increase their possibilities of choosing their mates and avoiding sexual coercion. In Neil Malamuth and others’ view, the evolution of antirape adaptations in women seems more probable than the evolution of specific rape-enabling mechanisms in men. Malamuth also remarks that even societies that are reported to have very low rape frequency have various mechanisms counteracting male tendencies for sexual aggression, suggesting that there may be a universal risk for such behavior. However, there is little convincing evidence that women’s rape-avoidance tactics would be specific adaptations rather than expressions of their more general sexual strategies, general risk avoidance, and learning. One proposed candidate for a specific antirape adaptation is that women would tend to avoid risky situations when ovulating (i.e., when conception is possible). However, studies reporting rapes as less frequent during ovulation have been criticized as unreliable. Furthermore, using a large survey dataset Jonathan and Tiffani Gottschall found that rapes of fertile-aged women lead to pregnancies more often than consensual intercourse (6.4% vs. 3.1%), which would also cast doubt on this mechanism, at least its effectiveness. Most of the evolutionary discussion and research on sexual violence, however, has centered on the male. Avisible topic in the discussion has been whether human rape is at least partly based on rape-specific adaptations in human males. This question seems to be undecided as the necessary data are scarce – and there seem to be slightly different views about the criteria that an adaptation must meet. A baseline finding consistent with the idea that rape may relate to conflicts over reproduction is that fertileage women are remarkably overrepresented among the victims. True, this overrepresentation is also consistent with a nonevolutionary routine-activity hypothesis: young women are more likely to be out alone at night or alone with men in dating situations, which means more rape opportunities. Richard Felson and Marvin Krohn used a US National Crime Survey dataset and looked at female robbery victims with the idea that an opportunity for robbery is often also an opportunity for rape. Those robbery victims who were also raped were 28 years old on average, significantly younger than those who were only robbed, whose mean age was 35. Thus, it appears that robbery offenders are more likely to rape a victim if she is young. Opportunity alone is not sufficient to explain the rape victims’ age patterns. It is clear that men prefer consensual sex, and no one has suggested that an inflexible use of sexual coercion would have brought ancestral men a better RS than seeking consensual sex. The interesting possibility – and a likely one in many researchers’ opinion – is that at least for some males in some situations during human

evolutionary history it was reproductively more advantageous to use sexual coercion than not to use it. Behind sometimes heated debates, there are several plausible suggestions about the role of evolution and adaptations in the ultimate causation of sexual coercion. One suggestion is that using sexual coercion had no recurring fitness consequences and therefore the human males have no psychological mechanisms that are relevant to sexual coercion. This alternative would mean that the ultimate causes of committing sexual coercion are unrelated to the fitness consequences of these acts; rape might be a totally unrelated by-product of adaptations to other problems or maybe caused by some random events in ontogeny, pathologies, or cultural norms. Another possibility is that rape would be a byproduct of evolved male–female differences in sexual desire that promoted male RS in contexts other than rape. Males seem to have evolved to be ready to shorttime sexual relations with much less discrimination than women, who are more selective. Add the fact that men are on average stronger than women and may be able to use physical aggression to achieve several kinds of goals and you get a situation where men sometimes resort to violence to achieve sex with unwilling women. This view can be silent on whether rapes as such increased or decreased the man’s fitness, but sees rape as a by-product of adaptations that in themselves probably did advance the RS of those male (and female) individuals who possessed them. Eric Alden Smith and others note that ‘‘males have a strong desire for sex and that they also have the ability to recognize when coercion can be used to obtain a desired goal’’ and they suggest that this is a more plausible explanation for many rapes than a specific male adaptation to rape. One can also think that sexual coercion had fitness consequences, so that males who could use violence in a discriminating way in sexual contexts (with a sense to the risks and possibilities of the situation) did increase their fitness, but there were no unique adaptive problems to using coercion in this context. Finally, there might have been unique adaptive problems associated with the use of violence in the sexual context such that specialized psychological mechanisms may have evolved as an adaptation. Malamuth points out that rape is different from most other uses of violence in that it requires the perpetrator to maintain an erection while coercing a victim who is unwilling and often fighting back. (Sexual arousal is not only unneeded but probably even counterproductive in most situations of nonsexual violence.) There are also several studies suggesting that human males show great variability in the extent to which they are sexually aroused by possibilities of coercive sex. Thus, sexual arousal specific to forced sex in males may be an adaptation that has helped some men to increase their RS. Smith and others provide a model for calculating the costs and benefits for the perpetrator of rape in the


currency of RS. Their model and hypothetical data suggest that, in a traditional society, raping does not pay as the perpetrator’s losses (in terms of RS) are an order of magnitude greater than benefits. However, the result relies critically on the assumption that most rapes were reported or detected, which is necessary for the costs to be realized. Many of the same factors that prevent most rape victims in today’s industrial societies from reporting their rape (a typical reporting rate, based on victim surveys, is around one out of 20) would probably have applied to ancestral women as well: social stigma, the difficulty to prove the case, and possibility of being punished or abandoned by one’s consensual mate or family. Furthermore, if the rapist was a powerful man and the victim a woman from a poor and weak family (or had no family) he may have had little reprisals to fear. And raping outgroup women during wars or raids may have carried little risk of retaliation (additional to the otherwise great risks of violent group conflict). Also men who have little chances of enhancing their RS through consensual sexual relations or by helping their own kin might accept high risks of detection and retaliation, because they have little to lose. This may be one reason why low-status men tend to be overrepresented among convicted rapists. Discussion of sexual assault in terms of evolutionary theory has been very controversial since the early stages of modern sociobiology in the 1970s. A new round in the controversy followed the publication of A natural history of rape by Randy Thornhill and Graig Palmer in 2000. A collection of criticism and the authors’ rejoinder give a taste of the heated debate. Malamuth and others and Lalumie`re and others include evolutionary informed and cautious reviews of what is known of sexual assault in terms relevant to the evolutionary approach.

Conclusion Evolutionary approaches to violence today focus on various issues. Some researchers, for instance, many of those identified with evolutionary psychology, attend to hypothesized behavioral and psychological adaptations for peaceful and violent interactions that are thought to be fairly universal or panhuman. Others, such as behavioral geneticists, look more specifically at individual differences in violent behavior and the possible contribution of genes to these differences. Twin and adoption studies show that there is indeed such heritable variation in humans that partly explains variation in violence and criminality. Simultaneously there is general agreement that some great variations in levels of aggression cannot be explained by genetic variation – the most dramatic being swift changes in the level of violence within single societies. However, even a universal evolved psychology will produce variable behavior in different conditions such that the outcome cannot be well understood

without a description of the ‘mechanism’ that operates in these various environments. Still other researchers focus on the influence of individual development on the propensity of violence later in life, one idea being that early experiences of, say, the use of violence and the risks of violent injuries or death in one’s social environment might ‘calibrate’ the individual’s own response mechanism regarding the use of violence. For instance, perhaps a violent childhood and adolescent environment sets the individual’s threshold for violent action lower than a peaceful environment. It ought to be mentioned also that the theory of genetical evolution is also fruitfully used as an analogy or heuristic model for examining competition for limited resources through sociocultural evolution. For instance, the development of many forms of crime and crime prevention measures can be conceptualized as a coevolutionary process analogous to the coevolution in nature of predator and prey. Adaptations, Law, and Morality Evolutionary approaches to violence are often controversial – even more so than evolutionary approach to human behavior in general. However, the partial explanation of violence by reference to evolved adaptations does not imply that violence should be condoned. Something is not moral just because it has evolved as an adaptation. ‘‘If you tell the judge that your genes made you do it, she can tell you that her genes are making her throw you in jail,’’ as Edward Hagen wrote. Behaviors that are partially determined by evolutionary factors are not impossible to prevent because of that causation. It may have been adaptive for stepparents to abuse their stepchildren, for men to deceive or force women into sex, or for women sometimes to kill their newborns, but that does not mean that it is moral or should be approved. If males have evolved to feel possessive about females, it does not make it right that they act violently as an expression of that feeling. If the male ancestors of humans enhanced their RS by rape under some circumstances, this does not make rape morally any less objectionable. It neither justifies nor makes it inevitable. The condemnation of rape seems also evolved: rape may greatly diminish a female’s RS by committing her investment for a lengthy period to an offspring whose father she did not choose, by risking to estrange her partner, and so on. One issue that often adds to the confusion about the meaning of evolutionary explanations of behavioral traits is that many people still understand adaptation as optimizing the good of the species. However, few scientists conclude that the group level has decisive influence under most circumstances. Controlled violence often is useful for a whole group in its competition against other groups, but this is best seen as an effect of natural selection operating on lower levels. Heritable traits underlying such behavior

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Anthropology of Violence and Conflict, Overview

cannot have evolved if they have not contributed to the relative success in competition against other traits within the population of those very genes responsible for that heritability.

Further Reading Buller, D. J. (2005). Adapting minds: Evolutionary psychology and the persistent quest for human nature. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Campbell, A. (1999). Staying alive: Evolution, culture and women’s intrasexual aggression. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22, 203–252. Campbell, A. (2005). Aggression. In Buss, D. (ed.) The handbook of evolutionary psychology, pp. 628–652. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Daly, M. and Wilson, M. (1983). Sex, evolution, and behavior, 2nd edn. Boston: Willard Grant. Daly, M. and Wilson, M. (1988). Homicide. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Daly, M. and Wilson, M. (1997). Crime and conflict: Homicide in evolutionary psychological perspective. In Tonry, M. (ed.) Crime & justice: A review of research, vol. 22, pp. 51–100. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Daly, M. and Wilson, M. (2005). Reply to David Buller by Martin Daly & Margo Wilson. http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/buller/ reply%20to%20david%20buller.pdf (accessed on February 2008). de Waal, F. B. M. (1996). Good natured: The origins of right and wrong in humans and other animals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ellis, L. and Walsh, A. (1997). Gene-based evolutionary theories in criminology. Criminology 35(2), 229–276. Felson, R. B. and Krohn, M. (1990). Motives for rape. The Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 27(3), 222–242. Fessler, D. M. (2003). Rape is not less frequent during the ovulatory phase of the menstrual cycle. Pscyhology, Evolution & Gender 5(3), 127–147. Fetchenhauer, D. and Buunk, B. P. (2005). How to explain gender differences in fear of crime: Towards an evolutionary approach. Sexualities, Evolution & Gender 7(2), 95–113. Fry, D. P. (2005). The human potential for peace: An anthropological challenge to assumptions about war and violence. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gottschall, J. A. and Gottschall, T. A. (2003). Are per-incident rapepregnancy rates higher than per-incident consensual pregnancy rates? Human Nature 14(1), 1–20. Groebel, J. and Hinde, R. A. (eds.) (1989). Aggression and war: Their biological and social bases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hrdy, S. B. (1999). Mother nature: A history of mothers, infants, and natural selection. New York: Pantheon. Lalumiere, M. L., Harris, G. T., Quinsey, V. L., and Rice, M. E. (2005). The causes of rape: Understanding individual differences in male propensity for sexual aggression. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Malamuth, N., Huppin, M., and Paul, B. (2005). Sexual coercion. In Buss, D. (ed.) The handbook of evolutionary psychology, pp. 394–418. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Smith, E. A., Borgerhof, M. M., and Hill, K. (2001). Controversies in the evolutionary social sciences: A guide for the perplexed. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 16(3), 128–135. Temrin, H., Nordlund, J., and Sterner, H. (2004). Are step children overrepresented as victims of lethal parental violence in Sweden? Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 271(supplement B), S124–S126. Thornhill, R. and Palmer, G. (2000). A natural history of rape. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Thornhill, R. and Palmer, G. (2003). A posse of good citizens brings outlaw evolutionists to justice. A response to Evolution, Gender and Rape (2003, ed. by Travis, C. B., MIT Press, Cambridge, MA). Evolutionary Psychology 1, 10–27. Travis, C. B. (ed.) (2003). Evolution, gender, and rape. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Trivers, R. (1985). Social evolution. Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin/ Cummings. Trivers, R. (2002). Natural selection and social theory: Selected papers of Robert Trivers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wrangham, R. and Peterson, D. (1996). Demonic males: Apes and the origins of human violence. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.

Relevant Website http://www.hbes.com – Human Behavior and Evolution Society.

Anthropology of Violence and Conflict, Overview Andrew J Strathern and Pamela J Stewart, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA Published by Elsevier Inc.

Overview Classic Ethnographic Studies Studies in Religion, Witchcraft, and Sorcery Modes of Settling Conflicts, Including Ritual The Place of Language Forms and Discourse in Disputing Violence, Peacemaking, and Ethology

Glossary Cultural Materialism An anthropological theory in which it is argued that material factors are the primary causes of the development of cultural patterns.

The Anthropology of War, and Warfare in ‘Tribal’ Contexts Violence, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Violence, Individual Action, and the State Terror and Terrorism: The Role of the Imagination Further Reading

Divination A ritual act by which the causes of an event or the guilt or innocence of accused persons is determined. Egalitarian Society A society based on the idea of relative equality between groups and persons within it.

Anthropology of Violence and Conflict, Overview 29

Ethology The study of fixed motor patterns in animals and the way in which these contribute to social relationships. Genital Mutilation The act of surgically removing parts of human genitalia, for example, in rituals marking a transition from childhood to sexual maturity. Ritualization The process whereby a dispute or conflict is handled peacefully by transforming an aggressive signal into a peaceful one. Segmentary System A social system in which the groups are arranged in such a way that smaller, closely

related groups combine in opposition to similar more distantly related ones. Sociobiology A branch of biology in which it is argued that the maximization of individual reproductive success is an important determinant of behavior. Violence An act or a threat of physical force between persons, the legitimacy of which may be contested; discursive elaborations of such acts or threats.

Conflict involves disputing over issues and interests that may lead to violence or the use of force whose legitimacy may be contested. Anthropologists have made their greatest contribution in discussing these topics as they relate to small-scale, stateless societies in which a balance of power is obtained between the different groups. This article discusses this contribution and also considers a range of related themes on both states and stateless societies in contemporary circumstances, including the transnational issues of terror and terrorism.

taken to be less problematic here, referring to any situation in which the participants see themselves as at odds over an issue or set of issues and engage practically in attempts to settle the issue by negotiation, force, or other means). D. Riches has examined the definitional question in a collection of studies on the topic and points out that the choice lies between adopting a new definition of a general kind or building on what he calls Anglo-Saxon meanings. Opting for the latter, and stressing the intentional agency of social actors, he pinpoints a crucial feature: violent behavior is behavior that is subject to contested legitimacy, and this is inherent to it. Violence is thus not simply physical force, although it stereotypically involves the use of force. Rather, it is the use of force in contexts where one or more parties may consider it to be legitimate (and the definition of what is legitimate may also be subject to varying interpretations). Riches also speaks of the triangle of the performer, victim, and witness, in which the witness is often the agent who evaluates the question of the legitimacy of a violent action. His viewpoint enables us to understand how a state agency may undertake a violent action in order to curb violent offenders, since violence, in a sense, is in the eye of the beholder/actor. In particular, a performer of violence may consider it a justifiable or legitimate use of force while the victim disagrees and witnesses are divided in opinion. For our purposes here, without claiming this as a generally valid definition for all purposes, we shall adopt Riches’ viewpoint, focusing attention on violence as an action characterized by force (physical or otherwise) that is subject to contested interpretations of legitimacy. Finally, the placement of violence in a typology of forms of disputing and dispute settlement needs to be specified. Such a typology may have to do with: (1) social contexts of disputing, in terms of scale and the degree of closeness or distance between the parties; an act that is heinous between siblings (e.g., incest, fratricide) may be acceptable or even expected between major enemies; (2) the matters at issue; serious matters may elicit violent responses whereas trivial ones may, or should, not.

Overview Conflict and violence are long-standing aspects of human behavior and social relationships. As with many other such phenomena, explanations for this fact have appealed either to biological/genetic patterns or to cultural/historical ones, or to a combination of both. General explanations may certainly implicate biological characteristics, but specific ones require that we take into account at least cultural factors as they have developed historically in particular formations. Such an approach may also lead to further levels of sociological generalization. Given the prevalence of conflict andviolence in historical experience, our scope in this survey needs to be delimited. We have chosen a range of topics that have been recognized widely as anthropological, along with their extensions into contemporary arenas of conflict linked to ethnicity, nationalism, and globalization and ‘terror’. Hallmarks of the anthropological approach, as we see it, are (1) an emphasis on firsthand observation and fieldwork, augmented by the use of other sources; (2) a concern with the small-scale as well as larger scales of events and processes; (3) an interest in the interpretation of meanings and the expression of intentionality, agency, and the capacity for action, including sensitivity to language use; and (4) an understanding generally of the role of symbols and ritual in sociopolitical history. A concern with meanings obliges us also at the outset to consider the meaning of the term ‘violence’ (conflict is

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In terms of nonviolent disputing processes, Philip Gulliver made a clear distinction between settlement by adjudication, mediation, and negotiation. Adjudication occurs in a context where laws exist and decisions can be imposed according to them; mediation where a third party attempts to act as a go-between or broker between disputants and is given power to do so; negotiation typically occurs between the disputants themselves and their support groups, who may take on, in part, roles of mediators or adjudicators. In the context of negotiation, Gulliver further noted an alternation between coordination and antagonism, leading ideally to a coordination that in some way is ritually confirmed, beginning with the search to define an arena of dispute, through an attempt to narrow the differences, and then on to the final bargaining. The model presumes settlement but, in reality, negotiations often break down. Since breakdown is marked by antagonism, it is here that violence may come into play, either as a way of settling matters or as a way of postponing and complicating a settlement. Socially defined emotions also become involved, and enter into political definitions of what is done.

Classic Ethnographic Studies B. Malinowski, in Crime and Custom in Savage Society, introduced questions of individual motivation and emotion into the study of primitive law and overturned the notion of the savage who was supposed to follow blindly the dictates of custom and tradition within the group. His extensive case history account of a youth who committed suicide as a result of shame sparked off a long tradition of looking at the significance of self-regulated sanctions in behavior. His major stress, however, was on the positive incentives and ideals that keep people in conformity with expectations and remove a need for violence or for imposed punishments in situations of conflict. Certain elements of adjudications were, of course, present in the Trobriands case history he was describing, since chiefs could impose certain decisions and were also feared for the sorcery and magical powers they commanded (see section titled ‘Studies in religion, witchcraft, and sorcery’). This overall Malinowskian approach, via the study of emotions, has returned in contemporary anthropology after having been displaced for a while by the functionalism of Radcliffe-Brown and the structurally oriented work of Evans-Pritchard and Fortes. Evans-Pritchard, in The Nuer, discusses politics, law, social control, and violence in a tribal social system based on a balancing of forces between territorial segments and a principle of the merging of segments in widening scales of opposition or conflict. He developed his model to account for (1) order in a society without government (the ordered anarchy concept) and (2) the place of physical force in such a society. The Nuer people were warlike and had been expanding at the cost of neighboring peoples such as the

Dinka, who were captured and assimilated into Nuer local groups. Evans-Pritchard pointed out that bloodwealth or compensation for killings was likely to be paid only within the tribe, the largest political group. He also noted the important role of the leopard-skin chief or man of the earth in giving ritual protection to killers and mediating in discussions over bloodwealth. A combination of structural rules and ritual role-playing kept violence to certain limits within the tribe. The threat of forceful action, however, was equally important in ensuring the territorial spacing of people and their access to resources. Such an ordered anarchy requires a certain level of consciousness of violence to maintain itself. Both Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard were, from different angles, tackling the question of whether all societies have law, in some sense or the other. The same matter was explicitly at issue between P. Bohannan and M. Gluckman. Gluckman, in his study of the court system of the Lozi or Barotse people in Rhodesia (Zambia), argued that definite rules could be derived from the study of court cases heard by magistrates and that the principles of law involved could be compared with English-law concepts such as that of the reasonable man. Bohannan, on the other hand, stressed the local cultural contexts in which the Tiv people of Central Nigeria pursued disputes through moots, general meetings, rather than in introduced courts. Bohannan’s account therefore implied difficulties of comparison between societies, based on the problem of cultural difference. The debate between Bohannan and Gluckman has often been taken as an example of the conflict between the particularizing and generalizing moments in anthropology. More specifically the difference of viewpoint they exhibited can be derived from (1) the differences between Tiv and Lozi society (relatively egalitarian vs. relatively hierarchical) and (2) Bohannan’s stress on indigenous processes, Gluckman’s on a court system influenced by British colonial ideas. Comaroff and Roberts, in their survey of legal anthropology, settled the issue of rules versus processes by pointing out that even the most complex rules are formulated and brought to bear only in elaborate negotiated processes, whose outcomes are therefore unpredictable and multiplex. They demonstrated this argument with reference to Tswana (South Africa) succession patterns and marriage disputes. The debate between Gluckman and Bohannan was thus in a sense finally laid to rest. None of these studies was particularly concerned with violence, or the intersection between law and politics. Bohannan’s study, however, was of interest here because of his chapter on the moot at home, in which he discusses the concept of tsav. Leadership, and in fact ability generally, was thought by Tiv to depend on a substance called tsav. Men with tsav were said to repair the tar, or local community, through sitting in moots by day and settling disputes. But the same men also acted by night to protect


the tar mystically against attacks by outsiders and were said periodically to require a human to be sacrificed as a victim for their work of mystical protection. Tsav in this context was a kind of witchcraft power. In other words, political power, seen as a form of witchcraft, depended also on notions of mystical violence. In times of political upheaval, Bohannan notes, the men with tsav were thought to kill for personal gain and the love of consuming human flesh.

Studies in Religion, Witchcraft, and Sorcery The use of sorcery and witchcraft as a means of controlling the acts of others is a common anthropological theme. It is often considered an illegitimate form of social control but examples also demonstrate its accepted and legitimate uses. Types of sorcery that are used include food sorcery (poison), leavings sorcery (taking something that has a part of a persons ‘soul’ in it and imprisoning it or subjecting it to torture to make the person ill or die), and assault sorcery (violently attacking someone from another community and causing their death). All these forms of sorcery are greatly feared and attacks of these sorts are repelled through proper actions and/or the assistance of healers who possess magical spells or means of divining who the sorcerer or witch is and thereby confronting the individual. In Melanesia among the Melpa, Pangia, and Duna peoples, sorcery and witchcraft are greatly feared and not generally considered to be a legitimate form of social interaction. Those who are witches are viewed as greedy persons who are attempting to take the health or life of another to satisfy their own desires. The fear of witches (kum koimb, in Melpa) who eat human flesh – stealing children and waylaying adults – has increased in conjunction with changing sociopolitical and religious circumstances. This description is paralleled in the African ethnographic records in which sorcery and witchcraft are socially condemned practices. In Africa, sorcerers use medicine to harm those toward whom they have an ill will, while witches are able to do extraordinary things beyond the capabilities of ordinary human beings in order to harm other people. In both the African and Melanesian contexts sorcery and witchcraft accusations have often been read as indices of conflict and tension. Sorcery accusations directed at enemy groups may increase ingroup solidarity and increase the likelihood that a war will be initiated against the accused group. In addition, among the Kuma of the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, war sorcerers were highly respected and legitimately used their powers to enlist the spirits of the dead and the ancestors to aid in battle against the enemy. Among the Wola of the Southern Highlands of Papua

New Guinea, sorcery is also used to attack the enemy in war in addition to appealing to the clan spirits and ancestors of the enemy side to ask that a longstanding dispute be resolved through a divination process in which the physical substance from the decomposing body of a sorcery victim is allowed to pass onto a pig that is to be eaten to determine who is guilty of the sorcery killing. The victim’s essence is thought to act as a poison that will kill those who are lying and their relatives. Just before eating the potentially lethal piece of pork, the accused swears an oath declaring the truth of his assertions of innocence. After the eating of pork the feuding ceases, and further revenge deaths will be caused, it is thought, by the ancestors if they judge that they are warranted. Ideas regarding sorcery and witchcraft are appropriate to consider here, since they both reflect and constitute modes of hostility between categories of people, and are experienced as forms of violent action. This is particularly true of notions of assault sorcery that effectively depict images of assassination and murder by a mixture of physical and mystical means as seen in the writings of Stewart and Strathern (1999a). As the example of the Wola indicates, the same forms of cultural logic that inculcate fears of sorcery can be brought into play in the service of divination and oath-taking (on the latter, see also section titled ‘Modes of settling conflicts, including ritual’). A major feature of the processes through which fears of witchcraft can lead to accusations and violence against suspects is the prevalence of gossip and rumor. This theme is explored in depth in Stewart and Strathern (2004) with references from a global context (see section titled ‘Terror and terrorism: the role of the imagination’).

Modes of Settling Conflicts, Including Ritual Within the category of settlement by negotiation we can distinguish between settlements that lead to an ending of the specific dispute, or at least a phase of it (partial settlement), and settlements that lead to a reconciliation or establishment of new positive relations between the parties. A number of writers have cautioned against the assumption that settlement means good feelings. Moore (1995) cites Gluckman’s description of ‘‘the case of the headman’s fishdams’’ and how it was cleverly settled at the time but how Gluckman later found that one of the parties involved had subsequently killed the other. Similarly, Elizabeth Colson in the same volume sums up materials on the Gwembe Valley Tonga of Zambia by arguing that moots and courts can settle individual claims but ‘‘have much less success in convincing contenders that they are in the wrong, and they do little or nothing to heal ruptured relationships or abate anger and contempt.’’ A dispute occasion may be a part of a longer-term and more deep-seated

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conflict involving persons other than the immediate parties. It has been argued for Melanesia that ongoing dispute is a part of a normal mode of social interaction and as with debt the aim is not to end but to continue it. While this may be overstated as a generalization there is certainly some truth in it. Nevertheless, in the Mount Hagen area, at any rate, there is an idea that a proper settlement should lead to an admission or confession of wrongdoing followed by a compensation payment to enable the offended party to recover good feelings. For Hagen, and for many parts of the Pacific and Indonesia, there is a special equation of wealth with human life itself, so that killings can also be compensated for by bloodwealth payments that may, in turn, lead to ongoing exchanges of wealth goods (pigs, shells, money) between the parties and their group-mates. If negotiations about the size of such a compensation payment break down, however, direct reprisals by way of retaliatory killings, destruction of property, or the confiscation of wealth goods may cut in. In contemporary disputes, settlements leading to productive exchanges have become harder to arrange and the possibility of violence has come much closer again, because of the increase in scale of social relations, a process that began with pacification in the 1930s and was evident already by the early 1970s. If disputes are ‘‘both theater and real contests’’ in Colson’s formulation, we might expect them to become a locus of the major tensions caused by the complicated overlapping and layering of institutions and processes in a postcolonial context, such as we find among both the Gwembe Tonga and in Hagen. Colson also has some sharp words to say about the potential of ritual for bringing about the healing of social relations. Compensation in Hagen would fall into the definition here, but it is important to note that where the ritual consists of the handing over of large amounts of wealth this carries its own potential for efficacy. It was Victor Turner, in his work on the Ndembu people of Zambia, who most powerfully expressed the role of ritual in these terms, but we should note the specific context into which much of his material was set, that is, rituals of healing for sickness in the bodies of particular persons. Turner was arguing that such healing rituals were constructed in terms of a specific cultural idea, that deepseated disharmony of feelings can cause sickness, and therefore sickness can be healed only by the (re)establishment of harmony. The idea of dispute as sickness is found in Papua New Guinea also. In Hagen, for example, there is a strong idea that frustration (popokl) can cause sickness and such sickness will again be healed only by overtly venting (confessing) the cause of one’s anger, leading at least to an attempt to put matters right. Ndembu and Hagen logic are at one within this fundamental, or cosmological, level, then. Turner’s approach therefore does not imply that harmony is always achieved, only that it is seen as a prerequisite for healing certain sickness conditions. Sickness prompts people to bring up matters of

dispute that have not been settled and to make a fresh attempt at dealing with them. Disputes where sickness is not (yet) implicated may nevertheless refer to the potentiality of both sickness and violence as their outcome if talk cannot solve them. Gulliver, in his book on disputes among the Arusha of Tanganyika (Tanzania), spends the bulk of his time explaining the modes of discussion that lead to settlements, mostly through the influence of age-mates. At the end of the book, however, he turns to the topic of additional means of coercion. The coercion he has been discussing is, as he says, ‘‘of a non-violent kind,’’ and it may have to be followed up with further modes of persuasion after an agreement is reached in order to make sure that a promised payment, for example, is made. Occasionally, physical seizure is resorted to, but ritual curses and oaths may be employed also. Both curse and oath appeal to an authority of power beyond the immediate context and they bridge the gap of doubt or mistrust that can arise between disputants. Arusha say that oaths are resorted to only when a dispute cannot otherwise be settled agreeably. The ritual mechanisms ‘‘all operate by producing illness or death in an offender,’’ and a diviner is employed postmortem to verify that the ritual has worked in this way. Effects can be warded off, however, by confession. The Arusha know several categories of oaths appropriate to different circumstances, for example, olmoma, to bring peace to two related men, involving the consumption of sacrificial meat as an embodied act: the meat is accepted by one party and offered by the other. This is a striking instance of the importance of the consumption of substances as a marker of truth on the body. These Arusha mechanisms are closely paralleled again by ideas from the Pacific. In Mt Hagen consumption or burning of the sacred mi plant that is a group’s emblem brings with it the putative sanction of death if one lies. Such mechanisms, going beyond words and into the bodies of the disputants, but invoking the deepest levels of cosmological notions, are perhaps important as backstops to Arusha discourse.

The Place of Language Forms and Discourse in Disputing The idea of disputing brings to mind words primarily: images of words spoken in contest, and therefore of the stylistic and rhetorical resources people bring to bear on an issue. It also makes one aware of how people view words and truth-telling. In Hagen, for example, it is assumed that people readily lie, but the group divination substance, the mi (or nowadays the Bible) can equally readily find them out. A refusal to swear on the mi is tantamount, therefore, to admitting guilt. The aim of an investigation is to ‘‘dig out the roots of the talk,’’ which are buried, entangled, and hard to bring to light but are at the bottom of the problem.


Brenneis, in a survey article on this theme, makes a number of significant points. He refers to Mather and Yngvesson’s model of dispute transformation dealing with how and when/why issues are broadened or narrowed, and points out that analysis of the verbal ways in which transitions are made from one phase to another would be more productive. Brenneis also notes Maurice Bloch’s argument linking formalization of style to authority in the rhetoric of the Merina, a hierarchical society in Madagascar, noting that the argument works less well in egalitarian communities. In Bloch’s original edited volume, A. J. Strathern remarked on a variant of the Merina pattern found among the Melpa of Mt Hagen, in which stylized oratory called ‘arrow talk’ (el ik) stands for a ritualized statement of the outcome of an event as if it were authoritative, marking a stage of consensual agreement between competitive groups. Brenneis goes on to note that forms of expression may play different roles at different phases of a dispute. Insults, for example, may function as preludes to physical violence or as an understood way of expressing and discharging hostility, depending on the stage of a dispute or the relationship between the parties. Silence as an avoidance of talk may also be highly significant and, in effect, communicate meanings. In the Papua New Guinea Highlands the winners of contemporary parliamentary elections are often advised not to say anything about their win, not out of any false modesty but simply to avoid antagonizing the supporters of the jealous losers and provoking violence. The winner of the regional election in the Western Highlands in July 1997, a Catholic priest, mediated this problem by announcing that he would celebrate his victory by drawing all the other elected members of his Province together and ‘‘giving all the praise and thanks to God.’’ Brenneis outlines two different approaches to the relationship between language and social process in disputes. In one (called ethnomethodology) social organization is seen as produced through language interaction. The other is the ethnography of speaking, which takes speakers’ intentions, strategies, and extralinguistic power differentials more into account. While the second approach provides a valuable expansion of the first, Brenneis also notes that language does not just reflect relations, it also often brings them into being and gives them form. In this regard, it is worthwhile to add that he does not greatly take into account here the question of emotions in disputing nor does he discuss the markers of transition from verbal to nonverbal expression that occur when talking stops and physical violence begins. A. J. Strathern has discussed how in Hagen verbal behaviors may copy patterns of dominance and appeasement that can be expressed nonverbally. A. J. Strathern and P. J. Stewart’s study (2000) details that when such verbal rituals break down, violence may result, and peacemaking is thereby made harder.

Violence, Peacemaking, and Ethology The mention of dominance and appeasement reminds us of the question of peacemaking generally, and the distinction between peace founded on mutual agreement and peace imposed by winners on losers. It reminds us also of the general debate on aggression, territoriality, and ritualization stemming from the work of Konrad Lorenz and I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt. We are not concerned here with the aspects of debates stemming from Lorenz’s work that deals with the possible innate or genetic basis for aggressive behavior in humans and other animals. We are rather interested in the question of ritualization. In certain animals gestures of appeasement in conflict situations are made by motor actions that correspond to fixed dispositions. In human social interactions standardized rituals are developed that function in a similar way, within a shared cultural milieu, to move from confrontation to conciliation. The mechanisms involved may be verbal, but often are nonverbal. Human ethology can thus provide interesting pointers for the analysis of rituals of both aggression and peacemaking, whether or not we consider these to have an innate basis. Sociobiological theory provides a more focused, and more disputed, approach to conflict, arguing that the maximization of reproductive success is at stake, as argued by Napoleon Chagnon for the Yanomamo people. Chagnon presents the male war-leaders among these people as motivated in their violence not by protein scarcity but by polygyny, suggesting a correlation between killings and wives. Other scholars have taken a different view (see further). Eibl-Eibesfeldt has collected together several examples of appeasement behavior that are interesting: for example, the waving of plant fronds and flowers to indicate a wish for peace, and the inclusion of women and children in parades as an indication of a desire for a resumption of friendly relations. In Hagen, this is directly expressed in a verbal mode also, when men say they are coming ‘‘like women’’ to a meeting, not to fight but to settle. Merlan and Rumsey (1991) have depicted the roles of women too in these processes. Robert Dentan has argued that ‘peace’ rather than ‘war’ may be the ‘normal condition’ of societies, even though conflicts are common in practice.

The Anthropology of War, and Warfare in ‘Tribal’ Contexts R. Brian Ferguson has described war as ‘‘organized, purposeful group action, directed against another group. . . involving the actual or potential application of lethal force.’’ The anthropology of war is complex and can involve conflict over a myriad of diverse factors (e.g., political

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stakes, an expression of witchcraft beliefs, revenge, wealth, etc.). Ferguson has pointed out the importance of conflict over material resources such as land, food, and trade goods, suggesting that an analytical research strategy on the anthropology of war must not overlook cultural materialism. Robarchek (in Hass 1990) notes that commonly the explanations of conflict in preindustrial societies are materialistic. He suggests that a focus on the capacity of humans to decide to become involved in conflict at the individual level by examining motivations (defined as all the forces, factors, options, and constraints, both intrinsic and extrinsic that influence the choices people make) for participation is crucial and that in all conflicts and disputes multiple levels of causality and contexts of tension coexist. He goes on to state that ‘‘warfare or nonviolence, like other behaviors, occur when they are perceived and selected from among a field of possible alternatives as viable means of achieving specific, largely culturally defined, goals.’’ Robarchek does not deny the importance of biology or the environment in shaping the forces that lead to warfare but points out that cultural constraints and individual and collective behavior determine if war will ensue. As noted already, many different views have been taken of the causes of warfare and also of its prevalence in various kinds of social contexts. Materialist theories generally argue that warfare has to do with competition over resources and therefore with population growth and territorial expansion. These theories hold in many contexts, but not all. Some kinds of warfare take the form of tournaments more than actual war, becoming an arena for the pursuit of prestige, such as the Great Wars among the Enga of Papua New Guinea. Some are connected with religious imperatives, such as headhunting, although from within the people’s own life-worlds this may have to do with the aim of increasing fertility and population. The Marind-Anim of New Guinea undertook raids not only for heads but to obtain children in order to increase their population. Aside from the general debates, interesting discussions have been entered into with regard to the place of warfare in interactions between state and nonstate societies. Ferguson and Whitehead have argued strongly that warfare in nonstate (‘tribal’) societies has been greatly influenced by interactions with state societies, and that consolidated tribal formations themselves are sometimes the historical product of such interactions, especially in contexts of encounters with expanding states. The same argument applies to colonial contexts, as for example among the Nuer of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Ferguson and Whitehead’s argument is applied broadly to cases from Roman North Africa, early Sri Lanka, the Aztecs and the Spanish, the West African slave coast, the Iroquois, Eastern Peru, and Papua New Guinea, as well as to their own work in South America. Whitehead argues it both ways: tribes make states and states make tribes. (The term ‘tribe’ is used here in a neutral and technical sense.)

Ferguson uses a sophisticated version of cultural materialism to argue that Yanomami aggressiveness was greatly influenced by the historical impingement of Europeans bringing disease, different settlement patterns, and new wants, and thereby increasing the shortage of game and levels of tensions in social groups. The Yanomami emerge as much the victims of colonization as the warlike tribesmen projected in the work of Chagnon. Ferguson concludes: ‘‘The ‘fierce people’ represent Yanomami culture in an extreme conflict mode, a mode that is clearly attributable to the exogenous factors of Western contact.’’ This conclusion does not absolutely refute Chagnon’s view, but it does contextualize it considerably and provides another way of viewing the situation. That warfare has been a pervasive feature of human life is not in doubt, but the specifics of its historical development need also to be examined carefully, as we have repeatedly noted. A different argument concerns the place of revenge practices and feuding in cultural practice. Revenge and intergroup hostilities are closely connected in Melanesian histories of war. Otterbein has argued that these practices tend to be most marked where hostilities are based on fraternal interest groups. Feud, he argues, with its limited reciprocities of retaliatory killings, is a way of avoiding larger-scale warfare between such groups. One can comment here that if it is so, it nevertheless can escalate into war, and the more effective way to halt escalation is to pay compensation, as has happened in the historical development of New Guinea Highland societies. Feud without compensation could interestingly be compared with feud with compensation in this regard, a comparative study that waits to be done in detail. Stewart and Strathern (2002) discuss revenge in more detail. The social and historical construction of tribes feeds in topical terms into consideration of the construction of ethnicity and the relationship between nationalism, ethnicity, and violence in the contemporary world.

Violence, Ethnicity, and Nationalism The end of the twentieth century has seen a series of historical changes in the world that have forced a new alignment between the interests of historians, political scientists, and anthropologists. Nation-states have broken up, violent and lethal conflicts based on ethnic ideologies have arisen, and new claims to national status have been made with bewildering rapidity and complexity around the world. In general, these events can be attributed to the recent collapse of the Soviet Union and to the longerterm results of colonial and postcolonial history in Africa. Anthropologists have been forced to expand their scope of reference, while political scientists have had to contract theirs and attempt seriously to understand the


intertwining of kinship and politics. Descriptive/analytical categories such as ‘warlords’, applied to political leaders in Somalia, have emerged in this new context. Here we use a selection of anthropological ideas to comment briefly on this situation. The first is that of the ‘segmentary system’ and the scale of politics. The ‘segmentary principle’ means that different ranges of persons may come into conflict depending on the social distance involved. This idea gives us a calculus for the rapid expansions and contradictions of arenas of conflict that can be seen in contexts of ethnicity. It does not, however, account for the fluidity and partiality of such arenas that are sometimes found. The same idea, however, also implies that a tribe may become an ethnic group tomorrow and a nation the next day, depending on the historical trajectory of conflict it may become involved with. The nation may thus draw on a naturalized symbolic repertoire of notions based on blood and kinship, thus creating itself as markedly different from others, a process EiblEibesfeldt calls ‘‘pseudo-speciation.’’ The phenomenon of physical violence tends to outrun the explanatory theories we apply to it. Allan Feldman has combined versions of anthropological and psychological theory to considerable effect in exploring ideas about violence in Northern Ireland; E. Valentine Daniel, among others, has given a moving account of how the experience of lethal violence is mediated in Sri Lanka. Both these authors manage to convey a sense of the construction of meaning even in an arena of mass killing that may lead us to reflect further on events in other parts of the world, such as Cambodia and Rwanda. Most scholars agree that we cannot simply ascribe violence to an aggressive human nature, yet neither can we argue that violence is simply a manifestation of culture. Rather, we need detailed studies of its social construction and the use of grounded generalizations such as the fact that in a cross-ethnic dispute, both sides may feel that they are the victimized minorities, depending in what majority is chosen for comparison. Processes of learned misunderstanding and extreme othering are also involved here. A combination of approaches from social psychology and anthropology could help greatly in rendering comprehensible the human capacity to kill. Where anthropology also needs to come into its own is in the study of the means, largely ritual and by no means always effective, whereby a measure of peace and healing can be constructed out of the destructiveness of warfare. New Guinea Highlanders, with their conversion of warfare via killings into compensation payments, and these into productive exchanges between groups, have in this regard been at the forefront of human political development. Their subsequent interactions with state systems and the new development of forms of violence and criminality within them, along with their own attempts to develop new compensatory rituals, have further shown how such a development can itself be overtaken by history.

Violence, Individual Action, and the State In a number of ways, the actions of authorities in society and of dominant or deviant persons in the community, may be seen as violent, and may produce violent responses, including that of self-punishment by suicide. In this section we look at a range of actions that belong under this heading, from capital punishment to domestic violence. Capital Punishment Capital punishment may be considered the supreme act of governmental violence in state contexts, and jurists point out that to distinguish it from mere execution or lynching, elements such as judicial interpretations and the stay of execution have to be brought into play. Recently, Austin Sarat has pointed out that the practice of allowing the kin of victims to make statements at the sentencing of persons convicted of violence has reintroduced elements of revenge found in retaliatory killings in nonstate societies. Homicide and Suicide Homicide may, in certain instances, take on some of the characteristics of capital punishment in societies without state institutions of control, as when suspected sorcerers or witches are killed for their alleged offenses. Community opinion, however, may be divided over such killings and they may represent the interests of a particular faction rather than a whole community. Bruce Knauft, in his study of homicide among a Papua New Guinean people, the Gebusi, found a surprisingly high rate of homicide among them to be related to male competition over marriageable women. There was a tendency for sorcery accusations and killings of sorcerers to be focused on those who had failed to reciprocate in marriage exchanges. Outbreaks of homicidal actions punctuated long periods in which harmony was stressed and the expression of anger or aggression discouraged. The Gebusi are unusual in terms of their very high putative homicide rate but not in terms of a cultural emphasis on male violence, which is found elsewhere in the world, for example, in other New Guinea societies and Amazonia, and is connected with warfare. Suicide may also sometimes be forced on persons in a manner reminiscent of capital punishment, as among the Duna people of the Papua New Guinea highlands in the precolonial past when female witches were, according to accounts, forced to hang themselves if found guilty. Stewart and Strathern (2003) have presented a contemporary update on such suicides among the Duna. The element of shame is powerfully involved here, as in other cases where persons found guilty of transgressing norms voluntarily choose suicide. The motivation of shame may be compounded further by a desire to protest against a situation and to bring shame on those considered to have

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caused it. Classically, a woman forced into a marriage or treated badly within it may, in male-dominated societies, protest in this way, either by drowning or hanging herself (examples can be found from New Guinea also). The sociologist E´mile Durkheim in 1897 classified suicide into three distinct types: egoistic, altruistic, and anomic. In the first, the individual is seen as insufficiently integrated in the group, in the second the individual is overidentified and may commit suicide out of shame or as an act of sacrifice, while in the third the cause of suicide is a social crisis in which individuals are unable to realize their aims. The first and third types are commonly found in contexts of rapid familial and social change such as have been commented on since the early 1970s for many parts of Micronesia in the Pacific. Rates of suicide in Micronesia are by far the highest for young males, indicating their problems of adjustment to society, their inability to find monetary employment, their use of alcohol and drugs, and the breakdown of kin structures such as lineage ownership of land that provided orderly patterns of resource control in the past. Conflicts of interest are always involved in all three types of suicide: quarrels over marriage and sexual activity, over the disposition or availability of resources, and the resulting feelings of shame and frustration, may all be involved. Suicide as protest is quite marked in Pacific contexts where the idea is that the suicide’s ghost may continue to bring trouble to the living. It may also be on the increase in contexts where other social sanctions on behavior have broken down or altered. Assault and Robbery Similar patterns of disintegration of social ties of control equally lead to an increase in violence on the part of young males who form into gangs and prey on social groups in urban contexts away from their home places. In Papua New Guinea such gangs concentrate their activities by robberies in the major towns and the highways that connect them, holding up travelers, killing them if necessary, and sometimes compounding their actions by rape and torture. Narratives of their activities circulate as cautionary tales and tales of horror among the rest of the community. We may call this, following Durkheim, a category of egoistic violence, prompted also by contexts where youths cannot easily meet their economic aspirations. Some of these gang members or ‘rascals’ in Papua New Guinea have voluntarily given up their ways when they received grants to start small businesses or been converted to Christianity. Stewart and Strathern (1999b) have presented narratives of ‘rascals’ and violence in relation to roads in Papua New Guinea. Torture Torture itself has most often been used as a means of domination to extract confessions of information about activities from enemies, from persons suspected of

witchcraft (internal enemies), or from dissidents. State authority may legitimize such forms of violence, as it does capital punishment and imprisonment. Torture need not be compounded by killing the victim, although it may do so, making a demonstration of the humiliation of the body as in the case of the ‘Shankill butchers’ in Northern Ireland, who were said to torture or kill both Catholics and, by mistake, Protestants in gruesome ways. Paramilitaries in Northern Ireland could expect that they themselves would be arrested by the authorities and interrogated violently with a view to breaking down their resistance and then extracting information. As Feldman points out, torture is concentrated on the captive’s body and creates its sense of power out of that concentration, as well as by the terror or threatened or simulated execution. Pointing the gun or the knife here is the same gesture as that exercised by the robber or gang member, but with the force of the state behind it. Further action, such as rape, is often enforced by means of a threat or other violence. One of the ways in which domination over others is exercised is through forms of torture and forced work, such as in the coercive contexts of slavery and forced child labor. Issues of how torture is to be defined and how coercive force may legitimately or otherwise be used in interrogation have arisen in the context of debates about the ‘war on terror’ in the early twenty-first century. Rape Rape is a form of violence directed mainly at females, although males may also be violently and forcefully sodomized, especially in prison conditions. During wartime, rape is often used as a form of terror and revenge-taking against enemy groups. A recent example is the Bosnian war where women were frequently raped in attempts to subjugate enemy groups. In contemporary Papua New Guinea violence sometimes erupts in the Highlands during and after local and national elections. At these times women who belong to groups targeted for violence are sometimes raped while males are beaten or threatened and property is destroyed. The form of rape on these occasions may involve a group of males attacking one female in what is known as gang rape. The same action may be undertaken as a form of humiliating ‘discipline’ exercised against a wife who has been defined as errant. Control of this sort is sometimes cited in other contexts as a reason for what has been described as female genital mutilation. Female Genital Mutilation Female genital mutilation can be discussed here under violence although this category, like suicide, falls into the grey zone of actions that are undertaken freely in some instances. Some outside (i.e., Western) observers have placed this practice under the rubric of child abuse since the female are generally very young when the operations are performed


on them. The phrase ‘genital mutilation’ may be seen as placing a culturally accepted practice into an unacceptable category by relabeling it. Female circumcision has also been called a ‘maladaptive cultural pattern’ by those who would like to see the practice halted. One consideration here is that these practices are also followed when families move to the United States or elsewhere in the world where female circumcision is not an accepted practice. Thus, issues of religious and ideological freedom arise. There is some evidence that lowered fertility may occur in some individuals as a result of scar tissue, which may inhibit sexual activity, and from chronic infections that result in higher rates of miscarriages. Janice Boddy has pointed out that these same problems have entered into the social construction of female cults of possession in the Sudan, in which women take control of their bodies and express themselves in ways that modify male control over them and also express their own view of themselves in the wider patterns of life. In this context, they do not oppose, but support, the practices of female circumcision and infibulation. Domestic Violence Domestic violence is a common problem in many parts of the world and much of it is directed at women and children. According to a United Nations study on this subject, it appears that to one degree or another violence against women in the home is a problem that can be found across all cultures and in all countries. The issues that bring on domestic violence often center on establishing authority and control in the household over the sexual activity of the partner as well as availability and use of resources such as animals (pigs and cows) and garden spaces, or property (e.g., house and vehicle). At other times domestic violence arises because of overconsumption of alcohol and/or drugs, or as a means of releasing anger/frustration that has arisen from some event outside of the domestic sphere but triggers violence in the home solely as a ‘coping’ mechanism in which anger is released against an innocent third party who is in some sense an easier target. Frequently reported forms of domestic violence include: (1) punishment/discipline, when a person is beaten because they are to be ‘taught a particular lesson’, that is, forced into one or another action or behavior pattern; (2) preventive, when a household member is beaten in order to remind them who is in control of the relationship and the material goods that are associated with it; and (3) defensive, when one household member hits back after being hit or threatened. Of course, domestic violence often involves forms of verbal abuse in addition to physical violence which can be equally devastating and destructive to the individuals involved. Both forms of domestic violence are disturbing to children and may produce lifelong psychological problems in addition to physical scars.

Terror and Terrorism: The Role of the Imagination In recent years the themes of ‘global terror’ and ‘the problems of terrorism’ have come to play an increasingly important part in the worldwide political processes, and a number of anthropologists have responded to this situation by addressing it through their writings. The place of religion in the enactment of terror and violence has also become contested and has been addressed by political scientists, sociologists, and psychologists, as well as by anthropologists Juergensmeyer presented a benchmark study on this subject in 2000. More generally, the role of the imagination, whether pertaining to the arena of religion or otherwise, is a crucial factor to consider when one is trying to understand the phenomenon of terror as portrayed in the studies by Strathern, Stewart, and Whitehead in 2006. Terror, then, and its manifold representations have taken hold of the global imagination in the decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of radical political movements opposed to the ‘West’ not simply in terms of political ideologies but also under the banner of religious differences. The events of 9/11/2001 and the conflicts in the Middle East and Afghanistan have undoubtedly been central in this reconstruction of the global imagination as well as the recognition of a new era of practices in relation to violence, at least from the perspective of the USA, and mutatis mutandis in the expanding sphere of the European Union. Terror in the abstract and practical terrors in concrete reality have become very much a part of everyday media representations, making issues to do with terror palpably present in many people’s lives. Present terrors surround us, both in our imaginations and the processes and practices of violence which feed into the imagination. Imagination and practice are closely linked. It is equally important to note that violent practices constantly lead themselves to the intensification of imaginative concerns, and that representations of these practices as events in the news constantly stimulate further imaginations and further practices, fusing together actions and images of actions in repetitive cycles. Images themselves, conducted in a creative or fictional mode (such as newspaper cartoons), may have as their intended, half-intended, or wholly unintended consequence the provocation of violent episodes of actions. Images and messages also stimulate and facilitate the mobilization of masses of people in crowds, protesting against government actions and eliciting forceful, if not violent, actions from police or military authorities. Small-scale and large-scale processes of conflict, and the terror that accompanies phases of violence, share many fundamental features. Scale itself, however, makes a difference. The global village and the Papua New Guinea village are in many ways alike (and, certainly, villages in Papua New Guinea are greatly affected by the

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world at large). Differences between these contexts lie in terms of the types of conflict they experience and their relative intractability. The world, for example, does not have many very effective rituals of reconciliation such as the New Guinea pig festivals and marriage exchanges. Studies in Papua New Guinea have recently merged with the general sphere of anthropological discussions of violence. As discussed in some earlier publications (e.g., Strathern, Stewart, and Whitehead in 2006; and Stewart and Strathern in 2002), a transactional theory of interactions was pioneered by David Riches (1986). Violent acts can be seen as belonging to ‘the triangle of violence’ between performers, victims, and witnesses as depicted by Stewart and Strathern in 2002. In the context of intergroup fighting, both sides are both performers and victims and include also witnesses. And casualties in fighting seen as ‘warfare’ may be considered by their kinsfolk as ‘heroes’ who have sacrificed their lives to the cause of their group rather than as ‘victims’. Similarly, the killers of others may be lauded as heroes. Lethal acts in warfare are given fundamentally different meanings from those in other contexts. The assignment of labels and meanings is always context-dependent, depending on the side of the conflict parties align themselves with. Riches’ transactional model is useful, especially when combined with two other observations he made. He points out that acts of physical violence have their own peculiar effectiveness; and their legitimacy also is often contested and ambiguous. These contests regarding the legitimacy of violence take place to a good extent in the milieu of its witnesses. Acts of violence may therefore be regarded not only in terms of their immediate instrumental effects as practices from the viewpoint of their performers, but also in terms of their intended or unintended auras of meanings – meanings that they gather within the space of the triangle of violence as we have defined it. Violence is about meanings and thus enters into the world of discourse, representations, and imagination. ‘Terror’ refers to these worlds, worlds both beyond and yet constrained by physical acts. In many ways, terror also belongs distinctively to boundaries and borders, such as have existed in the historical past between Scotland and England (Strathern and Stewart 2001), or in the more recent past between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland (Strathern and Stewart 2006). Furthermore, in terms of how meanings are created and communicated, rumor and gossip, whether spoken or in printed form, are often tremendously important, especially in the context of violence, threats of violence, and fears of violence. We have previously, in 2004, argued for this viewpoint, particularly in relation to accusations of witchcraft and sorcery, but also more generally in terms of issues and feelings that are conducive to conflictual acts. Rumor and gossip, like violence itself, are transactional acts, passed from person to person, often demanding reciprocity, and subject to disparate evaluations by ‘witnesses’ who then enter into the communicational network in which rumor flourishes. Rumor and gossip trade on fear, uncertainty, and ambiguity,

and they deal with the boundaries of legitimate action and speculations about those boundaries. They operate at different levels of societal complexity, from the interpersonal to the international. Intelligence agencies of governments essentially trade on hearsay as much as on direct observations and so may be regarded as purveyors (as well as evaluators) or rumors. Deliberate misinformation is often mixed with sheer inaccuracies as well as kernels of truth in these contexts of international life. And such acts of rumor-making and reception are not neutral; they are often political tools, and in any case they have consequences, leading to the mobilization of people in favor of certain causes. The study of events and physical acts inevitably, then, leads us back into the worlds of fluctuating, negotiated, constructed meanings, and thus, in turn, into representations of the events which form people’s memories and link to their desires and frustrations. See also: Clan and Tribal Conflict; Language of War and Peace, The; Peaceful Societies; Ritual and Symbolic Behavior; Warriors, Anthropology of

Further Reading Aijmer, G. and Abbink, J. (eds.) (2000). Meanings of violence: A crosscultural perspective. Oxford: Berg. Bloch, M. (ed.) (1975). Political language and oratory in traditional societies. New York: Academic Press. Bohannan, P. (1957). Justice and judgment among the Tiv. London: Oxford University Press, for the International African Institute. Brenneis, D. (1988). Language and disputing. Annual Review of Anthropology 17, 224–237. Caplan, P. (ed.) (1995). Understanding disputes: The politics of argument. Oxford: Berg. Chagnon, N. (1990). Reproductive and somatic conflicts of interest in the genesis of violence and warfare among tribesmen. In Haas, J. (ed.) The anthropology of war, pp. 77–104. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Colson, E. (1995). The contentiousness of disputes. In Caplan, P. (ed.) Understanding disputes: The politics of argument, pp. 65–82. Oxford: Berg. Comaroff, J. and Roberts, S. (1981). Rules and processes. The cultural logic of dispute in an African context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Daniel, E. V. (1996). Charred lullabies: Chapters in an anthropograph of violence. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. (1979). The biology of peace and war: Men, animals and aggression. New York: Viking Press. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1940). The Nuer. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Feldman, A. (1991). Formations of violence: The narrative of the body and political terror in Northern Ireland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ferguson, R. B. (1990). Explaining war. In Haas, J. (ed.) The anthropology of war, pp. 26–55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferguson, R. B. (ed.) (2003). The state under siege. London: Routledge. Ferguson, R. B. and Whitehead, N. (eds.) (1992). War in the tribal zone. Expanding states and indigenous warfare. Santa Fe: School of American Research. Ferme, M. C. (2001). The underneath of things: Violence, history, and the everyday in Sierra Leone. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gluckman, M. (1955). The judicial process among the Barotse. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gulliver, P. (1963). Social control in an African society. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Gulliver, P. (1979). Disputes and negotiation: A cross-cultural perspective. New York: Academic Press.

Theories of Conflict 39 Haas, J. (ed.) (1990). The anthropology of war. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutchinson, S. E. (1996). Nuer dilemmas. Coping with money, war, and the state. Berkeley: University of California Press. Juergensmeyer, M. (2000). Terror in the mind of god: The global rise of religious violence. Berkeley: University of California Press. Knauft, B. M. (1985). Good company and violence. Berkeley: University of California Press. Leopold, M. (2005). Inside west Nile. Violence, history and representation on an African frontier. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Malinowski, B. (1926). Crime and custom in savage society. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Merlan, F. and Rumsey, A. (1991). Ku Waru. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moore, S. F. (1995). Imperfect communications. In Caplan, P. (ed.) Understanding disputes: The politics of argument, pp. 11–38. Oxford: Berg. Otterbein, K. (1994). Feuding and warfare. Selected works of Keith Otterbein. New York: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers. Riches, D. (ed.) (1988). The anthropology of violence. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Stewart, P. J. and Strathern, A. J. (1997). Sorcery and sickness. Spatial and temporal movements in Papua New Guinea and Australia. Discussion papers series no. 1. Townsville: James Cook University, Centre for Pacific Studies. Stewart, P. J. and Strathern, A. (1999). ‘Feasting on my enemy’: Images of violence and change in the New Guinea Highlands. Ethnohistory 46(4), 645–669. Stewart, P. J. and Strathern, A. (1999). Death on the move: Landscape and violence on the Highlands Highway, Papua New Guinea. Anthropology and Humanism 24(1), 24–31. Stewart, P. J. and Strathern, A. (2002). Violence: Theory and ethnography. London: Continuum Publications. Stewart, P. J. and Strathern, A. (2003). The ultimate protest statement: Suicide as a means of defining self-worth among the Duna of Papua New Guinea. Journal of Ritual Studies 17(1), 79–88.

Stewart, P. J. and Strathern, A. (2004). Witchcraft, sorcery, rumors and gossip. New departures in anthropology, no. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strathern, A. J. (1971). The rope of Moka. Big-men and ceremonial exchange in Mount Hagen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strathern, A. (1992). Let the bow go down. In Ferguson, R. B. and Whitehead, N. (eds.) War in the tribal zone, pp. 229–250. Santa Fe: School of American Research. Strathern, A. (1993). Voices of conflict. Ethnology monographs no. 14. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh. Strathern, A. (1993). Violence and political change in Papua New Guinea. Pacific Studies 16(4), 41–60. Strathern, A. J. and Stewart, P. J. (1997). The problems of peacemakers in Papua New Guinea: Modalities of negotiation and settlement. Cornell International Law Journal 30(3), 681–699. Strathern, A. and Stewart, P. J. (2000). Arrow talk. Transaction, transition and contradiction in New Guinea Highlands history. Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press. Strathern, A. J. and Stewart, P. J. (2001). Minorities and memories: Survivals and extinctions in scotland and Western Europe. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Strathern, A. and Stewart, P. J. (2003). Conflicts versus contracts: Political flows and blockages in Papua New Guinea. In Ferguson, R. B. (ed.) The state under siege, pp. 300–317. New York: Routledge. Strathern, A. J. and Stewart, P. J. (2006). Narratives of violence and perils of peace-making in north–south cross-border contexts, Ireland. In Strathern, A. J., Stewart, P. J., and Whitehead, N. L. (eds.) Terror and violence. Imagination and the unimaginable, pp. 142–170. London: Pluto Press. Strathern, A., Stewart, P. J., and Whitehead, N. L. (eds.) (2006). Terror and violence: Imagination and the unimaginable. London: Pluto Press. Turner, V. (1957). Schism and continuity in an African society. New York: Humanities Press. Whitehead, N. L. (2002). Dark shamans. Kanaima´ and the poetics of violent death. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Whitehead, N. L. and Wright, R. (eds.) (2004). In darkness and secrecy. The anthropology of assault sorcery and witchcraft in Amazonia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Theories of Conflict Ho-Won Jeong and Eleftherios Michael, George Mason University, Centreville, VA, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Paradigms on Social Conflict Sources of Aggression Relative Deprivation and Basic Needs Rationality and Social Order Social Identity, Gender, and Violence Exchange Theories Functionalism and Social Integration

Glossary Conflict Groups Organized either to defend or challenge the legitimacy of existing authority relations. Nonrealistic Conflict Not directed toward achieving specific goals; merely releasing tensions.

Class Conflict and Agency Structure of Authority Discourse and Domination Functions of Conflict Implications for Conflict Resolution Conclusion Further Reading

Rational and Legal Authority Based on the principles of the universal and impartial applications of rules. Realistic Conflict It serves as a means for obtaining specific outcomes. Relative Deprivation A perceived gap between the expected conditions of life and the actual conditions of life.

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Theories of Conflict

This article focuses on the diverse social environments that generate conflict. Research on political violence and revolution has been popular among those who are anxious to understand the conditions for both social stability and the process of structural transformation. Several different theoretical traditions can be identified in understanding social conflict. Some focus on human nature and biological conditions. Others emphasize a social structure and relations within groups. The analysis of sources and the nature of conflict helps us explore the conditions needed for its resolution.

Paradigms on Social Conflict Conflict is a complex and dynamic phenomenon. Thus, developing theories to fully explain its dynamics, processes, and outcomes is a very challenging and complicated process. The root causes of conflict have been investigated from multiple perspectives for many years. Theories of conflict can be interpreted as conceptual maps that guide analysts and policymakers to correctly diagnose the root causes and dynamics of conflict at various levels of human relationships. One of the traditional paradigms in explaining conflict is the ‘real’ politics approach. It is a perspective that focuses its core assumption on the foundation that conflicts arise due to scarce resources. The original proponents of the realist theory were drawn to a variety of cases, from Thucydides’s history of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), to the Cold War. They highlighted violent struggles that arose from imbalanced power relations between the ancient Greek intercity-state system, monarchies and nation-states. Since the quest for absolute power is driven by inherent human nature, according to the realist politics paradigm, conflict is thought to be inevitable in various types of interaction. As conflict becomes part of power struggle between states, government elites attempt to have a tight control over intra-state, identity-type groups, or actors. The outbreak of several intra-state conflicts such as in Northern Ireland, Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Cyprus, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Columbia, and El Salvador, go beyond the frameworks of the realist paradigm, however. The critics have argued that the realist perspective does not adequately address the root causes and conditions that lead to the rise of deep-rooted and identity-type conflicts. In contrast with the realist approach, human needs theorists illustrated that conflict is driven by a group’s need for maintaining collective identity, recognition, security, political participation, distributive justice, etc. Proponents of the needs theory, such as John Burton and Edward Azar, argue that intra-state and identity-type conflicts will not be satisfactorily resolved by suppressing them through military and other forms

of coercive state power. Nation-state and international structures have to be reconceptualized to meet the needs of all individuals, and provide justice to those who have been marginalized and made to feel insecure within existing structural and institutional arrangements. In addition to the realist and human needs paradigms, conflict can be examined in terms of the dynamics of group interactions. According to this paradigm, the causes of conflict have been investigated by the socio-psychological and structural analysis of human relations at micro-, meso-, and macro-levels. In particular, the existence of conflict can be ascribed to aggressiveness, relative deprivation, failure of organizational functions, asymmetric power relations, and dominant social structure. The roots of such theories of conflict can be traced back to Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud. Some social-psychologists trace the sources of violent human behavior to the inner psychological environments. War and violence, according to this perspective, are inherent in human nature. Some of them believe that aggressive behavior is genetically fixed and biologically functional. Others explain conflict in terms of feelings of deprivation and frustration brought about by rapid social change. The collapse of social norms often allows the expression of frustration in violent forms. Social relations among and within groups have been the focus of another important paradigm in analyzing violent conflicts. Proponents of group-dynamic theory look at how patterns of conflict can be analyzed in terms of collective action. For example, social stability is maintained by the legitimation of authority relations between superior and subordinate groups. In its explanation about how to maintain harmonious relations, functionalism emphasizes that social disintegration results from the failure of basic functions of a social system. From this perspective, conflict is equated with social instability. Exchange theories explain the sources of power in terms of how normative structures and material incentives help maintain authority relations in organizations and society. In addition to the above paradigms, the sources and types of conflict can be studied in terms of how a hierarchical structure produces antagonistic relations among opposing classes or interest groups. Social and economic inequity generates class struggle in a modern political economy. In the Marxist paradigm, power relations between different classes are determined by an exploitative economic structure. Coercion is used to maintain unequal relations between the rich and the poor. Ethno-centric views of other groups may often emerge from the efforts to sustain social or economic and political inequalities, or unfair structural and institutional norms. While disagreeing with the Marxist emphasis on the sources of class antagonism, sociologists Lewis Coser and Ralph Dahrendorf challenged the assumption of functionalist approaches that conflict is pathological and dysfunctional. Under certain

Theories of Conflict 41

circumstances, conflict can contribute to social cohesion. The struggle between dominant and subordinate groups in a modern society has been stabilized through institutionalized mechanisms of dealing with social conflict.

Sources of Aggression Aggressive behavior, observed either psychologically or physically, has a negative impact on inter-personal and inter-group relations. The question arises as to whether human aggressiveness is inherent or intrinsic to all humans, or whether violent and antisocial behaviors are simply outcomes of failure of society to meet the expectations of its constituents. Some researchers argue that aggression stems from an instinct linked to an inherently violent human nature. Therefore, violence is explained by an inner cause. For example, several well-known social psychologists have pointed out particular psychological propensities as the origin of aggression. For traditional Freudians, a desire for destruction results from a death instinct. According to a slightly similar point of view, some others argue that most people have an autonomous source of aggressive impulses within them. If that is the case, could we then argue that pathological, psychological impulses largely account for outbreaks of war and mass killings? Competitive sports may also be considered as one of the means by which to express aggressive human nature. In one of traditionally known psychological approaches to conflict, most humans have a natural buildup of blocked energy that searches for outlets. Aggression stems from a genetically based innate drive that has to be satisfied; aggressive behavior is triggered by the excessive frustration of goals. Similarly, the perception of threats and uncontrolled emotion strengthen aggressive postures. Frustration might be further accumulated by the outside interference which prevents the achievement of certain objects. Thus, it is argued that failure of adaptation to frustration will lead to violence. If aggression is believed to be a response to certain biological and psychological stimuli, the origin of conflict is exclusively attributed to aggressive impulses that invite violent expression, no matter what the object might be. Given that aggressive energies have to be worked out by themselves, natural limitations are not likely to be imposed on the intensity of behavior. Since humans are assumed to be instinctually aggressive, conflict cannot be resolved peacefully. This innate propensity to aggression, therefore, is responsible for individual and group violence. The suppression of violent propensities within a group results in the pursuit of their outlets in relations with other groups. Violent conflict does not need to involve a contentious issue if we assume that violence is the result of the desire for the release of tension. The attainment of specific

outcomes does not necessarily mean the termination of conflict. Only external order would be able to control a tendency toward destructive behavior. However, if we believe that the motivational propensities for aggression are ascribed to the struggle for survival in a resource stricken world, then aggressive behavior can be reduced by creating a more caring world.

Relative Deprivation and Basic Needs Collective violence can be caused by feelings of relative deprivation and dissatisfaction with basic human needs. A prolonged period of economic and social development generates heightened expectations. There is a certain level of expectations for social and economic conditions to which people believe they are rightfully entitled. However, these expectations are not always met, even though people believe that they have the ability to achieve them. Relative deprivation exists when people feel that their expectations of conditions for life have not been satisfied. In presenting the relative deprivation theory, Tedd Gurr focuses on three major socio-psychological patterns behind collective rebellions. The first one, incremental deprivation, describes the potential for collective violence in a society where people’s value expectation for material, political, social, and other resources rises rapidly, but the political system’s ability to anticipate such demands remains rather unchanged. Unlike incremental deprivation, decremental deprivation refers to conditions under which peoples’ expectations remain relatively unchanged over time, but the political, economic, and social systems’ ability to keep up with its obligations declines rapidly, or even collapses. The last version of the theory describes conditions of progressive deprivation. These are conditions where both people’s expectations and system capabilities increase but they do so at a much different rate. For example, group expectations rise at a rate that creates a wider gap that cannot be reduced by material capabilities. The perception of deprivation tends to be often subjective. If people’s hopes and desires far exceed what they can realize, they may have more dissatisfaction with their current situation. The expectation to improve unsatisfied material and social conditions are likely to go up with time. However, the economic and social capacity to meet these expectations does not increase simultaneously. Thus, expectations are likely to rise disproportionately to what society can actually provide. Under such conditions, frustration is expected to deepen further when manifest reality does not match anticipated reality. An intolerable gap between expected social conditions and actual achievement of these conditions can be a precondition for widespread unrest and political violence. Poor economic performance, along with rapid social

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change, strengthens the belief that unfair economic and political conditions have been imposed on those who suffer loss. A lack of opportunities, as well as unequal distribution of benefits, generates contention of opposition to political authorities. A sharp reversal of gains, compared with others, in particular, leads to the increased perception of discrepancy between what people have and what they feel they are entitled to enjoy. Regardless of subjective perception, there are basic requirements for the survival and development of human beings in both physical and psychological terms. Some sets of fundamental universal human needs cannot be denied. The maintenance of decent human life requires selffulfillment, as well as physical survival. Food, shelter, and other basic material necessities are needed for physical survival. Love, affection, security, and self-esteem satisfy psychological needs. Human emotions are constructed within the framework of social life. No meaning in life is found if people’s self-esteem is destroyed. The denial of collective identity is a source of ethnic and other types of social conflicts. Needs can provide factual and objective criteria for analyzing a social situation that contains the potential for the emergence of conflict.

Rationality and Social Order Social relationships are based on mutual consent between groups of people. However, societies are not monolithic entities, and a specific interaction may have a different meaning to those who are engaged in it. People fight for control over advantages and opportunities. Actions may be taken intentionally to repress the resistance of others. To this extent, conflict is considered as a type of social relationship in which one party undertakes action against the other. Nonviolent and regulated conflict may be called competition. In the Weberian tradition, a legitimate social order is maintained by a set of rules and norms. Social action is affected by accepted norms and, in many societies, laws are used as a major means to contain conflict. Social tensions are regulated by agreed values and mechanisms. Thus, the acceptance and rationalization of conflict are made in terms of established sets of institutional procedures. While this approach legitimizes certain types of conflict, it gives power to a particular group of people who are in a position to make and enforce rules. The ideas of conflict management are based on rational approaches to all aspects of social problems. According to Max Weber, authority, justified in the light of rational and legal political order, is impersonal compared with charismatic authority, which depends on personal appeals and qualities. The principles of the universal and impartial applications of rules are the basis of a modern political system. The rational management of conflict legitimizes

the status quo and represents efforts to contain conflict within an existing political structure. To engage in conflict, parties must agree on certain formal rules of the game that provide the framework of their relations.

Social Identity, Gender, and Violence Every person has multiple individual and collective identities. Identities provide a reservoir of meaning and sense of who we are, but they are, to a large degree, fluid, situational, and socially and culturally constructed. Social discourse on collective traumas and national myths is an essential element to the construction and transformation of any ethno-political identity. In conflict situations, individuals’ social identities and group memberships color the perceptions about own-self in relation to others. The relationship between collective identities and conflict has drawn the attention of many theorists in social psychology, anthropology, and sociology over the last few decades. In considering that conflict occurs in many different types of social setting, many contemporary researchers have begun to investigate how inter-group dynamics can contribute to intra-group and inter-group relations and when identity becomes salient and politicized. In fractured societies, parochial identity exclusively based on ethnicity, race, and other primordial characteristics is often promoted to bring about group loyalty and cohesion in pursuit of political struggles. Identity-type conflicts are defined by seemingly incompatible goals, values, belief systems, influencing group behavior and attitudes. Various ethnic and religious groups have been victimized by genocides and mass murders, or have been socially discriminated and stigmatized over the years through stereotypes created to justify the dominant group’s superiority. Some social conflicts remain intractable and are reduced to a zero-sum game especially if each group sees the fulfillment of the other group’s need for security, recognition, and political participation as a threat to their identity and existence. Many individuals around the world are subjected to various forms of identity-type violence that limits their abilities and well-being in every aspect of life. While both men and women are victims of sexism, ageism, racism, and nationalism – among other ‘isms’ – the occurrence of gender-type violence is an important avenue in peace and conflict studies. Within the traditional perspective, gender identities are viewed as biological categories individuals are born into and the terms male or female are assigned to categorize men and women through the acquisition of locally defined attributes of masculinity and femininity. Within this paradigm, positive and negative stereotypes of gender roles are constructed and enforced by laws, acquainted through education and social norms, and built into


cultural and social expectations in the multiple lifeworlds we are all part of. Within the same paradigm, the construction of masculine and feminine categories is linked to power relations arising from the practice of attaching meaning to gender identities and genderspecific tasks and attitudes. In many cultures around the world, gender-specific attitudes defined under masculinity or femininity have created gender dichotomies, patriarchal hierarchies of social order, and laws for domination. Gender differentiation is an essential element in understanding social structures and the origins of violence. According to Reardon’s critique of patriarchy, the root causes of violence are found in the privileging masculine values in the process of establishing social and cultural distinctions between different gender roles. Within the patriarchic tradition, which exists in many parts of the world, inequality of sexes and genders in favor of men are institutionalized at various levels, leading to many forms of gender-type violence. Modern feminist perspectives illustrate how various forms of latent and manifest violence impede the hierarchical structure in our societies at various levels. Feminist peace perspectives challenge traditional and hierarchical government policies and general public perceptions that are shaped by traditional concepts of security. Modern feminists also emphasize the need to provide security and protection of individuals from organized state violence and the fulfillment of individuals’ fundamental needs, well-being, and safety at all levels of social interactions.

indebtness are perpetuated by obligations. People can alter their behavior and or influence others in an attempt to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes. Conflict may originate in the failure to reciprocate benefits. Disagreement on norms of fair exchange, type of rewards, and unanticipated costs might not be objectively defined and can also produce tension. In the absence of mutual consent, exchange relationships may be forced on the other side. Threats and violence are used in the case of robbery. Explicit and implicit forms of coercion are employed to guarantee the continued supply of goods and services. One example would be the exploitative economic and political structure setup by colonialism. Organizational structure emerges from social interaction. Exchange processes produce the differentiation of roles within a group such as leaders and followers as well as types of authority. The unilateral supply of goods and services can be contingent on the acceptance of unequal power relations. The ability to provide resources, essential for the survival of the community or the group, fortifies distinctions between superiors and inferiors. Those who hold higher power ranks in a group tend to feel the greater pressure to share their wealth with others. In many tribal societies, superiority is established by distributing gifts or offering religious services. A differentiated status structure necessitates legitimation and organization. Norms of reciprocity are developed to maintain social associations. Collective approval gives legitimacy to the power of the leadership. The failure to distribute social and material rewards can generate opposition and the call for new leadership, or the breakup of the group or community.

Exchange Theories People in almost all cultures are pursuing diverse social and material objectives. Exchange is inevitable since individuals have limited resources. In general, an exchange relationship is based on voluntary actions of individuals who are motivated by the returns they want to get from others. Goods and services can be tangible or intangible. Social associations are formed by the process of exchange activities between at least two people. Exchanging goods and services serves not only to create the bonds of friendship, but also to produce power relations. Establishing and maintaining relations emanates from the calculation of benefits and costs. Depending on the level of satisfaction, some exchange relationships are more rewarding than others. Benefits ought to be reciprocated in order to continue to receive them. Though obligations may not be specific, commitments to the other party are involved in the relationship. The fulfillment of exchange obligations generates trust and bond. Social exchange is not likely to happen without a promise from others to reciprocate favors. Thus, trust is essential for maintaining stable social relations. Bonds and

Functionalism and Social Integration Functionalist theories view society as an entity that can be reduced to its constituent parts. A social system has a specific structure that is composed of relationships among the constituent parts, including polity, economy, and culture. These parts carry out basic functions for maintaining the whole society. Functions of a social system are defined in terms of processes that are essential for the survival of the system. The solidarity of a society relies on the integration of its components. Actors in a social system fulfill their required role assignments. Institutionalized patterns of interaction among actors are regulated by cultural and other patterns. The educational component of the social structure has the function of transmitting the existing culture to future generations. Socialization helps keep a kinship structure, which in turn has the function of sustaining family ties. Social structure is based on the consensus of values among its members. The overall pattern of interrelationship is geared toward order and harmony. An inefficient

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response to disturbances from an environment causes malfunction of the system. For instance, social instability can arise from the incompatibility between modernization and traditional value systems. The domination of a new religion or ideology follows changes in power distribution in various subsystems. According to functionalism, progress means increased specializations and complexities in the functions of society. The economic structure of any given society should be compatible with the political structure and normative values. More specifically, an increased capacity to mobilize economic resources is based on the development of modern political institutions, which support market operations. In addition, the penetration of a free market economy is accompanied by the replacement of traditional cultural norms by universalistic values and generalized rules. The dissatisfaction with the existing system demands the adjustment of relationships among components. Deviant behavior is treated like a disease that should be cured. Coerced change does not necessarily engender either the political solidarity or cultural legitimation that sustains commitment from members of a society. Coercive order is not stable unless it brings changes in cultural norms to subjugated people. The subjugated groups should be willing to accept the dominant group’s cultural orientations as well as institutional models. Society can fail to respond to the challenges coming from the disequilibrium between the demand and the supply of resources. The failure of normal functions leads to pathological states. Abnormal states are considered harmful to the survival of the system. Systemic crisis or stress disrupts normal patterns of interactions among components within a system. The failure of critical social functions creates conditions for radical social change, such as revolution. Since conflict is associated with disunity, it is seen as dysfunctional according to functionalist theories. The re-establishment of functional social relations and integration has become an important agenda for preventing recurrent violence especially in postconflict societies. Political, social, and economic integration can be achieved through psychological rehabilitation and power-sharing mechanisms. Well-functioning, integrated structures would permit the creation of institutions that transcend ethnocentrism and would allow every group to retain their own cultural and linguistic identities.

Class Conflict and Agency In the Marxist paradigm, conflict between classes arises out of dialectical struggle among differing material interests. The political economy of social relations is important in understanding the causes of conflict. A basic assumption of Marxism is that a social and political structure is

determined by the mode of production and those who control the means of production such as labor, land, and factory facilities. The economic structure determines forms of social consciousness as well as types of legal and political institutions. Conflict is rooted in class antagonism, which results from the historical conditions of production. In a capitalist society – a transitory stage toward socialism – two main classes can be identified: the proletariat and the bourgeois who owns and controls financial flows and allocation of material resources needed for production. The workers provide labor in exchange for the wages that are essential for the subsistence of their physical survival. The economic and political power of the bourgeois derives from the ownership of the means of production. The business class dominates the working class until the latter organizes to protest exploitation and alienation. The unfair exploitation of one class by another is the main source of conflict. Workers are alienated since their work is not related to the realization of their needs. The work does not reflect a worker’s desire or nature. It only serves the interests of the owner of the means of production. The ultimate cause of all crises in a capitalist system is poverty and restricted consumption of the masses. The emancipation of the working class results from the elimination of private properties. Class struggle is a vehicle for structural change. Conflict can be eventually eliminated in a classless society, a stage of communism. Class conflict is characterized by the absence of mobility and the concentration of power and property among a few elites, as well as the superimposition of economic and political interests on the masses. A clear correlation exists between the distribution of power and social stratification. The intensity of conflict in a capitalist society is linked to the concentration of political and economic power in one class. Postindustrialized societies have reduced the degree of class antagonism, in part, by introducing effective conflict regulation mechanisms such as mediation, arbitration and, in part, by allowing workers’ participation in electoral processes. Marxist theory has evolved over the years and has not been completely refuted, despite its theoretical and practical weaknesses. Neo-Marxist approaches suggest a construction of social life that shifts from Marx’s dialectic relationship between modes of production and exploitative class relations to the role of power and control embedded in various social and economic settings. Human action and interaction is affected by changes in intentions and beliefs that are derived from the ongoing transformation of technologies and institutions. New demand for change can be made not necessarily by representatives of a working class but by those who have agency defined in terms of will and capacity to bring about changes to existing conditions.


Structure of Authority Status differences are found in most social relations. Power imbalance characterizes asymmetric relations. The unequal distribution of decision-making power is a source of latent conflict. The structural origins of group conflicts can be related to the arrangement of social roles attached to domination and subjection. The two distinctive sets of groups are produced by authority relations. One group has a position of domination with the other in a position of subjection. Opposing interests derive from power differences. Identical authority positions develop common group interests. Conflict groups are organized either to defend or to challenge the legitimacy of the existing structure. The creation of conflicting parties can be prevented by the lack of freedom of speech and associations. Communication among those who share the same interest is also essential in the formation of groups. Thus, the conditions for the formation of conflict groups do not exist in a repressive political system. The dominant group wants stability while the dominated group pursues change. The dominant group is interested in the preservation of a social structure that legitimizes their authority. Change is resisted by the party benefiting from the structure. Those on top interpret conflict in terms of law and order. For the subjugated group, the existing situation is perceived as unjust and exploitative. Those in a disprivileged position look for opportunities to establish a new set of relations. Conflict involves struggle between the forces of status quo and challenge. Opposing groups mobilize resources. The problems of maintaining or changing a given structure are interpreted in terms of the legitimacy of existing authority relations. Since conflict arises out of tensions between subordinate and dominant groups, solutions on individual issues do not eliminate the possibility of recurrent conflicts. Conflict regulation mechanisms may prevent violence but do not deal with sources of conflict. As far as asymmetric patterns of interaction exist, conflict cannot be avoided. Conflict resolution needs to be based on structural changes that lead to egalitarian relations.

Discourse and Domination In critical social theories, the social world is divided into a multitude of communities, cultural traditions, and knowledge. The primary forces of domination are not economic exploitation. The sources of conflict can be related to the subjugation of differing identities and understandings of reality that belong to particular groups of people. The process of discourse plays an important role in shaping subjectivity, social institutions, and politics. Language mediates between individuals and the conditions of their existence.

A discourse can be characterized as a set of rules for speech. Rules of discourse dictate who is accorded the right and the status to make authoritative statements. Mechanisms such as newspapers and television ensure the survival of a dominant structure under the mask of knowledge. There are close connections between knowledge and power. All knowledge claims are moves in power games. Methods of social control serve as instruments of those who have power. Subjecting and stereotyping individuals to specific identity groups contributes to the regulation of differences in a modern society. In a rationalized world, human beings are transformed into manipulative subjects. Modern industrial society allots each person to a specific role or an operation that characterizes the person. The individual is carefully fabricated in the social order. Hegemony is maintained by a complex web of conceptual and material arrangements producing the very fabric of everyday life. Hegemony at the workplace, for instance, is enforced by economic arrangements such as contracts and reward systems that are supported by laws. Discipline is based on more than physical coercion. The monopolization of economic and political power in the hands of corporations and state institutions illustrates the colonization of social spheres defined by German sociologist and philosopher Juergen Habermas. Absolute truth is controlled and manipulated to serve state interests or expand power of bureaucracies. Technocratic approaches to many contemporary political and social issues limit the role of citizen participation in public decision making at the expense of individual freedom and autonomy. Collective consciousness is fragmented and highly subject to a controlled flow of information provided by authorities. The goal of conflict-free society is based on emancipation from the dominant political structure by creating a social space that tolerates differences and favors autonomy. In terms of discourse, emancipation can be achieved by privileging local narrative over grand state ideologies favored by political elite. The dominant paradigm and its language need to be deconstructed by the analysis of the existing patterns of culture and political discourse. In empowering the marginalized narrative, one’s reality needs to be re-examined in terms of cultural and social circumstances that subjugate ecological and indigenous native people’s values to neoliberal political economic order. Reflecting on their specific locations in social space, identity based on gender, race, and class is fluid along with fluctuation in one’s reality.

Functions of Conflict While conflict may bring about radical social change, it can also enhance the function of a social system.

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Pressure for innovation and creativity prohibits the ossification of a social system. Social life is not entirely harmonious, and conflict does not need to be considered disruptive. A certain degree of conflict is, in fact, essential in promoting unity. Since conflict is natural in every society, productive relations may emerge from well-managed conflict. Group solidarity is more easily maintained by allowing conflicts. However, consensus on basic values is critical if the conflict is to be functional. The existence of established rules of competition can help the regulation of conflict within the system. If conflicts are superimposed on each other, they endanger social stability. In superimposed conflicts, the same groups face each other in various types of conflicts. The emergence of overriding interests increases the intensity of conflict with the concentration of emotional energies. On the other hand, the criss-crossing of conflicts cancel each other out. They prevent disintegration of a whole society along one primary line of cleavage such as class, religion, or ethnicity. Threats to consensus on core values would be reduced by the existence of multiple conflict groups engaged in many different issues. A conflict, which serves as a means for obtaining a specific outcome, can be called a realistic conflict. Particular demands are directed at the presumed objects. The antagonistic actions of labor unions against management are said to be realistic if these actions are organized to achieve results such as an increase in wages or benefits. The sources of realistic conflict exist in every social system as long as people raise opposing claims to power positions and economic resources as well as arguing about different values. If conflict is a means to an end, it can be resolved by achieving specific goals. Different forms of contention are assessed in terms of their effectiveness in promoting interests. In nonrealistic conflict, conflict is an end in itself. Finding a solution for the unsatisfactory situation is no longer a major concern. The aim of conflict is simply releasing tensions. Hostilities may be diverted toward substitute objects. Safety valve mechanisms function as channels for cathartic release. The weaker party in conflict especially uses displaced means to express feelings of frustration. However, the displacement of goals does not change the terms of the relationship. This distinction between realistic and nonrealistic conflicts has important implications for conflict management and resolution. A realistic conflict can be resolved if the desired outcome is obtained. Conflict is channeled into productive social activity. However, the hostility expressed in nonrealistic conflict is destructive and needs to be controlled. A safety valve function may be employed to avoid tensions between primary parties in conflict but does not solve the root causes of problems. Mediation is supposed to help adversaries direct their energies from engagement in the emotional aspects of nonrealistic conflict to discussion about substantive issues.

Implications for Conflict Resolution Depending on the assumptions of social order, different approaches to resolving conflict can be suggested. The emphasis on coherence and order may justify the use of force and other means of restricting behavior. If it is assumed that social order results from a general consensus on the core values of society that outweighs actual differences of opinions and interests, main concerns remain with conflict reduction and regulation. Since conflict appears to be avoidable, major efforts are made to strengthen the mechanisms of social control that minimize conflict. Social tension and strains may be ascribed to psychological maladjustment. Psychiatric approaches need to be used if problems are rooted in individuals. Stress is placed on the adjustment of individuals to given structures. The efforts to preserve existing institutional arrangements lead to the ignorance of pressures for change. An unstable social order is explained in terms of the breakdown of control mechanisms. The regulation of social conflict is more concerned with the way conflicts are expressed than understanding their causes. The functions of conflict regulation have been performed by conciliation, mediation, and arbitration. The ideas of alternative dispute resolution represent the philosophy of regulation by adopting a less costly method to handle the symptoms of conflict. Regulation methods have been designed to reduce physical violence. In this approach, the routinization of problems prevents the explosion of a superimposed conflict. In contrast with a consensus model of social order, society can be viewed as being held together by force and constraint. Changes are inevitable, given that coercive relations cannot be maintained forever. Social conflict could be eliminated only through structural change. Conflict resolution should address the causes rather than the symptoms of social conflict. If progress is made possible by a struggle, the task would be to overcome the resistance of those who benefit from the current system against changes. Since conflict is inherent in the social structure, the complete elimination of conflict is not possible and desirable. The suppression of conflict is not an effective means of dealing with its sources. Most importantly, efforts to ignore conflict are, in the long run, counterproductive. Conflict can be transformed and resolved by adopting nonviolence principles established by Tolstoy and Gandhi. Nonviolence has often been used as a strategy to break intolerable situations. The ideas of nonviolence suggest resolving conflict through persuading oppressors in a nonthreatening manner. At the same time, nonviolence can also be used to promote a culture of selfsacrificing love. Reconciliation is built in a nonviolent approach to conflict resolution which transcends dichotomization. Its aim is to resolve sources of problems rather


than annihilate adversaries. All parties are encouraged to participate in the process to explore a just solution to the conflict.

Conclusion The struggle against dominant social relations and oppressive cultural norms has existed throughout human history. The large question for research on conflict analysis and resolution is, then, how we can identify the sources of dominant relations that generate conflict. Examining the impact of conflict on human well-being has to be one of the most important tasks in analyzing the causes and nature of environmental conflict, labor disputes, problems in urban communities, and a violent culture. See also: Gender Studies

Further Reading Allport, G. (1954). The nature of prejudice. Cambridge, MA: AddisonWesley.

Blau, P. M. (1964). Exchange and power in social life. New York: Wiley. Burton, J. (1997). Violence explained: The sources of conflict, violence and crime and their provention. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Clark, M. (2002). In search of human nature. New York: Routledge. Colomy, P. (ed.) (1992). The dynamics of social systems. London: Sage. Conteh-Morgan, E. (2003). Collective political violence: Competing theories and cases of violent conflicts. New York: Routledge. Coser, L. (1964). The functions of social conflict. New York: The Free Press. Dahrendorf, R. (1959). Class and class conflict in industrial society. Stanford, CA: Stansford University Press. Freud, S. (1957). Repression. In Strachey, J. (ed.) The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (first publ. 1915) vol. 14, pp. 146–158. London: Hogarth Press. Gurr, T. R. (1970). Why men rebel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jeong, H. W. (2005). Peace building in postconflict societies. Boulder, CO: Lynn Rienner. Lorenz, K. (1966). On aggression. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Marx, K. (1906). Das kapital. New York: Random House. Reardon, B. (1985). Sexism and the war systems. New York: Teachers College. Sherif, M. (1958). Superordinate goals in the reduction of intergroup conflict. American Journal of Sociology 63, 349–363. Tajfel, H. (1981). Social identity and intergroup relations. London: Cambridge University Press. Weber, T. (1964). Theory of social and economic organization. (Intro. Parsons, T). New York: The Free Press.


II. NEUROBIOLOGY, NEUROCHEMISTRY – ANIMAL MODELS


Biochemical Factors in Aggression and Violence David LeMarquand, Regional Mental Health Care London, London, ON, Canada Peter N S Hoaken, The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada Chawki Benkelfat, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada Robert O Pihl, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Introduction Hormones Neurotransmitters

Glossary Agonist A compound that binds to a receptor and initiates intracellular processes. Amino Acids Monomers that are the structural building blocks of proteins; a small minority function as neurotransmitters. Androgens Male sex hormones; one class of steroid hormones in mammals. Antagonist A compound that binds to and occupies a receptor but does not initiate intracellular processes. Central Nervous System Part of the nervous system composed of the brain and spinal cord. Cerebrospinal Fluid Liquid produced by the choroid plexuses of the lateral, third, and fourth ventricles that fills the ventricular system of the brain and the spinal subarachnoid space. Hormone A compound released from neuronal or non-neuronal cells that circulates and acts at a site distant from its release site. Monoamine Oxidase An enzyme that degrades biogenic amines.

Introduction The biochemistry of human aggression has been studied for about three decades; over this period, a considerable but inconsistent literature has arisen. Much less research has been done on the biochemistry of human prosocial and affiliative behavior (e.g., cooperation, altruism, friendship); as such, the primary focus of this review will be the neurobiology of aggression and violence in humans. The primary dependent measures used in the study of the biochemistry of human aggression and violence include: (1) hormones and their precursors/metabolites, measured in saliva, blood, and urine; (2) neurotransmitters and their precursors/ metabolites, measured in blood, urine, and cerebrospinal

Other Neurochemicals Summary/Conclusions Further Reading

Monoamines A class of neurotransmitters, along with amino acids and peptides, consisting of three catecholamines (dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine), an indoleamine (serotonin), a quaternary amine (acetylcholine), and an ethylamine (histamine). Neurotransmitter A compound synthesized and released from the presynaptic membrane upon nerve stimulation of a neuron in the nervous system, inducing a physiological response on the postsynaptic membrane. Platelets Disk-shaped blood cells formed in the bone marrow whose primary physiological function is hemostasis. Receptor A protein in the neuronal membrane of a cell that is a binding or recognition site for a neuroactive compound which may result in a change in the activity of the cell. Reuptake Inhibitor A compound that blocks the reuptake of a neurotransmitter into the presynaptic membrane.

fluid (CSF); (3) neurotransmitter uptake and receptor functioning on blood platelets; and (4) neurotransmitter physiology and its effects on hormonal responses using neurotransmitter precursor, reuptake inhibitor, and direct receptor agonists/antagonists. The latter technique has been particularly useful in elucidating which specific neurotransmitter receptor subtypes may be involved in aggression, particularly with the development of agonists and antagonists with greater receptor specificity. Much of the literature is composed of correlational studies linking a particular biochemical to aggression; however, some experimental studies assessing human aggressive behavior following the administration of hormones or neurotransmitter precursors, agonists, or antagonists have also been conducted.

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Biochemical Factors in Aggression and Violence

Many of the aforementioned measures are limited in what they indicate about central nervous system (CNS) function. Urinary biochemicals (e.g., neurotransmitter metabolites) primarily result from metabolism in the periphery; therefore they tend to be less reflective of CNS function. The relationship between neurotransmitter (and precursor) concentrations in the blood and the function of CNS neurotransmitter systems is not well understood. As well, some cellular structures and physiological processes on blood platelets are thought to be analogous to those in synaptic membranes in the CNS. However, the environment of blood platelets is substantially different than that of neurons in the brain with potentially important consequences. It is not entirely clear how the levels of CSF neurochemicals, sampled from the lumbar spinal cord region, relate to brain neurochemical functioning. While studies have demonstrated correlations between CSF metabolite levels and levels of neurotransmitter metabolites in some brain regions, it is important to realize that it is unlikely that the former reflect neuronal activity in specific brain regions. This limitation also applies to the psychopharmacologic challenge paradigm. Despite their limitations, many of these measures have been correlated to CNS processes, and thus are held to be reflective of brain processes. As such, they are extensively utilized. It should also be noted that peripheral biochemicals may provide information on important peripheral processes pertinent to the understanding of the biochemistry of aggression and violence. A further difficulty in this field concerns how aggression and violence are defined, operationalized, and assessed. Aggression has been variously defined as any behavior directed toward the goal of harming or injuring another individual who is motivated to avoid such harm/ injury, or any behavior that is capable of damaging or degrading the integrity of other individuals or objects and that occurs within a social context. Violence has been defined as purposeless, antisocial aggression exhibited out of context: aggressive behavior that is no longer regulated by situational and social stimuli. A reactive form of aggression associated with high levels of emotional arousal has been distinguished from a more instrumental, proactive, calculated form of aggression associated with lower emotional arousal. The variability in the assessment of aggressive and violent behavior is equally great. Assessment techniques and measures include official records of violent and nonviolent criminal offenses, selfreport questionnaires of aggressive/violent traits and behaviors, and self-reported feeling states associated with aggression and violence (e.g., anger, irritability). Between-study differences on these parameters tend to hinder interpretation of the data, and may obscure relationships between certain biochemicals and specific types or components of aggressive/violent behavior (e.g., fighting, irritability, impulsivity).

Hormones Gonadal Androgens Hormones are secretions of endocrine glands that are transported through the bloodstream and act on target tissues throughout the body (including the CNS) to effect physiological and behavioral changes. Androgens, a particular class of steroid hormones, are primarily produced in the gonads (i.e., the testes and ovaries of men and women) and adrenal glands. They have two distinct sets of effects: androgenic (differentiation, growth, and development of the male reproductive tract) and anabolic (stimulation of linear body growth). During the pre- and perinatal organizational stage of sexual differentiation, androgens masculinize the fetus through the development of the male reproductive tract. At puberty, the activational stage begins, and androgen levels rise, leading to increases in bone growth, muscle mass, growth of the genital organs, development of the secondary sex characteristics, and increases in sexual motivation. The absolute levels of testosterone, one of the primary androgens, are substantially lower in women than in men, and decline with age in both sexes. Testosterone is the most abundant androgen, and is generally thought to have the greatest impact on behavior. Most of the behavioral effects of androgens are mediated through binding to androgen receptors widely distributed in the brain and other sites in the body. Hormonal action is terminated through the dissociation of the androgen from its receptor. Androgens are known to modulate the functioning of a large number of neurotransmitters and neuropeptides. Testosterone is metabolized into dihydrotestosterone, androsterone, etiocholanolone, and estradiol, the latter of which may act at the estrogen receptor to mediate androgen effects. Thus, how a steroid is metabolized will have important functional consequences. Interest in the relationship between the androgens, testosterone in particular, and aggression is most likely due to the oft-noted gender difference in aggressive behavior. Human males engage in more physical violence, and are more often the victims of violence, relative to females. As noted above, gonadal hormones are involved in the expression of sex differences in anatomy and sexual behavior. Androgens have also recently been demonstrated to have an effect on energy levels, play activity, and gender role behavior in children. As such, a possible relationship between androgens and aggressive behavior might be expected. A number of comprehensive reviews demonstrate that violent males have higher testosterone levels relative to nonviolent males. This holds true for criminals with histories of violent crimes compared to those with histories of nonviolent crimes, as well as violent sex offenders relative to nonviolent sex offenders and adult volunteers. Interestingly, studies with women have noted higher testosterone in aggressive versus nonaggressive

Biochemical Factors in Aggression and Violence 53

groups. Despite the general consistency of these findings, some studies with offenders have found no differences in testosterone levels between, for example, adolescent males convicted for repeated assault compared to those convicted for assault or for property offenses, or men charged with murder or assault versus those charged with property offenses. Even in the former study, however, adolescents from the most violent group tended to show higher testosterone levels than the other two groups. A higher than expected proportion of XYY individuals are involved in violent crime; these individuals also have higher testosterone levels than their adolescent peers. In more recent studies, impulsive alcoholic violent offenders with antisocial personality disorder had high levels of CSF-free testosterone relative to healthy volunteers, whereas impulsive alcoholic violent offenders with intermittent explosive disorder and nonimpulsive alcoholic violent offenders did not. In these violent alcoholic offenders, high free-CSF testosterone was correlated with self-reported aggressiveness and sensation-seeking. The authors suggest that increased CSF testosterone may result from a lack of inhibition of luteinizing hormonereleasing hormone and luteinizing hormone by circulating cortisol. Alcoholic, impulsive violent offenders have been reported to have low urinary free-cortisol outputs (see further). Cortisol has negative feedback effects on anterior pituitary function, where luteinizing hormone, responsible for stimulating production of testosterone in the testes of males, is produced. Interestingly, one previous study found no differences in CSF testosterone between impulsive and nonimpulsive violent offenders. Also, a recent study of personality-disordered males found no correlation between CSF testosterone and selfreported aggression or impulsivity. There have also been a number of studies investigating hormone-aggression correlations in offenders. Many of these studies investigated total plasma (blood) testosterone rather than unbound (physiologically active) testosterone levels. Salivary testosterone levels are thought to provide a measure more reflective of unbound testosterone. In those studies that measured salivary testosterone in violent offenders, positive correlations were found with indicators of aggression. Studies using total plasma testosterone also found, by and large, positive correlations with aggression in violent individuals. Unfortunately, wide between-study variation in the measures of aggression and sample characteristics hinders interpretation. Socioeconomic status (SES) and age appear to moderate the testosterone-aggression relationship. Among military veterans with high SES, high testosterone did not predict higher risk of engaging in antisocial behaviors. Among military veterans with low SES, however, higher testosterone predicted a higher risk of antisocial behavior. A study in incarcerated females found that increasing age

was related to lower testosterone levels, reductions in violent crime, and less aggressive dominance in prison. Among young men, an earlier age of onset of criminal activities is correlated with higher testosterone levels. A number of studies have investigated testosteroneaggression correlations in normal volunteers including both men and women. As mentioned earlier, wide variability exists between studies on the testosterone measure assessed (total plasma vs. salivary (unbound) testosterone) and the measures of aggression used (self-report questionnaires, peer ratings, diary assessments). Overall, similar to studies with offenders, small positive correlations between testosterone and aggression have been noted (r 0.15). The magnitude of this relationship is smaller for studies using self-report measures of aggression, and slightly larger for studies using observer ratings (teacher, peer measures). Self-report inventories of aggression commonly measure aggressive traits or dispositions, suggesting that testosterone may be more related to aggressive behavior per se, rather than self-reported aggressive traits. Balanced against these findings are the studies finding no relationship between testosterone and aggression in normal volunteers, and some noting a negative relationship. In a recent study, aggressiveness in women was negatively correlated with both testosterone and estradiol. These incongruities are difficult to reconcile. Another study found estradiol to be significantly positively related to aggression in young men. This is not entirely unexpected, given that testosterone is aromatized into estradiol. There have been a handful of studies on boys at puberty, a time when an increase in aggressiveness might be expected to occur due to a rise in testosterone in males. These studies have provided only modest evidence of an association between testosterone and aggression. A longitudinal study using path analysis found that testosterone in boys at 16 years of age was associated with provoked aggression at age 16. Also, there was evidence that provoked aggression at age 13 was related to testosterone at age 16, suggesting that earlier experiences of provoked aggression may have led to subsequent elevations in testosterone. More recent analyses have shown that testosterone had a direct causal relationship with provoked aggressive behavior from grade six to grade nine. There was an indirect effect of testosterone on unprovoked aggression mediated by low frustration tolerance at grade nine. More longitudinal studies such as these are needed in order to test for causal relationships between testosterone and aggression. In terms of studies investigating the testosterone– aggression relationship in preschool or school-aged children, two studies measuring plasma testosterone did not find relationships with Child Behavior Checklist aggression scores, while two studies measuring salivary testosterone did find the expected relationship between

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testosterone and observations of more serious aggression in social interactions or staff-rated aggression. The major limitation of correlational studies is the difficulty in specifying the direction of the relationship. It is commonly hypothesized that higher testosterone leads to increased aggression through some as yet unspecified biochemical pathway. Alternatively, the effects of testosterone on muscle mass and body hair may lead to a more intimidating appearance, which may affect interactions with others, lead to changes in one’s self-perceptions, and ultimately increase aggressiveness. Alternatively, or additionally, aggression may increase testosterone. Increases in testosterone in male judo competitors were correlated with anger and violence during the competition, suggesting that these behavioral reactions produced the hormonal changes. Additionally, plasma testosterone was found to be elevated in healthy males following a laboratory pointsubtraction aggression task. Other findings suggest that elevated mood may increase testosterone levels. In one study, testosterone levels increased prior to a sports competition and remained high in the winners compared to the losers. In this study, testosterone levels correlated more closely with the individual’s mood than performance; those with a more positive mood prior to the competition had higher testosterone. Also, among the winners, those most satisfied with their performance had the highest testosterone levels. Another study demonstrated elevated testosterone levels in the winners of a contrived laboratory competitive reaction-time task. There was no such increase in losers, which suggests that physical competition is not necessary to demonstrate hormonal changes. Thus it may be more the cognitive/affective experience of the event that affects androgen levels rather than androgen levels affecting performance. Additionally, dominance may be associated with testosterone. Testosterone levels in humans rise after victory and fall after defeat in competitions. Testosterone levels rose in winning male tennis players and wrestlers relative to the losers. Testosterone levels in chess players at a tournament rose and fell following wins and losses, with the likelihood of winning increased with higher testosterone. In new recipients of an MD degree, testosterone rises, and this increase is related to elevated mood in these individuals. Moreover, vicarious success and failure are associated with elevations and reductions in testosterone, respectively. Soccer fans whose team won showed an increase in salivary testosterone, while those supporting the losing team showed a reduction in testosterone. Testosterone is also positively associated with self-rated elevated mood, well-being and alertness, and decreased anxiety, fatigue, and tension. These findings suggest that increases in testosterone may result from the internal experience of dominance, or having dominance socially attributed (‘eminence’), and concomitant

increases in status and subsequent feelings of well-being. Bidirectional influences are also possible. Higher testosterone levels may increase the likelihood of engaging and achieving success in competition; the increased status attained through victory might then increase testosterone levels. A longitudinal study of adolescent boys supports the notion that testosterone is associated with dominance and social success rather than physical aggression. Thirteenyear-old boys concurrently rated by unfamiliar peers as ‘tough’ and ‘leaders’ had higher testosterone compared to ‘tough-not leaders’ and ‘not tough’ groups. Conversely, longitudinal analyses revealed that those boys teacher-rated as physically aggressive from ages 6 to 12 (particularly those also rated as anxious) had lower salivary testosterone levels than nonaggressive boys. These physically aggressive boys were not socially dominant, as they were rated as less popular by their peers compared to nonaggressive boys, and were failing in school. Thus, high testosterone was found in boys who were successful in imposing their will on their peers (perhaps through aggression at times), but who remained socially attractive. The stress of social rejection in physically aggressive boys may have led to higher anxiety and activation of the adrenal axis, which suppresses the hypothalamic–pituitary– gonadal (HPG) axis. Aside from the effects of competition on testosterone levels, a number of other factors can impact on testosterone and other androgens. Stress decreases these neurochemicals; sexual stimulation and exercise can increase them. Alcohol can also alter testosterone levels, although the direction of the relationship is not clear. These factors also must be considered when interpreting studies in this area. Some studies with adolescent males have shown that aggressive behavior is related to lower levels of gonadal hormones (e.g., testosterone) and higher levels of adrenal hormones. It has been suggested that lower concentrations of gonadal steroids and higher adrenal androgens are related to antisocial behavior through (1) a heightened sensitivity of the HPG axis to stress-related secretion of hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis hormones, resulting in HPG suppression, or (2) a predisposition in some individuals to heightened arousal following environmental stressors, resulting in HPA axis activation. Through its modulation, the HPA axis impacts indirectly on testosterone levels. Stress-induced HPA activation suppresses the HPG system, resulting in decreased androgen production. Finally, studies of aggressive behavior following androgen administration provide limited support for the notion that androgens increase aggression. A randomized, doubleblind, placebo-controlled crossover trial in which depotestosterone or conjugated estrogens were administered to adolescent boys or girls, respectively, demonstrated


increased self-reported physical aggressive behaviors and aggressive impulses in both boys and girls, with no changes in verbal aggressive behaviors or inhibitions in both. However, in a number of other studies in which testosterone has been administered to either hypogonadal men or men with normal gonadal function, no increases in mood correlates of aggression (e.g., anger) were noted following testosterone treatment. At least one study reported that, following testosterone treatment, anger decreased in hypogonadal men who were significantly more angry than controls at baseline. Healthy volunteers administered an anabolic steroid (methyltestosterone) in a double-blind, placebo-controlled study, experienced increases in negative mood symptoms, such as irritability, violent feelings, anger, and hostility, but also increases in euphoria, sexual arousal, and energy. Adrenal Hormones/Neurotransmitters Cortisol has been studied as method of indexing physiological activation of the HPA axis. Some studies have demonstrated that violent offenders have lower levels of HPA axis biochemicals, possibly indicating underarousal, an overregulated HPA axis, or an increased threshold for stress. For instance, urinary cortisol has been shown to be lower in habitually violent criminals relative to nonviolent offenders. Impulsive alcoholic violent offenders with antisocial personality disorder also had lower CSF adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH, or corticotropin, which regulates the synthesis of glucocorticoids such as cortisol) relative to healthy volunteers, with no differences in other adrenocortical stress response-associated neuropeptides (diazepam-binding inhibitor, corticotropin-releasing hormone, and arginine vasopressin). However, there have been opposing findings; violent alcoholics had elevated cortisol levels relative to depressed alcoholics and nonviolent, nondepressed alcoholics. The findings on the relationship between cortisol and aggression in children are equivocal. Some studies find lower levels of cortisol to be associated with aggressive behavior in children, which suggests reduced HPA activity. For instance, a negative correlation between the number of conduct disorder (CD) symptoms and salivary cortisol concentrations in preadolescent boys has been noted. In this study, boys whose fathers had CD followed by antisocial personality disorder had lower salivary cortisol compared to boys whose fathers had CD but not antisocial personality disorder, and boys whose fathers had neither diagnosis. Two additional studies have found lower urinary cortisol at baseline to be associated with aggression/hostility towards peers or the teacher. In another study, children with CD but no DSM-III-R anxiety disorder had lower cortisol levels when compared to children with conduct and a comorbid anxiety disorder, but not relative to children with neither diagnosis.

Similarly, low anxious/high externalizing boys demonstrated stress-induced cortisol decreases, while high anxious/high externalizing boys demonstrated large increases. Disruptive behavior disorder (DBD; i.e., a group including both oppositional defiant disorder and conduct disordered children) and normal control children did not differ in baseline cortisol levels, but the stressinduced increase in cortisol seen in the controls was absent in the DBD children. (Notably, antisocial children who demonstrate a cortisol response to a psychosocial stressor showed greater benefit from a structured therapeutic intervention.) In contrast, three other studies found no relationship between cortisol and aggression in disruptive children. This may be due to a failure to measure cortisol in children with aggressive and nonaggressive CD symptoms separately; however, a more recent study found higher salivary cortisol levels in boys with CD compared to those without, and boys with an aggressive form of CD with higher levels than with a covert form of CD. Furthermore, reactive aggression was strongly correlated with elevated cortisol. A few additional studies support the notion that aggression is related to reduced HPA axis function. Corticotropin-releasing hormone is released from the hypothalamus following a stressor. It induces the release of ACTH in the anterior pituitary. In pregnant adolescents, corticotropin-releasing hormone is negatively correlated with CD symptoms assessed postpartum. This finding is consistent with lower salivary cortisol in preadolescent males whose fathers had CD that later developed into antisocial personality disorder compared to boys whose fathers had no Axis I disorders or antisocial behavior. Also, prepubertal boys and girls characterized by low plasma cortisol levels at baseline that increased following a stressor had more CD symptoms than adolescents who either showed no changes or reductions in cortisol levels over time. Conversely, one study found a positive correlation between plasma cortisol and selfreported irritability and resentment (but not global aggressiveness) in healthy males. By and large, these studies, along with those reviewed in previous sections, suggest that reduced activity of the HPA axis is correlated with, and may be causally related to, aggressive and violent behavior. Cortisol levels have been shown to moderate the testosterone–aggression relationship. In one study of late adolescent offenders, among those offenders who were below the mean in cortisol levels, the correlation between testosterone and the extent to which the crime of conviction was violent in nature was higher, relative to those individuals above the mean in cortisol levels. Cortisol may moderate the testosterone–aggression relationship by inhibiting testosterone production directly (see ahead). Consistent with the notion that violent individuals may show reduced physiological activation under stress,

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several studies have demonstrated that violent offenders have reduced levels of plasma and/or urinary epinephrine. Epinephrine (adrenaline) is a neurotransmitter in the sympathetic nervous system and adrenal medulla; epinephrine levels may provide an index of peripheral sympathetic nervous system arousal. Plasma and urinary epinephrine were lower in men convicted of violent personal attack versus those convicted of arson, sexual, or property offenses. Urinary epinephrine and cortisol were also lower in violent offenders relative to nonviolent offenders, mentally ill, and healthy men following stressful environmental procedures. Conversely, a series of studies assessing urinary norepinephrine (NE) output found higher levels, particularly when anticipating a stressful experimental event, in violent incarcerated males relative to nonviolent controls. Plasma NE, a measure of peripheral presynaptic NE function, was positively correlated with risk-taking and self-reported impulsivity in personality-disordered individuals. Also, plasma NE in borderline hypertensives with suppressed aggression was higher following one of two mildly stressful laboratory tasks (mental arithmetic, Stroop task), with no changes in plasma epinephrine, relative to participants without suppressed aggression. Peripheral indicators of NE function are positively correlated with measures of aggression in healthy individuals as well. Self-reported irritability and resentment, as well as global aggressiveness reported by spouses and first-degree relatives, were positively related to plasma NE in healthy males. Also, plasma cortisol and growth hormone levels (but not prolactin) increased following a point-subtraction aggression laboratory task in healthy males with higher (vs. lower) basal aggressiveness. This was interpreted as a secondary response to increased plasma NE levels following the aggression task in these men. In another study, aggression on a laboratory task involving the administration of aversive noise to another person was weakly correlated with urinary methyladrenaline (methylepinephrine), but not with methylnoradrenaline (methylnorepinephrine) or creatinine, in healthy adolescent boys. Recent work with rhesus monkeys suggests that increased noradrenergic reactivity may be associated with state measures of aggressiveness and irritability. These results suggest that greater peripheral NE levels, and possibly function, is associated with aggressive behavior, particularly under conditions of stress. Also of importance are the androgens of adrenal origin, such as dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), dehydroepiandrosterone sulphate (DHEAS), and androstenedione. Children show a gradual increase in the adrenal androgens from approximately six years of age, a period known as adrenarche. The gonadal androgens, such as testosterone, become more important at puberty. As with the gonadal androgens, the hypothesis is that higher levels of adrenal androgens are associated with increased

aggressiveness. Three studies have measured plasma DHEAS levels in prepubertal boys; two of these three found these levels to be related to aggression and delinquency scores. Investigators were able to rule out the possibility that DHEAS levels were elevated as a consequence of the stress of psychiatric disorder, as might be hypothesized if higher adrenal androgen levels reflect the adrenal response to chronic stress. One of these studies also discounted the hypothesis that the association between DHEAS and aggression was due to the aggressive children (diagnosed with the Oppositional Defiant Disorder) being more physically mature than the children in the psychiatric and normal control groups by finding the groups similar on the development of their secondary sex characteristics. Taken together, the findings of studies on adrenal hormones and neurotransmitters in violent offenders, other clinical groups, and healthy individuals tentatively suggest that aggression is associated with reduced basal HPA axis function coupled with hyperresponsivity during stress. Secondly, the findings on cortisol in aggressive children suggest the need to distinguish between aggressive individuals with and without anxiety symptoms, as hormonal/neurotransmitter and aggression relationships may be different in these two groups.

Neurotransmitters Serotonin Serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine, 5-HT) has been hypothesized to play an inhibitory role in the expression of aggressive and violent behavior. This neurotransmitter is primarily concentrated in neurons of the raphe´ nuclei of the brainstem, whose processes project to a wide variety of subcortical and cortical areas. Serotonin is formed from the amino acid tryptophan. The primary pathway of 5-HT metabolism leads to the formation of 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid (5-HIAA), which is commonly measured in the CSF and employed as an indicator of brain 5-HT turnover. Violent offenders, fire-setters, incarcerated personality disordered individuals with XYY chromosomes, and homicidal perpetrators who had either killed a sexual partner or their own child have been shown to have low CSF 5-HIAA levels, suggesting reduced brain 5-HT function. Low CSF 5-HIAA also predicts recidivism in violent offenders and impulsive fire-setters. Additionally, low CSF 5-HIAA in them is associated with a history of serious suicide attempts and paternal alcoholism. The association between lower CSF 5-HIAA and aggression has been found to be independent of suicidal behavior in aggressive psychiatric patients. In several of these investigations, violent offenders have been classified as either impulsive or nonimpulsive based on the qualities of their index crime (impulsive crimes being those in which the


victim was unknown to the offender, the offender was not provoked, and the crime was committed with little chance of monetary gain). In these studies, it is the impulsive violent offenders that show reduced CSF 5-HIAA levels relative to nonimpulsive violent offenders and healthy controls. Thus it may be impulsivity, a characteristic of a subset of violent acts, that is related to low 5-HT functioning. These findings have contributed toward 5-HT being conceptualized as regulating behavioral inhibition/disinhibition. Some characteristics of the studies investigating the relationship between CSF 5-HIAA and impulsive aggression/violence suggest caution in the interpretation of their findings. For example, a number of the studies on CSF 5-HIAA and impulsive aggression have been carried out with samples of Finnish offenders; independent replication by other research groups with other samples is warranted. These violent offenders were comorbid for a number of other disorders (alcoholism, personality disorders), thus CSF 5-HIAA may be related to one of these characteristics rather than impulsive aggression. Also, in relating low CSF 5-HIAA to impulsive aggression, impulsivity has been defined as a quality of the index crime rather than a stable personality characteristic. The accuracy of such a characterization can be questioned; the description of the index crime may have been falsified by the offender in order to avoid more severe punishment. Despite these difficulties, a review of the studies judged to be the most methodologically rigorous concluded that low CSF 5-HIAA is related to aggression, particularly for relatively young, white, personality-disordered male criminal offenders. It has been hypothesized that the reduction in CSF 5-HIAA in impulsive violent offenders may be mediated genetically. The gene for tryptophan hydroxylase, the ratelimiting step in the conversion of the tryptophan to 5-HT, has at least two alleles, designated U and L. The L allele of the tryptophan hydroxylase gene has been associated with low CSF-5-HIAA in impulsive alcoholic violent offenders but not in nonimpulsive alcoholic violent offenders or controls. It has also been related to a history of suicidal behavior in the alcoholic violent offenders, irrespective of impulsivity. This suggests a possible reduced capacity to hydroxylate tryptophan to 5-hydroxytryptophan, the precursors of 5-HT. (In healthy men, however, the U allele has been associated with lower CSF 5-HIAA levels.) Questions remain as to whether the tryptophan hydroxylase polymorphism is associated with aggression/violence or suicidal behavior, as other studies have found conflicting results (e.g., no association between the tryptophan hydroxylase gene and suicidal behavior, or an association between the U allele and suicidal behavior in individuals with major depression). Other gene polymorphisms related to gene products involved in 5-HT synthesis, reuptake, metabolism, and receptor function that have been linked

to aggression or impulsivity include the 5-HT1B receptor (G861C allele), 5-HT2A receptor (T102C and 1438G/A alleles), and the serotonin transporter (5-HTT; 5HTTLPR allele). As one might expect, a similar relationship has been found between CSF 5-HIAA and aggression in personalitydisordered individuals and other clinical groups. For example, some of the earliest studies investigating the 5-HT/aggression relationship found an inverse relationship between CSF 5-HIAA and life histories of aggression and suicide attempts in personality-disordered men with no affective illness. Depressed individuals and alcoholic males who self-report high aggression have low CSF 5-HIAA. Low CSF 5-HIAA is also related to ratings of hostility and anxiety on the Rorschach inkblot projective test in depressed and suicidal individuals. These results suggest that the CSF 5-HIAA/aggression relationship represents a biochemical and behavioral trait association that cuts across clinical groups. There have been incongruous findings, however. A recent study found a positive association between CSF 5-HIAA and aggression in personality-disordered men, no association in borderline personality disorder individuals with a history of violence towards others versus those without such a history, and no differences in CSF 5-HIAA between violent and matched nonviolent patients with schizophrenia. It has been suggested that the inverse relationship between CSF 5-HIAA and aggression may be dependent on the severity of aggression, with the relationship being found in individuals with more severe aggression. This interpretation is not supported by one study that noted an inverse relationship between self-reported aggression and CSF 5-HIAA levels in normal volunteers (although a second study found that this relationship disappeared after controlling for age). CSF 5-HIAA has also been negatively correlated with aggression in children and adolescents with DBDs (characterized by hyperactive, impulsive, and aggressive behaviors), and was lower in these young people than in a comparison sample of pediatric patients with obsessivecompulsive disorder. CSF 5-HIAA significantly predicted the severity of physical aggression at two-year follow-up in these individuals. An alternate method of assessing central serotonergic functioning is through the measurement of the neuroendocrine hormones following the administration of a serotonergic compound. This method reflects the dynamic functioning of the serotonergic system in the limbic– hypothalamic–pituitary system, which regulates neuroendocrine hormones. Blunted prolactin responses following the administration of fenfluramine, a 5-HTreleaser and reuptake inhibitor, have been noted in murderers with antisocial personality disorder, suggesting a subsensitivity of central serotonergic systems, possibly due to reduced postsynaptic receptor numbers or functioning. This interpretation is

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supported by the findings of a peripheral indicator of 5-HT function, platelet receptor binding. Platelet receptor binding studies assess the density (Bmax) and affinity (Kd) of plasma platelet receptors using various 5-HT ligands. Significantly lower ketanserin binding to platelet 5-HT2 receptors was found in adolescent violent delinquents compared to controls, possibly indicative of lower receptor binding in the central serotonin system in violent individuals. Congruent with the studies in violent offenders, blunted neuroendocrine responses to challenges with various central 5-HT reuptake inhibitors, releasers, or receptor agonists have been found in personality-disordered patients as well as those of other clinical groups. Blunted prolactin and/or cortisol responses to challenges with 5-HT agents (fenfluramine, meta-chlorophenylpiperazine, ipsapirone) have been noted in individuals with past histories of suicide attempts, impulse control disorders (bulimia, substance dependence, pathological gambling), and personality disorders (borderline, narcissistic); borderline personality disorder patients with histories of impulsive and aggressive behavior; patients with histories of self-mutilation or suicide; men with antisocial personality disorder; and personality-disordered individuals, relative to healthy controls. One study in healthy males also negatively correlated cortisol responses to fenfluramine challenge with self-report Buss–Durkee hostility inventory total and aggression factor scores, with no relationship noted between prolactin responses and aggression, and no such relationships in females. Other studies have correlated the neuroendocrine response to 5-HT agonists with self-reported aggressivity. Prolactin responses to fenfluramine challenge have been inversely related to impulsive aggression in patients with personality disorders, Buss–Durkee hostility inventory ‘direct assault’ scale scores in personality-disordered individuals, a laboratory measure of aggression in personalitydisordered men, and self-reported life histories of aggression in personality-disordered individuals. Reduced neuroendocrine responses to other 5-HT agents, such as the mixed 5-HT receptor agonist meta-chlorophenylpiperazine, and the 5-HT1A receptor agonists buspirone and ipsapirone, have similarly been correlated to aggression and impulsivity. Interpretation of reduced neuroendocrine responses to 5-HTagonists is difficult at present. Blunted neuroendocrine responses to fenfluramine suggest decreased presynaptic availability of 5-HT. Blunted neuroendocrine responses to 5-HT receptor agonists may indicate decreased postsynaptic 5-HT receptor numbers or function; alternatively, they may be the result of adaptive changes in 5-HTreceptor numbers/ function in response to altered presynaptic 5-HTavailability. Recent neuroimaging studies using positron emission tomography (PET) have suggested altered 5-HT function in certain specific brain regions. In one study, impulsive aggressive individuals did not demonstrate an increase in glucose metabolism following a single dose of the

serotonin-releasing agent fenfluramine in the orbitofrontal cortex and medial frontal and cingulate regions. Such an increase was observed in healthy controls. In a second study, impulsive aggressive patients did not show increased metabolic glucose metabolism in the left anteromedial orbital cortex or in the anterior cingulate in response to the serotonergic agonist meta-chlorophenylpiperazine (m-CPP) relative to healthy controls. In contrast, the posterior cingulate gyrus was activated by m-CPP in the impulsive aggressive individuals relative to controls. A third study found reduced serotonin transporter availability in the anterior cingulate cortex of impulsive aggressive individuals compared with healthy subjects, possibly reflecting reduced 5-HT innervation. Together, these findings are consistent with the existence of reduced 5-HT function in the orbitofrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex in subjects with impulsive aggression. Reduced serotonergic function in aggressive individuals may be partly genetically determined. Twin studies with indicators of serotonergic functioning suggest that this neurotransmitter system is partly under genetic control. As well, a genetic vulnerability to aggression has been demonstrated. Furthermore, indicators of reduced serotonergic function have been correlated with family histories of impulsivity and aggression. Reduced prolactin responses to the 5-HT releasing/reuptake inhibiting agent fenfluramine in personality-disordered individuals are correlated with a greater prevalence of impulsive personality disorder traits in their first-degree relatives. Reduced prolactin responses to fenfluramine in aggressive boys are associated also with a parental history of aggressive behavior. Also, the density of platelet 5-HT2A receptors was lower in boys with parents with histories of incarceration or substance abuse compared to family history-negative boys, suggesting decreased central 5-HT2 postsynaptic receptor function. Finally, CSF 5-HIAA levels in newborns with family histories of antisocial personality disorder were lower than in those with no family histories of antisocial personality disorder. By and large, these studies suggest that low central 5-HT function is associated with aggression, and perhaps impulsive aggression. However, there have been conflicting results. Patients with compulsive personalities had higher impulsive aggression scores than noncompulsive patients, and had blunted prolactin responses to fenfluramine compared to noncompulsive patients and nonpatient controls. Additionally, there have been at least five studies showing no association, or a positive relationship, between neuroendocrine responses to 5-HT agonist challenge and impulsivity or aggressivity. Recent evidence suggests that the 5-HT neurotransmitter system in aggressive boys may show a different developmental trajectory than that of nonaggressive boys. Prolactin responses to fenfluramine challenge in younger aggressive attention-deficit hyperactivity


disorder boys were greater compared to attention deficit/ hyperactive nonaggressive boys with the same disorder. Also, prolactin response to fenfluramine was related positively to self-reported aggressivity and adverse-rearing environmental conditions in younger brothers of convicted delinquents. However, in an older cohort of boys, prolactin response was slightly higher in the nonaggressive boys (and therefore slightly blunted in the aggressive boys), suggesting that normal boys may show a developmental increase in serotonergic functioning not found in aggressive boys. This potentially interesting finding awaits replication. A recent investigation noted that central 5-HT function in childhood, measured via the prolactin response to fenfluramine, was negatively related with adolescent aggression assessed seven years later, and accounted for a significant proportion of variance in adolescent aggression. In one negative study, preadolescent and adolescent males with DBDs showed no differences in prolactin or cortisol release following d,l-fenfluramine challenge relative to controls. The neuroendocrine response was unrelated to aggression levels in those patients with disruptive behavior. A recent study found enhanced growth hormone responses to the relatively selective 5-HT1B/1D receptor agonist sumatriptan in DBD children, suggesting an increased sensitivity of these postsynaptic receptors, possibly due to an upregulation secondary to reduced brain 5-HT availability. Adolescent males and females with alcohol use disorders (AUDs) and comorbid conduct disorder also demonstrated elevated cortisol responses following fenfluramine challenge relative to those with AUDs and no comorbid CD and normal controls. Cortisol responses were also positively related to aggression in the total sample. Other putative peripheral indicators of central 5-HT function have been studied although their significance remains equivocal. The availability of plasma tryptophan, the amino acid precursor of 5-HT, for uptake across the blood–brain barrier in violent individuals has been studied. Tryptophan competes with other large neutral amino acids for the same carrier for brain uptake. Contrary to expectation, increased concentrations of tryptophan and competing amino acids were found in violent offenders compared to nonviolent offenders and nonoffenders and in violent male offenders with intermittent explosive disorder, compared to those with antisocial personality and healthy controls. In one of these studies, there was no difference in the relationship between tryptophan and its amino acid competitors between the violent offenders and controls. Contrary to the findings in violent offenders, tryptophan has been negatively related to aggressive behavior in studies with other clinical groups. One study with a small sample found preliminary evidence that impulsive adolescents have low tryptophan levels and a reduced ratio of tryptophan to the other large neutral amino acids competing for brain uptake. Two reports

have indicated that a low ratio of tryptophan to the other amino acids which compete for brain entry is associated with increased aggression in alcoholics, particularly early- ( 0, Dove scores 0). The higher reproductive success of Hawks enables the Hawk strategy to spread in the population; this also means that Hawks increasingly meet other Hawks and thus have to risk injury in real fights. In a population consisting of a proportion p of Hawks and 1 – p of Doves, the expected payoff to a Hawk is p(V – C)/2 þ (1 – p)V, while the expected payoff to Doves is (1 – p)V/2 since Doves only gain fitness if they meet another Dove. Being a Hawk is favored by natural selection only if p(V – C)/2 þ (1 – p)V > (1 – p) V/2, which is true as long as p < V/C. Therefore, if the risk

Table 1 The payoff matrix of the Hawk–Dove game. The first value of each cell in the matrix gives the payoff to individual A, the second value gives the payoff to individual B Individual A

Individual B

Hawk

Dove

Hawk

V C V C ; 2 2

0, V

Dove

V, 0

V V , 2 2

of injuries C is larger than the value of the resource V, we expect the Hawk strategy to spread only up to a fraction p ¼ V/C in the population. This model is oversimplified, but it illustrates an important conceptual point: it may be adaptive to fight against conspecifics, but it may also be adaptive to avoid too risky behaviors. The proportion p of aggressive individuals is evolutionarily stable: if a population deviates upwards from this equilibrium, nonaggressive individuals reproduce better than aggressive ones who suffer many injuries, while if a population deviates downwards, aggressive Hawks reproduce better as they often gain access to resources by scaring off nonaggressive Doves without risking injury. The early Hawk–Dove games have been followed by a large literature of game-theory models of animal contests and their empirical tests. For example, models quickly established that stepwise fight escalation can be an evolutionarily stable behavior, based on the idea that each stage gives information about the relative strength of an opponent. It is not in the interest of an individual to fight in a situation that will lead to a guaranteed loss, and similarly it is not in the interest of the stronger opponent to fight if a display of superiority, that avoids any risk of injury, is sufficient to settle the contest. These models predict that the more closely matched the opponents are, the longer the displays are the higher the risk of escalation. These predictions are amply matched with empirical data on, for example, cichlids and lizards. It is also of interest to note that there is current evidence that costs of aggressionrelated traits can exist even if no injuries happen during the lifetime of an individual. Testosterone, for example, regulates aggressive behavior in a number of organisms, and heightened testosterone levels have been shown to compromise the functioning of the immune system of birds and mammals.

Territoriality Respect for Ownership In the context of territoriality, the central question is to explain why rules that indicate ‘respect for ownership’ can evolve. A male finch singing from a perch may signal two quite distinct messages: one is that females are welcome to join him, the other is that conspecific males better stay away. Intruders are, indeed, quickly chased away, and true takeovers occur only rarely. But there is not necessarily anything physically superior about this male finch: take him to a foreign territory, and he behaves like any intruder, being clearly subordinate to the owner of the other area. Such a ‘psychological’ home ground advantage begs for an explanation: if aggression is favored when it brings about selfish benefits in terms of resource use, how can we explain the orderly arrangement of individuals, each residing peacefully in their own territories?

Animal Behavioral Studies, Non-Primates 69

In the same era (1970s) that witnessed the introduction of game theory to the study of animal behavior, Nick Davies conducted a series of now classic experiments with a butterfly species called the speckled wood (Parage aegeria). This butterfly inhabits brightly sunlit patches in otherwise shady woodlands, sunlight being important for an ectotherm (cold-blooded) animal. Males defend patches to which females are welcome. If two males meet, their contests consist of rapidly circling flights, that continue until one individual gives up and flies away (note that injury does not appear to play a role in such a contest, but energetic costs, wear and tear, and time costs may be relevant to short-lived animals). Davies observed that the butterfly that had entered the patch first was always the winner of such contests. This so-called prior residence effect has since been found in a large number of animals from polychaete worms to mammals. Davies was able to experimentally trick both butterflies such that both perceived themselves to be the rightful owner, and the consequence was that contest flights lasted much longer, supporting the role of prior residence as a determinant of ownership. Explaining the prior residence effect has been an example of gradual progress in the evolutionary understanding of animal behavior. The basic Hawk–Dove game, described in the previous section, was quickly developed further to study the evolution of ownership. The so-called Hawk–Dove–Bourgeois game allows individuals to use the strategy termed Bourgeois, that dictates conditional behavior: in the role of an intruder (latecomer), the individual plays Dove, while if in the role of an owner (prior resident), the individual plays Hawk. If injuries are risky enough (high costs C), it can be shown that evolutionarily stable behavior is that all individuals use the Bourgeois strategy. Thus, evolution can favor population-wide respect for ownership, based on the argument that it is cheaper for both individuals to use an arbitrary role asymmetry (‘who was here first’) as a cue that settles the contest, if fights are risky enough. If the role asymmetry is arbitrary and not related to, for example, body size differences that could reflect true fighting ability, it is called a convention, based on an uncorrelated asymmetry. However, subsequent work has pointed out that the explanation is incomplete. The first problem is that the success of a model in producing an observed pattern is not yet proof that the model captures the essence of the evolutionary problem. There are alternative explanations that could apply: for example, animals may differ in their body size or strength (termed resource holding potential, or RHP), and perhaps strong individuals accumulate as owners while weaker ones remain non-territorial. In such cases there is a correlated asymmetry between the roles of owner versus intruder, and an intruder that gives up may do so because it respects strong owners rather than ownership per se. Also, owners may defend more vigorously

than intruders challenge them, because they have accumulated knowledge of their territory that makes this particular location more valuable to them than to a random individual: for example, a bird residing in an area has learned where the best food sources are, and where to seek refuge from sparrowhawks. An intruder who lacks this information should not value the resource equally highly. Additional explanations may apply in special cases: butterflies that have been basking in a sunlit patch for longer may be warmer and therefore more agile in a contest flight, and cichlids that have been residing in an area for longer may be closer to spawning and should hence value their breeding site more than a randomly chosen member of the population. An additional problem of the uncorrelated asymmetry hypothesis is that if the cue used to settle contests is truly arbitrary, there is no reason why owners should play Hawk and intruders Dove: the opposite behavior (anti-Bourgeois) is an equally logical outcome of the model if the role asymmetry reflects a truly arbitrary convention. In fact, Alan Grafen has argued in the 1980s that if individuals cannot breed at all unless they gain access to a territory, they have very little to lose and should be desperados who fight especially hard. Anti-Bourgeois is a paradoxical strategy, as it predicts that owners should give their homes to intruders whenever the latter request it – which is not the case in nature. New theoretical work has provided a theoretical solution to this problem, based on the fact that as fighting behaviors evolve, they will change the population-wide patterns of space use and availability of vacant breeding sites. Once this is considered, the prediction is that multiple factors may produce respect for ownership: conventions may underlie ownership respect without producing paradoxical anti-Bourgeois behavior, but the respect for ownership is further strengthened if individuals differ in their fighting abilities. The new models also predict that respect is rarely complete, which is in keeping with reality where forceful takeovers occasionally occur despite the home advantage of the owner. On the empirical front, experimental work has accumulated, allowing more sophisticated tests of the reasons why owners tend to win. In a new experiment on the speckled wood butterfly, for example, Darrell Kemp and Christer Wiklund have used controlled conditions (including a forest made of artificial Christmas trees!) to be able to control precisely for the previous experience and the temperature of individuals. They showed that all individuals appear equally motivated to fight, but intrinsically aggressive males accumulate as residents and tend to win in later fights too. Neighbors and Dear Enemies An often observed aspect of territorial animals is that they become habituated to familiar neighbors, but react much

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more aggressively to, for example, the song of a bird that belongs to an unfamiliar individual, or is heard from a different direction from the usual one. This phenomenon, called the dear enemy effect, makes good evolutionary sense whenever new intruders pose more of a threat than neighbors who have already established a territory and can be assumed to no longer be a threat to the resources held by the focal individual. Animals often not only recognize conspecifics individually, but may perform surprising cognitive feats. The hooded warbler Wilsonia citrina is a small songbird that weighs only 10–12 grams, and it not only discriminates between songs of different neighbors, but males also retain the memory of each of their neighbors’ songs after an 8-month period during which no singing occurs, and all individuals depart their territories to overwinter in Central America before they return to the same breeding territories. The complexity of potential responses to familiar neighbors versus strangers is also highlighted by the fact that sometimes neighbors are not dear enemies but instead present a bigger threat than strangers. Such a situation can arise, for example, in species that are not sexually faithful: for example, DNA fingerprinting has revealed that socially monogamous bird species often have multiple paternity in their nests. If territorial males, being dominant and strong, are also sexually preferred by females, the intrusion of a neighboring territorial male poses a larger risk of cuckoldry to a focal male than the intrusion of a young and inexperienced nonterritorial bird. There is evidence, for example, that male red-winged blackbirds Agelaius phoeniceus particularly distrust their neighbors if these are sexually attractive. Sexual competition also plays a role when new members are accepted to groups in species where several individuals defend the same territory. In Siberian jays Perisoreus infaustus, females behave aggressively toward new females, while males welcome these to the group – and vice versa. Where the dear enemy effect holds, it may be advantageous for an owner of a territory to maintain the ‘status quo’ as long as possible. Australian fiddler crabs Uca mjoebergi show highly intriguing behavior in this context. These crabs live in tidal mudflats, and each one has to survive the high tide by entering a burrow dug in the mud. Burrows are also regularly used during the low tide as a refuge from predators. Digging a burrow is very slow and tedious, and if a crab does not have one, it typically tries to fight for established burrows instead. Crabs vary in size as they grow from molt to molt, and Patricia Backwell and Michael Jennions have recently showed that large crabs often help their smaller neighbors when an intruder needs to be chased off. It appears that having a familiar neighbor is preferable to new boundary negotiations as these take time and energy that could be put to better use (foraging and breeding).

Social Behavior, Reproductive Skew, and Dominance Hierarchies Conflicts in Social Groups Nature abounds with different social organizations of animals. In the simplest cases, individuals exist solitarily, busy gathering enough resources for reproduction which sometimes does not even require a mate (asexual reproduction is not limited to ‘primitive organisms’: many vertebrate taxa such as lizards and fishes have asexual species). At the other extreme are social species that live in groups, for a variety of reasons that range from avoidance of predation to scarcity of potential nest sites. In animal societies, reproduction is often unequally divided, and the extreme example is an ant colony with only one or a few queens and a large number of female offspring that form the worker caste. Even among the queens (if there are several), reproduction is often unequal, a phenomenon described by the term reproductive skew. In low-skew societies most individuals reproduce, in high-skew ones such as wolf packs only dominants breed and others are assigned a subordinate role. In many but not all species, subordinates provide active help, feeding offspring, helping in territory defense, and performing other necessary tasks in the society. Given that natural selection should favor individuals who promote their own genetic interests, it is not trivial to explain why subordinates accept their role and do not always try to fight their way to the top of the hierarchy. Indeed, the question of the stability of dominance hierarchies (pecking orders) is similar to the question of respect for ownership. In both cases, the answer is that peaceful strategies may outperform aggressive ones during a sufficiently short time span (the lifetime of an individual) so that the evolutionary process favors peaceful behavior despite its short-sightedness. One example of a peaceful solution is that young individuals, who are not yet strong, do not benefit much from trying to replace the dominant member of the group, because the probability of winning is much too low; it is better to wait and grow. Another possibility is that even if individuals do not differ in fighting ability or expected future lifespan, it may be on average better to rely on luck that perhaps makes the focal individual outlive the current dominant and inherit its status, than to initiate a potentially dangerous fight that could involve injuries even if it was won. An additional reason for relatively stable dominance hierarchies is that social groups often consist of related individuals. Increasing the number of copies of one’s genes in the world can happen in a variety of ways, and direct reproduction is only one of them. If a subordinate female helps her mother to rear new offspring, she increases the production of siblings. Full sibs (that share the same mother and father) are equally related to each other as mothers are to their offspring, which implies that genes in the focal


subordinate female would gain little if they promoted aggressive behavior when in the subordinate role, that is, making the subordinate try to take over her mother’s dominant status. However, since individuals in social groups are rarely clones of each other, their interests almost always differ to some extent at least. Animal societies therefore exist in a continuous state of tension, with benefits of cooperation interlocked with strong signs of conflict. The popular image of an ant or a bee colony is a superorganism in which every unit works for the good of the whole colony, but these species in particular show an amazing range of different conflicts. Ants and bees are examples of haplodiploid insects, which means that females are diploid (they have a double set of chromosomes, and develop from fertilized eggs), while males are haploid (they have a single set of chromosomes, and develop from unfertilized eggs). This creates a complicated web of relatedness values: for example, males do not have a father at all, and sisters are more related to each other than to their mothers. One consequence of fatherless males is that female workers, who could be supposed to work for the good of the colony, can instead spend their time laying unfertilized eggs and thus reproducing without ever having had a nuptial flight (the time during which queens mate and store sperm for the subsequent colony founding). It is not in the interest of the queen, however, to allow others to reproduce in the colony: she is more related to her own offspring than to the offspring of workers. Workerlaid eggs are indeed often detected and destroyed (eaten) by the queen. Fellow workers eat worker-laid eggs too, which is beneficial to them if workers do not always share the same mother and father, which diminishes the relatedness between a worker and another workers’ son. This phenomenon of removing unwanted eggs is called policing, and it provides another example in which destroying conspecific young can be beneficial. (It is of course not beneficial to the young victim itself, nor to the whole colony where productivity is partially wasted.) Insect societies offer many other examples of conflict too. For example, by varying the ratio of fertilized to unfertilized eggs, the queen may control the sex ratio of her offspring. She does not have the final say, however. Since workers are more related to their sisters than to their brothers (they share a father with the former but not with the latter), workers’ reproductive interests are best served with a female-biased sex ratio. Workers being numerically dominant in a nest, they sometimes use male offspring as nothing more than food storage units: rather than rearing them to adulthood, half-developed brothers of Formica excecta are killed and fed to their sisters whenever more food is needed. Thus, workers have many ways to increase the number of copies of their own genes

in future generations, even in cases where they do not manage to reproduce themselves. The examples above reflect nepotism, favoring one’s own relatives over others. Since the benefits of aggression in ant societies depend crucially on relatedness, natural selection should favor accurate detection of cues of relatedness. Efficient nepotism is sometimes based on rules of thumb: for example, in many bird societies individuals that grew up in the same nest are likely to be relatives. However, in ant colonies individuals have to be able to discriminate between individuals of different relatedness within the same nest. Much of kin recognition uses olfactory cues, which has particularly interesting consequences if these cues are broken down. Argentine ants that originate in the Americas have recently colonized large areas in Europe. In their native range, these ants are friendly toward near neighbors that reside within the same supercolony, but conspecifics from further away are vigorously attacked. Upon arrival in Europe, the ants formed the same population structure with supercolonies, but on this continent the supercolonies are truly gigantic. The whole European population exists as two supercolonies, of which the larger one is over 6000 km long, ranging from Italy to the Atlantic coast of Spain. When bringing together ants from anywhere within this vast supercolony, they show no aggression toward each other. Ants have recognition alleles that determine the olfactory cues that allow detecting kinship. It has been suggested that during the initial spread of a small introduced population it was beneficial to have whatever alleles were the most common, and intense between-colony aggression eliminated all rare alleles (genetic cleansing). After such a process has taken place, all ants have such similar genetic profiles that they simply cannot tell a familiar individual from a stranger. They consequently consider everyone a friend – which, incidentally, may have contributed to their invasion success too. Reproductive Skew Theory and Dominance Hierarchies We now know that factors such as relatedness and current and future reproductive prospects are important in determining whether a subordinate accepts its current status or if it would benefit from an attempt to ascend in the hierarchy. ‘Reproductive skew theory’, a currently popular theme in the study of animal societies, is a collection of game theory models that all share the aim of predicting patterns of how reproduction is divided among individuals in different societies. These models start by making a few simple assumptions regarding the options that individuals have in the society: for example, does the dominant have full control over who reproduces in the group, or not (e.g., the queen of a large ant colony cannot eat all worker-laid eggs, particularly if she is much larger than the workers and cannot enter most parts of the nest), or

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can dominants forcefully evict subordinates from the group. Then, the models derive the game-theoretic best response of each individual to the others’ best actions. For example, it can be shown that it may be in the best interests of a dominant individual to allow subordinates to reproduce to some extent, even if she could prevent subordinate reproduction, and even if it reduces the resources available to the dominant’s own offspring. The benefit can arise if this makes the subordinates less likely to benefit from an attempted takeover as a consequence. Such an allocation of reproductive rights is called a peace incentive. Whether reproductive patterns in animal societies really reflect such exchanges (transactions) of reproductive benefits is a currently much debated topic in behavioral ecology, as is the promise of reproductive skew theory that it serves as a comprehensive framework that can describe all social systems. What is clear, however, is that behaviors of social species in particular are not genetically fixed at birth but can feature complicated rules of how individuals respond to each other in behavioral time rather than over evolutionary timescales. (This, of course, does not imply that the rules of responding to each other could not be shaped by natural selection.) For example, dominants may behave more aggressively toward subordinates that have shown signs of transgressing (punishment). Also, there is strong evidence that dominance hierarchy formation can be influenced by winner–loser effects, which refer to situations where an individual who has won a fight is more likely to win future fights (winner effect), and losers likewise become more likely to lose again (loser effect). Winner and loser effects can exist independently of each other, and where they both operate together, they can easily lead to the formation of a stable dominance hierarchy. Showing that the effects are real requires disentangling the strength of an animal from its success in fights: if the winner effect operates, winning should improve an individual’s future success more than predicted solely based on the fact that a strong individual’s fighting ability exceeds many of its opponents. This has been shown in green swordtail fish Xiphophorus helleri, where randomly chosen fish were assigned to a winning or a losing role by pairing them with large or small fish, respectively. The fish that gained positive early experiences because they first encountered small opponents, later rose to the top of dominance hierarchies, while fish whose first fights were against large opponents became low-ranking fish later – even though the first opponents were no longer encountered in the trials that determined the final hierarchy. Fish thus form memories of their past fight outcomes. Whether this is real (cognitive) memory or a simpler physiological response to stress is an interesting question, but the behavioral outcome is the same either way: a dominance hierarchy is formed.

Aggression in Sexual Contexts The primary reason for aggressive behavior is competition for resources that are limiting the reproductive success of an individual. In many cases, the resources in question are different for males and females. In the majority of species (but by no means all), females care more for young than males do. This creates intense competition among males to find new females, as males are more free to roam around and seek for new females to be fertilized. In other words, male reproduction is often limited by access to females, whereas females suffer from a shortage of males much less often. Intrasexual competition among males is often associated with much aggression. The same rules apply as in the general discussion of aggression above: fights are often ritualized, which helps to avoid injury, but intense or even lethal combat is not an impossibility. Models predict that lethal fighting becomes more likely, if reproductive skew is very high among males, because this implies that the benefits are only reaped at the top of the hierarchy winning and they can be large. For example, only a small minority of male elephant seals Mirounga angustirostris ever get to reproduce; thus, the stakes are high and fights are accordingly severe. Often, evolutionary ecologists expect conflicts to be stronger among individuals of the same sex than between the sexes. In the past, this assumption was taken to the extreme: pair bonds were assumed to be harmonious, because both parents share an obvious interest in the well-being of offspring. However, the growing recognition that conspecific individuals can have strongly diverging interests in any given situation has also led to the study of ‘sexual conflict’. It remains true that conflict is much milder between a male bird and a female on the same territory, than between two male birds competing for the same territory: the former can do something constructive together, while in the latter case one individual’s gain is another one’s loss (except in unusual circumstances such as joint territorial defense, as in the fiddler crab example above). Nevertheless, there are also reasons why there can be conflict between individuals of different sexes. The simplest reason for this is that if offspring production requires time or energy, both individuals would benefit if the other did most of the work. Birds, for example, are typically able to work harder for their brood than they normally do, which is evident in increased food delivery rates by one parent if the other one dies. Experimentally increased workload of a parent, however, increases the parent’s mortality in the following winter, as has been shown, for example, for kestrels. Life appears to be full of tradeoffs. Recently found examples show how just intense sexual conflict can be. Males of numerous species harass females sexually, and in some cases females may get killed in the


process, as has been found, for example, in feral sheep Ovis aries. Garter snakes Thamnophis sirtalis mate in large aggregations in which multiple males compete for the same females, who may get strangled to death. Obviously, killing a female prevents all subsequent offspring production too, so it cannot be selected for per se. But if generation after generation eager males gain more paternity than passive ones, extreme eagerness can be selected for, even if this sometimes leads to female killing as a form of collateral harm. On the other hand, in the case of nonlethal harm, direct selection favoring harmful male behaviors appears at least theoretically possible. For example, many insects possess spiky sexual organs that damage the female, and sperm of fruit flies contains seminal toxins that shorten the lifespan of females. Such traits can be beneficial to a male, if damaged females are less likely to mate with another member of the same species than healthy females: after all, the worst thing that can happen to a mated male’s offspring production is that his female mates multiply. However, it is controversial whether female-damaging male traits have evolved because they damage the female, or despite the damage they cause (which makes them again examples of collateral harm). For example, a spiky penis might simply form an anchor that makes copulations last sufficiently long for efficient sperm transfer. This can be important for male insects, in which copulations can last for hours, and the amount of sperm transferred is huge relative to the body size. Seed beetle females kick vigorously during copulation, presumably because it is potentially dangerous for an insect to be mounted, and foraging is difficult during copulation; for males the tradeoff is different as sufficient sperm numbers are required to outcompete conspecific males if there is a risk that the female mates with several males. In an experimental setting, females that were prevented from kicking during copulation mated for longer, and suffered more damage such that their lifespan was significantly shortened. However, they were not less likely to mate multiply than control females, which suggests that the harm was of a collateral kind. The fascinating world of arthropods offers still weirder stories of sexual conflict. A spider species, Stegodyphus lineatus, has an intriguing form of maternal care: the mother guards the eggs until hatching, after which the spiderlings are first fed by the female (by regurgitating), but they then switch to cannibalism. Eating the mother is an obviously efficient way to transfer nutrients to the next generation, essential for a good start in life for the young spiderlings. This ‘suicidal’ form of maternal care means that a male spider who comes across an egg-guarding mother benefits nothing from this encounter, if he is not the father of the brood, as the female will not be able to lay eggs ever again. Mating would therefore be pointless.

But if the male cannibalizes the brood, the mother’s situation changes: the best option for her is to try again and produce at least some eggs after mating with the current, cannibalistic male. This is indeed what happens. The male’s cannibalism forces a delay in the mother’s ‘suicide’, which is detrimental for her reproductive success, as she has fewer resources left and can no longer lay as many eggs as she was able to initially. Thus the same species can feature two different kinds of cannibalism, one representing a form of parental care, the other a form of extreme sexual conflict.

Summary Nature abounds with fascinating examples of aggression and conflict. In this context it is important to emphasize that despite the language of strategies and behaviors that serve the interest of a male, female, parent, offspring, or worker, the evolutionary analysis of behaviors does not assume that there is any conscious thought or intention involved. Evolutionary biologists use colorful language ranging from suicide to nepotism simply because concise words from everyday use are preferable to abstract, complicated expressions that are hard to remember. The mechanisms that make behaviors evolve are not goaldirected. Instead, genes that are present in individuals today are those that have caused individuals to behave in ways that tend to increase the number of copies of that gene in subsequent generations. What this argument means in specific circumstances is the topic of evolutionary behavioral ecology, which uses mathematical analysis as well as experimental and field studies. There are numerous cases in which aggressive behavior benefits an individual, but tradeoffs (e.g., the need to avoid unnecessary injury when rewards are modest) typically dictate that there is an optimal level of aggression, rather than more being always better. Also, the best behavioral option may often be context dependent rather than invariable over the lifetime of an individual: male ants are cared for or fed to their sisters, depending on food availability. Regardless of whether one is interested in fixed or flexible (plastic) behaviors, evolutionary arguments are obviously based on the premise that there is genetic variation in behavior on which natural selection can operate, such as genetic variation that controls the developmental pathways related to hormone production or hormone receptors. The successful creation of highly aggressive and very docile dog breeds shows that this is indeed the case, and studies on many wild organisms likewise support the notion. The findings of evolutionary biology are often viewed with unease. Most evolutionary biologists agree that one should not base moral arguments on potential

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adaptiveness of a behavior (or lack thereof). Stealing, for example, can probably be considered adaptive if done cleverly and often enough so that resources required for offspring production or well-being truly increase. Yet this does not prove parents’ efforts pointless when teaching their children that stealing is wrong – while the reader might want to judge herself to what extent it provides an explanation for the a priori existence of a temptation to steal, that every society then has to deal with. See also: Animal Behavioral Studies, Primates; Biochemical Factors in Aggression and Violence

Further Reading Arnqvist, G. and Rowe, L. (2005). Sexual conflict. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Backwell, P. R. Y. and Jennions, M. D. (2004). Coalition among male fiddler crabs. Nature 430, 417. Chapuisat, M., Sundstro¨m, L., and Keller, L. (1997). Sex-ratio regulation: The economics of fratricide in ants. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 264, 1255–1260. Daan, S., Deerenberg, C., and Dijkstra, C. (1996). Increased daily work precipitates natural death in the kestrel. Journal of Animal Ecology 65, 539–544. Davies, N. B. (1978). Territorial defence in the speckled wood butterfly (Pararge aegeria): The resident always wins. Animal Behaviour 26, 138–147. Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dugatkin, L. A. and Druen, M. (2004). The social implications of winner and loser effects. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B (supplement 6) 271, S488–S489. Edvardsson, M. and Tregenza, T. (2005). Why do male Callosobruchus maculatus harm their mates? Behavioral Ecology 16, 788–793. Ekman, J. and Sklepkovych, B. (1994). Conflict of interest between the sexes in Siberian jay winter flocks. Animal Behaviour 48, 485–487. Giraud, T., Pedersen, J. S., and Keller, L. (2002). Evolution of supercolonies: The Argentine ants of southern Europe. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 99, 6075–6079. Godard, R. (1991). Long-term-memory of individual neighbors in a migratory songbird. Nature 350, 228–229. Grafen, A. (1987). The logic of asymmetric contests: Respect for ownership and the desperado effect. Animal Behaviour 35, 462–467. Johnstone, R. A. (2000). Models of reproductive skew: A review and synthesis. Ethology 106, 5–26. Kemp, D. J. and Wiklund, C. (2004). Residency effects in animal contests. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 271, 1707–1711. Kokko, H., Lo´pez-Sepulcre, A., and Morrell, L. J. (2006). From hawks and doves to self-consistent games of territorial behavior. American Naturalist 167, 901–912. Maynard Smith, J. (1982). Evolution and the theory of games. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Olendorf, R., Getty, T., Scribner, K., and Robinson, S. K. (2004). Male red-winged blackbirds distrust unreliable and sexually attractive neighbours. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 271, 1033–1038. Packer, C. (2000). Infanticide is no fantasy. American Anthropologist 102, 829–831. Schwagmeyer, P. L. (1979). Bruce effect: Evaluation of male-female advantages. American Naturalist 114, 932–938. Wenseleers, T., Helantera¨, H., Hart, A., and Ratnieks, F. L. W. (2004). Worker reproduction and policing in insect societies: An ESS analysis. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 17, 1035–1047.

Animal Behavioral Studies, Primates Irwin S Bernstein, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Definitions Functions of Aggression Conflict, Competition, and Aggression Aggression in a Social Context The Control of Aggressive Sequences

Glossary Aggression Behavior that increases the probability of injury to the recipient. Agonistic Aggression and typical responses to aggression, including submission. Dominance A learned relationship between individuals that influences the directionality of agonistic signals. Proximal Cause Event that acts as a stimulus for occurrence of behavior that follows.

Losing, Dominance, and Territoriality Polyadic Social Aggression Restoring Peace Conclusion Further Reading

Reconciliation Behavior that restores relationships following agonistic encounters. Submission Behavior indicating that aggression will not be initiated, but aggression may be provoked by attacks. Territoriality A learned relationship between individuals, specific to a geographic location. Trained Loser An individual who, having lost a previous encounter, retreats or signals submission at the start of any future encounter.

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Definitions When we try to define aggression we often do so in terms of the motivations and intentions of the actor, and sometimes the recipient as well. We may define aggression as behavior that is intended to harm another, or behavior that deprives others of their rights, or freedom, against their will. Such a definition implies that we know that the motivation of the actor was selfish or spiteful, that the actor intended harm to the victim, and that the victim would rather have avoided the consequences imposed. Of course, we may find that after we have classified an act as ‘aggression’, the victim denies that s/he was forced to do anything against his/her will and/or, that the perpetrator denies any ill intent, insisting that s/he had no intention of actually harming the victim, that his/her behavior was for the victim’s own good, and that the victim was a willing participant (s/he had ‘asked for it’) or deserved the treatment received. The very existence of such arguments implies that the definition is subjective and judgmental rather than an objective description of observable behavior. If we can have disagreements about whether human behavior meets such a definition of aggression, think of how much more difficult it is to classify nonhuman behavior as ‘aggressive’. How would we know if an oyster or lobster were motivated to harm another or deprive it of its freedom or rights? Are these animals even aware that others have rights, or even that others exist? One can readily decide that an individual has been harmed, or deprived of a necessary resource, but this is not, in itself, evidence that the victim suffered as the target of another’s aggression. To invoke the concept of aggression we require that the ‘aggressor’ be at least aware of the existence of its victim and that she engages in the injurious behavior with some knowledge that the victim is motivated to avoid such treatment. This is particularly difficult for us to ascertain when dealing with invertebrates, but is it any easier to determine for nonhuman primates, even if these are the animals most like ourselves? We do not have the ability to ask them their motivations nor do they have the ability to reply and explain the state of their cognitive awareness. Believing that they must act and feel as we do, and that they share the same motivations as we do, is anthropomorphism. We are less tempted to engage in anthropomorphism when we deal with spiders but readily succumb to this temptation when monkeys and apes are viewed as ‘furry’ people. If we wish to study and understand aggression in nonhuman subjects and learn about the fundamental principles of aggression, we must define it in terms of observable behavior so that we can all, at least, agree what it is that we are trying to understand. Niko Tinbergen, in 1951, stated that we should begin by describing what we can see, hear, feel, taste, and smell – the structure of behavior. Such a description is much like what a video

camera or other recording device would store. It is devoid of interpretation and, perhaps, relatively dry and uninteresting. It only becomes more interesting when we ask why it happened. According to Tinbergen, there were four answers to that question. The first answer can be obtained by identifying the situation in the environment that acted as the trigger for, or the stimulus, that elicited the behavior. This event, which releases or elicits the behavior of interest, is called the proximal cause. Proximal causes are observable events that can be described just as we can describe the behavior of interest, but they become more interesting to us when we think of them as being responsible for the occurrence of the behavior that follows. An extremely high correlation between the occurrence of a putative proximal cause and the behavior of interest (which follows in a brief temporal period) leads us to accept a hypothesis of causation. Of course, we know that individuals do not respond to the same situations in the same ways all through their lives. To understand why their behavior changes requires us to examine the second answer – the ontogenetic causes of behavior. Here we may explain the change in response to a stimulus over time as being due to maturational processes, physical alteration of the individual due to environmental events (injuries, amputations, the effects of exercise, etc.), and behavioral changes that result from learning. We may also note that different individuals (or species) respond differently to the same stimulus even when we control for ontogenetic events. In these cases we invoke the third answer – the concepts of evolution – to explain the differences in response to the same stimuli (or the different stimuli that produce the same responses), in different individuals or populations. The evolutionary cause of these differences relates to different evolutionary histories and the differences in selective pressures that operated on the ancestors of the subjects, thereby accounting for differences in the genetic material with which each began life. Of course, it is often very difficult to experimentally verify the effects of purported differences in selective pressures in the past and, as a consequence, research is often directed to animals with short generation times, such as fruit flies, so that evolution can be observed within the lifetime of the scientist. Finally, the ‘why’ question may be addressed to the functional consequences of the behavior. The consequences can be conceived of as the objectively described events that follow the behavior of interest, or may be perceived of as the long-term effects of the behavior on the genetic fitness of the actor, the adaptive significance of the behavior. Whereas the immediate consequent can be directly described, the question ‘What good did it do?’ requires a longer view of consequence and casts everything in terms of evolutionary theory.

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The two views of function lend themselves to a ready confusion of function with proximal cause. If the immediate consequence of the behavior is taken as equivalent to the motivation or intent of the subject just prior to or at the time of the response, then we are making a teleological error. Most of us are well aware of the differences between our intentions and the realities or results of our behavior. Why then are we so quick to gloss over this difference and to ascribe to an animal the intention to achieve the consequent observed? The second view of function leads to an even more egregious error when we assume that the animal was trying to improve its genetic fitness, as we later determined resulted as a consequence of its behavior. Of course, no one ever really assumes that animals understand evolutionary theory, nor that they are consciously attempting to improve their genetic fitness, but when we argue that the reason that the animal behaved in that manner was because evolution acted to select for individuals that behaved in a manner that maximized their genetic fitness, what are we implying? How could the individual have chosen among available alternative behavioral responses? What we are doing is hopelessly confusing proximal cause, evolutionary cause, and function. In dealing with aggression our task is made even more difficult by the fact that aggression is not a structure that can be objectively described. It is, instead, a class of behavioral responses linked to one another by some common consequent or function (as opposed to adaptive significance). We define broad categories such as feeding, reproduction, infant care, aggression, and locomotion based on the contribution of each element in the category to a particular function. Alternatively, we can postulate a common drive state, such as hunger, a maternal instinct, anger, etc. as the common cause of the behavior in a category, but with animals it is easier to observe what happens at the time of a behavior and what follows immediately from that behavior. How an animal felt (angry or not) and whether it intended to produce harm (meanness) are only subjects of conjecture. We can, however, note whether an injury occurred or whether the target individual was deprived of something as a consequence of the behavior of the actor. Losing something to another may occur as a result of several forms of competition and, in scramble competition, the competitors may even be totally unaware of each other’s existence. Being deprived of a resource due to the actions of another who is not even aware of your existence does not meet our subjective feel for what aggression is. On the other hand, an injury is believed to be a likely result of aggression, even if not all aggression results in injuries and not all injuries are a result of aggression. If an action is usually embedded in sequences where its presence increases the probability that the recipient is likely to suffer a physical injury due to the activities of

the actor, then we are inclined to see that action as aggressive. This is a probabilistic definition in that we say that the behavior increases the likelihood of an injury following, rather than that it always produces an injury. Verification requires sufficient data to determine what the usual consequent of such sequences are when the act of interest is, and is not, present. It does not require us to know what the intentions or emotions of the parties involved were at the time of the activity, nor does it ask if the long-term effects reduced or contributed to the genetic fitness of the participants. The latter become empirical questions and we can now independently ask what functions aggression serves in terms of long-term consequences. If aggression in some cases harms the recipient but benefits the actor it will be selfish; if it harms both the actor and the recipient it will be spiteful; if it benefits the actor and recipient it will be mutualistic; and if it benefits the recipient at some expense to the actor it can even be altruistic. At first it may seem contradictory to ask if aggression can ever be altruistic. On reflection, however, we readily perceive that aggression can modify the behavior of the recipient. Such behavioral modification may be brief or relatively long term (a learned response) and if it functions as a positive socialization experience, then it can modify the behavior of the recipient in such a manner as to enhance survival and reproduction. When we find that short-term injurious consequences can produce long-term benefits, we tend to search for new words like ‘punishment’ or ‘avoidance training’ rather than aggression to describe the very same motor acts with the very same immediate functional outcomes.

Functions of Aggression Nonhuman primates, lacking language skills, use relatively little positive reinforcement in the socialization of their young. They cannot explain that a reward was for not doing ‘bad’ behavior, or even for having done a particular good deed. Of course, they have no greater skill explaining punishment, but behavior that immediately elicits behavior in others with injurious consequences to yourself immediately receives your attention. The behavior of others that produces injuries to yourself, or the behavior of others associated with imminent escalation to behavior that produces injuries to yourself can powerfully alter behavior. Learning to avoid future injurious attacks is the basic element of avoidance learning. When an individual can respond to the threat of injury in such a manner as to avoid the injury, that individual has gained some measure of control over the behavior of the threatening individual. By providing a response that terminates sequences that otherwise escalate into exchanges that would be injurious to oneself, an individual has controlled


the behavior of another. This is avoidance learning as opposed to punishment or negative reinforcement where a response is required to terminate a noxious or injurious sequence already in progress. Of course, there are many cases where aggression modifies the behavior of the recipient in ways that only benefit the actor. Although the target may avoid the aggressive consequences of the actor, the target must modify its behavior in some fashion such that it gives up a resource or engages in a behavioral pattern that it was not otherwise motivated to engage in. In contest competition, aggression is used as an instrumental act to gain preferential or exclusive access to a resource. The loser is deprived of the resource but one may question if the winner was ‘trying’ to harm the victim or only attempting to further its own selfish goals in obtaining the resource. In nonhuman primates ‘grudges’ and personal animosities generated during such competitions may occur, but they are not invariable consequents and must be independently measured and verified. They can be recognized when we note that a pair immediately resumes a fight on their next encounter even when there is nothing to provoke a new one and nothing to compete for. This is essentially a continuation of the previous fight, regardless of what the original cause of fighting was, and the relationship between the two parties may not be resolved until there is a clear winner and a clear loser. Even in such a case, where a fight might be described as occurring to determine who the winner or loser will be, one might not know if either combatant was motivated to harm the other rather than that each was just trying to elicit nonthreatening or submissive behavior from its opponent.

Conflict, Competition, and Aggression In nonhuman primates we can identify situations where individuals come into conflict (initiate different incompatible behavioral sequences), are in competition (both attempt to use the same limited resource at the expense of the other), or are engaged in aggression (one or both engages in behavior that is, or is likely to be, physically injurious to the other). Bill Mason has clearly differentiated conflict, competition, and aggression, and there is no reason to equate the three terms. Each can occur in the absence of the other two. For example, a conflict occurs when two individuals, who both want to remain together, want to travel in a different direction. Competition may involve ‘scramble contests’ where whoever gets there first wins the resource even if the ‘winner’ and ‘loser’ are unaware of each other’s existence. Aggression can occur when an individual attacks an uninvolved third party when attacked by another. Such ‘redirection’ is based on availability and proximity rather than any interaction with or behavior of the third party. Likewise, an individual

may attack an individual already in an ongoing fight with another. Aiding another in a fight does not require any prior conflict or competition with the individual against whom aid is directed. Aggression, then, is not an invariable outcome of competition or conflict, nor is it limited to contexts involving competition and/or conflict. This has promoted some to talk of different ‘kinds’ of aggression with each kind defined by the situation in which it occurs or the specific functional outcome. Thus, we get ‘predatory aggression’ when an animal attacks a victim that it will feed on; ‘instrumental aggression’ when the behavior is seen as directed toward achieving some specific goal; ‘infanticidal aggression’ when an infant is killed as a consequence of the aggression; ‘pain-induced aggression’ when no clear function is apparent but pain is ascribed to the actor prior to the aggressive response; and, perhaps, aggression due to just plain ‘meanness’, a hypothesized temperament variable. Each possible outcome and each possible cause then becomes a separate type of aggression. Such a plethora of terminology only confuses matters as all are called ‘aggression’ and the common feature in each is that the recipient is likely to be injured, either immediately or in further escalated responses in the same sequence. Such sequences, in some cases, can be terminated or altered by specific changes in the behavior of the recipient, and then we sometimes assume that the change in the recipient’s behavior was what the aggressor was trying to achieve.

Aggression in a Social Context Most nonhuman primates are social animals, and in many species most individuals spend all of their lives as members of a social unit. Individuals may transfer between units and/or spend some time as solitaries in transit between units. In some species, individuals may travel or forage independently but nonetheless have frequent contact with certain specified individuals with whom they preferentially interact. Whatever the level of sociality, social units are collections of individuals that may come into conflict, or that may compete for the same resources. Some of these conflicts and competitions may be resolved by resorting to aggressive techniques. Social relationships between individuals may be described on a dimension of affiliative to antagonistic based on the ratio of agonistic to affiliative exchanges. If aggression increases the probability of injury to at least the recipient, then life in a social unit will require the development of means to prevent and control aggressive solutions to problems engendered by conflict and competition in socially living individuals. If aggression is elicited, then it must be limited, controlled, and regulated in such a way that it terminates with minimal risk of injuries. The expression and control of aggression must be

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regulated in any social unit lest the costs of aggression outweigh the benefits of sociality. On the other hand, not all aggression is antisocial. Aggression can serve as a social means of protecting a group against external sources of disruption. It can also be used to modify the behavior of group members in ways that benefit the individual whose behavior is being modified as well as other group members. Aggression can be used to socialize individuals into a group and can be used to promote the interests of members of one group over members of another. Uncontrolled aggression within a group, however, can destroy the group. Aggression in nonhuman primate groups has a multitude of expressions. These may vary from intense stares and various body postures and facial expressions to locomotor displays, such as charging, lunging, and rhythmic leaping, to interactions involving physical contact with the potential for bodily injury, such as slapping, kicking, pulling, biting, and slashing. Many nonhuman primates, and especially males, possess formidable canine teeth with the potential to inflict lethal injury. Some, such as drills and mandrills, literally have canines as large as those of any of the great cats, although they are only a fraction of the body size of a great cat and largely vegetarian or, at most, omnivorous in their diet. Despite this formidable armament, relatively few agonistic encounters between or within primate groups result in severe injuries or deaths, although some dramatic outcomes do result and excite our imaginations. It would also be a mistake to equate the potential for producing injury with aggressivity. Even if formidable teeth do result in obvious severe injuries, whereas less impressive physical equipment fails to do so, it would be a mistake to count injuries inflicted as a measure of aggression. Despite the sexually dimorphic nature of most nonhuman primates and the fact that males do often inflict most of the injuries in or by a group, females may engage in very comparable levels of aggressive behavior. The question of whether sex differences in aggression exist is an empirical question and incompletely answered by evidence of injuries inflicted by members of the two sexes. Given this extensive potential for mayhem, the question arises: ‘‘Why does life in a social group not result in a continuous set of injuries and wounds resulting from daily conflicts and the inevitable competition evoked when similar individuals, all with similar needs, seek the same limited resources?’’ There is no single answer to this question but, thankfully, we find that there are multiple mechanisms that come into play. These include: ritualization of aggressive expression, such that the most damaging forms of expression are rare within the group; development of nonaggressive means of resolving conflicts and competitions; and development of mechanisms that regulate aggressive expression within a group, including social means of terminating ongoing agonistic encounters.

The Control of Aggressive Sequences Although there are multiple causes of aggression, few aggressive encounters begin with an all-out fight. The potential costs of fighting are such that natural selection has favored individuals that avoid taking risks when the cost to themselves is likely to exceed the benefits of anything obtained by engaging in that interaction. When a situation develops where aggression is one possible way to achieve a desired outcome, the individual involved should first attempt to determine the likelihood of resistance and, second, the likely magnitude of that resistance. In other words, is the target signaling readiness to resist or counter attack (is it threatening?), and, if it is threatening, then what will be the likely strength of its resistance and/ or attack in terms of the costs that will be imposed? Animals often use body size, indicators of strength and physical vigor, and a variety of bodily postures, facial expressions, and vocalizations as indicators of the potential costs that an opponent can inflict and the willingness of that opponent to inflict such costs. If insufficient information is available to decide whether to precede or to break off an encounter, based on available visual, auditory, chemical, or other signal modalities, then physical contact may follow. Physical contacts may gradually escalate such that initial contacts convey information about strength and ability without either participant running the risk of extensive injury. If such initial probing attacks do not provide sufficient information for one participant to break off the encounter, then further escalation to more damaging forms of aggression may follow. Finally, when one of the opponents has transmitted sufficient information to convince the opponent that the costs of further aggression will be unacceptable, that opponent may retreat, or use a ritualized signal of submission to end the encounter. The victor now has unrestrained access to whatever resource was being contested, or can now obtain whatever goal was being sought, and further attacks on the part of the victor would only serve as ‘spite’, since the victor risks further injury in resuming aggression against a retreating opponent. There is no further benefit to be gained and inflicting additional injury on a defeated rival at some risk to one’s self meets the definition of spite. Contest competition can thus be seen as being extraordinarily dangerous if the two opponents are nearly equal in ability and motivation so that neither perceives the other as a likely winner and both continue to escalate the encounter to obtain more and more information about the abilities of their rival. Alternatively, contest competitions can prove to be extremely dangerous to one or both participants even when there is a great disparity in abilities and if one or more of the opponents is incapable of recognizing that disparity. Monkeys reared in social isolation seem to lack the social skills required to assess: the willingness of a rival


to engage in escalated aggression, the ability of the rival to inflict aggressive costs, and even the meaning of signals that a rival uses when conceding access to a contested resource. In these situations contests escalate rapidly and monkeys reared in social isolation may launch suicidal attacks against opponents who are clearly physically superior to them or, alternatively, may mount murderous attacks on opponents who are signaling submission and attempting to withdraw from the site of a contest. Every aggressive episode concludes when the parties involved cease further aggressive behavior. The individual who stops first may withdraw or otherwise show behavior incompatible with further aggression, and this individual is labeled the ‘loser’. The aggressive behavior of most winners ends when the goal is achieved, be that goal the attainment of a particular prize or the particular behavior demanded of the opponent (such as retreat).

Losing, Dominance, and Territoriality A winner and a loser emerge from a fight as a consequence of the sequence of events in that interaction. No further information is required to explain why one party retreated or ceased further aggression other than the events that transpired during the encounter. If every successive encounter followed exactly the same course as the initial encounter, then our explanation for the change in behavior observed in all encounters would be identical and limited to the exchanges that occurred during that encounter. The observer, on the other hand, may quickly recognize the similarities in the series of encounters and may soon learn to predict, with great accuracy, the outcome of each new encounter. This does not mean that the two opponents have established any special relationship or that either of them has learned anything, not if both go through exactly the same sequence on each new encounter. In this case only the observer has learned anything. If, on the other hand, there is a change in the directionality of agonistic behavior between the two opponents at the start of a new encounter, then we might believe that one or both were now more willing to attack or retreat and that this was due to the history of exchanges in prior encounters, that is, something had been learned. In most cases this learning means that one party immediately displays the behavior that it used to terminate the previous encounters. This is then the ‘loser’ and it is the loser who has learned something. The question now is what exactly was learned. If the learned component is so general that an individual who has lost previous encounters now immediately retreats or signals submission at the start of any future encounter, then we say that we have a ‘trained loser’. Such an individual is expected to break off any encounter whenever the opponent shows aggression. It has ‘learned’

because in the absence of such learning we should expect every encounter to proceed much the same way as the first. When there is no change in behavior, learning cannot be invoked in our explanations of behavior. If the loser has learned not to fight a particular opponent, but does not generalize to all opponents, then it will immediately yield to the aggressive signals of that particular opponent while continuing to respond aggressively to other opponents that it has previously defeated, and/or new opponents. What has been learned is specific to a particular individual and we can say that the subject has learned to be subordinate to that opponent, that is, a dominance relationship has been established. In future agonistic encounters, the subject will use the identity of its opponent in making its decision to submit or resist when faced with an aggressive challenge. Submission is in response to a perceived aggressive signal rather than a general response to the partner; dominant and subordinate partners can interact in nonagonistic forms of interaction. They may even come into conflict, or compete with one another, without aggression. When aggression is expressed, however, the subordinate will submit. Dominant animals can lose in competitions where scramble is involved and may yield resources whenever they are not willing to use aggressive means to claim them. In territoriality the relationship between the antagonists is complicated one step further. The individual that shows submission and the individual that shows aggression in a particular dyad will be determined by the geographical location of the encounter. When neither is on its territory, neither may show aggression, or both may do so, or some other mechanism will determine which of the two will be aggressive and which submissive. When a territorial individual is on its territory, however, we expect that the territorial holder will show aggression toward any member of a specified class of intruders. The key here is geography and not proximity. Whereas a territorial holder will cross any intervening distance to challenge a detected intrusion, many animals display flight and fight distances, or defense of personal space unrelated to geography. When another unexpectedly appears within a critical distance then the individual withdraws, but if the intrusion is within a smaller critical distance aggressive responses may be provoked. This should not be equated with territoriality as a ‘moving territory’. The physical laws of nature preclude two physical objects from occupying the same space at the same time but this would mean that all objects possessed territories if we followed this logic to reductum ad absurdum. Territoriality and dominance both regulate the expression of aggression between individuals, but slightly different, yet significantly, mechanisms are involved. Territoriality may be seen as the more complex of the two in that, in addition to the past history of interactions

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between the individuals, the location of the encounter determines which of the two will exhibit aggressive behavior and which one will retreat. Dominance relationships also influence which individual will show aggressive behavior and which one will withdraw, but this influence is independent of geographical location. In dominance, as a function of a past history of interaction between the individuals, there is a learned relationship specific to the two partners that is independent of geographic location. In territoriality, dominance, and encounters involving trained losers, the aggressive encounters are curtailed by learned elements so that only one or neither of the dyad displays aggressive behavior. Since the intruder or the subordinate or the trained loser leaves or submits immediately upon receiving an aggressive signal, escalation is rare and injuries are avoided. Assessments of opponents are based on membership in a class (trained losers) or individual identity (dominance) or individual identity and location (territoriality) rather than on displays and contests testing another’s abilities and resolve. Injuries often occur in aggressive encounters as part of the assessment process. In an aggressive encounter one or both participants uses aggressive techniques to modify the behavior of the other. Since the use of aggressive behavioral elements entails some risk of retaliation, the opponents must assess the value of the goal they seek and the likely costs to be incurred in attaining that goal. If an individual can anticipate costs greater than it is willing to bear to attain the goal, then retreat would be the better part of valor. Aggressive encounters thus may be seen as periods during which constant assessments are being made. For example, if two individuals are using aggression to compete for a particular resource, neither should be willing to sustain a cost greater than the value of that resource to itself. The value of the resource may not be equal to both and the costs that each can impose on the other may also be unequal. The antagonists therefore begin by assessing the value of the resource to themselves, and then the likely costs to be imposed by the antagonist based on indications of the antagonist’s aggressive potential and resolve. If sufficient information is available on the amount of cost that the antagonist can impose based on past interactions, and the resolve of the antagonist to impose such costs based on geographic location, then territoriality applies. If only the identity of the opponent is sufficient to assess the likely costs of aggressive resistance, then dominance applies. If all aggressive signals from any opponent are equally effective in eliciting retreat, then we have a trained loser. Of course, the application of these principles requires signals from the antagonist indicating that it is prepared to impose an aggressive cost – ‘threat’ behavior. Lacking such signals, a subordinate, or an intruder, or a trained loser should readily collect a valuable resource even if all the while monitoring the potential antagonist for any sign that an aggressive cost was about to be imposed.

Polyadic Social Aggression Aggressive episodes in nonhuman primates are not limited to dyadic encounters. Primates are social creatures and use social techniques to meet environmental (physical and social) challenges. Antagonists in aggressive encounters are often rapidly joined by others who take sides in the dispute. Assessment in these cases is not simply restricted to the opponents’ size, strength, and willingness to escalate, but also on the size and strength of the opponents’ allies and their availability and willingness to join in the encounter. When monkeys and apes become involved in agonistic encounters, the episodes are usually noisy, with each vocalizing its presence (and identity) and scanning the vicinity for potential allies and adversaries. Monkeys and apes often resolve fights based on the willingness of others to join on one side or another. In this way size and strength become much less important than the size and reliability of social alliances in resolving fights between individuals. It is no longer the largest and most powerful who will be the victor, but perhaps the most socially adept. The cohesion shown by all the members of a group when faced by a source of threat or disturbance from outside the group results in mobbing of predators, and joint attacks on rival groups. This same cohesion by subunits of a social group in resolving fights within a group results in cliques and alliances. Unresolved struggles between such cliques and alliances can cause fissioning or fragmentation of groups. To remain cohesive, groups must develop means of resolving conflicts between subunits within the group.

Restoring Peace Having developed methods to assess rivals and regulate and avoid fights, it should not be surprising to find that nonhuman primates have also developed techniques to restore peace and harmony in their all-important social units once fighting and/or conflict has occurred. Whereas fight interference, the joining in of uninvolved parties in an ongoing aggressive encounter, excited initial attention, more recently attention has been focused on the behavior that follows after an agonistic episode. Monkeys and apes have been noted to seek out former opponents in the minutes immediately following a fight, not to further the agonistic exchange, but to engage in positive affiliative contact. Such positive social behavior immediately following a fight exceeds the rate that would have been predicted based on positive social exchanges when no fight occurs and this has, therefore, been described as reconciliation. Either of the two former combatants, the winner or the loser, may be the first to initiate affiliative social interactions, although the loser is somewhat more likely to do so.


If this is ‘reconciliation’ functionally, then the occurrence of positive affiliative behavior immediately following an agonistic encounter should mean that the former opponents can now interact or engage in behavior in proximity to one another without resumption of hostilities. Indeed, Marina Cords found that former combatants who were allowed to reconcile did indeed share resources and cooperate in matters where they had formerly done so, whereas in the absence of such reconciliations, tension continued and the animals were reluctant to come into close proximity. The functional definition of ‘reconciliation’ therefore seems to be firmly established. Following what was said about the polyadic nature of agonistic encounters it should be no surprise to discover that many monkeys and apes reconcile polyadically. Following an agonistic encounter the aggressor, and/or the victim, may initiate positive social interactions with the close associates (generally kin and close allies) of its opponent in the minutes immediately following a fight. Alternatively, an animal’s usual allies may initiate the positive interactions with its opponent. These indirect reconciliations may thus restore the relationships between alliances as well as the individual combatants. On the other hand, whereas consolation may be considered related to reconciliation, instead of the allies of a combatant showing positive behavior to the combatant’s opponent, positive behavior is directed to the combatant; nonetheless, evidence for consolation among monkeys is sparse indeed. Although some evidence is available to support its presence in apes, this evidence is not nearly as convincing as is the evidence for reconciliation. It has been speculated that reconciliation serves the immediate interests of the reconciling parties whereas consolation requires empathic ability on the part of the consoling agent that, itself, receives no direct benefit. Empathic abilities may be poorly developed in monkeys that do not readily take the perspective of another, and only rudimentary in apes where such cognitive skills seem at the upper limits of ape abilities. Research in these areas is still ongoing, new, and hardly conclusive.

Conclusion Aggression, then, is not disorganized antisocial behavior. It is not base and basic animal behavior. Aggression is of sufficient consequence to individuals so that all of an individual’s skills can be expected to be called into play in aggressive encounters. In nonhuman primates with extensive social and cognitive skills, these skills will be employed in aggressive conflicts. Extensive cognitive skills will be employed in the difficult assessments of opponents’ abilities and resolve. Well-developed social skills will be employed to establish alliances and detect the existence of opposing alliances. Social mechanisms

within a group developed in order to maintain social units so that group members would each receive the benefits of social living. These social mechanisms must include mechanisms that not only use aggression to preserve the social unit, but also ensure that aggression between members of the unit does not destroy the unit. Aggression occurs within a social environment in nonhuman primates and that shapes the expression of aggression and modifies the sequences of behavior in aggressive encounters. Social mechanisms have developed to restore social relationships threatened by disruption due to aggressive episodes, and both direct reconciliation and social reconciliation involving third parties can be demonstrated. Restoring the peace may be one of the more demanding social skills; elimination of aggression is virtually impossible. Aggression socializes newcomers into the group, protects the group from external threats, modifies the behavior of disruptive group members, and is used as an instrument to further the goals of a group in competition with rival groups. On the other hand, aggression between members of a social unit threatens the integrity of the group. Social and individual mechanisms exist to limit the expression of aggression within a group and to counteract disruptive consequences. Social relationships among individuals must be restored, for this is the very fabric that constitutes the social group, and that provides extensive advantages to nonhuman primates. All of a group’s highest capabilities will be expressed in dealing with problems associated with aggression and its consequences, not so much to eliminate what in some form is essential, but to control the consequences so as to reap the maximum benefits with the least risk. See also: Aggression and Altruism; Aggression, Psychology of; Animal Behavioral Studies, Non-Primates; Neuropsychology of Motivation for Group Aggression and Mythology

Further Reading Aureli, F., Veenama, H. C., van Pathaleon van Eck, C. J., and van Hooff, J. A. R. A. M. (1993). Reconciliation, consolation, and redirection in Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata). Behaviour 124, 1–21. Bernstein, I. S. (1981). Dominance: The baby and the bathwater. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4, 419–457. Bernstein, I. and Ehardt, C. L. (1985). Agonistic aiding: Kinship, rank age, and sex influences. American Journal of Primatology 8, 37–52. Cords, M. (1994). Experimental approaches to the study of primate conflict resolution. In Roeder, J. J., Thierry, B., Anderson, J. R., and Herrenschmidt, N. (eds.) Current primatology, vol. II: Social development, teaming behaviour, pp. 127–136. Strasbourg: University Louis Pasteur. Cords, M. and Aureli, F. (1993). Patterns of reconciliation among juvenile long-tailed macaques. In Pereira, M. E. and Fairbanks, L. A. (eds.) Juvenile primates: Life history, development, and behavior, pp. 271–284. New York: Oxford University Press. Cords, M. and Thumheer, S. (1993). Reconciling with valuable partners by long-tailed macaques. Ethology 93, 315–325.

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de Waal, F. (1989). Peacemaking among primates. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. de Waal, F. (2005). Our inner ape. New York: Riverhead Books. de Waal, F. (2006). Primates and philosophers. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University. de Waal, F. B. and Aureli, F. (1996). Consolation, reconciliation, and possible cognitive difference between macaques and chimpanzees. In Russon, A. E., Bard, K. A., and Parker, S. T. (eds.) Reaching into

thought: The minds of the great apes, pp. 80–110. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press. Gust, D. A. and Gordon, T. P. (1993). Conflict resolution in sooty mangabeys. Animal Behaviour 46, 685–694. Mason, W. A. and Mendoza, S. P. (1993). Primate social conflict. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Tinbergen, N. (1951). The study of instinct. Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press.

III. PSYCHOLOGICAL, SOCIOLOGICAL AND BEHAVIORAL SUBSTRATES FOR CONFLICT, VIOLENCE AND WAR


Aggression, Psychology of Leonard Berkowitz, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Introduction Conceptions of Aggression Situational Determinants of Aggression

Glossary Affective Aggression The violence or aggression that results from a decidedly unpleasant (aversive) situation, and is carried out with very little thought; contrasted with instrumental aggression. Association In general, a psychological connection that a person believes exists between one object (or other situational detail) and another object (or detail). In the present context, the principle that aggression in response to a negative event will be directed toward a target that is psychologically associated with the believed origin of that occurrence or that, because of its other associations, is otherwise regarded very negatively, even though this target may not be the actual cause of the event. Aversion A state of affairs in which there is a strong unpleasant feeling about a situation or object; the present article proposes that such a condition tends to generate anger and aggression, even in the absence of a perceived wrongdoing.

Introduction This article will focus on the theorizing and research of many of the leading social-psychological investigators of human aggression. Little attention will be given to psychodynamic and psychoanalytic conceptions since these ideas have only a very minor part in guiding the empirically oriented, largely laboratory-based research covered here. Moreover, because of the necessary space limitations, this article will concentrate on the sources of aggressive conduct, and will not deal with such important matters as the consequences of an aggressor’s assault and how aggressive tendencies can be controlled. The first section, reviewing the leading conceptions of aggression in contemporary psychology, will argue that there are different kinds of aggression, each originating in different ways, and governed by different psychological processes. The article will then turn to a survey of the major determinants of this behavior, beginning with situational influences, especially those promoting relatively impulsive reactions, and then

Persistent Dispositions to Aggression Conclusion Further Reading

Hostile Aggression Aggression whose primary aim is the injury or destruction of the target rather than the attainment of some other goal such as money or approval. Impulsive or Expressive Aggression The aggression that is an automatic, nonthoughtful response to the instigating circumstances; also see affective aggression. Instrumental Being useful for the attainment of some goal; in the present article the aggression whose main goal is some objective other than simply the injury of the target, for example, to acquire money or social approval. Priming The process in which a situational stimulus (such as the words just heard or read or the sight of others fighting) increases the likelihood that other ideas having the same meaning will come to mind. This article holds that priming may also raise the chances that semantically related actions will be carried out, as when the playing of a violent video game (the priming stimulus) heightens the probability of aggression toward others.

will look at the personality characteristics involved in the disposition to be assaultive.

Conceptions of Aggression Although most theoretical analyses of aggression define this behavior as a deliberate attempt to hurt (or even destroy) some target, they disagree in a number of important respects. One difference has to do with whether the attacker’s major goal is to injure the victim. Quite a few conceptions, basically viewing the aggression as instrumental behavior, hold that the action’s chief aim is to satisfy some noninjurious purpose, such as to preserve or enhance one’s status in a group or protect or restore a threatened self-concept or obtain money. Several interpretations along this line go even further and do not posit any desire to hurt the victim. Other theorists, taking a different stance, propose that there are different kinds of aggression, with the assault being, sometimes, mainly

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intended to injure and, on other occasions, being largely an attempt to attain some nonaggressive objective. Considerably overlapping this issue of the attack’s primary goal, other variations have to do with the extent to which any given assault is said to be controlled primarily by cognitive processes. Most discussions of this behavior, it is probably fair to say, regard the aggressive action as arising from the persons’ understanding of, and previously acquired knowledge about, the surrounding situation. These cognitions presumably shape the decisions that are made as to what to do. Yet another approach maintains that aggression is frequently impulsive, relatively automatic reactions to situational features. Here too, where many discussions take a one-sided stance, contending that cognitive processes virtually always control aggression, other interpretations prefer to speak of different types of aggressive acts varying in the degree to which they are cognitively controlled. Aggression as Instrumental Behavior Most discussions of aggression in the social sciences, and especially in psychodynamic circles, basically assume that when people assault others, they want to do more than only hurt their targets. For the aggressors, this view contends, the action is instrumental to the attainment of some noninjurious goal, such as money, physical protection, increased status in one’s social group, or perhaps the repair of a damaged self-concept. Gerald Patterson’s well-known studies of the interactions between aggressive children and their parents provide one example of this kind of instrumental analysis. On the basis of his research, he and his colleagues concluded that when hyperaggressive children are nasty to others, they, typically, are seeking to coerce these persons to fulfill the youngsters’ wishes. They, presumably, frequently believe they can best get their parents, siblings, or anyone else, to do what they want by direct or indirect acts of aggression. In keeping with this formulation, Patterson pointed out that if the children were successful in their attempts to steer the others’ behavior, their action would be reinforced, and their conduct would be repeated. Many discussions of domestic violence follow this instrumentalist line of thought. It is often held that the person who is clearly dominant in the domestic relationship (because of such matters as that individual’s control over the couple’s economic resources, and/or the societal definition of who in the couple should make the most important decisions) is likely to attack his (or her) partner when he (or she) thinks his (her) commanding position is being challenged. The assault asserts the aggressor’s dominance. A variation of this theme proposes that many people regard a perceived social threat as ‘devaluing’ their self-worth, so that they then attack to show the threatening agent, and any other onlookers, that they must be treated with respect. Felson, as an example, maintains that the aggressors in

these instances frequently seek to nullify the negative identity imputed to them by the threat, and attack the offender to demonstrate their ‘‘strength, competence, and courage.’’ Analyses of the role of ‘cultures of violence’ in criminal assaults also take this instrumentalist position. According to Wolfgang, some ethnic groups have a high rate of violent offenses because their culture has taught them that they must strike at those who insult or otherwise threaten them to maintain their ‘‘honor’’ – their value in the eyes of their fellows. Nisbett and Cohen have employed this ‘culture of honor’ conception in their explanation of why people in the US south have a higher rate of violent crimes than their northern counterparts. Presumably as a vestige of the economic importance of herding in the early southern society, Nisbett and his colleagues maintain, southern culture still believes its members must react violently to those who threaten them if they are to protect their interests. There can be little doubt, then, that aggression is often employed dispassionately as a way of obtaining what the perpetrators want. This is not to say, of course, that emotions never enter into instrumental aggression. As a dramatic example of how feelings can help propel an instrumentally aimed assault, in Dreiser’s novel An American tragedy, the protagonist murders his pregnant girlfriend because of his anxiety that she will keep him from fulfilling his social ambitions. For another illustration that is perhaps of greater worldwide import, attitude surveys testify as to how emotions influence what people in the Middle East think of terrorist actions by Islamic militants. A study of Lebanese college students, conducted by Levin, H. and co-workers soon after the events of 11 September 2001, indicates that the students who identified most strongly with Arabs, in general, were most likely to support terrorist organizations and think that the 9/11 attacks were justified. Judging from other findings, it appears that in these students’ eyes Arabs were being unfairly dominated by the West. Greatly disturbed by this perceived domination, they evidently believed al-Qaeda’s attacks on the leading Western country, the US, would benefit Arabs in a variety of ways. Whatever the specific instrumental purpose, it’s important to note, the aggressors believe they are reacting ‘rationally’. For them, the instrumental behavior is consciously controlled – reasoned and calculated. Perceiving a threat, which may or may not actually exist, and aware of how the threat might impede the attainment of valued goals, these aggressors presumably decide, consciously or unconsciously, to attack the threatening agent so that they can satisfy their desires. Seeking the Others’ Injury Yet another view, frequently held by research-oriented social psychologists, maintains that an aggressor’s

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‘primary’ aim sometimes is to hurt (or perhaps even kill) the target, whatever else he or she might also want to accomplish. Along with Feshbach, in 1964, these investigators recognize that many attacks are chiefly instrumental in nature. But they also contend that when people are angered or otherwise emotionally aroused by a decidedly unpleasant event, the main objective is very apt to be the target’s injury. Robert Baron’s experiments on ‘pain cues’ are illustrative. The participants in this research were told they were to administer electric shocks to a peer whenever that person made a mistake on his assigned task. If these people had previously been angered by this individual, they administered stronger punishment when they were led to think their shocks were painful to the target rather than just a mild signal to him. It is as if the information about the target’s pain had implicitly told the angry people they were close to satisfying their desire to hurt the one who had provoked them, thereby whetting their ‘aggressive appetite’ even more. Where Feshbach’s influential 1964 paper had called this latter type of behavior ‘‘hostile’’ aggression, it is also frequently labeled ‘‘affective’’ or ‘‘expressive’’ or even ‘‘emotional’’ aggression since it typically arises when the person has strong unpleasant feelings and/or is emotionally aroused. Other writers have favored a different set of terms. Zillmann, for example, spoke of incentive-motivated and annoyance-motivated aggression, with the first, clearly instrumental in nature, and the second dealing with the aggression evoked by aversive stimulation. Dodge and his colleagues have referred to proactive and reactive aggression, notions apparently similar to Zillmann’s concepts. Whatever the labels used, all of these theorists are here proposing two basically different types of aggression, one that is reasoned and controlled and that is primarily aimed at the attainment of a nonaggressive goal, and the other, that may or may not be planned out, that is mainly intended to hurt the target (the latter here called hostile aggression for simplicity). Different Types of Aggression Acts of aggression sometimes have both hostile and instrumental objectives. A good many of the US marines in World War II apparently had both motives as they attacked the Japanese on the latter’s Pacific islands. Journalists accompanying the marines have reported how the Americans often sought to kill their enemy out of hatred for them as well as because of the marines’ desire to capture the island and use it as a steppingstone to ultimate victory. And somewhat similarly, the Palestinian suicide bombers who blew themselves up in Israeli restaurants usually had a number of motives; they hated their victims, thinking of them as their oppressors, and also believed the terror they inflicted would eventually drive the Jews out of the country. Several independent experts also see the bombings as

having another purpose as well: In the experts’ judgment, the leaders of the anti-Israeli groups also regard these attacks as ‘theater’, a way of drawing the world’s attention to the Palestinians’ cause. But even though any given assault can have both instrumental and injury-inflicting aims, it is still worth distinguishing between these two kinds of aggression; the relatively pure instances of these two types of aggression can still be very different in nature and can originate in very different ways. Studies pertinent to the Dodge concepts of proactive and reactive aggression testify to the desirability of not regarding all aggression as basically similar. In this research, it is often found that reactive aggression is linked to emotional dyscontrol, whereas this lack of control is rarely seen in proactive aggression. It should be noted, though, that even if these two kinds of aggression are basically different, rewards received for displaying one kind of aggression can still heighten the likelihood that either one will occur again sometime later. The reinforcement generalizes to affect aggression in general, as Walters and Brown demonstrated experimentally. They showed that when schoolchildren had been rewarded for engaging in make-believe aggression (punching a very large rubber doll), those who were frustrated soon afterwards because they could not see a promised movie, later exhibited a relatively high level of more realistic aggression in their game-playing with a peer. Is all aggression the result of a decision to attack the target?

As was indicated earlier, many analyses of aggression, especially in the social sciences outside of psychology, hold that the attacks exhibited are chiefly controlled by the person’s cognitions at that time and result from a decision to assault the target. The proponents of this position essentially believe that the perpetrators consciously or unconsciously act in terms of what they know and understand about the situation before them. They, presumably, then use these ‘knowledge structures’ (or to use another term, appraisals) in deciding how to respond. In arguing for such a conception, Bushman and Anderson contend that the decision reached can be made consciously or even unconsciously, in the latter case through mental processes of which the aggressors are not aware. The question of automatic-impulsive aggression

Whether the attack is instrumentally oriented or aimed mainly at hurting the target, it often is premeditated in the sense that it is a calculated attempt at achieving the aggressor’s desired objective. At other times, however, especially (but not only) under strong emotional arousal, injury-directed aggressive actions are not thought out beforehand, but are relatively impulsive, even automatic, reactions to an aggression-compelling stimulus. On these occasions, as Bargh, the present writer, and others

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have emphasized, little attention is given to other, notimmediately-obvious features of the surrounding situation that may warn against attacking the target, and the assault proceeds virtually unthinkingly once initiated unless the process is strongly blocked by a strong intervening inhibition. The new psychiatric term ‘intermittent explosive disorder’ apparently refers to an inclination to display this kind of behavior. A developing movement within social psychology, emphasizing the automaticity of a great deal of social behavior, argues that people believe that they have far more control over their actions than they actually do, and that much of their behavior is produced by situational cues to which they are not consciously attending. Bargh, one of the major contributors to this increasingly influential analysis, has provided supporting evidence. In two of his experiments he and some of his colleagues first showed that African-American faces are so often associated with hostility that the mere subliminal presentation of pictures of African-Americans tends to prime hostile ideas in white people. Then, building on this demonstration, in the second study, the white participants in one condition again saw pictures of African-Americans subliminally after which they had to interact with a peer in a mildly frustrating game. We are told that even though these people had not been consciously aware of the hostility-priming pictures, they afterwards displayed more hostility toward their peer than did their counterparts who had not been so primed, perhaps, partly because their inhibitions were weak at the time. It is unparsimonious to argue that the primed persons had ‘decided’ to be nasty to their partner, whether unconsciously or consciously. They could have acted as they did because the aggression-related situational stimuli had automatically activated associated hostile reactions. A somewhat similar process could play a role in quite a few instances of impulsive aggression. Here too, aggression-related situational cues might well setoff impulsive aggressive reactions from those who were aggressively disposed for some reason and whose restraints were relatively low at the time, even if they were not fully aware of these cues. As this article soon argues, internally generated reactions to a distressing occurrence can also automatically elicit impulses to aggression. This article also proposes here that strong negative feelings frequently activate not only hostile ideas and a tendency to appraise other people’s ambiguous behaviors in a hostile manner, but also, at least at times, even an aggression-related motor program.

situation (such as a hostility-associated photo, as in Bargh’s research, or the words that one reads) tend to prime other, semantically related ideas. These ideas then become more accessible mentally so that they easily come to mind. Although this kind of influence is quite reliable under particular circumstances, later research indicates it is most likely to arise when people are not especially motivated to be accurate in their judgments and do not realize their thinking might be affected by the priming experience. Furthermore, both theory and research suggest that the people most likely to be primed by a certain feature of the surrounding situation are those whose minds possess a highly developed network of associations to that particular situational stimulus. There is some debate among psychologists as to whether the priming has only cognitive effects or can also activate motor tendencies. It seems apparent that several of the experiments by Bargh and his colleagues support the latter possibility. Weapon effects

Another notable example of the priming produced by external stimuli is the so-called weapons effect first identified by Berkowitz and LePage in 1967. As they showed, the mere sight of weapons can induce people to be more aggressive than they otherwise would have been. The weapons’ presence apparently brings hostile ideas to mind and may even activate aggression-related motor impulses. Berkowitz held, though, that the guns and/or knives will promote hostile ideas and aggressive inclinations only to the extent that they are regarded as ‘aggressive’ objects, instruments used to hurt or kill people. They, presumably, will not have an aggression-facilitating effect if they are associated only with sport and recreation or if they strongly activate ideas and feelings of danger and anxiety. Bartholow, Anderson, and their colleagues have provided supporting evidence. In one of their experiments, men who were either recreational hunters or nonhunters were exposed to pictures of either a hunting rifle or an assault weapon and then, under a suitable pretext, had an opportunity to deliver punishing noise blasts to a peer. As expected, the hunters were less aggressive than the nonhunters after both groups had seen the hunting rifle. And interestingly, again demonstrating the importance of the gun’s meaning, the hunters were more aggressive after being shown the assault weapon than after seeing the hunting rifle. Movie and television violence

Situational Determinants of Aggression Priming: Automatic Cognitive and Behavioral Reactions to Situational Stimuli Cognitive psychologists have repeatedly shown that thoughts activated by some aspect of the surrounding

Even though this is not widely recognized by the general public, there is a great deal of evidence that the violence portrayed on movie and TV screens has deleterious effects; generally speaking, the depiction of aggression in the mass media heightens the likelihood that susceptible members of the audience will act aggressively themselves. Research by Anderson, Bushman, and Huesmann, among


others, has identified different reasons for this influence: There can be a relatively transient priming of aggressionrelated cognitions and motor impulses, and also, if a great deal of violence is seen over a substantial period of time, there may also be a long lasting learning of what is desirable behavior in particular situations as well as a lessening of concerns about the bad effects of aggression (the latter sometimes termed desensitization). This heightened likelihood of media-induced aggression is not always immediately apparent, however. The depicted violence might give the viewers hostile ideas, but they are unlikely to display an openly aggressive action afterwards if their inhibitions against aggression are strong at that time, perhaps because there are some indications that the display of open aggression on that occasion would be disapproved, or maybe because some cues in the situation bring their aggression-opposing moral standards to mind. Interestingly, the portrayed violence itself could influence what moral standards operate. Findings from a series of studies by Berkowitz and his collaborators, and replicated by other investigators, indicate how this can happen. When people see what they regard as morally justified aggression (as when a ‘good guy’ beats up a ‘bad’ person), for a short time afterwards they are apt to become more willing to attack the ‘bad’ people in their own lives. It is as if the supposedly proper action on the screen had temporarily shaped their idea of the propriety of their own aggressive behavior. Research conducted by Huesmann, Eron and colleagues indicates that this last-mentioned kind of influence, in which witnessed aggression affects the viewers’ judgments about the desirability of assaulting others, can be long lasting if they see enough violent programming over a long enough time. In this study, a sample initially comprised of 6- to 10-year-old youngsters, from a range of social backgrounds in the Chicago area, was reinvestigated approximately 15 years later. On assessing these people’s behavior, through their self-reports as well as the observations of others who knew them well, the psychologists found that those who continued to watch a great deal of violent TV as they grew older tended to be the most aggressive of all the participants as young adults. Their ideas of how they should deal with other persons apparently had been influenced to some extent by the actions they had seen frequently on the television screen. Of course, this media-induced influence will be stronger under some conditions than others. For one thing, some people are especially susceptible to what they see. Bushman, among others, has shown that violent scenes are particularly apt to activate aggressive inclinations in viewers with strong aggressive dispositions. Then too, according to several experiments, the priming experience (the sight of violence) is most likely to lead to aggressive behavior in a later situation if, on this later occasion, (1) they encounter a cue associated with the observed violence, and/or

(2) the available target is somehow associated with the victim in the previously witnessed violent scene. Aversive Conditions Frustration

It is widely recognized that many people become aggressive when they are kept from reaching a desired goal. With this phenomenon occurring so often, quite a few analysts of human social behavior have sought to incorporate frustration effects into their theoretical formulations. One such account, the strain theory of crime causation in sociology, initially advanced by Merton and then adapted by others such as Cloward and Ohlin, essentially traces antisocial deviancy to socially produced frustrations. However, the best-known conception of a relationship between frustration and aggression was offered by Dollard and co-workers, at Yale University in 1939. Defining a frustration as an external impediment to expected goal attainment and not as an emotional reaction, Dollard and his colleagues would not have regarded poverty-stricken persons as frustrated unless these individuals had anticipated getting some of the good things money can buy and then, unexpectedly, failed to have their wishes fulfilled. Such a state of affairs was, presumably, related to aggression in two ways. First, according to the Yale group, all aggressive behavior could be traced back to some prior thwarting. And second, they said that every frustration creates an instigation to aggression. Berkowitz has questioned the first of these propositions, pointing out that a good many aggressive actions are instrumental in nature; people are at times assaultive because they have learned that aggression can pay off. However, the second proposition is worth examining more closely. Critics of the ‘frustration–aggression hypothesis’ have generally argued that frustrations give rise to aggression only when (1) they regard the thwarting as improper, and perhaps also, (2) they had previously learned to react aggressively to barriers to their goal attainment. Although there can be no doubt that these two conditions heighten the likelihood of aggressive reactions to the impediment to goal attainment, research has shown that unexpected failures to obtain desired rewards can indeed produce aggressive responses even when the goal blockages are legitimate. And moreover, there is now suggestive evidence from experiments with human infants that the frustration– aggression relationship holds even when there was little opportunity for prior learning. In the most recent of these investigations, babies displayed angry reactions (in their facial expressions) when they were frustrated by the nonfulfillment of a learned expectation. All this is not to say that every failure to obtain a desired and expected goal will lead to open aggression. Prior learning can heighten (or reduce) the chances of a nonaggressive reaction to a thwarting – although the probability

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of an aggressive response increases if the nonaggressive actions prove to be unsuccessful and the frustration persists. And of course, inhibitions activated by the threat of punishment and/or prior learning can suppress the aggressive reaction. Perhaps most important of all, the thwarting might not be sufficiently unpleasant. In a major revision of the original frustration–aggression hypothesis, Berkowitz has proposed that an interference with goal attainment will produce aggressive inclinations only to the degree that this interference is aversive. This reformulation basically holds that it is the experienced decidedly negative feeling generated by the frustration rather than the frustration itself that creates the instigation to aggression. Aversive conditions as instigators to aggression

This interpretation of the frustration–aggression relationship rests on a rapidly growing body of evidence. As Berkowitz has noted, a good number of studies have now demonstrated that a truly impressive variety of decidedly unpleasant conditions – physically painful events as well as cigarette smoke, foul odors, high room temperatures, and repugnant scenes – can generate anger and aggression. In regard to the first of these factors, animal research, especially the experiments by Azrin, Ulrich, and their associates, and also investigations with humans, have shown that painful occurrences frequently produce anger displays and aggressive inclinations, especially when it is difficult to get away from the pain source. Anderson’s systematic investigations of the aggressionstimulating consequences of uncomfortable heat also provide good examples of this effect. Going beyond his earlier experimental and naturalistic studies (e.g., demonstrating that many of the urban riots of the 1960s burst out in unusually hot weather), one of his papers on this latter topic showed that there was a significant association between how hot US cities were and their rate of violent crime even when many alternative explanations of this relationship were ruled out statistically. Indices of the ‘southern culture of violence’ also forecast the violent crime rate in Anderson’s study but were generally not as good predictors as the temperature measure. Berkowitz’s cognitive-neoassociationist model attempts to account for these aggressive effects by positing a multistage process. According to this formulation, in the initial stage decidedly unpleasant feelings automatically activate at least two different emotional networks (or syndromes), one associated with aggressive inclinations and the other linked to escape/avoidance tendencies. Genetic, learning, and situational influences determine the relative strengths of the two opposing syndromes. Then, later, as the person thinks about the aversive occurrence, appraisals and attributions presumably come into play so that the initial, fairly primitive emotional reactions can be differentiated, intensified, or suppressed. Anderson’s analysis of the effects of aversive conditions, his general aggression model, is

somewhat similar except that he believes the afflicted person decides whether or not to attack an available target, whereas in Berkowitz’s model the intense negative affect theoretically activates an aggression-related motor program automatically, producing impulses to aggression which then may or may not be inhibited. Whatever the specifics of the theoretical analysis, we can extend the findings just mentioned and also propose that a broad spectrum of social stresses can spur aggressive inclinations and antisocial tendencies. One such stress has to do with the humiliation people experience when they believe that others have belittled them. It is often observed, for example, that a good deal of youth violence is precipitated by the youngsters’ sense that the others with whom they were dealing had in one way or another indicated they were of little worth (so that they felt ‘disrespected’ or ‘dissed’). This same sense of being humiliated operates in the international realm as well. As a notable case in point, Palestinian militants frequently maintain that much of their antagonism towards Israel stems from the way Israeli authorities have consistently devalued the Palestinian people. Quantitative research also testifies to the variety of stresses that can evoke aggressive reactions. Sampling from the many relevant studies, the women in a laboratory experiment who were afflicted by a relatively high level of task stress tended to be most punitive in their judgments of young children who were working nearby, and similarly, in the 1975 survey of a representative sample of US families, conducted by Straus and his associates, those respondents reporting the greatest number of life stresses (from a list of 18) were especially likely to have assaulted their spouses that year. Adding to these observations, Landau has noted that the level of stress in Israel, as indexed by objective measures of unemployment and hyperinflation as well as by more subjective reports of worry about political, economic, and national security conditions, was significantly related to violent crime indicators. It is possible to continue with the evidence, but we will here suggest only that sociological strain theories of criminality basically rest on these stress effects. Associations with the perceived source of the experienced displeasure

If decidedly negative events can produce angry thoughts and aggressive inclinations, it is not too much of an extension to propose that those people who are somehow associated with very distressing occurrences will also tend to prime aggression-facilitating reactions automatically, and thus, become targets for those who were aggressively disposed. The persons victimized by hate crimes are often attacked consciously and deliberately because they are clearly seen as threats to strongly held values. But in some cases, the hated targets might also draw hostile reactions impulsively and with little thought primarily


because they are linked in their assaulters’ minds with something extremely unpleasant. Perceived associations can also be responsible for those instances in which aggression is displaced onto others not at all responsible for the negative occurrence. Discussions of aggression for the general public frequently refer to this kind of happening. But although this phenomenon is widely recognized, present day social psychologists, with the exception of Norman Miller and William Pedersen and their collaborators, give it relatively little attention. Perhaps, partly because of the paucity of research on this topic, the best-known psychological account of this hostility displacement (as it is often termed) is still Neal Miller’s 1948 stimulus–response generalization formulation. Applying the then dominant associationistic perspective, Miller showed how displaced aggression could be explained in terms of a possible target’s association with the perceived source of an aversive experience. In general, Miller’s argument went, even though some person or group had actually not caused the unpleasant occurrence, the more closely this person or group was perceived to be psychologically linked to the supposed origin of the negative event, the stronger would be the aggressive inclinations that would be elicited by the person/group. The aversively generated urge to attack a possible target generalizes to others in proportion to their degree of association with the perceived cause of the displeasure. However, if it is believed to be dangerous to assault the aversive source for some reason, inhibitions against aggression would also generalize from the perceived cause to the other possible targets. The provoked person would then refrain from attacking the perceived perpetrator and the other possible targets close to him/her on the psychological association dimension. Still, Miller postulated, since the strength of the inhibitory tendency often declines more rapidly than the strength of the aggressive urge as one moves away from the perceived aversive source on the degree-of-association dimension, at some intermediate position on this dimension, the aggressive urge would be stronger than the inhibitory tendencies. People having a moderate degree of connection with the cause of the aversive experience are then apt to be the victims of displaced aggression. The Norman Miller–William Pedersen group took a different tack. Dealing with what they termed ‘triggered displaced aggression’, they demonstrated that the aggressive inclinations generated by different unpleasant sources can cumulate. Suppose that Person A does something mildly annoying to us, so mild in fact that we have very little if any hostile reaction to him at that time. Then let’s say Person B comes along and provokes us to a much more substantial extent. Soon afterwards, when we are given an opportunity to evaluate the first person A, there is a good chance we will be surprisingly nasty to him. The fairly intense negative arousal produced by Person B evidently generalizes to the upsetting individual

we had encountered earlier and strengthens our urge to attack him. Appraisals and Attributions So far, in emphasizing the role of priming (and more generally, associations) in many aggressive reactions, we have said little about the part played by cognitions – more specifically, people’s interpretations of the situation they are in – in the generation of emotion. The leading approach to the study of emotions in contemporary psychology, typically called appraisal theory, stresses the overriding importance of these understandings. According to this line of thought, it is a given event’s meaning for us (i.e., the appraisals we make of its personal significance and also what we believe is the particular cause of the occurrence) that determines what emotions we will feel in that situation and what actions we will undertake. The objections raised against the frustration–aggression hypothesis when Dollard and co-workers first published their monograph essentially faulted the authors for having neglected people’s appraisals of the frustrating incident. Averill and others voiced these objections succinctly by maintaining that anger was basically an accusation of blame at having been wronged. In the past several generations, appraisal theory has guided a great deal of research into the genesis of emotions, with many of the investigations simply asking college students about the incidents that had aroused emotions in them. These studies have obtained many similar findings (but also, as Berkowitz and Harmon-Jones noted, some puzzling differences). In the case of anger, the research results have been generally in accord with the critics’ objections to the thesis offered by Dollard and his colleagues: as was mentioned before, almost all of these appraisal studies agreed that this emotion arises when an external agent improperly prevents the person from reaching her or his valued goal. Still, to repeat what was stated earlier in connection with the frustration–aggression hypothesis, a good number of other studies have demonstrated that many persons do become aggressively inclined when they are thwarted even when they do not interpret the event in the manner stipulated by appraisal theorists. It is quite possible that the situational interpretations identified by the appraisal theory investigations may be especially apt to produce aggressive reactions primarily because they are very unpleasant. Take the case of frustration being attributed to an external agent’s deliberate action. When we make such an appraisal we believe the frustrating agent had intended to harm us personally, and it is unpleasant to think this. At the other extreme, we are less likely to assault someone who we think had thwarted us only accidentally because we do not take his behavior personally and also because we may well realize that it is socially wrong to retaliate against a person who had not wanted to hurt us.

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Persistent Dispositions to Aggression Consistency in Aggressive and Antisocial Behavior People’s susceptibility to aggression-eliciting influences in the surrounding environment does not mean that their inclination to violence necessarily changes drastically as they move from one setting to another. Indeed, as a great many studies have now demonstrated, those persons who exhibit a relatively high level of aggression on one occasion – whether in a personality test or a laboratory experiment or in a ‘real-world’ interpersonal encounter – have a better than chance likelihood of being highly aggressive in other situations as well (especially if the antecedent measure and/or the outcome to be predicted is/are based on an aggregation of a number of situations). Longitudinal studies of aggression and antisocial proneness

Olweus was one of the first psychologists to document the impressive stability in aggressive patterns of conduct over time. In his survey of US, English, and Swedish studies of male subjects ranging from 2 to 18 years of age, published in 1979, he reported that initial measures of aggressiveness successfully predicted later aggressiveness in each of the 16 different samples he examined. This relationship was moderately high (average correlation ¼ 0.7) when the follow-up was a year or less after the first assessment, and then declined regularly to about 0.4 when there was a 21-year gap between the first and later measurements. Other psychologists have also seen this consistency over time in their own investigations. The best known of these longitudinal studies probably are those conducted by Farrington and his associates at Cambridge University, based on a sample of working-class boys in London, by Eron, Huesmann, and their colleagues, employing male and female schoolchildren from a rural county in upstate New York, and by Moffitt and Caspi, using a large cohort of both boys and girls in Dunedin, New Zealand. All of these investigations found that a good number of the youngsters changed their conduct with the passage of the years, but that a sizable fraction of participants tended to maintain their general level of aggressiveness. Early aggressiveness is a risk factor predicting the chances of aggression-proneness in adulthood. Going beyond these demonstrations of consistency in the disposition to violence, all of the investigations cited here also found that a persistent high level of aggressiveness is part of a general pattern of social deviation. Thus, seeing that many of his youthful English troublemakers had engaged in many different kinds of socially disapproved behavior, Farrington concluded that they had a general tendency to antisocial conduct. In the New York State sample, as another illustration, those persons, males and females, who had been regarded by their peers as the most aggressive members of their school classes at age

8 tended to have the greatest number of criminal convictions by the time they were 30 years old. And similarly, Caspi has reported that in New Zealand aggressively disposed, undercontrolled 3-year-olds grew up to be impulsive, unreliable, and antisocial young adults. All in all, it appears that quite a few of the extremely aggressive people uncovered in these investigations fit the psychiatric category of aggressive conduct disorder: ‘‘. . . a repetitive and persistent pattern of aggressive conduct in which the rights of others are violated, by either physical violence against persons, or thefts outside the home involving confrontation with a victim. The physical violence may take the form of rape, mugging, assault, or, in rare cases, homicide . . .’’ Some people change

Even though there is this impressive degree of consistency over the years in the disposition to violence and antisocial behavior, quite a few people do change with time, as Moffitt, Caspi, and their associates have shown. Based on this group’s research findings, Moffitt has noted that there are substantial individual differences in the extent to which people maintain the pattern of behavior they displayed in childhood. She believes a good fraction of those who engage in antisocial conduct in adolescence do so, in large part, because of situational pressures (such as peer influence) and then become more law-abiding as they get older. Moffitt calls them ‘‘adolescence-limited antisocials.’’ On the other hand, there are a relatively small number of people who continue their extreme antisocial pattern over time, and Moffitt terms them ‘‘life-course-persistent antisocials.’’ A later study of school boys between 7 and 17 years of age suggests that the ‘‘life-course-persistent’’ troublemakers tend to have lower verbal IQs and experience more abuse and neglect than the adolescents who outgrow their antisocial pattern as they get older. Aggressive Personalities: Hostile Expectations and Weak Restraints against Aggression People’s likelihood of becoming aggressive on any given occasion is a function of their personalities as well as the specific nature of the situation they are in. And so, as Bushman has demonstrated, those who become most aggressive to a peer soon after they see a violent movie are the persons having the strongest aggressiveness traits (according to their scores on a standard hostility inventory). Their personal qualities had made them especially susceptible to aggression-stimulating features of the surrounding environment. This section will be a highly restricted review of some individual characteristics that, in interaction with aspects of the immediate situation, can affect the probability that a person will attack a particular available and suitable target: First, we will look at how the individual is apt to interpret his or her ambiguous encounters with others. Then after this, we will consider


the role of an inclination to impulsive aggression, and especially the impulsiveness stemming from a relative absence of restraints against aggression. Reactive and proactive aggressors: Perceiving hostility by others

A number of psychologists have shown that highly aggressive personalities typically carry around with them a general ‘social theory’ maintaining that the people with whom they are involved in a problematic encounter are likely to be hostile to them. There is a good chance, then, as Dill, Anderson, and their colleagues reported, that a characteristically aggressive individual, in having this broad-ranging hostile expectation, will interpret other people’s ambiguous actions as being hostile in nature. Dodge is one of the best-known investigators of this characteristic tendency to expect hostility from others. On the basis of his early work with children, Dodge and Coie believed it was advisable to distinguish between two kinds of aggressive boys (as was mentioned before) in terms of how they process information about social interactions. Some of these youngsters, labeled proactive aggressors, were essentially oriented instrumentally in that they, often, used their aggression to dominate and bully others. Their aggression was basically calculated and controlled. Other boys, called reactive aggressors, were much more prone to react quickly, even somewhat automatically, to perceived threats. Of particular interest to us here, these quick-to-anger aggressive youngsters are generally also quick to attribute hostile intent to other persons. When the participants in Dodge’s early research watched a videotaped series of interactions between two school-age boys, the two types of youths were equally accurate in recognizing clearly intentional hostility. In ambiguous situations, however, the emotionally reactive aggressors were especially apt to attribute hostility to the actors. And when the participants were asked what they would do in a similar situation, these boys were more likely than their instrumentally oriented, proactive peers to say they would respond with some form of aggression. Although Dodge and many other psychologists employing his typology emphasize the way reactive aggressors process information and make decisions, he and his colleagues have at times acknowledged that these persons’ emotional reactions could be, at least in part, an automatic and classically conditioned response to the threatening situation. They also believed that once the reactive aggressors make a hostile interpretation of the situation before them, this appraisal and accompanying emotion prevent any further information processing so that they do not evaluate the different possible actions they might undertake. The difference between the reactive and proactive aggressors could be largely due to the way their brains function. In his review of the relevant neuroscience literature, Blair proposed that the brain circuits involved in reactive aggression are different from those operating to

produce instrumental (proactive) aggression. The frontal cortex apparently is less operative in those prone to reactive emotional outbursts, whereas persons displaying predominantly instrumental aggression do not exhibit this reduced frontal functioning. Raine and his colleagues have made a similar observation. Comparing murderers who killed in a violent rage (probably reactive aggressors) and those who were predatory (instrumental) murderers, they found that the highly emotional killers in their sample had lower levels of prefrontal-cortical activity. Impulsive aggression

Turning from neurological to psychological considerations, the thesis offered here is that the impulsivity characteristic of reactive aggressors stems from two particular personality characteristics: incomplete and inadequate information processing, and especially, relatively weak restraints against aggression. Some suggestive evidence for this contention can be found in the research published by Barratt, one of the leading investigators of impulsivity as a personality trait. His chief self-report measure of impulsiveness embraces, among other things, a failure to plan ahead as well as a motoric impulsiveness. Then too, we can also see evidence of these two components in a study by White, Moffitt, and their colleagues. On factor analyzing a set of impulsivity indices, they identified two correlated but distinct types of impulsivity. One of these, termed ‘‘behavioral impulsivity,’’ appeared to reflect a lack of behavioral control. The second factor, called ‘‘cognitive impulsivity,’’ had more to do with inadequately thought-out effortful and planned cognitive performance. The proposal here is that the disposition to carry out impulsive attacks is more a matter of behavioral impulsivity or weak restraints, than of cognitive impulsivity or inadequate decision making. Here again, we find some support in the investigations by Caspi, Moffitt, and co-workers in New Zealand and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They tell us that a personality configuration comprised of ‘‘high negative emotionality’’ and ‘‘weak constraints’’ was significantly linked to juvenile delinquency. The researchers suggest that since these youngsters did not adequately control their impulses, their negative emotional experiences were all too likely to produce antisocial reactions. Since aggressive outbursts are part of these antisocial reactions, it could well be that weak inhibitions contributed greatly to their impulsive attacks on others.

Conclusion There is more than one kind of aggression even though in all instances the action is aimed at the injury or elimination of some target. For most analyses of aggression in the social sciences, however, the intended pain/destruction is only a secondary goal. These conceptions view the

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behavior as primarily instrumentally oriented actions, attempts to gain a nonhurtful objective such as the restoration of a wounded self-concept, the winning of a desired social approval, or the attainment of a position of power and dominance over others. Without denying the frequent occurrence of these instrumental attacks, other formulations maintain that many assaults are mainly directed at the injury or elimination of the intended target. Aggressive actions can also differ in the degree to which they are premeditated calculated and more or less rational (from the actors’ viewpoint) or are largely automatic, involuntary responses to aspects of the surrounding situation. Besides highlighting the different kinds of aggression, this article has summarized research pointing to some of the major situational influences on aggressive behavior and the role of persistent dispositions to aggressive conduct. But it has also focused to a considerable extent on impulsive assaults quick, automatic, and relatively unreasoned reactions. If there are few restraints in operation at the time, these responses can be produced by an external stimulus having a clearly aggressive meaning or by the intense negative feelings created by a decidedly unpleasant occurrence such as the emergence of a perceived threat or highly stressful event, even when no one is blamed for wrongdoing.

of affective aggression. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 21, 434–448. Anderson, C., Berkowitz, L., Donnerstein, E., et al. (2003). The influence of media violence on youth. Psychological Science in the Public Interest 4, 81–110. Bargh, J. and Chartrand, T. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American Psychologist 54, 462–479. Baron, R. A. and Richardson, D. R. (1994). Human aggression, 2nd edn. New York: Plenum. Berkowitz, L. (1989). The frustration-aggression hypothesis: An examination and reformulation. Psychological Bulletin 106, 59–73. Berkowitz, L. (1993). Aggression: Its causes, consequences, and control. New York: McGraw-Hill. Berkowitz, L. (2008). On the consideration of automatic as well as controlled processing in aggression. Aggressive Behavior. Berkowitz, L. and Harmon-Jones, E. (2004). Toward an understanding of the determinants of anger. Emotion 4, 107–130. Blair, R. (2004). The roles of orbital frontal cortex in the modulation of antisocial behavior. Brain and Cognition 55, 192–208. Dodge, K. and Coie, J. (1987). Social-information-processing factors in reactive and proactive aggression in children’s peer groups. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53, 1146–1158. Dollard, J., Doob, L., Miller, N., Mowrer, O., and Sears, R. (1939). Frustration and aggression. New Haven: Yale University Press. Miller, N. (1948). Theory and experiment relating psychoanalytic displacement to stimulus-response generalization. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 43, 155–178. Nisbett, R. and Cohen, D. (1996). Culture of honor: The psychology of violence in the South. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. White, J., Moffitt, T., Caspi, A., et al. (1994). Measuring impulsivity and exploring the relationship to delinquency. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 103, 192–205.

Further Reading

Relevant Websites

Anderson, C. and Bushman, B. (2002). Human aggression. Annual Review of Psychology 53, 27–51. Anderson, C., Deuser, W., and DeNeve, K. (1995). Hot temperatures, hostile affect, hostile cognition, and arousal: Tests of a general model

http://www.psychology.iastate.edu/~caa/ – Craig Anderson. http://www.personal.umich.edu/~bushman – Brad Bushman. http://www.rcgd.isr.umich.edu/people/huesmann.html – L. Rowell Huesmann.

Neuropsychology of Motivation for Group Aggression and Mythology Jordan B Peterson, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada Published by Elsevier Inc.

Introduction: Atrocity for Its Own Sake Territoriality: Inside the Walls Is Safe, Outside the Walls Is Dangerous Territory Is Social The Stranger Is Unpredictable and Terrifying Strange Ideas and Experiences Are Terrifying Motivation for Aggression: The Strange Is Demonic and Should be Destroyed

Glossary Allostatic Load The total demand for energy and physiological resource expenditure placed upon an organism in a particular situation or state.

Temperamental and Personality Variables in Unexplored Territory Exacerbation of Territoriality through Aversion and Hostility to the Unknown Reduction of Territoriality through Expansion of Individual Competence Conclusion Further Reading

Amygdala A brain area specialized for fear and anxiety, among other functions. Atrocity The willful subjugation of another or the self to threat or punishment whose severity far exceeds any reasonable standard.

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Avoidance Willful blindness; refusal to engage in the effortful multistage processing of anomalous information axioms or assumptions: predicates of beliefs or models, unprovable from within those beliefs or models. Chaos The virtuality or possibility from which order emerges. Constructivism A form of philosophy predicated upon the assumption that the human personality and human models of reality are constructed from information generated during the course of exploration. Cortisol A hormone produced in response to uncertainty and stress, which causes neurophysiological damage when chronically produced. Evil The act of doing harm for the express purpose of doing harm. Exploration The voluntary act of transforming anomaly or unexplored territory into productive, explored territory through the analysis of its structure and the consequential transformation of presumption and action. Explored Territory That aspect of territory which has been mastered and rendered safe and productive. Hippocampus A brain area devoted (1) to memory and (2) to the comparison of expected and desired outcomes of action to actual outcomes.

Introduction: Atrocity for Its Own Sake In the initial stages of World War II, in the Pacific theater, Dr. Hisato Yoshimura of the infamous ‘Unit 731’ conducted a series of ‘experiments’ upon Chinese prisoners. This is the same Unit 731 that was established on the express order of Emperor Hirohito, and the same Dr. Yoshimura who was in 1978 (!) awarded one of the Japanese nation’s highest honors, The order of the rising sun, for his work in ‘environmental adaptation science’. In one such ‘experiment’, a Chinese woman was shackled outside in subzero weather to a device like a stock that held her arms out in front of her, parallel to the ground, encircled by a restraining device that fit around her upper arms. The ‘medical experimenter’ poured freezing water over her extended arms until they were frozen solid, and then brought her into the ‘laboratory’ to then pour hot water (more than 50 C) over her frozen limbs. The process was then repeated until in front of the horrified victim’s eyes her skin and musculature loosened and could be stripped off both arms to the bone leaving them bare and lifeless and useless and utterly terrifying to apprehend. This is only one of many tortures practiced by this ‘investigative unit’ and not necessarily the worst. Obviously, the point of such processes was the utter degradation, traumatization,

Left Hemisphere Half of the cerebral cortex, generally linguistic, and specialized for activity in explored territory. Order Predictable or habitable human territory or conceptual space. Orienting Reflex An instinctual pattern of bodily and mental response to anomaly. Reticular Formation a brain area responsible for increasing cortical arousal and associated consciousness. Right Hemisphere Half of the cerebral cortex, generally non-linguistic, and specialized for activity in unexplored territory. Territory The local space and time continuum in which an organism is inevitably embedded. Territoriality The instinctive response of a creature to defend its social structure and environmental locale. Thalamus A brain area which filters sensory information prior to its transmission to the cortex and its manifestation in consciousness. Totalitarianism The attempt to impose a comprehensive ideological interpretation upon all phenomena, past, present, and future. Unexplored Territory That aspect of territory which has not yet been mastered and which thus remains both threatening and curiosity-provoking.

and destruction of the victim’s body and soul rather than any scientific knowledge that might be accrued thereby. It should be pointed out that such events are by no means rare and also that there is little evidence that emotionless psychopaths are always or even most commonly the perpetrators. Furthermore, it is evident that the capacity for such atrocity does not seem simply limited to the members of any one or even several particular cultures. Rather, careful study of such phenomena indicates that the motivation for terrorism and atrocity is something central to the human condition and must be understood as such, rather than as mere aberration. It appears that innate and justifiable territoriality, common to men and animals alike, can combine under certain conditions with self-deception and existential resentment, both unique to human beings, producing motivation for terrorism and atrocity.

Territoriality: Inside the Walls Is Safe, Outside the Walls Is Dangerous Territoriality cannot be properly understood without careful re-conceptualization of the nature of emotional regulation among individual human beings. This re-conceptualization

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must include careful consideration of man as a truly social animal whose physical existence and whose psychological stability is dependent on maintenance of a predictable social environment. The most important neuropsychological work, relevant to this re-conceptualization and consideration, has been conducted over the last 50 years by Russian neuropsychologists, students of Aleksandr Luria. Their work is revolutionary, from an ontological and epistemological perspective, because it forces a comprehensive reconsideration of the modern view of anxiety. Among Western experimental psychologists following Skinner, anxiety has most often been studied as fear which is always fear of something particular. Such fear is learned, through simple association or conditioning. For the Western psychologist, satisfied complacency is the normative state, and fear constitutes the deviation. From the Russian perspective, this is precisely backwards. Anxiety is instead the a priori state, manifested axiomatically whenever a stimulus or situation appears whose features have not yet been mapped functionally by the cortex. Now, the idea of ‘stimulus or situation’, appropriate for the lab, appears somewhat too conceptually restricted to serve as the proper signifier in the present context. More generally, ‘stimulus or situation’ might be regarded as ‘unknown territory’ – the unmapped aspects of the space and time continuum in which the organism is continually embedded. It was O. S. Vinogradova and E. N. Sokolov who first described the orienting response or orienting reflex as the immediate and involuntary response of the organism to the emergence of novelty or anomaly – or unexplored territory. Vinogradova, Sokolov and later Jeffrey Gray outlined the structures of a system centered in the hippocampus, an ancient part of the brain, central to the emotionallimbic system, so described by James Papez and Paul Maclean. In the West, under the influence of Scoville and Milner, the hippocampus has been regarded as a brain area primarily devoted to the movement of sensory information from short-term attention to long-term memory, in the human case, or as a ‘cognitive mapping’ device in the case of animals. Although there is no particular reason for assuming that the emotion-regulating and memory functions are by necessity exclusive, the tendency for territoriality characteristic even of human researchers has made irritation with the competing viewpoints rather than attempts to integrate across them (excepting the case of Gray) standard practice. In 2001, shortly before her death, Vinogradova gave her final opinions on the function of the hippocampus and brain systems directly associated with it. She described the hippocampus as an interface between two neural systems: the first, in the brainstem, responsible for activating and deactivating more complex brain systems, emerging later in phylogenetic and ontogenetic history; the second, in the cortex, responsible for the regulation of thought,

emotion, perception, and behavior as a consequence of learning. Sensory information streaming in from the outside world is fed in a bottom-up fashion through these ancient brainstem systems into the hippocampus, providing it with a quick-and-dirty picture of those events occurring in the territory currently occupied by the organism. At the same time information about what is supposed to be happening, according to current plans and desires, is being fed downward into the hippocampus where it is simplified and compared to the ‘real-world’ input from the brainstem. If the two inputs match, then the hippocampus sends a message to the raphe nuclei in the brainstem. This suppresses activity of the ascending, excitatory reticular formation which is responsible, in general, for increasing brain arousal, heightening attention, increasing sensory throughput via the thalamus, placing the body in a state of alertness and preparation for action, disinhibiting anxiety, and potentiating exploration. What this means is that the organism is only calm, habituated, free of stress, and well-adapted when cortical and brainstem input match, as computed by the hippocampus. Under such conditions, what is going on in the world as observed by basic rapid sensory processes matches what is supposed to be going on as a calculation of higher thought and presumption. When reality is manifesting itself in accord with the desires of the actor, negative emotion, particularly anxiety, remains wellregulated and controlled. This means that it is security and familiarity that is the learned, and anxiety that is the normative, default response to unknown territory. This fact has been demonstrated in various other manners by other researchers using different research paradigms. In the Western psychological tradition familiarity is not learned, except most simply, through habituation, considered the simplest form of learning. It is instead assumed. When B. F. Skinner conditioned fear into his experimental rats, he had to set the stage, implicitly, in accordance with his model of learning. First, a lab rat was introduced into the experimental cage or container – known territory. Once that rat had habituated, he was presented with a conditioned stimulus, a light, for example, which was paired repeatedly with an unconditioned aversive stimulus, such as an electric shock or a loud and sudden noise, which when presented alone would make the rat freeze. This sequence of unexpected events demonstrated to the rat that he was not where he thought he was, at least when the light was on. Soon the rat would come to freeze to the light alone. Thus, according to Skinner, he had learned fear. What was of course glossed over was the fact that the rat would freeze immediately upon first introduction to the experimental cage or container and that he had to be left to get over his initial anxiety and explore before he was ‘habituated’ enough to learn fear. A rat’s a priori state in a novel environment is anxiety, heightened alertness, and a slowly developing


inclination to explore, once its anxiety dissipates, as a consequence of activity in another ancient brain area, the hypothalamus.

Territory Is Social How then might the mapping of territory, so that emotional stability and familiarity might be established, be understood? In a nonverbal animal, such as a rat, the transition from anxiety and freezing in a new situation to active exploration and mapping begins with cautious sniffing. Such exploratory sniffing emerges after the animal has been immobilized by fear, when it does not know where it is, and under the spell of brain systems designed to minimize potential exposure to predators. After sniffing the animal switches to vision, using appropriate head movements, and then dares to move its body through the territory, assessing layout and the motivational/emotional significance of that layout as something that occurs in response to its own actions. For an isolated rat in a simple cage ‘territory’ may be construed as something as simple as the spatial layout of the cage – hence the primarily ‘cognitive map’ or ‘spatial’ models of hippocampal function buttressed by findings that the hippocampus does in fact contain ‘place’ cells. Other researchers, however, have made much of the ability of the hippocampus and closely related structures to enable ‘transitive associations’ – associations or relations between arbitrary stimuli – and have suggested that the place or location identification function of the hippocampus is actually identification of ‘context’. Context, which can mean place, can also mean ‘behavioral task demand’ or meaning of the place. A context or territory can be ‘a place to undertake some particular learned conception and action’ rather than a place to instinctually freeze or explore. Knowledge or memory of the appropriate learned conception and action inhibits the a priori instinctual responses. An animal – or a human being – is comfortable in those places where he knows how to act. Such places are successfully explored territory. However, the observer should not be fooled into thinking that ‘territory’ is simply physical space or place. After all, most complex animals – rats and primates included – are social animals. What this means is that their territories are not mere material places made of relatively predictable objects and their interactions but complex and dynamic social dramas whose behaviorally associated contextual meanings are very much dependent on the reactions of potentially unpredictable conspecifics, familiar and strange. Once the complexities of social being are added into the equation the situation becomes somewhat more difficult to understand. Territory that is unoccupied by other creatures tends to be rather predictable under most circumstances. However, territory that is occupied by societies is

characterized by the physical properties of the territory as well as the social structure of the society. That means that most of what is appropriate learned conception and action has to be negotiated with others. Thus, it is the establishment and maintenance of a social contract, implicit or explicit, that brings familiarity to territory. This of course means that any threats to the social contract are also simultaneously threats to the learned structures that inhibit or regulate terror.

The Stranger Is Unpredictable and Terrifying Most animals solve this problem by consorting, in the main, with a limited number of highly familiar peers whose potentially unpredictable behavior is strictly limited in its range by the strictures of the currently extant hierarchy of social dominance. Social dominance hierarchies are complex patterns of social behavior whose rulelike structure is encoded in the conceptual presumptions and behavioral rituals proscribed by each animal’s relative standing and role. The sensitivity of social animals to the disruption of their dominance structures – their implicit social contracts – can hardly be overstated. It is for this reason that human beings who break traditional rules are naturally regarded as immoral, threatening, and deserving of punishment. Their rule-breaking actions threaten the integrity of the structures that underlie cooperative behavior, regulate social interactions, and allow for familiarity and predictability in a given place and time. Interlopers – strangers – offer equivalent threat. No one knows where they fit, what they think, or what they are likely to do. Thus, they threaten the integrity of the social and psychological structures that inhibit fear. Even animals react violently to the unknown intruder, and it is for such reasons. If an experimenter removes a well-loved rat from its familial surroundings, washes it carefully, provides it with a new odor, and returns it to its peers, it will be promptly dispatched by those who once loved it. Rats determine familiarity by smell. The ‘new’ rat constitutes a threat to explored territory, physical and social – to everything secure. Chimpanzees act in much the same manner, and are perfectly capable of searching out and killing ‘foreign devils’, even if they were once familiar. Why do such reactions occur? Well, a familiar conspecific’s patterns of context-dependent behavior have been previously mapped and are additionally constrained and simplified by its particular placement in the dominance hierarchy and the ‘rules’ that govern behavior in that position. The cortex can thus render predictions about the outcomes of behaviors in interaction with that conspecific – can in fact strive with some success to ensure that those outcomes are positively beneficial. Those predictions/desires are very likely to match the sensory

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information about that conspecific’s behavior as it is occurring and as it is fed, bottom up, into the hippocampus through the ancient brainstem systems. Under such conditions, the hippocampus registers ‘match’ and the arousal systems (anxiety, aggression, panic, and exploration) remain under tonic inhibition. No threat is detected. No unnerving possibility for damage manifests itself. No stressful disinhibition of anxiety and aggression is necessary. No increase in computational or allostatic load, with its concomitant cascade of stress-induced physiological perturbation and damage, has occurred. An unfamiliar conspecific, by contrast, is unpredictable in his actions and something that presents a potential threat to the integrity of the entire dominance hierarchy structure, as his capacity for challenge and revolution remains unspecified. Familiar conspecifics are explored territory. Unfamiliar conspecifics are unexplored territory and evoke all the instinctual responses characteristic of reaction to the unknown, unexpected, and dangerous.

Strange Ideas and Experiences Are Terrifying Animals and human beings in social groups come to some shared implicit assumptions about the meaning of shared territory – about the nature of actions and reactions that are acceptable there. Any occurrences that violate those assumptions, whether they are natural or social events, threaten the integrity of the structure of the shared map of meaning that regulates emotional responding in that territory. In the human case, exposure to extreme anomaly or novelty or unexplored territory produces what JanoffBulman has called ‘‘shattered assumptions.’’ Such assumptions might be considered the axioms of the representation system, negotiated socially, then used by the nervous system to interpret, predict, and shape the world. The most fundamental of these, according to Janoff-Bulman, are ‘the world is safe’ and ‘I am a valuable asset in it’. These axioms correspond, respectively, to the stability and predictability of the social environment and the security of individual placement within it. The consequence of the violation of such by assumptions-shattering can be dramatic, neurophysiologically speaking. Individuals who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder – and, indeed, from other forms of severe negative emotion – suffer hippocampal damage brought about by chronically elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol. This means that the very system that regulates emotion is damaged by exposure to too much emotion (or by unexpected and assumption-shattering events). Elevated cortisol levels also increase propensity to a wide range of illnesses and degenerative conditions, including obesity, infectious illness, and heart disease. Recent research indicates that treatment with ‘antidepressant’ serotonin reuptake inhibitors – whose biochemical

effect essentially mimics the pharmacological state characteristic of stable high-dominance animals – allows for hippocampal neurogenesis, as well as improvement in memory functions associated with the hippocampus. Vinogradova’s work sheds substantive light on what an ‘assumption’ might be from a neuropsychological perspective and allows, in potential, for a developmental description of the relationship between the development of such assumptions and their relationship to the tonic inhibition of negative emotion. She points out that habituation of the orienting or novelty response should be regarded as negative learning and that the disappearance of that response is a consequence of the elaboration of an increasingly detailed world-model. This modeling occurs as a consequence of sequential learning in structures that receive outputs, sequentially, from the hippocampus. The higher up the chain of output from the hippocampus, the more sophisticated the brain area, and the more repetitions of the event necessary to shape the response. Vinogradova regards this sequential learning system ‘‘as a chain of integrators, where each one starts to respond only after reaction develops at the previous link, and as a delay line, preventing premature fixation of spurious, irrelevant, low probability signals.’’ She points out that the highest links in the system may be regarded as the ‘‘ultimate signal for information fixation’’ and presumes that these terminate in the language centers of the prefrontal cortex. Thus, what is fully understood and what inhibits anxiety most effectively is knowledge elaborated to the point of verbal comprehension and communicability. The most fundamental assumptions in the hierarchy of belief or representation, derived from exploration, are precisely those that govern the essential, implicit rules of social interaction as Jean Piaget suggested in his seminal work on the development of morality in children and adolescents. It is these ‘rules’, after all, that specify the nature of shared social territory and are encoded to some degree in our explicit conceptions of intrinsic human rights. Disruption of these most fundamental presumptions – the breaking of rules observed in action, or justification for such rule-breaking, presented verbally – thus presents a threat to the validity of the knowledge structures whose physiological instantiation inhibits and controls negative emotion and its associated arousal responses. The magnitude of this threat corresponds in intensity to the level of analysis such disruption affects. This means that the more fundamental the presumption threatened and the higher and more abstract the level in the sequential learning chain that presumption is instantiated, the more negative emotion will be disinhibited. It thus stands to reason that human societies with the most extreme explicit differences in opinion with regards to ‘intrinsic human right’ thus possess the most capability for mutual disruption of presumption and its attendant emotional regulation.


Predictability, consequential to the establishment of an implicit and then explicit social contract, inhibits terror. Threats to the integrity of that contract, behavioral or abstract, hint at unforeseeable terrors to come. Thus people, and animals, fight to preserve their familiar surroundings. So much for territoriality. The pathological exacerbation of territoriality by resentment, however, is a process much more difficult to accurately describe and understand. Thus, we have to turn our attention to forms of cognitive representation represented earlier in the chain of integrators, so to speak, and attend to descriptions in art, mythology, and literature as well as hints available in the psychological literature.

Motivation for Aggression: The Strange Is Demonic and Should be Destroyed At about the same time that Sokolov and Vinogradova were outlining the gist of the orienting reflex theory, George Kelly (1955) was developing a model of human motivation predicated on the idea that human beings love, above all, to be right. We now know that to be threatened with evidence for error at fundamental levels of analysis is traumatic, we know why, and all this knowledge supports Kelly’s theorizing. Kelly also believed, however, that human beings were apt to repress or otherwise restrict the appearance of data that invalidated their conceptual models. These data might include actual human beings whose appearance and behavior speaks of the strange, or just the ideas of those human beings (which can certainly be more dangerous than the physical incarnations themselves). Kelly entitled this tendency ‘hostility’, and regarded it as ‘extortion of confirmation’ (a particularly apt phrase reminiscent, e.g., of the incomprehensible insistence by Stalinist Soviet officials that their inevitably-to-be-punishedanyways victims ‘confess’ before being jailed or killed). He states: ‘‘. . . a major revision of one’s construct system can threaten with immediate change, or chaos, or anxiety. Thus it often seems better to extort confirmation of one’s opinion – and therefore of the system that produced them – rather than to risk the utter confusion of those moments of transition’’ (1969: 238). The desire to deny or to refuse to confront evidence of systemic error, described by Kelly, is something central to our notions of individual psychopathology. Investigation of this relationship is what begins to sheds light on the contributions of resentment, cowardice, and hatred to the pathologizing of territoriality among human beings. Kellyan ‘hostility’ is clearly a category that could be extended to include Freudian mechanisms of defense, the Adlerian life-lie, the inauthenticity of the existentialists, the Jungian failure to identify with the hero, or the rigidity characteristic of personality disorders. Perhaps we could extend such notions to the social realm and begin

to speak of ‘social psychopathology’ – that is, the tendency to demonize evidence of conceptual insufficiency, or the bearers of that evidence, and to ‘morally’ attempt to eliminate it or them from existence. This seems something close to the essence of totalitarianism and the brutality with which it is always associated. Elkhonen Goldberg – who is, not coincidentally, another student of Luria’s – has posited that the human brain is divided into two subsystems, one of which deals with novelty and the other deals with familiarity. These subsystems are lateralized. In the right-handed individual, the right hemisphere, part of the system that generates negative emotion, preferentially deals with the unknown. It is fundamentally nonlinguistic in its operations which appear tightly associated with and even dependent upon the subcortical systems described previously, the amygdala and hippocampus. The left hemisphere, by contrast – part of the system that generates positive emotion – deals with what has been previously categorized and explored. Such things tend to become stateable in words, communicable to others. In keeping with such a suggestion, the left hemisphere system is linguistic in its essential nature. The linguistic system can think about things it understands in words (and, maybe, about things it only partially understands). The nonlinguistic system is stuck with the ineffable, however, and has to make sense out of what threatens the structure of familiarity itself. The question then becomes, ‘how does the mind begin to form representations of the events and situations (territories) that it does not yet understand, or has not yet mastered?’ The answer seems to be found in the twin domains of motivation and emotion, in association with the cortical operations of the right hemisphere. If an event is unexpected, or unmapped, its potential meaning is initially processed by very rapid neurological systems. These systems assume that the unexpected or unmapped is, first, potentially fatal and then, if not fatal, intrinsically dangerous. In the latter case, it is likely to manifest innate threat features – bared teeth, low growling, predatory eyes, aggressive quick movements, blood, dismembered body parts, looming, etc. If it manifests none of these, then it is compared to frightening or threatening events in the personal past. If it matches none of these, then it may be considered either ignorable (unless it repeats) or worth exploring – now, or at some point in the future. This might be considered a form of associative thinking, something perhaps generated or motivated by the amygdala characteristic of the amygdala. This means that the brain starts to make a model of the unknown event by assuming that it is like other unknown or threatening events and it does it under the influence of associative emotional systems. This means, in a sense, that the unknown occurrences are ‘contaminated’, a priori, with everything else that is dangerous or unpredictable and has to be carefully separated from such things in the course of exploration if such separation is deemed appropriate.

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The fact that such contamination does occur has been very clearly illustrated by Mircea Eliade in his work on basic religious ideation. Eliade states: ‘‘One of the outstanding characteristics of traditional societies is the opposition that they assume between their inhabited world and the unknown and indeterminate space that surrounds it. The former is the world (more precisely, our world), the cosmos; everything outside it is no longer a cosmos but a sort of ‘other world,’ a foreign, chaotic space, peopled by ghosts, demons, ‘foreigners’ (who are assimilated to [undistinguished from, more accurately] the demons and the souls of the dead).’’ More specifically, ‘everything outside’ occupies the same categorical space as chaos and disorder itself – often given the theriomorphized form of a terrible, predatory reptile lurking in an infinite darkness. This is likely because snakes/reptiles/predators and their features are innately terrifying, produce amygdalic responses, and may therefore be productively used as ‘root metaphors’ for the place of ‘fear itself ’. The ancient Egyptians regarded the Hyksos, ‘barbarians’, as equivalent to Apophis, the serpent who nightly devoured the sun, according to Egyptian mythology. The early Indo-Europeans equated the destruction of enemies in battle to the slaying of Vrtra, the precosmogonic ‘dragon of chaos’, by Indra, the world-creating hero. Finally, the archaic Iranians or Zoroastrians equated the mythic struggle of King Faridun (a culture-creating hero, analogous to Romulus or Remus, the mythic founders of Rome) against a foreign usurper (the dragon Azdahak) with the cosmogonic fight of the hero Thraetona against Azi Dahaka, the primordial serpent of chaos. The enemies of the Old Testament Hebrews suffer the same fate as the usurpers of Iran: they come to be regarded as equivalent to Rahab, or Leviathan, the serpent Yahweh overcame in his battle to establish the world [‘‘Speak, and say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against thee, Pharaoh king of Egypt, the great dragon that lieth in the midst of his rivers, which hath said, My river is mine own, and I have made it for myself ’’ (Ezekiel 29:3); also, ‘‘Nebuchadrezzar the king of Babylon hath devoured me, he hath crushed me, he hath made me an empty vessel, he hath swallowed me up like a dragon, he hath filled his belly with my delicates, he hath cast me out’’ (Jeremiah 51:34).] What this all means is that any encounter with what is not understood – stranger, strange idea, strange occurrence – immediately evokes memories, perceptual schemes, and action patterns designed to deal with the horrifying, unacceptable, reptilian, predatory, and immoral.

Temperamental and Personality Variables in Unexplored Territory Everyone is implicitly primed to be afraid of the unknown. It is logical to implicitly fear strangers, strange ideas, and strange occurrences because their meanings are unspecified and potentially dangerous. However, everyone does not

respond to manifestations of the unknown in exactly the same manner. What is feared may also be hated and targeted for extortion or destruction. Under some circumstances, this makes the unknown vanish, at least temporarily – although it may fight back, particularly in the form of unknown people, and this can make the potentially threatening exceedingly dangerous. What is unknown may also be explored, however, after fear begins to disappear – in which case additional and potentially redemptive information may be garnered. This is, generally speaking, a useful response, if successful – in that the acquisition of additional information is generally useful from the perspective of personality expansion. More exploration means more ways of looking at the world, and more behavioral strategies at hand. What is it that determines whether the unknown is made subject to hostility or exploration? Social factors certainly play a role. As desired or necessary resources and opportunities for the acquisition of status become increasingly limited, the overall allostatic load on the organism increases, and the incremental costs of being thrust into novel social territory loom larger and larger. Thus, social instability – structural and unjust inequality of opportunity, unemployment, fiscal uncertainty – increases the probability that the bearer of unknown customs and ideas will be demonized and persecuted. However, individual differences in character must also play a determining role. These differences might be regarded as habitual responses to the unknown, and some of them are a consequence of experience – are learned.

Exacerbation of Territoriality through Aversion and Hostility to the Unknown Anything unknown can simply be avoided. In the short term, this simply makes the problem go away, or never even appear. Two strategies of avoidance appear most effective. The first is simple, and behavioral. Threats to the integrity of current territory, physical, social, and abstract, can merely be not encountered. Individuals who restrict their territory to very narrow parameters engage in this form of avoidance. They simply never put themselves voluntarily into a situation where they would have to do, think, or experience anything new. This keeps them safe – but poorly differentiated, inexperienced, fragile, and bored. The second strategy of avoidance is more abstract. If the limited actions and experiences characteristic of those who employ behavioral strategies of avoidance still produce unexpected events, they can still merely ‘refuse to engage in thinking about those events’. This does not mean that they repress them, in the classic sense, but that they merely will not engage in the effortful process that allows anomalous information to be fully processed, up the chain of integrators described by Vinogradova, such that new


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behavioral patterns and modes of perception might be established. Thus, all novel experience remains associated a priori with all things intrinsically and experientially terrifying and strange – and such things collect. Avoidance, in its two primary forms, means voluntary failure to update the framework guiding ongoing action, in consequence of desire to avoid uncertainty and fear. Unfortunately, such failure means existence in an evermore narrow frame. The domain of unprocessed novelty, defined prima facie by inaction and avoidance as ‘threat too intolerable to face’ expands inevitably with time when past knowledge is held as absolute. This is most simply because things constant in the past tend to change into variables as the future advances. More and more experience is therefore left intolerable, inexplicable, and chaotic as the cumulative effects of using avoidance as a mode of adaptation manifest themselves. Edwardes and Masters offer an interesting although perhaps mythological anecdote: ‘‘The Marabout [a West African Islamic spiritual leader] draws a large circle in the dirt, which represents the world. He places a scorpion, symbolic of man, inside the circle. The scorpion, believing it has achieved freedom, starts to run around the circle – but never attempts to go outside. After the scorpion has raced several times around the inside edge of the circle, the Marabout lowers his stick and divides the circle in half. The scorpion stops for a few seconds, then begins to run faster and faster, apparently looking for a way out, but never finding it. Strangely enough, the scorpion does not dare to cross over the line. After a few minutes, the Marabout divides the half circle. The scorpion becomes frantic. Soon the Marabout makes a space no bigger than the scorpion’s body. This is ‘the moment of truth.’ The scorpion, dazed and bewildered, finds itself unable to move one way or another. Raising its venomous tail, the scorpion turns rapidly ‘round and ‘round in a veritable frenzy. Whirling, whirling, whirling until all of its spirit and energy are spent. In utter hopelessness the scorpion stops, lowers the poisonous point of its tail, and stings itself to death. Its torment is ended’’ (Edwardes and Masters 1963: 128). The individual who lives in such a manner places himself in a spiraling process of entrapment (see Figure 1). His avoidance means that he is never called upon to master new territory. In consequence, his domain of mastery and confidence cannot grow. Furthermore, as what was once explored turns inevitably into something new, as the future advances, the ground on which he stands shrinks and more and more of the world surrounding him becomes chaotic and intolerable. Finally, his capacity for exploration diminishes as he refuses to engage in the process and cuts himself off from experiencing any of its potential benefits while his faith in that capacity diminishes in the same manner. At some point, he becomes both narrow and weak. Everything around him becomes unbearable and he can see no way out. Such conditions are optimal for the development of the kind of murderous resentment that

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Figure 1 The vicious circle of the adversary. This figure presents what might be regarded as the constituent elements of a mythological ‘journey to the underworld’. Totalitarian absolutism, rejection of the process of creative exploration, and consequent paralyzing fear of the unknown are viewed here as interacting parts of a process that inevitably produces dysregulation of individual emotion and increases meaningless suffering. This cycle produces an individual ‘inhabitant of chaos’ who is easily led to acts of resentment-motivated hatred. The ‘adversary’ is here conceptualized as the ‘archetypal’ and omnipresent enemy of courageous and creative thinking.

makes something truly pathological out of what started as mere desire to protect known territory. We can turn to mythology again, at this point, to try to obtain some sort of understanding of what conditions and states of mind such a looping process produces. The poet John Milton described the ‘‘vicious circle’’ created by the obedient/avoidant individual as spiraling down inevitably to a kind of hellish underworld of emotion: Him the Almighty Power Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal Sky With hideous ruin and combustion down To bottomless perdition, there to dwell In Adamantine Chains and penal Fire. (Milton, 1667/ 1991: 38, part 1:44–48)

Milton argued that it was precisely the failure to admit to error, and to rectify the consequences of that error, that placed Satan, symbol of totalizing rationality, ‘‘As far removed from God and light of Heaven/As from the center thrice to the utmost pole’’ (Milton, 1667/1961: 38, 1:54–1:74). He argued further that voluntary admission of inadequacy and guilt would have been sufficient for redemption. But ‘‘obdurate pride’’ and arrogance, associated inextricably with the tendency to refuse to accept error and accept ignorance, made such admission impossible. Totalitarian refusal to develop new skill and new modes of conceptualization when confronted with error makes life increasingly miserable. Individuals who are increasingly miserable become increasingly vicious, resentful, and full of hate. Such hate, in extreme forms, comes to be expressed in implicit identity with the source

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of archetypal evil, and is played out in active and often conscious revenge against the conditions of existence: - for whence But from the author of all ill could spring So deep a malice, to confound the race Of mankind in one root, and Earth with Hell To mingle and involve, done all to spite The great Creator? (Milton, 1667/1991: 71, part 2: 380–385)

What is the logical response of a victim to a terrible and unreasonable world apparently bent on his suffering and destruction? Hatred, contempt, and violence – and not because the manifestation of these motivations is going to do him any good. The fully resentful victim is perfectly willing to destroy himself while exacting revenge. The vengeful response to the injustice of existence is even more fitting, more esthetically pleasing, if it is just as damaging to the perpetrator as it is to the victim. That way the revenge on Mankind and Being is more complete. It is for such reasons that the two teenage killers at the Columbine high school, for example, killed themselves. It was certainly not for fear of post-crime imprisonment. The killers made their statement, and their own violent deaths merely drove the message home. Most investigators of the Columbine killings claimed that they could not understand the boys’ motivations. They could understand them. They just did not want to. Eric Harris, the most literate of the pair, explained himself as clearly as he could: ‘‘I hate the fucking world. Kill mankind. No one should survive. . . . I will sooner die than betray my own thoughts, but before I leave this worthless place, I will kill whoever I deem unfit.’’ Milton captured such motivation perfectly: Farewell happy Fields Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrors, hail Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell Receive thy new possessor – one who brings A mind not to be changed by place or time. (Milton, 1667/1961: 44, 1:249–1:253)

If this seems too literary, and not sufficiently psychological, try to otherwise make sense of the following diary entry made by Harris just the day before his mass murder and suicide: ‘‘About 26.5 hours from now the judgment will begin. Difficult but not impossible, necessary, nervewracking and fun. What fun is life without a little death? It’s interesting, when I ’m in my human form, knowing I ’m going to die. Everything has a touch of triviality to it.’’ Harris transformed himself, voluntarily, into the embodiment of the archetype of evil, into Satan himself, into Cain, murderer of his innocent brother, motivated by the following principle Goethe expresses: The spirit I, that endlessly denies. And rightly, too; for all that comes to birth

Is fit for overthrow, as nothing worth; Wherefore the world were better sterilized; Thus all that’s here as Evil recognized Is gain to me, and downfall, ruin, sin The very element I prosper in. (Goethe, 1832/1979: 75)

The human desire to ‘be right, above all’ – to presume personal omniscience – produces a state of being antithetically opposed to the process of exploration and the expansion of life and characterized by increasing environmental maladaptation and suffering. This is the process that was represented mythologically by Milton as the heavenly insurrection of Lucifer, the light of rationality, motivated by the desire to be placed above God in the ‘‘spiritual hierarchy’’ – motivated by the desire to assume complete knowledge. The suffering produced by such a totalitarian attitude breeds resentment and the desire for revenge. Vengeful desire and resentment broods, patiently, waiting for a forum of risk-free manifestation. When patriotism calls for brutality – during the ‘call to war’, for example – the individual is well-prepared. He can torment the ‘enemies of the state’, hide behind a mask of admirable social conformity – even bravery – and fulfill his darkest fantasies (Mayakovsy, in Solzhenitsyn, 1973: 41): With cohesion, construction, grit and repression Wring the neck of this gang run riot!

Thus the existential cowardice of the individual pathologically increases the danger of the intrinsic and necessary territoriality of the species – and atrocities committed ‘in the name of the state’ constantly and permanently threaten both human self-regard and the likelihood of long-term human survival.

Reduction of Territoriality through Expansion of Individual Competence Is there an alternative, given that the unknown and unexplored is threatening and dangerous? The developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, who adopted a constructivist stance with regards to the development of personality, presumed in essence that individual character was formulated as a consequence of the assimilation of information from the experiential world and subsequent accommodation of the structure of the organism to that experience. This might be best understood as pattern to pattern matching. The simplest organisms and the youngest human beings map the patterns of the environment directly onto patterns of action, changing their capacity for action. Perception may be changed in this manner, as well. New information gathered in the course of error-motivated exploration changes the structure of the systems that perceive the outcome of such exploration, as well as altering sensorimotor patterns at lower levels of the sensorimotor system. What this means, essentially, is that the organism


builds itself out of the information that it gathers in the course of active exploration (and that such information is derived from the plenitude of patterns available for analysis in the world of experience). Thus, organisms that explore freely are more sophisticated, both with regard to the motor output strategies that they might employ in a given situation and the perceptual strategies or frames that they might use to construe the situation (and that serve as a guide to security, resource acquisition, and further exploration for information). This means that they have more means at their disposal to turn unexpected occurrences to their own advantage and to experience delight in what has not yet been mapped, instead of terror. Such individuals learn to positively appreciate the vicissitudes of life rather than hiding their light underneath a bushel. A vast clinical literature attests to the fact that voluntary exposure to things and situations that elicit anxiety and other forms of negative emotion is curative. Individuals need work to extend the boundaries of the frames that regulate their social existence, structure their goals, and modulate their emotion as well as merely maintaining those frames. New territories, new sources

of anomalous information – which threaten the structures that inhibit terror – can be confronted and mined for significance. This means voluntary tolerance of an interim period of anxiety, followed by re-establishment of stability, in an enhanced form (see Figure 2). This pattern of voluntary frame transformation has been conceptualized, simply, as ‘steady state, breach, crisis, redress’ (and is central to complex narrative – mythology – itself). This is a hero myth, fundamentally: voluntary encounter with the terrible, redemptive unknown, the dragon of chaos; death of the current personality, followed by rebirth. The same pattern underlies archaic rites of initiation, processes of theoretical transformation, and more abstract religious systems of thought, such as Christianity or Buddhism. The great rituals, dramas, and religions of mankind – our most profound narratives and proto-narratives – are erected upon the (meta)story of ‘paradise, encounter with chaos, fall, and redemption’. Individuals who explore when neither their actions nor their perceptions produce the desired outcome become, simultaneously, more differentiated and more unified as they gather more information and transform it into conception and skill. Thus, they are less threatened by anomalous occurrences as their range of apprehension and

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Figure 2 The ‘meta-frame’: transformation of the simple frame. This figure portrays the dissolution and regeneration of a stable frame. Sufficiently anomalous information can undermine not only the means to an end, but the end itself. Such disruption produces emotional dysregulation as the stable meaning attributed to events in the course of normal goal-directed behavior disappears and is replaced by more global and negative emotion (consequent to the ‘renovelization’ of previously categorized experience). The re-emergent frame – which will only emerge as a consequence of voluntary exploratory behavior – should be more ‘complete’ than the frame it replaces as it ‘consists’ of the constituent elements of the previous frame ‘integrated’ with the information exploration of the anomalous occurrence generated. The re-emergent frame should be more stable – that is, less easily disrupted by ongoing events (since it now accounts for an additional possibility: that is, the previously destructive anomaly). The re-establishment of a new frame might be considered another ‘stage’ in cognitive development.

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response widens. This means that individuals who admit to the limitations of their territory and constantly work voluntarily to overcome those limitations are healthier, more competent, and much less likely to adopt rigid, selfdefensively aggressive, or absolutely hostile stances toward what they do not yet understand.

Conclusion The territory that human beings inhabit is physical and concrete, but it is also social and abstract. The meaning of things and situations is stabilized by the implicit social contract that governs actions and perceptions in their presence. Strange occurrences, strange people, and strange ideas may threaten the integrity of the social contract that constitutes territory, and undermine and terrify the individuals who utilize knowledge of that contract and its associated meanings to stabilize their emotions. Thus, the threat from the strange may be met with fear and with force. Habitual individual response to the unknown can modulate the nature of such threat. Those who chronically shrink from anything unexpected cease to expand their territories of competence, and lose faith in their ability to prevail. In addition, they become increasingly maladapted, as things they take for granted change uncontrollably around them. This makes them increasingly resentful about the nature of life itself and increasingly likely to take revenge. Those who chronically explore in the face of uncertainty, by contrast, expand their domains of confidence and increase their faith in their individual abilities. This makes exposure to the strange less threatening – even welcome. Such individuals have something to rely on beyond certainty and do not have to bristle with anger and resentment every time their current beliefs are challenged. See also: Chemical and Biological Warfare; Civil Society; Cooperation, Competition, and Conflict

Further Reading Becker, S. and Wojtowicz, J. M. (2007). A model of hippocampal neurogenesis in memory and mood disorders. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11, 70–76. Blanchard, D. J. and Blanchard, D. C. (1989). Antipredator defensive behaviors in a visible burrow system. Journal of Comparative Psychology 103, 70–82. Blanchard, D. C., Blanchard, R. J., and Rodgers, R. J. (1991). Risk assessment and animal models of anxiety. In Olivier, B., Mos, J., and Slangen, J. L. (eds.) Animal models in psychopharmacology, pp. 117–134. Boston, MA: Birkhauser Verlag. Brown, E. S., Woolston, D., Frol, A., et al. (2004). Hippocampal volume, spectroscopy, cognition, and mood in patients receiving corticosteroid therapy. Biological Psychiatry 55, 538–545. Browning, C. R. (1993). Ordinary men: Reserve police battalion 101 and the final solution in Poland. New York: Harper Perennial. Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bunsey, M. and Eichenbaum, H. B. (1996). Conservation of hippocampal memory function in rats and humans. Nature 379, 255–257. Campbell, J. (1968). The hero with a thousand faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Davidson, R. J. (1992). Anterior cerebral asymmetry and the nature of emotion. Brain and Cognition 20, 125–151. Dennett, D. C. (1984). Cognitive wheels: The frame problem in AI. In Hookway, C. (ed.) Minds, machines and evolution, pp. 129–151. New York: Cambridge University Press. Dennett, D. C. (1991). Real patterns. The Journal of Philosophy 88, 27–51. De Waal, F. (2000). Chimpanzee politics: Power and sex among apes. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Edwardes, A. and Masters, R. E. L. (1963). The cradle of erotica. New York: Julian Press. Eliade, M. (1958). Rites and symbols of initiation: The mysteries of birth and rebirth. New York: Harper–Colophon. Eliade, M. (1978). A history of religious ideas, vols. 1–3. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Eliade, M. (1987). The sacred and the profane: The nature of religion (first publ. 1959). New York: Harcourt Brace. Goethe, J. W. (1979). Faust, part one. (first publ. 1832; trans. Wayne, P.). New York: Penguin Books. Goldberg, E. and Costa, L. D. (1981). Hemisphere differences in the acquisition and use of descriptive systems. Brain and Language 14, 144–173. Goldberg, E., Podell, K., and Lovell, M. (1994). Lateralization of frontal lobe functions and cognitive novelty. Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience 6, 371–378. Goodall, J. (1990). Through a window. Boston, MA: Houghton–Mifflin. Gray, J. (1982). The neuropsychology of anxiety: An enquiry into the function of the septal-hippocampal system. New York: Oxford University Press. Gray, J. A. and McNaughton, N. (2003). The neuropsychology of anxiety: An enquiry into the function of the septal-hippocampal system, 2nd edn. New York: Oxford University Press. Grossberg, S. (1987). Competitive learning: From interactive activation to adaptive resonance. Cognitive Science 11, 23–63. Harris, S. H. (1994). Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932–45, and the American Cover-Up. New York: Routledge. Howard, M. W., Fotedar, M. S., Datey, A. V., and Hasselmo, M. E. (2005). The temporal context model in spatial navigation and relational learning: Toward a common explanation of medial temporal lobe function across domains. Psychological Review 112, 75–116. Janoff-Bulman, R. (1992). Shattered assumptions. New York: Free Press. Jung, C. G. (1967). Bollingen series XX, The collected works of C. G. Jung, vol. 5: Symbols of transformation: An analysis of the prelude to a case of schizophrenia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jung, C. G. (1968). Bollingen series XX, The collected works of C. G. Jung, vol. 12: Psychology and alchemy (trans. Hull, R. F. C.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jung, C. G. (1969). Bollingen series XX, The collected works of C. G. Jung, vol. 13: Psychology and religion: West and East. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kelly, G. (1955). The psychology of personal constructs. New York: Norton. Kelly, G. (1969). The threat of aggression. In Maher, B. (ed.) Clinical psychology and personality: The selected papers of George Kelly, pp. 281–288. New York: Wiley. Kravitz, E. A. (2000). Serotonin and aggression: Insights gained from a lobster model system and speculations on the role of amine neurons in a complex behavior. Journal of Comparative Physiology 186, 221–238. Kuhn, T. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. LeDoux, J. E. (1996). The emotional brain. New York: Simon & Schuster. Lorenz, K. (1974). On aggression. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch. Lubow, R. E. (1989). Latent inhibition and conditioned attention theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. MacLean, P. D. (1949). Psychosomatic disease and the ‘visceral brain’: Recent developments bearing on the Papez theory of emotion. Psychosomatic Medicine 11, 338–353. Mayakovsky, V. cited in Solzhenitsyn, A. (1973). The gulag archipelago I. New York: Harper and Row. McEwen, B. S. (2000). Allostasis and allostatic load: Implications for neuropsychopharmacology. Neuropsychopharmacology 22, 108–124.

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Milton, J. (1961). Paradise lost (and other poems) (first publ. 1667). New York: New American Library. O’Keefe, J. and Dostrovsky, J. (1971). The hippocampus as a spatial map: Preliminary evidence from unit activity in the freely-moving rat. Brain Research 34, 171–175. O’Keefe, J. and Nadel, L. (1978). The hippocampus as a cognitive map. New York: Clarendon Press. Ohman, A. and Mineka, S. (2003). The malicious serpent: Snakes as a prototypical stimulus for an evolved module of fear. Current Directions in Psychological Science 12, 5–9. Papez, J. W. (1937). A proposed mechanism of emotion. Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 38, 725–744. Peterson, J. B. (1999). Maps of meaning: The architecture of belief. New York: Routledge. Peterson, J. B. (2006). Religion, sovereignty, natural rights, and the constituent elements of experience. Archives of the Psychology of Religion/Archiv fu¨r Religionspsychologie 29, 135–180. Peterson, J. B. and Flanders, J. L. (2002). Complexity management theory: Motivation for ideological rigidity and social conflict. Cortex 38, 429–458. Phillips, R. G. and LeDoux, J. E. (1992). Differential contribution of amygdala and hippocampus to cued and contextual fear conditioning. Behavioral Neuroscience 106, 274–285. Piaget, J. (1932). The moral judgment of the child. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Sarbin, T. R. (1986). The narrative as a root metaphor for psychology. In Sarbin, T. R. (ed.) Narrative psychology: The storied nature of human conduct, pp. 3–21. New York: Praeger. Scoville, W. B. and Milner, B. (1957). Loss of recent memory after bilateral hippocampal lesions. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry 20, 11–12.

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Smith, D. M. and Mizumori, S. J. (2006). Hippocampal place cells, context and episodic memory. Hippocampus 16, 716–729. Solzhenitsyn, A. I. (1975). The gulag archipelago. New York: Harper and Row. Sokolov, E. N. (1963). Higher nervous functions: The orienting reflex. Annual Review of Physiology 25, 545–580. Swanson, L. W. (2000). Cerebral hemisphere regulation of motivated behavior. Brain Research 886, 113–164. Swanson, L. W. (2003). Brain architecture. New York: Oxford University Press. Tsuchiya, T. (2000). Why Japanese doctors performed human experiments in China 1933–1945. Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics 10, 179–180. Vermetten, E., Vythilingam, M., Southwick, S. M., Charney, D. S., and Bremner, J. D. (2003). Long-term treatment with paroxetine increases verbal declarative memory and hippocampal volume in posttraumatic stress disorder. Biological Psychiatry 54, 693–702. Vinogradova, O. S. (2001). Hippocampus as comparator: Role of the two input and two output systems of the hippocampus in selection and registration of information. Hippocampus 11, 578–598. Vinogradova, O. S. and Sokolov, E. N. (1955). Extinction of vascular component of orientation reaction. Zh Vyssh Nerv Deiat Im I P Pavlova (Journal of Higher Nervous Activity, named after I. P. Pavlov) 5, 344–350.

Relevant Websites http://www.mapsofmeaning.com http://www.eubios.info/EJ106/EJ106C.htm http://www.uoregon.edu/rbear/lost/lost.html

Social Psychology of Violence Daniel Christie, Ohio State University, Marion, OH, USA Michael Wessells, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Situational, Cognitive, and Systemic Sources of Violence Three Kinds of Violence: Episodic, Structural, and Cultural Analysis of Conflict and Violence at Multiple Levels

Glossary Enemy Images Exaggerated representations of the ‘other’ as thoroughly diabolical, aggressive, and untrustworthy. Dehumanization The mental process of stripping away the human qualities of the other. Fundamental Attribution Error The tendency to perceive the bad behavior of out-group members to bad character and to perceive the bad behavior of in-group members to situational factors.

Social psychology examines the psychological influence of people on people. Although violence such as the mass killing at Virginia Tech in April 2007 by a lone gunman is

Social Psychology of Peace-making Social Psychology of Structural and Cultural Violence Peace Psychology: The Pursuit of Peace-building Further Reading

Structural Violence Indirect violence through social injustice, inequity, and failure to meet basic human needs for items such as food and shelter. Superordinate Goals Goals that lie within the interests of each group in a conflict but that can be attained only through intergroup cooperation, which reduces tensions and destructive conflict.

often seen as individual aggression, social psychology analyzes such acts through the lens of social and situational influences.

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Situational, Cognitive, and Systemic Sources of Violence Following World War II, psychological analyses of violence often emphasized personality variables, such as the degree to which people are receptive to prejudice or have a tendency to endorse authoritarian beliefs. This emphasis arose as an effort to understand the rise of fascism in Europe and later, the problem of race relations in the United States. However, it soon became apparent that much violent behavior owes not to personality alone but also the powerful influence of social situations. The Power of the Situation Stanley Milgram demonstrated that under particular conditions, ordinary people would readily obey authority figures, even if it meant delivering what the participants believed to be painful and deadly shocks to a victim. Obedience enables violence by allowing perpetrators to attribute their actions to the authority figure who issued the orders and to avoid moral pangs by saying ‘‘I was only following orders.’’ Obedience to authority has been an important dynamic in genocides and mass killings, from the Holocaust to the My Lai massacre, in which US troops followed orders from their commander to slaughter more than 200 unarmed Vietnamese people, including women and children. Solomon Asch and colleagues demonstrated how individuals in a group tended to agree with the prevailing judgments of group members and resist breaking rank even when it was obvious that the group’s judgment was inaccurate. Pressures to conform also operate at the policymaking level among elites. Irving Janis has provided evidence that flawed decisions such as the Kennedy administration’s decision to launch the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba with a small number of poorly equipped and trained Cuban refugees, arose in part from groupthink. When groupthink occurs, members of decision-making groups seek unanimity and group cohesion at the expense of critical thinking and contingency planning. Groupthink is particularly likely to occur in groups that are highly cohesive and have members act as self-appointed mindguards to bring potential dissenters into line with the group thinking. Groupthink may also have contributed to the US decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003. Although this decision was based in no small part on the strong group expectation among policy leaders of finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the evidence indicates that this expectation had little or no basis in reality. Phillip Zimbardo’s mock ‘‘prison study’’ had college students engage in a simulation in which some students were prisoners whereas others were guards. When the prison ‘guards’ began engaging in abusive behavior, the experiment had to be discontinued after six days for ethical

reasons rather than continuing for two weeks as originally planned. These results indicate the power of the situation to lead normal people to engage in abusive behavior. The outcome of the Zimbardo study bears an eerie resemblance to the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the abuses of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. In both situations, US soldiers adopted abusive roles with the tacit approval of military commanders. In both cases, they appeared to have abdicated personal responsibility, regarding abuse as part of their job. An important difference is that official US policy at the time endorsed abuses of detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay in ways that violate the UN Convention Against Torture. The legitimation of abuse by high government officials such as Donald Rumsfeld, then head of the US Department of Defense, helped to create strong command pressures for actionable intelligence. These pressures, coupled with the enshrinement of abuse in official policy, added significantly to the already enormous situational pressures to abuse detainees. Research by Albert Bandura on social learning theory demonstrated that children did not have to be frustrated or rewarded to exhibit aggressive behavior. Instead, they could learn aggression by merely observing a model behaving aggressively. Observational learning is believed to encourage copycat crimes that mimic other crimes that have occurred recently. Observational learning can occur even through exposure to media and video game violence. Taken in large doses, youth learn new ways to behave violently, perceive violence as normal, and exhibit desensitization to violence, as indicated by reduced levels of physiological responses to violent events. Extensive media violence may also lead viewers to have an exaggerated sense of danger in everyday life and to see the world as being even more troubled than it already is. Social learning also occurs through external rewards and punishments and also through the internalization of group-defined values and expectations. Gang violence, for example, exhibits many of these social learning processes. Young people who see older, respected people join gangs and engage in violence also tend to join gangs. Young people often join gangs to obtain social rewards such as respect, power, and a sense of safety and belongingness. Cognitive Influences in Social Contexts In addition to underscoring the power of the situation, a second emerging theme in social psychology, like the field of psychology in general, is an emphasis on cognitive processes. Accordingly, social behavior is viewed as a function of cognitive processes that intervene between situational variables and behavioral outcomes. From a social cognitive perspective, violent behavior takes place in a social context and is largely a product of the way in which the individual interprets and processes


social information. The bully in the schoolyard, for example, may be particularly attentive to threatening cues in the social environment and have a repertoire of violent mental scripts that can be readily accessed from memory and quickly executed behaviorally. The importance of social cognition is highly visible in the use of political propaganda by groups in armed conflict. These groups tend to create mirror enemy images that portray the ‘other’ as thoroughly aggressive, diabolical, and untrustworthy. Often, the images are dehumanizing in that they depict the other as subhuman and rapacious. In World War II, for example, both the US and Japan used enemy images of each other to prepare troops to kill. After all, it is easier to kill someone who seems savage and subhuman. In the Rwandan genocide, enemy images were conspicuous in the calls over the radio for Hutus to kill their implacable enemies, the Tutsis, who were described as ‘‘cockroaches.’’ Cognitive factors also influence the decisions made by leaders. In situations in which there are high levels of fear and threat, for example, the complexity of thought tends to decline. People tend to be cognitive misers who limit potential burdens on their mental resources by adopting simplified views of the world. In violent conflict, groups tend to adopt black-and-white views of the Good Us versus the Bad Them, with each group typically deemphasizing the diversity of views that may in fact exist among the members of the opposition. Leaders, too, show a marked propensity to simplify when under stress. In analyzing the complexity of leaders’ speeches and writing before and during crises, Philip Tetlock has established that in the heat of a crisis, leaders show less tolerance of ambiguity, tend not to explore diverse arguments regarding the crisis, and tend to overlook differences that exist among the opposition. The net result can be oversimplification and misguided action. When facing a complex situation involving much uncertainty, people use, without conscious planning, fallible heuristics or shortcuts for making difficult decisions. Leaders, for example, may judge a current threatening situation by its similarity to the patterns of conflict that are most available in memory. If the Hitler-at-Munich pattern is highly salient and available in memory, then leaders may judge attempts at negotiation as inappropriate since attempts to negotiate with or to appease Hitler had disastrous consequences. In addition, leaders show strong loss-avoidance tendencies and are often willing to avoid losses by taking risks much greater than those they would take to obtain a goal they had not previously achieved. Systemic Interactions Although the origin of social psychology can be traced to Western intellectual traditions that emphasize

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individualism, contemporary social psychologists are mindful that individuals and their thought processes in the context of interpersonal relations often are manifest in actions and policies that take place on the larger stage of intergroup and international politics. For instance, Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian leader, had strong enemy images of Kosovar Albanians and a particular view of history, both of which he used to stir public opinion, fuel the fires of nationalism, and justify the invasion of Kosovo. Leaders such as Milosevic, to some extent, reflect the will of the people, but also exercise considerable impact as leaders who spread particular images of the other and legitimate discriminatory and hostile actions. In general, it is useful to think of social systems in which violence can arise at multiple levels such as family, community, ethnic group, societal, and international levels. The levels interact extensively, as the violence at one level may also fuel violence at other levels. For example, at an individual level, intrapsychic processes such as stereotypes can produce discriminatory behavior, which in turn can be part of a group process that supports exclusionary and violent national policies. Coming from the other direction, intergroup fighting can lead to increased pressure not to associate with ‘the other,’ and this can lead, in turn, to polarization at community and interpersonal levels. While it is recognized that different levels of social complexity have emergent properties, social psychological analyses of the interaction of cognitive and situational variables have provided a useful lens for understanding not only individual and interpersonal behavior but also group and intergroup behavior.

Three Kinds of Violence: Episodic, Structural, and Cultural The term ‘aggression’ has been equated with ‘violence’ and the emphasis has been on individual action. Both terms imply that harm has been done, but ‘aggression’ of the instrumental variety further implies actions that are intentionally carried out by an individual. It is important to recognize, however, that violence may or may not be intentional and may be carried out at various levels of social complexity. A more differentiated view of violence contrasts episodes and structural forms of violence, as illustrated in Table 1. Whereas people often think of direct forms of violence such as homicide and gang violence, some of the greatest harm comes from structural violence such as the caste system in India that discriminates systematically against ‘the untouchables’ and causes many deaths owing to deprivation of basic necessities such as access to quality healthcare. As Gandhi noted, poverty is one of the most potent forms of violence and harms people on a

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Table 1 Episodic and structural violence Episodic violence

Structural violence

. Also called ‘direct’ violence . Typically harms people quickly . Intermittently kills or harms people . Acute insult to well-being . Dramatic

. Also called ‘‘indirect’’ violence . Typically harms people slowly . Continuously deprives people of basic need satisfaction . Chronic insult to well-being . Normalized

large scale though there is often no particular person or group who causes the poverty. In general, episodes of violence are often intentional, personal, instrumental, and sometimes politically motivated. In contrast, structural violence is a result of the way in which institutions are organized, providing some people with material goods as well as representation and voice in matters that affect the well-being while depriving others. These structures are relatively impervious social arrangements. Although socially constructed, they cannot be imbued with motives or intentionality in contrast to many cases of episodic violence. Cultural violence occurs when the symbolic sphere of our existence supports episodes or structures of violence. Culturally constructed narratives, such as the ‘doctrine of just war theory’, specify when direct violence is justified. Cultural narratives may also be used to support structural violence, for example, the ‘protestant ethic’ and its emphasis on individual responsibility can be used to justify enormous gaps in wealth and health between different classes in a society. One of the most important tasks in limiting violence is to increase the relative strength of cultural narratives that support peace rather than violence.

Analysis of Conflict and Violence at Multiple Levels In violence-saturated contexts such as war zones or innercity neighborhoods controlled by gangs, violence in the family often spills over into the streets. Conversely, the violence witnessed in the society helps to fuel violence in families, as people bring home guns and violent habits learned in the streets. Violence at the individual level affects violence at national and international levels and vice versa. Interpersonal Violence Two prominent forms of interpersonal violence are spouse abuse and homicide. Spouse abuse is rooted in systems of patriarchy that create rigid gender roles and systematically privilege men over women and legitimate the use of violence as a means of disciplining one’s spouse and

demonstrating machismo. In most societies, men hold greater power than women, and members of both genders internalize values and hold to social roles that privilege men as the decision-makers. At household level, many men believe they have dominion over the home and may regard challenges to their authority as a transgression that must be answered by violence. In grim testimony to the potency of observational learning, men’s tendency to beat their spouse often increases significantly if the men themselves had grown up in families in which men beat their wives. In many war zones, rates of spouse abuse frequently rise as unemployed men, who have lost their role as providers, use spouse abuse as a means of venting frustration, reasserting control over their domain, and boosting their sense of power and manhood. Violence in communities often involves fighting between individuals, apart from gangs. Leonard Berkowitz has distinguished between hostile aggression that is emotionally driven by anger, hatred, or fear and evoked without much thought, and instrumental aggression that enables people to obtain particular goals. Both forms of violence may be strongly influenced by cognition. For example, people who are angry tend to engage in higher levels of violence if the situation contains cues such as the sight of weapons that people usually associate with violence. Instrumental violence is influenced by how people perceive themselves in relation to their social environment. In a very poor, urban neighborhood, for example, materially deprived youth may use violence as a means of taking coveted items such as expensive clothes, thereby demonstrating their power and gaining respect for their prowess. To maintain power, individuals may be highly watchful for the slightest sign of disrespect, which they respond to with violence. In such contexts, respect is very much in the eye of the beholder. Intergroup Violence There are multiple, complementary theories about the social psychological origins of intergroup violence. According to realistic conflict theory, intergroup hostility is likely to occur when members of two or more groups are in competition for some resource, particularly when the structure of the conflict is zero-sum – one side’s gain is the other side’s loss. Armed conflict in Africa and other areas has often been animated by competition over resources such as diamonds, oil, and timber. Similarly, disputes over land animate hostility between Israel and Syria, Turkey and Greece, India and Pakistan, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and many other interstate contests. Realistic conflicts over diminishing resources are expected to increase in the future because of population growth, increasing consumption of natural resources, a growing income gap, and deteriorating supplies of resources such as clean water, arable land, food, extractable oil, and precious minerals. Competition for oil, for


example, is likely to produce a growing number of violent episodes in regions such as the Persian Gulf, Caspian Sea Basin, and South China Sea that have large oil reserves. Conflicts can arise even when one side’s gain is not at the expense of the other side. Studies on relative deprivation theory have demonstrated that perceptions that one’s own group is deprived of money, jobs, status, or other coveted items may be as influential as differences that exist in reality. The mere perception of a discrepancy between one group’s current standard of living and the standard of living that members of the group believe they should be enjoying relative to another group can result in intergroup hostility. The spread of democracy and capitalism can leave in their wake intergroup prejudice as in the cases of South Africa’s transition to Black majority rule, a democratizing trend that produced an increase in the level of prejudice toward Blacks among White youth. Similarly, East Germany’s movement toward capitalism following the Cold War yielded a rise in xenophobia among youth who felt they were being left behind. Tensions over immigration also are amenable to a relative deprivation analysis. Henri Tajfel and others have developed social identity theory to explain how people, even in the absence of deprivation and conflict, tend to form mental categories that divide their social world into in-group and out-group members. Furthermore, people favor and identify with the in-group and derive a sense of self-esteem through their identification with the in-group. However, research on social identity also indicates that in-group identity precedes out-group hostility and intergroup conflict. Importantly, the formation of social identity and the division into in-groups and out-groups does not inevitably lead to out-group hostility and conflict. Social identity stirs hostility and violence when it is coupled with processes such as oppression, real or perceived threats or mistreatment at the hands of the out-group, hostile ideologies, hatred, and a sense of victimization. Social identity and categorization processes have been examined in the context of the conflict between Turkish and Greek Cypriots, Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, and Hutus and Tutsis in the Rwandan genocide, among others. That social identity alone does not cause violence is evident in the distinction between patriotism, defined as love of one’s country, and nationalism, which holds that one’s country or people are superior to others. Patriotism is a manifestation of social identity processes, and uses a host of symbols (e.g., flags, anthems, etc.) to bolster in-group cohesion and self-worth. In contrast to moderate patriotism, nationalism often fuels hostility and violence toward the out-group. Inflamed by extremist ideology and perceived threats, as in the case of Nazi Germany, nationalism simultaneously elevates the in-group and animates out-group enmity and violence. The combination of threatening situations and social categorization can lead to highly positive views of the

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in-group and highly negative views of the out-group. Often, the in-group views members of the out-group as homogenous and attributes their negative actions to immutable qualities of their character while attributing their positive actions to situational forces, a phenomenon called the fundamental attribution error. Conversely, positive actions by the in-group are viewed as evidence for their inherent goodness, while negative actions are seen as driven by situational forces. In its simplest form: they attack us because they are evil, while we attack them because the situation gives us no other choice. Their efforts to communicate with us are driven by the situation, while our efforts to communicate are due to our peace-loving disposition. When groups in conflict turn to violence, victim– perpetrator cycles of circular causality can develop as one or both sides develop a sense of victimization that is woven into their social identity, which is defined in part by opposition to the other group. Further, through social identity processes, victims are likely to perceive atrocities committed against members of their group as a personal affront, thereby linking group trauma and individual trauma. Communities often construct powerful collective memories of victimization, which are transmitted across generations and are honored publicly in rituals and memorials. In the former Yugoslavia, Serbs remembered their victimization by the Croat Ustasha during World War II, providing Slobodan Milosevic with a powerful dynamic to exploit. In apartheid South Africa, oppression and collective memories of mistreatment helped fuel Black consciousness, which contributed to violence against the apartheid regime. Among Jews in Israel, searing memories of their history of persecution and Hitler’s attempt to exterminate them became woven into their collective identity, creating a ‘never again’ mindset that helped fuel the already heated conflict between Jews and Arabs. Mass Violence At the societal level, the occurrence of mass violence, including political terrorist acts and genocide, owe in part to social psychological factors. Although terrorist acts have often been viewed as the product of mental illness or psychopaths, most terrorists appear to be normal and use terrorist acts as an instrument to achieve goals they could not attain through other means. For example, suicide bombers in Sri Lanka have, in videos left before their deaths, explained that their actions are necessary parts of their struggle for liberation from social oppression and injustice. Viewed in this manner, their acts of mass violence are not irrational but are rational expressions of a particular ideology that rationalizes bombing as an instrument for avenging past injustices inflicted upon their people and achieving liberation. Similarly, extremist suicide bombers in Iraq who kill US soldiers do so out of desire to end what they regard as

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an unjust occupation and an attempt of Christians to dominate Muslim people. Also, many Iraqis regard the violence against the US as payback for perceived wrongs such as the US support for Israel, which has dominated Palestinians. Regardless of the accuracy of such views, there is little doubt that radical ideologies shape how people perceive the actions of others, and these perceptions can fuel violence. Radical ideologies are particularly likely to incite violence when they are widely believed and leaders are skilled in using them to manipulate people into fighting. An important note is that the US, too, has been influenced by rather extreme ideologies such as the doctrine of ‘‘manifest destiny’’ at various points in its history. By 2007, many Americans came to the view that the 2003 war and occupation of Iraq was itself the product of extremist ideology and skilled manipulation of public opinion. Radical ideologies also play an important role in enabling genocide. Hitler’s regime, for example, embraced a thoroughly racist ideology that portrayed Germany as a body whose health was at risk due to the presence of Jewish people, gypsies, and other groups who were portrayed as imminent threats. Often, radical ideologies gain in following owing to absolute deprivation, which, like relative deprivation, can be a precursor for violence. Difficult life conditions, such as severe economic problems, frustrate the human need for satisfaction. In response, people may adopt destructive ideologies in which ‘others’ are viewed as barriers to need satisfaction. Taken to an extreme, the belief develops that those who constitute barriers must be eliminated. Through an analysis of case studies, Ervin Staub has demonstrated that absolute deprivation has been an important precondition for a number historical cases of mass murder and genocide including the Holocaust, the genocide of Armenians in Turkey, the Cambodian genocide, and mass killings in Argentina. The 1994 Rwandan genocide illustrates the interplay of diverse social psychological processes. In addition to the absolute deprivation described earlier, there was extreme competition for land. Hutus and Tutsis both experienced high levels of fear of the other group since historically there had been mass killings of each by the other in Rwanda and Burundi. Historically, animosity arose from the social injustice done when the Belgian colonials privileged Tutsis over Hutus, leading Hutus to turn the tables following independence. Hutu leaders used dehumanized images of Tutsis to quieten any moral angst over killing, and the people embraced an extremist ideology that made them easier to manipulate. Obedience animated much killing as local and national leaders issued orders to kill, and also fear motivated killing, as people who disobeyed demands to kill were themselves killed. In this manner, large numbers of ordinary people became elements in a societal killing machine that murdered approximately 800 000 people.

Social Psychology of Peace-making Around the middle of the twentieth century, Gordon Allport’s contact hypothesis proposed that groups could reduce their biases toward each other through contact as long as certain conditions were met. Subsequent research has generally supported the view that contact works when the groups (1) work together cooperatively, (2) have frequent and prolonged contact, (3) enjoy equal status, and (4) receive institutional and social support. Hence, contact alone will not reduce prejudice between groups. To the contrary, efforts to integrate schools in the United States, for example, often led to higher levels of prejudice between Blacks and Whites, largely because not all of the conditions for successful contact were met. Morton Deutsch has shown that conflict can be constructive if it is managed in a constructive way that prevents violent episodes. Conflict can be an opportunity for building constructive relationships at interpersonal and intergroup levels. In interpersonal relationships, for example, conflict can stimulate partners to express feelings, talk problems through, and solve issues in a mutually satisfying way that strengthens the long-term relationship. Between groups, conflict can enhance in-group cohesion, a common purpose, and yield mutually beneficial agreements. Two broad means of managing conflict in a constructive manner are negotiation and mediation. When individuals or groups engage in principled negotiation, as contrasted with hard bargaining, conflict is treated as an opportunity for joint problem-solving and resolution that meets the concerns and interests of all parties. The principled approach focuses not on stated positions but on interests that underlie positions. The approach also encourages (1) intergroup empathy in an effort to understand what each other really wants; (2) separating the people from the problem; (3) avoiding criticism of each other but being tough on the problem; (4) inventing options that yield mutual gains; and (5) using objective criteria to judge whether proposed agreements satisfy everyone’s interests. Principled negotiation tends to yield creative options, positional flexibility, and improved relationships though mutual learning and problem-solving. Mediation consists of a third-party facilitation that helps conflicted individuals or parties negotiate an agreement. Mediators do not have to be neutral in the conflict, but they must be trusted by the various parties. Mediation is used widely at local levels in child custody disputes, schoolbased conflicts among students, and labor-management disputes, among others. Mediation is used frequently in the international arena. Amidst hostility and distrust between warring parties that are reluctant to negotiate, a mediator can use leverage, rewards, and punishments (i.e., carrots-and-sticks approach) that can increase the parties’ motivation to engage in dialog and move toward a negotiated settlement.


When, for example, US president Jimmy Carter brokered a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel at Camp David in 1979, he used promises of military and economic aid to encourage both parties to engage in dialog. When the talks stalled, he threatened them with withdrawal of US support. Carter also allowed the wary adversaries to save face by suggesting options (e.g., withdrawing Israeli settlements from the Sinai) that they themselves could not have raised out of fear of appearing weak to their counterpart and their respective right-wing constituencies. Effective mediators reframe ideas for conflicted parties, create perceptions of common ground, and build hope that a mutually satisfactory agreement is possible. At its best, mediation not only facilitates agreements but transforms relationships so that the parties can adopt what Morton Deutsch refers to as a cooperative orientation that entails a positive interest in the well-being of the other as well as one’s self. In interactive problem-solving workshops, Herbert Kelman has employed social psychological principles to explore the relationship between individual and social changes. Changes at each of these levels are conceptualized as linked to each other by continuous, circular processes so that change in an individual can produce social change and conversely, social change can produce individual change. In Kelman’s workshops, representatives of conflicted groups interact in a small group, neutral setting designed to induce change in the individual participants, as a catalyst for macrolevel changes in the policies and cultures of the parties in conflict. In the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, a typical workshop brings together three to six respected members of the Israeli and Palestinian communities for two-and-a-half days of intensive dialog. To encourage truth-seeking and flexible exploration of ideas, the workshops convene in a private academic setting and no records are kept. Agreements are nonbinding because participants are not representatives of their governments; they are however, respected political influentials and it is expected that their work will induce changes in wider political communities. Kelman has emphasized that the workshops are not substitutes for official negotiations but are useful in preparing the way for official negotiations, for managing problems that arise during peace negotiations, and for enabling effective implementation of official agreements.

Social Psychology of Structural and Cultural Violence Structural violence is ubiquitous and manifest in the enormous gap between people who have influence and material resources and those who are relatively powerless. At the time of this writing, one-fifth of the world’s population has 80% of the income while the bottom one-fifth

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has only 1% of the income. Johan Galtung has proposed that one way to define structural violence is to calculate the number of avoidable deaths. For instance, if people die from scarcities of food or shelter when both are available for them somewhere in the world, then structural violence is taking place. As Gandhi once noted, there’s enough food for everyone’s needs but not for everyone’s greed. Structural violence is reduced when systems of production and distribution are more equitably organized. Cultural violence occurs when symbolic processes are used to justify and legitimize inequitable power relations in political and economic systems. Cultural violence and hierarchical structures are mutually reinforcing, highly resistant to change, and operate at the individual level of analysis where scripts that guide behavior are internalized and at the aggregate level where shared narratives support hierarchical social arrangements. Social psychological constructs that bear on cultural violence include the meritocratic ideology, a set of beliefs that support the proposition that rewards should be commensurate with one’s contribution to society. This ideology provides the value scaffolding for the capitalist notion, ‘to each according to his merit’. In turn, the capitalist ethos has built into it an acceptance of inequality and the continuous struggle for power within and between states, along with justifications for the use of force in the interest of domestic and international order. The protestant ethic, promulgated primarily by Western elites, emphasizes the values of individualism, hard work, and delay of gratification. The ideologically congruent notion of blaming the victim locates the origin of social problems in the purported deficits and failings of those whose basic needs are unsatisfied rather than in political and economic institutions. A cluster of companion beliefs cohere under the umbrella of just world thinking that rationalizes disparities in power and wealth by assuming the world is just. On this view, people get what they deserve.

Peace Psychology: The Pursuit of Peace-building While peace-making can prevent violence by managing conflicts between groups, the term ‘peace-building’ has been used to refer to the (1) pursuit of more equitable relations between groups, and (2) reconstruction of societies following large-scale violent episodes. Both approaches seek to address the root causes of violence. Pursuing more Equitable Relations The roots of violence can be found in structural and cultural conditions and therefore, the pursuit of a sustainable peace requires structural and cultural peace-building, a pursuit for which traditional psychological approaches

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are not particularly well suited. In its prototypical Western form, despite being local and indigenous, psychology has global pretensions. Its dominant narrative is decontextualized and emphasizes objectivity, mechanism, and individualism. Stripped of social context, the individual becomes the only legitimate locus of intervention for psychologists and the desired outcome is individual adjustment, despite unjust circumstances in which the individual is embedded. Hence, psychology, with an absence of an analysis of social and cultural conditions, fails to address systemic causes of the problem, and leaves the social order unaffected. In contrast, the emerging area of ‘peace psychology’ recognizes that violent episodes have structural and cultural roots. In domestic violence, for instance, the proximal cause may be interpersonal conflict that turns into violence. However, the violent episodes have structural roots in the power asymmetry between men and women and in women’s economic dependence on men. Similarly, organized forms of direct violence are often rooted in institutional structures that form a system of violence, a military–political–industrial complex, which is justified through cultural narratives embodied in ‘just war theory’, a set of propositions that spell out conditions under which war is acceptable and just. The violent acts of substate organizations such as Al Qaeda can also be viewed from the perspective of proximal causes as well as more deeply rooted structural/ cultural preconditions. A realistic conflict lens focuses on Western globalization as a proximal threat to traditional values of spiritualism, collectivism, and cooperation, a zerosum arrangement in which advances of Western values necessarily means a retreat of traditional Islamic values. Similarly, the proximal causes of the US war on terrorism have been examined. Drawing on ‘terror management theory’, social psychologists have demonstrated how events that raise an individual’s awareness of their own mortality produce a host of defenses in an effort to manage the terrorizing thought of one’s death. Applied to the attacks of 9/11, many Americans experienced a sense of vulnerability and mortality, which activated defenses, including a desire for in-group cohesion, strong leadership, denigration of out-groups, and retaliation. Examined from a peace psychology perspective, the violence of Al Qaeda, which targets civilians, can be viewed as a tool of the weak, a structural precondition that is supported by a host of cultural narratives. These narratives largely mirror US justifications for the use of force: the belief that there is no legal means to redress grievances, the ends justify the means, dialog is not an option, and only violence will work. Similarly, membership in Al Qaeda and the US military both engender obedience and conformity, in-group favoritism, depersonalization, sacrificing one’s life for a greater cause, and rewards for giving one’s life. Accordingly, sustainable

peace will require not only the removal of proximal causes of violence but addressing the structural and cultural roots of the problem. Reconstructing War-Torn Societies War shatters social trust, reduces social cohesion, and damages social capital. Following armed conflict, societies may remain deeply divided into subgroups that fear and hate each other and are ready to continue fighting. Weakened civil society and low government capacities may leave people unable to meet basic needs and easily manipulated by spoilers or political opponents of the state. This situation often sets the stage for ongoing cycles of violence. Social psychology offers numerous tools that complement wider political and economic reconstruction efforts and assist humanitarian efforts to support postconflict societies in moving toward peace. To strengthen social cohesion, it is useful to stimulate collective planning and action to meet community needs. For people who had been driven by displacement, fear, and desperation into isolation and lack of group planning to meet civilian needs, the process of participatory dialog, if managed well, can reestablish a sense of common purpose, reweave social ties, and enable different subgroups to act effectively as a community to solve their problems. Even in the early aftermath of an emergency, local people can organize themselves, often with outside facilitation, to plan how to most effectively distribute and use humanitarian aid. This approach fits with the methods of community participation and empowerment that yield the most sustainable results and benefits to survivors. To rebuild social trust and reduce social divisions, one can use the method of superordinate goals in which members of different groups cooperate on the achievement of a common goal. Following the war in Sierra Leone, for example, former combatants cooperated with other village youth in building schools and health posts that communities had selected as high priorities. Through cooperation, the two groups came to see each other as human and as people they could live with. Similarly, the community members who had previously feared the ex-combatants came to see them as citizens who give back to the community. The work that the formerly recruited youth performed served the needs for restorative justice since building the structures helped symbolically and physically to repay for the damage the soldiers had done. It is useful to complement such efforts with methods such as interactive problem-solving and indigenous methods of nonviolent conflict resolution and healing the invisible wounds of war. In Liberia, for example, the organization of peace festivals helped to reactivate traditional mechanisms of nonviolent conflict resolution and created a space in which people planned what they needed to do to support peace.

Institutionalization of Violence

Addressing poverty is a key need in postconflict situations. Through livelihoods programs that teach vocational skills, support prosocial values and behavior, and support income-generating activities, formerly recruited soldiers can enter constructive civilian roles, find meaning and hope in civil society, and change their social identity from soldier to civilian. Similarly, marginalized groups can receive the economic support needed to support social justice and transform the patterns of social exclusion that often animate war. By building government capacities to continue these efforts, it is possible to institutionalize the supports and simultaneously strengthen the links between local people and their government that are necessary for sustainable peace. See also: Aggression, Psychology of; Psychological Effects of Combat; Social Theorizing About War and Peace

Further Reading Allport, G. (1979). The nature of prejudice. Reading, MA: AddisonWesley. Asch, S. (1956). Studies of independence and conformity: A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological Monographs 70, (Whole No. 416). Bandura, A. and Walters, R. H. (1963). Social learning and personality development. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Berkowitz, L. (1993). Aggression: Its causes, consequences, and control. New York: McGraw-Hill. Cairns, E. (1996). Children and political violence. Oxford: Blackwell. Christie, D. J. (2006). Post-Cold War peace psychology: More differentiated, contextualized, and systemic. [Entire issue]. /Journal of Social Issues, 62, 1–208. Deutsch, M. (1973). The resolution of conflict: Constructive and destructive processes. New Haven: Yale University Press. Galtung, J. (1996). Peace by peaceful means: Peace and conflict, development and civilization. London: Sage. Janis, I. (1982). Victims of groupthink, 2nd edn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Kelman, H. C. (1965). International behavior: A social psychological analysis. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Kelman, H. C. (1996). The interactive problem-solving approach. In Crocker, C. A., Hampson, F. O., and Aall, P. (eds.) Managing global chaos, pp. 501–520. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press. Marsella, A., Friedman, M., Gerrity, E., and Scurfield, R. (1996). Ethnocultural aspects of posttraumatic stress disorder: Issues, research, and clinical applications. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Martıń-Baro´, I. (1994). Writings for a liberation psychology. In Aron, A. and Core, S. (eds.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority. New York: Harper & Row. Montville, J. V. (ed.) (1991). Conflict and peacemaking in multiethnic societies. Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath. Sears, D. O., Huddy, L., and Jervis, R. (eds.) (2003). Oxford handbook of political psychology. New York: Oxford University Press. Staub, E. (1989). The roots of evil: The origins of genocide and other group violence. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tajfel, H. and Turner, J. C. (1986). The social indentity theory of intergroup behaviour. In Worchel, S. and Austin, W. G. (eds.) The social psychology of intergroup relations, pp. 7–25. Chicago: Nelson-Hall. Volkan, V. (1997). Bloodlines. New York: Farrar, Straus and Girous. Wagner, R. V. (ed.) (1994). Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology. Mahwah, NJ: Earlbaum. Waller, J. (2002). Becoming evil. New York: Oxford University Press. Wessells, M. G. (2006). Child soldiers: From violence to protection. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. White, R. K. (1984). Fearful warriors: A psychological profile of US–Soviet relations. New York: Free Press. Zimbardo, P. G. (1969). The human choice: Individuation, reason, and order versus deindividuation, impulse, and chaos. In Arnold, W.J. and Levine, D. (eds.) Nebraska symposium on motivation, vol. 17, pp. 237–307. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Relevant Websites http://academic.marion.ohiostate.edu/dchristie/Peace%20Psychology %20Book.html – Textbook by Christie, D. J., Wagner, R. V., and Winter, D. D. (2001)./ Peace, conflict, and violence: Peace psychology for the 21st century/. http://www.apa.org/about/division/div48.html – Division (48) – Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, and Violence: Peace Psychology Division, American Psychological Association. http://www.ispp.org – International Society of Political Psychology. http://psysr.org – Psychologists for Social Responsibility.

Institutionalization of Violence Rajni Kothari, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, India ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Introduction Specter of Security and the Cult of Violence Global Context Emerging Scenarios The State as a Source of Violence

This article is reproduced from the previous edition, volume 1, pp 223–230, ã 1999, Elsevier Inc.

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‘Development’ and Violence Politics of Identity and the Growth of Violence Countervailing Tendencies Further Reading

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Glossary Anomie A widespread attitude of discontent, unrest, and uncertainty stemming from a general breakdown in the structure and values of a society; moral instability. Dacoities Physical attacks by a group of armed robbers. (From the Dacoit robber society that historically committed such crimes in India and Burma.) Dalits A social group in India, including those who were formerly designated in the Hindu caste system as the untouchables; that is, those completely beneath the main caste system and thus of lowest social status. Global Commons The sum of the Earth and its plant and animal life, thought of as a commons, or common

Institutionalization of violence generally refers to the process by which acts of violence or force are undertaken by an official group on behalf of, or at least with the tacit approval of, the society as a whole. Examples of such actions might include violence carried out by the society’s police against criminals, warfare by the armed forces against external enemies, and repressive measures by security forces against the society’s internal opponents, real or perceived. In this way institutionalized violence is typically contrasted with noninstitutionalized violence; that is, violent actions by individuals without any authorization or acceptance by the larger society, such as serial killings, gang violence, or spousal and child abuse. However, it can also be argued that these seemingly unsanctioned acts of violence are actually not the random behavior of deviant individuals, but an inevitable consequence of the inequities and pathologies of the society. In that sense the institutionalization of violence includes all types of violent acts that are prevalent within the society, not just those carried out collectively by official groups.

Introduction With the world moving from an era of well laid out assumptions about the path of human ‘progress’ and the institutional framework in which this was to take place to an age of growing uncertainty, ambivalence and groping towards a wholly unclear future, creating a growing sense of insecurity and anomie, violence seems to have become endemic to the state of human society. Increasingly, we are witnesses to a deepening of the social roots of violence and, at the other end of the spectrum, a growth of isolation and alienation of the individual. This tends to leave, in their wake, violent backlashes all the way from terrorist to neo-fascist responses to what many perceive as a decline in prospects for alternative futures.

area, to be protected and conserved by all humans and shared with all other species. Institutionalization A situation in which a certain behavior, condition, or phenomenon has become so established within a society that it can be considered an inherent aspect of the society rather than an incidental or subsidiary feature; for example, violence, though not ordained by a society and perhaps even officially described as an aberration, may actually be so widespread as to have become institutionalized. Polity The form or structure according to which the political system of a society is organized; the body politic.

We can identify many symptoms of the institutionalization of violence. There is an increasing sense of vulnerability at both the elite level and the level at which the common folk find themselves. There is a gradual erosion of the ‘state’ that had at one time given a sense of security to both levels. That at any rate was the basic presumption underlying Hobbes’s conception in his Leviathan. It is this sense of security that is, in the times we are living in, under siege. For today ‘security’ appears to be taking on an increasingly defensive stance, for both the ruling classes and the large masses of the people. Ruling elites the world over are creating walls of security around them and signing joint declarations against violence, terrorism, and the like, at a time when the mass of the people are being exposed to both state repression and the violence unleashed by militants of various types. It is with this loss of a sense of security at both ends of the social spectrum that we are witness to an increasing resort to violence. Other major symptoms widely observed include a growing role of corruption in human affairs which in turn is producing a culture of ‘mafia’ rule at the very grassroots of societies, a considerable growth in violation of human rights in many parts of the world, including atrocities against the weaker sections of society, especially women and children, the minorities and the dispossessed, and the poor at large, much of which is increasingly taking on an organized and institutionalized form. Many of us have been brought up on a belief in the sanctity of life in all forms and have for long considered violation of all sentient life as an aberration. The reality that faces us today, however, is that most nation-states and cultures tolerate oppression and rejection of basic rights and even endorse the institutionalization of such oppression and hence of violence. Violence is often hidden, especially violence against women but also violence against all beings that are victims of discrimination and exploitation. This is increasingly being brought out in investigations carried out by human-rights groups. (Women face


violence all the way from family and neighborhood settings to arenas where modern technology is rendering them unwanted and forcing them into the highly vulnerable ‘unorganized sector’ in which single women, child labor, involuntary immigrants, and slum dwellers are huddled together.) Paradoxical and ironic though it may sound, the more such reports get publicized, the more the mass media are showing an obsession with violence even while they profess to abhor violence in their own surroundings. Indeed, this seems to be the case with so many of us. While we abhor violence, we find it attractive and enticing in the world of the mass media, of fiction, and of stories and gossip that we are getting accustomed to. Studies of violence in the media are demonstrating a strong affect on levels of violence in civil society. Films depicting violence in its most grueling forms seem to have a special attraction for us – for the younger generation, the bored and frustrated housewives, those seeking escapism from the realities of life, those dealt with harshly by society and seeking refuge in criminalized acts which they themselves often try to emulate. Nor is this limited to the more criminalized aspects of modern life. We are being constantly threatened by the abuse of religion for economic and political power, giving rise to a phenomenal growth in ethno-religious conflicts and in religious fundamentalism, causing potential damage to our psyches. Minds may be enslaved by the stereotyping that we see on television as indeed by the myths about ‘others’ that are perpetrated in the textbooks on which our children are brought up. In the meantime we find ourselves surrounded by pornography on the Internet.

Specter of Security and the Cult of Violence All in all we find ourselves surrounded by not just a growing scale of violence but in fact an emerging cult of violence that is spreading fast and may lie behind the growing sense of insecurity, especially in elite circles. Expenditures on the military, police, prisons, private security systems, and the upper strata are growing more and more fearful of the social reality that confronts them which they may have themselves to some extent given rise to but are unable to predict and deal with. It is this fear that lies behind what may be a pathological preoccupation with creating walls of ‘security’ from one and all, the cult of violence giving rise to a cult of security. What has come to be known as a national security state is not merely a reflection of nation-states constantly preparing themselves against both real and imagined ‘enemies’ (more the latter than the former) but also of the ruling class anticipating outbreaks of unanticipated violence resulting from growing turbulence and states of

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discontent and anomie in society at large. That bombs and explosives are blowing up here and there, that assassinations and political murders (including of people at the very top) have taken place, that more and more incidents of ‘indigenous terrorism’ are taking place, cannot any longer be blamed on outsiders. Yet no matter how much security is provided to a whole phalanx of ‘leaders’ and their large retinues and kins, and no matter how much diplomatic effort is expended to hold the forces of terrorism at bay (e.g., by designating some countries as ‘rogue states’ and pressuring allies to cut trade and other relations with them), fear of violence, both from within and from without, appears to be a dominant strain in the mental makeup of those in command of diverse states and perhaps the state system as a whole. As for the nonelite strata constituting more than 50–60% of the world’s population, the tendency is the opposite: rather than provide minimum security to them it is found more efficient to shove them out of the system, excluding millions from the institutional framework of the polity and the economy and treating them as dispensable. Poverty is increasingly ceasing to be seen as a problem to be resolved and perceived instead as an embarassment, especially as there seems to be a slow dawning on our consciousness that we may not for a very long time be able to eradicate it. This in itself and indeed above all is a most cruel manifestation of basic violence. Poverty is also a source of violence in reverse, as survival on the margins of society is becoming a breeding ground of a variety of violent acts – turning inward (hence the growing number of suicides among the poor as well as a growing resort to murders of one’s own kin). Violence is thus premeating primary units like family and immediate neighborhoods, along secondary channels of social castes and classes, as well as in sudden outbursts of anger and aggression against those belonging to the upper reaches of the social order. Criminality and the violence associated with it are not merely a function of ‘criminalization’ of the polity about which there is a lot of talk these days in a number of countries in which ‘antisocial elements’ and people with a criminal record are gaining access to the portals of power. It is something much more corrosive and comprehensive and consists of a whole social order – nationally and internationally – becoming vulnerable to the growing virus of crime and corruption of all kinds, from the flimsiest to the most grotesque, all the way from financial scams to the destruction of religious sites and the destruction of the global commons, in which a large array of otherwise prestigious institutions are found to be involved. Closely aligned with all this is the violence that is taking hold of the state itself, with armed police, paramilitary units, and even the official armed forces allegedly indulging in it wantonly, as some suggest for the sheer pleasure of shooting down people, raping women, indeed simply letting themselves go. The paradox is striking: the very

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custodians of law and of people’s safety, as well as the very segments that are expected to observe exemplary discipline in their behavior, are found to indulge in what appears to be a whole lifestyle of violence and disorder. All this leads to another insight: perhaps the simplest forms of institutionalization of violence lie in its routinization – violence as a ‘daily affair’, murders galore, incidents of rape of women, old and young and the very young among them on the increase, and a growing spate of shootouts in public places in metropolitan centers. We can also observe a growing incidence of inner violence in the form of suicides and suicide pacts, bands of ruffians from the upper classes carrying out massacres of segregated communities in rural areas and burning down their dwellings, hit and run killings of members of rival races and ethnic groups, sporadic as well as organized ‘riots’ between rival religious sects, a growing spate of assassinations of political cadres belonging to rival political parties, robberies and dacoities followed by killing of the victims of the same, and police firings on ‘mobs’ and processions of protesting demonstrators. Governments themselves issue ‘shoot on sight’ orders, and sanction ‘encounter’ killings mounted by police and paramilitary personnel on extremist groups belonging to separatist and/or revolutionary causes. So much of this is taking place regularly and on an almost daily basis.

All this is happening at time when it appears to many that the whole world is adrift. The twentieth century has been a century of violence – of wars, revolutions, a fascist cult of destruction and all-out devastation, ‘liberation wars’ gone awry in so many parts of the ex-colonial world, turning antipeople, repressive and particularly coercive toward the laboring classes, increasingly brutalized and dehumanized. Everywhere the state is found hand-inglove with special interests at home and in concert with neocolonial interests globally, in turn forcing the victims to turn anarchistic and violent. It is this phenomenon of the rise of national-security states opposed by the victimized turning unruly and turbulent, suffering continuously but at the same time displaying bursts of anger and contempt against those wielding power and authority, often becoming available to movements of insurgency and terrorism, in all of which violence is becoming the new language of discourse between the wielders of coercive power and those run over by them.

be seen in a general historical context. The point is that unless consciously checked and countered, violence often takes on an endemic state in a society so full of inequity and potential for basic protest and growing despair, extremes of both socioeconomic and cultural kinds, and political misuse of the power of the state in rich and diverse societies. As governments themselves increasingly feel threatened, they frequently resort to a ‘law-and-order’ approach to deal with what are basically deep social and psychological issues. This pushes them to retain large retinues of armed forces which are no longer aimed at an ‘enemy’ but rather at citizens who are found to engage in movements of protest, struggles for civil liberties, and generally in dissent against a system that is judged by them to be undemocratic and lacking in accountability. The result is often internal militarization in which since there is no longer any need to go to war with an outside enemy, an inner enemy has to be found and ‘crises’ created within the society. Small social groups, activists and intellectuals, and those struggling for survival in situations of growing want and destitution often become the targets. Once this happens, violence grows by leaps and bounds (violence as well as counter-violence). As we have learned during the last decade and more, once violence takes root in a society full of divisions and schisms, it rarely vanishes. It grows, seeks new outlets, looks for new enemies. As the basic principle of militaristic thinking is typically the suspension of all thought other than its own, those who dare to think become the ultimate enemy. The point is that one tyranny can face another tyranny. It can handle brute force. What it cannot handle is creativity that resists control and refuses to fall in line. The result is that the violence which was justified at one time by pointing to an outside enemy may gradually turn against its own people, against minorities, against women activists, against generalists who dare to write independently, against artist, and thinkers. This is what happened under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. For all of them a nuclear bomb in the possession of an enemy appeared less dangerous than a sketch drawn by an artist in one’s own society, a sketch that exposes the ills of the regime. For this artist is the more immediate enemy. Violence, then becomes endemic to a society when it reaches deeply into the social and cultural terrain. It is this that ultimately makes it truly institutionalized. In the foregoing the author has deliberately laid out a broad synoptic statement on the larger issues that underlie the institutionalization of violence. She now proceeds to take up the matter in different fields of human endeavor as structured by different agencies and institutions.

Emerging Scenarios

The State as a Source of Violence

To put it all in perspective, the reactions of surprise, despair, and intrigue at the various forms in which violence has surfaced and resurfaced in recent years need to

Having dealt with the evidence for a gradual increase in the repressive nature of the modern state in the face of growing assertions based on class, on the one hand, and

Global Context


indigenous structures of civil society on the other, we may now examine how state violence has been institutionalized over time. There is a historical background to this. The modern state since the Treaty of Westphalia was signed, has had an expansive streak to it (almost following the homocentric thrust of modern man). Culturally too, the modern divorce between the secular and the religious domains set the stage for the tendency of secular authority to expand outwards both vis-a-vis voluntaristic structures at home and vis-a-vis other peoples and cultures. This led to the spread of a geopolitical, militaristic, and technologically outward looking and colonizing character of the modern state, beginning with Europe and, by stages, engulfing practically the whole world. The growth of population movements, for example (both from rural agricultural hinterlands to urban industrial enclaves following the enclosure movements in the industrializing countries and from high-density regions with overflowing populations to low-density regions), has led to ever new forms of conquests and wars (including civil wars). Also, the rise of linguistic nationalism and the proliferation of modern nation-states in Europe, in the wake of the decline of multicultural empires and the spread outward of these states toward distant lands, has led to the development of professionalized armies and advances in military technology. More recently, this process has been taken further with the growth of ethnicity and diverse forms of subnationalism, again following the weakening of empirelike formations (including that of the Soviet Union). In short, both the ‘integrative’ thrust based on superimposition of the expansionist drive of the European conception of the state and the ‘disintegrate’ thrust following the rise of cultural nationalism have precipitated a simultaneous surge toward ethnic conflicts, interstate rivalries, geopolitical conquests, and local and regional wars, all of these involving a great deal of violence. The current and latest phase of these developments occurs especially in postcolonial states created by the presence of artificial boundaries left behind by colonial regimes but lately also in the European region following the collapse of Cold War bipolarity. There has taken place a growth of armed militias fighting for capture of state power, the worst manifestations of which are to be found in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Rwanda, Burundi, Zaire, and Chechnya. Some of these struggles also involve religious fundamentalism. An extreme form is found in the Taliban in Afganistan. Almost all of them have taken highly explosive and bloody forms, often verging on genocide. The scenario that is unfolding before us is hardly conducive to reducing the role of violence in human affairs. Indeed, as we move toward the end of the century we are witness to both a clash of cultures and ethnicities within nation-state boundaries and a clash of civilizations between and beyond nation-states and constellations thereof. Both forms of conflicts are also reinforced by

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counter-systemic movements, for example, for self-determination, for human rights, and even for social justice and economic and regional equity. Indeed, violence is often institutionalized even in the struggles for peace (conceived as resistance to violation of people’s right and their struggles for justice, often termed as ‘just wars’), found especially in Africa. As has been expressed by one of the most seasoned statesmen of Africa, Julius Nyerere, ‘‘Peace can only be a product of justice; it is not simply the absence of violence.’’ Even the processes associated with decolonization have produced a legacy of territorial disputes and brutal civil wars sometimes fought out of personal hatreds, or on account of tribal and ethnic aggrandisement. As regards the behavior of major powers, the post-Cold War promise of peace, disarmament, and a radical change in the psychology of competing power blocs has been totally belied by the continued use of military force in the conduct of international conflict. A few intractable conflicts of the Cold War era, like those in Indochina, have been dealt with as a result of a worldwide movement of protest. The worst manifestations of inhuman governance, such as apartheid in South Africa, have been successfully put to an end, but we can hardly say we are out of the woods. Over 50 conflicts continue to rage even today, some of them putting on display humanity’s basest instincts that many thought the march of human civilization would have brought under control.

‘Development’ and Violence Meanwhile, ‘development’, which was once thought of as an antidote to war and violence, and even the struggle for justice, are riddled with both social conflicts and a culture of violence. The idea that economic well-being, achieved through planned development, would reduce exploitation of various types does not seem to be that clear any more. The same is apparently true of the idea that the growth of economic independence of different social strata, as for example of women or of tribal groups (and what we in India call the Dalit ’, i.e., the ex-untouchables) will make them less vulnerable, for example, to the male atrocities and vandalism against the deprived groups in society which are now on the rise. Violence against women, as against depressed ethnic racial groups, is on the increase in much of the world. And as gaps widen and inequality in access to power and decision making grows, vulnerability to atrocities and exploitation grows as well, and with that grows both violence of the system and counterviolence against it. For there is still a considerable lack of security for ordinary people who can be shot at and killed, or be tortured by the police to force a confession, or be arrested and jailed, or be at the mercy of gangsters and kidnappers, even quite often at the mercy of ‘militants’ who are supposed to be waging a struggle on their behalf. In the

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meantime, the large hordes of migrants and refugees who come to the cities to escape persecution or social ostracism in the areas – even countries – they belonged to as well as tribal groups and other rural folk who resist being displaced and forciby evicted, as a result of the construction of large dams and nuclear and thermal plants, are branded as extremists and are pushed around, often arrested under some anti-terrorist act or subjected to the opposite end of state repression, namely handed over to the terrorist arms of the state, the police, the paramilitary, and even the armed forces.

Politics of Identity and the Growth of Violence Then there is the phenomenon of sectarian violence, usually waged by ethnic and religious majorities against minorities but sometimes also by minorities. In both cases people claim to seek justice but adopt organizational modes involving violence. Indeed, violence is often used for both forging and sustaining sectarian identities; what has baffled social scientists for some time now is the unabated continuation of violence in creating a sense of belonging among those who are driven to the wall. According to one estimate, nearly 120 million people have been killed in the present century on the sites of collective identities. It appears as though ‘genocide’ has become an integral part of many mass movements for self-definition. There is now taking place a phenomenal growth in the politics of identities which involve a growing recourse to violence. While much of the focus of social-science studies and investigative reports is on the state and its repressive arms, these being seen as the main agents of genocidal acts, there is relative neglect of the selves of people – individuals – who also participate in such acts, of course for more complex reasons. People are found to kill themselves and are ready to kill others, engage in collective self-immolation, often backed by religious cults. Even the aspiration at leveling the differences between the rich and the poor, between the privileged and those left out of the system, is often conceived in forms that are violent. There is no space here to go into the manner in which sacrificial altars are created on which human beings commit both suicides and murders, the variety of occult activities that are on the rise, the inner recesses of a psychological kind in which some residual evil allegedly resides and various other rituals that are performed in which violence is seen not as an aberration but as a mode of self-expression. Suffice it to say that we are moving into an era in which violence is represented at so many levels and across so many institutional structures that it would be foolish to wish it away or simply engage in some naive and innocent or romantic Utopian ‘vision’. Violence is getting increasingly institutionalized, of course more against the weak

(especially women and children and the poor at large) but also against the rich and the powerful, in opposition to whom banners of revolt and revulsion are being raised.

Countervailing Tendencies And yet the opposite tendency is also on the rise. There is evidence of growing exasperation with violence of both state-sponsored and militant varieties which is leading to a search for solutions that, if they succeed or even make slow headway, could lead to nonviolent ways of resolving conflicts and reconciling seeming opposites. There is of course still a long way to go on this path, but the process seems to have begun. We find this in the long beleaguered Middle East – the melting pot of two major Semitic cultures – of course in the apartheid-ridden South Africa, in the slow and painful but nonetheless continuing efforts in the former Yugoslavia (despite more recent aggressions as found in Kosovo), in the emerging way out of the long drawn out war of attrition based on an interface between bellicose religiosity and militarist confrontation in Northern Ireland, and even in the difficult and irrational dispute in the muddy terrains of hatred and suspicion in the Indian sub-continent. In each of these conflicts there are many hurdles to be crossed. In each of them new problems keep emerging. And in each of them not only the politics of military engagements but also the politics of ethnicities and identity formations, so often drawing upon deeply religious sentiments, are being tackled. But there seems to be no escape from continuing with the efforts that have already begun. As the specter of violence keeps haunting us and as the human urge toward a more peaceful and civilized existence persists despite it, and in both cases through ever new institutionalized forms, we are also witness to the growth of institutional structures that go beyond violence and nonviolence. This is occurring through the growing interface between state and civil society, the former being forced to become increasingly decentralized and the latter increasingly providing alternatives to mainstream politics, economics, and society, thereby returning to deeper roots of both human nature and human personality, and indeed also to a caring approach toward nature and toward diverse other species with whom the human species is bound in an organic way, both for sheer survival and for new flowering of potentialities and possibilities. This will not of course be realized merely on the basis of some naive hopes and some ‘grand vision’ (which is of course vital, for without it we cannot move out of the present crisis). Advocates of this alternative call for immense efforts to ensure that the rise of the poor and oppressed against the ‘system’, after an early phase of violent backlash, both against it and from within its own dynamics, can provide a basis for a more integrated and negotiated framework to

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reconcile conflicts and bridge the wide gaps that exist in livelihood patterns, in access to political power, and in the structuring of civil society. And by doing this we will also defuse, through new institutionalized expressions, the violence that has of late accompanied the politics of protest and the culture of identity formations and the deeper roots in both nature and human nature – and the human psyche – that violence has acquired and that needs to be contained. It may be no less necessary to collectively deal with the various disasters visited by floods and famines, ecological breakdowns, and the erosion of life-sustaining gases and the ozone layers in the atmosphere. The ecological

challenge faced by humankind, including the challenge for restraining ‘development’ from taking violent forms, calls for new institutional mechanisms that cut across nation-state boundaries, social identities, and political divisions of various kinds. Perhaps the struggle against violence might be waged by focusing first on these more basic challenges. Once that is done and a more balanced approach to cosmic issues is evolved, and human imagination moved along to deal with the same, and the Earth is seen as not only an ecosystem but also a sociopolitical arena, then the scourge of violence might automatically start receding. See also: Structural Violence; Terrorism; Torture (State)

Social Theorizing About War and Peace Hans Joas, University of Erfurt, Erfurt, Germany; The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

War and Peace in the Social Sciences Today The Age of Enlightenment Marxism Classic Sociology

The Social Sciences after World War II The Contemporary Theoretical Situation Further Reading

The topic of social theorizing about war and peace involves two questions. First, what do sociology and the social sciences tell us about the genesis and causes of war and about the effects of war on the development of humanity? Second, what light is shed on the major theoretical projects generated by our disciplines and on these disciplines themselves if they are viewed in light of the first question?

the various trends in the peace movements quit the level of appeals to personal ethical convictions, they almost exclusively argue in terms of global analyses in the social sciences. The contradiction between these two observations resolves itself once it becomes clear that the social sciences have, to a certain extent, delegated the concern with war and peace to a separate area of its own. Peace research, military sociology, the study of international relations, the analysis of nuclear conflict scenarios in terms of game theory – none of these fields have had any noteworthy effect on the general development of the social sciences. Even new research on ‘post-heroic’ or ‘postmilitary’ societies, although of crucial importance for the possibilities of a type of warfare that leaves large parts of the population in a technologically superior country relatively unaffected by war, has not become a central part of most sociological diagnoses of the time. The reasons for this segregation are by no means coincidental. Rather, they are closely linked to the definition of the concept of ‘society’ that is constitutive for the social sciences. Alain Touraine and Anthony Giddens both criticized classic sociology for employing a concept of ‘society’ that expressed only the reality of the nineteenth-century European and perhaps also the North American nation-state. All the asserted regular laws of development thus refer clandestinely to

War and Peace in the Social Sciences Today In this context, if one casts an initial glance over the social sciences at present, the result is a highly contradictory impression. On the one hand, it looks as if pressing current global problems have had little impact on the dominating approaches in these disciplines. The major theories that are the subject of general discussion today – for example, those of Habermas, Luhmann, or the Poststructuralists – contain hardly any mention of war and peace. On the other hand, approaches derived from the social sciences are of considerable importance both for the development of nuclear strategies and for peace movements. Game theories and conflict theories often constitute the core of lines of argumentation employed in strategic analyses, and as soon as

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Social Theorizing About War and Peace

the reality of a state whose territories are clearly delineated and which is bound to a body of law, and administered in a modern manner, whereas the dynamics of the relationships between these states is regarded as a purely historical contingency and otherwise hardly warrants interest. Consequently, such an approach cannot adequately thematize the particular internal characteristics of a nation-state as opposed to other historical structures: the dependence of intrasocietal processes on global economic, political, and military processes, or on supranational cultural processes. The only exception, albeit not with regard to the fixation on the nation-state, but in the central treatment of war and peace, is a specifically German (and Austrian) tradition of historical humanities and political science. Yet, this tradition cannot simply be drawn on, given its strong connection to the glorification of power and chauvinism. If one criticizes classic sociology for neglecting to deal with international relations, one must at the same time ask whether the Enlightenment’s optimism with respect to peace was a worthless illusion that had necessarily to be abandoned in favor of a realism based on power politics or whether it can be made the subject of a serious reconstruction. The debate about Kant and the prospects for a ‘democratic peace’, that is, a peace between democratic states, has become crucial in this regard.

The Age of Enlightenment Thought on the conditions for peace began, of course, long before the Enlightenment. The late Middle Ages, at least, engendered a series of attempts to make the Christian religion, which linked the peoples of Europe, the core of a peaceful order patterned after the ancient Pax Romana. Such attempts, of course, hardly focused on the non-Christian world; and when they did, the conditions of a Christian peace would seem not to apply to it. It was the thinkers of the Renaissance as well as some from the radical sects of the Reformation who created a universalistic orientation toward peace. The historical impact of this was widespread and left its mark on many aspects of life in the North American colonies. The predominant line of development, however, lies in the subsequent period, namely in the consolidation of the territorial and/or nation-states of Europe and in the development of the ideology of the raison d ’e´tat and the balance of power. The discourse on peace can, to a certain extent, be regarded as a relatively quiet voice of the outsider being raised against the status quo; at this time, it was the way of thinking for which standing armies and perpetual conflicts of interest between the states became ever more a matter of course. The reemergence of the issue of peace in France during the early Enlightenment was perceived by contemporaries as abstruse rumination. Although the author of the early Enlightenment’s most

famous Utopian vision of peace – the Abbe´ de St. Pierre – cannot complain that his proposals failed to attract any attention, the crude and polemic retorts were initially clearly the order of the day. Nevertheless, it was the Enlightenment, which generated the first serious attempts to base the possibility of lasting peace on a change in the internal substance of the state, that continues to have an influence on the social sciences even today. A total of at least five such approaches can be discerned; they set their sights on guaranteeing peace, respectively, by means of the expansion of free trade, the founding of republics, the development of industrial society, the establishment of socialism, and, last, the existence of stable nuclear alliances. All of them have been, at least in the very basic form in which they were initially presented, sullied by historical events. This is not to say that they were falsified in some simplistic fashion. Their overall claims, however, were dashed by the emergence of wars which they had not foreseen and the causes of which apparently contradicted the expectations that had been nourished by theory. The two oldest relevant models in the social sciences are associated with the names of Immanuel Kant and Adam Smith. Adopting motifs from Rousseau, Kant established a link between the capacity of the state for peace and its internal structure and spoke in terms of the peaceful nature of republics. His concept of the republic, however, was not at all aimed at deposing the monarch, but rather signified the constitutionalization and juridification of the power of the monarch. The well-understood interests of the citizens would have the effect of helping to avoid war and promote mutually beneficial relations between the states if only these interests were taken into account when making foreign policy decisions. On this point this ‘republican’ model corresponds to the other great peace model that was represented in the emerging political economy. Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith sought to establish the pacifying impacts of free trade. It was, after all, possible to effect a peaceful exchange of needed goods instead of mutual threat, destruction, and pillage; the expansion of these exchange relations would serve the interests of both sides and render war superfluous. However, both models soon ran into difficulty due to historical developments. This comes most blatantly to light in the case of Kant’s position, which was totally in keeping with ‘republican’ thinking in general, both in Germany and in France. Just after 1789, hopes in France were high that the revolution would also be a step toward eliminating the cabinet wars of the eighteenth century. Thus, a republican victory in the wars that were being waged against France by the monarchies of Europe would have been a contribution toward the emergence of a peaceful world. Instead, the increasingly offensive character of the French war campaign plunged the republican model of peace into a severe crisis. It was in particular the German intellectuals of the time who discussed the


consequences of this state of affairs. Was it right for revolutionary France to use violent means to convert other states into republics and should the intellectuals who sympathized with the revolution support expansion of this revolution by armed force? After Napoleon’s victory over Prussia in 1806, this issue necessarily became even more acute. It was now these same progressive intellectuals who began to regard the strengthening of a German national consciousness and, to an increasing degree, the armed struggle against the occupying forces as the only political conclusion. The justification of national consciousness still contained universalistic elements, yet the hope for a future peaceful world no longer played a role. As a result, in a peculiar about-turn, that philosophy gained the upper hand in the peace debate, which expected peace to come both from eliminating France as the source of unrest through reinstating the legitimate monarchy and from a new balance of power coordinated in the spirit of a reinforced Christendom. The question as to how strong the break was between the justification of war and the philosophy of peace as based on natural rights and the universalistic ideals of the Enlightenment is an important issue for assessing the further development of German thought of the nineteenth century. Smith’s theory of replacing war with free trade was not at all as simple as it sounded. He was well aware that even communities engaged in trade still remained dependent on military protection indefinitely just as he was conscious of the question as to how trade between states that were totally different in terms of their military strength could be kept free of the influence of this strength. On the whole, however, his optimism in peace-making policy surely predominated. After all, free trade itself bolstered those social strata within society that opposed the traditionally bellicose nobility. The free-trade, liberalist model of peace, however, had a covert particularistic undertone. For the hopes for peace it nourished were usually not truly universalistic but, rather, limited to the circle of ‘civilized’ people. Thomas More had already declared that such a war as was waged against a people that leaves land untilled while denying others use of that land was just. In many cases, ‘savages’ were expressly excluded from the proposals intended to foster peace. As an exception, Bentham had, as a consistent free trader, demanded as early as the end of the eighteenth century that the colonies be dispensed with; otherwise, it was to be feared that, even after curbing the power of war-mongering aristocrats, conflict over the colonies would give rise to ever more wars. In England, discussions that focused on peace and the appeal for free trade remained closely linked. For this very reason, those outside England felt that free trade in many cases merely served the interests of what was at that time the most economically and technologically advanced nation (England) and that it was therefore by no means simply an outgrowth of universalistic thinking.

Marxism In the nineteenth century, the two models of peace discussed above were joined by two additional models, both of which were also closely linked to the ideals of the Enlightenment. Marxism took the stance against the nonconstitutional state’s lack of a capacity for peace and leveled it at capitalism: it was not the republic but socialism that provided the social conditions for peace. Capitalism is ascribed a violent and expansive character; the struggle to overthrow capitalism thus goes hand in hand with the struggle for peace. This is why the Marxist-inspired movements have always regarded pacifist policies that did not give priority to critiquing capitalism or efforts to reach a peaceful settlement of international conflicts at the level of international law with a fair degree of arrogance. The late Engels, however, showed a new receptivity to both a nonviolent upheaval within society and the prospects for European disarmament. More recent Marxist attempts have been able to draw on this and have attested to the capacity for peace that capitalism, at least in principle, exhibits in the nuclear age. Mainstream Marxist thought, however, is shaped by the diverse attempts to draw up a theory of imperialism; this line of reasoning was developed immediately prior to World War I and found its view that capitalism inexorably drifts into an imperialistic ‘stage’ – in which conflict between the major ‘imperialist’ powers is inevitable – confirmed by this war. This view of things determined the way people thought after World War I and extended far into the social democratic camp, where admittedly older Enlightenment models of peace continued to have an effect. It was fueled by the impression that the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, being the only socialist state, was – regardless of what one thought of the precise nature of this socialism – nonaggressive and aiming toward peace. Outside the socialist and communist movements, the fear of a revolution within society of course allied itself early on with the fear that such a rebellion could be incited or supported by the Soviet Union or the Communist International. Within the working-class movement, however, the Hitler–Stalin Pact of 1939 was the event that undeniably shook the foundations of those things that had hitherto been taken for granted. This was true for the members of the resistance who were fighting the Nazis within the Third Reich but was also exemplified by the abrupt cessation of all contacts made with a view to possible cooperation between the German Social Democratic and the German Communist Parties. It was true above all for the exponents of Marxist thought. The entire range of reactions can be understood if one takes a look at the controversy between Rudolf Hilferding, the Social Democrat and theoretician of ‘Finance Capital’, and Walter Ulbricht, the later Communist leader of the East German State. At the end of 1939, convinced that

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Hitler’s Germany and the Soviet Union of Stalin were hand in glove, Hilferding concluded that both had totalitarianism in common and that social democracy consequently had to take up the cause of supporting Great Britain and France in the fight against both of them. Ulbricht reacted to this with a polemical attack that attracted international attention; in it he characterized British imperialism as the principal enemy. Precisely because of its willingness to establish a pact with the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, as Ulbricht saw it, had become the less aggressive form of imperialism. This, of course, demonstrated not only the bankruptcy of the Marxist theory of imperialism, which was completely functionalized to serve as a justification for Soviet foreign policy, but also its profound lack of consideration for the autonomous significance of democracy and constitutionality for an assessment of the capacity of states for peace. The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 albeit led to a renewed shift in emphasis, as now the principal opposition to fascism was again undisputed. Yet Soviet policy in Eastern and Central Europe after World War II, and especially in the cases of military intervention to repress internal reform movements in socialist states (Hungary, 1956, and Czechoslovakia, 1968), provoked large-scale discussions on both occasions about the capacity of socialism for peace; the simple thesis that eliminating the interests of the capitalist military–industrial complex would result in peace was, in any case, put to a hard test and gradually lost any credibility. For the generation who rediscovered Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s and in so doing helped it to undergo a renaissance, with the exception of the suppression of the ‘Prague Spring’ the events outlined above were already too far back in time to leave their mark on political perceptions. For this generation, the military conflicts between the socialist states (above all, between China and the Soviet Union) and the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979 played a decisive role. For many former Marxists this meant a simple switch, for they adopted a realism of power politics or even one of geopolitical power. This transformation is not all that plausible, since, despite all the evident gaps in the explanatory power of a peace model centered on capitalism or ‘imperialism’, the basic question as to the internal economic, social, and political prerequisites for a capacity for peace in foreign policy cannot simply be abandoned.

Classic Sociology The theory of the peaceful nature of industrial society was constitutive for sociology. Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, the academic outsiders who propagated sociology as a new science without being able to give it institutionalized

academic foundations, undoubtedly perpetuated the peaceoriented thinking of the Enlightenment by attempting to prove the peaceful character of the nascent industrial society. Spencer’s distinction between two types of society, namely the ‘militant society’ and the ‘industrial society’, was particularly influential. According to Spencer, in the society of the militant type primacy was accorded to the collective capacity for violent action toward the outside. Such a society, he claimed, as a consequence completely subordinated the individual to a collective purpose; domination was structured around a unilinear hierarchy. By contrast, the industrial society tolerated relationships between individuals that were entered on a voluntary, contractual basis. In such a polity, individualism and the market flourish; the structure of domination is decentralized and multipolar. Such a polity aims externally at entering contractual relations with other polities for the purpose of mutual benefit. The evolutionist assumption that the ‘militant society’ will inevitably die out may seem incredibly optimistic to us today; however, these assumptions were representative of the nineteenth-century social sciences, especially in England and the United States. Even classic Marxism is more closely in tune with the optimism of these assumptions than may appear at first sight. It merely moves the dawning of the age of peace up one step in history, as it were: in this system, only the socialist industrial society is in itself peaceful in principle, not the capitalist society. The path leading to such a state leads via internal social changes, with an emphasis on violence. The success of these changes, however, as Engels puts it in Anti-Du¨hring , is evolutionistically guaranteed, for example, by the internal dissolution of capitalist militarism owing to the increasing inability to finance the arms burden and the arming of the class-conscious proletariat, which goes hand in hand with compulsory conscription. The period between 1815 and 1914, which was interrupted by only a few small wars, could serve as evidence supporting the assumption that industrial societies are peaceful. For this reason, the outbreak of World War I was a severe shock in that it called the philosophy of history behind the social sciences into question. Even if the war as such did not contradict expectations, the course it took was the source of profound irritations. The reaction of contemporary German sociologists to World War I is extraordinarily interesting, particularly with regard to the various ways the cult of war and chauvinism deformed the glorious tradition of German historical thought in the humanities and political science; however, it is least revealing with regard to the intrinsic problems of the thesis that industrial society is peaceful. For this thesis was least widespread in Germany; generally speaking, the German founders of sociology took a contemptuous view of Comte and Spencer and were far removed from liberalism and positivism. Werner Sombart, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel can be treated here as three clearly distinguishable types. Whereas Sombart had put forward a substantial social scientific theory about the


connection between war and capitalism prior to the outbreak of World War I, during the war he boiled this down to the fateful struggle between British utilitarian commercialism and German antiutilitarian heroism. Although Max Weber steered clear of such hyperbolizations of the war in terms of the philosophy of history, he, too, failed to develop any sociological analyses of the emergence and impact of war. Those of his publications that directly intended to have a political influence are pioneering achievements in the analysis of the link between the internal constitution of a state and the capacity for action in foreign policy. Georg Simmel, in turn, interprets the war only in terms of esthetics and a philosophy of life and believes that the experience of war offers a possible escape from the tragedy of modern culture. Nor do the other authors of the period offer anything to overcome this failure of sociology; the only exception is the work of Emil Lederer, who does not fall prey to unrestrained speculations about either the question of war guilt or the meaning of the war. Rather, he attempts a sociological interpretation of the surprising features of the war, namely the concept of total war and an increasingly autonomous war machinery. The positions taken by the major sociologists of other countries at this time were just as favorable to their own respective national causes as they understood them. Yet, the relationship between such nationalistic positions and the universalistic Enlightenment ideals of a peaceful world order took a different form. In his political writings Emile Durkheim, the leading sociologist in France, did not believe that the war sounded the death knell for the pacifist ideal; rather, he regarded a victory for France as a contribution to the end of militarism and a step toward the ultimate triumph of peace. Theoretically, Durkheim differed from Spencer in predicting that the disappearance of war in industrial society would occur gradually and not in leaps and bounds. In a view that was nevertheless optimistic and evolutionist, Durkheim assumed a progressive adjustment from the continuous state of war in primitive communities to the permanent legislation of modern societies. But Durkheim failed to face up to the problem that a state structured by and through a legislative body could very well take a stand toward the outside world as a power-state bound by no law. Thus the events of the war proved too unwieldy for his categorizations. Durkheim could only attempt to prevent his normative ideals from being sucked into the vortex of nationalistic ideologies. American sociological thought at the time was characterized less by a belief that followed Spencer in promulgating the pacifying effects of individualistic contractual freedom and more by taking a specific understanding of the republic and democracy and transposing them onto an international context. According to this view, the steadily progressing process of internationalization in economy and the sciences would no longer permit a mere coexistence of the states.

The only alternative to solving conflicts without institutions, and this would always tend to be a violent solution, consisted in establishing a moral and legal level at which international disputes could be settled peacefully. For these sociologists, the outbreak of war was especially shocking since it contradicted their assumption of orderly progress and their strongly evolutionist belief in a decided trend toward the dissemination of democracy throughout the world. And indeed, the events of war in Europe were initially interpreted as being anachronistic, as the expression of European backwardness; it went without saying that America should stay out of such a war. During the course of the war, however, a line of argumentation became ever more prevalent which advocated America’s entering the war on the side of the Allies, for which it perceived a universalistic justification. Joining the cause of democracy and abolishing war by setting up a League of Nations and guaranteeing the right to selfdetermination for the small nations – these were, however, entirely noble war objectives in the eyes of American reformist intellectuals. The consequences of America’s entrance into the war on domestic policy, however, dashed all hopes that the war would provide an opportunity for reform. The analysis of the war gave rise to a few fruitful approaches in the social sciences which were derived, above all, from the assumption that a relationship existed between ‘democracy’ and ‘peace’. For the most part, however, these approaches considered the sociopsychological level: here the possibility of social integration through loyalty-fostering participation in public and consequential processes of will formation was contrasted with integration via opposition to external or internal enemies. With a few exceptions – such as in Thorstein Veblen’s 1917 book ‘The Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation’, for example – the relative weight of such sociopsychological factors, however, was only seldom considered in relation to economic, political, or military-technological factors in American social science at that time. It is interesting that Veblen quite clearly assumed that tension exists between democracy and capitalism. He views this as one of the reasons for modern nationalism to the extent that nationalism is promoted by the powers that be out of fear of demands for social equality. On the whole, however, he, too, considers nationalism obsolete and not modern enough or promising for the future. Here the sociopsychological considerations are not developed into an analysis of modern nationalism and the significance it had in the war.

The Social Sciences after World War II The four models of peace mentioned – free trade, the republican order, socialism, and the industrial society – continued to have a great deal of influence in modified form even after the end of World War II. However, all of

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them increasingly gave way to the realism of power politics. Just as the nuclear-armed superpowers and the alliances they set up confronted each other since the beginning of the Cold War, so, too, did the ‘proletarian internationalism’ of the one side and the democratic universalism of the other appear to be diametrically opposed, hostile, and mutually exclusive alternatives. In reality, both positions increasingly deteriorated into legitimatory ideologies that served the objectives of realists in the sphere of power politics. Although many social scientists made various declarations of their personal beliefs with regard to the problems of war and peace during the Cold War, or confessed that they could at best beat a retreat in the face of the intimidating horrors of nuclear strategies, they only rarely contributed more extensive analyses. The representative theorist of the time, Talcott Parsons, made little if any comment on the Cold War in the framework of his studies, and when he did, the statements did not go much beyond noting that international relations had become institutionalized to a slight degree. As leading representatives of NeoParsonianism themselves concede, Parsons had difficulty dealing not only with the present but also with the historical role of war when it came to fitting it into the framework of his evolutionary model based on the theory of differentiation. In his theoretical framework, wars, like social movements, are only the agents of overarching processes of differentiation; at worst, they can divert or hinder the course of these processes in a minor way but cannot really have any decisive influence on them. For Parsons, there can be no question of such contingent processes of collective action constituting the direction or extent of differentiation. The two most important voices in sociology during the 1950s and 1960s who consistently addressed the social meaning of war and the effects of the nuclear arms race were Raymond Aron and C. Wright Mills. Aron is being rediscovered in France and England with such enthusiasm because for decades he did not submit to the thematic repression of war-related problems and made an abundance of important contributions to the topic, both in his theoretical work and in his extensive political journalism. In his theories, he always remained a neo-Clausewitzian strategic realist whose work can be helpful as an antidote to economic reductionists, but in my view it still cannot open up any approaches that take us further. Mills was the actual dissident in the ‘orthodox consensus’ of an American-dominated sociology. His warning, which is still rousing today, on the ‘Causes of World War III’ was based on his analysis of the power structures of American society in which he identified an elitist complex that controls military-strategic and general foreign policy decisions. This thesis of course proved to be too simple in empirical terms; his analysis of contemporary society focused too strongly on the opposition of the two superpowers and did not go into sufficient historical depth to warrant being adopted. Nevertheless, here was someone

protesting against the carefree attitude with which the public and, implicitly, many social scientists believed in the stability of the system of deterrence. This belief was indeed very widespread. People called for at most the elimination of isolated elements that threatened the stability of this deterrence through arms control agreements; of course, the interest in the possibilities of conventional warfare below the nuclear threshold was kept alive in order to maintain the political scope for action.

The Contemporary Theoretical Situation The situation changed fundamentally in the 1980s. For postwar theory, that is the belief that peace is guaranteed through stable nuclear deterrence, this change plays the role of a ‘crisis experiment’, which can, like World War I, serve to make us aware of hidden assumptions. Innovations in weapons technology reduced the stability of deterrence or at least made us realize that radical destabilization is a possibility. This applies to the vision of a protective shield over the United States (Strategic Defense Initiative) as well as to new possibilities of a first-strike or limited nuclear war. The rapid escalation of international tensions in the early 1980s caused the populations of many European countries to become sensitive to the military nexus of conditions under which they lived. The extent of ecological problems that crossed all ideological bloc boundaries (Chernobyl) foreshadowed the need for global cooperation and to address the links between the economy, ecology, and armaments. All of these developments suggested that the world had moved beyond the deceptive security of this fifth model of peace, which in many ways is, of course, more similar to the old notion of a balance of power. From this viewpoint, the peace movements’ most important contribution may have been that they once again rocked the foundations of power politics and generally reopened a public discourse about peace and war among citizens in an international context. This debate was opened up, moreover, in a theoretical situation in which Marxism did not present itself as a convincing alternative. Major contributions by Marxists diverged greatly from the traditional ideas of Marxism; this is true of E. P. Thompson’s thesis of an ‘exterminism’, of an arms race that escalated primarily because of its own intrinsic dynamic and not because of economic or political interests, and it is equally true of Mary Kaldor’s thesis of the ‘Baroque arsenal’ with which she questioned the economic and military benefits of the new military technologies produced by the arms race. Most of the younger intellectuals in the social sciences, however, began, as already mentioned, to look more in the direction of Clausewitz and Aron or even to search for rejuvenated ‘geopolitical’ views. The point is, however, that here all the elements of the peace models that are potentially


worth preserving even though they certainly cannot be upheld in their entirety are lost in the process. One way out of this situation is to undermine the tooeasy identification of social order and nation-state. Indeed, in particular, Alain Touraine and Anthony Giddens have called attention to the fact that tacit identification of the abstract concept ‘society’ with the concrete reality of territorially delineated nation-states tends to obscure rather than shed light on the dependency of social processes on economic, political, military, and cultural complexes of an international nature. In classic sociology, the relationship between state and society as expressed is not reflected upon in terms of its historical and geographical particularity. Relativizing the concept of society implies that the widest variety of social processes can be analyzed using the category of action and thus suggests that the degree to which they exhibit a ‘systemic’ character should not be prejudged in conceptual terms but rather be taken into account as being empirically variable. An approach that centers on the interweaving and intermeshing of actions and the consequences thereof yields a more differentiated picture than is afforded by the concept of system. The early transformation of Parsons’ work in Etzioni’s theory of the active society, Giddens’s development of a theory of structuration via a critique of Marxism, Castoriadis’s and Touraine’s contributions to a theory of institutionalization as a creative process, and Michael Mann’s historical sociology of power are cases in point. The general theoretical approaches of these authors have become even more pertinent because of specific features of war in the era after the end of the Cold War. The literature on new wars asserts a tendency toward a confrontation between states and nonstate actors. The research on genocide investigates the relationship between external and internal violence (directed against ethnic minorities, etc.). The debate about American foreign policy, particularly since 2001, has given rise to a controversy about the question whether a new form of empire has come up that is about to replace the system of nation-states and the institutionalization of peaceful conflict resolution through international bodies like the UN. New cases of nuclear proliferation will probably give the literature on nuclear strategy a new relevance. What all of these authors of general sociological theory have in common is that they renounce the granting of privileged status to one particular domain of society that then supposedly holds the key to understanding the totality of that society. Giddens, for example, attempted to analytically separate the dimensions of capitalism, ‘industrialism’, the organization of military power, as well as internal ‘surveillance’ and control, and to retain them as possible variables to one another. Castoriadis stressed especially that democracy is not to be viewed as a superstructure of capitalism, but rather that it represents an autonomous dimension of the history of humankind. Etzioni wanted to show how additional strata of inter- or supranational regulations

are established above the level of the nation-state; against this background, he appealed for a dismantling of the military blocs by means of regulated forms for their cooperation as opposed to their renewed disintegration into rivaling nation-states. Michael Mann consistently distinguishes between four sources of social power (ideological, military, economic, and political) and analyzes societies as organized power networks. The program of such a family of theoretical approaches permits us to set our sights on integrating the assumptions of the models of peace in the social sciences and the social philosophy discussed above. Despite the fact that all of them were shaken by historical events, this is no reason to cast them aside. The theory of the peaceful character of industrial society, at least with respect to the process of internal pacification, which extends all the way to ‘civilizing’ the military complex, has, after all, largely been proved correct in this narrower sense today. Kant’s idea of republicanism still raises important questions with regard to the public control of foreign policy as a condition for its defensiveness. The Marxist assumptions regarding the interests of the capitalist defense industry are not mere figments of the imagination. Free trade and the prevention of both protectionism and export monopolies have essentially contributed to peaceful relations between the Western industrial societies. However, it is necessary to reflect in theoretical terms on the relative accuracy of every single explanation and to bring it to bear in the narrative totality of the analysis of the causes of war. Thus, it is surely too simple to explain World War I in terms of the conflict of interests of various imperialist powers, the autocratic character of the German Reich, the existence of distinct export monopolies or Europe’s backwardness in relation to the United States as various people did at the time. The combination of the rational core of the various approaches into one ‘integrated’ concept of peace is the task of the day. This task has become even more pressing since the short phase of hope in ‘‘democratic peace’’ at the beginning of the 1990’ has been replaced by new worries about terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and the possibility of the formation of new empires. See also: Aggression and Altruism; Economic Causes of War and Peace; Economics of War and Peace, Overview; Military Culture; Nuclear Warfare; Structural Violence; World War I; World War II

Further Reading Doyle, M. W. (1997). Ways of war and peace. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Giddens, A. (1985). The nation-state and violence. Cambridge, MA: Polity. Joas, H. (2003). War and modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Johnson, J. T. (1987). The quest for peace. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mann, M. (1988). States, war, and capitalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Senghaas, D. (2007). On perpetual peace. A timely assessment. Oxford: Berghahn.

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Structural Violence

Structural Violence Kathleen M Weigert, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Origins of the Concept Development and Use of the Concept Relationships between Direct and Indirect Violence

Glossary Conflict As a noun, a relationship between actors in a system that is based on perceived or structurally embedded incompatible goals or values. Nonviolence Between individuals, refraining from using violent means to achieve one’s goals, either out of a religious or philosophical rejection of such means or because of a practical assessment that such means are the only ones available and/or are worth using in an effort to achieve one’s goals while simultaneously reducing violence.

Structural violence (also called indirect violence and, sometimes, institutionalized violence) is differentiated from personal violence (also called direct or behavioral) and refers to preventable harm or damage to persons (and by extension to things) where there is no actor committing the violence or where it is not practical to search for the actor(s); such violence emerges from the unequal distribution of power and resources or, in other words, is said to be built into the structure(s). This article discusses the origins, dimensions, development, and use of the term as well as the relationships between the two types of violence and examines various advantages and disadvantages for the concept’s use in peace research and peace action.

Origins of the Concept While other social sciences (and, indeed, other fields) examine peace, conflict, violence, and nonviolence, it is in the field of peace and conflict studies (or justice and peace studies) where these terms take on central significance and, as a result, where sustained attention is paid to them for an understanding of the preventing, waging, transforming, and/or ending of conflicts as well as, more generally, for the creation, maintenance, and transformation of structures and processes of peace from the personal to the global levels. The definitions and dimensions of these central concepts are rich and subject to much discussion and debate.

Structural Violence in Peace Research and Peace Action Further Reading

Power The capacity to effect change, differentiating power over others (to get others to do what you want) from power with others (to work together to achieve some common purpose). Structure Patterned relationships among components of a social system that, although creations of human actors, constrain human behavior. Violence Either the intentional use or threat of force to harm others in order to achieve some goal or harm that results to some because of the unequal distribution of power and resources.

In this article the focus is on the relationships among the terms as they relate to the particular concept of structural violence. While the idea of structural violence, at least in an embryonic way, may be as old as the study of conflict and violence, the actual concept was introduced into the field and given salience by Johan Galtung in his 1969 seminal essay. Both he and other scholars have developed the concept in an attempt to provide a tool for peace research, education, and, at least for some, action. Several distinctions merit attention. In his 1986 review essay on the concept of structural violence, Webb highlighted the debate in the field as represented by ‘subjectivists’ and ‘objectivists’. In addressing the issue of the ingredients needed to warrant labeling something a conflict, the distinction between these two groups focuses special attention on the role of actors and their perceptions in a conflict situation. The subjectivist model maintains that there must be at least some perception of incompatible values or goals by the actors involved to justify calling something a conflict. The objectivist model, on the other hand, argues that conflict can exist without the awareness of the social actors since conflict, in this view, has to do with ‘interests’ and interests are not a matter of the subjective definition of the actors but are instead ‘determined’ by the social structure. In short, conflict is incompatible interests embedded in the structure of the system where the conflict is found. A second key distinction focuses on positive and negative peace. This distinction was apparently first presented

Structural Violence

by Wright in a discussion of pacifists and internationalists in his 1942 classic, ‘A Study of War’. He attributed to the former an ‘unsophisticated interpretation’ of peace as negative (i.e., the absence of war) and contrasted this with the latter’s more complex understanding of peace as something positive (i.e., international justice), which in turn implies ‘orderly procedures and a spirit of cooperation’ in dealing with international problems which ‘can only be realized in a world-society’. Wright concluded, ‘‘The positive aspect of peace—justice—cannot be separated from the negative aspect—elimination of violence.’’ It was Galtung who advanced the distinction. In his editorial in the very first issue (1964) of the Journal of Peace Research’, Galtung referred to the two aspects of peace, calling negative peace ‘the absence of violence, absence of war’ and positive peace ‘the integration of human society’. In a 1968 essay, he defined negative peace as ‘‘the absence of organized violence between such major human groups as nations, but also between racial and ethnic groups because of the magnitude that can be reached by internal wars’’ and positive peace as ‘‘a pattern of cooperation and integration between major human groups.’’ This leads to a third distinction that between violence and nonviolence, which helps pull together ideas from the previous two and brings us to the concept of structural violence. While the nonviolence–violence distinction raises such topics as definitions, tactics and strategies, and outcomes and evaluations, for this article the fundamental issue is conceptual. In defining violence, some choose to restrict the term to the intentional use of force (foremost, but not exclusively, physical) against one or more ‘others’ (and in some definitions, to property) to inflict injury or death. Violence is seen as goal oriented; actors resort to violence in order to achieve some particular or general purpose(s). Thus, an actor, an action, and an ‘actee’ (adapting a legal convention that avoids relying on the word ‘victim’, a term which renders an individual, at least in ordinary usage, quite powerless) are necessary in this conceptualization of violence. For others, violence is conceived in broader terms. In his 1969 essay, Galtung began with the idea that ‘‘violence is present when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations’’ (italics in original). Violence, then, was defined as ‘‘the cause of the difference between the potential and the actual’’ (italics in original). Note that here there is no need for an ‘actor’ in the traditional sense of the term, while there is some kind of ‘action’ and an ‘actee’. This led Galtung to his formulation of structural violence. We shall refer to the type of violence where there is an actor that commits the violence as ‘personal’ or ‘direct’, and to violence where there is no such actor as ‘structural’ or ‘indirect’. In both cases individuals may be killed or mutilated, hit or hurt in both senses of these words, and

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manipulated by means of stick or carrot strategies. In the first case these consequences can be traced back to concrete persons as actors, whereas in the second case this is no longer meaningful. There may not be any person who directly harms another person in the structure. ‘‘The violence is built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances (italics in original).’’ In a 1985 review of peace research, Galtung pinpointed the genesis of the term to his experience in what was then Southern Rhodesia, where he did statistical work on interracial violence. Acknowledging his debt to Gandhi (who apparently never used the term itself), Galtung commented that the concept of structural violence allowed him to get away from the actor-oriented perspective of much western social science. He elaborated by saying that structures are the settings within which individuals may do enormous amounts of harm to other human beings without ever intending to do so, just performing their regular duties as a job defined in the structure. . . . Structural violence was then seen as unintended harm done to human beings . . . as a process, working slowly in the way misery in general, and hunger in particular, erode and finally kill human beings. Galtung posited that the introduction of this concept offered a new thrust in peace research, namely a ‘‘critical analysis of structures and possibly to efforts to transform structures pregnant with violence into less violent ones.’’ His use of the term structure fits with a common approach found in the social sciences, namely, one that uses structure to refer to patterned relationships among components of a social system (although which patterns are discerned is related to one’s perspective). A social structure can be considered a ‘social fact’ (i.e., something external to individuals) with an independent reality that constrains their behavior and channels their actions. While that facticity suggests a determinism of some kind, many would hasten to add that structures are creations of human actors as well, a point to which we return in the section entitled ‘Structural violence in peace research and peace action’. In his 1969 essay, Galtung offered several illustrations of structural violence. One focused on hunger: ‘‘if people are starving when this is objectively avoidable, then violence is committed, regardless of whether there is a clear subject–action–object relation, as during a siege yesterday or no such clear relationship, as in the way world economic relations are organized today.’’ A second, perhaps more famous, example referred to husband–wife patterns: ‘‘Thus, when one husband beats his wife there is a clear case of personal violence, but when one million husbands keep one million wives in ignorance there is structural violence.’’ In the 1969 essay, Galtung proffered the word ‘social injustice’ as a substitute to describe the condition of structural violence but rejected the term ‘exploitation’,

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arguing that the latter belongs to a political vocabulary and, besides, it can all too readily change to the verb ‘exploit’, which might draw attention away from structure (‘‘and even lead to often unfounded accusations about intended structural violence’’). Galtung linked structural violence with positive peace (i.e., the absence of structural violence was seen as positive peace) and equated positive peace with social justice, a positively defined condition of an egalitarian distribution of power and resources. While structural violence did not prevent social change, it did constrain it, making it difficult to accomplish.

Development and Use of the Concept A number of scholars took up Galtung’s challenge to examine structural violence. Of those who did so in empirical research, the earliest operational definition of the concept took the form of life expectancy data (initially undertaken by Galtung and his colleague, Ted Hoivik) either within a country or between countries. The conclusion from this line of research was straightforward: there were unnecessary (i.e., theoretically preventable or ‘premature’) deaths, differentially distributed, and these deaths could be attributed to the structures of power and resource allocation in the particular arena (domestic or international) – in short, to structural violence. For some scholars in the peace research field and in international relations more generally, these kinds of data were framed in different conceptual terms, such as development, where premature or unnecessary deaths were taken as indicators of uneven or maldevelopment. While not always directly referring to Galtung’s work, researchers in other fields employed the term itself, for instance, in the areas of public health and preventive medicine. Gilligan, for example, following Gandhi, labels poverty as the ‘deadliest form of violence’ and examines it as a form of structural violence, defined as ‘‘increased rates of death and disability suffered by those who occupy the bottom rungs of society, as contrasted with the relatively lower death rates experienced by those who are above them.’’ Whether such researchers did not know of Galtung’s work or simply found it not useful is an empirical question beyond the scope of this article. That in fact they employed the concept without reference to Galtung’s work, however, suggests an issue raised by various critics of academic specialization, including deconstructionist scholars. They find fault with the on-going practice of a narrow specialization of knowledge, arguing that such an approach raises barriers to the inter-, multi-, or transdisciplinary research they contend would better advance our knowledge and understanding of social realities. It appears that structural violence as a term has, nevertheless, entered the lexicon of peace studies and peace research and is used at least at a descriptive level, as

indicated by an examination of introductory texts and anthologies in peace studies. Certainly, some scholars have found the concept theoretically suggestive and have sought to employ and/or develop it. Brock-Utne, for example, paid systematic attention to the term in her analysis of peace and peace education from a feminist perspective. She extended earlier works by including in the negative peace concept the absence of collective, personal violence against women. She employed the distinction between unorganized and organized violence and drew attention to structural violence that leads to a shorter life span and structural violence that leads to a less fulfilling life; her typology is examined in the next section.

Relationships between Direct and Indirect Violence Granting for the moment the validity of the distinction between direct and indirect or structural violence, one of the important issues calling for attention is the relationship between the two types. In his 1969 essay, Galtung urged that the distinction between personal and structural violence be made the ‘basic one’ in peace research and peace action. He justified this in terms of the ‘unifying perspective’ it offered to the study of violence, plus the advantage of not prejudging which caused more suffering. After a discussion of the means of personal and structural violence, he turned to the relationship between the two types, first arguing that there is a logical distinction between them. He then examined several possible hypothetical relationships between the two types (e.g., does one cause the other?; does the manifest form of one presuppose the latent existence of the other?; is one the price of the other?) and rejected reductionism in each case. While originally eschewing the term ‘exploitation’, as noted above, Galtung later included it as one of the ‘mechanisms’ or ‘aspects’ of structural violence (along with penetration, fragmentation, and marginalization). In a 1990 essay, he further pinpointed exploitation as a ‘center-piece’ in his view of ‘the archetypal violent structure’. He combined the distinction between direct and structural violence with four classes of ‘basic needs’, yielding ‘a typology of violence’ (see Table 1). The distinction between Exploitation A and Exploitation B is that the former refers to the situation where the ‘‘underdogs may in fact be so disadvantaged that they die (starve, waste away from diseases) from it,’’ while the latter refers to the situation in which the underdogs ‘‘may be left in a permanent, unwanted state of misery, usually including malnutrition and illness.’’ Suggesting that it is possible to label this table ‘anthropo-centric’, Galtung noted that a fifth column (for the rest of nature) could be added at the beginning. As he did in 1969, Galtung urged acceptance of the direct violence–structural violence distinction because to do

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Table 1 A typology of violence Survival needs Direct violence Structural violence

Killing

Well-being needs

Identity needs

Freedom needs

Maiming, siege, sanctions, misery Exploitation A

Desocialization, resocialization, secondary citizen Exploitation B, segmentation

Repression, detention, expulsion Penetration, marginalization, fragmentation

Galtung, J. (1990). Cultural violence. Journal of Peace Research 27(3), 291–305.

Table 2 A summary of the concepts of negative and positive peace Negative peace

Positive peace

Unorganized

Absence of personal physical and direct violence Absence of, for example, wife battering, rape, child abuse, dowry deaths, street killings

Absence of indirect violence shortening life span Absence of inequalities in microstructures leading to unequal life chances

Organized

Absence of, for example, war

Absence of economic structures in a country or between countries so that the life chances of some are reduced or effects of damage on nature by pollution, radiation, etc.

Absence of indirect violence reducing quality of life Absence of repression in microstructures leading to less freedom of choice and fulfillment Absence of repression in a country of free speech, the right to organize, etc.

Brock-Utne, B. (1997). Linking the micro and macro in peace and development studies. In Turpin, J. and Kurtz, L. R. (eds.) The web of violence: From interpersonal to global, pp. 150–160. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press.

otherwise (i.e., to restrict ‘peace’ to the study of direct violence) is ‘narrow’ and, furthermore, leaves out important interconnections among types of violence, ‘‘particularly the way in which one type of violence may be reduced or controlled at the expense of increase or maintenance of another.’’ In his 1990 article, Galtung expanded his work on direct and structural violence by introducing the concept of ‘cultural violence’, which he defined as ‘‘those aspects of culture, the symbolic sphere of our existence— exemplified by religion and ideology, language and art, empirical science and formal science (logic, mathematics)— that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence.’’ He conceived of three ‘super-types’ or overarching categories to make a ‘(vicious) violence triangle’ image, leading to a ‘violence strata’ image, and suggested that, generally, the causal flow is from cultural via structural to direct violence. Brock-Utne explored and expanded the relationship between direct and indirect violence as she applied it to the field of peace education in her 1989 work. Table 2 presents her summary frame. In her 1989 work, she argued that while the six cells are logically independent of one another, this does not mean that there are no relationships between them; whether and what connections exist is to be decided empirically. She suggested research questions within each cell. For example, a focus on cell I (unorganized negative peace) could lead to an analysis of patriarchy and macho attitudes since they are

relevant to both rapes and wife battery as well as to street killings. She also highlighted possible research questions for linking different cells. Is there, for example, more or less of cell I-type violence in periods of economic decline, which might lead to a type of structural violence, or in times of direct violence, that is, war and revolution? Or what is the relationship between organized direct and organized indirect violence (e.g., the relationship between the lives of women and children in developing countries and the money spent on weapons)? While just briefly referring to one of Galtung’s works, Eisler is also concerned with the relationships between kinds of violence. She approaches the issue in her examination of human rights, calling for ‘‘a new integrated approach to both violence and human rights.’’ As Table 3 shows, Eisler differentiates between two models of social organization. In the dominator model, differences are ‘automatically equated with inferiority or superiority’ and the superior dominates the inferior. In the partnership model, difference is not automatically equated with inferiority or superiority. She argues that the domination and violence that occur in the private sphere provide the basis for domination and violence in the public sphere; partnership and peace are juxtaposed with domination and violence. The evolving concern with human rights is at the heart of much of the dialog in the early twenty-first century about the relationships among concepts such as violence, terrorism, war, poverty and inequality, globalization, development, and democracy. The realities of genocide and civil

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Table 3 The dominator and partnership models Basic configurations Component

Dominator model

Partnership model

Gender relations

The ranking of the male over the female as well as the higher valuing of the traits and social values stereotypically associated with ‘masculinity’ rather than ‘femininity’a A high degree of institutionalized social violence and abuse, ranging from wife- and child beating, rape, warfare to psychological abuse by ‘superiors’ in the family, the workplace, and society at large A predominantly hierarchic and authoritarian social organization, with the degree of authoritarianism and hierarchism roughly corresponding to the degree of male dominanceb

Equal valuing of the sexes as well as of ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ or a sexually egalitarian social and ideological structure where ‘feminine’ values can gain operational primacy A low degree of social violence, with violence and abuse not structural components of the system

Violence

Social structure

A more generally equalitarian social structure, with difference (be it based on sex, race, religion, or belief system) not automatically associated with superior or inferior social and/or economic status

The terms ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ as used here correspond to the gender stereotypes appropriate for a dominator society (where ‘masculinity’ is equated with dominance and conquest) and not with any inherent female or male traits. b As used here, the term ‘hierarchic’ refers to what we may call a domination hierarchy or the type of hierarchy inherent in a dominator model of social organization based on fear and the threat of force. Such hierarchies should be distinguished from a second type of hierarchy, which may be called an actualization hierarchy (e.g., of molecules, cells, and organs in the body: a progression toward a higher and more complex level of function). Eisler, R. (1997). Human rights and violence: Integrating the private and public spheres. In Turpin, J. and Kurtz, L. R. (eds.) The web of violence: From interpersonal to global, pp. 161–185. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. a

wars in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries contributed to this concern as did the more positive work emanating from the World Conference on Human Rights in 1993 and the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A human rights orientation calls for protecting and promoting the human dignity of each person as the foundation to the diminishment of violence, terrorism, war, poverty, and inequality, and to the augmentation of a more humane and inclusive kind of globalization, development, and democracy. Nevertheless, it is not clear that the focus on human rights is seen as related to structural violence; the author has found little evidence of such linkage.

Structural Violence in Peace Research and Peace Action In considering the future of the concept of structural violence, at least two issues arise. First, how useful is the concept for those doing peace research? Second, how useful is it for those involved in action for peace? As indicated in the above review, at least some scholars in peace research have found the term helpful. Perhaps an answer to this question depends, in turn, on how peace research is defined – another subject of differing perspectives. In his 1969 essay, Galtung argued for an enlarged version of peace research, ‘‘defined as research into the conditions—past, present and future—of realizing peace,’’ one that would of necessity be ‘‘equally intimately connected with conflict research and development research; the former

often more relevant for negative peace and the latter more relevant for positive peace, but with highly important overlaps.’’ In asking if research should emphasize negative or positive peace, Galtung cautioned that ‘‘too much research emphasis on one aspect of peace tends to rationalize extremism to the right or extremism to the left, depending on whether one-sided emphasis is put on ‘‘absence of personal violence’’ or on ‘social justice’, and that the two types of extremism are related formally, socially, and ‘in a dialectic manner: one is often a reaction to the other’. He urged attention and action to both types of peace and rejected the ‘pessimistic’ view (i.e., that one could not meaningfully work for both negative and positive peace) by pointing to the many forms of social action (citing e.g., the field of nonviolent action); the theoretical work on symmetric, egalitarian organization; the theory of vertical development; and approaches to arms control and disarmament issues. Finally, he concluded that peace research could make ‘a real contribution’ by recognizing the double goal (i.e., concern with the conditions for promoting both aspects of peace) and aiming for both: ‘‘there is no reason to believe that the future will not bring us richer concepts and more forms of social action that combine absence of personal violence with fight against social injustice once sufficient activity is put into research and practice.’’ In his 1996 comprehensive work, Galtung highlights the notion he used in earlier works that views peace studies as ‘‘an applied science similar to medical studies or health science, informed by an underlying D, P, T paradigm (diagnosis, prognosis, therapy).’’ In peace studies, diagnosis refers to states of violence, prognosis to processes of

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Table 4 Systematization II of peace and conflict studies: Some examples of fields of education, research, and actiona Direct violence (DV) N: ‘‘survival of the fittest’’ P: violence to self, suicide S: violence across fault lines W: war geography; genocide C: culturocide T: history and future of violence, war Structural violence (SV) N: ecocide P: psychopathologies S: patriarchie, racism, class W: imperialism, trade C: cultural imperialism T: history and future of exploitation and repression Cultural violence (CV) Religion: transcendent Law: democracy, human rights Ideology: universalist, singularist Language: sexist, racist Art: patriotic, patriarchy Science I: Western logic? Science II: to destroy life Cosmology: Occident I? Sinic? Nipponic? Buddhic? School: militarization University: militarization Media: war/violence journalism

Direct (positive) peace (DP) N: ‘‘mutual aid and cooperation’’ P: intra-, interpersonal growth S: nonviolent liberation W: peace movements; alternative defense C: cultural liberation T: history and future of peace Structural (positive) peace (SP) N: non-homocentric eco-peace P: intra-, inter-personal peace S: development, parity, equity W: peace regions; governance, UN C: cultural coexistence T: sustainability of the above Cultural (positive) peace (CP) Religion: immanent Law: democracy, human rights Ideology: particularist, pluralist Language: humanist/non-speciesist Art: humanist/non-speciesist Science I: Daoist? Buddhist? Science II: to enhance life Cosmology: Occident II? Indic? School: peace education University: peace study and research Media: peace journalism

a Key: N ¼ nature; P ¼ person; S ¼ social; W ¼ world; C ¼ culture; T ¼ time. Galtung, J. (1996). Peace by peaceful means: Peace and conflict, development and civilization. Oslo, Norway: PRIO, International Peace Research Institute.

violence (increase, same, decrease), and therapy to processes of violence reduction (negative peace) and processes of life enhancement (positive peace). Table 4 presents Galtung’s detailed systematization of peace and conflict studies, and the place of ‘structural violence’ in that system. As pointed out earlier, structural violence is seen as one of three violences that must be addressed if we are to better understand social reality and if we are committed to reducing violence at all levels. In his recent collaboration, Galtung and colleagues have formed TRANSCEND, ‘‘a peace and development network for conflict transformation by peaceful means,’’ which builds on his work and that of others to advance peace research with the explicit goal of ‘searching for peace’ that includes explicit attention to the ‘violence triangle’, that is, direct, structural and cultural violence. Nevertheless, as noted above, not all scholars in the peace research movement have embraced the concept of structural violence. Three basic arguments can be cited. First, some argue that the term cannot be made adequately operational. Second, some contend that even if one could make it more operational, it would still not be helpful to theory building because it is rooted ultimately in ‘value’. Here, two critiques are offered. On the one hand is the observation that not all researchers (or participants in a system) would agree on the importance of the implicit

values which seem to under-gird the term; for example, equality, basic needs, and so on. Some would go so far as to say that structural violence equals whatever the researcher does not like. On the other hand are those whose concern is that the use of such a term will undermine the ‘objectivity’ of the science project (although this charge can be made as well against other concepts, such as development with its implicit values). Third, for some the term does not seem to go beyond what basic stratification theory and research already have to offer, so there is no advantage to using a term like structural violence. For those who employ the term, on the other hand, several arguments are put forth in its favor. Some contend that in enlarging the focus of violence from the behavioral to the structural, the concept provides a means for moving beyond psychologistic interpretations (which can seem to suggest ‘fitting’ an actor into an existing system) and thus, quite importantly, allows for challenges to that system itself. Second, the enlarged view is an advantage to those who are interested in decentering the ‘state’ as the only or main actor of any importance in global analyses, making room for an examination of other actors, issues, and social forces which, they argue, are necessary for an understanding of peace. In this vein, structural violence calls for attention to a particular historical situation as well as for studies of that concrete reality in comparative

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perspective. Which leads to a third advantage to the term, namely, that researchers from other disciplines not viewed as centrally involved in the peace research movement (e.g., humanities and philosophy) may be interested in making contributions from their perspectives because of this more expansive view of peace. In the process, a richer understanding of the complexities of peace and violence can be advanced. Finally, for some, precisely because structural violence does imply value(s), as would-be critics contend, it is more appealing to them as researchers; they do not subscribe to the paradigm of ‘value-free’ knowledge. Some extend this position by pointing out that such a value position is important because it allows for links between the academy and the peace movement, which leads to the second major question: How useful is the structural violence concept to those involved in peace action? There are both disadvantages and advantages. On the negative side, there is for some a simple antitheory stance. Concepts at the level of abstraction that structural violence seems to be are to be avoided because they obfuscate reality. For others, there is the possibility that the term may evoke a determinism. Structural violence seems, in effect, to reduce if not eliminate the notion of human agency. Worse yet, the concept may engender a fatalism which precludes action. If things ‘are as they should be’, one can do nothing except become resigned – hardly the impetus to individual or collective action. Relatedly, it can imperil those who are less interested in more macro-analysis to the extent it seems to overcomplexify the situation, enervating them in the process or adding to their sense of powerlessness. It can also discourage those who are simply less experienced in structural analysis because, as with any structural analysis, there are not always clear, obvious implications for action. The impulse is to retreat to the local scene, restricting one’s vision and energies to what can be ‘done’ in one’s own backyard. The challenge then becomes to engage in more holistic thinking, to diagnose structures in such a way that individuals can see their positions in them but can also perceive the possibilities for change, which leads to a discussion of the advantages of the term for those involved in peace action. To label something as ‘violent’ often carries with it a general cultural valence of negativity which can elicit, at least theoretically and possibly in concrete actions as well, the rejection of any such situation so defined; it is ‘wrong’ and it should be ‘righted’. Second, structural violence contributes to a focus on the larger system and helps deflect the commonly used ‘blame-the-victim’ approach for the cause of social problems. Third and relatedly, for some actionists an analysis that calls attention to structural issues, as long as it is done in conjunction with attention to the individual level, can encourage (if not in fact demand) work on both levels: actions to alter the violent structures and processes, and personal decisions to lead one’s own life

in a conscious way so as to lessen the suffering of others. Here the theoretical as well as experience-based redefinitions of power from ‘power over’ and power as ‘zero-sum’ to ‘power with’ and ‘power to’ become central to individual action as well as to community capacity-building in attacking roots of structural violence. Fourth, with the concept of structural violence, the links between justice and peace become key and the question of nonviolent action essential. Here, concepts such as interdependence, solidarity, and conscience constituency and metaphors such as the ‘web’ and ‘spaceship Earth’ can help sustain and motivate those working for peace. Here, too, the importance of developing skills of imagination and of working to construct cultures of peace and new identities (e.g., ‘world citizen’ as Wright called it or ‘global citizen’ or even ‘planetary citizen’ as some use today) take on more urgency. Fifth, this leads as well to a discussion of social change, social movements and actions to reduce or eliminate structural violence. How one defines ‘democracy’ and ‘democratic structures’ becomes key. If, for example, democratic structures are conceived as those in which people have some voice in the decisions that most affect their well-being, the call for changes in the current world system as well as systems at lower levels of analysis (down to and including the family) becomes imperative. And finally, peace action calls for an examination of education. Learning about structural violence is a beginning step in acting against it. Gleaning principles of action against direct, indirect, and cultural violence becomes essential if indeed the purpose of the study of peace and violence is not simply to advance theory but also to contribute to the decrease of violence and the increase of structures and processes of peace in the global community. See also: Institutionalization of Violence; Peace Culture; Social Theorizing About War and Peace

Further Reading Brock-Utne, B. (1989). Feminist perspectives on peace and peace education. New York: Pergamon Press. Brock-Utne, B. (1997). Linking the micro and macro in peace and development studies. In Turpin, J. and Kurtz, L. R. (eds.) The web of violence: From interpersonal to global, pp. 150–160. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Coicaud, J. -M., Doyle, M. W., and Gardner, A. -M. (eds.) (2003). The globalization of human rights. New York: United Nations University Press. Eisler, R. (1997). Human rights and violence: Integrating the private and public spheres. In Turpin, J. and Kurtz, L. R. (eds.) The web of violence: From interpersonal to global, pp. 161–185. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Galtung, J. (1964). An editorial. Journal of Peace Research 1(1), 1–4. Galtung, J. (1968). Peace. In Sills, D. L. (ed.) International encyclopedia of the social sciences, vol. 11, pp. 487–496. New York: The Macmillan Company and The Free Press.

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Galtung, J. (1969). Violence, peace, and peace research. Journal of Peace Research 6(3), 167–191. Galtung, J. (1985). Twenty-five years of peace research: Ten challenges and some responses. Journal of Peace Research 22(2), 141–158. Galtung, J. (1990). Cultural violence. Journal of Peace Research 27(3), 291–305. Galtung, J. (1996). Peace by peaceful means: Peace and conflict, development and civilization. Oslo, Norway: PRIO, International Peace Research Institute. Galtung, J., Jacobsen, C. G., and Brand-Jacobsen, K. F. (2002). Searching for peace: The road to transcend. London: Pluto Press in association with Transcend.

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Gilligan, J. (1996). Violence: Our deadly epidemic and its causes. New York: Putnam’s. Shiva, V. (2005). Earth democracy: Justice, sustainability, and peace. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Webb, K. (1986). Structural violence and the definition of conflict. In Laszlo, E. and Yoo, J. Y. (eds.) World encyclopedia of peace, vol. 2, pp. 431–434. Oxford, UK: Pergamon World report on violence and health. (2002). World Health Organization, Geneva. http://www.who.int Wright, Q. (1942). A study of war, vol. 2. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.


IV.

WAR PRECURSORS


Warriors, Anthropology of Andrew Sanders, University of Ulster, Coleraine, Londonderry ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Introduction The Tribal Warrior

Glossary Age Set Formally organized group of persons of a common age range. Genipa Bluish-black pigment of the fruit of the tree Genipa americana. Mana Personal mystical power associated with Polynesians of high rank, causing them to be, to varying degrees, sacred.

Warriors, as the term is used here, are persons whose vocation is warfare and who engage in the actual physical activity of fighting. In contrast to soldiers, and in particular to conscripts, they fight for personal glory. Consequently, they often fight as individuals rather than as members of disciplined military formations. To warriors, warfare is a way of life and its values dominate much of their behavior. In contrast to modern soldiers, warriors supply their own weapons. With the development of the state, warriors (such as medieval knights) fought in a more disciplined way, but their lives continued to be dominated by values of personal and military glory. It is not possible to make an absolute distinction between the warrior whose vocation is warfare and the soldier whose profession is warfare, and today’s professional soldiers still demonstrate some aspects of warriorhood. Personal honors are awarded for military deeds of outstanding bravery, and battle honors are given to successful military units and services. But personal glory and individual prowess have become subordinated to military strategy and technical efficiency.

Introduction In discussions of ‘primitive’ societies, the term ‘warrior’ is often applied to any fighting man. This is particularly true in popular literature, where ‘warrior’ and adult male are used as if they are synonymous. In most human societies all able-bodied men were at least potential fighters and engaged in military activity when necessary, but there are This article is reproduced from the previous edition, volume 3, pp 773–784, ã 1999, Elsevier Inc., with revisions made by the Editor.

The Warrior in Centralized Polities Further Reading

Military Associations Men’s social groups of the Native American tribes of the North American Great Plains, which carried out military activities. Tipi Conical skin tent of the North American Plains Indians. Tsantsa Shrunken human head trophy of the Jivaro Indians of Ecuador.

fewer examples of persons to whom warfare was a vocation and whose lives were dedicated to military pursuits. In the great majority of human societies, the role of fighting with weapons was culturally restricted to men. There were notable exceptions, the Amazons of Dahomey being the most famous authenticated example. These were women soldiers in the service of the West African kings of Dahomey in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 1845 Dahomey had a standing army of 12 000 soldiers, of whom 5000 were women. The Amazons were organized in brigades with their own female officers and were billeted in special apartments in the royal palace. They formed the king’s bodyguard and were recruited by the king, to whom they were said to be devoted, from among both free Dahomeans and captives. They should remain celibate until middle age, when they could marry on receiving permission from the king. Their historical origins appear to have been the women employed to hunt for game for the royal table, and the elite corps among the nineteenth-century Amazon companies was the Fanti company, which was recruited from elephant huntresses. Amazon companies wore the uniform of Dahomean regular soldiers and were armed with muskets and bayonets, or bow and arrows in the case of young recruits. Dahomey was a politically and socially complex precolonial West African state. In some tribal societies (see below) in which men’s and women’s activities were not strongly differentiated, such as the Ojibwa Indians of the North American Great Lakes region, women warriors were not unusual and their war exploits were accorded social recognition. Other nonindustrial societies have produced individual female warriors, such as Celtic warrior chieftainesses and Jeanne d’Arc, but either their warlike activities were an aspect of their special

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status (they belonged to cultural categories different from normal men and women) or they were regarded as abnormal and their exploits explained in supernatural – or similar – terms.

The Tribal Warrior A common anthropological classification of human societies is to divide them into four types (bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states) on the basis of complexity of social organization and political structure. This is a useful classification for a general examination of warriors, as patterns of warfare are related to general types of political structure. Bands and tribes are egalitarian forms of political organization that lack formalized political hierarchy or a social division into dominant and subordinate political groups. Leadership is based on achievement and is for limited purposes only. The power an individual can acquire depends on his ability and is influential rather than coercive. Because of this, bands and tribes are classed together as uncentralized structures, in contrast to chiefdoms and states, which are hierarchically organized. Bands constitute the simplest form of political organization. They are associated with a hunting and foraging way of life and usually contain between 30 and 100 persons. They are of fluid composition: size and membership fluctuate with local and seasonal changes in the availability of natural resources. A band’s members have relatives in many neighboring bands, may change their band of residence relatively frequently, and often marry persons from other bands. Consequently, important social and personal ties often link persons residing in different bands. Under these circumstances there is no formal organization for warfare and war is not an important activity, although actions such as homicide and wife-stealing may provoke retaliatory attacks between families. Bands do not produce fighting men who are warriors by our definition. Tribes usually consist of a number of residential groups – villages, hamlets, or homesteads. These settlements are made up of close kinsmen and have a high degree of political autonomy. They are confederated through the operation of kinship groups, political and recreational associations, and ritual organizations, which are organized on a tribal basis. In some cases a tribe may constitute a single large village, but common residence is cemented through village-based organizations and activities. Tribal organization is associated with horticulture, the large-scale keeping of livestock, and with more complex patterns of hunting. (However, tribes are not the only forms of social organization to be based on these ways of life.) Tribes were more effectively organized for warfare than were bands. The typical fighting unit was a small group of kinsmen mobilized to carry out a raid in retaliation for a

perceived offense against one of its members. Recruited on the basis of obligations of mutual assistance between close kinsmen, it was a temporary unit, informally organized and lacking authoritative leadership. Raiding was the major form of military activity, but if hostility developed between communities or tribes over a long period, it might culminate in a battle in which, at most, the victorious group could kill its opponents or drive them away. Men usually lacked extensive training in military activities and tended to act on their own initiatives during fighting. Although all able-bodied adult males fought as the occasion required, warfare was not usually a vocation. It was one of a man’s several cultural roles and was not the principal means of attaining prestige. Warrior Societies However, some tribes placed a strong value upon warfare and war-like achievements. Warfare was a cultural value, exalted in itself, and assumed the character of a personal vocation. Outstanding fighting men received honor and prestige. Warfare was integrated with other aspects of culture, such as religious beliefs and ritual practices. Pierre Clastres terms these societies ‘warrior societies’ because of the special place given to war and violence in their cultural ethos. Some warrior tribes had special organizations whose members carried out military activities. The equestrian Indians of the North American plains in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries possessed men’s social and recreational associations that competed with each other in military activities, and many East African pastoral tribes had age-based organizations that pursued warfare. However, the diagnostic characteristic of warrior tribes is a matter of cultural ethos and personal calling rather than the presence of specialist military organizations. Keith Otterbein lists six possible goals of war: subjugation and tribute; acquisition of land; acquisition of plunder; trophies and honors; defense; and revenge. (To this we should perhaps add a further category, ritual goals – e.g., acquiring heads for religious purposes or prisoners for human sacrifice.) Revenge or retaliation is generally regarded as the most common motive for the warfare of bands and tribes, as they lack the organization to subjugate a defeated foe, but there are also economic motives in some situations. For example, pastoral peoples in East Africa, Central Asia, and southern Siberia fought for control of pastures to graze their flocks and herds, and the Indians of the Gran Chaco in Paraguay fought for control of water. In warrior societies, personal glory (Otterbein’s ‘acquisition of trophies and honors’) was a particularly important motive for participating in warfare. Military activity continued to be an individualistic enterprise characterized by limited discipline, informal controls over individual warriors, and restricted powers of leaders. Many anthropologists argue that underlying the individual motives and social goals of warfare are deeper influences.

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For example, Otterbein claims that changing patterns of warfare in southeastern Africa in the nineteenth century, and the associated political changes, resulted from pressure on land caused by population increase. In contemporary anthropology, the most influential of these explanations are material ones; patterns of warfare are the product of ecological influences or of (often hidden) economic factors. It may be argued that idealistic motives really mask more fundamental material ones. Or that warfare operates to maintain favorable ecological and demographic relations – by reducing the pressure of population on land or by producing a more ecologically efficient distribution of resources, for example – and that ecological and demographic problems generate particular patterns of warfare that serve to resolve them. In some tribes a warrior ethic was associated with intergroup competition for scarce material resources. For example, pastoral tribes often fought for pasture, and some tribes of the New Guinea Highlands fought for land. But material causes do not appear universal. In the peripheral areas of the New Guinea Highlands, warfare was endemic in the precolonial period, but there was no shortage of land and acquisition of land was of little importance as a goal of warfare. A warrior ethic may not be simply a cultural response to material conditions. Competition for material resources may have been of little importance in the creation of a warrior ethos among the Jivaro Indians of Ecuador, the Indians of the North American plains, or the Indians of northeastern North America. Clastres argues that a society may develop a warrior ethic in a variety of ways. It may be a response to external social influences or be an internal cultural development. The transformation may not be permanent. He also suggests that warrior societies have the potential to become predatory, looting societies through raiding their neighbors for booty, and cites the North American Apache as an example. However, anthropological accounts of many warrior societies describe them after they had been subjected to the influences of European colonial expansion, which may have stimulated warfare through dispossession and competition for land, demand for European commodities, or the development of more efficient weapons and military techniques. Warrior ideals were sometimes created by this process, while existing warrior ideals often came to be more strongly expressed. Seventeenth-century Iroquois militarism exemplifies the latter development. As a result of contact with Europeans, the Iroquois (a warrior society of the New York–Pennsylvania region) developed new military tactics that gave them a commanding position in the intertribal conflicts that were generated by European colonialism and gave new goals to warfare. Recent studies of South American warrior societies argue that Mundurucu militarism was intensified through their use as mercenaries by the Portuguese and that

Euro-American colonial and commercial activities intensified Jivaro warfare. The Integration of Warriors in Tribal Social Structures In warrior societies, there was often a marked differentiation between the proper social role of the warrior and that of the elders, with the latter directing community policy making. War was primarily a young man’s occupation, and the warriors’ passion for war often conflicted with more pragmatic policies advocated by their elders. Consequently, the elders sought to exercise some control over the activities of the warriors. In East African pastoral societies such as the Masai, male roles were allocated within a formal system of associations recruited on the principle of socially recognized age. Initiation into an age set created a common identity and a strong esprit de corps among its members. The members of the elder’s age sets were expected to decide policies in matters vital to the well-being of the community. The warriors’ age sets acted to defend land, cattle, and other resources and to raid enemies. The impulsive glory-seeking warriors should be under some control from their elders. Among North American Plains Indians such as the Crow, influential civil leaders, whose status in part depended on their war performance in the past, decided policy through consultation with their peers. They used the military associations of the tribe to implement their decisions. Within the tribe, competition for prestige between different military associations may have acted both as an outlet for the aggressive values of young men and as a mechanism to reduce the likelihood of conflict arising from the differing interests and values of the young and the old. However, assaults from more powerful societies might promote an increase in the power of warriors and their leaders over the direction of community policy. This development occurred among many Native American societies during the European colonization of the Americas. Training In warrior societies, warfare was strongly integrated with religious and social values, and from childhood a male was socialized into warrior ideals and trained in military activities. Among South American tribal groups such as the Tupinamba and the Guarani, boys were taught that they must avenge warriors killed by enemies by capturing prisoners to sacrifice as compensation for their loss. The primary aim of a Jivaro boy’s upbringing was to make him a brave and skillful warrior. A father sought to inculcate his hatred of his enemies into his sons, and young boys were taken on war expeditions. At puberty a Jivaro boy

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drank a narcotic prepared from the bush Datura arborea, which caused him to hallucinate. Ancestral spirits appeared to him, to help him become a valiant and successful warrior. Throughout his life he would take narcotic drinks in order to consult the spirits for advice in military matters. Among the Indians of the North American plains in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a boy was taught from infancy that bravery provided the route to social success and that old age was an evil and it was good to die young in battle. He was taught to admire and emulate eminent warriors. (Boys who showed no inclination toward this way of life might be allocated to a nonmasculine gender and allowed to pursue a lifestyle different from other men.) In coastal Melanesia, boys were taught to regard allies and enemies as significantly different persons. The enemies were defined as external, negative objects against which one’s self and one’s group were defined. The successful taking of enemy life was associated with joy and prestige, and the torture and cannibalizing of enemy prisoners might be relished. In some tribal societies, adulthood was entered through initiation rituals, which might involve ordeals. In warrior societies successful passage of initiation might be necessary to qualify for warrior status, as in parts of East Africa and Melanesia. War Honors Where warfare was exalted and the warrior was an ideal, particular achievements often provided the criteria of personal success. They were demonstrations of worthiness. To become an important man, a Jivaro should have participated in successful war expeditions and killed at least one enemy. To be elected as war leader, he had to be a renowned warrior who had taken part in many wars, killed many enemies, and taken at least one enemy head and participated in the subsequent tsantsa feast. Accumulation of war honors increased social status. A Bagobo man of Mindanao in the Philippines who had killed two persons was entitled to wear a chocolatecolored kerchief as a symbol of his achievement and was believed to be protected by two great spirits. Four killings entitled him to wear blood-red trousers, and when he achieved six he was entitled to a suit of blood-red and could lead war parties and assist in annual ceremonies. War achievements were ranked, and the highest might stress the bravery involved in the exploit. Warriors achieved prestige and became war leaders by performing the higher-ranked deeds. Among Plains Indians, the highest war achievement, the coup, involved touching the body of a living or dead foe with a special stick. This testified that the warrior had been at close quarters with the enemy. It was an expression of personal bravery, and counting coup on a foe usually ranked higher than killing

him, which could be done from a distance. Achievements had to be socially recognized to be valid, which usually meant that they had to be witnessed. Consequently, a man counting a coup in battle would call out his exploit aloud, and war exploits were recounted at public gatherings. The nineteenth-century Cheyenne Indians allowed three persons to count coup upon the same body, the first coup ranking highest. Other high-ranking deeds involved saving a wounded comrade, having a horse shot from under one, being the first to locate the enemy, and charging a body of enemy alone. The Crow allowed four coups, ranked according to the order in which they were struck. They recognized four categories of war honors: striking a foe, leading a war party, stealing a picketed horse from an enemy camp, and snatching a bow or gun from a foe in hand-to-hand combat. To be recognized as a distinguished warrior, a man had to have achieved at least one deed of each type. Honors were displayed in dress and personal decoration and painted on the warrior’s tipi. Ranking of military achievements engendered competition between warriors. War was fought as an individual activity, for personal glory. The successful warrior was driven continuously to seek greater achievements, so that he became an individual who invited death. Formal single combats between noted warriors or between champions of groups are reported from warrior societies around the world. They are frequently reported for nineteenth-century Plains Indians. Sometimes they involved behavior comparable to the medieval European idea of chivalry. A classic example is the American artist George Catlin’s account of a duel between the noted Mandan leader Mato-Tope´ (Four Bears) and a prominent Cheyenne warrior. When a party of Mandans met a much larger Cheyenne war party, Mato-Tope´ rode toward them and thrust his lance into the ground. He hung his sash (the insignia of his position in his military association) upon it as a sign that he would not retreat. The Cheyenne leader then challenged Mato-Tope´ to single combat by thrusting his ornate lance (the symbol of his office in his military association) into the ground next to that of Mato-Tope´. The two men fought from horseback with guns until Mato-Tope´’s powder horn was destroyed. The Cheyenne then threw away his gun so that they remained evenly matched. They fought with bow and arrow until Mato-Tope´’s horse was killed, when the Cheyenne voluntarily dismounted and they fought on foot. When the Cheyenne’s quiver was empty, both men discarded bow and shield and closed to fight with knives. Mato-Tope´ then realized that he had left his knife at home, and a desperate struggle ensued for the Cheyenne’s weapon. Although wounded badly in the hand and several times in the body, Mato-Tope´ succeeded in wresting the Cheyenne’s knife from him and then killed him and took his scalp. Consequently, among his war honors


highest honors for risk-taking behavior, but Plains culture also regarded high loss of life on one’s own side as an unacceptable price for success. A successful war leader who had never lost a follower ranked higher than one who, however successful in terms of other war honors, had done so. A Cheyenne’s rank as a warrior was created by a combination of his score in personal war honors and his ability to lead successful raids in which Cheyenne losses were low. Trophies

Figure 1 Mandan warrior, Mato Tope´ (Four Bears), displaying his war honors. Watercolor sketch by Karl Bodmer (1834). (Salamander).

Mato-Tope´ wore a red wooden knife in his hair to symbolize the deed, and the duel was one of the 11 war exploits painted on his buffalo robe. He also wore in his hair four small yellow sticks, one blue stick, and one red stick to symbolize wounds received in battle. His coups were indicated by yellow horizontal stripes on his arm and a yellow hand painted on his chest showed that he had taken prisoners (Figure 1). Although some war honors might exalt risk, others might not require it. War was not usually indulged in for risk: honors might be awarded for any homicide. Among the Bagobo of Mindanao, killing a sleeping enemy and killing from ambush ranked equal to homicide carried out in more dangerous circumstances, as did killing a faithless wife and her lover. The Jivaro tried to kill their enemies by ambush and surprise attack and avoid open fights, but a warrior was expected to show valor and contempt for death. He was taught not to run away or abandon his fellows. Melanesian warfare eulogized hit-and-run tactics, the killing of women and children, and deeds that entailed little risk. Plains Indian raiding and warfare gave the

Warriors often had to obtain trophies to demonstrate their power and achievements and sometimes for ritual reasons. A famous example is the taking and shrinking of heads by Jivaro warriors. The Jivaro shrunken-head trophy (tsantsa) was not only a victory token, it was a repository of supernatural power for the slayer and it gratified his ancestors’ desire for revenge and secured their good will. The more valiant the enemy, the greater the power of the tsantsa made from his head. Taking a head and celebrating a tsantsa feast brought honor to the slayer and was believed to promote his material success, future victory, and long life. Head-taking was a common form of trophy acquisition. It often involved religious motives, as in Indonesia and Melanesia. For example, headhunting in the Purari delta of New Guinea was interpreted as taking the life force of other communities to augment the spiritual force of one’s own clan spirit-ancestors. These were given the form of large wicker monsters that were fed enemy heads, which were placed in the mouth of the effigy and shaken into its stomach. Like war honors, war trophies might be graded in importance and prestige. Among the South American equestrian tribes of the Gran Chaco, there was a hierarchy of scalps. The Chulupi placed highest value upon scalps from their inveterate enemies, the Toba. (According to Clastres, the Chulupi claim that during the Chaco War of 1932–35 between Bolivia and Paraguay, they killed so many Bolivian soldiers that their scalps depreciated in prestige to the point where warriors only bothered to scalp officers.) Killing and the collecting of trophies might be accompanied by some degree of cannibalism, performed for ritual purposes and restricted to parts of the body considered to be the seat of particular virtues. The Bagobo ate the heart of a courageous foe in order to obtain his courage. Sometimes a more systematic form of cannibalism was carried out on war prisoners. The warrior societies of eastern North America often ate the remains of a prisoner in a cannibalistic feast after he had been killed by systematic prolonged torture. The Tupinamba Indian tribes of the Brazilian coast practiced the ceremonial killing and cannibalizing of war prisoners after they had

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enjoyed a period of freedom within their captors’ community. (Prisoners did not attempt to escape. Their own communities rejected them and to be killed and ceremoniously eaten was an honored fate.) The executioner of a prisoner scarified himself in order to create upon his body a permanent mark of his prestige. Although Tupinamba cannibalism was performed for religious purposes related to warfare and general cultural values, it also involved a genuine enjoyment of human flesh. In some Melanesian societies cannibalism had strong ritual and cosmological significance. It was believed that by incorporating the enemies’ life-force the victors acquired strength, well-being, and spiritual rejuvenation. In others, cannibalism was more a culinary delicacy or a way of insulting an enemy. Preparations for War Going to war in warrior societies involved ritual preparations to promote a successful enterprise. Throughout native South America, omens were consulted to gauge the likely outcome of a proposed raid. If a Tupinamba warrior dreamed of a meat-rack full of enemy flesh, this was a good sign. Should he dream about corpses of his own people, this was a bad omen and the war party would be aborted. Rites were performed to protect the warriors and make their expedition a success. The Araucanian Indians of southern Chile, who became equestrian warriors through Spanish contact, observed strict chastity before going to war. They drew magic symbols on their weapons and inoculated themselves with magic powders to make themselves invulnerable. They rubbed their horses with feathers of vicunã skins to make them swift. Shamans performed rituals and consulted oracles to discern the future. On the march, warriors continued to look for omens and would return home on sighting an inauspicious animal or hearing the call of an inauspicious bird. When a Jivaro expedition was being planned the warriors, and particularly the war leader, repeatedly drank narcotic drinks in order to consult with ancestors and other spirits. They paid special attention to dreams. For several nights before the expedition, the war party performed a ritual dance as an exhortation to war and an attempt to secure victory. Armed warriors were organized in two lines, and they performed the ritual in pairs, each pair engaging in a stereotyped dialog. While the party was away, the women assembled each night and danced. This was believed to protect their men and lull the enemy into a false sense of security. Before attacking an enemy household, the Jivaro warrior dressed for battle. Rafael Karsten describes the symbolism of the warrior’s dress and armaments. To give him strength and valor, he wore a necklace of jaguar’s teeth, long ear tubes, and a belt of boa’s skin – or he might wear a belt of human hair, as it was believed to have supernatural properties, hair being the seat of the

soul. He painted his face, limbs, and the exposed parts of the body black with genipa, to make him resemble a demon and give him the strength and ferocity of this spirit. His lance of chonta palm had special power, as the palm is the abode of a spirit; and his shield was decorated with paintings of spirits and animals intended to inspire him with strength and courage and strike fear into his foe. Ritual preparation for war was not only a symbolic act to promote success. It created a frame of mind conducive to performing acts of violence, which often involved physical risk and required courage. Even in the most war-like cultures aggression and courage have to be fostered in the individual. The Yanomano¨ Indians of Venezuela and Brazil are noted for their fierceness. Violent responses to personal slights are lauded. Yet even here, fighting cannot rely upon the existence of a violent temperament. Young warriors practice simulating rage as a tactic in interpersonal confrontation, and men use drugs to put themselves in a fighting mood. The attitudes of warriorhood in coastal Melanesia involved intense anger projected onto a dehumanized enemy. This was accomplished through war cults that transformed the warrior into a virulent persona of enragement and aimed to reduce the enemy to fear. In Avatip, a community on the middle Sepik river in Papua-New Guinea, headhunting involved rituals associated with the village men’s cult, intended to put warriors in a depersonalized state where their spirits were believed to act through them. Men were emotionally transformed so that they perceived others as quarry and were capable of killing anyone. They killed in order to become ritually significant individuals. A man went out to kill with an ornament in the form of a face clasped between his teeth. It went before him and obscured his real face. Simon Harrison argues that ritual transformation did more than create an attitude that enabled killing. It enabled men to break strongly held moral conventions that governed everyday behavior and social relationships. By attributing their actions to Spirit acting through a disassociated self, they were able to explain why they did so and to distance themselves from their ‘antisocial’ behavior. This practice was common in warfare on the middle Sepik. Avoiding the Demands of Warriorhood In warrior societies, not everyone wished to pursue the demanding life of the ultimate warrior to its logical conclusion by constantly courting death in seeking to outdo his fellows. It was a way of life that appealed to relatively few. Consequently, there were institutionalized ways in which a warrior could avoid such a course without losing honor. The equestrian tribes of the Gran Chaco each had a warriors’ association, membership of which was the ultimate recognition of warriorhood and conferred high social status. In late adolescence, boys underwent a


painful rite of passage which entitled them to bear arms; but to attain full warrior status by entering the warriors’ association a man had to bring back the scalp of an enemy killed in combat. Many men who could qualify did not wish to commit themselves to constant engagement in situations of personal danger, so when they killed an enemy, they chose not to take the scalp. Provided they continued to fight bravely when the occasion demanded, they lost no honor thereby. Among the Crow Indians of Montana, men joined one of several named associations that operated as military and recreational clubs and competed with each other for military renown. Each club possessed its own insignia and songs and had a number of club offices to which eminent or aspiring warriors were appointed each year. Four officers were standard bearers who carried special staffs and were pledged not to retreat in the face of the enemy. Because of the danger, many men refused to accept these offices. A reluctant candidate might be compelled to do so by having a ceremonial pipe forced against his lips.

The Warrior in Centralized Polities Centralized polities are hierarchically organized, with administrative functionaries who act as agencies for the redistribution of goods. In states, this agency takes the form of an organized, centralized government that claims a monopoly over the use of force within the society. Centralized polities are inegalitarian, with marked differences in rank and with social strata that are differentiated from each other in terms of prestige and often of power. Chiefdoms A chiefdom is characterized by hereditary chiefs, drawn from high-ranking kinship groups, who are the foci for the redistribution of goods and services. In addition, they may direct cooperative labor. Chiefly, status is sanctioned by ritual, and chiefs perform important religious duties affecting the whole polity. Some anthropologists argue that warfare was an important factor in the evolution of tribes into chiefdoms, suggesting that ecological pressures intensified warfare between polities and produced centralization. Others argue that increased warfare may be a consequence of increased centralization and social stratification – centralized organization enabled the development of a more efficient military force. Whichever view is taken, it is usually argued that once chiefdoms have developed, they are likely to expand by incorporating territory – and often by subjugating its population – through warfare and that, consequently, neighboring polities are likely to adopt more centralized institutions in their own defence.

The immediate motives for conflict between chiefdoms were usually chiefs’ desires to revenge what they perceived as slights against themselves. Within chiefdoms, hostilities involved grievances and clashes of interest between paramount chief and subchiefs. Warfare might result from, or be influenced by, economic considerations such as retaliation for trespass or seizure of territory when a chiefdom’s land was no longer able to support its population. Military practices in centralized political systems tended to be characterized by hand-to-hand combat, fortifications, and sieges, whereas in uncentralized political systems war was generally fought with projectiles. Chiefly armies averaged about 100 persons, but in larger, more strongly hierarchical chiefdoms they might be as large as 5000 individuals. Military encounters were battles rather than raids and resulted in much higher loss of life than was usual in the military activities of uncentralized peoples. The military organization of chiefdoms was much more complex than that of tribes. It was based upon the hierarchical structure of the polity and had a permanent, hierarchical command structure where senior members could transmit orders to their subordinates. This situation contrasts with uncentralized societies, where involvement in fighting was an individual decision or a group decision in which the individual fighter participated. In chiefdoms, war was decided upon by leaders who had the power to compel subjects to participate. A chief ’s status was hereditary and sanctioned by his prestige and ritual position, including his association with rituals of war. But he also had at his command a retinue of personal retainers who would enforce his decisions. War leaders were usually chiefs or their representatives (who were appointed from among their close kinsmen), and consequently the role of the warrior was to some degree hereditary. In a typical chiefdom, the paramount chief led his army and established military alliances with other chiefdoms. It was usual for the heir to the chieftainship to be trained from childhood in the martial arts. The chief not only led his forces; often he was expected to demonstrate his personal bravery in combat. Although he might command support, he led by example. Chiefs and renowned warriors might engage in single combats. For example, the leaders of Maori war parties were usually high-born chiefs and their military training, rank, and mana were supposed to make them brave men and successful leaders. If hostile Maori forces met in the open, renowned warriors might challenge each other to single combat. The fight was supposed to be conducted with some degree of chivalry. However, the ideal was not always followed, and a warrior might seek to disadvantage his opponent by tricking him. Although single combats might give individual renown, the military strategies of chiefdoms often involved trickery, treachery, and ambush.

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Members of a chief ’s domain could be mustered for combat at the chief ’s demand, but personal bravery and individual military success (measured in terms of enemies killed and prisoners taken) were applauded and outstanding performance socially rewarded. In contrast to uncentralized polities, warfare was more organized, often with military campaigns aimed to restrict the power of other chiefdoms. But fighting was a personal action that required skill and bravery. The encouragement of these qualities meant that in many chiefdoms, particularly those where warfare was endemic, fighting men, and not only those of high rank, were also warriors. A Fijian who clubbed an enemy to death was given an honorary title, and commoners who distinguished themselves in battle could be raised in rank to a position just below that of town chiefs and priests. However, genealogy was important in determining social status, and a man’s war exploits only enabled him to elevate his rank within certain social limits. Among the Maori, a courageous and successful warrior was given the title of toa. Among the Chibchan chiefdoms of the Cauca Valley in Colombia, where warfare was intense, the principal way a man could raise his status was by taking prisoners in war. Killing enemy warriors also merited prestige, and a brave and successful warrior could raise his rank and might achieve the position of war captain.

and preserved as trophies in a special house belonging to the paramount chief. Treatment of prisoners varied with culture and social circumstances. The Maori feasted on the flesh of dead enemies. The survivors might become slaves of chiefs and perform menial tasks. However, although they might be killed as human sacrifices or to provide part of a feast, the physical conditions of their servitude were not severe. In the Cauca Valley and in Fiji, obtaining prisoners to cannibalize became an increasing factor in promoting war. Robert Carneiro argues that in neither region was there any reason for large numbers of captives for economic exploitation, and consequently prisoners were usually killed and eaten. Preparations for War

From his comparative analysis of Fiji and the Cauca Valley, Carneiro argues that courage-instilling rituals prior to war were more elaborate in chiefdoms. He considers this to be a consequence of the increased risk of death in battle. Presumably, it was also related to the fact that participation in war was compulsory and no longer a matter of individual choice. Before going to war, the forces of a Fijian chiefdom would assemble to undergo a review in which each man would boast of how he would kill the enemy (Figure 2). The chief would encourage them by promising rich rewards for their valor.

Trophies

States

Success in warfare increased the prestige of the chief; it could strengthen his power by increasing the number of his subjects and consequently the amount of tribute he received. War trophies gave prestige to the chieftainship. The Maori smoke-dried and preserved the heads of defeated enemy chiefs and publicly insulted them. In the Cauca Valley, skulls and dried heads were hung from the bamboo palisades and walls of temples and houses and heaped on platforms in village plazas. In at least one Cauca Valley chiefdom, enemy corpses were smoke-dried

The hierarchical organization of chiefdoms enables them to become larger and more complex by incorporating defeated populations. The evolution of early states was a development of processes and structures already present in chiefdoms. The importance of warfare in the creation of the first states is debated, but there is universal agreement that once they evolved, warfare was a major factor in their expansion, which generated new states. The simplest states often did not contain warriors or professional soldiers. Waging war was only one of a man’s

Figure 2 Fijians performing war dance. Original photo: Henry King (Sydney, Australia).


cultural roles. The army was organized and mobilized on the basis of local divisions that incorporated all the ablebodied men of a district, often fighting under the command of their local chief. Other simple states had standing armies and made war into a young man’s profession. The great Zulu king Shaka (d. 1828) organized his army on the basis of age regiments, each with its own name, leader, and barracks. Young men of equivalent age were initiated together to form a new regiment, whose members lived together until middle age, when the king gave them permission to marry. Under these circumstances, each regiment developed a strong esprit de corps. While bravery was encouraged and rewarded, warfare was a disciplined activity and Zulu fighting men were more like professional soldiers than warriors. Such standing armies appear associated with expansionist warfare. With the development of aristocratic states, an aristocratic class dominated the highest military offices. S. P. Reyna describes these states as organized on the basis of two major social classes, aristocracy and peasantry, with differential property ownership, occupations, and political rights. Often, the aristocracy was a military caste of professional warriors, as in the case of medieval knights and Japanese samurai. War was a major means by which the aristocratic class acquired land, tribute, and rents. It was carried out principally in pursuit of aristocratic interests, and it has been claimed that warfare was necessary to maintain an aristocratic ruling class. In aristocratic states warriorhood was an occupation, closely associated with the ruling class and with a strong hereditary aspect. The Greek heroes of Homer were born of high rank. War was their main means of attaining wealth, and their lives were given over to warfare, government, religious ceremonies, and sports – the only activities worthy of a warrior. Their personal qualities were those proper to the warrior – courage, strength, and skill. Similarly, to the medieval knight war was a noble profession and the main purpose of life. He fought because it was his legal obligation to his feudal lord and because war provided the opportunity for material gain, but also out of love of war and to defend his honor. European feudal nobility lauded the skills and characteristics of the warrior. Courage and contempt of death were valued. Unwarlike persons (villeins) were despised. The knight was driven to perform feats of arms, both in his military activities and in his private life. The only civil activities with which he was likely to concern himself involved the exercise of judicial responsibilities. Proper peacetime pursuits involved demonstration of skill and courage, such as hunting and participating in tournaments, and a prodigal and luxurious lifestyle was the ideal. During the second feudal age the ideal knightly qualities became defined in a code of chivalry, which from about 1100 was described by the word ‘courtesie ’. A knight should use his sword in good causes

and to defend the Holy Church. He should not slay a vanquished or defenseless enemy. He should eschew any part in false judgement or acts of treason and aid those in distress. Although the reality was far different, the ideal was supposed to set the noble class apart as a special category of persons, superior to other classes. A trained warrior, the knight provided his own specialized equipment and fought in armor from horseback. The superiority of aristocratic armaments, their personal use, and skill in their use, enabled the operation of a warrior ethic as part of the aristocratic way of life. Knights formed the heavy cavalry core of shock troops of medieval armies, and with the invention of the stirrup in the tenth century their characteristic weapon became the long heavy lance. Armies consisted of a core of aristocratic warriors, with foot soldiers drawn from their feudal subjects. By 1250 knighthood had become hereditary, an aspect of the noble class of medieval European kingdoms. From the second half of the eleventh century, a new knight formally received his vocation through a ritual in which he was given his weapons by an established knight, who struck him a blow with the flat of his hand. This ritual of ‘dubbing’ became a Church service performed by a priest, in which the knight took an oath to abide by the knightly code, and there developed the concept of knighthood as an order to which all knights belonged and into which an initiate was religiously ordained. Archaic or aristocratic empires created mercenary groups from conquered populations or from groups living on their borders, such as the barbarians who were settled within the later Roman Empire as feodorati and the Cossacks of Imperial Russia. They were recruited to form military units in imperial armies, often because they held warrior values. Now, however, they were fighting in disciplined formations under imperial command and were professional soldiers rather than warriors. In a similar manner, the recent Age of Imperial Expansion resulted in certain groups – such as Ghurkas, Senegalese, and Scottish Highlanders – becoming associated with war-like abilities and recruited for imperial armies, with a corresponding development of a tradition in military careerism. With the development of industrialization and the nation-state, armies have become huge and intensely specialized with complex and sophisticated command hierarchies. Modern military personnel undergo intensive training to equip them with the skills and values of their occupation, which set them apart from the civilian population. Senior personnel are not exclusively drawn from ruling classes. Status within the military organization depends more on ability than birth. Women are recruited to military occupations. Material factors and class or national interests are the main causes of modern warfare. Combined with modern technology, this makes modern warfare a highly organized and disciplined activity and makes the true warrior, pursuing personal glory in battle, redundant.

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However, there are elements in modern military life that are universal aspects of a military vocation and consequently are shared with the warriors of tribal societies and of simpler states. It is not possible to draw a clear line between warriors and professional service personnel. Courage remains valued within the military services and is given special honors. There are medals for personal valor. Honor is associated with regiments and services and symbolized in battle honors. Rituals, often of a secular nature, continue to be used to generate military values and promote esprit de corps. This is particularly the case with officers, and officer-recruits may have to prove themselves during a long, humiliating period of initiation which resocializes the apprentice officer and creates commitment to the values of the military profession and establishes a strong identity with fellows and loyalty to comrades, as well as instilling discipline and obedience to orders. See also: Anthropology of Violence and Conflict, Overview; Military Culture; Warfare, Trends in

Further Reading Bloch, M. (1965). Feudal society. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Carneiro, R. L. (1990). Chiefdom-level warfare as exemplified in Fiji and the Cauca valley. In Haas, J. (ed.) The anthropology of war, pp. 190–211. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Catlin, G. (1973). Letters and notes on the manners, customs and conditions of North American Indians, vol. 1. New York, NY: Dover. Clastres, P. (1994). Archaeology of violence. New York: Semiotext(e). Ferguson, R. B. (ed.) (1984). Warfare, culture and environment. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Ferguson, R. B. and Whitehead, N. (eds.) (1992). War in the tribal zone: Expanding states and indigenous warfare. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Gilchrist, R. (2003). Introduction: Towards a social archeology of warfare. World Archaeology 35(1), 1–6. Haas, J. (ed.) (1990). The anthropology of war. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harrison, S. (1989). The symbolic construction of aggression and war in a Sepik river society. Man (N.S.) 24, 553–599. Jones, D. E. (1997). Women warriors: A history. Washington, DC: Brassey’s. Karsten, R. (1923). Blood revenge, war, and victory feasts among the Jibaro Indians of eastern Ecuador. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin No. 79. Keeley, L. H. (1996). War before civilization: The myth of the peaceful savage. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Knauft, B. M. (1990). Melanesian warfare: A theoretical history. Oceania 60, 250–311. Lowie, R. H. (1956). The crow Indians. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Me´traux, A. (1963). Warfare, cannibalism, and human trophies. In Steward, J. (ed.) Handbook of South American Indians, vol. 5, pp. 383–409. New York, NY: Cooper Square. Otterbein, K. F. (1970). The evolution of war. New Haven, CT: HRAF Press. Otterbein, K. F. (1973). The anthropology of war. In Honigmann, J. J. (ed.) Handbook of social and cultural anthropology, pp. 923–958. Chicago, IL: Rand McNally. Otterbein, K. F. (1994). Feuding and warfare: Selected works of Keith F. Otterbein. Langhorne, PA: Gordon and Breach. Redmond, E. (1994). Tribal and chiefly warfare in South America. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology Publications. Reyna, S. P. (1994). A mode of domination approach to organized violence. In Reyna, S. P. and Downs, R. E. (eds.) Studying war: Anthropological perspectives, pp. 29–65. Langhorne, PA: Gordon and Breach. Reyna, S. P. and Downs, R. E. (eds.) (1994). Studying war: Anthropological perspectives. Langhorne, PA: Gordon and Breach. Schmidt, B. and Schrøder, I. (eds.) (2001). Anthropology of violence and conflict. London, UK: Routledge. Vayda, A. P. (1960). Maori warfare. Polynesian society maori monographs 2. Wellington, New Zealand: The Polynesian Society.

Gangs Glen D Curry and Scott H Decker, University of Missouri, St. Louis, MO, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Gangs in History The Magnitude of Contemporary Gang Problems Theories of Gang Involvement Correlates of Gang Involvement

Glossary Gang (James F. Short, Jr.) Groups of young people who meet together with some regularity, over time, on the basis of group-defined criteria of membership and

The Dynamics of Gang Involvement Responding to Gangs Further Reading

group-defined organizational characteristics. In the simplest terms, gangs are unsupervised (by adults), self-determining groups that demonstrate continuity over time.

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Gang (Malcolm W. Klein) Any denotable group of youngsters who are (a) generally perceived as a distinct aggregation by others in their neighborhood, (b) recognize themselves as a denotable group (almost

invariably with a group name), and (c) have been involved in a sufficient number of delinquent incidents to call forth a consistent negative response from neighborhood residents and/or enforcement agencies.

Reason for two definitions. The operational definition of what constitutes a gang is one of the major debates in research on gangs. Both sides in the debate agree that gangs are groups and are recognized as such by their members and those outside the group. The controversy is over whether the definition of gangs should include participation in delinquent or criminal behavior as part of the definition. Among senior gang researchers, James F. Short and Joan Moore are among those favoring the exclusion of delinquency criteria from the definition of a gang. They argue that discussions of the relationship between gangs and delinquency become tautological when the definition of gang requires such a relationship. On the other hand, a larger number of researchers, including Walter Miller, Malcolm Klein, and Irving Spergel, argue that the exclusion of delinquent or antisocial behavior from the definition of gang diffuses any study of the phenomenon beyond practicality. Since this definitional issue is far from resolved, one of each kind of definition is offered.

the 1920s. This was the first such increase and decline to be recorded. This and subsequent rises and declines in gang activity have led some researchers to hypothesize that gang activity in the United States follows decadeslong cyclical patterns. While the youth gangs were very different organizationally from the adult gangs of the prohibition era, it is worth noting that Al Capone and a number of his peers were members of delinquent youth gangs before moving into organized crime in adulthood. One of the most important of all gang researchers, Frederic Thrasher, did his work on the gangs of this period. Based on his observations of Chicago gangs, Thrasher concluded that gangs developed out of the spontaneous play groups of children and adolescents and were strengthened by conflict with other groups and community adults. The major activity of gangs, he noted, was the search for thrills and excitement. Fighting was the predominant activity, and fights with members of one’s own gang were as likely as those with members of rival gangs. During the depression and World War II, the United States again experienced a decline in gang activity. The postwar gangs differed from the gangs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For the first time, large numbers of African-American, Puerto Rican, and Mexican-American youths were involved in gangs. Also, levels of violence were higher than in previous periods of gang activity. This increased lethality has been attributed to guns and automobiles, a condition that would be magnified in the next great wave of gang activity. The most recent wave of gang activity emerged in the 1980s. At the beginning of that decade, gang problems were recognized in only a few large cities, particularly Chicago, Detroit, New York City, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. By the end of the decade, gangs taking on the symbols and names of the Blood and Crip ‘nations’ from Los Angeles and the People and Folk ‘nations’ from Chicago were appearing in large and medium-sized cities across the nation. Levels of violence were much higher than during any previous wave of gang problems, perhaps corresponding with even more widespread availability of automobiles and firearms. The spread of gangs in this most current wave of activity has been attributed on the one hand to the emergence of an urban underclass hopelessly separated from available economic opportunities and on the other to a youth culture that makes gang symbols, clothing, and language commodities available in large and small cities.

Gangs in History At least one biographer of Napoleon described his youthful participation as a leader in gang fights. The Sons of Liberty were described by British sympathizers as no more than a gang of delinquent youth. Accounts of the American Civil War include the threats against Lincoln made by a Baltimore gang and the effort of Jefferson Davis to intervene in a dispute between rival adolescent gangs in Richmond. Urban industrial development in the latter part of the nineteenth century brought a large influx of European immigrants into American cities. The children and adolescents of these immigrants became members of groups identified as gangs. In the late 1800s, youth gangs emerged in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh. In those decades, Italians and Irish immigrants were overrepresented in the ranks of gang members. These gangs roamed the streets of their neighborhoods engaging in petty forms of property crime and conflict with members of rival gangs. As with today’s gang members, these youth represented what were regarded as the lowest levels of the economic strata of their communities. There was an apparent decline in gang activity between the last decades of the nineteenth century and

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The Magnitude of Contemporary Gang Problems National surveys of law enforcement agencies have served to provide the most widely accepted assessment of the magnitude of the US gang problem. In 1988, Irving Spergel and his colleagues found that 76% of 98 cities screened indicated the presence of organized gangs and gang activities. From reports from 35 of these jurisdictions, 1439 gangs and 120 636 gang members were tabulated. In 1994, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention established the National Youth Gang Center (NYGC) in Tallahassee, Florida. In 1995, the NYGC conducted its first assessment survey of the national gang problem. Of 3440 responding agencies, 2007 reported youth gang problems. The survey’s total of 23 388 youth gangs and 664 906 gang members suggested that the most recent wave of gang activity is the largest ever experienced in the nation’s history.

Theories of Gang Involvement

by Robert Bursik and Harold Grasmick as an enhancement to classic social disorganization theory. Under systemic control theory, interpersonal ties between community residents are only one level of social control. Two other levels are also important. These are control of parochial institutions such as schools and businesses and public resources such as government and police protection. Gangs can then emerge in communities where interpersonal ties are strong, but parochial or public control are weak. Levels of Explanation Gangs are collectivities. In terms of social organization, gangs fall somewhere between their individual members and their greater community context. Most studies of gangs have treated individual gang members or communities as the level of analysis. Very few studies have incorporated differences in individual gangs into the analysis. In his 1997 presidential address to the American Society of Criminology, James F. Short called upon social scientists to attempt to include all three levels of explanation into their research on gangs.

Cultural Theories Two major bodies of theory have most frequently been offered as explanations of gang activity. The first of these are cultural theories. Subcultural theory has been characterized by two very different kinds of explanations. In one view, lower-class youths find that they are failing to measure up to ‘middle-class measuring rods’. As a result these youths undergo what has been called a ‘reaction formation’ and turn middle-class values ‘upside down’ to create subcultural norms. Youth gangs become repositories and mechanisms for transmitting these antisocial subcultural values. A very different perspective suggests that gang behavior reflects preexisting focal concerns of lower-class culture. Hence, lower-class youth who join gangs are not rebelling against the values of the adults in their lives but are simply taking on the values of lower-class adults. Social Disorganization Theories Of the two major types of theories, social disorganization theory has the longer history. From Thrasher’s research on 1920s gangs, he concluded that gangs were interstitial in the sense that they filled gaps in the institutional fabric in which youths grew into adulthood. Where families or schools were weak or ineffective in socializing a youngster, the gang took their place. In this earlier form, social disorganization theory placed its emphasis on interpersonal ties between members of a community. This led to a powerful critique of social disorganization theory as an explanation of gangs, because gangs existed in many comparatively poor communities where interpersonal ties were strong. Systemic control theory has been offered

Correlates of Gang Involvement Ethnicity and Gangs Ever since the post-World War II resurgence of gangs, law enforcement records have indicated an overrepresentation of minority youth among the ranks of gang members. A national survey of police departments conducted by the National Institute of Justice supported this overrepresentation especially for African-Americans and Latinos. According to that study 48% of gang members were African-Americans, 43% Latinos, 5% Asian-Americans, and 4% white. It has been argued, however, that police, and thereby police data, overly criminalize the activities of minorities. Survey research projects conducted in Denver, Colorado, and Rochester, New York, have reported far more white gang members than were found in surveys of police departments. Gender and Gangs From a study of police records conducted in the late 1970s, Walter Miller suggested that 10% of gang members were females. Several studies suggested that police departments have consistently underestimated gang involvement by females, at least until recently. A number of surveys based on different community contexts have reported that as many as 30% of all self-reported gang members are females. Her study of female gang members in New York City led Ann Campbell to suggest that female gang members were becoming more independent of males in their gang involvement. Joan Moore and Meda

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Chesney-Lind have challenged the perspective that gang involvement by females can be a ‘liberating’ experience. From their separate research efforts in Los Angeles and Hawaii, they have argued that gang involvement for females results in levels of social injury sufficient to overshadow any level of personal actualization. A view that accepts both the findings of Campbell and those of Moore and Chesney-Lind suggests that gang involvement can provide females some level of agency in coping with the deprivations of their day-to-day existence, yet still result in social injury and enhanced risk of victimization. Gangs and Community As noted above, gangs can be considered as interstitial groups that are able to develop to the degree that other community institutions are weak. For this reason, one strategy for understanding gangs places them in the broader social context of other community institutions. Five social institutions that have been shown to have an impact on gangs are (1) families, (2) schools, (3) the criminal justice system, (4) politics, and (5) the labor market. The family or household is the primary institution in community life and particularly in the lives of children and adolescents. The proposed connection between the emerging urban underclass and the most recent increase in gang activity is very important, since the institution most affected by the emergence of the underclass is the family. Where families were once the key socializing and supervising institutions for young people, families where they still exist are preoccupied by the struggle to survive. As a consequence, many young children grow up with little or no direction, and the need for socialization and order in their lives is often found on the streets. In many instances, gangs filled the void in juveniles’ lives. Another factor linking families to gangs is the growing intergenerational character of gangs in some locales. When gang members and former gang members become parents, their children are at increased risk for gang membership. After the family, schools are the most powerful socializing agent in the lives of adolescents. As is the case with families, the strength and stability of inner-city schools have suffered as a result of national-level changes in the economy over the last two decades. Just as strong families produce strong communities, strong communities have historically been associated with effective schools. This principle has an obvious converse. Weakened communities with struggling households produce schools that have a tenuous place in those communities and a limited capacity to prepare students for participation in mainstream society. The relationship between school and gangs has been conceived in two ways by researchers. In one perspective, gang involvement in schools drive students to skip school or to drop out in fear of gang violence.

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There is limited empirical support for this view. The more likely scenario is that it is gang members themselves who are pushed or pulled away from schools. Gang members are usually poor academic performers and are more likely than other students to violate school discipline codes. Administrators and teachers facing such unpromising and disruptive charges may do everything possible to force them out of school. On the other hand, the gang and its thrills and excitement may have a greater appeal to the student gang member than anything that the school can offer. Another important institution, particularly in the lives of gang-involved youths, is the juvenile justice system. Research suggests that while most adolescents engage in some level of risk-taking or delinquent behavior, sanctions are more likely to be leveled against the minority youths most likely to be involved in gangs identified as such by law enforcement. In communities where families and schools are stronger, youths who do get in trouble with the juvenile justice system have more resources available to them with which to recover from the stigma of a delinquent label. There is a great deal of evidence that incarceration may be an extremely important factor in increasing a youth’s ties to gangs. In some juvenile facilities, gangs are extremely active. The incarcerated youth must choose between taking care of himself or relying on a gang for some margin of safety and protection. At the same time, being incarcerated can provide gang members with additional status when they return to the streets. In the past, researchers have viewed gang involvement as a transitional phenomenon filling the gap between childhood and adulthood. The primary mechanism by which the transition was effected was through the young adult getting a job and eventually forming a family. A predominant feature of the urban underclass is the absence of linkages to the mainstream economy. Under the dramatic economic restructuring of the last two decades, there are few if any jobs to motivate a gang member to leave the gang. When there is no prospect for a job, there is even less likelihood of stable family formation. From family to labor market and back to family, the dearth of opportunities result in community conditions that foster the emergence and continuity of gang activity.

The Dynamics of Gang Involvement Gangs and Delinquency One consistent research finding has been that gang youths engage in more delinquency than nongang youths. Surprisingly enough these findings come not from law enforcement data, but from surveys where both gang membership and delinquency are self-reported. Both cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys conducted in a variety of social settings have shown that youth who

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report being gang members also report higher levels of delinquency. In studies conducted in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, Rochester (New York), and Denver, males were found to report more frequent and a wider range of delinquency than girls. Male gang members surpassed female gang members, but female gang members surpassed male nonmembers. Across all of these studies, gang members reported approximately three times as many delinquent offenses as did nongang members. Longitudinal studies have shown that levels of self-reported delinquency go up after youths join gangs and decline again after youths leave their gangs. Gangs and violence

In a national survey conducted in the late 1970s, Walter Miller found that by far the most common defining characteristic of gangs offered by representatives of agencies dealing with gangs was violent behavior. Field researchers in the decades since have reached a similar conclusion. In a study of Milwaukee gang members, John Hagedorn reported that gang members were well armed and had unactualized potential for engaging in violence. From another field study in St. Louis, Scott Decker described how gang members’ lives were permeated with thoughts and actual incidents of violence. Many gang members report joining their gangs out of fear of gang violence only to discover that their risk of violent victimization is actually increased. Violence serves as a method of initiation for many gangs through ‘beating in’ rituals or requirements to commit an act of violence against members of rival gangs. The day-to-day activities of gang members were characterized by violence, and even gang members’ own proposed solutions for gang problems were violent in nature. Of the 99 gang members included in Decker’s study which was published in 1996, 16 were dead by New Year’s Eve 1998. In order to explain cycles of gang violence at the community level, a contagion model has been suggested. In such a model, subsequent acts of violence are directly linked to preceding acts of violence through an expanding network of retaliation. The central role of violence in gang life is evident in recent patterns in gang homicide rates. Between 1987 and 1992, the number of gang-motivated homicides in Chicago increased five times. In Los Angeles County, the number doubled in that same period of time. Most large cities with gang problems reported that in the early 1990s a larger and larger proportion of their city’s homicide victims involved gang members. Some cities such as Chicago and St. Louis report that about one in four homicide victims are gang members. In Los Angeles County, authorities claim that nearly half of homicide deaths are gang members. Gangs and drugs

There are two very different opinions among researchers about the role of gangs in drug sales. The first argues that

gangs run well-organized narcotics distribution operations. The other presents the contrary view that while individual gang members may engage in drug sales and especially drug use, organized drug-selling operations by gangs as organizations is comparatively rare. Interestingly enough, both of these very different perspectives originated from studies of crack distribution in California. One study was based on interviews with prison inmates and representatives of law enforcement agencies. Its authors concluded that many gangs are organized solely for the purpose of selling drugs. They characterized involvement of gangs in drug distribution as disciplined and structured. A principal conclusion was that many gangs in California effectively controlled the drug markets in their territory. The second study analyzed the official records on drug-related crimes in Los Angeles and several other jurisdictions. The authors of this study concluded that gangs did not control a significant portion of crack distribution and that drug-related crimes involving gang members were no less likely to involve violence than those that did not involve gang members. Subsequent studies of drug sales by gang members in other cities have supported one or the other of the two perspectives. The key question underlying gang involvement in drug markets revolves around the nature of gang organization. In order for gangs to participate in drug distribution with any kind of organizational effectiveness, a stable leadership structure, member roles, shared goals, mechanisms for consistently disciplining members, and the ability to manage collective resources would all be required. Few studies of gangs have substantiated the existence of any of these features in contemporary gangs. In an extensive report issued in 1992, the District Attorney’s Office of Los Angeles County concluded that gangs did not control drug sales in that jurisdiction because of their disorganized and loosely confederated structures. Entering and Leaving Gangs Gang members have been said to be both ‘pulled’ and ‘pushed’ into gang membership. Those pulled into gang membership are attracted by the camaraderie and excitement promised by membership. In many communities, especially Latino and Hispanic, gangs represent a source of cultural pride and identification. A number of studies also quote gang members as stating their motivation for joining the gang to be profits from drug sales and other crimes. There is a general distrust of such professed gains from gang-related criminal activity among most researchers. Youths are pushed into gangs by the perceived threat of violence from other gangs and by the lack of other alternatives. As noted above, the supposed security provided by gang membership often is accompanied by greater risk of victimization. The lack of other alternatives can be represented by both a lack of economic opportunities and deficits in what James S. Coleman called social capital.

Gangs

Whether a member is pulled or pushed into joining the gang, becoming a member is agreed by most researchers to be a gradual process requiring an extended period of trust building and progressive participation. Most gangs do, however, have a recognized initiation process to mark the point at which a gang associate makes the transition to gang member. Most often this initiation involves violence. The most widespread procedure is being ‘beaten in’. In the beating in process, the new initiate usually experiences a brief infliction of violence by current members. The next most common ritual is a requirement to inflict some kind of harm on a member of a rival gang or at least issue through some action a challenge to a rival gang’s sovereignty. Such challenges usually involve assault on a rival gang member or committing an act of vandalism or a robbery in the rival gang’s territory. Any initiation requirement is, however, likely to be waived for a younger sibling or cousin of a current member with some level of prestige. Several incidents given attention in the media involve the initiation of female members by male gang members in mixed-sex gangs through a process described as ‘sexing in’. The veracity of the most highly publicized incidents of this type have been subsequently challenged. In most cases, female gang members enter the gang in initiations similar to those required of males, most often being beaten in or required to perform a violent act against a rival gang. Most often the initiation of females is the responsibility of other females. In some incidents recorded by researchers, female gang members have ‘set up’ females whom they did not really intend to include in their group for group rape or other abuse by male gang members. There exists considerable mythology about leaving the gang among gang members. Media reports and gang members have attested that it is simply impossible to leave the gang. In some gangs, there is a myth that the member must kill a parent in order to leave the gang without experiencing the gang’s wrath. The truth is that no such exit from a gang has ever been recorded. In some gangs, there is a ritual ‘beating out’ comparable to the ritual ‘beating in’. Based on studies from a number of cities, though, it is a very simple matter for members to leave their gangs. The major problem is that former gang members find little else to do outside of the gang. Gang members who try to leave too often find themselves hanging out with the same old associates and engaging in many of the same activities that they did as a gang member. The gang is where the former members’ friends are, and there are few opportunities, social or otherwise, to take their place.

Responding to Gangs Types of Response Irving Spergel led a team of researchers in conducting a 1988 national study of promising gang intervention programs.

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From this study, four basic strategic responses to gangs were identified. These were suppression, social intervention, community organization, and economic opportunities. First, suppression was the most common reaction to gang problems in the 1980s. On one hand, it involved traditional criminal justice efforts to identify and incapacitate serious offenders. On the other, it involved enhanced networks between criminal justice agencies and the implementation of sophisticated intelligence-gathering techniques. The rise of suppression as the dominant response to gang crime problems in the 1980s may have been a function of growing political conservatism, or suppression may have simply been the easiest and most rapid response to implement in reaction to increased levels of gang violence. In most cases, the institutional instrument of suppression strategies has been police department gang crime units, many modeled after Los Angeles Police Department’s Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH) program. A 1992 national survey reported specialized police gang units in 53 of the 79 largest city police departments. Of these units, a majority were created after 1986. The second most common strategy used as a response to gangs in the past has been social intervention. Social intervention strategies primarily have taken one of two forms – agency-based service programs and street outreach programs. In the agency-based programs, youth centers usually offer adolescents a secure setting in which to participate in structured recreational activities while receiving other kinds of services. One of the oldest and without question the most widespread agency-based program involved in gang response is the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. Frederic Thrasher evaluated a gang intervention program at a New York ‘Boys Club’ in 1928. In a typical Boys and Girls Club in St. Louis, a gang prevention and intervention program is provided to specifically targeted youth at high risk of gang involvement. At the same time, the club offers water recreation activities (including kayaking), organized sports programs, music and art lessons, and even a free dental clinic. The other kind of social intervention program is street outreach. These programs have been called detached worker or street worker programs. In street outreach programs, workers approach and interact with youths on the streets of their neighborhoods where risk of gang involvement and youth violence is greatest. On the street, the worker provides counseling. From the street, the worker makes referrals to agencybased social intervention programs. Social intervention programs were the most common response to gangs in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. A study published by Malcolm Klein in 1971 on his research in Los Angeles questioned the effectiveness of social intervention strategies. When such strategies dealt with gang members within the context of their gangs, Klein concluded that programs could increase the cohesion of the gangs.

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The first large-scale gang response program was implemented under the leadership of Clifford Shaw, a University of Chicago professor, who had conducted extensive research on gangs in 1929. The Chicago Area Project was in its philosophy and structure a community organization strategy – the third type of strategic response. Residents were empowered to elect the leaders of the Chicago Area Projects, of which the major goal was the strengthening of interpersonal ties within the community and greater community control over key institutions such as police, schools, and government. Subsequent community organization strategies were implemented in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. A major criticism of these earlier community organization programs has been their inadequate or inconclusive evaluations. The fourth response strategy to gangs has been opportunities provision. This response strategy is based on the importance of access to legitimate opportunities for avoiding and ending gang involvement. Opportunities provision strategies are financially costly and difficult to implement. Under this response strategy fall programs that provide job preparation, training, and placement for gang-involved youths, as well as programs that reintegrate younger gang members back into schools or alternative educational programs that can enhance their future employability. The 1988 national survey found that opportunities provision strategies were the least common of all strategies. Major Gang Initiatives In 1982, Walter Miller advised that any significant reduction in collective youth crime would require major federal initiatives. In the 1990s more federal and local initiatives responding to gangs were in place than ever before. In 1988, under the Omnibus Anti-Drug Abuse Act, the Youth Gang Drug Prevention Program under the Administration on Children, Youth, and Families (ACYF), US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), was implemented. Between 1989 and 1996, this program established gang program consortiums in 16 cities and a diversity of single-agency gang prevention and intervention programs (including programs designed specifically for females, new immigrant youth gang members, and intergenerational gang families). Each year between 1991 and 1994, ACYF sponsored an annual conference designed to build skills, communication, and understanding among representatives of funded projects and other agencies with shared goals. Although the Youth Gang Drug Prevention Program was eventually phased out, it provided a model for a number of programs that would follow. Programmatic responses to gangs have emerged in conjunction with an unprecedented level of federally funded research on gangs. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention undertook a longitudinal research program in four cities to identify the

causes and correlates of delinquency. The first wave of data was gathered in 1990. In 1991, an initiative on research on gangs was undertaken by the National Institute of Justice. Many of the findings cited in this article were generated by these research efforts. In addition to longitudinal research on gang involvement in Rochester, New York, and Denver, and the national surveys of law enforcement agencies about record keeping and levels of gang activity, research was conducted on gang activity in correctional facilities, patterns of gang migration, and other topics with relevance for policy. In 1995, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention established the National Youth Gang Center in Tallahassee, Florida. The center is responsible for maintaining updated information on the level of gang problems nationwide and serving as a clearing house for current information on gangs. At least three major gang program initiatives with strictly defined evaluation guidelines were in place in 1997. The first was the Comprehensive Community-Wide Approach to Gangs implemented by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency in five cities. The Community-Wide Approach is generally known as the ‘Spergel model’ because it was developed by Irving Spergel from his surveys and program analyses conducted between 1988 and 1992. The Spergel model is primarily a community organization strategy with integrated social intervention, opportunities provision, and suppression components. Training manuals were produced for law enforcement, grassroots organizations, schools, youth service agencies, prosecution, the court, probation, and corrections. Once the mobilization is underway, any of the component agencies can be the lead or mobilizing agency. The model was designed to be tailored to the special needs of each individual community. The program’s flexibility encourages local program planners to assess the special features of local gang problems and take advantage of local agency strengths. The guidelines for community mobilization are intended to facilitate interagency cooperation and minimize interagency conflict. The Spergel model was funded for implementation in five sites. The results of evaluations at each site revealed areas of success and failure that can be incorporated in future programs. At the same time that the Spergel model was being developed, the Causes and Correlates Program was developing a systematic response to serious, chronic, and violent offending by juveniles. The model was based on a social development model emphasizing protective and risk factors and focusing on the influences of family, school, and community. A key principle of this response model (called the ‘comprehensive strategy’) required the juvenile justice system to become part of a comprehensive continuum of services and sanctions for youth. Officials at the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention had become convinced that the problems of serious, violent, and chronic offending and gang-related

Clan and Tribal Conflict

crime were related. In their most commanding initiative to date, the agency undertook the implementation of a combined program called Safe Futures in four urban sites, one rural site, and one Indian reservation. The Safe Futures Program combines both the Spergel model and the comprehensive strategy. Initiated in 1996, funding for Safe Futures projects was larger and extended over a longer period of time (5 years) than funding for previous comparable efforts. Each program was required to incorporate a local evaluation and cooperate with a national evaluation. The program implementation evaluation was positive, but outcome evaluations were incomplete or inconclusive. Some sites terminated their programs early failing to spend all of the funds available. In addition to community organization initiatives, two other kinds of gang response programs were implemented in the 1990s. A law enforcement strategy that tied suppression to community organization is community orienting policing. In 1996, the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) office in the Department of Justice launched a 15-city Anti-Gang Initiative. The 15 target cities were selected on the basis of their consistency in providing gang-related crime statistics to national surveys in the preceding decade. The local programs were encouraged to choose among a number of community policing strategies, including the improvement of data collection, the integration of law enforcement agencies into community-wide responses to gangs, and the provision of a safer setting in which less-suppressive response programs could be given a chance to develop. Evaluations of the programs published by the Department of Justice showed mixed results.

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The final contemporary gang response program of note is school based. Gang Resistance Educational Assistance and Training (GREAT) was modeled after the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program. Under GREAT, uniformed police officers provide in-class training to fourth- and seventh-grade students. GREAT is funded by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) of the US Treasury Department. Initial evaluation results of GREAT suggested that the program was successful in reducing gang participation by middle-school children in the short term. However, a longitudinal evaluation revealed the positive effects of the GREAT program to diminish with time. ATF redesigned the GREAT program curriculum, and the revised GREAT program is undergoing a stringent evaluation. See also: Ritual and Symbolic Behavior

Further Reading Curry, G. D. and Decker, S. H. (2002). Confronting gangs: Crime and community, 2nd edn. Los Angeles: Roxbury. Decker, S. H. and Van Winkle, B. (1996). Life in the gang: Family, friends, and violence. New York: Cambridge University Press. Huff, C. R. (1996). Gangs in America, 2nd edn. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Klein, M. W. (1995). The American street gang. New York: Oxford University Press. Miller, J. A. (2001). One of the guys: Girls, gangs, and gender. New York: Oxford University Press. Moore, J. W. (1978). Homeboys: Gangs, drugs, and prison in the barrios of Los Angeles. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Short, J. F., Jr. (1990). New wine in old bottles. In Huff, C. R. (ed.) Gangs in America, 1st edn, pp. 223–239. Newbury Park: Sage. Spergel, I. A. (1995). The youth gang problem: A community approach. New York: Oxford University Press.

Clan and Tribal Conflict Keith F Otterbein, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Fraternal Interest Groups Types of Societies Feuding Military Organizations

Glossary Cultural Unit An ethnic unit composed of contiguous political communities that are culturally similar. In most instances the cultural unit is the same as a society or culture.

Warfare Summary Further Reading

External War Warfare between political communities that are not members of the same cultural unit; that is, they are culturally different. There are two aspects of external war that can be measured separately: political

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communities of a cultural unit can either attack or be attacked by culturally different political communities. Feuding A type of armed combat occurring within a political community in which, if a homicide occurs, the kin of the deceased take revenge through killing the offender or any member of his kin group. Feuding with Compensation Feuding that occurs if the relatives of the deceased sometimes accept compensation in lieu of blood revenge. Feuding without Compensation Feuding that occurs if the relatives of the deceased are expected to take revenge through killing the offender or any close relative of his. The possibility of paying compensation does not exist. Fraternal Interest Groups Localized groups of related males who can resort to aggressive measures when the interests of their members are threatened. Internal War Warfare between political communities within the same cultural unit. Matrilocal Residence Marital residence rule that requires the groom to reside with the bride, either nearby or in the home of the bride’s parents. Often referred to as uxorilocal residence. Military Organizations A type of social organization that engages in armed combat with other similar organizations in order to obtain certain goals. Multilocal Residence Marital residence in which the bride and groom establish a household either nearby or in the home of either the bride’s or groom’s parents. Also referred to as ambilocal residence. Neolocal Residence Marital residence in which the bride and groom establish a household independent of

the location of the parental home of either partner. Unlike matrilocal and patrilocal residence, a rule requiring an independent location is rarely specified. Patrilocal Residence Marital residence rule that requires the bride to reside with the groom, either nearby or in the home of the groom’s parents. Often referred to as virilocal residence. Political Community A group of people whose membership is defined in terms of occupancy of a common territory and who have an official with the special function of announcing group decisions – a function exercised at least once a year. There is usually more than one political community in a cultural unit. Polygyny The marriage of one man to two or more women at the same time. Self-Redress One disputant takes unilateral action in an attempt to prevail in a dispute or to punish another. Also called self-help, coercion, or folk justice. War, Causes of The causes of war – that is, the reasons that military organizations go to war – include subjugation and tribute, land, plunder, trophies and honors, revenge, and defense. These are goals of war. Warfare Armed combat between political communities. Warriors, Nonprofessional Military personnel who have not had intensive training in the art of war. Warriors, Professional Military personnel who devote a substantial part of their time during their early adulthood to intensive training, which may involve practice not only in the use of weapons but also in performing maneuvers. They may be members of age-grades, military societies, or standing armies.

Clan conflict is feud; tribal conflict is war. Feuding takes place within a political community, war takes place between political communities. War between culturally similar political communities is internal war, while war between culturally different political communities is external war. Figure 1 shows the interrelationship among these several forms of armed combat. Armed combat is fighting with weapons.

and violence. These fraternal interest groups constitute the vengeance parties that engage in feuding in tribal societies as well as in modern polities, and they form the backbone of the military organizations of the majority of tribal societies.

Fraternal Interest Groups What They Are Fundamental to the understanding of clan and tribal conflicts is the recognition that when conflict of a violent nature arises among nonliterate peoples, as well as among ethnic groups in modern nations, localized groups of related males – fraternal interest groups – pursuing their own interests are likely to be responsible for the conflict

Cause of Feuding and Internal War In 1960, in one of anthropology’s seminal papers, H U E Thoden van Velzen and W van Wetering demonstrated that the presence of fraternal interest groups is responsible for the conflicts that occur within local groups. Fraternal interest groups – power groups of related males – arise by following a rule of patrilocal residence and/or practicing polygyny. In a cross-cultural study, that is, a study examining ethnographic descriptions of practices of a sample of societies, K F Otterbein and C S Otterbein showed that fraternal interest groups, using either patrilocal residence or polygyny as an index of


3 1 2

Key Circles: Solid circles represent fraternal interest groups Broken-line circles represent political communities Solid-line circles represent cultural units Double-headed arrows: 1. Feuding 2. Internal war 3. External war Figure 1 Diagram of major concepts.

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types; not all societies neatly fit into one of them. Yet, fraternal interest groups, rape, feuding, internal war, and capital punishment are interrelated; rape can lead to feud, while the military organization whose core is a fraternal interest group can on one day attack a member of a kinship group within the political community (an act leading to feuding or continuing a feud) and on the next day ambush a member of another political community (an act of internal war). Thus, the emergence of societies in category 1 (mentioned earlier) helps to explain the widespread occurrence of violence in tribal societies. These are the societies that W T Divale and M Harris argue have the male supremacist complex. The complex arises through patrilocal residence, polygyny, internal warfare (including feuding), and female infanticide. Extreme mistreatment of women follows, including beatings and rape. Bands

the presence of fraternal interest groups, predict feuding. K F Otterbein, in other cross-cultural studies, showed that the presence of fraternal interest groups in a society predicted rape, often a cause of feuding, and internal war. In another study Otterbein showed how fraternal interest groups, feuding, and capital punishment were interrelated in tribal society. In tribes with fraternal interest groups, executions of wrongdoers are carried out by members of the wrongdoer’s own clan. The homicides that occur between feuding clans are not capital punishment. In tribes without fraternal interest groups but with councils of elders, executions are performed only by political leaders; thus, capital punishment in these tribes can serve to limit the occurrence of homicide. Executions of recidivist killers in tribes without fraternal interest groups does not lead to feuds, and the execution assures that the recidivist is prevented from killing again. Facilities for holding prisoners in permanent incarceration are rare in bands and tribes.

Types of Societies Although societies with fraternal interest groups based on patrilocal residence are a majority of those described by ethnographers (about 70%), there are nevertheless numerous societies without fraternal interest groups, which have matrilocal, multilocal, or neolocal residence. Thus two categories of societies can be delineated and contrasted: (1) societies with fraternal interest groups have much conflict, rape, feuding, internal war, and intraclan executions, whereas (2) societies without fraternal interest groups have little conflict, no rape, no feuding, no internal war, and politywide executions. Self-redress occurs but it does not lead to feuding. These are ideal

These two categories of societies cut across the traditional typology of bands and tribes. Bands can be divided into seven types, and tribes into five types. Bands with feuding and warfare include Big Game Hunters. Australian Aborigines, Settled Fishermen, and Mounted Hunters. These types of bands make their appearance in prehistory in the order given. They are characterized by the hunting of land and marine animals, often by groups of related males who reside patrilocally, and by armed combat within and between political communities. Bands without feuding and warfare include Simple Foragers, Symbiotics, and Incipient Tillers. Simple Foragers also appear in prehistory, Symbiotics after the rise of agriculturalists to whom the foragers can become attached through trade, and Incipient Tillers appear after the foragers begin to grow crops to supplement their hunting and gathering. These bands are characterized by plant-gathering; residence patterns that are matrilocal, multilocal, or neolocal; and individual self-redress rather than feuding and internal war to attempt to right wrongs. Fraternal interest groups are absent. Three of the four warring types extend back to the Upper Paleolithic; they hunted medium to large game animals – the Big Game Hunters, the Australian Aborigines, and the Settled Fishermen, if they whaled. The Mounted Hunters came later, but before getting horses their predecessors hunted big game (e.g., the Clovis hunters of ancient North America). Settled Fishermen in the Upper Paleolithic probably had war because similar villages in the nineteenth century engaged in warfare. The Australians and the fishermen are virilocal; the hunters probably were not although small fraternal interest groups could form. The present author believes hunting, armed combat, and virilocality occurred in the Upper Paleolithic, category 1 societies.

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This analysis allows for category 2 societies – peaceful people who gathered, did not engage in armed combat, and who were multilocal or matrilocal. Tribes Tribes with feuding and warfare include all five types. All tribes make their appearance in prehistory after the domestication of plants and animals. This also means they emerged after the development of complex societies in the Americas, the Middle East, and Asia. The criteria used to delineate tribes include sociopolitical structure, settlement pattern, and mode of subsistence. Similar criteria were used to distinguish bands. The Autonomous Village is based primarily on crop production. Villages may form a Village Cluster where they are linked by kinship, marriage, trade, or military alliance. Villages may also be organized into a two-level system with a formal or informal leader, the former referred to as a chief, the latter as a big man. The leader resides in a central village. Other villages in the polity have leaders who follow his direction. Such tribal peoples can be described as a Minimal Chiefdom. (Although the author studied such a people in northeast Nigeria in 1965, he has still not decided whether he should classify the Higi as a tribe or a chiefdom. They had a hereditary chief.) If the tribesmen are herders they can become Pastoral Nomads. As the first three types of tribes are conquered and incorporated into expanding states, they become Dependent Native Peoples. Just as bands may follow a developmental sequence (simple foragers to symbiotics to incipient tillers), so may tribes. Any of the first three types may become a Dependent Native People, which in turn will probably eventually become a peasant community. Pastoral Nomads generally maintain a degree of political autonomy by resisting incorporation. Fraternal interest groups are frequently found in all five types of tribes. Although Settled Fishermen and Mounted Hunters are included in most comparative and cross-cultural studies of bands, they are also included in discussions of tribal societies. This taxonomic ambiguity arises because the subsistence of Settled Fishermen and Mounted Hunters is based exclusively on hunting and gathering, while their political organization is like that of tribal societies. These societies, nearly without exception, engage in frequent internal and/or external warfare. Where one places them taxonomically affects the interpretation of how warlike bands and tribes are. Their inclusion with the five band types, two of which frequently are characterized by feuding and warfare, produces a high percentage of hunting/ gathering bands with warfare. Their inclusion with the five tribe types, all of whom engage in frequent feuding and warfare, produces a large category in terms of types and numbers of societies in which warfare is nearly universal. The removal of Settled Fishermen and Mounted Hunters

from the band category makes it possible to classify bands as relatively peaceful (i.e., the percentage of hunting/ gathering bands with warfare may drop below 50%). If bands include only category 2 societies, they do not have warfare.

Feuding Essential Elements K F Otterbein’s review of definitions of feuding revealed two essential elements. First, kin groups are involved, homicides occur, and the killings take place as revenge for injustice (the terms duty, honor, righteous, and legitimate appear in discussions on the motivation for the homicides). Second, three or more alternating killings or acts of violence occur. Nonetheless, if an unsuccessful attempt at a counter-killing leads to the killing of one of the attackers, as occurred in the Turner–Howard feud in nineteenth century Eastern Kentucky on several occasions, Otterbein would classify the sequence of killings as feuding. Incidentally, mortality in that feud was onesided: 13 Turners died, and no Howards. However, one element of feud is in dispute: whether the unit within which feuding occurs is political or ethnolinguistic. It appears that in politically developed societies the unit is the political community, and that in acephelous (meaning headless) societies without any formal overall political authority (the identification of headmen is nearly impossible) the unit is the ethnolinguistic group. Nevertheless, in only a small number of societies is it difficult to identify the political community. Compensation In many feuding societies the feud can be ended by the payment of compensation. Indeed, feuding societies can be classified into two categories: (1) feuding without compensation, in which there is no institutionalized means by which compensation can be paid and (2) feuding with compensation, in which payment of compensation can either prevent a counter-killing or stop a feud. In a sample of 50 societies, Otterbein and Otterbein found that 16% fell into the first type, while 28% fell into the second type. The majority of cases (56%) fell into a third category that included societies in which homicides were rare, or in which, following a homicide, a formal judicial procedure came into effect, leading to either settlement through compensation, or the killer being executed. Christopher Boehm argues that feuding with compensation is a means of controlling conflict; in his view it is an alternative to warfare. Feuding arises, Boehm suggests, because the potential combatants realize that uncontrolled warfare at close quarters would be disastrous. In a 2002 review of feuding Otterbein questions the positive


social role that Boehm, Fry, and others have attributed to feuding with compensation. Compensation is an unreliable mechanism for stopping feuds. Otterbein views revenge-based killings as crimes. This judgment pertains to internal war, feuding, and individual self-redress. Legitimacy of and Target of Vengeance In addition to whether compensation can be paid, two other dimensions to feuding have been considered. Karen Ericksen and Heather Horton in 1992 used a range of six categories to describe the legitimacy of kingroup vengeance: (1) moral imperative, (2) most appropriate action, (3) circumstantial, (4) last resort, (5) formal adjudication only, and (6) individual self-redress. The second dimension used three categories to describe possible targets of vengeance: (1) anyone in the wrongdoer’s kin group; (2) the wrongdoer if possible, otherwise selected members of his kin group; and (3) wrongdoer only. Otterbein questions whether feuding is a legitimate course of action for a kin group that believes itself to be wronged. For some researchers, feud occupies an intermediate position between law and crime, and thus has been designated quasi-law or self-help. Although feuding may be carried out following a large body of culturally defined rules, the political leaders and members of kinship groups not involved in the feud are usually highly desirous of seeing the feud end or be settled. Political leaders – it is the nature of the status role – almost always attempt to abrogate to themselves the exclusive right to judge whether a crime has been committed and to do the punishing. For these reasons, Otterbein views feuding not as a legal action, but rather as a highly disruptive sequence of antisocial acts. Actions taken by political leaders to prevent feuding are viewed as legal, the revenge killings of kinship groups as extralegal. The feuds of nineteenth century Eastern Kentucky illustrate this well. Wilson Howard, who admitted to killing five Turners, was hanged. In the French–Eversole feud, Tom Smith, a French supporter and killer of six Eversoles was also hanged. Furthermore, in the Martin–Tolliver and Baker–Howard feuds, the governor of Kentucky sent in troops to prevent further killings. Extent of Feuding The extent of feuding can be inferred from two crosscultural studies, one by Otterbein and Otterbein, the other by Ericksen and Horton; each examined ethnographic descriptions of the feuding practices of a sample of societies. The former found that 44% of their sample societies had feuding, the latter found that 54% of their sample viewed violent action as legitimate. A crosscultural study of homicide conducted by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson found that 95% of their sample

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societies harbored the idea of taking a life for a life. To achieve near universality the researchers needed to include capital punishment as evidence of the desire for blood revenge, a result which is not surprising since Otterbein found, using the same sample, that 51 of the 53 societies, or 96%, for which there was information had the death penalty. The results of these studies lead to the conclusion that although approximately 50% of the world’s societies practice feuding, the desire for revenge – a life for a life – may be nearly universal. Feuding versus Internal War Can feuding be distinguished from warfare in small-scale societies? Otterbein believes that these two types of violent conflict can be distinguished if a political community can be identified. He looks for a political leader who announces group decisions. The group is often small. Some researchers, including Melvin and Carol Ember, have despaired of distinguishing feuding from warfare and include feuding under the rubric of internal war (war within the same cultural or ethnolinguistic unit). But to most researchers feuding and warfare appear to be qualitatively different. One of the few societies whose armed combat had not been influenced by Western contact when they were first studied by anthropologists is that of Bellona Island, a small Polynesian outlier. Rolf Kuschel recorded ‘‘feuds’’ stretching back 21 generations and ending only in 1938. Application of the concept of political community to a specific case leads to reclassification of Bellona feuding as warfare. On Bellona Island the clans were politically autonomous fraternal interest groups. The feuding of these clans can thus be classified as warfare. It can also be argued that since the kinship group and the political community are coterminous, Balona armed combat is simultaneously both, feuding and warfare. Further support for this interpretation arises from Kuschel’s contention that the intent of a raid was not to ‘‘even the score’’ but to reduce enemy manpower. Once a pattern of mutual raiding was set in motion it was likely to continue until one group was nearly annihilated.

Military Organizations What They Are Military organizations, which can be viewed as a type of social organization, engage in armed combat in order to obtain certain goals. They differ, however, from other organizations in that the goals or objectives they pursue are usually directed at military organizations in other political communities. The goals of war include subjugation and tribute, land, plunder, trophies and honors, defense, and revenge. All these objectives can be achieved

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only at the expense of other political communities. When two military organizations engage in an armed combat, the outcome will depend upon the efficiency of their respective military practices. A victorious military organization makes a political community militarily successful and increases its likelihood of survival in conflicts between political communities. The successful political community will almost undoubtedly expand territorially. Composition of Military Organizations The warriors comprising a military organization may be either professionals or nonprofessionals. Professionals, in contrast to nonprofessionals, devote a substantial part of their time during their early adulthood to intensive training, which may involve not only practice in the use of weapons but also in performing maneuvers. They may be members of age-grades comprising all males of a given age, of military societies, or of standing armies, or they may serve as mercenaries employed for a specific purpose. Political communities with age-grades, military societies, and standing armies are considered to have military organizations composed solely of professionals. Political communities that employ mercenaries to lead, train, or assist untrained warriors are considered to have both professionals and nonprofessionals in their military organizations. If all members of a military organization are warriors who have not had specific intensive training in the art of war, the military organization is considered to be composed solely of nonprofessionals. If both professional and nonprofessional warriors are absent, there is of course no military organization. Otterbein’s cross-cultural study of war examined the military practices of 50 cultures. He found that 9 political communities had military organizations composed of professionals, 13 had military organizations that included both professionals and nonprofessionals, 24 had military organizations composed of nonprofessionals, and only 4 had no military organization. The vast majority of tribal peoples have military organizations composed only of nonprofessionals. These military organizations are frequently composed of fraternal interest groups. Indeed, a political community composed of either a Village Cluster, a Minimal Chiefdom, Pastoral Nomads, or Mounted Hunters may have several military organizations, each of which is a fraternal interest group. Even an Autonomous Village or a village of Settled Fishermen may have several military organizations. Why Military Organizations? The fact that few political communities have no military organization raises the fundamental question: why do most political communities have military organizations? The answer seems to be that if a political community is to have contact with other political communities and yet

remain a social entity, it needs to have the means to defend itself from the attacks of neighbors and to retaliate if the attacks have been successfully made against them. The four political communities without military organizations, mentioned earlier, are all found in isolated locations. Their members are descendants of groups that had been driven from other areas and had taken refuge on an island, in arctic wasteland, or on the top of a mountain. Relocated in an area where they were protected by their isolation, they no longer found it necessary to maintain a military organization. Thus a political community that does not have a military organization capable of defending it, will probably be annihilated and absorbed into other political communities unless it is able to flee and protect itself, not by arms, but by hiding in an isolated area. Robert Dentan’s ‘‘geographic refuge’’ inhabited by foragers who adapt to slave raids by their ability to disperse and regroup elaborates this theme. The foragers in Dentan’s ‘‘geographic refuge’’ become nonviolent and develop values of peace. The Semai of South-East Asia are a prime example. This does not always occur. The Waoroni of the western Amazon who occupy a geographic refuge were until recent years able to keep foreigners at bay with their long thrusting spears. A further indication that a military organization is a necessity, if a political community is to persist through time, is to be found in the fact that defense and revenge are universal causes of war. Several studies have shown that all known military organizations go to war at sometime or the other for defense and revenge. For the Andaman Islanders Raymond Kelly has argued that hunters who trespassed were ambushed, using shoot-on-sight tactics, thereby initiating cycles of defense and revenge that led to the emergence of distinct bands. The destruction of a political community does not necessarily mean the disappearance of tribesmen. The conquest and incorporation of peoples without written language creates Dependent Native Peoples. Feuds may continue. Groups of warriors may try to seize by force the government into which they have been incorporated, or may serve as soldiers in their new nation. Native Americans are an example of the latter situation. By the twentieth century only in a few remote places in the world could anthropologists find native peoples who had not been deprived of their political autonomy. These included Amazonia, Highland New Guinea, and the Central Sudan spanning East and West Africa. Brian Ferguson has argued that the expansion of Western civilization into regions occupied by native peoples either creates warfare where it had not existed or transforms their warfare into a more violent form. His prime example are the Yanomamo of northern South America. His approach contrasts with that of Lawrence Keeley, who argues that war existed before civilization.


Warfare Types of Warfare Warfare, which is defined as armed combat between political communities, is conducted by military organizations. If the political communities are culturally the same, the armed combat is classified as internal war. But if the political communities are culturally different, the armed combat is external war (see Figure 1). Two types of external war can be distinguished: a political community can either attack (offensive external war) or be attacked by (defensive external war) a culturally different political community. In tribal societies, the military organizations that carry out the armed combat are apt to be fraternal interest groups. If the members of such a military organization make an attack on someone who is a member of their own political community, they are engaged in feuding or the initiation of a feud. If the next day these warriors ambush a member of another political community, they are engaged in war. Thus, a fraternal interest group employing ambushing tactics, can be responsible for both feuding and warfare. Otterbein showed in a crosscultural study that fraternal interest groups lead to frequent internal war. This apparently occurs because most cultures with fraternal interest groups probably contain a large number of such military organizations because of the large number of localized kinship groups in the constituent political communities. The presence of a large number of small-scale military organizations creates the strong likelihood that there will frequently be internal war in a society. Presumably because of the greater distance between most political communities that are in different cultures, fraternal interest groups do not produce either the offensive or the defensive type of external war. Frequent offensive external war is related to a high degree of military sophistication of the political community. Such efficiency leads to territorial expansion, provided neighboring polities have military organizations with a lower degree of military efficiency. Goals of War Wars occur when military organizations do battle in order to obtain certain goals. These goals may vary from war to war, and may change over time. Thus for the military organizations of a political community there will probably be several goals of war. At a given period in the history of a political community, if sufficient ethnographic information is available, the order of the importance of the goals can probably be ascertained. The political leader of the political community may determine the goals and send the military organizations to war in order to achieve these goals, or the leaders of the military may make the decision as to which goals will be pursued. Thus it can be argued that wars are caused by the decisions of men as members

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of organizations, whether they be military organizations or political systems. There are six basic reasons for going to war: subjugation and tribute, land, plunder, trophies and honors, defense, and revenge. Some social scientists have argued that states, which are political communities headed by kings or dictators, go to war for subjugation and tribute. On the other hand, political communities headed by chiefs and headmen go to war for economic, social, and defensive reasons. These reasons for going to war are likely to be pursued at one time or another by the military organizations of states. They also constitute the major reasons stateless political communities go to war. An important economic reason for attacking other political communities is to capture land by defeating and driving back or killing the inhabitants. The land may be used for fields, hunting, or grazing. Another goal of war, primarily economic, is to obtain plunder. Plunder includes forms of wealth, such as animals, material goods, and money and also captives for use as wives, slaves, hostages, adoption, or sacrifice. Trophies and honors are social or prestige goals. Military organizations and political communities often go to war, just as individual warriors do, to obtain honors. Simply the prestige of victory in armed combat may be the sole reason for going to war. The capturing of trophies, cherished items usually of little economic value, is another way of obtaining prestige. Revenge – the desire to retaliate for the killing of a member of one’s political community and even the score – is another reason military organizations go to war. And the final reason military organizations engage in war is defense – the organized attempt by a group of armed men to defend their own lives, the lives of their families, their property and homesteads, and their political community from enemy attacks. Basic Pattern of Warfare The ambush and the line are two components of the warfare pattern of most tribal peoples who engage in war. In his study of warfare, Otterbein distinguished between each type of tactic and classified each society in terms of whether its warriors used ambushes only (23 cases), lines only (5 cases), or both (18 cases). Detailed analysis of numerous cases since has revealed, however, that both tactics are probably used by all societies at war. An ambush consists of either laying a trap or surrounding the enemy, usually a village at night. A line consists of warriors drawing parallel to the enemy forces. A distinction that is important, but that was not made in the original study, separates mutually arranged battles, perhaps on a traditional fixed battlefield, from encounter battles. An encounter battle arises when a raiding party intent on laying an ambush encounters a band of warriors either hunting or intent on laying their own ambush. When two raiding parties meet in the field, they line up facing each other

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and a battle that is often more noise than combat ensues. If the sides are relatively equal, they may withdraw before there are serious woundings or fatalities. If one side greatly outnumbers the other, the smaller side may be annihilated except for the warriors who can run the fastest. Whether battles are prearranged or unexpected encounters, they constitute one of the two components of the warfare pattern of all warring peoples. Since ambushes are part of the basic two-component warfare pattern, Otterbein now considers attacks by a group of armed men on a single individual or a group of individuals from a different political community to be examples of war, even if the object of the attack is unarmed, and thus armed combat has not occurred. When groups attempt to destroy each other, they will choose the most effective means they can find to accomplish the task. The basic pattern provides two ways of waging war; if one way is not effective, the other may be. If neither is effective, another means may be developed. For example, the Dani of Highland New Guinea had arranged battles that produced few casualties, ambushes that produced a few more, and massive dawn raids that killed hundreds. Battles were a means of testing the strength of an adversary. If one polity appeared weak, two others might join forces and annihilate the weaker in a dawn raid.

Summary Major Conclusions 1. Fraternal interest groups are a major cause of rape, feuding, and internal war in many societies. Military organizations in tribal societies are frequently fraternal interest groups. Defense and revenge are universal reasons for going to war. 2. The peoples of the world fall into two categories: those with fraternal interest groups that are violent and conflict-ridden, and those without fraternal interest groups that are relatively peaceful within their culture. Two types of bands fall into the first category: Big Game Hunters and the Australian Aborigines. Three types of bands fall into the second category: Simple Foragers, Symbiotics, and Incipient Tillers. All five types of tribes fall into the first category: Autonomous Village, Village Cluster, Minimal Chiefdom, Pastoral Nomads, and Dependent Native Peoples. Settled Fishermen and Mounted Hunters, which are taxonomically in limbo, usually fall into the first category. 3. Feuding peoples may or may not use compensation to terminate a feud. Revenge for injustice drives feuds. Without the means to settle feuds they may persist for centuries. 4. Political communities with neighbors have found it necessary to have military organizations to defend themselves. Those that cannot defend themselves will be annihilated and any survivors absorbed into other

political communities or driven into refuge areas. Those with efficient military organizations are likely to expand territorially. 5. The warfare pattern of most tribal peoples consists of the ambush and the line. In a confrontation, the more effective tactic will be chosen. See also: Anthropology of Violence and Conflict, Overview; Peaceful Societies; Ritual and Symbolic Behavior; Warriors, Anthropology of

Further Reading Boehm, C. (1984). Blood revenge: The anthropology of feuding in Montenegro and other tribal societies. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Daly, M. and Wilson, M. (1988). Homicide. New York: Aldine de Gruyder. Dentan, R. K. (1992). The rise, maintenance, and destruction of peaceable polity: A preliminary essay in political ecology. In Silverberg, J. and Gray, J. P. (eds.) Aggression and peacefulness in humans and other primates, pp. 214–270. New York: Oxford University Press. Divale, W. T. and Harris, M. (1976). Population, warfare and the male supremacist complex. American Anthropologist 80, 379. Ember, C. R. and Ember, M. (1992). Warfare, aggression, and resource problems: Cross-cultural codes. Behavior Science Research 26, 169–226. Ember, C. R. and Ember, M. (1997). Violence in the ethnographic record: Results of cross-cultural research on war and aggression. In Martin, D. L. and Frayer, D. W. (eds.) Troubled times: Violence and warfare in the past, pp. 1–20. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach. Ericksen, K. P. and Horton, H. (1992). ‘Blood feuds’: Cross-cultural variations in kin group vengeance. Behavior Science Research 26, 57–85. Ferguson, R. B. and Whitehead, N. L. (eds.) (1992). War in the tribal zone: Expanding states and indigenous warfare. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Fry, D. (2006). The human potential for peace. New York: Oxford University Press. Heider, K. (1997). Grand Valley Dani: Peaceful warriors, 3rd edn. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College Publishers. Keeley, L. (1996). War before civilization: The myth of the peaceful savage. New York: Oxford University Press. Kelly, R. C. (2002). Warless societies and the origin of war. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Kuschel, R. (1988). Vengeance is their reply: Blood feuds and homicides on Bellona Island. pt. 1. Copenhagen: Dansk Psykologisk Forlag. Murdock, G. P. (1968). The current status of the world’s hunting and gathering peoples. In Lee, R. B. and DeVore, I. (eds.) Man the hunter, pp. 13–20. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company. Nettleship, M. A., Givens, R. D., and Nettleship, A. (eds.) (1975). War, its causes and correlates. The Hague: Mouton. Otterbein, K. F. (1970). The evolution of war: A cross-cultural study. New Haven: Human Relations Area Files. Otterbein, K. F. (1977). Comparative cultural analysis: An introduction to anthropology, 2nd edn. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Otterbein, K. F. (1986). The ultimate coercive sanction: A cross-cultural study of capital punishment. New Haven: Human Relations Area Files Press. Otterbein, K. F. (1994). Feuding and warfare: Selected papers of Keith F. Otterbein. Langborn, PA: Gordon and Breach. Otterbein, K. F. (1996). Feuding. In Levinson, D. and Ember, M. (eds.) The encyclopedia of cultural anthropology, pp. 492–496. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Otterbein, K. F. (2000). Five feuds: An analysis of homicides in Eastern Kentucky in the late nineteenth century. American Anthropologist 102, 231–243.

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Pearce, J. E. (1994). Days of darkness: The feuds of Eastern Kentucky. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. Robarchek, C. and Robarchek, C. (1998). Waorani: The contexts of violence and war. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace and Company. Thoden van Velzen, H. U. E. and van Wetering, W. (1960). Residence, power groups, and intra-societal aggression. International Archives of Ethnography 49, 169–200. van der Dennen, J. M. G. (1995). The origin of war: The evolution of male-coalitional reproductive strategy. Groningen, The Netherlands: Origin Press.

Otterbein, K. F. (2002). Feuding. In Levinson, D. (ed.) Encyclopedia of crime and punishment, vol. 2, pp. 691–696. Great Barrington: Berkshire Reference Works/Sage. Otterbein, K. F. (2004). How war began. College Station, TX: A & M University Press. Otterbein, K. F. (2005). Hunting and virilocality. Current Anthropology 46, 124–127. Otterbein, K. F. and Otterbein, C. S. (1965). An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth: A cross-cultural study of feuding. American Anthropologist 67, 1470–1482.

Gender Studies Lynne M Woehrle, Mount Mary College, Milwaukee, WI, USA Donna Engelmann, Alverno College, Milwaukee, WI, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Overview What Is Gender? Patriarchal Gender Relations and Violence

Women and Peacebuilding Conclusion: Viewed through a Gendered Lens Further Reading

Ecofeminism An academic and activist movement which applies feminist analysis to theorizing about and acting on environmental issues. Equity Feminists Those feminists whose goal is to achieve equality of rights, opportunity, and social standing between women and men. Feminism Theories and practices that challenge male dominance and privilege. Critiques patriarchal power relations. Gender One’s socially constructed identity as male or female. May or may not be identical to one’s biological sex characteristics. Glass Ceiling The invisible barrier that keeps members of a less-powerful group from advancing into the top-tier leadership and decision-making positions in a society or group. Intersectionality A theoretical perspective that analyzes social structures and relations from and at the

points where various categories (e.g., race, class, gender, etc.,) intersect. Argues that oppression is not an additive model (e.g., race þ class þ gender) but a dialectical model. Marginalization Placing a person, group, theory, or practice to the edge of society. It utilizes exclusion from institutions and social relations. Strategies may include silencing, severe disempowerment, and the exclusion from participation in the creation of dominant knowledge. Patriarchy A hierarchical system of power relations that is based on male privilege. Privilege Access to or control over social power and resources that provide power. Often its presence seems invisible, or if visible, natural. Radical Feminists Those feminists who seek to dismantle theoretical frameworks and institutional arrangements, based on gender, which create and maintain patriarchal dominance and oppression.

Gender studies is a multifaceted field of inquiry into social structures and social relations that has important implications for the study of violence, peace, and conflict. Gender analysis provides tools that are applicable to a wide range of social concerns. This article summarizes key aspects in the field of gender studies in order to consider the contributions that gender analysis brings to inquiries into violence, peace, and conflict. A discipline in

its own right, gender studies focuses on the implications of values, actions, and systems formed on the basis of definitions of and beliefs about masculinity and femininity. Suppositions in the theories of gender mesh well with the normative approach of peace and conflict studies. This essay considers the influence that gender studies has and can have on thinking about violence, nonviolence, war and peace, and conflict transformation.

Glossary

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Overview Gender studies as a field of study does not offer a single, unified approach to understanding the phenomenon of gender. The interdisciplinary nature of the topic and the variety of areas from which gender analysis has emerged means that there are multiple and at times conflicting streams of thought about gender and its meaning and origins. Where gender comes from (learned or innate), what purpose(s) it serves in society, and its relation to other forms of oppression, are central concerns to the field. Although processes of sexism, racism, classism, heterosexism, and ableism vary in the specific ways in which they operate in social structures, each shares a dependence on a hierarchical system of power relations for continued existence. Identifying the operation and effects of those power relations is a central component of gender studies. For this reason, gender studies cannot merely analyze gender but it must also cast a critical eye on the larger systemic nature of social inequality – power and privilege. While research often focuses on the problems of the oppressed, gender studies have opened a discussion of the importance of identifying the role of privilege (the access to and control over social power and economic capital and the ability or recognized ‘right’ to invoke that power) in perpetuating systems of inequality. The power of privilege is its ability to combine multiple levels of exclusion and oppression based on gender, race, ethnicity, class, ability, sexual orientation, nationality, and/or global location. Gender studies work at the intersections of these sources of privilege and oppression to shed light on how systems of inequality are maintained and enforced and this can assist the project of emancipation. It also points to the responsibility the ‘haves’ bear in creating social change and reminds us that the categories of ‘have’ and ‘have not’ are a false dichotomy that oversimplifies the complex web of relations of power. The relevance of gender to the study of violence, peace, and conflict is significant. Our intent is to show how the analysis of gender has over time opened new insights into each of these areas.

What Is Gender? Theoretical Explanations of Gender It is generally accepted across the field of gender studies that sex and gender represent different entities in society. Sex is used to refer to the biological categories, most often described as male and female. While the strict division between male and female sexes seems rooted in biology, seeing sexual identities as polar opposites masks a continuum of sexual identities: intersexed individuals, hermaphrodites, and transsexuals. A well-known

feminist who argues that gender is a continuum is Judith Butler. She supports this claim by pointing out that even on the level of human physiology the existence of intersexed individuals demonstrates that there are in fact more than two biological sexes. She points out that in spite of social stigma around atypical gender behavior in dominant cultures, there is a great variety in the ‘performance’ of gender. Gender refers to the social processes that fit us into the highly distinct (though falsely so) categories we have named male and female. Gender involves action and agency. West and Zimmerman refer to this as ‘doing gender’. Gender can come from either individual actions or institutional structures or systems. In other words, one can put on the clothing and style the hair in ways recognized by society as either male or female and thus reify one’s location in the social structure. More persuasive though in shaping individual actions are institutional rules such as dress codes or even less explicit cultural expectations which may influence or even enforce the practices of gender. For example, female flight attendants were required to wear makeup until they fought their employer in court. And in the late nineteenth century in the United States women could be arrested for wearing pants. If we accept that sex categories exist on a continuum rather than in a dichotomous relationship, it is much more difficult to establish membership in distinct groups and to create a hierarchical ordering of society. Gender analysis points out the ways in which a series of rather discrete variations are treated as categories that can be used to reify the hierarchical systems of power. Once gender is seen as an action rather than as a static role, it is possible to understand how gender can be the basis for enforcing a system of privilege and oppression. We have such deeply embedded structures of gender in society that we will risk everything to fit ‘properly’ into one group or the other. And those who transgress strict gendered social codes are marginalized and stigmatized. Theorists continue to debate how much of an individual’s gender-oriented behavior is culturally induced and how much relates to biological predispositions. Since socialization begins early, often even before birth, separating the biological and the sociological is very difficult. It is apparent that there are some sex-linked chemical differences in the brain, however most scholars agree that the experiences of socialization solidify and exaggerate these differences. Thus gender studies tend to emphasize the social processes of teaching, learning, and enforcing gendered behaviors and beliefs. Within gender studies there is significant variation on how to address and change the gender dichotomies and power relations. Some feminist thinkers and activists, sometimes called ‘equity feminists’, have accepted the socially prevalent structure of gender difference and focus their efforts on rectifying the unjust distribution of

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social goods between males and females in society. Others, who might be termed radical feminists, seek to question and ultimately overthrow the gender categories themselves. Yet others suggest maintaining the differences in role and ability associated with gender categories but eliminating the hierarchy that privileges that which is male. Each of these approaches adds valuable ways for reworking our thinking about peace. More generally what we can draw from gender studies is the concept of gender as socially constructed and the idea that such distinctions provide the opening for destructive systems of inequality, such as patriarchy. This provides important insights for the analysis and understanding of violence, conflict, and peace. Gender in Society Worldwide, the consequences of the use of categories of gender to create hierarchies of political and economic power can be seen in the material conditions of women and children. In the United States, the feminization of poverty – the increasing tendency for those in poverty to be primarily women and their children – has been documented over the last several decades. During this same period, it has also been conclusively demonstrated that women in the United States are paid less than men for work in the same occupation. An important factor contributing to this situation is women’s lack of access to positions of influence and decision-making in government and business – the glass ceiling. Of the CEO’s of the Fortune 500 companies in the US in 2005, only eight were women. Outside the US, especially in the Third World, the political and economic situation for women is very difficult. Despite important strides forward during the United Nations Decade for Women (1985–95) gender inequality is still rife on the global stage. In many countries in the developing world, gender roles restrict women’s access to education, to political participation, and to many sectors of the workforce. In some societies, where there are limited social goods available, such as resources for food, healthcare, and school fees, the resources go to men before women, male children before female children. And in countries with government-imposed, or scarcityimposed restrictions on child-bearing, female fetuses are aborted in favor of bearing male children. Responses of gender theorists to these inequities have taken several forms. Some feminists have argued for the extension and modification of the available theoretical tools of Western notions of human rights. For instance, Charlotte Bunch has argued that the traditional notion of human rights is incomplete because it does not universally encompass women’s rights. In many societies legal protections are not extended to women in the private sphere, such as protection against domestic violence. Other feminists,

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especially postmodern and Third World feminists have recognized the gap between the guarantee of procedural rights and the inequity of social outcomes for men and women. They have argued that the Enlightenment notion of human rights is inherently flawed, in that it assumes that the bearer of rights is an independent, white, male property-owner. At its inception and ever since, this notion of rights has operated only in the public sphere for the benefit of men, and has not been extended to guarantee the political, economic, and social rights of women. Even countries that champion human rights still fail to recognize the necessity of protecting women’s rights, as is seen in the United States’ failure to ratify the United Nations Convention on Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) enacted in 1981. Moreover one could argue that, the insistence by Westerners on imposing their notions of human rights on nations whose cultures do not value individualism, capital and property accumulation, and competition, or share Western ideas of gender and family relations, is a type of cultural imperialism. Responding to these cautions against cultural imperialism, Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen have proposed a capabilities approach to development and rights issues. Nussbaum and Sen argue that there are certain characteristic activities of human beings – capabilities – that can provide a basis for determining what is just in the distribution of resources. These include, among other capabilities, the ability to live out a normal span of life, to have good health, food, shelter, the ability to move around at will, to be educated and to participate in political life, to have choice in reproductive matters and to have sexual and other forms of lifeenhancing pleasure, and to avoid unnecessary pain. These capabilities as articulated by Nussbaum and Sen strongly resemble the rights outlined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights which ground many international and local development schemes. They also parallel the work of Johan Galtung and his concept of structural violence which articulates that violence is not merely the direct physical attack but can also come from institutional inequalities. What might seem basic needs to some is to others a potential trip-wire for cultural imperialism. For example there are arguments about whether the capabilities or rights represent a false, and thus unacceptable, essentialism or universalism. This debate is at the center of academic and policy discussions about development and aid for ameliorating the condition of women and children worldwide.

Patriarchal Gender Relations and Violence Violence and Masculinity Gender studies, which grew out of feminist social critique and the feminist movement to end sexism, concerns much

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more than studying the ways in which women are oppressed in various social conditions. Recognizing the way in which gender operates in a society demands that we understand the experience of males. This is not a singular experience because other sources of categorization, such as race, class, and sexuality, enter into the larger picture of male experiences. The naming of ‘male privilege’ hides important adjectives that go along with that expression. When we look more closely at the intersections of race, class, and gender, we can see that the privilege of being male is a different experience for White, middle/upper-class males than it is for other groups of men. This can affect men’s relations with women. The most privileged men may view their advantage as natural and can justify it based on the rationale that they are better equipped to wield political and economic power. It is to their benefit to exclude women on the basis of gender and to view the power that they have as a failure on women’s part to be strong enough or masculine enough to compete. Thus men’s power over the so-called ‘weaker sex’ is justified in biological and historical terms, and the social structures of oppression and exclusion are ignored. Male power is often reinforced with physical violence, an arena in which men generally have a clear advantage over women. Men who are not in the most privileged categories may have more of a sense of inferiority and thus have a different and more complex relationship with women’s oppression. As author bell hooks suggests, men in the traditionally oppressed and under-represented groups can be an ally for social change if they embrace the goal of ending sexist oppression. On the other hand, these men can also contribute to perpetuating sexist oppression if they believe that exercising their physical power over women is a means for joining the club of the elite privileged male. In this way, Manning Marable in his essay in Messner and Kimmel’s book, Men’s Lives, suggests that men of color and with lower incomes manipulate women in order to try to make up for the disempowerment that they feel elsewhere in their lives. Perhaps controlling women or the family as a whole is their one means of feeling good about themselves. As John Stuart Mill wrote in ‘On the Subjection of Women’ in 1869, the poor man ‘‘exercises . . . his share of power [over women] with the highest nobleman.’’ Studying the impact of cultural assumptions about masculinity and the intersections of gender with other categories is an important strategy for understanding violence and nonviolence, and conflict and peace and the various experiences of these social interactions. Studying ‘domestic violence’ as an important issue in peace studies means unpacking the complex layers of gender in which it is embedded. If we can see beyond a

sense of isolated victims and bad individuals we can explore the ways in which gender, race, and class structures of inequality are an integral part of violence that happens on a seemingly personal level. Connecting the societal to the individual level resonates with the familiar feminist slogan which insisted ‘‘the personal is political.’’ Violence against women by men is a means of controlling women and maintaining or enforcing male privilege. Male privilege is the mainstay of a patriarchal system. Work in gender studies has also shown the intertwining relationship of militarism and patriarchy. It is argued that violence against women is linked to all other forms of violence that are perpetuated by the model of dominant and dominated that is basic to Western forms of hierarchical rule. One example is provided in the intersection of gender and peace studies. Scholar/activist Betty Reardon described the reinforcing relationship of patriarchy and militarism pointing out that the virtues of patriarchy are the virtues of martial culture. The justifications for the domination of women and the use of violence against them to maintain male power in the domestic sphere, parallel the arguments used to justify military aggression. Another example is provided by a range of theorists who argue that the analysis of rape and sexual assault should look at them as products of patriarchal relations where men utilize violence to maintain power. Thus it is a system of rule and not a biological function to dominate and violence, including war, functions to maintain those in power. Power is not exclusively abused by men. As bell hooks argues, there are many ways in which women also use this system to dominate others, including other women. Violence is seen as a means for achieving security and wide latitude is given to the state for violent acts committed in the guise of nationalism and protection of citizens. As children we are consistently exposed to the idea that violence is the most effective way to deal with conflict. Feminism points to violence and gender distinctions as mutually reinforcing each other. As we have seen, violence is used against women on the interpersonal level to enforce patriarchal rule. Social institutions such as competitive sports and the military provide examples of negative views of weakness being associated with the archetypal female. In these settings the insult of being or acting like a ‘weak woman’ is attached to men and women who are unwilling or unable to participate. Women are not only placed as the victim they are also blamed for the system. For example, women who have been raped have been accused of bringing the sexual assault on themselves through their own promiscuity, choice of clothing, social image and status, participation in sex work, or even natural beauty. An important part of the patriarchal gender system is the privileging of heterosexual intimate relations. The social construction of heterosexuality as the norm – what feminists have called

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‘compulsory heterosexuality’ – is achieved in a number of ways, one of which is the repression of homosexuality through homophobic violence. Many people are surprised to learn that with the increasing public presence of homosexuals in social institutions and throughout daily life, violence against homosexuals has increased. Besides ridicule, discrimination, and general social exclusion, homosexuals are constantly faced with threats and acts of physical violence if they make their sexuality public knowledge. Women and the War System Sex and sexism are used to limit and control women within many institutions; international relations and war provide important examples of this process. In patriarchal social structure women are viewed as property. Many historical precedents in Western legal code are based on this objectification of women’s bodies as property of men. For instance, Carole Pateman has argued that the social contract which governs relations among male citizens in patriarchal liberal democracies has its foundations in an unspoken agreement among them to treat women and children as property. We still have not moved beyond patriarchal arrangements that pass a woman from her father to her husband to her son. It is this objectification of women as property that makes it possible to believe that violence against women is a plausible means for gaining power over women or over other men related to the women against whom the violence is directed. It is also the rationale that makes women targets for the enemy. Violence against women can enter into struggles to maintain culture against outside influences. Women are often pawns in the practice of state politics. And women as a group seldom have much say in the processes of foreign relations. Sometimes women are the victims of violence used in resistance against unwanted foreign political and cultural influences. Two examples of this are explored in Moghadam’s work, including sati, the tradition of wifeimmolation in India, which has been revived in recent years by religious traditionalists in resistance to the introduction of values perceived to be Western and the increasing influence of modernity. Also the sometimes violent enforcement of hijab and seclusion is argued by some to be a resistance to the cultural colonialism of Western economic and military powers. Women feel the violence of state politics in wartime. They are the most likely to be displaced and along with children make up the vast majority of refugees of conflict. There are plenty of examples throughout history where the rape of women is a conscious strategy of warfare and cultural genocide. But this is not a new concern; perhaps more surprising is that it is still used as a strategy in the twenty-first century despite a clear exposure of its basis in

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power rather than in sexuality. War shares with sexual assault the characteristic of being a mechanism for shoring up masculinity through power assertion and the controlling of another. Cultural offense through the sexualization of a situation has also entered into wartime practices such as torture, as exemplified by the case of the sexual and physical torture of Iraqi prisoners by US military personnel at Abu Ghraib prison in the Second Iraq War. Women have also served as soldiers in war for both the state and for rebel groups. This phenomenon has been extensively studied and many scholars conclude that it rarely leads to the elimination of sexism or the long-term empowerment of women. The presence of women soldiers has led to increased visibility of instances of sexism in the military, but thus far women have not gained significant political or social power through military service. Governments formed by rebel groups have usually expected their female participants to return to tending what are considered the gender appropriate responsibilities in that society once the conflict is over. The association of female with weak and male with strong and successful is rife throughout military organizations and the history of modern warfare. An excellent analysis of the embedded masculinity in military organizations appears in the work of Carol Cohn, writing in her 1987 article in Signs, Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals, about her firsthand observations of ‘nukespeak’ among military leaders and strategists. This, coupled with accounts of misogynist training rituals in the preparation of military recruits and the barring of women from positions of power and honor in the military, suggests means by which we can do a structural analysis of gender inequality and its relationship to masculinity. The practices of institutionalized prostitution, female sexual slavery, and human trafficking are important examples of the treatment of women (and other disempowered groups) as property to be used rather than as beings with agency. In some cases women become bounty in war, claimed as slaves by the enemy and often later traded or sold into prostitution. One force for the expansion of prostitution globally has been the military. Enloe has observed the pattern of locating houses of prostitution near military bases. Historically women have been encouraged to support war and conflict by making sure that soldiers receive sexual gratification. The claims of Korean women against the Japanese government for their use as ‘comfort women’ for Japanese troops in World War II is a prime instance of involuntary sexual servitude in war. Whether voluntarily or involuntarily providing sexual outlet for male soldiers, women’s bodies are integrally connected to their experience of international politics.

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Women and Peacebuilding There are three stages that occur in the process of integrating the study of women and women’s experiences into theorizing. In the first stage the history of participation of the silenced actor or concept is reclaimed, named, and included. Feminist movements over the years have left a wake of books and articles about women’s contributions. In the second stage women are included in the larger picture, and books written by women may be included in the curriculum or cited by scholars. A research study may include a more diverse sample or the category of gender becomes a variable for analysis. This stage is often referred to as ‘add-and-stir’ gender studies. In the third stage, gender or female is not merely a variable but it becomes a paradigm of analysis. So, for example, in studying social inequality one would not just control for gender, but rather the larger social context of patriarchal systems would guide the development of the analysis. Two books written in the 1980s helped guide the emergence of the third stage in US gender studies: Carol Gilligan, In A Different Voice (1982), and Mary Field Belenky and colleagues, Women’s Ways of Knowing (1986; 1996). Perhaps a more important influence, however, is the theories of intersectionality that have been generated by womanist theorists writing about feminism from the margins of society. The work of postcolonial critics such as Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Angela Davis, Chandra Mohanty, and Patricia Hill Collins, among others chart the way for seeing the multi-dimensionality of gender and oppression. The four sections that follow provide examples of the potential for integration of gender analysis into peace and conflict studies. Ecofeminism and Peace Analyses of the intersectionality of race, class, and gender oppression have been applied in the arena of environmental activism. Ecofeminism has developed as an international movement that includes academic feminists and first and third world environmentalists. Ecofeminism encompasses a variety of approaches to thinking about and acting on behalf of the environment, but all ecofeminists recognize the necessary linkage between a healthy ecology and healthy lives for women and children. Ecofeminists view patriarchy as responsible for both the oppression of women, the poor, and indigenous people and for systems of production and consumption which view nature as a commodity to be used and discarded. Vandana Shiva has argued that in pursuit of an illusion of progress, Third World development projects designed to promote industrialization on the Western model have enriched their Western sponsors while doing little if anything to alleviate the poverty of Third World people.

Worse, they have tended to replace small-scale indigenous ecological practices with large-scale degradation of the environment. Shiva distinguishes between material poverty and spiritual poverty. While Third World material poverty is real and highly visible, it is also relative to the supposed superior standard of living of the developed nations. The spiritual poverty in the midst of material plenty of the developed nations – demonstrated by high rates of mental illness, drug addiction, and personal violence – and the relation between spiritual poverty and estrangement from nature, is less visible to Westerners themselves, but still very real. Sandra Harding and other feminist philosophers of science have argued that science and technology have played a leading role in worldwide patriarchal dominance. The supposed value-neutrality and objectivity of scientific method has cloaked science and its resulting technological advances in an aura of certainty and inevitability. In reality, science has been firmly in the control of and has conferred its benefits upon the wealthy and powerful. Its pretense to being a progressive force for all humankind has served to conceal such damaging results as destabilizing and polluting military technologies, exploitation of natural resources, and unchecked consumption. Harding and others have argued that it is important to recognize the validity of non-Western and indigenous methods of acquiring knowledge. It is also necessary to acknowledge that social contexts and value systems influence all forms of knowledge production, including Western science, so that these practices and their results can be properly examined and critiqued. In the absence of these critiques, science and technology will continue to be a force for widening the gap between the richer and poorer nations, resulting in increasing misery and political instability. Conflict Transformation/Mediation For centuries women have played central roles in conflict and in resolving conflict. As discussed above women’s bodies have been violently abused as a strategy of escalation in conflict. Women have become workers in the wartime industries, making it possible for more men to join combat. Women in significant numbers have joined revolutionary armies, particularly in colonial and postcolonial societies. Alternately women have participated in and led nonviolent confrontations throughout the world, documented at least as far back as when Hebrew women hid their sons in the bulrushes to protect them from the Pharaoh. Carrying the precepts of gender studies into research on conflict demands that gender (and thereby other relevant social categories as discussed earlier) be introduced into the analysis. In studies of conflict and conflict resolution, gender is currently introduced primarily as a

Gender Studies

variable rather than as a social paradigm. Therefore, most study of gender in conflict has tended to look at the influences of sex category differences in behavior rather than in the way in which gender operates in conflict and conflict resolution. Exceptions to the ‘variable approach’ are evident in work that views conflict and conflict resolution as situated in a particular social system, such as patriarchy. This research then considers how a woman’s identity as female and her experience growing up as a female in a system of male dominance impact on her attitudes and approaches to conflict. There is also comparison in this approach of male and female views toward conflict situations and toward the possible range of solutions. A further step is to see that the very conflicts and any possible resolutions themselves are embedded in the system of power relations in a particular social structure. In many cases power is controlled mostly by men, by whites, by heterosexuals, and by the upper and middle classes. The ways in which dominant systems of gender shape our experiences of conflict are also apparent in research on communication. Deborah Tannen and others have argued that in the process of learning how to be masculine or feminine we also learn different styles of communicating. Women and men also develop different expectations for when and how communication should happen. These differences are thought to be an important source of conflict between men and women. Conflict styles also seem to differ, not for biological reasons but because of social messages that encourage women to please and to submit (and thereby women practice conflict-avoiding behavior), and that teach men that conflict is a contest of wills and that winning is what is ultimately important. But how we conflict and communicate is not only about gender. It is also about race and class and the many other social categories that place us either in positions of power or of dominance. The work of bell hooks in Feminist Theory from Margin to Center highlights that there are alternatives to the two major White Western models of dealing with power: (1) dominant/submissive relationships where someone must be in a position of superior power, or (2) a separatist model in which the answer to power inequalities is for the submissive party to exclude the oppressor. As a woman who lives at intersections of race, class, and gender oppressions, she rejects the White feminist claim that gender oppression is the root of all other oppressions and calls for a multifaceted understanding of power relations. In the early 1980s an important contribution was made by feminist theoreticians to the field of conflict resolution. Early writings on mediation as an alternative to litigation had extolled its promise for resolution of conflict in a way that achieved win-win solutions rather than winner take all outcomes. With the development of the literature of

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feminist jurisprudence, new critiques emerged that broke down the dominance of male-centric theory and practice in the field. One important critique shared by feminists and critical legal theorists recognized that the private and non-precedent setting nature of alternative dispute resolution made it inappropriate for addressing conflicts arising over the rights of women and other oppressed groups, who deserved their day in court and place in the legal record. Another concern was that existing power imbalances between men and women in US patriarchal culture were not being recognized in practice by mediators, who assumed a level playing field and equal negotiating ability on the part of the parties in conflict. These inequities emerging in conflict resolution practice led to a rethinking of the meaning of the requirements of neutrality and impartiality on the part of mediators. Maintaining neutrality between unequally socially situated parties might not mean treating them the same, but rather recognizing differences in their interest in and competence to negotiate. Particularly telling examples of gender power imbalances arose in mediation of divorce and custody cases, where women’s submissiveness to the men in their lives often resulted in their surrendering their interests in mediation. As Deborah Kolb suggests in her 1988 book Her Place at the Table, having learned different negotiation styles and having different levels of power, women may be at a disadvantage in current practices of mediation and arbitration. Knowing what we do about cultural differences in handling conflict and the power implications of race and class, it is likely that our options for negotiating and solving problems are really much wider than current literature and practice suggests. Thus we might treat the facility for particular styles of communication and negotiation among women and other marginalized groups as a resource rather than as a liability. If women and people of non-Western cultures prefer and are good at transformative approaches to conflict resolution that aim as much at preserving relationships as at maximizing interests, a wider role should be found for these approaches in not only domestic and local conflicts, but international ones as well. The study of how social categories (e.g., race, class, gender) and cultural factors may deeply change how we relate to, define, enact, and resolve conflicts is a desperately needed area of research. Gender and Nonviolence One of the more interesting debates to emerge from the intersection of gender analysis and the study of peace, violence, and conflict is whether women are more peaceful than men. Some in society carve out a particular place for women as peacemakers. They claim that by nature and through the experience of mothering, women are more apt to oppose violent responses to conflict. In a sense

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Gender Studies

peacemaking is a niche that women can claim. Sara Ruddick provides an analysis that transcends simple gender distinctions. Instead she argues that women engage in caring labor and thus view negatively the impact of war on society. So the explanation is that women are socialized to nurture and thus prefer peaceful means of settling conflict. That said, she also points to the ways that women have participated in and supported wars. The question in gender analysis then is not a static association of women with peace or men with war; rather, it is to ask whether the gender system in any way shapes our relations to violence or nonviolence. In this regard, the theoretical understanding of women’s relationship with peace parallels the development of other areas of gender theory. Feminist theorists in the 1970s and 1980s tended to give essentialist accounts of women’s experience and capabilities, rooting their analyses in innate differences between men and women. As feminist theorists subjected one another’s work to critique, they moved to more nuanced and multiple understandings of women’s experiences, based on similarities in socialization processes across historical periods and cultures. Looking at women’s participation in nonviolence provides an example of more deeply integrating gender analysis into the study of peace. Ruddick proposes the concept of maternal nonviolence. Other women work on the historical reclaiming of memories about women’s nonviolent actions. There are hundreds of books and articles that document the nonviolent actions of women around the world, throughout history. But there is minimal recognition of gender as a means of analyzing the philosophy of nonviolence or the specifics of nonviolent action. The small group that works on the latter project exists among the margins of theorists in the field. The system of gender assignment often teaches women to be passive and to solve conflicts by avoiding violence to others and by absorbing the consequences themselves. Because of this, women’s passivity is often seen as nonviolence. But nonviolence, as Barbara Deming so often pointed out, is active, not passive. Some women’s silence is a form of violence either to themselves or others. Nonviolence teaches respect and boundaries. Deming describes it as the two-hand method, protecting my needs while offering you what you need. For those without social power (e.g., women or people in post-colonial societies) the first step towards nonviolence is awareness and rage. Often this rage has to be expressed and then can be constructively shaped into a very powerful nonviolent force – such as the tree-hugging movement in India or the Greenham Common protests of the 1980s. There are many critiques of the ‘woman is peaceful’ motif. Critics point out that historically women have played all sorts of roles in society and many of them

have perpetuated violence. Another problem with the ‘woman as peaceful’ analysis is that it marginalizes women who participate in violence, such as members of liberation armies, into the category of bad women. It makes essential a particular approach and experience of being a woman. And that approach emerges predominantly from the experiences of the colonizers rather than the colonized. Women intellectuals have extensively considered the relationships of women, peace, war, and international politics and roundly rejected the assumption that women are naturally peaceful or nonviolent while at the same time reserving a special place in society for women doing peacemaking work. Another approach suggested is to view the act of gendering war and peace as a product of a patriarchal system. Assigning certain activities to each gender helps to establish a sense of difference between male and female. That sense of difference is exploited into definitions of masculinity and femininity. So rather than attributing women’s participation in peacemaking to the fact that they have the resources and the power to make it their responsibility it is instead attributed to their gender. At the same time the violence of men is made more acceptable because it is argued that it is in the nature of the male to solve problems in this way. Christine Sylvester argues that one perspective is to see that the war system and the peace system are really two halves of a whole. To affix a gender association to war and to peace is actually to reify patriarchal definitions of world politics and systems of power relations. Peace Movement Organizations The work of peace-building stretches well beyond the processes of caring for returning soldiers or working for human rights. While many aspects of international politics have been closed to women until recently, peace movement organizations have long benefited from the efforts of women as both members and leaders. Women have participated both in single-gender peace organizations and in mixed gender groups. Peace has been defined in a variety of ways by women. In many parts of the world it is related directly to issues of development and daily survival. For example, Mertus shows the importance of postwar economic development in improving the situation of women in Bosnia and Afghanistan. Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan environmental activist who won the Nobel Prize for peace in 2004 for her role in creating the Green Belt movement, insists that there can be no peace unless we care for the environment and provide for appropriate development. Women have often been able to use their groups to press for peace and the end of war or conflict. The Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom (WILPF) was

Gender Studies

critical in the formation of the initial League of Nations, a precursor to the United Nations. Because it had formed alliances with many different groups the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition was central to the formulation and success of the talks that in 1998 produced a peace agreement. In Argentina, women who were seen as outside of politics used their social role as mothers to bring local and global awareness of the government’s policy of ‘disappearing’ activists and critics. Antiwar groups have also utilized women’s identities to criticize foreign policy. In 2003, the group Code Pink was established in the United States with the purpose of opposing the Iraq War and related wars on terrorism. The group uses the highly gendered symbolism of pink but plays on it to give leaders the ‘pink slip’ or to suggest the absurdity of color coding security (yellow, orange, red). The organization Women In Black utilizes the image of women in mourning dress to protest the impact of war throughout the world. They stand in silent protest in places where violence tears apart society. The group Raging Grannies juxtaposes the wisdom of the elder with the power of rage to provide political commentary at public protest – usually through song. And a popular bumper sticker reads ‘‘wellbehaved women rarely make history.’’ Even within peace movement organizations women have found it necessary to address systems of sexism and to push for positions of leadership. Antiwar posters from the

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Vietnam War era provide an example of the problem: some against a military draft read ‘‘Women say yes to men who say no.’’ These are no longer considered acceptable because women spoke up. And women are more often now in leadership positions in mixed-gendered peace organizations. Yet even so there continue to be moments of re-creation of gendered roles within peace movement organizations and women find themselves working on both sexism and antimilitarism simultaneously.

Conclusion: Viewed through a Gendered Lens Bringing gender studies into research on violence, peace, and conflict is essential. A gender analysis helps to show that even the most basic systems that we may assume are ‘natural’ are in actuality socially constructed and culturally embedded, and serve to perpetuate larger systemic values. In the case of gender analysis it makes the institutional structures of patriarchy more apparent. If gender is approached from a view of the intersectionality of privileges and oppressions, then it also becomes apparent that male privilege connects to White privilege, to class privilege, and to heterosexual privilege. Noticing these intersections may complicate analytic work, but it gives us a more complete view of the issues and events that we study.

Table 1 Intersection of gender with violence, peace, and conflict Gender and. . .

Personal

National

Global

Economic Status

Glass ceiling

Sweatshops and Maquiladoras

Militarism

Misogynist military training

Violence

Domestic/family violence

Nonviolence

Nurturing approaches in families and neighborhoods

Conflict Transformation

Use of alternative styles of conflict resolution and communication

Social Change

Empowerment of women and girls through education, leadership development, and political participation Consumer choices, everyday conservation activities

Lower wages for comparable work; feminization of poverty Rape in war, military and prostitution, sex and torture Cultural images of violence toward women Collective protest (hunger strikes, witness for the disappeared . . . etc.) Influence on inclusion of affect and power relations into training for conflict intervention skills Policy making to insure infrastructure that supports the empowerment of women

Environment

Theoretical

Feminist consciousnessraising

Advocating for policies that protect the health of children, reforestation projects, challenging environmental racism Making gender central to analyses of issues in peace and conflict

Women as refugees Female sexual slavery Women’s movements for peace Recognizing and including women’s particular experiences of war and violence Creating and participating in coalitions with broad spectrum of marginalized peoples Making the links between healthy environment, appropriate development and peacebuilding Developing global scholarly community that utilizes theories about the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexual identity.

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A preliminary picture of how gender analysis might shape the work of the field of peace studies is charted in Table 1. On a theoretical level, gender analysis requires that we renegotiate the meaning of several concepts: violence, power, justice, difference, and social movement theory. The typologies listed in Table 1 suggest that gender studies expands the traditional definition of violence studied in peace research. Thus, issues of personal violence and structures that perpetuate violence against women are defined as types of violence that are socially unacceptable in our vision of peace and justice. Table 1 also begins the project of de-centering Western experiences of violence and inequality by pointing to the connection of individual levels of gender inequality with global levels of social and economic inequality. Feminist scholarship and experience offer several ways of altering our traditional definition of power as the ability to control and to have or to own. This traditional definition of power focuses on the tangible accumulation of symbols of wealth, including money, women, land, industry, food, shelter, and slaves or employees. However, we can alter power by redefining what it means and who has it, recognizing that power has always existed – if unacknowledged – in the form of competence, passionate commitment, self-determination, and effective collaboration. While the academic study of violence, peace, and conflict has tended to focus on the nation-state, a gender analysis demands that analytic work be done across all levels of human interaction. Moreover, the definition of politics is extended to cover those whom it affects, not just those who have a voice. A gender analysis can help point out where other analytic frames have privileged the male perspective on a particular subject such as nonviolence theory or mediation training. A gender analysis demands that we ask in each moment of theory building: In what ways is gender influencing what is happening here? The emphasis is on realizing that gender is not natural, objective, or neutral. Rather, gender is always a product of dominant cultural systems and of the structure of power relations in a given society.

Belenky, M. F., Clinchy, B. M., Goldberger, N. R., and Tarule, J. M. (1996). Women’s ways of knowing. New York: Basic Books. Brownmiller, S. (1993). Against our will: Men, women, and rape. New York: Ballentine Books. Bunch, C. (2000). Encyclopedia of women: Global women’s issues and knowledge: Women’s human rights, an introduction. New York: Routledge Press. Butler, J. (1999). Gender trouble. New York: Routledge Press. Cohn, C. (1987). Sex and death in the rational world of defense intellectuals. Signs 12(4), 687–719. Confortini, C. (2006). Galtung, violence and gender: The case for a peace studies/feminism alliance. Peace and Change 31(3), 333–367. Deming, B. (1981). Remembering who we are. Kansas City, MO: Naiad Press. Enloe, C. (2001). Bananas, beaches, and bases. Berkeley, CA: University of CA Press. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harding, S. (1998). Is science multicultural? Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Harris, A. and King, Y. (1980). Rocking the ship of state: Toward a feminist peace politics. Boulder, CO: Westview. Hooks, B. (1984). Feminist theory from margin to center. Boston, MA: South End Press. Kolb, D. (1988). Her place at the table. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Law School. McAllister, P. (1983). Reweaving the web of life: Feminism and nonviolence. Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers. Mertus, J. (2000). War’s offensive on women. Bloomfield, CA: Kumarian Press. Moghadam, V. (ed.) (1994). Identity politics and women. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Nussbaum, M. and Sen, A. (eds.) (1993). The quality of life. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Pateman, C. (1988). The sexual contract. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Reardon, B. (1996). Sexism and the war system. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Ruddick, S. (1989). Maternal thinking: Towards a politics of Peace. New York: Ballentine. Shiva, V. (1989). Staying alive: Women, ecology and development. Atlantic Heights, NJ: Zed Books, Ltd. Smith, K. (2005). Prebirth gender talk: A case study in prenatal socialization. Women and Language 28(1), 49–53. Sylvester, C. (1995). Riding the hyphens of feminism, peace, and place in four (or More) Part cacophony. Women’s Studies Quarterly 23(3–4), 136–146. Tannen, D. (1990). You just don’t understand: Women and men in conversation. New York: Morrow. West, C. and Zimmerman, D. (1987). Doing gender. Gender and Society 1(2), 125–151.

See also: Conflict Management and Resolution; Military Culture; Peace Culture; Warriors, Anthropology of

http://www.codepink4peace.org/ – Codepink Women for Peace. http://www.feminist.org/ – Feminist Majority. http://www.huntalternatives.org – The Initiative for Inclusive Security, Hunt Alternatives Fund. http://www.twnside.org.sg/ – Third World Network (TWN). http://www.womenforwomen.org/ – Women for Women. http://www.womenwarpeace.org/ – WomenWarPeace.

Further Reading Allen, B. (1996). Rape warfare. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Relevant Websites

Ritual and Symbolic Behavior

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Ritual and Symbolic Behavior Philip Smith, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA Brad West, Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Concepts of Ritual and Symbolic Behavior Ritual and Symbolic Behavior among Animals Ritual and Symbolic Behavior among People

Glossary Ritual Forms of associative human activity organized around symbolic sets denoting the sacred and profane. Can also be used to denote repetitive, conventionalized forms of human activity and/or forms of human action which lack an obvious practical utility.

Studies of ritual and symbolic behavior look at the signifying practices and expressive actions that underpin both peace and violence. An emphasis is therefore placed on symbols and communication practices and the contexts within which they operate. Two broad theoretical traditions can be identified, one rooted in evolutionary biology and the other in cultural theory. In this article, greater attention is given to elucidating this cultural strand, with biological understandings used as a counterpoint.

Ritual and Conflict Ritual, Symbolic Action, and Building Peace Further Reading

Symbolic Behavior Activities organized around a process of communication, usually involving the transmission and reception of information. Can also be used to describe deeds that have a normative or cultural component which is expressed in the action itself. The concept of symbolic behavior is often contrasted with ideas of purely rational or utilitarian action.

is one of symbolic action rather than behavior. There is usually a greater emphasis placed on voluntarism and reflexivity, seeing symbolic systems as a resource with which humans construct meaningful worlds. Notwithstanding these divergent roots, both traditions give a central place to processes of communication and to describing the roles which participants take up.

Ritual and Symbolic Behavior among Animals Concepts of Ritual and Symbolic Behavior It has long been noted that many violent behaviors of both humans and animals cannot be accommodated within commonsense understandings of ‘real’ violence and ‘rational’ action. Observers have pointed to play, pretense, and mock violence and to elaborate preparations and displays that appear to have no obvious utility for the conduct of battle or to social norms which replace bloody combat with elaborate but harmless games. These sorts of disparate phenomena tend to be accounted for in terms of ideas of symbolic and ritual behavior, which to some extent operate as catchall residual categories for explaining the apparently inexplicable. In the biological sciences, understandings of symbolic behaviors are framed within the discourse of evolutionary biology and, in particular, game theory. This gives rise to a mechanistic and strategic model of action, with animals seen as engaging in expressive actions in order to obtain an evolutionary advantage. In the social sciences, a greater emphasis is placed on culture and the imaginative faculties of the human species. Here the preferred vocabulary

The seminal text in the study of ritualistic violence in animal populations is Konrad Lorenz’s work in 1966 On Aggression. In this work Lorenz pointed to the tendency of many animal species to engage in ritualized, nonlethal displays of aggression, especially in the context of mate selection. There may also be ceremonial displays of dominance and deference which animals conduct through the careful production and reading of the signs that are exchanged. Among African wild dogs, for example, a defeated combatant will signal when it is bested by posturing in submission and will usually be allowed to escape unharmed. Lorenz argued that such activities carried evolutionary advantages. They provided a harmless outlet for violent instincts, allowed superior specimens to locate mating partners (thus improving the gene pool), and provided a means of strengthening group bonds in social animals such as geese and rats. More recent work argues that Lorenz wrongly specifies the level at which natural selection works. Instead of looking for benefits at the level of the species or even the individual,

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we should see natural selection operating at the level of the gene. Consequently, ritualized combat behaviors should be seen as a manifestation of ruthless, genetically programed competition between gene-carrying organisms of the same species rather than as a more or less cooperative adaptation that allows a species to compete with other species. A fundamental problem for this sort of tooth-and-claw view of the animal world has been to explain why animals do not kill their opponents once they have defeated them in a ritual encounter. The current orthodoxy is to suggest that escalated fighting carries a risk of serious injury even for a dominant animal. Natural selection will favor genes that prevent animals from engaging in this activity too frequently. Accompanying the shift to the gene level of analysis has been the rise of game theory as a means of explaining animal behavior. Using mathematical models it is possible to interpret and numerically represent displays of ritualistic behavior as a form of competition in which players (genes carried in organisms) engage in competition with other players. Strategies (escalation, bluff, submission, flight, etc.) are determined by the costs (e.g., time, energy), benefits (e.g., potential access to mates, food), and risks (e.g., danger of injury) of particular lines of action. It is generally argued that ritualized displays of aggression are common in the animal world because they provide players with a low-cost, low-risk means of attaining benefits. Dominant animals can assert their power, and weaker animals can challenge, without either risking fatal injury. And both can obtain objective information about their position in the pecking order and their odds of future success. Because such a system will eventually work to the benefit of participants, ensuring the survival of their genes, evolutionary process will work to effect a gradual improvement in the transfer efficiency of signals between actors and reactors, leading to sophisticated mechanisms for signaling ‘intentions’ and future lines of action. With communication replacing (or at least augmenting) real force, possibilities arise for organisms to obtain an evolutionary advantage over other members of their species through specializing in or manipulating ritualized communication systems. It has been suggested this might account for hypertrophied display organs, such as the peacock’s tail, which are, in other respects, possibly cumbersome and dysfunctional for survival. Such an analysis can also help interpret bluffing behaviors. For example, a bird might signal to its flock the arrival of a predator in order to have exclusive access to a food resource. In the case of ritual aggression, a skilled mimic could sound or look like a bigger animal or could fake the ‘intention’ of being willing to fight to the death. To sum up, current research on ritualized aggression and symbolic behaviors in animal populations is driven by evolutionary biology and game theory. Emphasis is given to the selective advantage that accrues to genes from

participation in this kind of encounter rather than in escalated fighting. While the language of game theory speaks of the ‘strategies’ and ‘ploys’ that might be involved in a symbolic conflict, it is important to remember that these are linguistic conventions that assist in the application of a rationalistic game theory to a behaviorist context. Most biologists see animal behavior as a blind product of genetic programing. By contrast, social scientific understandings of ritualistic aggression in humans tend to point toward the culturally meaningful nature of such forms of conflict. The broad consensus is to see them as products of broader social values and specific human choices rather than as the expression of a utilitarian survival function. Despite these divergent paradigms there are some important areas of overlap. Sociobiologists such as Edward O Wilson, Lionel Tiger, and Konrad Lorenz have suggested that the resources of biology might be of use in explaining ritualized violence in areas such as human territoriality, male bonding, and group cohesion. Other scholars exploring more microlevel issues of body language, emotions, and facial expressions have also tried to draw analogies from animal behavior to human experience. Symbolic interactionists have also, albeit rarely, looked to animal studies in developing a broader understanding of routinized and ritualistic aspects of face-to-face human interactions. For example, although he was attentive to the creative, meaning-making qualities of human actors, Erving Goffman’s work in areas such as frame analysis and interaction ritual evinced an awareness of ethology. This is reflected in some of his terminology (e.g., deference and demeanor, grooming talk) and in the influence upon him of Gregory Bateson’s work on the metacontexts that frame the interpretation of behavior among animals. Despite these linkages, the dominant stream in cultural anthropology has been profoundly antithetical to biological understandings of ritualized encounters and violence, seeing them as deterministic and insufficiently attuned to the complexities of human symbolic systems. This article now turns to this more cultural tradition.

Ritual and Symbolic Behavior among People One of the most significant findings across the anthropological and sociological record has been the centrality of symbolic and ritual behavior to forms of violence. In traditional societies war is often regarded as a ritual activity as much as a utilitarian activity for gaining political or economic power, with violence strongly linked to the attainment of manhood. Indeed one commentator sees it as ‘‘a rough male sport for underemployed hunters, with the kinds of damage-limiting rules that all competitive sports have.’’ Conflicts are often on a small scale with tribes agreeing to limit the force that is used. In parts of Highland New Guinea, for example, wars are called off


when someone is wounded and warriors use inaccurate arrows without feather flights. Among the Native Americans of the Great Plains, the highest honor came from ‘counting coup’, not killing. This involved approaching an enemy without carrying weapons and touching him. Comparative studies of war and violence across civilizations, like that of Quincy Wright, suggest that the shift to more utilitarian, rationalized, and unrestrained forms of violence organized around conquest and domination emerged with agriculture and large-scale civilizations. In hunting-and-gathering societies there was no fixed wealth worth taking and people could easily run away. With the shift to agriculture, people had to stand and fight if they wished to eat. Along with agriculture there also came larger population densities and complex hierarchies, the emergence of military specialists, and full-scale wars associated with imperial expansion. These trends reached their logical conclusion in the militaristic empires of antiquity (Egypt, Rome, etc.), with their planned, ‘pragmatic’ approach to violence. This saw mass killing replace the ritualized killing of small-scale societies, with defeated populations often put to the sword. The shift toward more ‘rational’ and secular but also larger-scale forms of violence has continued up to the present day. Indeed, the rise of industrial capitalism and modernity in the West has seen the process accelerate thanks to a growing reliance on advanced technology and systems of coordination and control that operate at a distance from the points of battle. This move from symbolic and ritual violence toward norms advocating a rational and utilitarian organization of combat is in degree rather than in kind. Throughout history we can identify ritualistic elements in fighting styles and ethics. Noted examples include the combat codes of European knights and Japanese samurai, and the individualistic flair demonstrated by Cossacks and cavaliers. While contemporary combat styles have been rationalized by technowar, many scholars argue that conflict and violence is still underpinned by nonrational factors at levels from those of everyday life to full-scale war. Moreover, normative constraints often play a role in limiting the intensity of violence. To a certain extent, then, contemporary violence can be still considered a form of symbolic action, even if its ritualistic qualities are sometimes latent rather than manifest. Consider the following examples from everyday life:

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. Crimes against women such as domestic violence and rape are often interpreted as expressive acts which dramatize male power and resentment and which are often underpinned by an irrational culture of machismo. . Studies of urban gangs have pointed to the value system that leads young men to risk their lives and kill to protect their territory and gang colors. In addition, the following are examples from war: . Ethnic, racist, and/or nationalist beliefs have played a role in every war since the French Revolution. Today ethnonationalist beliefs remain important in arenas such as Iraq, Aceh, and Chechnya. . Many states voluntarily subscribe to the Geneva Convention, a document that provides minimum rights for those involved in war. This might be seen as an endorsement of the idea that war should be limited and constrained by human values. . Religious beliefs and motivations remain important factors behind war (e.g., in the Middle East). It could also be argued that apparently secular beliefs in democracy, reason, and equality that underpin some pro-war rhetoric amount to a civil religion. . Extreme atrocities, such as genocide or acts of terrorism, are difficult to interpret as rational or instrumental actions that contribute much to winning a war. They can be better understood as dramatizations of power and hatred. . The legitimization for going to war is often supported by quasimythological themes. In the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States and Western allies these included the demonization of Saddam Hussein and apocalyptic narratives concerning his intention to employ weapons of mass destruction against his enemies. Few commentators would claim that contemporary war is directly analogous to its more ritualistic counterparts. Similar to other major social processes it has been bureaucratized and its conduct is usually rational and strategic – in intention, if not in enactment. However, it is important to realize that ritualistic and symbolic beliefs provide for its legitimacy in wider society and offer an important source of motivation for participants.

Ritual and Conflict . Anthropological research shows that casual bar-room brawls tend to follow a ritualistic sequence of threats and blows, with informal rules preventing fighters from using weapons like knives. . Anthropologists and sociologists studying sport have pointed to the symbolic and ritualistic qualities of violence in sports such as boxing, wrestling, cockfighting, and bullfighting.

So far this article has discussed the symbolic and ritualistic dimensions of violence in animals and humans. These have been described as the ways in which conflict is patterned, generated, or limited by meanings embodied in codes, signs, and symbols. This last section looks at theories of ritual itself and the ways in which theories of ritual have been used to explain peace, war, and violence.

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The contemporary study of ritual in the social sciences has its foundational moment in Emile Durkheim’s masterwork The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Here Durkheim drew upon Australian aboriginal ethnography to argue that societies must periodically come together to renew their bonds. He claimed they achieved this through rituals characterized by physical proximity and the manipulation of the symbols of the sacred and the profane. In his understanding, these rituals worked to generate social stability and harmony. The broad thrust of Durkheim’s work, then, is to suggest that ritual activity is important for allowing peaceful coexistence within groups. Despite his data being drawn from a small-scale society, Durkheim claimed that his theory had a more general applicability. He argued, for instance, that the flags of modern nations were analogous to aboriginal totems. Important arguments to this effect have come from scholars like Lloyd Warner and Edward Shils. Drawing upon ethnographic data from a small Massachusetts town, Warner suggested that Memorial Day ceremonies dedicated to fallen soldiers constituted a kind of cult of the dead that united citizens. Shils made a similar point about the 1952 coronation of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, arguing that it enabled the nation to come together. These kinds of claims are now generally perceived to be simplistic. In a seminal article, Steven Lukes suggested that we need to explore the relationship between rituals and social conflict. Pointing to sectarian Orange Day parades in Northern Ireland, Lukes maintained that rituals are often used to divide as well as to unite communities. He also argued for ideas of agency and strategic action to be included in thinking about rituals as a replacement for the vague and systemic causal attributions of the Durkheimian functionalists. Over the past 30 years the kind of agenda instantiated by Lukes has come to predominate in ritual studies. Functionalist models that locate ritual causality in ‘social needs’ for harmony have been replaced by studies attentive to power, inequality, and interests. Here an emphasis is placed on the ways that rituals and ritual exchanges legitimize and reproduce structures of power and inequality. Important contributions within this critical tradition have come from scholars like Marc Auge and Pierre Bourdieu. Another significant feature of contemporary research has been inputs from structuralist and poststructuralist theories. These have enabled ideas of discourse, narrative, and semiotics to be incorporated into an understanding of ritual dynamics, providing for a more sophisticated understanding of the ways culture works. Early contributions from Mary Douglas on purity and pollution and Victor Turner’s processualist analyses of liminality remain important sources of inspiration. Also significant are borrowings from Le´vi-Strauss on cultural codes and Bakhtin on the carnivalesque. While also vital to critical understandings of ritual, this line of cultural elaboration has provided the basis for a recent revival in neo-Durkheimian

scholarship. This research seeks to hold on to what is best in Durkheim’s Elementary Forms (such as ideas about the autonomy of culture, solidarity, and emotion) while jettisoning what no longer seems viable (the assumption of social consensus, functionalism). This emerging research tradition also draws upon the critical theories discussed earlier so as to be able to put forward a more hard-headed and empirically grounded understanding of ritual dynamics. At present, links between ritual studies and peace studies remain underdeveloped. Scholars in the ritual studies area often use phenomena like nationalist and military parades as sources of data, but do not have issues of peace and violence at the center of their research agenda. They are often more interested in theoretical issues concerning the structure and process of rituals themselves. To be sure, ideas about domination, conflict, and exclusion can be found, but rarely are these translated into a central preoccupation with issues of physical violence or peaceful coexistence. On the other hand, scholars in the peace studies area often refer to the ritualistic qualities of violence (e.g., when discussing the kinds of themes listed in the section entitled ‘Ritual and symbolic behavior among people’), but do so in passing and without reference to core theory in the ritual studies area. The result has been two literatures that have passed each other like ships in the night. This is unfortunate as the core issues of ritual theory, such as the dynamics of solidarity and exclusion, the importance of sacrifice, and the roles of quasireligious symbolic codes and the collective memory in the legitimation of the social order, are obviously of very direct relevance to understanding peace and conflict. Nevertheless, in recent years a number of studies have become influential in thinking through these latent and potential connections. Important characteristics of the literature include an interdisciplinary theoretical input centering on the textuality of social life, the idea of ritual as an arena of struggle and violence as well as consensus, a concern with the autonomy of culture as a ‘variable’ that makes possible violent and nonviolent outcomes, and, finally, a concern with the need for historically and culturally specific, process-driven explanation. Perhaps the best way to get a feel for this expanding, interdisciplinary literature is to briefly review some representative examples. . Bruce Lincoln’s explorations of ritual and violence are rooted in critical theory. Lincoln makes use of Roland Barthes and Maurice Bloch in developing a model of social life that sees symbolic and ritual activity as closely associated with the reproduction of, and challenges to, structures of power. In Lincoln’s view, social integration through ritual always benefits some groups more than others. This is evinced in his discussion of the Swazi Ncwala, an annual ritual ostensibly celebrating harvest, death and rebirth, and kingship. Lincoln shows


how a covert subtext of the ritual was a sustained, but coded, critique of colonial domination. This affirmation of a universal Swazi identity worked, however, to reinforce the power of the Swazi king over his subjects by symbolically trumping internal conflicts between factions within the Swazi nation. So a ritual constructing solidarity in the face of one form of domination ended up reproducing another. . The work of Randall Collins shares with Lincoln an interest in the relationship between ritual and power. Collins, however, believes that acting together is more important than a shared symbolic code in building solidarity. Central to his argument is the concept of ‘emotional energy’. For Collins, it is in situations of high emotional energy that symbols endure by being inculcated in people’s minds, carried through time by ‘ritual chains’. High and low emotional energy emerges from the relative intensity of situational characteristics such as communicative gestures, emotional rhythms, flows, and mutual focus. These, in turn, produce motivating forces in which individuals will instrumentally seek out interaction rituals that contain maximum emotional energy, whether they are positive emotions such as altruism and love or negative emotions such as anger and fear. For this reason individuals and groups can often find a kind of desire for conflict and crisis, such as in individual acts of violence or the undertaking of military action. . The ability of ritual to bridge social divides in plural Western societies is explored in an alternative dramaturgical way by Jeffrey Alexander. Alexander argues that a more nuanced understanding of ritual in contemporary society can be achieved through conceiving of cultural traumas and periods of crisis in performative terms involving actors, audiences, props, scripts, and plots. In a study of the terrorist attack on New York’s Twin Towers, Alexander argues that Al Qaeda not only wished to inflict death and destruction but also create political and social instability in the United States through an act in which American culture would be seen as weak and morally corrupt. While the performance was initially successful in threatening to disrupt social order, the terrorists failed in their aims as a counter-performance was constructed in the United States’ public sphere that reinterpreted the event and resulted in a new social solidarity. From this perspective we can understand how the attacks eventually produced exactly the opposite effect and meaning than Al Qaeda had in mind. . In his book Why War Philip Smith compares different nations’ narrative constructions of crisis leading up to the Iraq war, the Gulf war, and the Suez conflict. Contrary to the dominant academic theories of warfare that privilege economic and material interests, Smith argues that narrative understanding itself can be the

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reason that warfare is chosen by the state over alternatives such as diplomacy. Drawing upon the work of narrative theorists such as Northrop Frye, Smith decodes the national discourses of the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Spain for his case studies. He concludes that genre interpretations align with war in ways that are regular and predictable. For example, in the Suez crisis the narrative employed in the American public sphere could be classified as ‘‘low mimetic,’’ with an ‘everyday’ and bureaucratic nature. The result was opposition to military intervention against Colonel Nasser’s regime. By contrast, prior to the Gulf war and Iraq war, a ‘‘high mimetic’’ apocalyptic genre developed in the United States that portrayed Saddam Hussein as an evil, Hitler-like figure, and allowed for the justification of human sacrifice. Smith’s narrative classification model helps us develop a cultural interpretation of war where discourse and narrative are not merely used as tools for legitimation by powerful elites but which also directly influence the decision to go to war. In a sense, all wars are symbolic actions as they are launched from platforms of meaning-making activity. . In Theorising the Standoff, Robin Wagner-Pacifici explores similar kinds of narrative themes of crisis but relates them to symbolic action at the level of the individual as well as the group. She analyzes various standoff cases in the United States such as Wounded Knee, Waco, and Ruby Ridge, to understand moments of social contingency. In such threshold episodes in which violence is imminent, the normal guiding principles of action become unstable and ambiguous. A siege mentality occurs on both sides where new interpretive and symbolic frameworks apply. Seemingly banal actions and objects, such as the sirens of fire engines, can result in situations of danger and confrontation. Wagner-Pacifici’s analysis informs us that while such potential violent episodes are created by structural forces such as religious, ideological, and political clashes, it is often situational behaviors by individuals in particular cultural environments that ultimately determine peaceful conclusion of the standoff.

Ritual, Symbolic Action, and Building Peace Ethological studies belong to an intellectual field which borders on the morally dubious territories of Social Darwinism and eugenics. In the wrong hands, such as those of Adolf Hitler, such theories can be used to question the belief that peace is either possible or good. On the contrary, they can be taken to lead to the conclusion that conflict is not only inevitable, but also an ennobling duty.

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Through military triumph over the weak and through programs of ‘ethnic cleansing’, the strong can claim their birthright and purify and refine their bloodstock thus fulfilling some kind of ‘racial destiny’. Fortunately, it is possible to derive a more constructive lesson from the ethological literature once it is realized that there is no inevitable connection between scientific knowledge derived from observations of animal behavior and a pseudo-Darwinistic moral philosophy. Humans are different from animals, and one of the most important differences is their ability to construct moral codes and institutional arrangements which modify or transcend the effects of nature. An important argument along these lines is William James’ essay on ‘The moral equivalent of war’. James recognizes the existence of martial traits in modern people that have arisen as a result of thousands of years of war but suggests that these can be channeled into nonviolent avenues such as public service. In this way, he argues, society could retain the constructive ‘‘character building’’ qualities of military service but avoid bloodshed. In a similar vein, the biologist Richard Dawkins has denied that his analysis of the ‘‘selfish gene’’ is a justification for selfish, free-market individualism as some of his critics have suggested. Rather, he contends, scientific knowledge allows us to be aware of the operation of genetic conditioning and, consequently, to be able to sit down and discuss rational strategies for thwarting genes and nurturing genuine altruism. In this way, we can ‘‘rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.’’ Knowledge about ethology allows for reflexivity and an awareness of the negative traits of our species – the instinctual and selfish behaviors which are to be avoided. We can also look to the ethological corpus for more positive suggestions for constructing peace. Two potential themes stand out. The first of these is that the literature can be used as a resource for strategy analysts who are attracted to rational choice and game theory. It might be possible to locate in the animal kingdom and the adaptive behaviors of its members exemplars for constructing distributions of resources, threats, and balances of power that encourage ritualistic rather than escalated fighting. The attraction (and also weakness) of these kinds of solutions is that they do not require changing people’s minds. Rather they permit peaceful coexistence to be built into situations where human competition remains every bit as fierce as it is between genomes. An example of such a situation was the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, which underpinned the nuclear deterrence strategies of the United States and the Soviet Union in the post-World War II period. The idea here was that the costs of full-scale nuclear war, such as global destruction and nuclear winter, would be too high for either side. Consequently, expressions of their mutual hostility were limited to regional wars (e.g., Nicaragua, Vietnam) and symbolic and diplomatic skirmishing. This is perhaps

analogous to the de-escalated violence we find in animal combats, where threat of death or serious injury prevents even dominant contestants from using full force. A second possibility afforded by animal studies is that they can be creatively misread to serve as a kind of moral exemplar. While animal behaviors might be selfish from the perspective of science, they can often appear to be altruistic or moral to common sense. The shift toward postmodernity is seeing nature resacralized in contemporary popular culture as a zone of purity and symbiosis. This provides a fertile setting for distributing positive imagery that sees ritualistic, restrained violence in animals as a role model for morally aware human action. We can already see signs of this kind of discourse emerging in popular advocacy for animals like dolphins, whales, and gorillas. Such animals are often attributed an almost spiritual ability to live in peace and harmony with their environment and each other. The diversity of human cultures equally provides a rich resource with which to think creatively about building a peace culture. The literature on small-scale societies can be studied for ideas about how to replace a culture that valorizes escalated violence with one that recognizes the superiority of low-harm alternatives. An enhanced understanding of the ritual and symbolic foundations of contemporary violence can lead to greater reflexivity about existing practices and promote the search for nonviolent alternatives. By the same token, we can look in a pragmatic way for forms of symbolic action that seem to offer more positive alternatives. In the case of ritual, for example, the weight of academic research suggests that militaristic parades do little to build peace and understanding. Alternative commemorative forms, however, can play an important role in breaking down barriers and building pacifist solidarity. In their book Dark Tourism John Lennon and Malcolm Foley show how sites of death, disaster, and atrocities have increasingly become sites of modern pilgrimage. From fieldwork at places such as the Auschwitz death camps and tours of World War II battlefields, they argue that tourism at these sites promote doubt about the project of modernity and the questioning of the infallibility of science and technology. In a more detailed ethnographic study on tourism at the World War I Gallipoli battlefields in Turkey, Brad West similarly demonstrates how international tourism can foster sentiments of tolerance and peace. From interviews with young Australian budget travelers, he argues that a new national collective memory of the campaign has developed in which former foes Turkey and Australia/ New Zealand have been reimagined as friends that share common historical event of sacrifice. By looking at these kinds of success stories, and through analyzing their symbolic and ritual foundations for generalizable principles, peace activists can start to construct lines of action that might make a difference.

Folklore 177 See also: Aggression and Altruism; Clan and Tribal Conflict; Folklore; Gender Studies; Warriors, Anthropology of

Further Reading Alexander, J. (2004). From the depths of despair: Performance, counterperformance, and ‘September 11’. Sociological Theory 22(1), 88–105. Alexander, A. and Smith, P. (eds.) (2005). The Cambridge companion to Durkheim. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barnard, C. J. (1983). Animal behaviour. London: Croom Helm. Collins, R. (2004). Interaction ritual chains. Princeton: University of Princeton Press. Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Durkheim, E. (1915). The elementary forms of religious life. London: Allen and Unwin.

Dyer, G. (1985). War. New York: Crown. James, W. (1942). The moral equivalent of war. In Essays on faith and morals, pp. 311–328. New York: Meridian. Lennon, J. and Foley, M. (2000). Dark tourism. London: Continuum. Lincoln, B. (1987). Ritual, rebellion, resistance. Man 22, 132–156. Lorenz, K. (1966). On aggression. London: Methuen. Lukes, S. (1975). Political ritual and social integration. Sociology 9(2), 289–308. Smith, P. (2005). Why war? The cultural logic of Iraq, the Gulf War and Suez. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sperber, D. (1975). Rethinking symbolism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wagner-Pacifici, R. (2000). Theorizing the standoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. West, B. (2005). Independent travel and civil religious pilgrimage. In Down the road, pp. 9–32. Perth: API Press. Wright, Q. (1965). A study of war. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Folklore Sanja Magdalenic´, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

What is Folklore? Identifying Themes of Violence, Peace, and Conflict in Folklore Research

Glossary Genre Traditionally, a system for collecting and classifying folklore material. In recent perspectives, orienting framework for the production and interpretation of cultural discourse.

What is Folklore? Folklore generally refers to cultural expressions, such as narratives, jokes, beliefs, proverbs, legends, myths, music, songs, dances, costumes, food, and festivals, through which individuals and groups shape and disseminate a shared identity. There is, however, hardly any consensus among folklorists on either how to define folklore or how to explain the issues with the meaning and the function of it. The interest in folklore emerged primarily out of the Romantic nationalism of the early nineteenth century. Enthusiastic intellectuals, amateurs, and artists started to collect different kinds of folklore material in order to be able to study various aspects of ‘the folk’ and folk-life.

The Dilemmas of Folklorists Regarding Research on Violence and Conflict Prospects for Future Research Further Reading

Performance Repeated artistic practices that shape individual and group identity. Tradition A continuous process in which individuals and groups construct their future by reference to past experiences.

During this early period, folklore was viewed as ‘the lore’ – the materials of folklore – of ‘the folk’ – the people who utilize the materials. The discoverers of folklore identified the ‘folk’ as peasant society or rural groups, regarding them as the main carriers of distinct traditions that were slowly dying out due to urbanization and industrialization during the transition to modernity. The bourgeois nostalgia for the ‘paradise lost’ motivated the efforts to examine and preserve different aspects of folk-life. In some countries, the rising interest in folklore studies was also motivated by the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Within this perspective, the folk and their traditions were regarded as primitive and therefore had to be studied in order to be transformed. Early folklorists focused

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primarily on oral traditions, such as ballads, folktales, epics, and sagas, and how these were transmitted within rural communities. During the 1960s, a paradigm shift occurred in the theory and methods of folklore studies. Folklorists became aware of the class, gender, and national bias embedded in the old concept of folklore. Moreover, contrary to earlier research that approached folklore as authentic and ahistorical artifacts, new research streams pointed out that folklore was always situated within some particular space and time. Recent folklore studies tend to view folklore as processcentered, context-sensitive, and performance-oriented. According to a contemporary influential conception of folklore, ‘folk’ refers to any group of people who share some common grounds, such as occupation, language, religion, or ethnicity. Most people are members of several and not just one folk-group. The paradigm shift allowed the expansion of folklore studies into new areas of inquiry that previously received little attention. Folklore studies (alt. folkloristics) as a discipline continues to struggle for its place in the academic world, where it rarely has achieved an autonomous status. In most countries, folklore is studied within the neighboring fields of ethnology, anthropology, cultural studies, literature, or history. Folklore material is primarily collected through fieldwork, participant observation, and interviews. Various kinds of secondary sources, such as archival materials, diaries, autobiographies, letters, and photography, serve as excellent sources of folkloric imagination. The availability of sources, however, varies both geographically and chronologically. Inasmuch as ‘folk culture’ was long considered to be of low status and was denned in opposition to ‘high culture’, records of it sometimes exist only as selected and filtered by the latter. When folkloristics as a scholarly endeavor emerged in the West, it was primarily oriented toward documenting Western folklore. Collecting folklore from other parts of the world was done occasionally by missionaries, travelers, and anthropologists. There are also examples that colonial powers not only actively discouraged but even banned native scholars from collecting folklore expressions. In recent discussions on the state of folklore scholarship, there have emerged claims that contemporary folklorists must direct attention even toward the political aspect of folklore research in order to be aware of who is studying whose traditions and on what terms.

Identifying Themes of Violence, Peace, and Conflict in Folklore Research Recent research approaches tend to view folklore as a system in which and through which individuals and groups interact. The assumption underlying this perspective is that folklore takes shape in social relations within

groups and is strengthened in communication with other groups. The group’s image of itself as well as its images of other groups is often reflected in its folklore repertoire. In general, folklorists have been predominantly concerned with documenting and analyzing customs and traditions that emerge in peaceful conditions and deal with identity formation or social cohesion, while neglecting the dark sides of social life. Even though folklore archives contain such material, entries such as aggression, conflict, violence, and war are seldom found in folklore journals and monographs. Some folklorists have suggested that the fact that such studies are rare is to a great extent related to the two perspectives that influenced the development of folklore studies. The perspective of Romantic nationalism considered folklore to represent the best of a given national culture. Such a point of view, however, hindered folklorists from acknowledging that the folk, the idealized object of their study, could even have destructive beliefs and traditions. The political perspective of the Enlightenment, on the other hand, perceived folklore as a primitive culture that had to be studied in order to be changed. From this perspective, it was justifiable to collect destructive elements if the aim was to condemn them and eliminate them through social reforms. Even though these two perspectives were opposed to each other, they created a similar outcome: folklorists experienced considerable difficulties when confronted with the violent behavior and aggressive ideas of their informants. This in turn created the remarkable avoidance of such topics and placed them on the margins in folklore research. The absence of these issues is also explained with reference to the character of knowledge production in folkloristics, the lack of funding, and personal dilemmas related to the topics. Comparative research, in particular, cross-cultural research in this area, has been less common. Over the past few decades, however, the interest in the dark side of folklore, in aggressive and violent practices about which groups invent traditions, seems to have found its way onto the research agenda. The change of paradigm in folklore research brought to light awareness that peace, conflict, and violence are an inherent part of human existence, and that folklore can be as much a mechanism of social cohesion and identity affirmation as of conflict and violence. The examples of folklore expressions considered in this article have different forms and take place in a variety of contexts; they are loosely grouped along a continuum from primarily peaceful settings, ritualized versus real violence to war. Folklore in Primarily Peaceful Contexts There is a wide variety of ways in which people use folklore to negotiate identities and boundaries between different groups as well as express beliefs, anxieties, aggression, conflict, and violence. Such practices most

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often take place in primarily peaceful settings and do not necessarily lead to open conflict or violence. Narratives, urban legends, jokes, children’s games, and nursery rhymes are some examples of folklore expressions that enable dealing with cultural values, norms, conflict, and violence in peaceful contexts. Fairy tales, this popular children’s literature that derives from folktales, have entertained generations of children over the last two centuries. Tales such as Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Cinderella, and Hansel och Gretel have appeared in various forms and have become part of a cultural legacy. Fairy tales deal with a broad spectrum of themes from love, affection, happilyever-after romance, and heroic deed to family conflict, child abuse, punishment, aggression, murder, cannibalism, torture, and spectacular violence. As Maria Tatar in 2003 has shown, violence has a special place in this folklore genre that is often narrated to children at bedtime. Some of the pioneering work in collecting folktales was done by the Grimm brothers who at the beginning of the nineteenth century collected and edited an anthology of fairy tales that almost immediately gained enormous popularity. Tatar indicates that one of the reasons behind this success can be attributed to the fact that fairy tales were in accordance with the moral standards of the emerging bourgeoisie during the nineteenth century. She shows how the Grimms selected particular versions of the tales and sometimes transformed them so as to serve the pedagogic visions considered as appropriate. Violence was sometimes removed from, disguised in, or added to fairy tales for didactic purposes. In such edited versions of fairy tales, violence was turned into an instrument for controlling behavior of children, socialization, and acculturation. Folklore can reflect symbolic hostility between different groups and individuals who participate in the mutual exchange of stereotype attitudes so as to define their identity and establish their place in an imagined social hierarchy. Sociocentrism and boundary work are some of the conceptual tools that folklorists utilize when studying ‘the will to differentiate’. Some folklorists believe that people need hate figures in order to be able to project onto outsiders the hostilities and tensions that exist within the community. Projection is a type of psychological defense mechanism that is defined as the unconscious ascription of one’s own feelings and qualities to a source in the environment. Some of the common examples in folklore of how attitudes of suspicion and hate can be projected toward outsiders include projections on witches and scapegoating. Manifesting indifference and/or feelings of superiority are used as a device in practices that facilitate the formation of individual and group identity. From time to time, folklore can serve as a channel through which people are able to express attitudes and behavior that otherwise might be considered socially unacceptable.

Examples from the area of folklore research on humor and jokes reveal the existence of a complex hierarchy among folk-groups and their subgroups. Groups employ different strategies to regulate joking so that it does not get out of hand and become a destructive force. Regulation of joking, for instance, is easily observed in gender differences in joke-telling traditions. Contemporary folkloristics emphasizes the importance of paying attention to context in the study of jokes, claiming that variations in text and structure of jokes are related to the particular situation within which jokes are told. Furthermore, contextual variation offers multiple interpretations of jokes. The person telling the joke and the audience listening to it are identified as two of the most vital constituents of contextual structure. A joke often reflects a concern of society. Thus, the existence of racist jokes is seen as an indication of the society’s racist attitudes. In a comparative study of ethnic jokes, Christie Davies in 1990 has examined jokes as a means of ascribing different traits to other groups in a comical manner. According to her findings, the most popular and universally spread are ethnic jokes in which groups either are depicted as stupid, inept, and ignorant, or are portrayed as canny, calculating, and craftily stingy. Every country has its own repertoire of ethnic jokes about ‘stupid’ and ‘canny’ groups. By means of telling ethnic jokes, people strengthen their own identity. Davies also emphasizes that joke-telling patterns and patterns of social stratification are strongly related to each other in an asymmetrical manner. The members of the dominant ethnic group in a given society never make jokes about their own group but only about others. The joke patterns of subordinate and marginal groups, on the other hand, include their own group but are even more directed toward superior groups in the hierarchy. Over the past few decades, folklorists have turned attention to a variety of ways in which ethnicity is used to construct identity and solidarity as well as the category of the ‘other’. Collecting and analyzing narratives, the classic folklore genre, has enabled to study how different majority and minority groups deal with ethnicity through folklore expressions. On the one hand, there are narratives of immigrants who attempt to negotiate their position in the new country and to preserve traditions that they consider as valuable. Such narratives can be used to form ethnic identities and strengthen ethnic communities. On the other hand, folklorists have also collected narratives told by majority groups about immigrants. These narratives, which often include remarks on specific traditions and practices that are perceived as culturally different, become a channel through which majority groups construct and articulate their images of minority groups. Narratives, along with other folklore expressions, play an important role in negotiating the imagined rather than fixed boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

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Folkloristic collections include even numerous examples of how traditional wisdom, but even cultural and ethnic stereotypes as well as racial prejudices are transmitted through proverbs. Proverbs are among the most universal expressions within the genre of traditional verbal folk art. They are found in all human cultures, and they display similar structural features across languages and societies. A proverb is a saying that is assumed to express a general truth, a wisdom of the elders, that everyone can approve of as important and useful to recall. Folklorists have indicated that proverbs often reflect the norms and values of some particular society in which they circulate. In this view, a complete interpretation of a proverb has to take into account what is being promoted and in which context. One classical example in point is the incorporation of proverbial expressions aimed at degrading the undesirable members of the population, the Jews and Gypsies in particular, into the propagandistic vocabulary that supported the political program in Nazi Germany. Wolfgang Mieder in 1997 has explored the mechanisms of how proverbs are created and transmitted, and how they often continue to be used in daily communication. He draws attention to the ways in which various political leaders have used and misused proverbial expressions, aware of the great manipulative power of this folkloristic material. Mieder also examines more closely the origins and the meaning of two American proverbial stereotypes ‘The only good Indian is a dead Indian’ and ‘No tickee, no washee’. As regards the first, even though it is not certain who coined this proverbial slur, its appearance in documents and speeches suggest that by 1886 its use was already well established. This proverb was used as a battle slogan in the massive campaign that started after the American Civil War with a purpose to physically and culturally exterminate the Native Americans. Even today this proverb is widely spread in the United States and continues to transmit the negative stereotype of Native Americans. Moreover, Mieder has noticed that an internationalization of the basic proverbial formula ‘The only good X is a dead X’ has occurred. This essentially racist saying has been practiced against military enemies in many ‘national’ variants. For example, during World Wars I and II , the original pattern was adequately adapted and utilized as a slogan against the German enemy. The same formula was also found during early Spanish conquests in South America. There seem to be no limits for how this particular proverb can be modified as a national stereotype or be used as a generalization about any racial minority. Even the other proverbial slur, ‘No tickee, no washee’, has been and still is used to transmit stereotypes about minorities, in this case Asian-Americans. Hence, the study of proverbs can significantly increase the awareness of the psychological and ethical implications of the strategies for transmitting stereotypes and prejudices in everyday verbal interaction.

Folklore and Violence This section considers ritualized or festive canalization of inter- and intragroup antagonisms, where performed aggression, in particular circumstances, may turn into real aggression, as well as how folklore expressions may be used to deal with actual violence. Analyses typically indicate that the mechanisms for control of violence are closely related to the outbursts of it. Folklorists have shown that mock battles, football matches, festivals, or carnivals often are accompanied with both ritualized and real violence. Festive violence can be found in many countries, for example, Spain, Peru, and Trinidad. One example of a festival that includes a performed battle is Tomatina, which is held at the end of August in the Spanish town Bunõl. Perhaps the most spectacular part of this festival is the tomato fight. About 30 000 people come from all over the world to participate in this ritual battle and throw ripe tomatoes at each other. Similar to other rituals, the tomato fight is regulated by special rules that the participants are expected to follow for safety reasons. Firing water cannons signals both the beginning and the end of the battle, which goes on for exactly one hour. Carnival is another example of ritualized canalization of festive violence. The tradition of Carnival – an annual festival held in days preceding Ash Wednesday – has European origins and is particularly strong in the Mediterranean and Central European area. Folklorists have identified food, sex, and violence as three main themes of Carnival festivities. Violence, however, especially the relationship between ritualized aggression and real aggression seems to have attracted the least scholarly attention. Folklorists view Carnival as a cultural performance that allows social roles to be temporarily inverted. Carnival is a time of institutionalized disorder, when adults and children dress in costumes and are encouraged to insult others and criticize authorities under controlled forms. Some folklorists believe that festive violence has a meaning, and that it should not be understood simply as an unintended consequence of festive behavior or alcohol consumption. In an inquiry on carnival in a Brazilian city, Daniel Touro Linger in 1992 has observed that people even tend to judge Carnival by its level of violence and they see it as a disturbing indication of the community’s underlying anxieties. Carnival violence often takes the form of briga, a physical fight between two individuals, and entrudo, a practice of throwing various substances, such as mud, urine, sewer water, and rotten eggs, at other members of the Carnival procession. In Linger’s view, there is an apparent class component in violent Carnival actions: people always attack either their social equals or social inferiors, never those in a superior position within the internal social hierarchy of the given community. Within the analysis of rituals in public places in Sweden, attention was directed to the ritual of honoring

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the anniversary of death of Charles XII (1682–1718), which occurs on 30 November. In the beginning of the 1990s, the ritual (which at that time took place around the statue of Charles XII in Stockholm) often escalated into violent conflicts that required police intervention to separate the two opposing groups that took part in it. One group consisted of nationalists and skinheads, who marched together in a procession toward the square, determined to place a wreath at the king’s statue. Antiracists and members of immigrant groups formed the opposing group. At the moment when the first group approached the square, they were confronted by the opposing group, which attempted to prevent them from achieving their task. At this point, the manifestation typically evolved into a conflict about conquering and defending an imagined territory around the statue. The celebrators of Charles XII believed that they had to reconquer this particular territory and defend the right to pay homage to their national symbol. Although they differed in ideological standpoints, both sides in the conflict sang the national anthem – yet two different versions of it – and both used the flag as their main symbol. Folklorists even observed that the media used war rhetoric and words such as front line, attack, and war scenario when reporting this ritual conflict. In media accounts, the conflict came to symbolize an annual struggle between good and evil forces in the society, which is a well-known theme in the realm of folklore. An interesting detail is that the day of death of Charles XII coincides with the day of birth of Arthur Hazelius, the creator of Skansen, an open-air museum in Stockholm, which was built to represent Swedish nature and folk culture. During a short period after World War II, on 30 November, homage to both Charles XII and Arthur Hazelius was paid in Skansen. In the view of the celebrators of Charles XII, Skansen continues to stand for genuine Swedish values and culture, which, they believe, are being threatened by foreign influence. These groups tend to romanticize the peasantry, mythologize the past, promote the ideas of cultural purity – which originate from the ideas of racial purity – and see themselves as keepers of the ancient traditions. Folklore expressions vary among different subgroups. The folkloristic study of gangs focuses on particular aspects of a phenomenon that can be observed in the larger cities throughout the world. Poor social and economic conditions, loosening of family ties, domination of female heads of households, lack of male adult identification, and spatial segregation from the rest of the society are usually indicated as the main reasons behind the formation of a gang subculture. Most gangs recruit their members from racial or ethnic minorities, for whom membership in gangs becomes an important source of identity. In a now classical study of African-American oral tradition, based on fieldwork carried out at the end

of the 1950s in what at that time was a lower-class black neighborhood in Philadelphia, Roger D. Abrahams was able to observe distinctive characteristics of gang formation and gang behavior. This folkloristic inquiry into traditional oral performances of the people from the ghetto contains numerous insights into gang patterns in the neighborhood. For the youngsters living on the streets, the gang becomes one of the main forces of socialization. Organized as a loosely formed grouping, the gang gives the individual, who is generally male, the sense of belonging to a particular neighborhood and it offers protection from aggression by other similar groups. Obscene rough talk, a distinctive, colorful dress style, a characteristic way of walking and hairstyle have been indicated as parts of the image of gang members. A gang lifestyle emphasizes and promotes manliness in both words as well as actions, ranging from general toughness, roughness, and mistrust toward women, via choices of profession and favorite heroes, to actual physical violence. In this context, folklore – in the form of proverbs, jokes, taunts, toasts, or catches – is used as a weapon in verbal battles and provides an important channel for control of expressions and dealing with anxieties. Winning verbal contests affirms the masculinity of the winner and demonstrates the femininity of the defeated. Such verbal battles generally follow specific rules by which the boundaries of the game are strictly predetermined so as to provide the means for the control of aggression. In a study of Chicano gang subculture in Southern California, James Diego Vigil in 1988 employed the concept of multiple marginality to explain why some members of this particular ethnic minority join and identify with gangs. He also draws attention to a characteristic style of appearance called ‘cholo’, a particular street identity required by everyday life in the street. Cholo, which actually appears marginal to both Mexican and American culture, consists of: (1) cholo front: dress, forms of speech, gestures, and body language; (2) street rituals: initiation and exit rites, gang warfare; and (3) symbols: tattoos and graffiti. According to this study, this particular image becomes a source of identification with the gang and with the territory that is under its control. Affiliation with gang style may be of varying duration: from short to lifelong membership. In Vigil’s view, the difference among regular, peripheral, temporary, and situational gang members is central to an explanation of gang behavior, since it influences not only gang entrance and exit but even the likelihood of engaging in violent behavior. Scarcity of resources, discrimination, drugs, delinquency, and frustrations that result from an awareness of the inescapable cycle of poverty are listed as the main generators of violent behavior. Even though the presence of conflict is found in many aspects of gang life, Vigil’s analysis points out that manifestation of conflict and violence within some particular gang formation is regulated

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and restricted. For example, a member who too often causes confrontation within the group runs the risk of being expelled from it. On the other hand, violence is considered obligatory when it is directed toward nonmembers of the gang, especially when it is used to defend the territory claimed by the gang, the boundaries of which are symbolically marked out by graffiti. The inquiry confirms that fighting between gangs is the main reason behind most contemporary gang violence. Such conflicts are increasing and they create numerous problems, especially in the large cities. A rivalry between gangs often has a long tradition that tends to be reproduced by group solidarity based on perceived differences in gang organization and culture. One of the ways in which people cope with the increasing rate of violence in urban areas is by transforming their experiences into narratives. Particularly in the United States, folklore about crime in general, and narratives that deal with violence and criminal behavior in particular, have been identified as a part of the common cultural heritage. Eleanor Wachs in 1988 collected and analyzed crime-victim stories that circulated in New York, a city that occupies a special place in American folklore as regards the issues of crime and violence. Crime-victim stories fall within the genre of urban folklore. Some of these stories are versions of urban legends, which is another folklore expression. Mugging, murder, and rape are three types of narratives that Wachs has distinguished. The stories typically focus on three characters: the victim (hero/heroine), the offender, and the occasional witness to the event. The pattern of resolution is predictable and appears in three forms: the offender manages to flee the scene, the victim somehow sneaks away from his/her pursuers, or the police are called to intervene. Unlike the media reports on crime, the tellers of crime-victim stories are highly reluctant to talk about violence in concrete terms and tend to use euphemisms instead. To a certain extent, however, these narratives transmit racial prejudices, since the offender in stories most often is black. As folklore expressions, crime-victim stories have several functions. They are used to transmit attitudes about life in New York, they provide information about required cultural and social codes for living, or they are told as cautionary tales to warn women, who make up the majority of victims, about how to protect themselves as well as how to avoid dangerous situations. It is believed that the wish to show others how not to become a crime victim is one of the main reasons that these stories continue to circulate. Personal narratives about domestic violence are related types of folklore materials. Along with documenting violence against women they provide insights into the ways in which women deal with traumatic experiences by narrating their stories of violence. For example, storytelling may also be a way to achieve personal empowerment.

Elaine J. Lawless in 2001, who collected and examined narratives of abused and battered women in a women’s shelter, questions the ‘cycles of violence’ narrative (‘his’ violent behavior and ‘her’ responses to it), which has become the master narrative in the institutions that work with abused women. In her view, storytelling is as an important element in this particular context. In order to get aid and shelter, battered women must give an account of their traumatic experiences in contacts with different officials, such as the police, the shelter workers, counselors, and in the courts of law. According to Lawless, the stories they tell in these different contexts are often only fragmentary as the women almost immediately learn how to ‘tell their story’ in order to achieve best assistance. Paradoxically, the ‘system’ that helps the women compels them to frame their narratives according to the existing institutional practices and language. The women learn what to tell, and how, and what to leave out of their accounts. In order to provide a ‘herstory’ of domestic violence, and bring in the perspective of the battered women into the discourse, Lawless asked the women to tell their entire stories in their own words. The narratives that she collected in this way revealed that all of the women whom she interviewed have been abused most of their lives and that spirals or cycles of abuse often occur across generations. Lawless also noticed the tendency of women to narrate ‘around’ violence when being unable or unwilling to recount particular incidents. Through personal narratives about violence, the women survivors are able to make sense of their experiences. This ‘transformational remembering’ enables them to gradually find ways to escape violence and move toward a life beyond abuse. Folklore and War Folklore collections contain reminiscences of war in various forms of folklore materials. War is a context of extreme and unpredictable violence. Folklore expressions are part of the strategies that people use to cope with traumatic experiences of chaos, terror, and dehumanization. Folklorists have not systematically analyzed wars. In studies on war, they typically examine some traditional folklore expression and the ways in which it is used and transformed within the context of war. Collecting folklore material seems to be the main interest and the context of war is seldom problematized in these studies. Studying folklore and war does not imply that folklorists necessarily focus on violence, shooting, and killings. Wartime humor, public displays, and peace rituals have also attracted folklorists’ attention. For example, as Kathleen Stokker in 1995 has shown, wartime humor helped the Norwegians who were opposed to Nazism to develop and promote a sense of solidarity during Norway’s World War II Nazi occupation. Jokes that ridiculed the Germans were used to raise morale and

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encourage resistance. Occupation humor also provides insights into how people dealt with different aspects of daily life during occupation, such as food shortage. Furthermore, through wartime humor the Norwegians were able to disseminate information about actual war developments that was censored from the media. A focus on public displays, that is, various events, performances, and artifacts, also sheds light on the nature and the evolvement of some particular conflict. In his analysis of what he terms a guerilla war in Northern Ireland, Jack Santino in 2001 drew attention to the ways in which the two sides of the conflict (Protestants and Catholics) use public displays – such as parades, flags, assemblage, fireworks, bonfires, murals, and spontaneous shrines – to shape and reconstruct their particular version of collective memory and national identity. During the Gulf War in the 1990s, folklorists observed that many houses and public places in the United States were decorated with yellow ribbons and American flags. Two related traditions merged in this custom: the public assemblage and the symbolism of yellow ribbon. The custom of decorating public and private spaces with assemblage has become quite common during recent decades. The old tradition of displaying a yellow ribbon as a sign of remembering the absence of a dear person emerged anew during the 1970s crisis with Iran. During that period, many Americans tied yellow ribbons to trees, on doors, and on facades of buildings. Two meanings of this custom were identified: showing absence and expressing welcome. During the Gulf War, the yellow ribbon became a patriotic symbol. During the calendrical holidays that occurred at the time of war, holiday decorations were combined with war symbols, which made the signification of assemblage even stronger. By displaying flags and yellow ribbons people not only declared their support for American troops but also found a way to cope with uncertainty and their inability to control and influence the war situation. Moreover, putting up war-related assemblage was a folkloric expression of community solidarity. The Gulf War often included updated folkloristic materials from earlier periods (and earlier wars). According to Alan Dundes in 1997, the Gulf War folklore in the form of xerographic cartoons and jokes was frequently based on masculine symbolism. He draws attention to sexual undertones that are often present in male ritual combats where the invasion by an enemy force is perceived as a metaphorical rape. Specific rituals in the form of nonviolent protests against the war, such as calls for peace, marches of refugees with candles and songs, and mass gatherings in town squares, have also been observed when the war in Croatia broke out in the early 1990s. Through these, people were able to express their feelings and deal with the traumatic events through folklore. A variety of folklore expressions were observed. For example, with the outbreak of war, the

intellectuals as a group were confronted with a dilemma of what to write and whether to write at all during the war, or whether their position ought to be on the front line instead. For some of them, this dilemma resulted in an intense need to write about war and to inform others about the situation. An important part of the activity that emerged included sending letters and appeals to existing or symbolic addresses in foreign countries, which was meant to give the war an international dimension and provide a Croatian perspective on the evaluation of events. The sending of appeals was most intensive at the very beginning of the war, when it was believed that the confusion in international scientific and media reports was a result of a lack of information. Since most of the appeals received little attention abroad, as the existing image of the Balkans as ‘the other’ in Western press and academic reports and of the war as a tribal conflict was difficult to change, this activity slowly died out. To some extent, folklore studies on war deal with different aspects of military folklore. The existence of a soldier subculture and its masculinity as manifested in clothes, songs, dance, slang, and various kinds of rituals, was observed already during the early modern period. It was not unusual among ordinary people at that time to have warriors and soldiers, whom they probably considered a form of protection, painted on cupboards. In many parts of the world warriors prepared for battle or celebrated victory by ritually performing the conflict. War dance is a highly specialized form of folk dance with great variation in form and style. It can be performed by men, women, or men and women together. In some parts of the world, such as in the Far East, dance performances may include acrobatic scenes with weapons, or, as in some countries of South America, require specific masks. One of the most common forms of war dance is a stylized combat mime usually performed with weapons. Various types of sword dances still performed in Europe are some of the examples of ritually performed reminiscence of battle and war. The origin of sword dances, as folklorists believe, derives from ancient victory dances or military training exercises. Sword dances, such as Moresˇka and Moros y Cristianos, are today only performed during festivals and the original meaning of these performances has been completely transformed. Even though these dances are based on conflict or symbolic struggle for freedom, folklorists emphasize that one of the main purposes of this kind of dance today is to reinforce the integrity of the particular community within which the dance performance takes place. Some analyses of folklore expressions have pointed to the existence of taboos within the context of war. Taboo, the principle of social prohibition or the method of social control, can be found in most cultures. It can appear in diverse forms, such as actions, words, names, sexual relationships, food, or social contacts. Emmanuel Chiwome in

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1990 observed that practicing various kinds of taboos was common among both the guerrilla soldiers and peasants in Zimbabwe during the War of National Liberation of the 1970s. The taboos regulated different kinds of actions. For example, it was forbidden for combatants to eat certain kind of food, to mate, to sleep in houses, as well as to allow anyone not engaged in combat to carry weapons. It was even prohibited for menstruating girls to make food and enter the military base. Since the taboos had their origins in the precolonial era, they helped to establish a sense of solidarity among the combatants. Folk songs are considered another important means for establishing a sense of belonging and homogeneity among group members. Collections of folk songs performed during war consist mainly of military occupational folk songs, but still provide a specific inside perspective on the war. In the War of National Liberation in Zimbabwe, folk songs were an important part of oral traditions used by the liberation movement in the armed confrontation with the white colonial regime. According to Chiwome, the Chimurenga (Uprising) songs helped the combatants to emotionally cope with the war situation and raised their fighter spirit as well as their awareness of oppression. At the same time, folk songs documented and preserved the radical social transformation Zimbabwe was passing through. Folk songs, together with the rock and roll music of the 1960s, had an important role among American soldiers in the Vietnam War as well. Even references to popular music found their way into the language of the war: ‘rock and roll’ meant fire from an M-16 on full automatic. Some of the collected folk songs were created especially for Vietnam and both the words and music were original. Otherwise, it was more common to set new lyrics to the already existing folk, country, or popular tunes. Most of the songs, however, were actually a part of the traditional military folklore of earlier wars: World Wars I and II, the Korean War, and even RAF and British Army songs. These songs display traditional themes of the military folk song: praise of the great leader, celebration of heroic deeds, laments for the death of comrades, disparagement of other units, and complaints about incompetent officers. The civilians serving in Vietnam developed their own traditions and had a different song repertoire. It is interesting to note that the majority of folk songs from Vietnam were not collected by a professional folklorist, but by an air-force general stationed in Vietnam. His collection of occupational folk songs provides folklorists with an inside perspective on the ways in which soldiers expressed emotions and the strategies they developed in order to cope with violence, fear, and frustration during the war. Marching chants, a particular military tradition, have attracted only minor attention among folklorists. This part of military training programs circulates not only from company to company but even from war to war.

In times of war, marching chants make the recruits adopt the role of front-line soldiers, whereas in peacetime, they are intended to help them remember their predecessors. Folklorists who have studied the lyrics of this particular form of military folklore have indicated that marching chants provide valuable information about how some traditions and attitudes characteristic for military life are transmitted to new recruits. Offensiveness, whether in the form of insult to a superior, slaughter of innocents, or sexist objectification of women, has been identified as the main characteristic of the chants. The chants assist the transition from civilian to military life through the verses that celebrate the displacement of sexual energy from the female left behind to the enemy waiting on the battlefield. The existence of particular projective folk characters was indicated in the lyrics of marching chants during the Vietnam War: ‘Jody’, a reference to a trainee’s nonprofessional life, the trainee’s car, his girl, or his sister; ‘Charlie’, a personification of the military/civilian enemy, ‘Slippery Sam’, a marine soldier who fights against ‘Charlie’, and ‘Mama’, a character who is addressed to approve the use of violence. To a great extent, marching chants are used by soldiers as a way of controlling emotions, of establishing group cohesion, and of easing the strain caused by the demands of military training. Recently, some efforts have been made to prohibit the transmission of the most sadistic versions. How individuals use folklore expressions to deal with their experiences of the Vietnam War has also attracted folklorists’ attention. One of the examples is the analysis of dioramas created by a disabled Vietnam veteran, in which he portrayed scenes of battle and military experiences, such as firefights, prisoner of war (POW) camps, torture pits, and ambushes. Three types of dioramas were identified: those dealing with situations familiar to most Vietnam veterans, those reflecting personal memories, and those based on stories told by other veterans. For folklorists, this work is an interesting example of folk creativity that is directly related to such narrative forms as war stories and ballads. The fact that dioramas are not for sale makes them characteristic of folk art. This example shows how personal war traumas can be dealt with creatively through artistic expression. When the war in Croatia broke out in 1991, scholars and folklorists found themselves within the war. Accounts on war from an insider position, such as those collected in Fear, Death and Resistance, provide various insights on how the war transforms everyday life and about the strategies, including folklore expressions, which people used to cope with the war situation. The war transformed the existing political rituals on the one hand and generated new manifestations on the other. The context of war made the soldiers become visible as a subgroup. Folklorists observed changes regarding dress style, music, and speech. Some of the soldiers transmitted warrior images

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from films and television series. The war transformed even many of the rituals of commemorating Croatian soldiers killed in the war. For example, civilian occupation was no longer mentioned in obituary notices. Instead it was indicated that the deceased soldier was a member of the Croatian armed forces. Funerals changed into soldierly funerals, with uniformed soldiers in the funeral procession, the coffin covered with the Croatian flag, the decorations often in the shape of the Croatian coat of arms, and the national anthem at the end of the ceremony. Furthermore, folklorists drew attention to the emergence of rituals with respect to a commemorative board with photographs of soldiers that was placed at the central square in a small Croatian town. Besides being commemorative, the board became a site of mourning ritual. When one of the photographs was taken down, rumors started to circulate about the event. The site was visited not only by relatives and friends of dead soldiers but also by the official delegations that came to town. The board was decorated on the name-day of soldiers with wreaths, flowers, and candles. Even the annual holidays, such as Christmas, Palm Sunday, and Easter, were marked by placing ribbons or decorations characteristic for the holiday underneath the board. Through these folklore expressions, the community, which experienced the war only indirectly through the death of its young men, managed to preserve and strengthen its integrity. Folklorists also collected narratives and letters of refugees from Eastern Slavonia, a part of Croatia that was occupied by Serbian troops during the war. The potential of these documents is significant, inasmuch as they provide accounts of personal experiences of having to deal with violence and fear as well as raising awareness about the human tragedy of the war. Some of the themes that can be illuminated through narratives include identity formation and the ways in which refugees construct and narrate their history, memories of war and life in exile. On the basis of personal narratives, researchers were also able to analyze nutrition, which is a traditional research topic in folkloristics, in the context of war. Personal narratives revealed how everyday life during the shellings turned into everyday struggle for survival in food shortages and chaos. People baked bread in ashes, as they had seen in an educational program on Australian aborigines. These documents also have the potential to show how refugees shape and/or transform their traditions. However, researchers emphasized that the study of refugees, from all other possible war themes, caused the greatest moral and scientific dilemmas.

The Dilemmas of Folklorists Regarding Research on Violence and Conflict Many folklorists who have studied violence and related themes in folklore have pointed out serious personal as

well as professional dilemmas in connection with such research efforts. The mentioned dilemmas, however, do not seem to be as apparent among folklorists who study archival material as they are among those who personally encounter their informants during fieldwork. An issue that has been discussed concerns the potential effects of publishing studies that deal with material that can be viewed as delicate or provocative. There is always the risk that such publications will be perceived as sensational. Doing folklore research on political violence and on war in particular raises a number of ethical issues. Researchers also must be extremely cautious when interviewing refugees in war conditions or other victims of violence to carefully protect their anonymity. The researcher also has to be able to cope with his/her own emotions when confronted with the traumas of others. Studying violent topics may in some cases even involve personal danger. Finally, there is a dilemma as to whether researchers should collect folklore material without questioning the circumstances in which some of the informants or groups of informants live. On the whole, doing folklore research about conflict and violence is a complex and demanding effort that raises important ethical, methodological, as well as theoretical problems.

Prospects for Future Research During recent decades, the awareness that the dark side of folklore often has been neglected and left out of the research agenda has created a growing interest in the mutual relationship between identity-affirming folklore and its opposite destructive component. There is a trend towards studying the issues of conflict and violence from within the location in which they take place. Like other scholars who deal with similar issues, folklorists will have to solve problems connected with dangerous fieldwork, emotional dilemmas, or veracity of data. Having realized that comparative studies are necessary for mapping the historical and geographical distribution of folklore expressions as well as for their interpretation, many folklorists now call for the exchange of scholarly information across cultural and disciplinary borders. In this contemporary vision of folklore as transdisciplinary and integrative, folklorists will have to be prepared to accept multiple interpretations and to capture the interplay between national and international influences brought about by processes of globalization. Understanding folklore as partly universal and partly embedded into some particular cultural context benefits the systematic field research necessary to elaborate a conceptual framework within which to study and explain different aspects of the interrelation among peace, conflict, and violence. The existing folklore studies form a solid foundation for future research.

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See also: Aggression and Altruism; Gangs; Military Culture; Ritual and Symbolic Behavior; Peaceful Societies

Further Reading Abrahams, R. D. (1970). Deep down in the jungle: Negro narrative folklore from the streets of Philadelphia. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company. Bauman, R. (ed.) (1992). Folklore, cultural performances, and popular entertainments: A communications-centered handbook. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bendix, R. and Roodenburg, H. (eds.) (2000). Managing ethnicity: Perspectives from folklore studies, history and anthropology. Amsterdam: Het Sphinus. Burke, C. (1989). Marching to Vietnam. The Journal of American Folklore 102(406), 424–441. Cˇale Feldman, L., Prica, I., and Senjkovic´, R. (1993). Fear, death and resistance: An ethnography of war (Croatia 1991–1992). Zagreb: Matrix Croatica and X-Press. Chiwome, E. (1990). The role of oral traditions in the war of National Liberation in Zimbabwe: Preliminary observations. Journal of Folklore Research 27(3), 241–247.

Davies, C. (1990). Ethnic humor around the world: A comparative analysis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dundes, A. (1997). From game to war and other psychoanalytic essays on folklore. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. Klein, B. (ed.) (1995). Gatan ar var! Ritualer pa offentliga plaster (The street is ours: Rituals in public places). Stockholm: Carlssons. Lawless, E. J. (2001). Women escaping violence: Empowerment through narrative. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Linger, D. T. (1992). Dangerous encounters: Meanings of violence in a Brazilian city. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mieder, W. (1997). The politics of proverbs: From traditional wisdom to proverbial stereotypes. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Santino, J. (2001). Signs of war and peace: Social conflict and the use of public symbols in Northern Ireland. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Stokker, K. (1995). Folklore fights the Nazis: Humor in occupied Norway, 1940–1945. London: Associated University Press. Tatar, M. (2003). The hard facts of the Grimms’ fairy tales. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press. Vigil, J. D. (1988). Barrio gangs: Street life and identity in Southern California. Austin: University of Texas Press. Wachs, E. (1988). Crime-victim stories: New York City’s urban folklore. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Weaponry, Evolution of Dave Grossman, Arkansas State University, Jonesboro, AR, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Weapons as Devices to Overcome Physical and Psychological Limitations A Brief Survey of Weapons Evolution

Glossary Acquired Violence Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AVIDS) The ‘violence immune system’ exists in the midbrain of all healthy creatures, causing them to be largely unable to kill members of their own species in territorial and mating battles. In human beings this resistance has existed historically in all close-range, interpersonal confrontations. ‘Conditioning’ (particularly the conditioning of children through media violence and interactive video games) can create an ‘acquired deficiency’ in this immune system, resulting in ‘AVIDS’. As a result of this weakened immune system, the victim becomes more vulnerable to violence-enabling factors

This article is reproduced from the previous edition, volume 3, pp 785–800, ã 1999, Elsevier Inc.

The Role of Weapons Evolution in Domestic Violent Crime Conclusion: The Future of Weapons Evolution Further Reading

such as poverty, discrimination, drugs, gangs, radical politics, and the availability of guns. Chariot A two-wheeled platform pulled by horses (usually two) generally carrying a driver and a passenger. Of limited value for commerce due to its small capacity, the chariot was primarily an instrument of war and the hunt. Its greater mobility gave it a high degree of utility in the pursuit of a defeated enemy. The passenger was usually an archer who would fire from the platform while on the move or during brief halts. Conditioning A type of training that intensely and realistically simulates the actual conditions to be faced in a future situation. Effective conditioning enables an

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individual to respond in a precisely defined manner in spite of high states of anxiety or fear. Phalanx A mass of spearmen in tight ranks, carrying spears approximately 4 m long and protecting themselves with overlapping shields, highly trained to move in a formation organized in depth (i.e., moving and fighting ‘in column’ as opposed to ‘in line’) and trained to strike the enemy as a coherent mass. First widely utilized by the ancient Greeks. Physical Limitations The physical limitations of the human body which, when overcome, will assist in physically enabling killing. These can be broken down into force, mobility, distance, and protection. Posturing In the territorial and mating battles of every species the individual who puffs itself up the biggest or makes the loudest noise is most likely to win; this process is referred to as ‘posturing’. Humans engaged in close combat are invariably profoundly frightened, and in such individuals primitive, midbrain processing often causes the actual battle to be, from one perspective, a process of posturing until one side or another turns and runs, after which the real killing usually begins. Thus posturing is critical to warfare and victory can be achieved through superior posturing. Bagpipes, bugles, drums, shiny armor, tall hats,

Humans have proven themselves to be infinitely ingenious at creating and using devices to overcome their limitations. From one perspective human history can be seen as a series of ever-more-efficient devices to help humans communicate, travel, trade, work, and even to think. Similarly, the history of violence, peace, and conflict can be seen as the history, or the evolution, of a series of ever-more-efficient devices to enable humans to kill and dominate their fellow human beings. The concept of an ‘evolution’ of weaponry is very appropriate, since the battlefield is the ultimate realm of Darwinian natural selection. With few exceptions, any weapon or system that survives for any length of time does so because of its utility. Nothing survives for long on the battlefield simply because of superstition. Anything that is effective is copied and perpetuated, anything ineffective results in death, defeat, and extinction. There are fads and remnants (the military equivalent of the appendix) but, over the long run, everything happens for a reason, and a valid theory of weapons evolution must make these reasons clear, explaining all extinctions and all survivals.

chariots, elephants, and cavalry have all been factors in successful posturing (convincing oneself of one’s prowess while daunting ones enemy), but, ultimately, gunpowder proved to be the ultimate posturing tool. Psychological Enabling Factors The processes that can be manipulated as a weapon to psychologically enable a human, or a group of humans, to kill. These can be broken down into posturing, mobility, distance, leaders, groups, and conditioning. Weapon A device or system that is designed to permit humans to overcome natural physical and psychological limitations in order to enable the killing and domination of other creatures, particularly their fellow human beings. Weapons Evolution The process of Darwinian natural selection in the development of a series of evermore-effective weapons. Weapons Lethality A factor of the effectiveness of the weapons used to kill and the ability of medical technology available to save lives. Thus, weapons lethality can be thought of as a contest between weapons effectiveness (the state of technology trying to kill you) and medical effectiveness (the state of technology trying to save you).

Weapons as Devices to Overcome Physical and Psychological Limitations Ultimately the nature of humans determines the nature of their weapons. There is the nature of the body ‘and’ the nature of the mind; let us first examine the nature of humans’ ‘physical’ limitations and the evolution of weapons to overcome these limitations. Overcoming Physical Limitations The physical limitations of humans are a key factor in their search for weapons. The need for force, mobility, distance, and protection have been the key requirements in this realm. The need for force

The physical strength limitations of humans led to a need for greater physical force in order to hit an opponent harder and more effectively, resulting in the development of more-effective methods to transfer kinetic energy to an opponent. This process evolved from hitting someone

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with a hand-held rock (providing the momentum energy of a greater mass than just a fist), to sharp rocks (focusing the energy in a smaller impact point), to a sharp rock on a stick (providing mechanical leverage combined with a cutting edge), to spears (using the latest material technology (flint, bronze, iron, steel) to focus energy into smaller and smaller penetration points), to swords (which permit the option of using a thrusting, spear-like penetration point or the mechanical leverage of a hacking, cutting edge), to the long bow (using stored mechanical energy and a refined penetration point), to firearms (transferring chemical energy to a projectile in order to deliver an extremely powerful dose of kinetic energy).

harm (in the form of kinetic energy) upon one’s own forces. This evolution generally followed the latest development of material technology, incorporating leather, bronze, iron, and steel, until the invention of firearms created a degree of force so great that the human body could not carry sufficient steel to stop a penetration, and the only remnant of armor was the helmet to stop fragmentation (grenade and artillery) wounds to the vulnerable and crucial brain area. Today this evolution continues in tank and ship armor. Interestingly, in recent years, human-made fiber technology (such as Kevlar) has again made body armor practical, and for the first time in centuries the average combatant, in both law enforcement and military realms, once again wears body armor.

The need for mobility

Limited by the constraints of a bipedal body that could be outrun by a majority of ground-based creatures and recognizing that a human who has cast off weapons and armor is hard for a human carrying a weapon to catch and kill, humans’ cross-country speed limitations created a need for a mobility advantage, resulting in a succession of weapons to provide more-efficient means to go around or to chase an enemy. These weapons evolved from the chariots of the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Persians (which were without horse collars (an invention of the Romans) and were thus quite inefficient since the mounting system choked the horse); to the cavalry of the Greeks and Romans (which, without stirrups, limited but did not completely prevent the ability to strike from horseback); to the cavalry that dominated the battlefield throughout the age of the European knights (since the introduction of stirrups made it possible to deliver a powerful blow from horseback without danger of falling off) and continued to play a key (but ever-decreasing) role up to the beginning of the twentieth century; to modern mechanized infantry; tanks; and (the ultimate form of mobility) aircraft. Simultaneously, a similar evolution of evermore-effective forms of mobility took place with ships at sea until the introduction of aircraft (originally based on ships (aircraft carriers), but increasingly ground-based, long-range aircraft) came to dominate this realm. The need for distance

Similarly, human limited reach created a need for a range advantage in an effort to attack more people than just those in immediate reach (i.e., to increase the zone of influence) and to do so without placing oneself in danger. This need resulted in increasingly more efficient means to kill at a distance, moving from the spear, to the long spear of the Greek phalanx, to the throwing spears of the Roman legionary, to the bow, the crossbow, the English longbow, firearms, artillery, missiles, and aircraft. The need for protection

Physical vulnerability resulted in a continuous need for armor that would help to limit an enemy’s ability to inflict

Psychological Enabling Factors These physical needs for force, mobility, distance, and protection interact with each other in the evolution of weapons, but man’s psychological limitations are even more influential in this process. Lord Moran, the great military physician of World Wars I and II, called Napoleon the ‘‘greatest psychologist,’’ and Napoleon said that, ‘‘In war the moral is to the physical as three is to one.’’ Meaning that psychological advantage, or leverage, is three times more important than physical advantage, and modern studies support Napoleon’s contention. The resistance to killing

At the heart of psychological processes on the battlefield is the resistance to killing one’s own species, a resistance that exists in every healthy member of every species. To truly understand the nature of this resistance to killing we must first recognize that most participants in close combat are literally ‘frightened out of their wits’. Once the arrows or bullets start flying, combatants stop thinking with the forebrain (which is the part of the brain that makes us human) and thought processes localize in the midbrain, or mammalian brain, which is the primitive part of the brain that is generally indistinguishable from that of an animal. In conflict situations this primitive midbrain processing can be observed in the general, widespread existence of a powerful resistance to killing one’s own kind and in particular the fellow adult males of one’s own species. During territorial and mating battles, animals with antlers and horns slam together in a relatively harmless headto-head fashion, rattlesnakes wrestle each other, and piranha fight their own kind with flicks of the tail, but against any other species these creatures unleash their horns, fangs, and teeth without restraint. This is an essential survival mechanism that prevents a species from destroying itself during territorial and mating rituals. One major modern revelation in the field of military psychology is the observation that this resistance to killing one’s own species is also a key factor in human combat.


Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall first observed this during his work as the Chief Historian of the European Theater of Operations in World War II. Based on his innovative new technique of postcombat interviews, Marshall concluded in his landmark book Men against Fire that only 15–20% of the individual riflemen in World War II fired their weapons at an exposed enemy soldier. Marshall’s findings have been somewhat controversial, but every available, parallel, scholarly study validates his basic findings. Ardant du Picq’s surveys of French officers in the 1860s and his observations on ancient battles, Keegan and Holmes’ numerous accounts of ineffectual firing throughout history, Paddy Griffith’s data on the extraordinarily low killing rate among Napoleonic and American Civil War regiments, Stouffer’s extensive World War II and postwar research, Richard Holmes’ assessment of Argentine firing rates in the Falklands War, the British Army’s laser re-enactments of historical battles, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)’s studies of nonfiring rates among law enforcement officers in the 1950s and 1960s, and countless other individual and anecdotal observations all confirm Marshall’s fundamental conclusion that man is not, by nature, a close-range interpersonal killer. The existence of this resistance can be observed in its marked absence in sociopaths who, by definition, feel no empathy or remorse for their fellow human beings. Pit bull dogs have been selectively bred for sociopathy, bred for the absence of the resistance to killing one’s own kind in order to ensure that they will perform the unnatural act of killing another dog in battle. Breeding to overcome this limitation in humans is impractical, but humans are very adept at finding ‘mechanical’ means to overcome natural limitations. Humans were born without the ability to fly, so we found mechanisms to overcome this limitation and enable flight. Humans also were born without the ability to kill our fellow humans, and so, throughout history, we have devoted great effort to finding a way to overcome this resistance. From a weapons evolution perspective, the history of warfare can be viewed as a series of successively more effective tactical and mechanical mechanisms to enable or force combatants to overcome their resistance to killing. Posturing as a psychological weapon

The resistance to killing can be overcome, or at least bypassed, by a variety of techniques. One technique is to cause the enemy to run (often by getting in their flank or rear, which almost always causes a rout), and it is in the subsequent pursuit of a broken or defeated enemy that the vast majority of the killing happens. It is widely known that most killing happens ‘after the battle’, in the pursuit phase (Clausewitz and Ardant du Picq both commented on this), and this is apparently due to two factors. First, the pursuer doesn’t have to look in

his victim’s eyes, and it appears to be much easier to deny an opponent’s humanity if you can stab or shoot them in the back and don’t have to look into their eyes when you kill them. Second (and probably much more important), in the midbrain, during a pursuit, the opponent has changed from a fellow male engaged in a primitive, simplistic, ritualistic, head-to-head, territorial, or mating battle to prey who must to be pursued, pulled down, and killed. Anyone who has ever worked with dogs understands this process: you are generally safe if you face a dog down, and you should always back away from a dog (or almost any animal) in a threatening situation because if you turn around and run you are in great danger of being viciously attacked. The same is true of soldiers in combat. Thus, one key to the battle is simply to get the enemy to run. The battlefield is truly psychological in nature, and in this realm the individual who puffs himself up the biggest, or makes the loudest noise, is most likely to win. The actual battle is, from one perspective, a process of ‘posturing’ until one side or another turns and runs, and then the real killing begins. Thus posturing is critical to warfare and victory can be achieved through superior posturing. Bagpipes, bugles, drums, shiny armor, tall hats, chariots, elephants, and cavalry have all been factors in successful posturing (convincing oneself of ones’ prowess while daunting one’s enemy), but, ultimately, gunpowder proved to be the ultimate posturing tool. For example, the longbow was significantly more accurate and had a far greater rate of fire and a much greater accurate range than the muzzle-loading muskets used up to the early part of the American Civil War. Furthermore, the longbow did not need the industrial base (iron and gunpowder) required by muskets, and the training of a longbowman was not really all that difficult. Thus, mechanically speaking there are few reasons why there should not have been regiments of longbowmen at Waterloo and the 1st Bull Run cutting vast swaths through the enemy. (Similarly there were highly efficient, air-pressure-powered weapons available as early as the Napoleonic era (similar to modern paintball guns), which had a far higher firing rate than the muskets of that era, but were never used.) However, it must be constantly remembered that, to paraphrase Napoleon, in war, psychological factors are three times more important than mechanical factors. The reality is that, on the battlefield, if you are going ‘doink, doink’, no matter how effectively, and the enemy is going ‘BANG!, BANG!’, no matter how ineffectively, ultimately the ‘doinkers’ lose. This phenomenon helps explain the effectiveness of high-noise-producing weapons ranging from Gustavus Adolphus’ small, mobile cannons assigned to infantry units to the US Army’s M-60 machine gun in Vietnam, which fired large, very loud, 7.62-mm

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ammunition at a slow rate of fire versus the M-16’s smaller (and comparatively much-less noisy) 5.56-mm ammunition firing at a rapid rate of fire. (Note that both the machine gun and the cannon are also crewserved weapons, which is a key factor to be addressed shortly.) Mobility as a psychological weapon

Once it is understood that most of the killing (and thereby the ‘true’ destruction and defeat of an enemy) happens in the pursuit, then the true utility of weapons that provide a mobility advantage becomes clear. First, a mobility advantage often permits a force to get in the enemy’s flank or rear. Combatants seem to have an intuitive understanding of their vulnerability (both psychological and physical) from an opponent in their rear, and this almost always results in a mass panic and rout. Second, it is during the pursuit of a defeated enemy that a mobility advantage is needed if a pursuing force is to kill the enemy. An opponent who has cast aside his weapons and armor can generally outrun an armed pursuer, but a man on foot cannot outrun chariots or cavalry, and it is here, in stabbing and shooting men in the back, that chariots and cavalry had their greatest utility. Distance as a psychological weapon

Another key factor in overcoming the resistance to killing is distance, which has been partially addressed earlier. The utility of weapons that kill from a distance cannot be truly understood without understanding the psychological enabling aspect of distance, which, simply stated, means that the further away you are the easier it is to kill. Thus, dropping bombs from 20 000 ft or firing artillery from 2 mi away is, psychologically speaking, not at all difficult (and there is no indication of any noncompliance in these situations), but firing a rifle from 20 ft is very difficult (with high

High

incidence of nonfirers) and from a few feet away it is virtually impossible to stab an opponent. John Keegan’s landmark book The Face of Battle makes a comparative study of Agincourt (1415), Waterloo (1815), and the Somme (1916). In his analysis of these three battles spanning over 500 years, Keegan repeatedly notes the amazing absence of bayonet wounds incurred during the massed bayonet attacks at Waterloo and the Somme. At Waterloo Keegan notes that ‘‘There were numbers of sword and lance wounds to be treated and some bayonet wounds, though these had usually been inflicted after the man had already been disabled, there being no evidence of the armies having crossed bayonets at Waterloo.’’ By World War I edged-weapon combat had almost disappeared, and Keegan notes that in the Battle of the Somme, ‘‘edged-weapon wounds were a fraction of one per cent of all wounds inflicted in the First World War.’’ Indeed, all evidence indicates that ancient battles were not much more than great shoving matches, until one side or the other fled. This can be observed in the battle record of Alexander the Great, who (according to Ardant du Picq’s studies of ancient records) lost a ‘total’ of approximately 700 men ‘‘to the sword’’ in all his battles put together, and this is simply because Alexander the Great always won, and the actual killing happened only to the losers ‘after’ the battle (Figure 1). The only thing greater than the resistance to killing at close range is the resistance to ‘being’ killed at close range. Close-range interpersonal aggression is the universal human phobia, which is why the initiation of midbrain processing is so powerful and intense in these situations. Thus, one limitation to killing at long range is that greater distance results in a reduced psychological effect on the enemy. This manifests itself in the constant thwarting of each new generation of air power advocates and other adherents of sterile, long-range, high-tech warfare and a constant need for close combat troops to defeat an enemy.

Hand-to-hand combat range

Resistance to killing

Knife range Bayonet range Close range (pistol/rifle) Handgrenade range Midrange (rifle) Long range (sniper, antiarmor missles, etc.) Max-range (bomber, artillery)

Low Close

Far Distance from target

Figure 1 Distance vs. resistance. From Grossman (1993).


Leaders as a psychological weapon

Milgram’s famous obedience research demonstrated the tremendous influence that can be wielded by an unknown individual in a white lab coat in a laboratory situation, but on the battlefield the influence of a respected leader, with the trappings of true power, wielding authority over life and death, can far transcend Milgram’s results. Marshall is one of many who have noted that soldiers will invariably fire if an officer stands over them and demands that they do so, but this firing will generally decrease as soon as the officer leaves. The modern concept of a combat leader usually calls up visions of a hardened veteran moving behind a battle line of his men, exhorting, encouraging, punishing, rebuking, correcting, and rewarding them. However, combat leadership has not always been like this. Armies have always had leaders, but the Romans were the first to take proven warriors and systematically develop them into professional leaders, starting at the lowest levels. Prior to this time leaders were usually expected to get into the battle and lead from the front, but the Romans were the first to place leaders ‘behind’ their men in an open order of battle. The influence of this kind of leadership was one of the key factors in the success of the Roman way of war, and this process of having a respected, proven, small-unit leader, who moves behind his men and demands effective killing activity from them (but does not himself necessarily have to kill) continued to be a key factor in effective combat in the centuries that followed. This kind of leadership initially disappeared with the Roman Empire, but it appeared again sporadically in the firing lines of English longbowmen and then as a systematically applied factor in the firing lines of the successful armies of the gunpowder era and continued into the present. Groups as a psychological weapon

Konrad Lorenz observed that ‘‘man is not a killer, but the group is.’’ This fundamental observation of human nature has great utility in helping to understand the effectiveness of what are generally referred to as ‘crewserved’ weapons. These are weapons that require more than one individual to use, which provides a form of mutual accountability and a diffusion of responsibility, which is very effective in enabling killing. Marshall noted in World War II that the firing rates of individual soldiers was very low, but crew-served weapons (primarily machine guns) almost always fired. Such weapons have generally done the majority of the killing throughout the history of warfare, beginning with the chariot, which was the earliest crew-served weapon. The chariot often employed a driver and a ‘passenger’ who generally fired a bow (which added the factor of distance in the killing-enabling equation) and was most effective in the pursuit, when their mobility advantage gave them the ability to shoot large numbers of fleeing enemy in the back.

The powerful group dynamics of the chariot (along with its mobility) were to show up again, over 2 millennia later, in the tanks of the twentieth century. The Greek phalanx was a mass of spearmen in tight ranks, carrying spears approximately 4 m long and protecting themselves with overlapping shields, highly trained to move in a formation organized in depth (i.e., moving and fighting ‘in column’ as opposed to ‘in line’) and trained to strike the enemy as a coherent mass. As such it was a form of crew-served weapon in which newer members were placed in the front and were thereby under direct observation and accountability by the veteran warriors behind them. The phalanx was of such utility that it has shown up repeatedly throughout history and around the world. The first systematic military use of gunpowder was in cannons, and these crew-served weapons immediately began to dominate the battlefield. Unlike the early muskets, cannons were effective killers from the beginning. Not only did they provide the best form of posturing (i.e., noisemaking) ever to be seen on the battlefield, but they were also a highly effective crew-served weapon (being generally manned by numerous individuals and directly commanded by an officer or a sergeant with sole responsibility for that gun and its crew) whose crew members almost never showed any hesitation or mercy in killing the enemy. At close range the cannon fired ‘grape shot’ into tightly packed enemy formations, thus becoming, in effect, a great shotgun capable of killing hundreds of men with a single shot. Napoleon, the ‘greatest psychologist’, demonstrated his understanding of the true killing utility of the cannon (and the comparative ineffectiveness of infantry) by ensuring that his armies always had a higher percentage of cannons than his enemies and by massing those cannons at key points in the battle. In the twentieth century the cannon became an ‘indirectfire’ system (i.e., firing over the heads of friendly combatants from a great distance away), and the machine gun (with its ‘gunner’ and ‘assistant gunner’ or ‘loader’) came to replace the cannon in the crew-served, ‘direct-fire’ role on the battlefield. In World War I the machine gun was called the ‘distilled essence of the infantry’, but it was really just a continuation of the cannon in its old, crew-served, masskilling role. The crew-served machine gun is still the key killer on the close-range battlefield, but the evolution of groupenabling processes can continue to be seen in tanks and armored personnel carriers. At sea the dynamics of the crew-served weapon have been in play since the beginning of the gunpowder era – that is, crew-served weapons, distance, and the influence of leaders. Conditioning as a psychological weapon

By 1946 the US Army had completely accepted Marshall’s World War II findings of a 15–20% firing rate

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among American riflemen, and the Human Resources Research Office of the US Army subsequently pioneered a revolution in combat training that replaced the old method of firing at bulls-eye targets with that of deeply ingrained ‘conditioning’ using realistic, humanshaped pop-up targets that fall when hit. Psychologists know that this kind of powerful ‘operant conditioning’ is the only technique that reliably influences the primitive, midbrain processing of a frightened human being, just as fire drills condition terrified school children to respond properly during a fire, and repetitious, ‘stimulus–response’ conditioning in flight simulators enables frightened pilots to respond reflexively to emergency situations. Throughout history the ingredients of posturing, mobility, distance, leaders, and groups have been manipulated to enable and force combatants to kill, but the introduction of conditioning in modern training was a true revolution. The application and perfection of these basic conditioning techniques appear to have increased the rate of fire from near 20% in World War II to approximately 55% in Korea and around 95% in Vietnam. Similar high rates of fire resulting from modern conditioning techniques can be seen in FBI data on law enforcement firing rates since the nationwide introduction of modern conditioning techniques in the late 1960s. One of the most dramatic examples of the value and power of this modern, psychological revolution in training can be seen in Richard Holmes’ observations of the 1982 Falklands War. The superbly trained (i.e., ‘conditioned’) British forces were without air or artillery superiority and consistently outnumbered three-to-one while attacking the poorly trained but well-equipped and carefully dug-in Argentine defenders. Superior British firing rates (which Holmes estimates to be well over 90%), resulting from modern training techniques, have been credited as a key factor in the series of British victories in that brief but bloody war. Any future army that attempts to go into battle without similar psychological preparation is likely to meet a fate similar to that of the Argentines.

A Brief Survey of Weapons Evolution Having established an understanding of the physical factors required for effective weapons (force, mobility, distance, and protection) and the psychological enabling factors required to effectively employ these weapons (posturing, mobility, distance, leaders, groups, and conditioning), an overall survey of weapons evolution becomes possible. Although parallel evolutionary, weaponry processes have occurred around the world, the process is most easily observed in the West, and it is in Western civilization that the evolutionary development

of weaponry achieved a degree of ascendancy that permitted Western domination of the globe starting as early as the sixteenth century and culminating in total Western domination in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Combat throughout ancient history generally involved more and more effective applications of force, moving from rock, to sharp rock, to sharp rock on a stick, to swords and spears using the latest metal technology. This aspect of close-range, hand-to-hand combat remained the same until the late nineteenth century when reliable, repeating gunpowder weapons replaced swords and bayonets as the weapon of choice to kill repeatedly at close range. Some aspects of distance weapons have been present, in the form of archers and slingers, since ancient Egypt, but until the introduction of the longbow the available armor (generally just a shield) was sufficient to stop these weapons from becoming decisive. The Chariot The chariot was introduced to ancient Egypt early in the second millennium BC, and subsequently it was to become the first major, evolutionary weapons innovation. As a system it was made possible by the domestication of the horse, the invention of the wheel, and the invention of the bow and arrow – particularly the compound bow. The chariot was a two-wheeled platform pulled by horses (usually two) generally carrying a driver and a passenger. It was of limited value for commerce due to its small cargo capacity and was primarily an instrument of war. Its mobility gave it a high degree of utility in attacking vulnerable flanks or in the pursuit of a defeated enemy, and the passenger was usually an archer who would fire from the platform while on the move or during brief halts. The ascendancy of the chariot for well over a millennium has been called ‘inexplicable’ by some historians, but an understanding of the chariot’s powerful psychological contribution makes its role clear. The chariot undoubtedly had many limitations: the horses were very vulnerable to archers and slingers and if just one horse was disabled the whole chariot was out of action, and the absence of a horse collar meant that the mounting system choked the horse, thus making the chariot’s effective range a fraction of that of the cavalry, which would later replace the chariot in its mobility role. And yet, in spite of these limitations, the mobility advantage of the chariot (useful primarily in the pursuit, when most of the killing occurred) combined with some group processes (driver plus archer) and some distance processes (archer firing from a mobile platform) made the chariot the dominant weapon of an era ranging from the Egyptian to the Persian Empires. Ultimately it would be defeated by the phalanx and replaced by cavalry.


The Phalanx One limitation of the chariot (and later of cavalry) is that horses consistently refuse to hurl themselves into a hedge of sharp, projecting objects such as a phalanx, with its deep ranks of tightly packed men carrying 4-m spears and protecting themselves with overlapping shields. The Greek phalanx required a high degree of training and organization, but starting around the fourth century BC, the Greek city-states were able to use it to negate the impact of the chariot in battle. The tightly packed ranks of the phalanx created a group process that apparently permitted it to act as a vast, crew-served weapon. This factor, along with some distance (through the long spears) and the simplicity and economic viability of the phalanx, made it the dominant weapon system of its era. These aspects of the phalanx ‘combined’ with the later Greek mastery of horseback riding (albeit absent stirrups) in order to approach an enemy from vulnerable flanks and to exploit pursuits permitted the Greeks to conquer a vast portion of the world. The Greeks were defeated by the Romans, but the inherent simplicity of the phalanx combined with its psychological fundamentals were so powerful that after the fall of the Roman Empire the phalanx again became ascendant, with the Swiss achieving the epitome of perfection of the phalanx in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. The armies of the early gunpowder era continued to use phalanx formations of pikemen combined with formations of primitive, early muskets. The pikemen were replaced with the advent of the bayonet, which made every man a potential pikeman, and a remnant of the psychological dynamics of the phalanx could be seen in the great, column-based bayonet charges of Napoleon’s armies. The Roman System It must be remembered that the Roman Empire lasted for approximately half a millennium (and longer if we count the Eastern Roman Empire) and that to say ‘the Romans did this’ or ‘the Romans did that’ would generally be inaccurate when referring to a military system that evolved and changed constantly across the centuries. However, certain things did stay somewhat constant over the centuries in the Roman legions, and it was these constant factors that can be generally attributed to the extraordinary military success of the Roman Empire, starting in the second and first centuries BC and continuing for around 500 years. The Greek phalanx required a high degree of training to be effective, but an efficient phalanx could still be achieved, for example, as the product of a local militia who trained in their free time. However, the Roman system was a highly complex professional army that

devoted itself full time to the development of its skills and to the development of a leadership structure with systematic professional advancement based on merit, taking soldiers from the ranks and placing them in charge of larger and larger groups of men as they demonstrated competence at each level. The Roman open order of battle permitted their small-unit leaders to move behind the battle line, holding their men accountable and rewarding skill and valor with advancement and reward. Today most professional armies are designed around a professional small-unit leadership drawn from the ranks with advancement based on merit, and small-unit leaders who have proven themselves in combat (except in emergencies) are expected to stay behind their men in order to directly influence their actions in battle, but it must be remembered that the Romans were the first to truly, systematically introduce these factors to the battlefield on a large scale over a long period of time. Another key aspect of the Roman way of war was the fact that each of their soldiers carried a variety of throwing spears (the number and type varied over the years) with which they were highly proficient. An approaching enemy was greeted with a series of volleys from these spears, which served to break up an enemy’s ranks and often to strip them of their shields. These ingeniously designed distance weapons often included light javelins, which were thrown at a long range, followed by a standard heavy spear (or pilum), which was thrown at a medium range, followed by a lead-weighted pilum, which was hurled, with enormous force, as one final volley before closing with swords. After shattering an approaching enemy force from a distance with a series of spear volleys, the Romans closed with short swords designed and intended for stabbing. These swords were often qualitatively no different from those of their opponents, but the Romans were systematically trained to use their swords to stab and thrust in a highly effective way that was largely unprecedented prior to this. Like the post-World War II training that was to be developed two millennia later to condition men to fire in combat, Roman training used constant, repetitive training, to the point where it could be accurately described as conditioning, in order to insure that their soldiers would thrust in combat rather than use the more natural hacking and slashing blows. This was a technique that was to be used in later centuries to train some elite warriors in fencing and swordsmanship, but never before, nor probably since, has an entire army been trained to this degree of perfection. This combination of projectile weapons, intense training, and the presence of effective small-unit leaders who moved behind their men and demanded effective killing activities was a devastating force that smashed approaching enemy formations, including the phalanx. The final ingredient in a Roman battlefield victory was the

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organization of their forces into small units with reserves; with dispassionate, highly trained, small-unit leaders operating behind their men; ready to maneuver their unit to exploit any exposed enemy flanks or penetrate deep into the enemy rear. Once the enemy was defeated, the final blow (and most of the killing) was executed by cavalry auxiliaries (which, still without stirrups, were little different from the cavalry of the Greeks), who would pursue and kill a broken, fleeing enemy. The result of this complex process was the Pax Romana: hundreds of years of relative stability and peace in the Western world. However, it was a fragile strength, created through complexity and economic abundance, difficult to sustain in the best of times, and impossible to replicate (at least in Western Europe) for almost a millennium after the Roman Empire collapsed. The Mounted Knight With the fall of Rome the complex Roman way of war collapsed, to be replaced by simpler systems, such as the phalanx, and one new system, which was the mounted knight. The introduction of the stirrup (coming to Europe from China and India around the tenth century AD) made it possible for a man on horseback to strike an opponent with remarkable force without danger of being unseated. Furthermore, horse breeding had developed increasingly larger and more powerful mounts who could carry sufficient weight of armor to make both horse and man virtually invulnerable. A devastating blow could be delivered by a spear, or lance, which could be ‘couched’ or semiattached to the knight. Charging at full speed, the spear point would strike an opponent with the combined momentum and weight of horse, man, and armor approaching at full gallop. After the initial blow with the lance the knight could continue to plow into an enemy formation, delivering blows from above with heavy weapons (sword, mace, flail, or morning star) assisted by the force of gravity and downward momentum. A formation of such knights, striking together, was an extraordinarily frightening and almost overwhelming force, combining high degrees of posturing, force, and mobility, which could only be stopped by a hedge of spears and the horse’s complete and consistent unwillingness to impale itself. Thus, the answer to the knight was a phalanx, but the horse’s mobility made it possible to maneuver around a phalanx, or any enemy formation, in order to attack from a vulnerable direction and to pursue the enemy after they have been broken. This created the need for spear- or bayonet-equipped ground troops to form a ‘square’ that faced outward in all directions while keeping other units inside the protection of the square. This was an effective defensive maneuver as long as the infantry kept their nerve (if only a few men broke and ran the knights could move into that gap and break the entire formation),

but until the introduction of the longbow and (later) gunpowder the forces inside the the square were completely neutralized and could often be held at bay by a small force of knights. The longbow (and, later, gunpowder weapons) spelled the doom of the mounted knight and, ultimately, of all individual armor until the twentieth century. Cavalry would continue to exist on the battlefield for centuries, but their economic cost and their increasing vulnerability to small arms fire meant that by the late nineteenth century the utility of cavalry had reverted to that of the Greek and Roman era: useful for reconnaissance, to move riflemen rapidly to key a location where they would dismount and fight, and for mobility in the pursuit. During the twentieth century mechanization (trucks, tanks, etc.) would almost completely supersede the horse’s mobility contribution to the battlefield. The Age of Projectile Weapons Humans had always thrown rocks or fired arrows, but usually these could be neutralized by armor. With the advent of the longbow (c. 1400), for the first time the average combatant could single-handedly fire a weapon, from a distance, that would penetrate even the best of available, man-portable armor. This was a revolution that introduced a combination of distance and force that would continue in its basic format up until the present. The longbow began the process of rendering the knight extinct, but the advent of gunpowder introduced powerful posturing processes into the equation that quickly (in evolutionary terms) led to the extinction of both the knight and the longbow. Once individual gunpowder weapons were introduced and widely distributed (c. 1600), the evolution of closerange, interpersonal weaponry subsequently moved along a single, simple path of perfecting this weapon. The early, crude, primitive, smoothbore, muzzle-loading, gunpowder weapons were pathetically ineffective. They were almost impossible to aim, very slow to fire, and useless in any kind of damp conditions. And yet their posturing (i.e., their noise) combined with their absolutely overwhelming force (when they could hit something) was so great that they soon came to dominate the battlefield. Gunpowder was invented in China, but China was under a comparatively centralized government that appears to have seen gunpowder weapons as a threat to the established order and made a conscious decision not to develop this weapon. (Over a millennium later the Japanese would do something similar.) A powerful argument can be made that this single decision in weapons development resulted in the eventual subjugation of the East and the inevitable domination and colonization of the world by Western Europe. In Europe there were constant wars and turmoil and a complete absence of


centralized authority, which created an environment that pursued a continuous development and refinement of gunpowder weapons. This process led to weapons that could be fired in wet weather (percussion caps), fired accurately (rifled barrels), loaded from a prone position (breech loaders), fired repeatedly without loading (repeaters), and fired repeatedly with no other action than pulling the trigger (automatics). Almost all of this development of gunpowder weapons occurred in the nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century this developmental process had reached its culmination. One common myth in this area involves the increasing ‘deadliness’ of modern small arms, which is largely without foundation. For example, the highvelocity, small-caliber (5.56-mm/.223-caliber) ammunition used in most assault rifles today (e.g., the M-16 and the AK-74) was designed to wound rather than kill. The theory is that wounding an enemy soldier eliminates three people: the wounded man and two others to evacuate him. These weapons do inflict great (wounding) trauma, but they are illegal for hunting deer in much of the United States due to their ineffectiveness at quickly and effectively killing game. Similarly, since World War I and until recently the US military’s weapon of choice in pistols was a .45 automatic (approximately 12 mm). In recent years the military weapon of choice has become the 9 mm, which has a smaller, faster round that many experts argue is considerably less effective at killing. What these new, smaller ammunitions (5.56 mm for rifle and 9 mm for pistol) ‘do’ make possible is greater magazine capacity, and this has increased the effectiveness of weapons in one way, while decreasing it in another. The point is that there has ‘not’ been any significant increase in the effectiveness of the weapons available today. The shotgun is still the single most effective weapon for killing at close range and it has been available and basically unchanged for over 100 years. Long-range killing technology (missiles, aircraft, and armored vehicles) have all evolved at quantum rates, but the basic technology of close-range killing through transferring kinetic energy has apparently achieved an evolutionary dead end in this century. Enabling the Mind to Kill Thus the basic, close-range killing weapon has not changed fundamentally in nearly a century, but there ‘has’ been a new, evolutionary leap in the conditioning of the ‘mind’ that has to use that weapon to kill at close range. The development of a psychological conditioning process to enable an individual to overcome the average, healthy, deep-rooted aversion to close-range killing of one’s own species is a true revolution. By changing from bulls-eye targets to pop-up, human-shaped targets that

fall when hit, modern armies and police forces have learned to operantly condition their combatants to respond reflexively even when literally frightened out of their wits. This process has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to raise the firing rate among individual riflemen from a baseline of around 20% in World War II to over 90% today. This is a revolution on the battlefield, and it is a revolution that has also had an absolutely unprecedented influence on civilian violence and domestic violent crimes.

The Role of Weapons Evolution in Domestic Violent Crime Weapons play the same role in domestic violent crime as in war. The resistance to killing also exists in peacetime, and weapons provide psychological and mechanical leverage to enable killing in peace, as well as in war. Weapons Lethality Weapons lethality (in peace ‘and’ war) is a factor of the effectiveness of the weapons used to kill and of the ability of available medical technology to save lives. Thus, weapons lethality can be thought of as a contest between weapons effectiveness (the state of technology trying to kill you) and medical effectiveness (the state of technology trying to save you). Like weapons lethality, the difference between murder (killing someone) and aggravated assault (trying to kill someone) is also largely a factor of the effectiveness of available weapons versus the effectiveness of available medical life-saving technology. Advances in Weapons Effectiveness Throughout most of human history the effectiveness of weapons available for domestic violence was basically stable, relative constant. The relative effectiveness of swords, axes, and blunt objects has been basically unchanged, and killing (as an act of passion vs. a premeditated act like poisoning or leaving a bomb) was only possible at close range by stabbing, hacking, and beating. Bows were kept unstrung, not in a state of readiness for an act of passion. It required premeditation plus training plus strength to kill with a bow. Early, muzzle-loading, gunpowder weapons were also often not kept in a state of readiness. It required time, training, and premeditation to load and shoot such a weapon. Once loaded, the humidity in the air could seep into the gunpowder, and the load could become unreliable. Only in the late nineteenth century, with widespread introduction of breech-loading, brass cartridges, was a true ‘act of passion’ possible with state-of-the-art weapons technology. Powerful weapons could now be kept in state of readiness (i.e., loaded), and

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Table 1 Landmarks in the evolution of weapons effectiveness

Table 2 Landmarks in the evolution of medical lifesaving

c. 1700 BC

c. 1690

c. 400 BC c. 100 BC c. AD 900 c. 1350 c. 1400 c. 1600 c. 1800 c. 1850 c. 1870 c. 1915 c. 1915 c. 1915 c. 1915 c. 1915 c. 1940 c. 1945 c. 1960 c. 1960 c. 1970 c. 1980

Chariots provide key form of mobility advantage in ancient warfare Greek phalanx Roman system (pilum, swords, training, professionalism, leadership) Mounted knight (stirrup greatly enhances utility of mounted warfare) Gunpowder (cannon) in warfare (Battle of Crecy, 1346) Widespread application of longbow defeats mounted knights (Battle of Agincourt, 1415) Gunpowder (small arms) in warfare, defeats all body armor (30 Years War and English Civil War) Shrapnel (exploding artillery shells), ultimately creates renewed need for helmets (c. 1915) Percussion caps permit all-weather use of small arms Breech loading, cartridge firing rifles, and pistolsa Machine gun Gas warfare Tanks Aircraft Self-loading (automatic) rifles and pistols Strategic bombing of population centers Nuclear weapons Large-scale introduction of operant conditioning in training to enable killing in soldiers Large-scale introduction of media violence begins to enable domestic violent crimea Precision-guided munitions Kevlar provides first individual armor to defeat state-of-the-art projectiles in 300þ years

Represents developments influencing domestic violent crime. Note: Dates generally represent century or decade of first major, large-scale introduction.

a

they now required minimal strength or training to use. This achievement in weapons effectiveness has been virtually unchanged since the 1870s. Colt’s revolver or a double-barrel shotgun is basically equally effective to any small arms available today (Table 1). Thus, the effectiveness of weapons available for domestic violence has remained relatively stable throughout most of human history. It then made one huge quantum leap in the late nineteenth century and has not moved since then, with the sole exception of the psychological conditioning to enable killing. Advances in Medical Effectiveness Since 1957, in the US, the per capita aggravated assault rate (which is, essentially, the rate of ‘attempted’ murder) has gone up nearly sevenfold, while the per capita murder rate has less than doubled. Vast progress in medical technology since 1957 to include everything from mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, to the national ‘911’ emergency telephone

c. 1840 c. 1840

c. 1860 c. 1880 c. 1930 c. 1940 c. 1945 c. 1960 c. 1970 c. 1990

French army institutes first scientific, systematic approach to surgery Introduction of anesthesia overcomes surgical shock Introduction in Hungary of washing hands and instruments in chlorinated lime solution reduces mortality due to ‘childbed fever’ from 9.9 to 0.85% Introduction by Lister of carbolic acid as germicide reduces mortality rate after major operations from 45 to15% Widespread acceptance and adaptation of germicides Sulfa drugs Penicillin discovered Penicillin in general use and ever-increasing explosion of antibiotics thereafter Penicillin synthesized on a large scale Cardiopulmonary resuscitation introduced on wide scale 911 centralized emergency response systems introduced in US on wide scale

Note: Dates generally represent century or decade of major, large-scale introduction.

system, to medical technology advances is the reason for this disparity. Otherwise murder would be going up at the same rate as attempted murder (Table 2). Furthermore, it has been noted that a hypothetical wound that 9 of 10 times would have killed a soldier in World War II would have been survived 9 of 10 times by US soldiers in Vietnam. This is due to the great leaps in battlefield evacuation and medical care technology between 1940 and 1970. And we have made even greater progress since 1970. Thus, it is probably a very conservative statement to say that ‘if ’ today we had 1930s-level road networks, evacuation vehicles, communications, distribution of medical care, and medical technology (no penicillin, etc.), ‘then’ we would have 10 ‘times’ the murder rate we currently do. That is, attempts to inflict bodily harm upon one another would result in death 10 times more often. Consider, for instance, some of the quantum leaps in medical technology across the years. Just a century ago, ‘any’ puncture of the abdomen, skull, or lungs created a high probability of death. As did any significant loss of blood (no transfusions) or most large wounds (no antibiotics or antiseptics) or most wounds requiring significant surgery (no anesthetics, resulting in death from surgery shock). Also consider the increasing impact of police methodology and technology (fingerprints, communications, DNA matching, video surveillance, etc.) in apprehending killers, preventing second offenses, and deterring crime.


Each of these technological developments, in their place and time, should have negated the effects of weapons evolution and saved the lives of victims of violence. When assessing violent crime across any length of time we could and should ask what proportion of trauma patients survive today and what proportion of those would have died if they had: 1940s-level technology (no penicillin), 1930s-level technology (no antibiotics), 1870s-level technology (no antiseptics), 1840s-level technology (no anesthetics), or 1600s-level technology (no doctors, no anatomical knowledge, etc.).

Increases in Worldwide Violent Crime Thus, instead of murder, we have to assess attempted murder, or aggravated assault, or some other consistently defined attack as an indicator of violent crime, and the increase in this indicator is staggering. Between 1957 and 1992 aggravated assault in the US, according to the FBI, went up from around 60 per 100 000 to over 440 per 100 000. Between 1977 and 1986 the ‘serious assault’ rate, as reported to Interpol: . Increased nearly fivefold in Norway and Greece, and the murder rate more than tripled in Norway and doubled in Greece.

. In Australia and New Zealand the ‘serious assault’ rate increased approximately fourfold, and the murder rate approximately doubled in both nations. . During the same period the assault rate tripled in Sweden and approximately doubled in Belgium, Canada, Denmark, England–Wales, France, Hungary, the Netherlands, Scotland, and the US; while all these nations (with the exception of Canada) also had an associated (but smaller) increase in murder. All of these increases in violent crime, in all of these nations, occurred during a period when medical and law enforcement technology should have been bringing murder and crime rates down. It is no accident that this has generally only been occurring in Western, industrialized nations because the same factor that caused all of these increases is the same weapons factor that caused a revolution in close combat (Table 3).

Military Conditioning as Entertainment for Children The tremendous impact of psychological ‘conditioning’ to overcome the resistance to killing has been observed in Vietnam and the Falklands, where it gave US and British units a tremendous tactical advantage in close combat,

Table 3 International violent crime rates Serious assault

Australiaa Belgium Canadab Denmark England–Walesa France Greece Hungaryc Netherlandsd New Zealanda Norway Scotlande Sweden United States

Murder

1977

1993

Increase

1977

1993

Increase

21.9 65.9 447.0 78.7 163.0 59.8 14.4 45.1 101.1 83.4 12.8 53.0 17.3 241.0

81.3 125.0 916.0 179.0 362.0 99.0 68.4 76.9 196.0 313.0 62.0 123.0 51.1 440.0

þ3.7 þ1.9 þ2.0 þ2.3 þ2.2 þ1.7 þ4.8 þ1.7 þ1.9 þ3.8 þ4.8 þ2.3 þ3.0 þ1.8

2.8 2.2 3.0 2.5 1.4 3.4 1.2 3.5 8.3 1.8 0.7 8.4 4.8 8.8

4.5 3.1 2.0 4.8 2.5 4.9 2.5 4.5 27.4 4.0 2.5 11.4 8.8 9.5

þ1.6 þ1.4 þ1.9 þ1.8 þ1.4 þ2.1 þ1.3 þ3.3 þ2.2 þ3.6 þ1.4 þ1.8 þ1.1

Data are only through the following dates when the indicated nations stopped reporting to Interpol: Australia, 1988; England–Wales, 1991; India, 1991; New Zealand, 1992. b Canada does not report crime data to Interpol; Canadian data are from Canadian Center for Justice. c Data begin in 1980, when Hungary started reporting to Interpol. d Netherlands did not begin reporting serious assault data to Interpol until 1981, but murder data begin in 1977. e Scotland’s serious assault data begin in 1977, but murder data begin in 1985 (when they apparently started reporting murder under a broader definition) and both murder and serious assault data only run through 1991 when Scotland stopped reporting to Interpol. Note: All data represent incidents per 100 000 population, as reported by each nation to Interpol and recorded in Interpol International Crime Statistics, vols. 1977–1994. (Except for Canadian data, as stated in footnote ‘b’). Different nations use different criteria to define ‘murder’ and ‘serious assault’, therefore ability to use this data to compare between nations is limited, but comparisons of increases within each nation across time are valid. This information was previously reported in a different format in On Killing, ã 1996, Dave Grossman. a

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increasing the firing rate from the World War II baseline of around 20% to over 90% in these wars. Through violent programming on television and in movies, and through interactive point-and-shoot video games, Western nations are indiscriminately introducing to their children the same weapons technology that major armies and law enforcement agencies around the world use to ‘turn off ’ the midbrain ‘safety catch’ that Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall discovered in World War II. The US Bureau of Justice Statistics research indicates that law enforcement officers and veterans (including Vietnam veterans) are statistically less likely to be incarcerated than a nonveteran of the same age. The key safeguard in this process appears to be the deeply ingrained discipline that the soldier and police officer internalize with their training. However, by saturating children with media violence as entertainment and then exposing them to interactive ‘point-and-shoot’ arcade and video games, it has become increasingly clear that society is aping military conditioning but without the vital safeguard of discipline. The observation that violence in the media is causing violence in our streets is nothing new. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the American Medical Association, and their equivalents in many other nations have all made unequivocal statements about the link between media violence and violence in our society. The APA, in their 1992 report Big world, small screen, concluded that the ‘‘scientific debate is over.’’ And in 1993 the APA’s commission on violence and youth concluded that ‘‘there is absolutely no doubt that higher levels of viewing violence on television are correlated with increased acceptance of aggressive attitudes and increased aggressive behavior.’’ The evidence is quite simply overwhelming. Dr. Brandon Centerwall, professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington, has summarized the overwhelming nature of this body of evidence. His research demonstrates that anywhere in the world that television is introduced, within 15 years the murder rate will double. (And remember, across 15 years, the murder rate will significantly underrepresent the problem because medical technology will be saving ever more lives each year.) Centerwall concludes that ‘if ’ television technology had never been introduced in the US, ‘then’ there would today be 10 000 fewer homicides each year in the United States; 70 000 fewer rapes; and 700 000 fewer injurious assaults. Overall violent crime would be half of what it is. Centerwall notes that the net effect of television has been to increase the aggressive predisposition of approximately 8% of the population, which is all that is required to double the murder rate. Statistically speaking 8% is a very small increase. Anything less than 5% is not even considered to be statistically significant. But in human terms, the impact of doubling the homicide rate is enormous.

Acquired Violence Immune Deficiency Syndrome There are two filters that a human mind has to go through to kill at close range. The first filter is the forebrain. A hundred things can convince the forebrain to take gun in hand and go to a certain point: poverty, drugs, gangs, leaders, radical politics, and the social learning of violence in the media – magnified when the child is from a broken home and is searching for a role model. However, traditionally, all of these influences slam into the resistance that a frightened, angry human being confronts in the midbrain. With the exception of sociopaths (who, by definition, do not have this resistance) the vast majority of circumstances are not sufficient to overcome this midbrain safety net. However, if you are conditioned to overcome these midbrain inhibitions, then you are a walking time bomb, a pseudo-sociopath, just waiting for the random factors of social interaction and forebrain rationalization to put you at the wrong place at the wrong time. An effective analogy can be made to Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in attempting to communicate the impact of this technology. AIDS does not kill people, it simply destroys the immune system and makes the victim vulnerable to death by other factors. The ‘violence immune system’ exists in the midbrain, and conditioning in the media creates an ‘acquired deficiency’ in this immune system, resulting in ‘Acquired Violence Immune Deficiency Syndrome’ (AVIDS). As a result of this weakened immune system, the victim becomes more vulnerable to violence-enabling factors such as poverty, discrimination, drugs, gangs, radical politics, and the availability of guns. In weapons technology terms this indiscriminate use of combat conditioning techniques on children is the moral equivalent of giving an assault weapon to every child in every industrialized nation in the world. If, hypothetically, this ‘were’ done, the vast majority of children would almost certainly not kill anyone with their assault rifles; but if only a tiny percentage did, then the results would be tragic and unacceptable. However, it is increasingly clear that this is not a hypothetical situation. Indiscriminate civilian application of combat conditioning techniques as entertainment has increasingly been identified as a key factor in the worldwide, skyrocketing violent crime rates outlined above. Thus, the influences of weapons technology can increasingly be observed on the streets of nations around the world.

Conclusion: The Future of Weapons Evolution Wars are fought by one group of humans to force another group to submit to their will. Weapons are tools to help


humans overcome their physical and psychological limitations in order to inflict their will upon others. Democratic nations seldom, if ever, go to war against each other, choosing instead less-destructive methods of influence. Thus, with the coming of the age of democracies, the time of wars may be coming to an end, and the passing of war may also mark the passing of some of the instruments of war. Indeed, a precedence for an end to war can be found in weapons evolution. It has become increasingly obvious that each act of violence breeds ever-greater levels of violence, and at some point the genie must be put back in the bottle. The study of killing in combat teaches us that soldiers who have had friends or relatives injured or killed in combat are much more likely to kill and commit war crimes. The world is just now recovering from the most violent and bloody century in human history, and the streets of the Western, industrialized nations are the scenes of a level of violence that is unprecedented in human history. Each individual who is injured or killed by violence provides a point of departure for further violence on the part of their friends and family. Every destructive act gnaws away at the restraint of human beings. Each act of violence eats away at the fabric of our society like a cancer, spreading and reproducing itself in ever-expanding cycles of horror and destruction. The genie of violence cannot really ever be stuffed back into the bottle. It can only be cut off here and now, and then the slow process of healing and resensitization can begin. It can be done. It has been done in the past. As Richard Heckler has observed, there is a precedent for limiting violence-enabling technology. It started with the classical Greeks, who for four centuries refused to implement the bow and arrow even after being introduced to it in a most unpleasant way by Persian archers. In Giving up the gun, Noel Perrin tells how the Japanese banned firearms after their introduction by the Portuguese in the 1500s. The Japanese quickly recognized that the military use of gunpowder threatened the very fabric of their society and culture, and they moved aggressively to defend their way of life. The feuding Japanese warlords destroyed all existing weapons and made the production or import of any new guns punishable by death. Three centuries later, when Commodore Perry forced the Japanese to open their ports, they did not even have the technology to make firearms. Similarly, the Chinese invented gunpowder but elected not to use it in warfare. However, the most encouraging examples of restraining killing technology have all occurred in this century. After the tragic experience of using poisonous gases in World War I the world has generally rejected its use ever since. The atmospheric nuclear test ban treaty continues after three decades, the ban on the deployment

of antisatellite weapons is still going strong after two decades, the US and the former USSR have been steadily reducing the quantity of nuclear weapons for the past two decades, and we have seen a Nobel Peace Prize awarded to a new movement to eliminate land mines. As we have de-escalated instruments of indiscriminate mass ‘destruction’, so too can we de-escalate instruments of indiscriminate mass ‘desensitization’ as entertainment in the media. Firearms probably will not go away any time soon, but their abuse will almost definitely be strongly influenced by technology that will make guns ‘keyed’ so that they can only be fired by a designated individual and will thereby be useless to all others. Similarly, violence in the media will not go away as long as there is a market for it, but there will probably be movement ‘away’ from indiscriminate violence enabling of children through violent video games and violence in the media and ‘toward’ protecting children from these things while still permitting their availability to adults, in much the same manner as alcohol, tobacco, prescription drugs, pornography, and guns. Heckler points out that there has been ‘‘an almost unnoticed series of precedents for reducing military technology on moral grounds,’’ precedents that show the way to understanding that we do have a ‘choice’ about how we think about war, about killing, and about the value of human life in our society. In recent years we have exercised the choice to move ourselves from the brink of nuclear destruction. In the same way, our society can also take the evolutionary steps ‘away’ from the technology that psychologically enables killing in children. Education and understanding is the first step. The end result may be for weapons evolution to take a considered step backward and for our civilization to come through the dark years of the twentieth century and enter into a healthier, more self-aware society. See also: Military Culture; Psychological Effects of Combat; Ritual and Symbolic Behavior; Warfare, Trends in; Warriors, Anthropology of

Further Reading Dyer, G. (1985). War. New York: Crown. Griffith, P. (1989). Battle tactics of the civil war. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Griffith, P. (1990). Forward into battle. Novato, CA: Presidio Press. Grossman, D. (1995). On killing: The psychological cost of learning to kill in war and society. New York: Little, Brown. Holmes, R. (1985). Acts of war: The behavior of men in battle. New York: The Free Press. Keegan, J. (1994). A history of warfare. New York: Knopf. Keegan, J. and Holmes, R. (1985). Soldiers. London: Hamish Hamilton. Marshal, S. L. A. (1978). Men against fire. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith. Stouffer, S. (1949). The American soldier: Combat and its aftermath. Princeton, NJ: Princeton.

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Civil Society

Civil Society Martin Shaw, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Meaning of Civil Society Civil Society on a Global Scale Civil Society, Violence, and War in Historical Perspective

Glossary Civil Society A sphere of association in society in distinction to the state, involving a network of institutions through which society and groups within it represent themselves in cultural, ideological, and political senses. Global Civil Society The extension of civil society from national to global, regional, and transnational forms, involving the development of globalist culture, ideology, and politics.

Civil society refers to a sphere of association in society in distinction to the state. The term has been used in a variety of ways, and this article will explore the meaning of civil society by examining the understanding of it in the modern social sciences and its relevance to the understanding of violence, peace, and conflict in major periods of modern history.

The Meaning of Civil Society The origins of the concept of civil society lie in key phases of modernity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Then writers in classical philosophy and political economy began to distinguish systematically between the spheres of state and society. In feudal society, the same social relations between superiors and inferiors had embraced both production and family life, on the one hand, and political and military authority, on the other. With the dissolution of feudal relations, these two areas of social life became more clearly demarcated in modern conditions as ‘society’ and ‘state’. The term ‘civil society’ was first used to distinguish a sphere in which social relations were based on the free association of individuals, rather than a fixed hierarchy of legal institutions. For classical writers like the philosopher Georg Hegel and the revolutionary theorist Karl Marx, civil society was an inclusive concept of ‘society minus the state’, and very definitely included what we would now call ‘the economy’. Civil society was defined, indeed, by the emergence of a distinct political economy in which individuals

Civil Society and the Cold War Civil Society in Contemporary War and Peace Further Reading

Hegemony The cultural, ideological, and political dominance, in civil society, of a social class or group or bloc of social classes and groups. Social Movements Collective actors in civil society distinguished by mass mobilization or participation as their prime source of social power, typically concerned to defend or change society or the relative position of a group within society.

related to each other as independent agents rather than as people who filled prescribed social roles. The major classical theorists had, however, different ideas about civil society and its relation to the state. Hegel saw civil society as a sphere of contradictions which could be resolved in the higher institution of the state, which embodied the highest ethical ideals of society. Marx believed, in contrast, that civil society was a sphere of conflicts between competing private interests, and that far from being reconciled in the state, these conflicts would take the form of class struggles in which the state itself would be overthrown. (In Marx’s later work, the concept of civil society is largely replaced by that of the capitalist mode of production.) Although these classical ideas of civil society are still influential, as we shall see, the concept has been refined by later writers in ways which have made it, while still a broad concept, arguably more relevant to contemporary social analysis. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, writing in the 1930s, referred to civil society in a more specialized sense than that of ‘society minus the state’. He argued instead that ‘‘between the economic structure and the state with its legislation and coercion stands civil society.’’ Civil society for Gramsci was a set of institutions through which society organized and represented itself autonomously from the state. Although representative institutions of the economic sphere, such as employers’ associations and trade unions, were among the institutions of civil society, there were also churches, parties, professional associations, and educational and

Civil Society

cultural bodies. The economic sphere itself, with its functional institutions (firms, corporations) responsible for organizing production, was not on this definition part of civil society. Gramsci built an argument about comparative political change on this concept of civil society. Whereas in the East, where civil society was weak, revolution succeeded through a direct violent assault on the state (as in Russia in 1917), in the West, where civil society was strong, this would not be possible. The institutions of civil society formed the ‘outer earthworks’ of the state, through which the ruling classes maintained their ‘hegemony’ or dominance in society. It was necessary to transform civil society, indeed to create an alternative hegemony of the subordinate classes, before it would be possible to challenge state power. Gramsci’s hegemonic theory of civil society saw transformation as a cultural, as well as political, process, and specified an important role for intellectuals. According to Gramsci, each class developed its own intellectual groupings. While some traditional groups, such as priests and lawyers, continued from previous phases of society, many new groups had been created ‘organically’ through the development of capitalism – managers, educators, social workers, etc. These groups, playing central roles in the institutions of civil society, contributed to maintaining the existing hegemony. A counter-hegemony, which Gramsci conceived of in Marxist terms as led by the working class, would require its own organic intellectuals and beliefs. For him, the Communist Party should be the collective organic intellectual of the proletariat. Gramsci’s ideas were newly influential in the 1970s, both among Western social science academics and in inspiring the ‘Eurocommunist’ strategy of the Italian and some other West European communist parties. Another strong stimulus to the development of civil society thinking came around the same time from oppositional thinkers in the communist states of East-Central Europe. In an interesting advance on Gramsci’s ideas, many oppositionists believed that because the authoritarian character of the communist regimes made a direct challenge to their legitimacy very difficult, it would be easier to develop civil society based on social movements and cultural institutions which made an indirect challenge to the values of the system. In the repressive atmosphere of the late 1970s and early 1980s, even this was difficult, although in Poland the autonomous trade union Solidarity developed as a mass national movement. In the more liberal situation of the later 1980s, however, civil society mushroomed in many communist countries. The growth of autonomous cultural and social institutions played the role of preparing the foundations for a challenge to political power, very much as Gramsci had argued. As communism collapsed and competitive party politics developed, however, key

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intellectual elites often moved from civil society to parties and the state, leading to a crisis of civil society practice and thinking. Nevertheless, the more advanced Central European countries, especially, are characterized by much more extensive civil societies based on voluntary associations than was the case under communism, although the political significance of these civil societies has changed. Implicit in these ideas of civil society was the notion of it as a sphere of peaceful civility in contrast to the coercion, authoritarianism, and violence of nondemocratic states. At the end of the twentieth century the development of civil society is coming to be seen, therefore, as a significant criterion of the development of democracy. Democracy is seen as involving not merely the formal establishment of certain rights, institutions, and procedures – important as these are – but also the consolidation of the social relations which support these. These supports include the development of an educated middle class and a framework of civil institutions which can support democracy. Just as in former communist states, so in many countries of the Third World: as democratization has advanced in the early twenty-first century, the creation of civil society is widely viewed as a concomitant of democratic change. Similarly in the West, the strength of civil society is often seen as a criterion of democratic health and stability. A central question in Western analysis, however, is the role of mass media in civil society. Traditional representative institutions of civil society, such as trade unions, parties, and churches, have decayed in many Western societies, with membership and participation rates often (although not always) in decline. Even where some of these institutions remain strong, they exercise their representative functions to a large degree through mass media, above all television. Participation in Western civil societies (and democracies) increasingly depends on the openness of communications media. Media can be seen both as constituting the framework of contemporary civil society and as powerful actors within it. The centralized mass media of the early twentieth century are partially giving way to more participatory media such as the Internet, in which civil society is renewed. There are key differences between media and other civil institutions, to do with the informational character of much media activity and the quasi-instantaneous communication between communicators and audiences. Nonmedia institutions largely take for granted the information which their members or audience possess and are more concerned with influencing the value framework within which information is evaluated. Media, on the other hand, are always heavily concerned with communicating information, and have highly divergent relationships to evaluation. Much television eschews open commitment to value-frameworks (except those concerned with information), while at the other extreme, many newspapers are

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highly committed to propagandizing particular values. On the Internet, a diversity of both, information sources and opinions, transforms these tensions. Frequency of communication between media and audiences is another key differentiator between them and other institutions. Many newspapers publish daily, and television and radio broadcast continuously, sometimes updating news and interpretation hourly or even more frequently. Computer communication is virtually instantaneous. Political and religious leaders, educators, movement activists, and other civil leaders, on the other hand, communicate with their audiences intermittently and update their analyses of specific situations episodically; they are not required in the same way to inform or comment regularly on every social development, but only on those that particularly concern their institutions. A related difference is that media news analysis claims, implicitly or explicitly, to provide a total context of information relevant to given situations (whether or not media do this is, of course, another matter). The views of political and religious leaders, educators, activists, and others are ‘parts’ while the media provide the ‘whole’ picture. In this sense media contextualize and relativize the outputs of other institutions.

Civil Society on a Global Scale A primary tension in the development of civil society has been between the universal values which civil institutions have often professed – and which many see as characteristic of civil society as such – and the national forms of civil society which supplies much of their real content. Both religious ideologies like Christianity and secular political ideologies like liberalism, socialism, and conservatism have fostered universal beliefs. Nevertheless, institutions like churches, parties, trade unions, schools, and media were characteristically highly national institutions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, civil society as a whole has been a national sphere, generally involved in mutually sustaining relationships with the nation-state. Civil institutions have generally fostered national versions of universal belief systems and values, including loyalty to the state, and have been supported in turn by states. In the second half of the twentieth century, much of the nation-state framework of civil society was transformed. During the Cold War, both state and civil society changed in the West. National forms were maintained, but they lost much real significance. There was a huge internationalization of Western military, economic, cultural, and ideological power. Western states increasingly shared frameworks for organizing their monopoly of violence and their management of economic life. They created the conditions for massive processes of economic and

cultural globalization. In this context, the old national civil society declined. The weakening of many of the forms which were most characteristic of it in midcentury – churches, mass political parties, and trade unions – was partly related to this transformation of the national context. Civil society has been partially renewed in new institutions which are less formal, less tied to particular social interests and less national. Sociologists have given most attention to ‘new’ social movements (i.e., those based not on class but around other social identities or issues). Mass-participatory social movements tend to be episodic, but there are other institutions – single-issue campaigns and voluntary organizations, especially global development and human rights agencies – which are more enduring if often less activist-based. These nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are particularly important not only in that, although based in the West, they operate across the globe, but also because many (e.g., Amnesty, Greenpeace, Me´dicins sans Frontie`res) are ‘globalist’ organizations with a specifically global orientation, membership, and activity. There are, however, other major types of institutions which comprise the emergent global, regional, and transnational civil society. These include networks and formal organizations linking national parties, churches, unions, professions, educational bodies, media, etc. The growth of mass media has also tended to transcend the nation-state context, and not simply because of trends towards transnational ownership and diffusion. Media also have different relationships to the tension between the universal values (religious, political, educational, informational, etc.) on which civil society institutions claim to be based, and their essentially national character, based on the aim of representing nationally defined social interests and viewpoints. Insofar as media fulfill their function of providing information on the widest possible (i.e., global) basis, they inevitably tend to transcend the national limitations of state and civil society, although of course many remain highly national in content. Although the worldwide expansion of civil society – in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and parts of Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere – has often taken highly national forms, it has rested on the globalizing forces of education and cultural diffusion. The present growth of civil society combines global and particularistic aspects, even the nation is a universal idea in the modern world. These changes in civil society – the decline of some traditional national forms, the rise of global (or globalist) social movements, NGOs, and media, and its worldwide expansion – have led many to discuss a movement from national to global civil society. Recent debates in international relations have extended the analysis of civil society to the transnational and global levels. They have often

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ascribed to it considerable normative and political importance, although they have not always dealt with the empirical problems involved in hypothesizing ‘global civil society’. Civil society and social movements have become leading concepts of critical theory, more sociologically-based approaches and especially of radical political visions in international relations. As international theorists have moved beyond realism and neorealist ideas, they have increasingly seen social movements as a third major category of international actor after states and transnational corporations. These movements have been seen as especially significant forms through which society outside the state is represented in the global and international arenas. Social movements are seen as having unique characteristics, but in reality they have many features in common with the other civil society institutions to which we have referred. It cannot be assumed that social movements are more effective than other bodies in civil society: their relatively informal, spontaneous character brings advantages but also disadvantages in both the mobilization of support and the achievement of leverage. Linkages of social movements and informal networks (e.g., of women’s, gay, and peace groups and movements) are only one kind of global development. A particular problem in the definition of global civil society is to specify its relationship with state forms. The emergence of global civil society can be seen both as a response to the globalization of state power and a source of pressure for it. There is no one, juridically defined global state to which global civil society corresponds, even if a de facto complex of global state institutions is coming into existence through the interaction of Western state power and the legitimation framework of the United Nations. The emergence of global civil society in fact corresponds to the contradictory processes of globalization of state power, and the messy aggregation of global and national state power which comprises the contemporary interstate system. The forms of global state power are often inadequate from the point of view of civil society organizations, for example, power can be mobilized to deal with developments seen as problems for Western strategic interests, but not coherently to deal with genocide, environmental crises, or world poverty. Civil society organizations often find themselves, at the end of the twentieth century, arguing for a different kind of crystallization of global state power from those favored by state elites. The development of global civil society, as of the global state, is moreover still limited. Civil society institutions are still generally defined in terms of national bases, and because of this there is a deep structural difficulty in their relationship to interstate relations, let alone transnational forms of state power. These problems are especially significant in the case of social movements.

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Whether social movements are demonstration-based or mobilize utilizing a wider range of methods, they rely more on cultural impact than on articulated connections with the political system. The cultural strength of social movements derives partly from their location outside the formal party and parliamentary structures of the state, but this can also be a weakness when it comes to seeking particular concessions from the state. The political power of social movements does not arise from occupying positions within formal political institutions (as in the case of parties) but largely depends on their cultural mobilizing power, that is, the extent to which they can achieve symbolic impact on the streets and/or in the media. In the case of demonstration-based movements, leverage is dependent on the relationships between physical mobilizations and media coverage. There are cycles of mobilization within social movements, mediating the internal momentum of the movement and the politicocultural context in which it is operating. It is very difficult for the leaders of a movement to ensure that the peak of the mobilizing cycle coincides with the greatest opportunity for influence on the state. Leverage is often a somewhat hit-and-miss affair. If social movements generally have such difficulties with the state, then clearly they are greatly magnified in relation to interstate (rather than intrastate) politics. To influence interstate relationships, social movements need to move beyond the national base which is still their most common framework. They need, implicitly, to influence all of the states involved in a particular set of interstate relations, which in turn requires equivalent movements within each state and developed transnational linkages, including ideally a common strategy. All of these requirements represent an inherent strain on the resources of social movements, which typically respond locally, regionally, and nationally to issues, expressing feelings and beliefs within these limited frameworks. The problem of international leverage expresses the general contradiction between the modes of bottom-up and top-down politics in its most extreme form, since interstate relations have traditionally been the area of politics most removed from popular or electoral influence. At the turn of the twenty-first century, however, the ‘anti-globalization’ or ‘alternative globalization’ movements achieved considerable impact through regular demonstrations at global summits, the most famous protest being at the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization in 1999. Given these structural limitations of social movements within interstate politics, how should their role be understood? From the point of view of states (and hence also of statist theorists of international relations), social movements represent a relatively unpredictable (often even ‘irrational’) intrusion into the balance of power. From the standpoint of a broader conception of international politics, in which states are the organizing but not the only

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level of analysis, the effects of including social movements (and other civil society organizations) are to complicate ‘pure’ interstate relationships. In this perspective, international politics is one subcontext of the larger framework of global politics. States can be seen as parts, in Justin Rosenberg’s (1994) phrase, of the ‘empire of civil society’ within which they originated and on which they depend. In this context, rather than seeing social movements or other civil society organizations as intruders, or categorizing them residually as ‘nonstate actors’, they are recognized as normal actors within global politics. As the increasing ‘turbulence’ of global politics and the relative decline in state autonomy break down the insulation of international politics from politics in civil society, international relations theorists are finding the ‘conceptual jailbreak’ to postinternational – indeed global – concepts more and more necessary. Within recent international theory, both substantive and normative arguments have been developed concerning the significance of global civil society. It has been argued that international governance, in the twenty-first century, involves international organizations and global civil society as well as the system of states. The moral and political significance of global civil society has also been elaborated, in two principal ways. On the one hand, writers like the Marxist Rosenberg and the Hegelian Mervyn Frost have revived classically inclusive concepts of civil society and argue correspondingly (in the former case) for a broad social transformation as the context of changing international relations and (in the latter) for an ‘ethical’ approach to international order. On the other hand, however, a broader range of radical writers have argued for approaches to global politics based on a concept of civil society closer to the narrower Gramscian approach. Richard Falk, for example, argues for a ‘humane global governance’ based mainly on civil society, in the sense of civil associations and especially social movements, as opposed to the ‘inhumane global governance’ of states and multinational corporations. In his project, civil society is the core of a democratic ‘globalization from below’ to be counterposed to the dominant trend towards an authoritarian ‘globalization from above’. In this humane alternative, the development of civil society is seen as working against the militarism of the state system towards a democratic world peace.

Civil Society, Violence, and War in Historical Perspective This positive reading of the role of civil society in war and violence is only partially supported by a reading of the historical evidence, although is not to deny that the emerging global civil society of the early twenty-first century may have different relationships to war from

those of the national civil societies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Perhaps because of the positive reading of civil society which characterizes most of the literature, little has been written on the role of civil society as such in the violence of the European empires and the world wars. We can, however, construct an argument from historical literature on all aspects of social life in the wars of this period. The study of ‘war and society’ has been a staple of modern historiography. Vast literatures analyze the ways in which warfare has hardly been an exclusive concern of states and armies, but has transformed and been transformed by social relations. From the mid-nineteenth century especially, warfare has been industrialized, adopting technologies from the civilian economy, as well as functioning as a motor of technological change in the economy as a whole. The relations between states and arms corporations have been a central facet of political economy since the late nineteenth century. Thus beneath the surface of the pacific commerce which mostly reigned in Europe from 1815 to 1914 (if not in the United States where the civil war foretold twentieth-century horrors), the industrial capitalist societies which developed in the nineteenth century engendered the classic modern form of militarism. Everywhere in Europe toward the end of the century, militarist ideologies flourished in social life: from the propagandist militarism of army and navy leagues to new paramilitary youth organizations and the militarist saturation of popular culture. In this climate, no institution or profession of the national civil societies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries escaped militarization, although the degree and forms varied. Industry, schooling, and religion showed the influence of military methods and values. Newspapers and advertising, and later radio and cinema, were often enthusiastically and voluntarily militarist, before they were conscripted to the cause of the nation-state. The paradigmatic social movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the social–democratic parties and trade unions, fell under the sway of militarism, putting aside the pacifist tendencies of their ideologies once war was declared. In the practice of total war, civil societies took almost wholly national forms. The internationalization of professions and science, which had a long history even before the nineteenth century, largely succumbed to the nationalism of the early twentieth. As in almost all civil institutions, national content prevailed over universal forms. Internationalization prevailed only within the framework of military alliances, and even then was often limited by nation-state interests. The most that could be claimed was that the universalizing values of civil society lent a special character to the war aims (and later Cold War aims) and the political–intellectual culture of the democracies, as

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opposed to totalitarian fascist and communist states, where autonomous civil societies ceased to exist. The historical sociologist Michael Mann has pointed out, moreover, that civil society hardly had a pacific character in colonial wars. Settler civil societies were often more militaristic (and racist) than even colonial empires. They generated their own systematic violence of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and even genocide against indigenous populations across the continents, wherever Europeans migrated, whether in North or South America, Africa, or Australasia. Settler societies were often more aggressive, even genocidal, toward pre-existing societies than were colonial states. They continued as sources of violence into the era of decolonization, playing key roles in wars to defend ‘white’ or ‘European’ power, from Algeria to South Africa. Total war, in both its major interstate and minor guerilla forms, transformed civilian populations and their institutions into factors in warfare. Civilians and civil society generally became both instruments and targets of war. However, in some cases civil society and civilian populations were seen as ‘enemies’ in their own right – undesirable groups who should be removed from society. In these cases, total war mutated into genocide, which can be defined as a form of war against civilian populations. Wars were fought against peoples and cultures (for Hitler, the war was against the Jews as well as his conventional state adversaries). Attempts were made to expel peoples, to eliminate their ways of life and histories, to abolish their civil society and institutions, and even to physically exterminate them. Thus, in the militarization of civil society by total war, some versions of civil society triumphed, others were destroyed; all changed. Guerrilla war involved a special version of the totalwar militarization of civil society. Guerrillas fought directly in and through civil society, hiding behind civil institutions just as states sought to secure them against guerrilla takeovers. Thus guerrilla war, even more than total war between conventional state military forces, was a form of warfare centerd on the shape and control of civil society. However, although guerrilla war has been seen as war fought by ‘armed civilians’ rather than professional soldiers, blurring the boundary between combatants and noncombatants, there are always tensions between armed groups and civilian populations, so that the basic idea of civilian as noncombatant tends to re-emerge, and with it the idea of civil society as distinct from armed struggle. Indeed the era of total war also saw specific forms of resistance (to occupation) based on civil society, which have been called ‘civilian resistance’ (Semelin 1993). Although often from necessity, since armed resistance was difficult, civil society developed its own forms of struggle for specifically civilian ends, to defend society rather than to overthrow the occupier. (This model has also inspired some recent resistances, e.g., in Kosovo.)

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This emphasized that members of civil society were ‘civilians’ from the point of view of armed conflict. Although civilians often supported armed struggle, they had very different relationships to it than combatants did.

Civil Society and the Cold War During the Cold War there was a major transformation of warfare. Total war in the form that had dominated the first half of the twentieth century declined. Certainly, the totally destructive, degenerate character of war was accentuated by the development of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. Yet at the same time, these systems made redundant the mass mobilization and participation of the total war era, inaugurating a ‘postmilitary society’. Civil society began to develop therefore beyond its dominant national and militarized forms in international and global directions, in which a new postmilitarist character was strong. Thus during the Cold War, ‘new’ social movements developed with implicitly or explicitly transnational and global reference. Some, like women’s movements, were movements with broad social and cultural aims which had a wide-ranging influence on international politics. Others, however, like peace movements represented the opposite case: movements with very specific political goals designed to affect the workings of the interstate system and particularly to affect the dangers of war and the possibilities of peace. The genocidal character of nuclear warfare, with its total threat to society, stimulated new mass participatory movements against state strategies. Although peace organizations of various kinds have existed continuously for many decades, peace movements have tended to develop because of particular conflicts or crises. Unlike some other social movements, peace movements have tended to rise and fall quite dramatically in conjunction with particular international crises. In recent times, they have been of two main types: to halt or prevent particular wars (this type of movement is discussed ahead in relation to the 2003 Iraq war) and to oppose particular weapons developments (chiefly nuclear weapons). The latter, ‘nuclear disarmament’ movements emerged, primarily in Western Europe and North America, in two main periods (1958–63 and 1979–85) but almost disappeared in the intervening years and again at the end of the twentieth century. The author concentrates on the most recent phase of these movements, when they arose almost simultaneously in 1979–80 in a number of Western European countries, following the NATO decision to introduce new nuclear systems, especially cruise missiles, into five states (the United Kingdom, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium). From the beginning, although antinuclear campaigns arose locally and nationally within each state, the common

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framework of the NATO decision, while varied according to the missile installation timetable and national political situation, imposed a common agenda on the new European peace movements: to prevent the deployment of the new systems. In European states not directly affected, such as France and Spain, parallel movements arose with different national agendas. In the United States, a similar movement arose around the broader demand for a ‘nuclear freeze’. These movements were successful in mobilizing largescale demonstrations and influencing public opinion. While they imposed some delays in implementation, they failed however to prevent deployment of the new missiles, which was mostly completed by 1984 (or in the American case, to secure a general freeze on new nuclear deployments). Ironically, new disarmament proposals between the superpowers, which developed from 1986 after the coming to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in the USSR the previous year, appeared after the peace movement had gone into decline as a mass movement. In the short term, therefore, failures of nuclear disarmament movements were substantive and their successes largely symbolic. Their influence on European public opinion was significant: in all states designated for the deployment of cruise missiles, opinion poll majorities consistently opposed the deployments. They also influenced established civil society institutions like social– and liberal–democratic parties, media, and churches. The movements partially succeeded in their cultural goals: movement culture, in which pacifist, environmentalist/ green and feminist strands were strong, which had a powerful impact on many sections of society, especially the young. At a deeper level, the peace movements were less successful in shifting support for existing nuclear systems or for NATO, or in deflecting US and Western nuclear strategy. The movements stimulated a different political climate around nuclear weapons issues, forcing governments to justify and debate their policies; the bottom line, however, was that they failed in their manifest political aim of preventing missile deployments. A major reason for this is revealing: despite the movements’ influence on both public opinion and opposition parties, the parties which adopted or were more influenced by their demands were resoundingly defeated in national elections (notably the German Social– Democratic Party and British Labour Party in 1983, the American Democrats in 1984). The structural problems of social movements in the context of interstate politics largely account for the failures of the peace movements. The mutual solidarity of NATO governments helped them to withstand the separate (and variable) pressures of their national peace movements. The European peace movements faced the difficulty that the major center of NATO decisionmaking, the USA, was outside their reach. The difficulty

of stimulating a large-scale parallel peace movement in the Warsaw Pact states was a major additional factor, since it enabled NATO governments to claim that for them to halt their deployments would be ‘one-sided’ disarmament in the face of Soviet weapons modernization. Nonetheless, although the disarmament of the later 1980s arose primarily from interstate politics and the domestic politics and economics of the Soviet Union, the peace movements were an important part of the context which produced these changes. First, since peace movements stimulated strong popular support in Western Europe for detente and disarmament, they ensured Gorbachev of a positive Western European response to his disarmament proposals. Second, Ronald Reagan’s ‘zero option’ proposals for eliminating intermediate nuclear missiles, were initially produced as a propaganda measure to help counter the peace movements, but were picked up by Gorbachev and became an important element in the move towards agreement. Third, the small independent peace and human rights movements in Eastern Europe, stimulated by deliberate actions of the Western movements, helped to lay the foundations for mass opposition to the communist regimes. This led in turn to the East German and Czechoslovak revolutions of 1989 which overthrew the system and completed the ending of the Cold War. The 1980s began with one kind of social movement, the peace campaigners, on the streets of Western European capitals, and ended with another, the movement for democracy, on the streets of Eastern European capitals. These two movements, together, represented important moments in the complex processes – both within civil society and within and between states – which unravelled the Cold War system. Neither set of social movements could by itself claim direct and decisive responsibility for this change, but their actions contributed both directly and indirectly. Any account of the end of the Cold War which seeks to interpret it without reference to them is certainly lopsided. Peace movements and the wider civil society context which they helped to transform were significant factors in the processes of transformation.

Civil Society in Contemporary War and Peace Since the end of the Cold War, there have been new, dramatic transformations of global politics, the longerterm results of which are still uncertain. Economy and culture have become significantly more globalized, due particularly to the removal of the major political barriers between the former communist states and Western-led world economic and communications systems. War between Russia and the West has become as unthinkable as war between the major states of North America, Western Europe, and Japan became during the Cold War.

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Yet since the Islamist terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the USA has proclaimed a ‘global war on terror’, redefined five years later as a ‘long war’, a global conflict that could be as durable and fundamental to world politics as the Cold War. Civil society had a new centrality to what were called the ‘new wars’ of the 1990s (Kaldor 1999). With the diminution of classic interstate conflict, most major wars of this first post-Cold War decade were wars of state fragmentation in the former Soviet region, former Yugoslavia, and many regions of Africa. In these wars, the central issues were often the very composition of society and the character of civil society, as well as of the state. Two visions of civil society and its relations with the state have been in contest. On the one hand, ethnic nationalists have sought to define civil society and state in exclusivist terms. On the other, pluralists and democrats have contended for open and inclusive ideas of society and the state. Ethnic nationalism has arisen because of how political elites – in the post-Soviet and post-Yugoslav states, often old communists in new guises – have sought to maintain or carve out political power. They have exploited old ethnic differences to mobilize support and maintain legitimacy, and have utilized parts of the state and military apparatuses to create ethnically homogenous mini-states or fiefdoms. Many wars have been, like Hitler’s war against the Jews, wars against civilian populations and against civil societies and cultures. While these wars have often been directed against ‘other’ ethnic cultures, plural civil society has also been a key target of ethnic nationalism. In Bosnia, multi-ethnic Sarajevo, where intermarriage and ‘Yugoslav’ identification was relatively high, was a prime target of Serbian nationalists. Intellectuals who organized pluralist civil institutions – local officials, teachers etc. – have often been prime victims of the new genocidal politics. So-called ‘ethnic cleansing’ (since the term derives from the Serbian practitioners of violent expulsion, it is hardly adequate for social science) has targeted pluralists as well as people of other ethnicities. Although these elements of the ‘new wars’ are not really novel, the particular configuration of contemporary genocidal wars is distinctive. The trends towards global and transnational forms of civil society work in these wars in a number of different ways. On the one hand, the protagonists typically mobilize ethnic-national civil society in a trans-state and global manner. The Israeli state, for example, has long been dependent on the American Zionist lobby. More recently the Palestinians have also organized themselves with increasing effectiveness as a diaspora, not merely in the refugee camps of neighboring states but in the wealthier West too. Irish Republicanism has long depended on Irish–American support. Serbian and Croatian ethnic nationalisms were trans-state in the dual sense of being organized on a transrepublican basis

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within the former Yugoslav territory, and in drawing on the global Serb and Croat diasporas, again in North America but also in Western Europe and Australia. In these and other contemporary cases, the organization of civil society on an ethnic-national basis threatens to undermine the idea of a plural, often pan-ethnic civil society not only in the zones of conflict but also in areas of the advanced West where diaspora communities are strongly organized. The role of these civil societies in wars and even genocide shows a heightened tension between national and universal interpretations of civil values, which we noted existing in earlier periods. On the other hand, some sections of war-zone populations have defended the idea of plural, nonsectarian civil society, creating ‘islands of civility’ (Kaldor 1999). Some wars have been recognized as global political crises, so that civil society linkages have generated international support for victimized groups. Not only the protagonists of plural civil society, but the representatives of abused ethnic groups, have pressured Western states and the United Nations to provide protection against genocide and violence. Because Western states often fail to perceive traditional strategic interests in the plights of victims of war and genocide, and are reluctant to commit people and resources to helping them, the appeal of the oppressed is often directed at Western civil society, and linkages between civil society in zones of crisis and in the West are strengthened. These links can be seen as elements in the forging of global civil society. Two kinds of responses originating in Western civil societies have been crucial in generating support and protection. On the one hand, mass media have been the main agencies through which some (but by no means all) wars have become recognized as global crises, and through which political pressure for aid and intervention has developed. While the attention of mass media, especially television, to wars is undoubtedly selective, brief and episodic, and often led or circumscribed by the access for cameras and portable satellite dishes which determine picture availability, there is no doubt that it can have powerful effects. The intensive television campaign by news broadcasters during the Kurdish refugee crisis following the 1991 Gulf War, for example, helped push the American and British governments towards an unprecedented ‘humanitarian intervention’ in northern Iraq, which reversed their previous stance of nonintervention. The possibility and success of this campaign depended very much on the prior nexus of responsibility between Western leaders and Iraq, and in this sense was atypical. But elsewhere, media have still nudged governments, however unevenly, towards interventions, and once intervention has taken place, have made them aware of the responsibility that goes with it. On the other hand, humanitarian agencies, human rights campaigns, and other NGOs have been principal

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means both of mobilizing political pressure within Western societies, and of delivering aid within zones of crisis. Aid organizations mediate between donors and victims: in the zones of crisis, they are the physical representations of a substantial minority of Western public who donate and raise funds for the downtrodden in war zones; within Western societies, they are the symbolic representatives of the victims, seeking to mobilize support. Aid organizations have some of the aspects of social movements: the goal of mobilizing a large popular base, and the aim of changing social conditions (if only in an ameliorative sense). Of course, many agencies have longer-term development as well as short-term aid objectives, and some seek to organize people in a more campaigning mode to alter general perceptions of Third World problems. To this extent, these organizations operate in a social-movement mode; yet their primary relationship to their supporters is a passive financial one and so they fail the participatory or mobilizing test of a social movement. The international crises of the 1990s failed, indeed, to precipitate classic social-movement responses in Western societies. The Gulf and Kosovo Wars produced only brief intimations of antiwar movements of the kind seen over the Vietnam War. Despite the enormity of the mass killings in Bosnia, Rwanda, etc., which were extensively publicized in the mass media, these sorts of situations neither appeared as simple, nor was there a clear nexus of responsibility involving Western governments. Their challenges did not fit, moreover, into established ideological paradigms: Western governments could not be represented so easily as ‘imperialist’, nor could the demand for military intervention to protect victims of genocide be accommodated simply within the pacifist, or at least antimilitarist, traditions of most social movement activism. The Iraq War of 2003 was different. In response to the 9/11 attacks, the US attacks on the Taliban regime and al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan seemed to many like a legitimate response. But when President George W. Bush extended his ‘war on terror’ to attack the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, which had no connection with al-Qaida, on the pretext of its possessing ‘weapons of mass destruction’ despite UN inspections providing no evidence of these, this was widely seen as illegitimate. Opposed by most major states, including key Western allies like France and Germany, and widely viewed by international lawyers as lacking UN authorization (thus becoming illegal aggression), the prospect of an Iraq invasion aroused huge public opposition on a scale unseen since the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and the nuclear disarmament movements of the 1980s. Although these movements had also coordinated demonstrations across many countries, the February 15, 2003 protests took global coordination to new levels, with tens of millions on the streets of cities worldwide. The marches failed to

prevent the war, which Bush launched the following month, but contributed hugely to a worldwide perception of its illegitimacy. Even more than in previous cases, this movement failed to sustain mass street protests after the outbreak of war. Once the morally simple and overriding goal of preventing war was no longer the issue, the movement lacked clear foci in the more complex political landscape that succeeded in Iraq. Despite the debacle of the illprepared US occupation and the murderousness of the ensuing insurgency and counter-insurgency, social movement politics failed to make a strong impact on US policy. Nevertheless the legacy of the protest provided a moral background for the growing public disillusionment in the USA itself and ‘coalition’ countries like Britain, where Prime Minister Tony Blair was fundamentally damaged by his support for the war in the face of protests and public opinion. Although street protest movements faded, civil society organizations were able to make effective protests which affected public opinion and government policies over issues like the ill-treatment of prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay internment camp and in Abu Ghraib prison, Baghdad. In the twenty-first century, therefore, profound changes in world politics are posing new dilemmas of violence in which the nature and role of civil society is being transformed. The plural, global idea of civil society is central to the politics of peace, but the relations between this and the national framework in which civil society has historically been cast still contain many tensions. See also: Mass Media, General View; Peaceful Societies; Religious Traditions, Violence and Nonviolence; Ritual and Symbolic Behavior

Further Reading Clark, H. (2000). Civil resistance in Kosovo. London: Pluto. Cohen, J. L. and Arato, A. (1992). Civil society and political theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Falk, R. (1995). On humane governance. Cambridge: Polity. Frost, M. (1996). Ethics in international relations: A constitutive theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gill, S. (ed.) (1993). Historical materialism and international relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaldor, M. (1999). New and old wars. Cambridge: Polity. Mann, M. (2005). The dark side of democracy: Explaining ethnic cleansing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosenberg, J. (1994). The empire of civil society. London: Verso. Scott, A. (1990). Ideology and the new social movements. London: Unwin Hyman. Seligman, A. (1992). The idea of civil society. New York, NY: Free Press. Semelin, J. (1993). Unarmed against hitler: Civilian resistance in Europe, 1939–1943. Westport, CT: Praeger. Shaw, M. (1991). Post-military society. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Shaw, M. (1996). Civil society and media in global crises. Pinter: London. Shaw, M. (2006). The concept of genocide. Cambridge: Polity.

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Military Culture James Burk, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA Published by Elsevier Inc.

Elements of Military Culture Technology and the Experience of War Military Education and Training Collective Memory

Glossary Ceremonies The rituals of collective action that mark (and often celebrate) certain events or passages to new rank or status within the life of the military unit. Cohesion The emotional bond of shared identity and camaraderie among soldiers within their local military unit; in sociological terms, horizontal or primary group integration. Esprit de Corps The commitment and pride soldiers take in their military establishment and its effectiveness; in sociological terms, vertical or secondary group integration. Etiquette Normative prescriptions that guide or control interpersonal behavior especially between those of different rank or military status.

The study of military culture combines institutional and cultural analysis. It does not encompass every cultural contribution (or response) to the preparation for or conduct of war, but is limited rather to the study of those particular beliefs, values, rituals, and other symbolic productions that organize and sustain military organization. It does include the reception of these by the larger society to which the military belongs. Even with these restrictions, the subject matter is vast. A complete treatment would include detailed comparisons of military cultures from ancient times to the present and include societies from around the globe. Of particular interest would be comparisons based on the different approaches to war that characterize military culture in Europe, India, and China. Historically, the so-called Western way of war has, with few exceptions, emphasized the importance and glory of war, aiming at a decisive victory over one’s enemy through battles of annihilation; it elevated the warrior to a position of high status, second only to the political leader, who was often a warrior-king and the highest-ranking member of society. The strategic culture was quite different in India, where following the Vedic age and over a long period of transition, the Brahman priestly caste established its dominance over the (still elite) Kshatriya warrior caste. Particular Brahmans

Political and Social Trends Relation of Military Culture to the Larger Society Further Reading

Military Culture A symbolic ‘toolkit’ of rituals, ceremonies, assumptions, and beliefs that grow out of and guide a military force. Military Discipline Behavior of military personnel – as individuals or in group formations, in battle or in garrison – in conformity with previously prescribed rule, usually in response to command and the result of instruction and drill. Professional Ethos Normative understandings that define the corporate identity, code of conduct, and social worth of the officer corps.

sometimes ruled by military means, but that was not typical and not the basis of their power. More generally, the Brahmans were committed to the principle of nonviolence and thought violent acts degraded the ritual purity on which their high status depended. Similarly, in China, much has been made of the rule of Confucian scholars over military warriors and of the Confucian strategic culture, which downplays the use of force. Rather than engage in all-out wars of attrition, Chinese rulers favored the use of stratagems or minimum force. As may be expected, however, such broad contrasts are sometimes more misleading than helpful. In an important recent study of China during the Ming dynasty, Alastair Iain Johnston provides clear evidence that in addition to the better-known Confucian culture there was another ‘parabellum’ culture. The parabellum culture more closely resembled Western notions of ‘strategic realism’ than the Confucian ethos and was the primary guide to Chinese military practice. Even more could be done. Archeaologists writing since the 1990s, spurred by the ethnic violence of that decade, launched new enquiries into the origins, conduct, and social commemoration of war in prehistoric as well as more recent societies. L. H. Keeley’s influential War Before Civilization (1996) debunked the ‘‘myth of the

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peaceful savage,’’ arguing that earlier anthropological and archaeological studies had artificially ‘‘pacified’’ the human past. Also critical of earlier theories, J. N. Thorpe finds fault with universal theories about the origins of war because they suppose uniformity in practice when the archaeological evidence documents an enormous variation in the onset and scale of conflict and warfare – and so presumably also in the cultures of violence in prehistoric times. Similar ideas about cross-cultural and historical variations in the meaning of warriors and warfare are evident in what Roberta Gilchrist (and others) call the ‘‘social commemoration’’ of violent conflicts. In related work, Jonathan Lear examined the problems of belief and meaning posed for a Native American tribe when its warrior culture (central to tribal life) collided with the military culture of the United States. To avoid problems of misleading generalization, it is clear that boundaries must be placed around the inquiry. This treatment of military culture will focus on the experience of Western armed forces in the modern era broadly conceived. This emphasis is due also to the ready availability of sources and may also be justified on substantive grounds by the relative predominance of Western military organization over the last four centuries. Three themes are covered in this article: (1) the elements of military culture, (2) the sources of continuity and change in military culture, and (3) the relation between military culture and the larger society.

Elements of Military Culture Modern military institutions are organized and supported by states to wage war and enforce domestic order. The precise balance between these two tasks has varied by state and historical circumstance. At any one time, armies are usually engaged in one task or the other. So the European armies that fought in the Napoleonic Wars early in the nineteenth century spent much of their time over the next 30 years suppressing internal rebellions. The army of the United States occupied by preparing for and fighting wars in the twentieth century spent the 30 years following the Civil War enforcing Reconstruction in the South, opening the frontier against the resistance of native Americans, and quelling labor disputes. Sometimes, however, armies perform both tasks simultaneously. The British army, for instance, from the 1970s until the end of the Cold War, maintained order in Northern Ireland and was deployed in Germany to help deter war with the Soviet Union. Only on rare occasions have states – such as Costa Rica and, to a lesser extent and for quite different reasons, Japan – maintained armed forces only for domestic and limited defensive purposes. Before the age of nation-states, however, one could not so clearly distinguish between these tasks. Preparing for and fighting war was the military’s

central mission and arguably its only mission. Despite the proliferation of humanitarian and peacekeeping assignments, which armed forces have taken on since the Cold War, war-fighting still determines the central beliefs, values, and complex symbolic formations that define military culture. Military culture is no more homogeneous than human culture or war itself. Like all cultures it is, to use Ann Swidler’s term, a kind of ‘‘tool kit’’ and it holds at least four distinct and commonly used tools: discipline, professional ethos, ceremonies and etiquette, and esprit de corps and cohesion. In general, however, one finds in each element an attempt to deal with (and, if possible, to overcome) the uncertainty of war, impose some pattern on war, control war’s outcome, and invest it with meaning or significance. That is not to assert a simple functional theory of culture, in which the elements of culture operate together as mechanisms to adapt armed forces to war’s turbulent environment. It is especially not to assert that these cultural elements are instrumentally rational, ‘fitting’ armed forces to the task of fighting wars. Historically, there is abundant evidence to show that they may or may not be functional or instrumentally rational for military organization and that they may or may not operate cooperatively. Although intended to facilitate the effective functioning of its forces, a political and military culture may also blind military leaders to certain facts of a situation and inhibit their strategic capabilities. Svetlana Savranskaya’s analysis of Soviet documents and memoirs from the period of Soviet invasion in Afghanistan suggests, for example, that preconceptions about tribal society and the role of Islam in Afghan culture prevented the Soviet military from making wise strategic choices. Nor is it to conceive of military culture as simply derivative from the experience of war, as if war were an external stimulus evoking military culture in response. Rather, military culture is an elaborate social construction, an exercise of creative intelligence, through which we come to imagine war in a particular way and to embrace certain rationalizations about how war should be conducted and for what purposes. While it is a response to war, one effect of military culture (perhaps its most important effect) is to influence the likelihood and form of war itself. Discipline Military discipline refers to the orderly conduct of military personnel – whether individually or in formation, in battle, or in garrison – most often as prescribed by their officers in command. A high level of discipline begins with instruction and is perfected through repetitive drill that makes the desired action a matter of habit. (This may explain why many believe that the military is an institution that requires uncritical and instant obedience to orders.

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The belief is exaggerated.) An obvious aim of rituals of discipline is to minimize the confusion and disintegrative consequences of battle by imposing order on it. Discipline provides military personnel with a repertoire of patterned actions that they may use on their own initiative or in coordination with others quickly to adapt to and (hopefully) prevail in battle. Another aim, perhaps less obvious, is to ritualize the violence of war, to set it apart from ordinary life. Following the discipline reassures soldiers, telling when and how they (and not others) are ‘authorized’ to violate the usual taboos against killing and destruction. In modern militaries, this is a formalized and deliberate practice. As David Grossman argues, a major goal of contemporary military training is to overcome a soldier’s ‘‘natural resistance’’ to killing other humans. What kind of discipline the military requires and how it is achieved varies historically. At least two patterns can be discerned. One is ancient and has to do with the relative importance of individuals versus military units in waging combat. The other is modern and has to do with changing methods for enforcing discipline. Individual versus group discipline

Historically, it is common for military organizations to be little more than a charismatic band of individual warriors, each fighting for his own reputation and honor. Occasionally, but characteristically in our time, military organization entails a high level of coordination with fighting carried out by well-drilled units in formation. War as combat among individual ‘warrior heroes’ is not without discipline or ritual, as readers of Homer’s Iliad will know. Fighting of this kind is frequently governed by complex conventions and rituals. In any case, it requires extraordinary personal discipline to overcome the fear of close combat, to endure the physical strain of battle, and to express oneself through skill in wielding weapons. Such warfare was not confined to primitive infantry. It characterized war dominated by cavalry from the ancient charioteers to the ritualized feudal warfare of European knights or the raids of Cossacks swooping across the steppes of Central Asia. Air combat among fighter pilots continues the tradition in the midst of modern war. In these cases, military discipline is a personal attainment achieved, if at all, through individual competence and exertion. In sharp contrast is warfare based on the group discipline of well-drilled infantry. Whether we look at the hoplites of ancient Greece, Swiss pikemen fighting feudal knights, the armies of Maurice of Nassau and Gustavus Adolphus harnessing the power of gunpowder, or the conduct of joint force operations as prescribed by contemporary air–land battle doctrine, fighting with these forces envisions the coordinated and simultaneous movement of soldiers as a group in response to their leaders’ commands. This is only possible to do after countless hours of instruction and much practice in the arts of close-order drill. In these armies,

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individual will is subordinate to the group. The results of group discipline have often been astonishing, enabling well-disciplined troops to deliver an enormous shock when on the attack and to remain intact while bearing the brunt of enemy fire. But the results were gained at a cost. Because group discipline requires continuous drill in preparation for war, whenever it gained influence, it encouraged formation of either a military class, as in ancient Sparta and in Japan under the Samurai, or a professional standing army, as it has done in Europe since the seventeenth century. One exception to this usual occurrence is found in the mass armies industrialized countries raised in the late nineteenth century and used to wage world wars in the twentieth century. Mass armies depended on group discipline but were staffed by conscription and so reflected the heterogeneous identities and outlooks of the whole population. This posed problems of integration – some still unresolved even in professional militaries – to diminish the importance of differences based on race or ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. As Carol Burke has shown, traditional rites of passage – military haircuts on entry, uniform dress, off-color ‘Jody’ songs chanted on an infantry march, or degradation ceremonies to mark a sailor’s first crossing of the equator – were designed to suppress individuality and forge a common (stereotypically male) identity. Neither the looser discipline of individual warriors nor the stricter discipline of well-drilled infantry guaranteed victory or survival in battle. Historically, the dominance of one kind of discipline or the other depended largely on what kind of weapons were used, a matter to which we will return. For now, it is enough to observe that modern military cultures assume a high (perhaps even an increasing) level of group discipline as part of their operational strategy, and have done so, with some exceptions, since the seventeenth century. From punitive to positive social control

Discipline, of course, is a means of social control. It may be defined by customary beliefs about how to wage war, but is enforced by authority. When we confine attention to modern militaries, we observe an important shift in the methods authorities use to enforce their discipline away from harsh corporeal punishment to a more positive leadership by persuasion, manipulation, and example. It is no exaggeration to say that group discipline in the new militaries formed in the seventeenth century was enforced by the lash and continued to be so through the nineteenth century. British soldiers serving during Queen Victoria’s reign could expect to receive 150 lashes for failing to answer roll call, more for stealing a pig, more still for failing properly to perform one’s duty as a sentinel, and many more for stealing money from a comrade. Major crimes were punished by death. Yet these nineteenthcentury punishments were more moderate than those

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meted out before – King George III limited (to 1000) the maximum number of lashes that could be inflicted for a serious breach of discipline – and they became more moderate still. Flogging was abolished before the end of the nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century, British officers punished soldiers by confinement to barracks or, for more serious offenses, by turning the case over for adjudication by court-martial. Following World War I, the use of court-martial to impose death penalties was restricted. This moderation did not mean an end to discipline but marked a different perception of how discipline should be achieved. Morris Janowitz noted a similar trend in his classic study of the American military, The Professional Soldier (1960). In his terms, discipline based on domination declined in effectiveness as war industrialized. With industrialization, military organization became more complex and its discipline required coordination of technological specialists stretching from the front lines to the home front. For such an organization, authoritarian discipline was no longer effective. Rather, leaders had to influence behavior by emphasizing the importance of achieving group goals, to gain the benefits of discipline by building consensus. No doubt, Janowitz is right to emphasize the importance of industrialization and the growing complexity of military organization as a cause of this change in the means of enforcing discipline. Not less important, however, was the preindustrial rise of the mass armed force whose power was demonstrated by the French Revolutionary Armies led by Napoleon. Before the French Revolution, enlisted personnel were typically outcasts, misfits, or worse, who were impressed from the lower reaches of society and forced to serve. While the eighteenth-century officer corps were careful not to waste scarce military assets, they did not strongly identify with these men or regard them as people entitled to respect. The power of the mass army, harnessed to nationalist democratic social movements, changed the social composition of military forces in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As the officers of World War I learned through bloody trial and error, a mass army, representative of the population, could not be led to fight by authoritarian means; it had to be convinced of the technical competence of its leaders and of the reasonableness of the goals it was asked to achieve. Military discipline is not absolute, but must conform to the expectations of the society it represents. Professional Ethos Depending on how one defines ‘military professional’, it is anachronistic to speak of a professional military before the seventeenth century or even later. To be sure there are earlier examples of warrior castes or groups (like the Roman legions) for whom war-fighting was the chief means of employment. And one may say, at least in

terms of ideal culture, that the warrior knights of feudal Europe conceived of themselves as engaged in a calling, not very different from a religious vocation. A professional officer corps, however, entails more than this. It possesses a corporate identity based on expert knowledge of and control over the means of violence, with that knowledge and control deployed in the service of the state and rendered in accordance with a relatively explicit normative code of conduct. Not until the seventeenth century do we begin to discern development of such a corps. Its beginnings are due largely to requirements of the ‘military revolution’ in discipline and organization. The newly forming standing armies of the (then) absolutist nation-states needed a relatively large number of officers serving full-time to instruct, drill, and command soldiers in the new techniques of close formation fire, to use scientific, engineering, and tactical knowledge for inventing new guns, cannon, or other weaponry, and to manage the increasingly heavy logistical demands these new armies imposed. While still important, traditional hereditary qualifications and part-time service, central to feudal military organization, were not sufficient to accomplish these tasks. Over time, they lost importance. A key element distinguishing the emergent modern officer corps was its professional ethos. Its ethos, a set of normative understandings, defined its corporate identity, its code of conduct, and (for the officers at least) its social worth. It expressed the ideal commitments of the modern military officer. It was and still is a complex amalgam of (1) the heroic traditions of knighthood inherited from the feudal past, (2) the technological traditions associated with modern weaponry’s design and use, and (3) the managerial traditions of modern bureaucracies that emphasize skilled leadership and coordination of human effort to achieve group goals by rationally efficient means. The knightly heroic traditions emphasize bravery in combat and loyalty to one’s comrades and liege. They retain power today, as shown in the symbols used in advertisements for military recruiting and, more importantly, in the high prestige accorded those who have faced combat. Modern officers are normatively proscribed from turning down a combat command and are always supposed to deplore ‘desk jobs’ as a distraction from their ‘true’ calling. This is so even in the twenty-first century when combat arms represent only a small proportion of the total military establishment. Preparing for and facing battle remains the central commitment. It is a shared commitment that presumes personal willingness to kill and accepts the risk of being killed, for oneself and for those one commands – not indiscriminately, of course, but in defense of the state and in the context of war. This commitment underlies the professional soldier’s corporate identity, as the pursuit of truth underlies the corporate identity of scholars. Fulfilling the commitment, however, requires more than a knight’s bravery. Over time, it required increasingly

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specific theoretical and technical knowledge that could not be obtained without formal study. Once recognized, early in the nineteenth century, it led states throughout Europe and North America to establish military academies to train junior officers and staff colleges and other advanced schools to train field-grade and senior officers. First in Germany, then elsewhere, formal training was put to use under the direction of a general staff of senior officers who engaged in formal planning for the waging of possible future wars. This imposition of formal education had normative overtones. The virtue of professional officers rested and rests still on their ability successfully to accomplish their mission. Though offering no guarantees, formal training was necessary for officers to be competent in the use of modern weapons and tactics. Encompassing bravery and technical competence, the professional ethos rests also on beliefs about effective leadership. Willingness and skill at facing combat are not enough. To be effective in combat, soldiers must believe that they are being asked to risk their lives and others’ for some higher good, and typically that they are waging war not for its own sake but for the sake of their country. They must also believe that their leaders hold their well-being in high regard. These beliefs are earned, if at all, by the officer’s managerial competence to discern and provide for the needs of those he (or she) commands. Meeting these needs demands bureaucratic skill to organize and supply basic provisions of food, shelter, clothes, medical care, and the means to fight. But moral competence is required as much as bureaucratic skill: to know when battle serves a purpose; to calculate that battle has some fair chance of success, consistent with the risks being run; and to possess the rudimentary decency and integrity to refrain from useless slaughter. In short, the professional ethos of the officer corps sets a high standard. The ideal of heroic, technically and morally competent combat leaders is rarely, perhaps never completely, realized. Its importance, however, for us and for those in the military, lies in what it imagines professional officers to be. It defines their virtue and worth in terms of their preparation to fight war. Since the end of World War II, the foundations of this professional ethos have been subject to erosion. Professional officers may wish still to define themselves in its light. But the ethos is rooted in assumptions about the inevitability and in some sense the positive value (or justice) of interstate war. The changing nature of war over the last 50 years, perhaps longer, challenges the relevance of both assumptions. If nothing else, the threat of nuclear war has caused militaries to prepare more for deterring than for fighting war. Following the logic of deterrence, preparations for war are successful when no war actually occurs. This stands in sharp contrast to the logic of war-fighting that judges success at war preparations by victory in battle. The shift in outlook has meant the military spends much time engaged

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in what Martin van Creveld has called ‘‘make-believe’’ war – in the simulation of combat to demonstrate both to oneself and potential adversaries that any real war would be selfdefeating. Under these circumstances, the traditional ethos of professional soldiers based on combat seems no longer appropriate. Yet no suitable alternative has developed to take its place. Meanwhile, departure from tradition risks turning the professional soldier’s vocation into an ordinary career; rather than a special calling, it is just another job. Justifying its importance, which is necessary to gain funding and other social resources, becomes a more difficult task. Increasingly, justifications are based on the performance of new military tasks such as peacekeeping and humanitarian relief. But, however similar these are to war, they are not war; the ethos of the professional peacekeeper, unlike the ethos of the professional warrior, has yet to be defined. Ceremony and Etiquette Outside of war, perhaps, the ceremonial displays and etiquette that pervade military life are the most readily observable elements of modern military culture. These displays are connected to the business of war. Brightcolored uniforms and unfurled flags were an aid to commanders and soldiers in early modern warfare, if only because they helped to distinguish friendly from enemy forces. Similarly, the drum rolls and bugle calls that punctuated a day in garrison helped maintain a system of communication to direct force movements. Foot parades and the more contemporary air shows by military aviators exhibit excellence in close-order movement and maneuver on which well-drilled militaries depend for success in battle. But the connection of military ceremonies and etiquette to war is looser and more subtle than these illustrations suggest. Today’s battlefields call for camouflaged dress, electronic communication, and dispersed movement in motor vehicles, but military uniforms for dress occasions remain brightly colored and drummed cadences still pace military parades. Military ceremonies and etiquette make up an elaborate ritual and play the role that ritual typically plays in society: to control or mask our anxieties and ignorance; to affirm our solidarity with one another; and to celebrate our being, usually in connection with some larger universe. No matter how it’s fought or when, war presents harsh realities of death, disease, and destruction, realities that have not grown less harsh over time. These are difficult to experience and, once experienced, difficult to contemplate, much less to comprehend. They can only be approached at a distance, through the filters of social forms. Some few, like the British poet Wilfred Owen, use their art to help with the task. Most in the military (and elsewhere) are not so creative and rely instead on already constructed rituals to guide their conduct and to preserve a semblance of order and meaning in a situation that

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threatens to overwhelm both. The effectiveness of military rituals to control anxiety about facing war arises from their familiarity, acquired by use in garrison, long before battle is joined. Ceremonies of induction and promotion or change of command, for military weddings, retirements, and funerals – these mark the life cycle of soldiers as formations at dawn and dusk, ceremonies for changing the guard, marching in review, and periodic inspections mark the passing of the soldier’s working day. No doubt, in peace time, they also occupy and make up part of a boring, seemingly endless routine; they may degenerate, in peace or war, into burdens soldiers rightly call ‘‘chickenshit.’’ Yet, when tragedies occur – a plane crash killing a company of peacekeepers on their way home for Christmas, a terrorist bomb ripping a barracks, or death in battle – they provide a ready framework for survivors to mourn and commemorate the dead and to uphold, albeit fragilely, the structure of a world where (in their lives) chaos took root. Apart from tragedy, military ceremonies and etiquette are rituals that mark collective identity and group affiliation. They take a variety of forms but are usually highly visible and officially sanctioned. Almost universal among militaries is the practice of saluting as a sign of deference and the wearing of distinctive uniforms that bear emblems of one’s unit, one’s rank, and one’s achievements. They may be illustrated best perhaps by the traditions surrounding the British regimental system. Some dating back to the seventeenth century, these regiments often wear the colors and crest of the royal who led them. They have a flag of their own, traditions of dining, reunions with former members, and annual celebrations of the day they won their major battle honor. Such practices forge a common identity and symbolize a common fate. And, while the strength of the regimental system today is not what it once was, similar practices in the military establishments of other nations suggest that they are unlikely to disappear. One can point for instance to the Canadian military’s attempt in recent times to institute a common uniform to be worn by members of the air force, army, and navy. Probably cheaper and certainly emphasizing the importance of joint operations in the present age, the attempt at uniformity was nevertheless enormously unpopular and finally abandoned. A common military identity bears the marks of its various services, branches, and units, and of the history associated with each one. They are not easily abandoned. They are totems around which one’s military identity and purpose are formed. It would be a mistake to assume that this ceremonialism is an anachronistic persistence of tradition into modern times. Not the least important role they play is to celebrate or honor unique achievements by those who have served. The practice is as old as the laurel crowns given to heroes in ancient Greece and probably older. Membership in honorary orders, like the Order of St. John of Jerusalem or the Order of the Garter, began

in the Middle Ages as a means of recognizing extraordinary service by particular knights. But the institution of decorations and medals for gallantry in combat or other kinds of service only began in the nineteenth century. The French Legion of Honor and the German Iron Cross were first awarded during the Napoleonic Wars, the British Victoria Cross in 1857 to veterans of the Crimean War, and the US Congressional Medal of Honor in the Civil War. The French Croix de Guerre was not introduced until 1915. The importance of these awards to the honor of military personnel was illustrated tragically in the United States in 1996 when its Chief of Naval Operations committed suicide, in part because of accusations that he wore a badge for valor that he had not earned. More recently, a federal judge assigned the stiffest possible penalty to two men convicted of making and selling unauthorized tokens of the Congressional Medal of Honor. An important purpose of these awards and other public military ceremonies is to connect the burdens of military service with the larger society the military serves. The connection is largely symbolic, of course, but weighted with meaning. Sometimes the ceremonies are grave as they are when heads of state lay wreaths on the tombs of unknown soldiers. Sometimes the ceremonies are joyful, as are commemorations of the Queen’s Birthday in Britain, of Bastille Day in France, or Independence Day in the United States. Grave or joyful, they hope to convey the full meaning of military service, to show how central military service is to the life and well-being of the country. Precisely because this is their aim, they can also arouse controversy. So, for instance, President Reagan’s decision to lay a wreath in a German cemetery in Bitburg horrified some Americans (including veterans of World War II) who thought his act might seem to honor Nazi war dead buried there. And so it was a powerful symbol when some Vietnam War veterans returned medals they had earned, in protest against policies continuing the war. Cohesion and Esprit de Corps Less visible than ceremonies or displays of etiquette, but hardly less important to military effectiveness, is the morale of military personnel, whether high or low. Morale is a product of cohesion and esprit de corps; and these are intangible, highly changeable elements of military culture. Military cohesion refers to the feelings of identity and comradeship that soldiers hold for those in their immediate military unit; it is an outgrowth of face-to-face or primary group relations or, in formal terms, of horizontal integration. Esprit de corps, in contrast, refers to the commitment and pride soldiers take in the larger military establishment to which their immediate unit belongs; it is an outgrowth of secondary group relations or, again formally, of vertical integration. Both result to an important degree from structural factors of military

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organization, but are primarily matters of belief and emotional attachments. They refer in particular to beliefs and attachments that shape the willingness of military personnel actually to perform their mission. They refer, in short, to the soldiers’ willingness to fight. Appreciation of the importance of cohesion and esprit de corps as aspects of military culture has grown over time. The reasons for this are twofold. The French Revolution introduced the idea of the military as a ‘nation in arms’. Those in the military were not a class separate from society. They were drawn from and representative of the society as a whole, preparing or mobilized for war. But they were not professionals. The rank and file were civilians conscripted into service, in peace for a short term of training and in war, particularly the world wars, for the duration of the conflict. How they would respond to military discipline and the stress of combat was open to doubt. At the same time, industrialization of war – which introduced long-range artillery, smokeless gunpowder, and machine gunfire – required troops to be widely dispersed over extended battle lines, a requirement that unfortunately took some time to grasp. No longer in close physical proximity with one another, soldiers had to exercise initiative in carrying out their orders and they had to be confident that their comrades would do the same. Initially it was thought that the beliefs that underlay high levels of cohesion and esprit de corps derived from the love of country and attachment to ideological commitments of the state. Many writers at the turn of the twentieth century dwelt on the importance of statesponsored efforts to inculcate patriotic sentiments in youth in schools and to provide opportunities to enact these sentiments through paramilitary clubs and other military training programs, voluntary or compulsory. These ideas intensified during World War I. The British Army, for example, instituted an extensive program of political education in response to worries of senior officers that their men did not understand what they were fighting for and so might not fight at all. During World War II, American soldiers (and civilians) were shown short movies of high quality, directed by Frank Capra, and other leading Hollywood directors, to explain and justify ‘‘why we fight.’’ In both wars, countries on all sides printed posters relying on simple slogans and graphic images to convey ideas (often ideas for action) the government wanted people to believe. These programs may have had some positive effect on esprit de corps, providing a vague sense of the justice of one’s cause and the basic goodness of the society for which one fought. But a long stream of social science research has shown that factors other than ideology are more important in forming military cohesion. Cohesion among soldiers, especially in war, rests on concrete and primary experiences. The historian William McNeill has recently suggested that cohesion results from military drill, that there is a kind of ‘‘muscular bonding’’ arising from the practice of marching together in time, not

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very different from the bonding that occurs among those engaged in a collective dance or enacting a common religious ritual. There may be something to this claim. But there is more to cohesion than ‘‘muscular bonding.’’ In their classic essay studying cohesion and disintegration of the Wehrmacht during the last months of World War II, Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz directly challenged the argument that German soldiers continued to fight from commitment to Nazi ideology. More important, they argued, was the capacity of the soldiers’ immediate unit, their company and platoon, to meet their basic needs for food and shelter, and for affection and esteem. These were more important because war posed a genuine threat to their sense of security and the recognition of their worth as human beings. So long as these needs were met, soldiers believed themselves part of a powerful group and felt responsible, even empowered, to fight for their group’s well-being. When these needs were not being met, soldiers felt alone and unable to protect themselves; the unit disintegrated and fighting stopped. Esprit de corps is an important factor affecting smallunit cohesion. Small units, to be effective, must be tied to a larger group. Their capacity to operate depends on links with larger units (the battalion, the regiment, the division, etc.), which provide their supplies, maintain symbols of the homeland, and regulate their exposure to war’s danger through the exercise of command. Clearly, more is involved than material organization. Small-unit nesting within a hierarchical organization constructs a situationspecific context within which unit operations gain or lose meaning and become objects of pride or disgrace. The defense of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge illustrates the point. The American general commanding the defense of the city, encircled by Germans, was confident when refusing German terms of surrender. He knew that holding the city was critical to Allied war plans and that relief was on the way from Patton’s Third Army. His confidence and commitment, communicated to the rank and file, reinforced their cohesion, strengthened their pride in their division, and increased their willingness to fight despite being surrounded by the enemy and perilously short on supplies. In the same way, members of Patton’s army drove hard through foul weather and overcame stiff German resistance to relieve the besieged city. They did so knowing that their local sacrifice was meaningful: to rescue one’s countrymen from an enemy and to stop the Germans from advancing into France. Without the sense that sacrifice is worthwhile, esprit de corps declines, threatening military discipline, effectiveness, and cohesion. This was true, for instance, for US forces in Vietnam during the last years of American involvement in that war. The relationship between esprit de corps and cohesion, however, is more complex than these examples suggest. While esprit de corps cannot be high when cohesion is low, the reverse is not necessarily true. French soldiers

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who survived Verdun and the Somme in 1916 mutinied after another failed and bloody offensive in April of 1917. But their mutiny did not signal the disintegration of small units. On the contrary, cohesion remained high. It was their esprit de corps, their pride and dedication to the larger military command, that unraveled. What they refused to do was fight for generals who would lead them into another offensive slaughter. Their obedience was regained and discipline restored, but only after a change in command and an agreement to deploy troops defensively. A Cautionary Note A cautionary note is in order. Those concerned with the effectiveness of military institutions may wish to conclude that while military culture is heterogeneous, its elements are reinforcing. If discipline is strong, professional ethos is well-developed, military ceremonies and etiquette are fully observed, and esprit de corps and cohesion are high, then military institutions presumably operate at their best. Yet it is unwise to argue this way for at least two reasons. First, this list of elements of military culture is not exhaustive. The present author does not think any description of military culture could ignore the elements included here. They are necessary. But they may not be sufficient. Social historians in particular may wish to pay attention (say) to soldiers’ songs and religious beliefs or to the moral life of military encampments; philosophers and legal scholars may wish to pay attention to the laws and conventions regulating the justice and just conduct of war; and students of language may wish to examine how military terminology (often euphemisms) clarify or obscure our reasoning about war. In any case, military culture does not live in isolation. It breathes – influences and is influenced by – the air of the larger culture of the society the military serves. The full effects of military culture on military performance are determined in this larger context. Second, it is not at all clear that these various cultural elements are mutually reinforcing or that they enhance military effectiveness. The cohesion of French mutineers is only an obvious case in point. Consider another. Close observance of ceremonies and etiquette handed down from the past may reinforce a corporate identity on which professional ethos rests. But the ceremonialism and etiquette that reinforced the professional ethos of mounted cavalry officers hindered their military effectiveness in World War I, as it hindered the Mamelukes who faced Napoleon more than 100 years before. Examples could be multiplied. Certainly future studies should examine how cultural elements are related and trace the effects of these relationships on military organization and performance. We may find some reasons for the persistence of dysfunctional military cultures, say, in the all-too-human habit to repeat in the future ways of acting that worked in the past or else in the practice of

many modern militaries to rotate leaders from one job to another, thus limiting their ability to undertake long-term or fundamental reforms. But it is idle to expect a general theory of military culture that precisely prescribes cultural relationships that invariably enhance that performance. Like all cultures, military culture varies in form and substance, and for many of the same reasons. Military culture is handed down across generations. Some, of course, are attached to the status quo, whether critically or not, and they try to reproduce in the future what they inherited from the past. The strength of this attachment no doubt is stronger for victorious than defeated militaries. Yet even with victorious militaries, passing on a military culture is difficult to do. Successful transmission is selective at best. Many factors push military culture to change. It changes from within when basic patterns of military action change, usually in response to new technologies, from stirrups and gunpowder to jet planes and nuclear bombs. It changes as military innovators such as Maurice of Nassau or Gerhard von Scharnhorst reflect on the experience of war and devise new practices or promote new beliefs that they hope will, if adopted, increase the likelihood of wartime success. And it changes in response to influences from the larger society, as memories of war shape beliefs about what the military can or ought to be like and as other social and political trends alter the context within which judgments are made about the quality of military life.

Technology and the Experience of War That technology affects culture is an old and welldocumented belief. In the case of military culture the rationale for it is often simple and direct. Technology, particularly weapons technology, profoundly affects the experience of war and the military culture that is in large part a response to that experience. To illustrate the point, consider first the effects of industrialization on war and military culture, effects that have already been mentioned in passing. Industrial development of the means of communication (e.g., telegraph, radio, radar, computer, and satellite) and transportation (e.g., steamships and railroads, trucks and tanks, airplanes and rockets) radically reshaped the ability to move, supply, and control the power of armed forces at war. For the first time, militaries were deployable largely without regard to the seasons, which is to say without remission. Application of industrial technology to the weapons of war (from rifled projectiles and machine guns to nuclear weapons of mass destruction) radically increased the lethality of military firepower and the geographical theater of battle. The force of these developments were first shown in the American Civil War but were not fully felt until the world wars of the twentieth century. The effects on military culture were profound. Horse-mounted

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cavalry and the bayonet charge, with their associated culture of brave warriors seeking glory in war, were abandoned as suicidal in the face of long-range and rapid-fire weapons. For similar reasons, traditional bright-colored battle attire, and the spectacle that went along with it, gave way to camouflage and the search for cover in trenches and foxholes. Not less important was the transformation of the ethos of the professional officer corps. Industrial war required military leaders who were more than heroic characters. Indeed, senior officers who planned campaigns might not see the battlefield at all. What counted was their ability to mobilize and command the new technologies of destruction and their ability to organize and manage the huge logistical demands of an industrial army at war. Most radical, industrialization increased the destructive power of weapons to such a degree that serious military thinkers now believe that the use of modern weapons, without restraint, would be self-defeating. The idea challenges the previously taken-for-granted belief that war is an inevitable (if lamentable) feature of social life. Consider also organizational differences and the still intense rivalry among army, navy, and air forces. The bases for these differences can be explained in part by the self-interested competition for scarce resources; money spent building stealth bombers means less money for building aircraft carriers or tanks. Yet more is at work than competitive self-interest. Each service fights in a unique environment to gain effective control over the land, sea, or air. The unique features of these environments affect weapons technology, the way force is organized and controlled and, as a result, the culture of the service and fundamental beliefs about the nature of war and the qualities of effective leaders. In Command, Control, and the Common Defense, Kenneth Allard has examined how these differences molded the doctrine and professional ethos of US army and navy officers. For the army, success in battle depends on the application of mass force at the decisive point of the battle line, which requires a division of authority organized and coordinated hierarchically. This belief rests on the army’s need in land battles to maintain flexible control over the movements of large numbers of soldiers through subordinate commands. Successfully acting on this belief depends on communication technologies (whether messengers, flags, drum rolls, bugle calls or, now, computers and radio) that enable the commander to instruct subordinates on how to deploy. For the navy, in contrast, success in battle depends on the exercise of the undivided and unchallenged authority of the ship’s captain. Historically, this belief rested on the small number of ships most navies could afford, which were typically deployed alone or in small squadrons. And it rested, before the age of radio, on the technical impossibility of exercising central control over a squadron once battles began. Commanders could not readily extend their influence beyond their own ship.

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Not surprisingly, navies developed a unique service culture that cherishes decentralized organization and distrusts concentrated authority, while the army culture cherishes centralized organization and distrusts authority that operates outside a chain of accountability and policy control. The navy cultivates a professional ethos that rewards a field commander’s willingness to act independently. The army cultivates a professional ethos that rewards a field commander’s willingness to act interdependently. We would nevertheless be mistaken to believe that the technology of war determines military culture. In fact, the relationship is a complex one of mutual influence. The prevailing military culture affects whether or how new military technologies are received or rejected. Samurai warriors in sixteenth-century Japan, for instance, were quick to adopt and manufacture firearms once they were introduced on the island. But the social leveling effects of firearms in battle seriously threatened the military and political dominance of the warrior knights (and indeed of the existing social order). Early in the seventeenth century the ruling Tokugawa lord moved effectively to ban firearms from Japanese warfare. He established an effective monopoly over the manufacture, purchase, and use of firearms and, over the course of the seventeenth century, restrictions on the use of firearms multiplied and their manufacture decreased virtually to nothing (despite Japan’s relatively advanced technological capacities). In this case, the military potential of the new technology was recognized, but after a trial its adoption was rejected in order to preserve the samurais’ rule and to support what they thought was a superior military culture. Their rejection of firearms continued for 200 years. In other cases, the military potential of an invention may lay unrecognized for long periods of time. Though invented centuries earlier in China, the military value of the stirrup was not realized until the eighth century, when the stirrup arrived in Frankish realms and was adopted by Charles Martel and his sons to permit a new and devastating mounted shock combat. The effect (as we know thanks to Lynn White, historian of this event) was to establish feudalism as a new type of warfare, dominated by knights, and with it a new social and cultural order in Europe, elements of which persist to this day. Most often, a new technology will be received, but how it is deployed or developed reflects the military culture of the particular armed force. Many differences in the design of ‘rugged’ Russian versus ‘sophisticated’ American fighter jets, for example, owe more to differences in their respective beliefs about the nature of air combat than to differences in their technological capacities.

Military Education and Training Before the nineteenth century, formal military education was rare, and state-sponsored institutions to promote the

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education of the officer corps were rarer still. Military education, such as it was, consisted largely of military drill and hands-on weapons training. In some cases, officers were sent to observe when others fought in war. Technical schools were founded in the seventeenth century to promote the application of science to artillery, but this was an exception, not a model. Only in the nineteenth century were schools established for advanced officer education. Even then, it was after World War I that noble but (relatively) untrained officers were finally displaced by the professionally educated. Three reasons can be suggested to explain why schools for advanced officer education were established at this time. First, Enlightenment thought emphasized the capacity of reason and the applicability of scientific thought in particular to explain and regulate all human affairs. The general influence of Enlightenment ideas made it possible to think that war was more than a practical art; that it was also a subject governed by scientific laws that might be discovered through a positivist, empirical study. The greatest product of this belief is Karl von Clausewitz’s still influential work On War. A second reason was the shock of defeat in war. Military defeat had the effect of discrediting the competence of the officer corps and encouraging a search for new methods to organize and fight war. It is not surprising therefore that the first important school for advanced military education was the Prussian Allgemeine Kriegsschule founded in 1810 in reaction to Napoleon’s defeat of Prussia at Jena in 1806. This school set a standard for excellence in training an elite corps of officers in the operational art of war, training that was thought so effective that the Treaty of Versailles formally abolished it, along with the German General Staff, following World War I. (The school was continued in disguise and openly resurrected under Hitler.) The French and British also established schools for advanced instruction in the wake of defeats. The first French school was established in 1818 after Napoleon’s downfall, but was notably ineffective. In 1876, after the Franco–Prussian War, a more effective institution replaced it that closely copied the German example. Emphasis on schooling was weakest in Britain. Yet even there, in 1856, owing to dissatisfaction with the conduct of the Crimean War, the Camberley Staff College gained an independent existence from the Royal Military College (founded in 1799). It did not become an important institution for advanced officer education however, until the Haldane reforms of 1906 were instituted in response to the Boer War. Finally, schools were needed to train officers in the military uses of the new industrial powers. Officers serving on the general staff had to plan for the movement, arming, protection, and supply of large militaries in the field. This meant having to master the military uses of new industrial means for transportation and communication

and to harness new industrial production techniques as they applied to the manufacture and invention of new weapons of war, from machine guns to battleships. These schools had both conservative and innovative effects on military culture. They were innovative most notably in defining service in the officer corps as a profession through which one advanced by education. They helped (albeit slowly) to dissolve the inherited feudal belief that only aristocrats were suited to lead men into battle. These institutions were innovative also insofar as the practice of industrial war forced them to reexamine inherited beliefs about the tactics and scale of war. They were conservative in a narrow sense because they encouraged systematic study of military theory and history. The schools became literal bearers of military tradition, explicitly preserving, codifying, and passing down knowledge about previous beliefs and practices that influenced the conduct of war. More broadly, to the extent of their own prestige, which varied by nation, they also elevated the status of the military profession, indirectly promoting respect for military values in the larger society.

Collective Memory A diffuse, but still important, influence on military culture is the collective memory or imagination of past war that is widely shared among members of the military and is frequently relied on as a normative guide for behavior in the present. In the last century, memories of World War I for European militaries and the Vietnam War for the American military have been especially powerful in shaping the professional ethos of the officer corps. For both France and Britain, the experience of World War I quickly crystallized into a narrative about the stupid slaughter of high-minded but innocent men misled by general officers who seemed incapable of adjusting their tactics to the realities of trench warfare or to minimize the cost in lives of the men they sent into battle. Perhaps lower-ranking soldiers and civilians were more prepared to accept this narrative than the officers who conducted the war and who might prefer a more qualified and generous account of their endeavor. But, collective memories are not histories, characterized by concern for detail and accuracy; they are symbolic constructions condensing events to communicate their essential meaning simply and powerfully. Ironically, one cause of this (for the officers) unflattering memory and the tragic circumstances on which it was based was the stubborn persistence of an earlier collective memory that extolled the efficacy of the bayonet and infantry charge. That memory was accurate enough before war’s weapons were industrialized. It held only woe for those who relied on it to guide their conduct in 1914. Certainly after 1918, if not sooner, French and British officers gave up this earlier vision and were guided

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instead by the cautionary tale of World War I. They were more careful with the lives of their men in World War II. For the American military, the experience of loss in Vietnam was equally profound. Unlike World War I, there was no one narrative widely shared (if differently valued) to summarize the American experience in Vietnam. Yet for the officers who fought there and remained in the military, the experience nevertheless forged a common memory of ‘‘lessons learned’’ that have not been forgotten. Four lessons, in particular, have become articulated as a political doctrine on the use of force and incorporated into American military culture: (1) do not go to war without public support, (2) clearly specify the military objective to be achieved, (3) send overwhelming force to ensure (as far as possible) the mission’s success, and (4) do not micromanage commanders in the field. These may seem rudimentary lessons, part of the taken-for-granted discipline with respect to the use of force. But, in memory at least, all four lessons were followed with success in World War II and violated in Vietnam to the detriment of military cohesion, discipline, and effectiveness. On reflection, it is clear that these lessons are directed as much to civilian political leaders as they are to military leaders. They shape the military professionals self-understanding of how to act responsibly. But they also shape the culture of civil– military relations in a democratic regime. Up to now, there has been no serious disagreement between US presidents and the military elite over whether these lessons should be applied. The potential for conflict, however, raises questions about how to manage civil–military relations when there is a clash between military and political cultures.

Political and Social Trends Military culture is not and cannot be hermetically sealed from the rest of society. As our discussion of industrialization has already shown, societal trends may exert tremendous influence on the content of military culture. (How military culture affects the culture of the larger society is discussed in the concluding section.) Here, two other trends merit attention. One trend is toward reduced confidence in the power of central governments, manifest in demands to end government regulation of (and intervention in) economic markets, to lower individual and corporate taxes, and to abandon conscription of soldiers in favor of professional all-volunteer forces. The other, more recent, trend is toward expanding the circle of citizenship, to devalue exclusionary practices based on race, religion, or gender, and to institutionalize practices of equal opportunity throughout the public sphere. Confidence in the power of central governments has fallen steadily over the last generation and led to contraction of state power to gain or control social resources by coercive means. For our purposes, the most relevant symptom of this decline has been the end of conscription

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for military service. This end came first in the Englishspeaking nations, all of which abandoned conscription by 1973. After the end of the Cold War, other Western European states moved quickly in this direction. At the moment there are comparatively few national (and fewer comprehensive comparative) studies that examine the causes and consequences of this event. Based on British and American experience, however, we can say that transition from a conscript to a volunteer force has had enormous effects on military culture. Some are quite predictable. For instance, because they rely on volunteers, the militaries of both countries have been freer than they were to separate from the ranks soldiers who for whatever reason are unable to conform to the rigors of military life. This practice encourages stricter discipline. Perhaps more important, freedom to select who should join and stay in the military, narrows the range and diversity of values represented in the force. Self-selection and anticipatory socialization reinforce the narrowing. At the same time, ironically, some new value conflicts have developed, particularly with respect to the priority of military over family life. Unlike the conscript forces, in which relatively few enlisted persons were married, volunteer forces have seen a steady rise in the number of military personnel who are married with children. The result tests traditional military solidarity manifest through esprit de corps and cohesion. The bonds of loyalty on which esprit de corps and cohesion depend are bonds among a community of warriors. They entail a commitment to self-sacrifice that places the well-being of the outfit above all else, including the responsibilities of family life. In practice, these bonds can be sustained only if the military provides practical social and material support for its members’ families, to limit worries about family well-being while on the job. (Someone had to care for the children of single-parent soldiers sent to the Gulf War.) Nonetheless, when the military uses scarce resources to support military families in hopes of maintaining esprit and cohesion, it often provides a perverse incentive encouraging young military personnel to marry. The average age at first marriage of British army enlisted personnel is far below that of the society at large. (The same is true in the United States. A century ago, it would have been much higher, as lower-ranking enlisted personnel were prohibited from marrying.) This only increases demand for the resources, compounding the problem, all the more so because younger married couples are less mature and less wealthy and so are more likely to require assistance. The second trend – expanding the circle of citizenship, encouraging inclusionary policies that are blind to distinctions based on race, religion, and gender – has had enormous consequences for military culture as well. Excluding citizens because of race or religion from the enlisted or officer ranks and reserving the most prestigious positions for members of the dominant group are both practices that

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have declined over the course of the century. In the United States, in particular, the military over the last 50 years has become a model institution for racial integration. This is not to say prejudice and discrimination are absent. But in the face of social and legal pressures to include minority groups, and worried about the effects on cohesion, the military over time developed a relatively strict policy of intolerance toward discrimination and made advancement through a military career depend on effective leadership in sustaining good intergroup relations. It has proved more challenging to integrate women into military service. The problems here are subtle and defy brief description. Traditionally, military culture has been thoroughly masculine; military service was often said ‘‘to make a man’’ of those who served. Emphasis on male military culture was reinforced in the larger society. Women were defined in terms quite opposite those of a warrior, by their capacity for nurturance and by their need for male protection. Of course, the truth was more complex. (Against aggressive acting out of male strength as a warrior one must juxtapose the usually sublimated homoerotic elements of love for one’s comrades.) In this context, integration of women into the armed forces has been incomplete. In Britain and in the United States the number of women serving in the military increased with the need for recruits in all-volunteer forces. Once serving, women were entitled to legal protections against sexual harassment or sex discrimination. Yet women have been barred from holding most combat jobs; they were assigned instead to branches in combat support and combat service support. Military culture, however, is still rooted in the culture of combat. Failure to have combat experience or to hold combat positions limits one’s ability to rise in the profession. Dealing with this is made more difficult owing to legal and social pressures that value equal opportunity. Increasing promotion opportunities for women with limited exposure to combat or training for combat erodes the central value on which military culture depends. Failure to do so reproduces gender inequality. Increasing women’s exposure to combat assignments is a possibility, of course; and some have proposed using gender-blind tests of physical abilities and assigning jobs without regard to gender. Yet, despite broad support to include women in the military service and to ensure that they receive fair and decent treatment, there is only limited support to require women to kill or be killed in combat on the same basis as men. In any case, it is unknown how complete gender equality (or a gender-blind policy) would affect cohesion and esprit de corps, especially in time of war.

Relation of Military Culture to the Larger Society Military culture spreads by various means beyond the boundaries of military organization. What the effects are

is a matter of some controversy. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from the writings of Immanuel Kant to those of Herbert Spencer, hope was expressed that the influence of military culture and the culture of war was waning; that the cultures of democracy, sweet commerce, and industry (not to mention reason) were leading modern society to the possibility (in Kant’s words) of ‘‘perpetual peace.’’ It was a hope that made military affairs and culture seem retrograde. Complete confidence in this thesis was shaken, as the need for it was intensified, by the twentieth century experience of world wars. There is no wonder why. Yet, the earlier hope, if not yet realized, was not baseless. The political organization of Western nation-states emerging from the Middle Ages did rest on a historical differentiation of civilian political and military elites and the subordination of military to political power. If wars in the twentieth century have been all too many and too intense, it is still true that Western states have spent fewer years at war than in previous centuries. There is also much evidence, carefully combed in recent years, to support the hypothesis that modern democratic states have been less likely to use force against one another, however likely they have been to war against others. It is in the context of these larger trends that we consider who carries military culture into civilian society and what reception awaits it there. Bearers of Military Culture in Civilian Society Relatively few people in contemporary society actually serve in the military and fewer still see combat. Yet representations of military culture and the experience of war are not foreign to everyday life. They are conveyed by a variety of means, ranging from the use of camouflage patterns in high-fashion clothing to public ceremonies remembering past sacrifices in war and current news reports carrying home images of the effects of armed conflict (say) in Darfur or Rwanda, in Afghanistan or Iraq. The wide range of means by which military culture is carried into society makes an adequate discussion of the topic more difficult. What is possible here is to identity the key groups that are bearers of military culture in civilian society and to indicate what forms their representations of military culture may take. The principal creators and bearers of military culture are those that belong to and lead the military. Military life is not entirely isolated from civilian life. Service members directly carry military culture with them into the civilian society. They make an impression on civilian society when they are on parade, wear their uniform to travel home on leave or on recruiting trips to schools, or when they give public lectures or testify before congressional or parliamentary committees. They are direct embodiments of the military ceremony and etiquette and intimations of the kind of discipline and ethos that military service entails. The strength of this influence

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depends in part on the size of the military or on the military’s presence within the civilian population. It is naturally greater in towns and in state capitals where the military are garrisoned. More pervasive perhaps are representations of military culture carried in newspapers and magazines, in novels and movies, and on television. These are the creation of journalists and artists, who are sometimes remarkably schooled in military affairs. Their creations are not always independently done. They often depend for information and support and, under some circumstances, even the approval of the military to produce their work. (That is especially true for the production of motion pictures that may require military cooperation for props and staging.) Through them, the military exerts an indirect yet substantial influence on how military culture and war are represented to civilian society. But the point should not be exaggerated. Like all organizations, the military is concerned about presenting a favorable public image. During wartime, given the need to maintain public support for the war effort, presenting a positive view of military culture will seem essential to the government and its supporters. To accomplish this, censorship can be exercised. But symbols often carry more meaning than censors can control. A World War II poster urging Germans to hold Frankfurt nevertheless shows the city in rubble and flames and suggests that Frankfurt’s defense depends on the efforts of women, old men, and children. Sometimes symbols censors approve of carry little or no persuasive power as (one may guess) was true of an early World War II exhortation from the British government that ‘‘Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution will Bring Us Victory.’’ In any case, in war or peace, the productions of artists are hard to rein in, whether the works are paintings by Goya and Dix, sculptures by Luytens and Kollwitz, movies by Gance and Kubrick, poems by Owen and Jarrell, or novels by Graves and Vonnegut. Perhaps to a lesser degree, the same is true of journalists’ reports, television documentaries, and scholarly writing. Not to be overlooked as culture bearers are veterans. Recruiters for today’s volunteer forces are well aware that veterans among family and friends greatly influence the attitudes of young people toward enlisting in the service. Once discharged, some veterans have been sufficiently affected by the experience of military service to join veterans’ associations. These associations typically provide opportunities for socializing in clubs with people who have shared experiences similar to one’s own. But they are also engaged in local community service or vaguely patriotic civic education projects. And they are integrated into larger national networks that keep them apprised of military affairs and lobby for veterans’ benefits. On occasion, veterans’ associations can form an important national social movement as they did, for instance, in France after World War I, to win pensions, to seek relief for disabled men, and to promote a conservative yet still democratic politics that would steer

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clear of war. Nor was theirs the only activist movement. In 1932, in the US, 25 000 unemployed veterans, some with their families, marched on and encamped for months in Washington demanding that Congress relieve their economic misery by paying immediately a $500 bonus the government had promised in 1924, but not intended to pay until 1945. In the end, they were forcibly decamped by federal soldiers under the command of Douglas MacArthur. Veterans’ representation of military culture is as varied as the culture itself and is sometimes so diverse that veterans are divided among themselves. That was so in the United States during the 1970s when veterans disagreed about whether to support the Vietnam War and veterans from previous wars were reluctant to recognize the claims of Vietnam veterans who were described as suffering from exposure to Agent Orange or from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. To be effective , the claims of veterans in these organizations must clearly convey to their civilian audience something of the experience, the worth, and the culture of military life. Civilian Reception of Military Culture Civilian response to military culture depends on the context within which it is represented and the form it assumes. On ceremonial occasions or days that celebrate important events in the nation’s history, it is not unusual to see a military presence. Few are offended by it and many take pride or pleasure (say) at watching the Horse Guards on parade to and from Buckingham Palace. Yet generalizations are always hazardous. Britain is not a society haunted by memories of recent defeat in war nor one accused of harboring a militarist past. In contrast, in Germany in the 1960s, the military had to beware of conducting simple evening exercises (or tattoos) for fear of stirring protests and controversy. And while Muscovites might have taken pride in the Soviet Union’s May Day military parades, civilians elsewhere seeing highlights of the event may have had a more fearful response. Another key difference between these events is that the German and the Soviet displays, however different in scale, were displays of ready forces. The Horse Guards parade in a ceremonial dress that no military deployed for war would wear today; the fangs of yesterday are no threat today. In the era of total war, when weapons of war are against civilians as well as soldiers, reactions to military culture have been understandably extreme, both pacifist and militarist, either wholly rejecting or wholly accepting (even celebrating) military beliefs, values, and symbols. These extreme reactions were strikingly evident after World War I. In the 1920s, an international peace movement flourished whose numbers far exceeded those who belonged to traditional pacifist religious groups. Its members believed that the horrid experience of trench warfare had proved beyond doubt that modern war on such a scale could not be waged again. In Britain, France, and the United States, they launched a campaign to outlaw war.

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They wrote antiwar plays and songs for school children to perform and lobbied heads of state on the need to outlaw war. In 1928, they achieved what seemed a victory when these three powers, joined by Japan and others, signed the Kellogg–Briand Pact renouncing war as an instrument of national policy. Unfortunately, the pact had less capacity than the League of Nations to bring about this happy result. The movement that led to its signing was animated in part by the knowledge that other forces loose in the world pushed in the opposite direction. Germans showed another way of responding to the experience of war. Offended by the harsh peace and persuaded (wrongly) that the military had been ‘‘stabbed in the back’’ by its civilian leaders, many believed that Germany’s future would be determined by its military strength. This belief was supported by government policy that sought to avoid complying with the Versailles Treaty and it supported in turn large paramilitary movements in the 1920s, with parades and marches and field exercises held in remote forests. These movements had roots in the old Prussian militarism but were not simply reactionary. Trench warfare imposed a regimented and egalitarian experience, literally a primitive nationalist socialism, that some Germans wished to use as a model for building a new Germany. Reactionary or not, it was an embodiment of militarism, celebrating military values above all other social goods. It found partners in Italy and Japan where similar social currents had strength. Where that partnership led is too well known. Since World War II, civilian reaction to military culture remains divided. One may point to the hysteria for building bomb shelters, to fantasies of redemption by Star-Wars weapons systems, and to the episodic protests against nuclear weapons, the draft, and the military actions in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. The liberal democracies of the West and elsewhere confront a ‘moral defense dilemma’. Some would so enhance military organization for the sake of security as to undermine liberal democracy, while others would enhance liberal democracy to undermine military organization and security. The difficulties of steering between the horns of this dilemma were obvious during the Cold War when major powers adopted the logic of deterrence, the validity of which relied on the grim promise of mutually assured destruction. The difficulties have not disappeared with the end of the Cold War. They may have increased with the onset of the ‘war on terror’, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the increased number of failed states. Armed forces still prepare for – in hope of deterring – general war. They also engage in peacekeeping and more difficult counterinsurgency operations, intervening in conflicts hoping to contain them, using armed forces to hold the lid on war until

diplomatic solutions can be worked out. How military culture works to exacerbate or resolve this dilemma remains an important but unanswered question. See also: Warfare, Trends in; Warriors, Anthropology of; Weaponry, Evolution of

Further Reading Allard, K. (1990). Command, control, and the common defense. New Haven: Yale University Press. Burk, J. (2001). The military’s presence in American society, 1950–2000. In Feaver, F. D. and Kohn, R. H. (eds.) Soldiers and civilians, pp. 247–274. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Burke, C. (2004). Camp all-American, Hanoi Jane, and the high and tight. Boston: Beacon. Dawson, J. G. (in press). The military and movies and television. In Bradford, J. C. (ed.) Blackwell companion to the American military. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Dunivin, K. (1994). Military culture: Change and continuity. Armed Forces & Society 20, 531–547. Gilchrist, R. (2003). Introduction: Towards a social archaeology of warfare. World Archaeology 35, 1–6. Grossman, D. (1996). On killing. New York: Back Bay Books. Hynes, S. (1990). A war imagined. New York: Atheneum. Johnston, A. I. (1995). Cultural realism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Keeley, L. H. (1996). War before civilization: The myth of the peaceful savage. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Manning, F. J. (1991). Morale, cohesion, and esprit de corps. In Gal, R. and Mangelsdorf, A. D. (eds.) Handbook of military psychology, pp. 451–470. New York: Wiley. McNeill, W. H. (1995). Keeping together in time. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Milner, M. Jr. (1993). Status and sacredness. New York: Oxford University Press. Nath, R. (1990). Military leadership in India. New Delhi: LancersBooks. Paret, P., Lewis, B. I., and Paret, P. (eds.) (1992). Persuasive images: Posters of war and revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Prost, A. (1992). In the wake of war. Providence, RI: Berg. Segal, D. (1996). The social construction of peacekeeping by US soldiers. Tocquevilk Review 17, 7–21. Shils, E. and Janowitz, M. (1948). The cohesion and disintegration of the Wehrmacht. Public Opinion Quarterly 12, 280–315. van Creveld, M. (1990). The training of officers. New York: Free Press. White, L. (1962). Medieval technology and social change. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Winter, J. (1996). Sites of memory, sites of mourning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Relevant Websites http://hrw.org – Human Rights Watch http://iusafs.org – Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces & Society http://strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/army-leadership/militaryculture – Military Culture Studies, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College http://peacewarconflict.org – Peace, War and Social Conflict Section, American Sociological Association http://www.oft.osd.mil/initiatives/tmc/ – Transforming Military Culture, Office of Force Transformation, US Office of the Secretary of Defense

V.

WARS


Warfare, Trends in James K Wither, George C Marshall European Center for Security Studies, Germany ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Nature and Character of War Trends in Warfare: The Modern Historical Context The Impact of Nuclear Weapons The Trend toward Irregular Warfare

Glossary Collateral Damage Unintended damage during military operations, usually referring to the deaths of civilians or the destruction of their property. Conventional War A war fought between two or more states using legally constituted and controlled uniformed regular armed forces. Cyber Warfare The use of computers or the internet to spread propaganda, access classified information, disrupt electronic surveillance systems, or attack information technology-dependent infrastructure targets. Globalization The increase in global economic, social, technological, and cultural communication, integration, and interdependence. Insurgency An armed rebellion against the authority of a government intended to secure political, economic, or social objectives. Irregular War A war that does not involve direct combat between the regular armed forces of nationstates, but is characterized by armed conflict between state forces and nonstate guerrilla fighters or between rival militia groups. Mass Casualty Terrorism An act of politically motivated violence using methods deliberately intended to cause the deaths of large numbers of civilians.

The Nature and Character of War War is organized and politically motivated violence, destruction, and death. It is a phenomenon where rationality and order coexist with chance and uncertainty and the most intense human feelings of determination, honor, greed, fear, and ignorance interact and conflict. The fundamental nature of war has remained unchanged over the centuries, which accounts for the continued interest in venerable analysts of warfare such as the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu, the Greek historian Thucydides, and the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz. Their works remain on the reading lists of military staff colleges around the

The Decline of War Contemporary Trends in Warfare Future Trends in Warfare Further Reading

Network-Centric Warfare The achievement of information dominance on military operations through the electronic linking of sensors, decision-makers, and weapons systems, enabling shared awareness, a faster reaction time to events, and greater lethality. Precision Guide Munitions Munitions that can achieve unprecedented accuracy through the employment of laser, infrared, radar, or satellite guidance systems, colloquially known as ‘smart bombs’. Proxy War A war where major powers use third-party actors to advance their policy objectives as a substitute for fighting each other directly. Revolution in Military Affairs A dramatic change in the character of war caused by political, social, technical, or doctrinal changes. Total War A war characterized by the mass mobilization of a nation’s resources and fought largely without limitations or restraints on the geographical area of hostilities, the means employed to wage war, or the targets selected for attack. Weapons of Mass Destruction A weapon with the power to kill large numbers of people; the category includes nuclear, chemical, bacteriological, and radiological weapons.

world even in an era of stealth technology, networked information systems, and satellite communications. In contrast, the character of war is ever changing. From ancient times, developments in technology, social organization, and political systems have shaped the ways wars have been fought. Warfare itself has in turn affected the evolution of each of these factors. Therefore, trends in warfare do not take place in isolation and cannot be divorced from broader national and international societal, economic, and political developments. For example, the invention of gunpowder led to the introduction of firearms that rendered obsolete the armored knights that had dominated European battlefields for centuries. As gunpowder artillery also allowed rulers to

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breach the once impregnable walls of medieval fortresses, it also enabled them to destroy the independence of warlords who challenged their authority and lay the foundations for the growth of modern, centralized nation-states. In the contemporary world, the process of globalization has both facilitated new forms of warfare and likewise been affected by their impact. The terrorist network Al Qaeda has exploited the unprecedented global exchange of information, people, and finance to wage its self-declared war against the West, demonstrated most spectacularly with the attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001. These attacks are estimated to have cost the world economy more than a trillion dollars and called into question the sustainability of the openness and freedoms that are indispensable to the globalization process. Changes in the character of war have tended to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Different trends in warfare often run parallel to each other and developments are frequently uneven rather than linear. The longbow, for example, remained a more effective battlefield weapon than primitive handguns long after the advent of gunpowder. Nevertheless, scholars are fond of identifying significant developments and labeling them ‘revolutions in military affairs’. These are periods when technological breakthroughs, profound sociopolitical changes, or radical new ideas have had a seismic impact on the character of war. There have been many of these so-called revolutions in military history. The French leveé en masse, the largescale mobilization of citizenry made possible by the political and social changes of the French Revolution, not only enabled Napoleon to overwhelm the smaller professional armies of his continental opponents, but also served as the blueprint for the mass conscript armies that fought the major wars of the twentieth century. The advent of nuclear weapons in 1945 perhaps uniquely deserves the epithet ‘revolutionary’. The introduction of weapons of previously unimaginable destructive power made the prospect of war between nuclear-armed states practically unthinkable and forced major powers to find safer ways to advance their national interests. Many have argued that developments in information systems have created a contemporary revolution in military affairs, although the advances in microelectronics that have made these technologies possible were already starting to have an impact on warfare in the 1970s.

Trends in Warfare: The Modern Historical Context The Trend toward Total War Despite the invention of firearms, a medieval or even Roman commander would not have found a Napoleonic-era battlefield an entirely alien environment.

Because the scope and scale of war had increased only slowly over the centuries, commanders could still exercise direct control over their troops and the battlefield was still the preserve of men and horses rather than machines. In the century after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, the character of war was transformed as technological advances greatly increased the destructive power of weapon systems and the strategic reach of military forces. Brass cartridges and breech-loading weapons extended the range and accuracy of artillery and firearms and magnified the killing power of armies on the battlefield. Steamships and railways allowed the projection of military force on land and at sea over hitherto unthinkable distances and at previously unimaginable speeds. The invention of the telegraph gave commanders the ability to control and direct military operations in locations hundreds of miles away. The pace of technical innovation accelerated in the first half of the twentieth century, not least because of the spur provided by the two World Wars. The invention of the internal combustion engine led to the mechanization of warfare on land, in the skies, and under the seas with the appearance of tanks, aircraft, and submarines. Research in the new science of electronics created breakthroughs in communications, target acquisition, and fire control systems. Radio sets, for example, linked armor, artillery, infantry, and aerial units and facilitated the rapid fusion of mobility and firepower that characterized German blitzkrieg warfare. The introduction of radar allowed targets to be identified far beyond visual range at sea and in the air by day and night. Toward the end of World War II, German scientists developed the world’s first operational jet aircraft and ballistic missiles, although these weapons came too late to affect the outcome of the war. In 1945, American physicists won the race to build atomic weapons. The single atom bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused death and destruction on a scale that had previously required the employment of hundreds of conventional bomber aircraft. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, industrialization in Western states hugely expanded the wealth of the major powers and similar advances in public health allowed rapid increases in their populations. Modern bureaucracies enabled the mass mobilization of citizens in the name of nationalism or universalistic ideologies. Thinkers as diverse as Hegel and E H Carr viewed war in a positive light, arguing that it provided a legitimate means of promoting social and political change. Popular commitment was as important as industrialization in providing the means to wage total war. The growth of economic power and national consciousness allowed huge armies, navies, and later air forces to be equipped, sustained, and motivated. Consequently, World War I (1914–18) and World War II (1939–45) were massive wars of attrition with victory ultimately granted to the side with the

Warfare, Trends in

greatest reserves of men, material, and money. If World War I was characterized by battlefield slaughter and destruction on a massive scale, in World War II this slaughter and destruction extended to the homelands and civilian populations of the combatant states. World War II truly merits the description of ‘total war’. The major combatants mobilized to the limit of their technical and manpower resources to achieve war aims that were grandiose and uncompromising. The scope of the war was global, no continent or ocean remained free of combat or the effects of the war. Unlike the limited European wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the focus of violence was enemy armies on the battlefield, societies and civilian infrastructure became regarded as legitimate targets. Bomber fleets were employed to terrorize civilian populations and attempt to break the will of their governments to continue fighting. Attacks on German cities alone killed over 600 000 civilians. In Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and China, civilians were deliberately killed during military operations in vast numbers as extreme ideological and racial theories unlocked a savagery unprecedented in modern conflicts. Whereas 90% of the deaths in nineteenth-century wars had comprised military personnel and a clear majority of the casualties in the World War I were also soldiers, over half of the estimated 50 million dead in World War II were noncombatants. The magnitude of the deaths in World War II compared with a selection of other wars of the twentieth century is illustrated in the chart in Figure 1.

The Impact of Nuclear Weapons Global politics between 1945 and 1990 were dominated by the rivalry between the two principal victors of World War II, the United States (US) and the Soviet Union. The relationship between these ideological opponents was characterized by political, economic, and military competition on a global scale, but because a direct military engagement between the two states was avoided, the period is most frequently referred to as the Cold War. The advent of nuclear weapons reversed the trend toward total war that had developed over the previous century. War had always been an expensive and risky undertaking, but the unlimited destructive power of nuclear weapons made interstate war between major powers an act of potential national suicide. The implications of the nuclear age were not fully appreciated in 1945. At first, atomic weapons were few in number and monopolized by the US. However, within ten years, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom (UK) had become nuclear-armed states and France and China had their own nuclear weapons’ programs. Above all, the introduction of thermonuclear hydrogen bombs in the early 1950s, with far greater destructive power than those used in 1945, eliminated any lingering illusions that nuclear weapons could be employed in a similar manner to conventional ordnance. From the 1960s, the creation of huge arsenals of nuclear-armed intercontinental, ballistic missiles created the phenomenon known as mutually

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assured destruction (MAD), which appropriately described a situation where the homelands of both the US and the Soviet Union would have been utterly devastated in the event of a full-scale nuclear exchange. By the end of the Cold War, there were around 30 000 nuclear warheads based on missiles in underground silos, on mobile launchers above ground, in nuclear submarines, and on aircraft. With no viable defense against nuclear missiles, deterrence rather than defense was the main focus of strategy during the Cold War and both superpowers sought to avoid a direct, bilateral armed clash that could escalate to nuclear war. Consequently, the US and the Soviet Union limited the scale and scope of the wars they fought in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan and constrained armed conflicts fought by their allies and clients. After the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the US and Soviet Union came close to nuclear war, both superpowers also made formal efforts to diminish the risk of war through confidence-building arms control and antinuclear proliferation measures. The Western democracies relied on nuclear deterrence to keep the peace during the Cold War. However, they also recognized that if deterrence failed it would be necessary to resist a possible Soviet conventional military assault in Europe. The standoff between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Warsaw Pact alliance in Europe was the most visible manifestation of the military confrontation between the rival superpowers. Both alliances maintained large numbers of troops with armored vehicles, combat aircraft, and warships at a high state of readiness. By 1980, in the European theatre alone, 11 000 NATO battle tanks and 3300 tactical aircraft confronted over 27 000 Warsaw Pact tanks and nearly 6000 aircraft. During the Cold War, continuous improvements took place in mechanization and the rate of fire and accuracy of weapon systems. By the 1970s, advances in microelectronic guidance systems allowed bombs, shells, and missiles to strike targets with ever-increasing precision. Military planners prepared for a conventional war in Europe similar in form to World War II, with combat between mechanized, armored formations; long-range aerial bombardment; and naval battles on the North Atlantic supply routes. However, technological trends suggest that such a war would have involved a hitherto unprecedented rate of casualties, attrition of military hardware, and expenditure of munitions. Conventional military operations would have resulted in the rapid exhaustion of the combat power of the forces involved. Given NATO’s numerical inferiority, its leaders might have been faced with the dilemma of surrender or escalation to the use of nuclear weapons relatively soon after the outbreak of hostilities. Contemporary simulations of nuclear war in Europe involving relatively low-yield, so-called tactical or theater nuclear weapons, predicted continent-wide devastation and millions of casualties.

The fact that neither alliance could view the prospects of even a conventional war in Europe with equanimity increased the perception that war between the major powers would hardly advance any rational policy objectives. Nuclear weapons inhibited but did not eliminate interstate wars during the Cold War period. The Soviet Union and the US were not adverse to exploiting local conflicts to advance their own or their allies’ interests. Some regional wars such as those between Israel and her Arab neighbors were treated as proxy wars by the two superpowers. During the 1973 Arab–Israeli war, for example, the US and Soviet Union supported and supplied weaponry to opposing sides, even during the fighting, and intervened to end the conflict when it threatened to escalate to a wider war. The superpowers could not control the behavior of all states and some military clashes were largely outside of their control. For example, India fought wars with Pakistan and China, China conducted a border war with Vietnam in 1979, and in 1982 the UK and Argentina went to war over the Falkland–Malvinas Islands. Interstate wars of the Cold War period, fought under the nuclear shadow of the superpowers, were generally localized and characterized by restraint. The Iran–Iraq war (1980–88) was an exception to the prevailing tendency. Poison gas was employed by the Iraqis and both sides mounted indiscriminate missile and air attacks against each other’s cities. However, despite infantry combat that resembled the trench warfare of World War I, neither Iran nor Iraq possessed the necessary industrial, technological, or military muscle to fight a truly total war.

The Trend toward Irregular Warfare For the world’s richest and most technically advanced states, the Cold War was a time of unprecedented freedom from war. However, this was not the experience of people in the developing world where civil wars and wars of national liberation in states as diverse as China, Vietnam, El Salvador, Guatemala, Algeria, Angola, and Mozambique led to the deaths of around 40 million people between 1945 and 1990. Irregular warfare has become a term used to describe any armed conflict that does not involve set-piece battles between the uniformed armed forces of nation states, though the category embraces wars of very different scale and complexity. In China and Vietnam, large-scale armed conflicts inspired by Mao Tse Tung’s concept of People’s War involved concurrent irregular and conventional military operations. In small, densely populated territories, the predominant form of irregular warfare was urban terrorism, such as the campaigns against the British in Palestine, Aden, and Northern Ireland. Irregular warfare is just one term used to classify these wars; they have also been variously described as guerrilla wars, small wars, insurgencies, revolutionary wars, low-intensity wars and, most

Warfare, Trends in

recently, asymmetrical wars. The plethora of terms reflects the difficulty of classifying armed conflicts that do not fit the traditional model of war between nationstates fought by legally constituted and controlled military forces. Major definitional problems have also arisen over attempts to distinguish between a guerrilla fighter and a terrorist as illustrated by the cliche´ that ‘one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter’. In practice, fighters in irregular wars conduct both, guerrilla operations against government security forces and perpetrate acts of terrorism, to inspire fear among the civilian population. Irregular warfare is by no means only a modern phenomenon. Since ancient times, guerrilla tactics have been employed by the militarily weak against stronger opponents, although prior to 1945 such operations were usually subsidiary to the campaigns by regular armed forces that decided the outcome of wars between states. The impetus for irregular warfare after 1945 arose from many interrelated factors. The decline of the European colonial empires caused political and social upheaval on a grand scale and unleashed anti-imperialist and nationalist aspirations for statehood. In this context, revolutionary socialism appeared to offer ideological inspiration to many oppressed people in much of the developing world. Consequently, the geopolitical rivalry between the superpowers acted as an additional stimulus to warfare. The Soviet Union and its allies supplied many guerrilla movements with arms and training and the US and its allies in turn supported counterrevolutionaries. Improvements in global communications allowed guerrilla movements to mobilize support and influence public opinion across the world and the ready availability of weaponry, in particular the ubiquitous Kalashnikov assault rifle and rocketpropelled grenade (RPG) launcher, ensured that irregular fighters were usually well armed. Traditionally, guerrilla warfare has been characterized by small-scale, hit-and-run operations by lightly armed fighters who exploit deception, surprise, and the ability to merge into the local population and terrain. In wars fought for anticolonial, nationalist, or ideological objectives, guerrillas sought to exploit popular grievances to build mass support for their cause. Where persuasion failed, judicious use of terrorism was made to coerce the local population and undermine their confidence in the ability of government security forces to protect them. Because guerrilla fighters sought to undermine their opponents’ political will rather than destroy their material means to make war, irregular wars tended to be protracted. Guerrillas in Indo-China fought the Japanese in the 1940s, the French in the 1950s, and the US in the 1960s before attaining a unified, independent state of Vietnam in 1975. In a very different theater of operations, the Provisional Irish Republican Army’s military campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland lasted 25 years.

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The major powers of the postwar period had ample experience of small-scale, colonial constabulary operations dating back to the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the strategic focus on the nuclear and conventional military balance of power during the Cold War tended to obscure the fact that irregular warfare was the predominant type of war after 1945. While the armed forces of the major powers trained and equipped for a large-scale interstate war, they were more likely to find themselves deployed on counterinsurgency operations. In these campaigns, where success was determined by political rather than military factors, measures of progress in conventional warfare, such as the attrition of enemy forces, were usually of lesser importance. Neither the US in Vietnam in the 1960s, nor the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s was able to prevail against irregular opponents. Their massive arsenals of nuclear missiles and sophisticated conventional weaponry were largely irrelevant to the outcome of these wars. In campaigns where the guerrillas were able to gain popular support, governments often faced the dilemma of accepting defeat or attempting ruthless repression of the insurgents by means widely perceived as illegitimate, especially for modern democracies. During the campaign in Algeria (1954–62), the French armed forces successfully suppressed the guerrillas of the National Liberation Front, but the brutality of the counterinsurgency campaign, including the use of torture, undermined public support for the war in France, brought down the metropolitan government, and ultimately failed to prevent Algerian independence. Elsewhere, notably in Malaya and Oman, guerrillas were contained or defeated by effective counterinsurgency techniques in which civil administrative, police, and military responses were coordinated and integrated. In these campaigns, military forces played a supporting role to the political initiatives that were the main ingredients of successful strategies. Nevertheless, the failure of insurgent campaigns between 1945 and 1990 was due more to the inability of guerrilla movements to capture mass popular support than specific counterinsurgency measures or outright repression by the governments of states that opposed them.

The Decline of War The Impact of the End of the Cold War A marked trend since 1990 has been the significant reduction in the number and magnitude of armed conflicts worldwide. However, the decline in warfare is not evenly distributed across the world. In the early twenty-first century, wars are largely confined to sub-Saharan Africa and south-central Asia. Europe and North America, by contrast, continue to enjoy a historically unprecedented era of peace and stability. The prospect of a conventional war between major powers remains uniquely low, not least

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because of the continued existence of substantial arsenals of nuclear weapons. Contemporary wars are liable to occur in weak or failing states and are civil rather than interstate conflicts. Poorly governed countries plagued by corruption and poverty, ethnic or religious divisions, and rapidly growing populations provide breeding grounds for warfare. The twentieth century was the bloodiest in human history with an estimated 200 million deaths directly or indirectly associated with armed conflicts. It is too early to conclude that the twenty-first century will be any less violent than its predecessor, but a number of trends have contributed to the resolution of disputes between states by nonviolent means and reduced the likelihood of war. The end of the Cold War in 1990 had a major impact as it lowered international tensions and stopped American and Soviet support for proxy wars in the developing world in countries such as Angola and Nicaragua. The 1990s also brought what has been called a ‘peace dividend’ as states reduced their military spending and cut the size of their armed forces. Only a few nations, most notably the US and China, have increased military spending in the last decade. Overall, per capita global military spending has declined by one-third since 1985 and most developed states no longer measure their security and influence in terms of military capabilities as was formerly the case. Globalization and Democratization Most states have benefited from the growth of trade and attendant prosperity arising from globalization. Since entering the global trading system, for example, the Chinese economy has grown by more than 10% per annum. Economic interdependence is the predominant feature of globalization, a factor that makes it harder for states to act independently or pursue unilateral, selfish state interests with impunity. War or the threat of war can drive away investment, destroy business confidence, and jeopardize economic progress and prosperity. Major wars can bankrupt even the most powerful trading nations as the UK found to its cost in the first half of the twentieth century. The current globalization process is characterized by unprecedented integration through formal international institutions and informal transnational professional and social networks. Finance and industrial production are now organized on a worldwide scale. Although pessimists point out that an earlier age of globalization ended with the outbreak of World War I in 1914, current levels of interdependence suggest that contemporary globalization could prove a more robust restraint on war than its predecessor. The eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant is credited with the origin of what has become known as the concept of ‘democratic peace’. Kant argued that constitutional republics, where rulers required the consent

of the people to govern, were much less likely to go to war, particularly with each other. Empirical evidence appears to support his theory as fighting between democracies is rare. The creation of nearly 80 new democracies in the last 20 years suggests that wars might become even rarer in future. The ideal of democratic peace has reached its most advanced form in the institution of the European Union (EU), which has united former perennial enemies, such as France and Germany, and made the idea of war between them an anachronism. International Efforts to Prevent War The proposition that war can only be justified in a limited set of circumstances dates back to ancient times. For most of history, efforts to limit the incidence of war through the international rule of law have been trumped by notions of state sovereignty and national interest. However, the total wars of the twentieth century generated a new urgency in efforts to curtail war. The League of Nations was set up as an international body in 1919 to promote the negotiated resolution of disputes between states. This initiative was followed in 1928 by the Kellogg–Briand Pact, which renounced war as an instrument of national policy. After the failure of these measures to prevent World War II, the international community tried again with the establishment of the United Nations (UN) organization in 1945. The aims of the UN are to maintain international peace and security and outlaw war. Although the UN has obviously failed to prevent interstate and intrastate wars since 1945, it has nevertheless succeeded in establishing a new norm that the use of force in international relations without the sanction of the UN Security Council contravenes international law. States seeking to use military force attempt to justify their actions on the grounds of self-defense or make considerable diplomatic efforts to gain UN support, as the US and the UK tried to do prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. War has not been delegitimized out of existence but, in contrast to the late nineteenth century, the existence of the UN and the attendant body of international law governing the use of force (jus ad bellum) has helped to establish a trend that war is something pathological in international relations. Up until 1990, the antagonism between the Soviet Union and the US and its allies obstructed the work of the UN Security Council. The five permanent council members – China, France, the Soviet Union, the UK, and the US – exercised their individual veto rights to prevent the Council from taking effective action to keep the peace as intended by the UN’s founders. The end of the Cold War unlocked the Security Council and the UN has been able to conduct or sponsor a sixfold increase in conflict resolution and peacekeeping operations since 1990. This includes peacekeeping activities by regional collective security organizations, such as NATO, the Organization

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for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the African Union. The rise in peacekeeping activities is illustrated in Figure 2. UN activities remain constrained by a number of factors, for example, it is still hard to achieve unanimity in the Security Council and the quality of troops sent by many states on operations is poor, but overall, peacekeeping contributes significantly to the prevention and control of armed conflict throughout the world. Constraints on Warfare States in the developed world are no longer confronted by existential threats. War appears a distant prospect for citizens living at a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity. The heroic, common national causes that inspired the will to sacrifice in the era of the World Wars of the twentieth century seem to be largely absent. Consequently, it is harder for governments, especially in liberal democracies, to persuade their public of the need to use military force or to accept the risks associated with its use. Although troops have been deployed frequently since 1990, some states appear unwilling to use their armed forces for tasks other than humanitarian missions or benign peacekeeping operations where there is little danger of combat. Governments fear the impact of casualties on already tenuous public support for military operations and many contingents deployed on recent operations have been subject to national caveats placing restrictions on their use. Although less casualty-verse than its European allies, the US is not immune from this trend. During

operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, American troops have relied on force-protection measures and precision aerial bombing to keep soldier casualties to a politically tolerable level. The reluctance to expose small, expensive professional military forces to debilitating losses is reminiscent of the approach to military operations in eighteenth-century Europe, when commanders were equally disinclined to risk their troops in battle. Laws governing the conduct of warfare (jus in bello) also act as a constraint on the abuse of military power. Attempts to limit the savagery of war through reciprocal agreements and customs are as old as warfare itself. However, formal international laws governing the conduct of war, including the first of the Geneva Conventions, were not introduced until the mid-nineteenth century. Since 1945, the body of humanitarian law covering armed conflict has grown substantially. Laws governing the conduct of war include measures to limit or ban the use of certain weapon systems, restrict the range of legitimate targets and stipulate behavior toward noncombatants and prisoners of war. Soldiers and their leaders are increasingly liable for prosecution for alleged war crimes in national or international courts. In contemporary conflict zones, military lawyers are on hand to advise commanders on the legal implications of their actions. During the Kosovo campaign in 1999, for example, military lawyers assessed all proposed NATO targets in Yugoslavia in terms of the Geneva Conventions. The 24-hour media presence in contemporary conflict zones has also helped to reinforce the laws of war as the conduct of even the most junior soldiers in the heat of battle is

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potentially subject to global news coverage. Compliance with the laws of war is still far from universal. Powerful states are often criticized for ignoring international law when they feel vital national interests are at stake. The US has been widely condemned for denying legal rights to suspected terrorist detainees held at Guantanamo in Cuba. During wars against Chechen rebels in the 1990s, the armed forces of the Russian Federation frequently violated international humanitarian norms. A massive bombardment of Grozny in 1995 alone is estimated to have killed as many as 27 000 civilians. Irregular fighters generally disregard the laws and conventions of armed conflict, not least to even the odds in what would otherwise be very unequal military contests. Insurgents in Iraq have murdered hostages, used religious buildings for military purposes, and reportedly transported arms and fighters in ambulances, all actions that are in breach of the Geneva Conventions. Western sensibilities regarding casualties and the laws of war have been deliberately exploited by nonstate fighters in contemporary conflicts. The images of dead American soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu in 1993 were instrumental in persuading the US government to withdraw its forces from the peacekeeping mission in Somalia. During the Lebanon war in August 2006, Hezbollah fighters deliberately intermingled with the civilian population, taking advantage of Israel’s reluctance to cause civilian casualties. Even the most accurate air strikes in urban areas cause so-called ‘collateral damage’, usually a euphemism for civilian deaths. In a notable double standard of contemporary warfare, it is the armed forces of the state concerned that tend to take the full blame for civilian casualties in such circumstances rather than local irregular fighters.

Contemporary Trends in Warfare Information Age Warfare The Cold War rivalry acted as a stimulus for scientific research and many of the technologies that currently define the information age, most notably the internet, were originally developed for military purposes. During the Gulf War in 1991, advanced microelectronic technology gave the US forces a decisive advantage over their Iraqi foes. American aircraft were able to outsmart Iraqi air defenses and their armored vehicles could navigate accurately across the desert at night and engage targets at long range with a 90% hit probability. An Iraqi army that had stood up to eight years of combat with Iran collapsed rapidly with the loss of an estimated 10 000 battlefield deaths. In contrast, casualties in the US-led coalition were minimal. The wars against the former Yugoslavia (1999), the Taliban regime in Afghanistan (2001), and Iraq (2003) further demonstrated the futility of engaging American forces in conventional combat. In these campaigns the US

demonstrated its unchallenged ability to conduct devastating, large-scale, precision-guided missile and bombing strikes. Improvements in the miniaturization and data-handling capacity of digital information systems throughout the 1990s gave rise to the concept of network-centric warfare (NCW). NCW seeks to defeat an opponent through total information dominance at all levels of military operations. A worldwide grid of networked communication systems provides the foundation of the system. Data from electronic sensors on satellites, aircraft, and unmanned aerial vehicles are transferred into the network to provide real-time surveillance and allow commanders to acquire targets rapidly and accurately. Commanders can then choose to engage and destroy these targets with a range of precision-guided munitions. A hypothetical visual representation of NCW is shown in Figure 3. NCW has the potential to transform military structures and consequently the ways that wars are fought. Networking, for example, enables the integration of army, navy, and air force units, thus removing the tendency for each service to fight separately. Networked forces also have the potential to achieve greater lethality with fewer weapons’ platforms and the wider dispersal of battlefield units enhances flexibility and survivability. Just as in business enterprises, networking favors flatter organizational structures. This development might render traditional military hierarchical structures obsolete as the fleeting operational opportunities provided by real-time battlefield data can best be exploited by delegating decision-making down to the lowest levels of leadership. Advocates of NCW believe that the exploitation of information technology offers the prospect of wars that can be won rapidly with few casualties and, thanks to precision targeting, a minimum of noncombatant deaths. Impressive results were achieved by networked units and precision-guided bombing during the conventional phases of operations in Afghanistan in 2001 and in Iraq in March–April 2003. However, both Taliban and Saddam Hussein’s armed forces were weak and no military competitor has yet emerged armed with sophisticated electronic countermeasures to challenge US information superiority. Historical experience suggests that no state can sustain a decisive military technological lead for long. China, for example, is investing heavily in cyber-warfare resources and methods to disrupt the satellite surveillance systems on which American information dominance depends. Irregular, rather than conventional, warfare remains the prevalent form of war in the early twenty-first century. High-technology sensors and communication systems, as well as precision bombing, can play a useful role in such wars, but cannot substitute for large numbers of relatively low-tech light infantry soldiers. The techniques of guerrilla warfare continue to be effective in contemporary conflicts against opponents armed with greatly superior military

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Figure 3 Network-centric warfare.

technology, as illustrated by the improvised roadside bombs that have caused over 70% of US casualties during counterinsurgency operations in Iraq. Irregular fighters have also proved adept at exploiting the technology of the information age. Al Qaeda has created its own form of sophisticated networked warfare, giving its campaign a global reach that was impossible for earlier terrorist groups. Al Qaeda maintains affiliated cells in over 40 countries, coordinated and motivated through the exploitation of modern communication systems. The group has used the internet to facilitate financial transfers, recruit and train fighters, and pass encrypted instructions and intelligence. During the war with Israel in August 2006, Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon demonstrated the extent to which modern technology can empower well-trained, nonstate militias. Hezbollah fighters operated advanced command and control equipment to coordinate missile strikes against Israel, eavesdropped on Israeli military radio and telephone communications, and employed unmanned aerial vehicles for surveillance. The Changing Character of Irregular Warfare The character of irregular war has continued to evolve since 1990. Guerrilla fighters of the Cold War, such as the Vietcong, typically belonged to disciplined, hierarchically organized political movements. Contemporary equivalents are groups such as the Taliban or Hezbollah, although their ideology is political Islam rather than Maoism or Marxist–Leninism. However, such unified movements are relatively rare. Most contemporary war zones are populated by disparate groups of irregular fighters with differing objectives and motivations. The insurgents in Iraq, for example, include Sunni and Shiite militias, Al Qaeda jihadists, and criminal gangs.

Terror was used by guerrillas and state security forces during irregular wars of the Cold War era, but normally its purpose was to coerce or frighten political opponents rather than kill large numbers of people. However, in some recent wars, entire ethnic or religious communities have been targeted in campaigns of terror, a trend stimulated by the collapse of central governments and the splintering of states along ethnic, religious, or tribal lines after 1990. During the wars that accompanied the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, combatants committed atrocities, including massacres and mass rape, to force ethnic opponents to flee their homes; a process that became known notoriously as ‘ethnic cleansing’. In the war in the Republic of Congo (1998–2003), an estimated 3.8 million people, almost all noncombatants, died in fighting that primarily involved tribal militias. As is frequently the case, economic rather than political objectives sustained the war, as different groups of fighters struggled for control of Congo’s rich natural resources. The withdrawal of state sponsorship following the end of the Cold War forced some guerrilla groups to sacrifice any pretense of ideological purity and turn to organized crime to finance their activities. This is the case in Columbia where Marxist–Leninist insurgents have merged with the major narcotic trafficking gangs. Many contemporary conflicts, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, resemble large-scale turf wars between rival criminal gangs and bear little resemblance to the popular image of warfare. Urban terrorism, rather than rural-based insurgency, is now the dominant form of irregular warfare. To an extent this is the result of accelerating global urbanization, but it also reflects contemporary terrorists’ desire to cause the maximum number of civilian casualties. The dramatic rise in deaths due to terrorist attacks is illustrated in Figure 4, which covers the period from 1983–2006. The

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Marxist–Leninist or nationalist-inspired groups of the Cold War period were prepared to act ruthlessly to achieve their objectives, but mass casualty attacks on civilians were rarely a feature of traditional insurgencies. The Spanish experience of terrorism provides an illustration of the difference between traditional and contemporary terrorist campaigns. Euzkadi Ta Azkatasuna (ETA) has fought the Spanish government since 1959 with the aim of establishing an independent Basque homeland. ETA has killed over 800 people, but its violence has largely been restricted to representatives of the Spanish government and security forces. Indiscriminate attacks on civilians have been avoided, with warnings sent to the authorities before bomb attacks on infrastructure targets and a tacit understanding on rules of engagement established with the security forces. The bombing of commuter trains during the morning rush hour in Madrid on 11 March 2004, which killed 191 people and injured over 1600, provided a stark contrast to ETA’s methods. The Madrid attack perpetrated by Arab immigrants affiliated with Al Qaeda was mounted without warning with the deliberate intention of causing maximum casualties. Unlike the local grievances that have motivated campaigns by groups like ETA or the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, the Madrid bombings were representative of a new trend in terrorism, both global in its reach and as extreme and uncompromising in its objectives as any ideology of the total war era. With a campaign restricted in scope to intermittent if devastating terrorist attacks, Al Qaeda’s violence cannot be compared to World War II

in its scale or intensity. Terrorism is not generally thought to represent an existential threat to Western states comparable to that of the former Nazi Germany or Soviet Union. However, just as in World War II, the civilian population is in the front line of the war. Al Qaeda’s leadership has openly stated that civilians in the US, the UK, and elsewhere are legitimate targets because they share responsibility for the perceived aggression by their governments against the Muslim world. Terrorist organizations are known to be seeking weapons of mass destruction and the prospect of the use of chemical, biological, or radiological devices in an Al Qaeda-inspired attack provides contemporary security analysts nightmares. The employment of such weapons would certainly bring parallels with the era of total war frighteningly closer. The growing tendency toward indiscriminate mass casualty attacks since the 1980s has been accompanied by a rise in suicidal terrorism, justified by the perpetrators on both strategic and ideological grounds. Suicidal bravery is not uncommon in conventional and irregular wars, but deliberate acts of suicide have been comparatively rare. Suicide bombing was not a technique of classical guerrilla warfare. For example, suicide bombings have only recently occurred in Afghanistan; it was not a technique employed during the struggle by Afghan guerrillas against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. The era of suicide terrorism began in Lebanon in the early 1980s and suicide bombers have become a major feature of irregular warfare campaigns in Palestine, Iraq, Sri Lanka, and Chechnya. Suicide was also used for the mass casualty terrorist attacks of September 2001 in the US

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and in London in July 2005. Although frequently identified with so-called martyrdom operations by organizations like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Al Qaeda, suicidal terrorism is not restricted to Muslim groups. Until recently, it was the Tamil Tiger separatist fighters in Sri Lanka that made the most frequent use of suicide bombing as a technique of warfare. The obvious reason for the use of suicide bombers is their effectiveness. On average suicide attacks cause six times as many deaths as conventional terrorist bombings, generate more propaganda value, and are more likely to result in concessions from target governments. Consequently, suicidal terrorism is no longer merely a tactical device, but rather has become a basic strategy of irregular warfare. Campaigns based on suicidal terrorism were instrumental in coercing Israel into withdrawing from Lebanon in 1985 and from the West Bank in 1995. Al Qaeda has employed massive suicide car bombs in a largely successful attempt to promote sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims in Iraq.

Future Trends in Warfare Despite the contemporary decline in the frequency and magnitude of armed conflict, historical experience suggests that war will not disappear. It is even possible that the contemporary era will be viewed in retrospect as a particularly peaceful one, as there are a number of threatening developments on the horizon. Some of the more dire predictions of the impact of global warming include the return of old-fashioned interstate wars over territory and resources. These wars could erupt because of shortages of water, food, and fuel or climatic changes that force millions of people to migrate. Vulnerable states could collapse under these pressures creating further opportunities for savage interethnic and tribal civil wars. Nuclear proliferation is another threatening trend as more states seek to acquire nuclear weapons and the danger of them falling into the hands of terrorist groups increases. A nuclear arms race in the volatile Middle East region, for example, could potentially create a greater risk of a nuclear exchange than existed at the height of the Cold War. There is no guarantee that future nuclear powers will manage their rivalry as carefully as the US and the Soviet Union. New nuclear-armed states may not have the technological and administrative fail-safe procedures of the established nuclear powers and small, unsophisticated nuclear arsenals might tempt rival states to risk disarming first-strike attacks. It is possible to identify three major trends that will affect the way that future wars will be fought. One future scenario is based on emerging technical innovations, which have the potential to fundamentally alter the character of war, such as robots, directed-energy weapons, genetically engineered clones, and nanotechnology. Aircraft, warships, and armored vehicles could operate without human crews and robots may take over from fallible human beings in the network that links

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surveillance, acquisition, and target engagement. In this environment, future human soldiers may be computer scientists and women rather than the physically fit young men that have traditionally supplied societies with their warriors. While interstate conventional wars are likely to remain rare for the foreseeable future, there will still be states and nonstate groups willing to use force to further their political objectives. These actors are likely to continue to employ the techniques of irregular warfare to offset the military advantages of the major powers. In this scenario, the primary threat is likely to come from superterrorism inspired by ruthless, uncompromising ideologies similar to those that currently motivate Al Qaeda and its offshoots. Quite apart from weapons of mass destruction, advances in explosive devices, personal weapons, and cyber-warfare threaten to place ever greater destructive potential into the hands of smaller groups or even radicalized individuals such as Thomas McVeigh, who perpetrated the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 that killed 168 people. Another significant trend is that states appear to be losing the monopoly of armed force that has been a defining feature of sovereignty since the emergence of nationstates. Advanced, nonstate militias, such as Hezbollah, are emerging with greater military capability and will to fight than the cash-starved and poorly motivated armed forces of many nation-states. On the other hand, many military services have been privatized or outsourced by advanced military powers. Civilian companies have taken over logistic, training, and security roles on operations that were previously undertaken by military personnel. Some private companies that offer combat services have emerged and the UN has even contemplated the privatization of peacekeeping operations. The current tendency to outsource warfare to nonstate agencies seems set to continue. Predictions of the future of warfare must be approached with caution. History is full of examples where states have been taken by surprise by novel ideas, sociopolitical changes, or technological breakthroughs. Predicting future trends in the early twenty-first century is particularly problematic as the boundaries between conventional and unconventional, regular and irregular warfare, civilian and military, political and criminal, and public and private are becoming increasingly blurred in many conflict zones. See also: Chemical and Biological Warfare; Civil Wars; Clan and Tribal Conflict; Guerrilla Warfare; Nuclear Warfare; Peacekeeping; Terrorism; World War I; World War II

Further Reading Berkowitz, B. (2003). The new face of war: How war will be fought in the 21st century. New York: The Free Press. Bobbitt, P. (2002). The shield of Achilles: War, peace and the course of history. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

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Boot, M. (2006). War made new: Technology, warfare and the course of history, 1500 to today. New York: Gotham Books. Ferguson, N. (2006). The war of the world: History’s age of hatred. London: Allen Lane. Gray, C. S. (1999). Modern strategy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hammes, T. X. and Respondents (2005). War evolves into the forth generation. Contemporary Security Policy 26(2), 189–285. International Institute for Strategic Studies (2005–2006). Complex irregular warfare: The face of contemporary conflict. In The military balance, vol. 105, ch. 9, no. 1, pp 411–420. New York: Routledge. Kaldor, M. (1999). New and old wars: Organized violence in a global era. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Keegan, J. (1989). The Second World War. London: Pimlico. Leitenberg, M. (2006). Deaths in wars and conflicts in the 20th century. Occasional paper no.29, 3rd edn. Cornell University Peace Studies Program. Luard, E. (1989). The blunted sword: The erosion of military power in modern world politics. New York: New Amsterdam Books. Luttwak, E. N. (1995). Towards post-heroic warfare. Foreign Affairs 74 (3), 109–122. Marshall, M. G. and Gurr, T. R. (2005). Peace and conflict 2005: A global survey of armed conflicts, self determination movements, and democracy. Baltimore, MD: Center for International Development and Conflict Management, University of Maryland. Metz, S. (2000). Armed conflict in the 21st century: The information revolution and post modern war. Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute. http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/ display.cfm?PubID=226. (accessed on February 2008). Murray, W. and Sinnreich, R. H. (eds.) (2006). The past as prologue: The importance of history to the military profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pape, R. A. (2003). The strategic logic of suicidal terrorism. American Political Science Review 97(3), 343–361. Shultz, R. H. and Dew, A. J. (2006). Insurgents, terrorists and militias: The warriors of contemporary conflict. New York: Columbia University Press. Smith, R. (2005). The utility of military force: The art of war in the modern world. London: Allen Lane. Special Report Civil Wars (2003). The global menace of local strife. The Economist 24, 23–26 May 2003. van Creveld, M. (2000). Through a glass, darkly: Some reflections on the future of war. Naval War College Review Autumn 25–44, http://www. d-n-i.net/creveld/through_%20a_glass_darkly.htm (accessed on June 2008).

Relevant Websites http://www.cidcm.umd.edu – Center for International Development and Conflict Management, University of Maryland. http://www.defac.ac.uk – Conflict Studies Research Centre, Defence Academy, UK. http://www.d-n-i.net – Defense and the National Interest. http://www.mipt.org – Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism. http://www.rand.org – RAND Corporation, National Security Research Division. http://www.sipri.org – Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil – Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College. http://ccw.politics.ox.ac.uk – The Oxford Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War, University of Oxford.

Economic Causes of War and Peace Jon D Wisman, American University, Washington, DC, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Overview A Brief History of the Economic Causes of War and Peace Is War Natural? What Economists Have Had to Say about War and Peace

Glossary Financial Capital An ownership claim on real wealth. Stocks, bonds, bills of exchange, and money are examples. Free-Rider Problem Within a market economy, the problem of not being able (without undue costs or appeal to government) to exclude someone from receiving benefits that others have paid for. It results from the failure of markets to efficiently allocate resources in certain instances.

The Socioeconomic Dynamics of Peoples at War and Peace The Socioeconomic Dynamics of Peace Creation Further Reading

Game Theory A procedure for mapping the strategies and corresponding payoffs available to competing participants such as two firms, a firm and a union, or two nations where their decision making is interdependent. That is, the effectiveness of one agent’s strategy, depends upon the decisions taken by the other agent. Gene-Culture Co-Evolution An evolutionary theory that argues that genetic change and cultural change mutually affect each other. This is the dominant view among evolutionary biologists of how the human species has evolved.


Negative-Sum Game Where the sum of losses exceed the sum of gains for all parties taken together. War is typically an example of a negative-sum game.

Overview On the most general level, it is hardly surprising that economic forces have been significant in setting the stage for war and peace, since humans are necessarily and fundamentally economic beings. In order to survive and reproduce in a world of scarcity, humans must struggle with nature to meet their needs. But this very condition of scarcity also establishes a reason why groups of humans might fight for limited resources. Yet even though economics and war seem related, no general theory of war and peace has evolved that is widely embraced within the economics profession. This may be due in part to the fact that economists are generally concerned with resource allocation through peaceable means – especially markets – and have not given a great deal of study to the economic causes of war and peace. And, those who have attempted to develop broad general theories of war and peace have not managed to convince their colleagues – much less the wider body of scholars who study the domain – of the explanatory power of their approaches. During the earliest part of human existence economic surpluses were extremely meager such that war offered limited economic benefits. However, with the rise of agricultural society, war came to offer more substantial economic payoffs to the victors. Indeed, for likely victors, war could be more economically beneficial than economic production. Yet war is a negative-sum game. That is, the economic gains of the winner are less than the losses to all participants taken together. Therefore, peace has always offered a higher collective payoff. There has always been an economic motivation for peace. Where the outcome is obvious, it may be better for the likely losers to bribe the likely winners not to attack. It must be emphasized, however, that because humans are social beings, the motivations for war or peace are more complex than such mere calculation of advantage. Indeed, as society became more complex, so too did these motivations. In any event, the evolution of capitalism eventually changed the equation: economic production came to offer greater benefits than waging war. The economic benefits of peace increased. The technological sophistication and social coordination that accompanied the maturation of capitalism made war increasingly destructive.

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Neolithic Revolution The beginning of humanity’s adoption of agriculture about 10 000 years ago. It was the greatest economic revolution in human history. It was a precondition for the evolution of civilization.

Indeed, the level of destructive capacity of potential combatants eventually came to mean that even a victor would lose economically. Yet even as war became ever more destructive, and hence ever more economically irrational, it continued all the same. However, in the latest chapter of humanity, a major war has come to mean potential species suicide, and this, combined with the critical selfinterested individualism that ever-expanding capitalism nurtures, provides grounds for optimism that major wars belong to the past. Yet if the threat of major wars seems attenuated, this does not appear so true of local and more limited wars, especially in the less-developed world. Participants in these wars have often been funded and armed by the world’s major powers. These wars are often driven by population pressures, ethnic hatred, and a struggle for control over resources. Also, the superpowers, following their own geopolitical and economic interest, have frequently intervened militarily in the internal workings of Third World nations. Some of these external incursions have been especially violent and costly in terms of human lives, some major examples being the US in Vietnam, the Soviets in Afghanistan, and more recently the Russians in Chechnya and the US in Iraq. To gain a broad appreciation of the manner in which economic forces have generated the conditions for both war and peace, it is useful to survey broadly the history of humanity. To make this task manageable, this history will be divided into several stages of economic development. Surveying this history will constitute the first part of this article. The second part will examine the question of whether war is natural. Part three will briefly survey the spectrum of theories that economists have formulated concerning war and peace. Part four will focus on the social dynamics of peoples at war and peace. The concluding section will look at the future potential for peace from an economic perspective.

A Brief History of the Economic Causes of War and Peace As human culture has evolved, the specific economic causes of war and peace have not only varied, they have also become increasingly complex. Consequently, a useful overview of the topic can be gained by briefly examining

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war and peace over the historical stages of economic development. As will become evident, for much of human history – indeed until rather recent times – there was no clear distinction between an economy and warfare. War and Peace among Hunters and Gatherers Hunters and gatherers were typically nomadic. They would hunt and gather an area until it was fairly well picked over and then move on, often following the migratory patterns of animals. Because of their nomadic ways, foragers could not accumulate significant material wealth. What material wealth they might possess would be in the form of crude primitive weapons and tools, perhaps clothing and hides for shelter, and ornamental jewelry. Such meager material wealth offered groups little incentive to attack so as to steal others’ possessions. This does not mean, however, that hunting and gathering peoples did not war with each other. Indeed, the personal and social skills necessary for bringing down prey were highly suited for war. And there were motivations for belligerence toward other groups. They might fight for women, or for hunting and gathering rights to specific territories. Until fairly recently, the dominant view was that such warring was quite limited in scope and damage was unlikely to be severe. The reasoning was that unless there was a shortage of promising hunting and gathering territory, groups would not so readily risk death in battle. An economic form of reasoning was believed to have prevailed, one balancing the risk of death from starvation against death in battle. And because groups could usually move on to other territories, conflict was believed to have been more in the form of bluffing, an attempt to convince the opposing group of their fighting superiority and their willingness to do battle. This highly ‘economistic’ view is now challenged. Evidence suggests that warfare in pre-agricultural societies was incessant, driven more by the sexual rewards of being a successful warrior than by economic advantage. Those warriors who had succeeded in killing an enemy sired more children, thereby passing more of their genes into future generations. In this manner, a genetic proclivity for warlike behavior was presumably selected. This proclivity would work even should a warrior be killed. Most hunter–gatherer societies were patrilocal. Wives are sought from outside the band and moved to live with the husband’s family. This means that most of the males in the band were relatives. Thus if one were killed, some of his genes would still pass into future generations. Interestingly, our closest primate relative, the chimpanzee, whose genome is 99% identical to ours, are also patrilocal and share our earlier propensity for murderous raids on other groups. None of this, of course, negates the economic benefits of successful warfare. Annihilating one’s enemies meant reduced competition for scarce resources.

To minimize risks, such warfare was apparently carried out as raids, ambushes, and surprise attacks. The ideal was to gain or protect territory and to annihilate or exterminate the opponent so as to preclude revenge. According to anthropologist Lawrence Keeley, 65% of pre-agricultural societies were at war continuously, and 87% fought more than once a year. They killed their enemy, taking no prisoners, excepting perhaps women. It has been estimated that about 30% of males were killed in warfare (about the same rate as for chimpanzees). War and Peace in the World of Early Agriculture Although the adoption of agriculture – the so-called neolithic revolution – is typically dated to about 10 000 years ago, it did not begin of a sudden. Groups planted crops at first to supplement food from hunting and gathering. Nor was agriculture chosen because it seemed to be a superior mode of existence. In fact, evidence suggests that given the choice, hunter–gatherers will not voluntarily adopt agriculture. Instead, it is generally believed that the adoption of agriculture was forced by the decline of productivity in hunting and gathering as populations expanded. It was over-hunting and over-gathering, perhaps combined with climatic changes and new technologies, that made necessary the adoption of agriculture. Agriculture means greater human command over the physical world. Rather than foraging for food, humans gained a greater degree of control over their food sources. But agriculture introduced a new problem of major importance. Agriculturalists do not live hand-to-mouth. Instead, they invest long periods of labor in their future food supply. They must await the harvest, or wait until their animals have birthed young and nurtured them to an independent age. The problem is that marauders can sweep in and steal the harvest or poach their herd animals. And after they have done so, the victims are highly vulnerable to starvation. Consequently, the adoption of agriculture created a need for effective defense. Agriculturalists needed to defend their investment in their future food supply, even to their deaths, since they would likely starve if the marauders should win. The existence of a saved food supply, whether in grains or animals, made war far more economically attractive. Harvests and herd animals could present all but irresistible pickings. Agriculture created greater differentials in group sizes, division of labor, and technological sophistication. Clear military superiority could well enhance the chances of plundering raids, or the ability to withstand such raids. Yet if agriculture created surpluses worth stealing, it also greatly increased the potential benefits of trade. A proclivity for trust and coordination was rewarded with the economic benefits of increased trading. Humans were encouraged to calculate the costs and benefits of cooperation with nonkin others.


Pastoral Nomadic Horsemen and Continual War One form of agriculture – pastoral nomadism – became especially prone to warlike behavior. Pastoral nomads herded animals from one grazing area to another. Once horses became domesticated and nomads began moving about on horseback, they became ferocious warriors. Their wealth was in their herd animals, and the skills they needed to develop to protect this wealth against both animals and other groups of humans kept them continually prepared for combat. Their equestrian skills gave them the capacity to strike with lightning speed and terrifying effectiveness. Virtually all adult males would serve as warriors. Thus they had two principal means of acquiring their needed resources: They could tend and breed their herds and they could attack agricultural settlements or other nomadic bands to steal all that was worth carrying off. Their economic well-being depended upon both. Not surprisingly, then, the skill and courage required for attack made war a noble activity within their cultures. Yet their mobility posed serious limits to their economic and cultural development. Without giving up nomadism, they could accumulate only limited wealth. Because of their nomadism, they could not develop a high degree of division of labor or specialization. Consequently, they typically remained poor and illiterate. Nevertheless, their aggressiveness had serious economic consequences. It was to severely retard economic development in many areas of the world, such as Eastern Europe, which suffered continual waves of nomadic attack from the East. Because of their mobility and military skills, they were all but impossible for more settled powers to constrain or control. War and Peace and the Rise of the State As agricultural settlements grew, defense became increasingly specialized. Social power came to be based increasingly on political relations as opposed to kinship relationships. Sociologist Max Weber saw this evolution of the state as a consequence of a group gaining a relative monopoly on violence. In a similar vein, economic historian Douglass North has developed a theory of the state according to which a group with a comparative advantage in violence specializes in offering defense in return for a portion of the output of all producers. This group becomes the state. It should be noted that from the vantage point of economic science, the state can be viewed much like a monopoly business firm, albeit one with unique characteristics. An implicit contract exists between the state and its subjects: in exchange for protection from both external and internal aggression, subjects provide the state with resources in the form of tribute or taxes. Its superior fighting power, and hence its high degree of monopoly

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on violence, gives the state the temptation and potential ability to extract a maximum of taxes from producers. However, the state’s ability to exploit the people within its domain is checked by the threat of revolt and the availability of substitutes. If the state’s tax burden is deemed excessive, subjects might be tempted to give their allegiance to a rival group offering to provide protection for less. They might even prefer the assumption of power by a foreign force. Paradoxically, peace is necessary for economic progress, yet peace can make despotism more readily possible. If a state faces no serious internal or external competition for the allegiance of its subjects, then these subjects have no recourse to substitutes. If the state has no internal competitors, then it need not be so solicitous of its people. If no external competition is in evidence, then factions of subjects cannot flirt with foreign powers in a manner that places checks on the sovereign’s power. Thus, without internal or external substitutes, the state can more readily oppress its people. Its people have no other defense options. A classic example is pharaonic Egypt. With a sea to the north, deserts to the south and east, and semiarid lands to the west, Egypt was relatively well insulated from external aggression. Also, with periodic exceptions, there was little or no internal competition. Consequently, the power of the pharaohs was nearly absolute and their exploitation of their peoples supposedly quite extreme. A second example is that of Rome. The Roman state developed military technology that was superior to that of other states and peoples. Yet more importantly, it developed the economic power and highly sophisticated social organization that gave it clear military superiority over contending political entities. The consequence was that competing political powers were typically defeated. The evolving Roman Empire had, then, two sources of income: It could tax its own citizens, and it could demand tribute from conquered peoples. The Roman state developed a fairly high degree of monopoly power over violence for a theretofore-unparalleled geographic range. This high degree of monopoly resulted in the pax romana, a degree of peace in the Empire that enabled the growth of trade and economic development. This economic dynamism increased the tax base and hence the revenue accruing to the state. Yet the far-flung nature of the Roman Empire meant that internal competition for power was ever-present. This placed a check on the ability of the state to exploit not only Roman citizens but also others within the Empire. Eventually, however, Rome lost its comparative advantage in violence. The challenge was both internal and external. Internally, factional fighting weakened the state. Externally, political contenders, adopting similar technology and organization strategies, succeeded in opposing Roman forces on the frontiers of the Empire.

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If the state is viewed as a unique type of economic agent, then like all other economic actors, the state will attempt to maximize its income. But its power to do so, as noted above, is constrained by the availability of substitutes. If an internal or external contender offers protection for less, then the ruled may switch allegiance. It is for this reason that rulers, like all economic firms, will constantly strive to eliminate all competition. The invasion of the Roman Empire by ‘barbarians’ offered peoples in the Empire substitutes. The invasions may have been successful in part because the invaders offered a better deal – better protection for less taxes or tribute. Once a state is weakened by competition, it may find itself on an ever-accelerating decline. The dynamic works as follows: An attack means that more resources must be allocated to defense. At some point these increased costs will force the state to increase the amount of surplus it takes from its citizens. It must increase taxes, tribute, or confiscations. Such highly unpopular measures cause allegiance to waver. In addition, if the state takes more, economic incentives may be impaired. Why work hard to create a large harvest or amass a large stock of animals if the state is likely to take them away? Instead of putting their wealth into productive assets, people have an incentive to convert it into nonproductive forms of property, such as precious metals, that can be hidden from a confiscating state. Obviously, such behavior reduces a society’s potential economic output, and thus is also likely to erode the state’s revenue base, handicapping its chances of amassing the resources necessary for fending off contenders for power. Ideology can, of course, play a significant role. The state would wish that subjects express ‘product loyalty’. If possible, the state could be expected to appeal to higher motivations such as defending the ‘fatherland’ or ‘motherland’. It would wish to convince its subjects that its cause is the will of a god or gods, a just cause against the forces of evil. Typically a priestly class helped create and maintain such state-supportive ideology. Rulers might even portray themselves as gods, as was the case with Egypt’s pharaohs, or divinely chosen, as was the case in much of medieval Europe. A state’s capacity for waging war is constrained by the amount of surplus output that can be produced. For instance, if people faced such material hardship that they would have to expend absolutely all of their energies producing for bare survival, then no one could be freed from production to engage in fighting. By contrast, if 90% of the population could produce enough subsistence for the entire population, then conceivably 10% could engage in fighting. Of course, the amount of surplus created by those in production limits not only the capacity for waging war, but also the size and luxury of the governing or priestly classes.

The Rise of Capitalism In premodern agricultural societies, war was frequently a more promising route to wealth than economic production. The spoils of war could potentially make the victors instantly wealthy. The two principal factors of production and hence the two principal forms of wealth were land and labor. Both could be obtained through military conquest. To be useful, conquered land had to be controlled and defended against competing forces. Captured peoples could be returned as slaves to work the land of the victors. Indeed, the taking of slaves was an especially good economic coup. Those taken would typically be old enough to work. The conquered peoples had paid the substantial expense of raising them to that age. Thus the capturing of adults to serve as slaves was a better deal than domestically breeding and raising slaves until old enough to work. Hard work in production, saving, and investment, by contrast, could promise to improve one’s lot, were it not for the fact that brigands or the state stood too frequently ready to take it all away. Indeed, a principal reason why economic development has been so slow to evolve in human history is that property rights have been too fragile. The superiority of war over economic production was expressed in the status relationships of premodern agricultural societies. The highest prestige was held by those in government or in military service. Frequently, the two were indistinguishable. In fact, the only acceptable careers for the nobility were in politics and the military. As the Marquis de Vauvenargues put it in the mid-eighteenth century, ‘‘a man of quality, by fighting, acquires wealth more honorably and quickly than a meaner man of work.’’ Those in production, by contrast, typically commanded little if any esteem. Those in agriculture – the overwhelming majority of the people – were generally not free, being tied to the land as slaves, serfs, or in debt bondage. Those in crafts, although generally freer than cultivators, had relatively little prestige prior to the rise of capitalism. In most premodern societies, those in trade and finance were especially looked down upon. Indeed, their domains were viewed with such disdain and distrust that they were frequently not accepted as full members of society. Instead, trading and banking functions were often performed by metics or resident aliens. Incidentally, the state periodically found it ideologically useful to blame society’s ills on these metics, making it easier to confiscate their wealth. The slow rise of capitalism in Western Europe became one of humanity’s great watersheds. It set in motion forces that would create not only unparalleled wealth, but also the eventual promise of an end to war. As nation-states evolved in Europe, fueled by the new technology of gunpowder that could lay waste to feudal castles, and by the wealth of expanding trade and


commerce, these states found themselves in the unique political situation of a general balance of power. After the fall of Rome, no single political power succeeded in conquering and sustainably controlling all of Europe, not that there were not notable attempts such as those of Charlemagne, Napoleon, and Hitler. This prolonged general balance of power was unique to Western Europe and helps explain its economic success. The consequence of no one power being capable of establishing hegemony over Europe had three major related consequences. First, nations faced the constant insecurity of being attacked by other more or less equally insecure political entities. This nation-state competition created an arms race in which to fall too far behind meant possible conquest by a more advanced enemy. This competition also placed a premium on improving the economic foundations of military might. Second, nation-states had a collective interest in no single power becoming overly strong. Alliances would thus form to preclude an already strong nation from becoming yet stronger by annexing a neighboring territory. Third, nation-state competition made it more difficult for individual nation governments to suppress new ideas, practices, and technological progress. Repressed or fearful intellectuals could often flee to neighboring states to find sanctuary. Some of the best-known examples of this were Reńe´ Descartes, John Locke, Voltaire, and Karl Marx. In addition, intellectuals, unable for political reasons to publish a work within their own nation, often successfully sought publishers abroad. European nations that attempted to repress technological innovations frequently were forced to relent. A striking example was France’s attempt to outlaw the printing press in order to protect the livelihood of copyists. The consequence was that authors sent their manuscripts abroad for publication, thus not only outflanking the prohibition, but also depriving France of an important industry. Eventually, France was obliged to permit the evolution of printing within its own borders. While capitalism made states stronger by strengthening their economies, it also tended to weaken states’ ability to act tyrannically. It did this by dividing authority or power into two spheres: the political and the economic. As capitalism evolved, the state was forced to withdraw progressively from intervention in the workings of the economy. Although this withdrawal has never been total and there have been reversals, it has generally meant that the political sphere occupies itself with the functions of statecraft such as waging wars, making and maintaining alliances, maintaining order, and promulgating laws and regulations (setting the rules of the game). The second sphere of power and authority is the economy. It concerns itself with production and distribution, both of which came increasingly to be ruled by market forces. States discovered, and are still discovering, that

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economic dynamism is frequently better promoted by leaving most economic matters to the workings of this market sphere. The market sphere grew to serve as a countervailing power to the political sphere. The evolution of capitalism has slowly replaced the premodern logic of economic reward. The potential for attaining wealth through war has declined as the technology of destruction has become ever more sophisticated and widely dispersed. The increasing cost of this technology, along with the rising amount of destruction of wealth that it promised, reduced the probability that the spoils of war could make war economically worthwhile. Further, under capitalism, growing productivity in agriculture meant that this sector would decline in relative importance. With the exception of a few natural resources such as oil and minerals that are highly unevenly dispersed geographically, capturing land promised too little in terms of wealth. Two forces were also generated to serve against the capturing of labor in the form of slaves. First, the growing sophistication of production technology made the use of bonded/slave labor less productive. Second, markets work best if all are free to enter and exit them without coercion. The expansion of markets helped increase the value of freedom generally. Slavery came to be seen as morally wrong. The logic of reward shifted from war and violence to peaceable production. And, although the potential risks and rewards of a military career would continue to confer social prestige upon its practitioners, leaders in production found their social standing continually improving as capitalism evolved. The fuller manner in which the maturation of capitalism favored production over war can be seen by examining the changing relative importance of the factors of production. Economists have long identified the three major factors of production as land, labor, and capital. As agriculture declined in relative importance, so too did land. As manufacturing and services increased in relative importance, capital became increasingly important. The traditional aristocratic class held its wealth in and derived its power from land. As land’s relative importance declined, so too did the power, influence, and status of the aristocracy. The bourgeois class, by contrast, holds its wealth in and derives its power from the ownership and control of capital. The rising importance of capital resulted in the ascendancy of bourgeois power, influence, and values. Unlike land, capital is fairly mobile. Machines can be moved. But even more mobile is the ownership claim on capital, financial capital, which provides the capitalist class with great power vis-a-vis the state. Because this wealth is highly mobile, it can more readily escape the control of any particular government. This was noted by Montesquieu in the early eighteenth century. He wrote of how, with the evolution of a form of financial capital, the

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bill of exchange, ‘‘the richest trader had only invisible wealth which could be sent everywhere without leaving a trace . . . a contrivance which somehow lifts commerce right out of [the ruler’s] grip.’’ The market sphere came to serve as a countervailing power to the political sphere. If government threatened capitalists’ freedom or wealth, capitalists could threaten to flee with their wealth to friendlier locations abroad. Because military strength ultimately depends upon economic power, governments had to be careful not to frighten off capital. They had to provide capital with security. Social thinkers were beginning to recognize that this new economy promoted nondespotic government. For instance, in the mid-1760s, political economist James Steuart observed that a ‘‘modern economy . . . is the most effectual bridle ever was invented against the folly of despotism.’’ As governments became increasingly aware that military strength was dependent upon economic strength, property rights were established that provided producers with greater assurance that their property was secure. Property came to be better protected by more clearly defined and better enforced laws. Note, for instance, the concerted efforts to eliminate piracy on the high seas. The state also offered greater assurances that property could not readily be confiscated by the state itself. Note here, for instance, the protections against confiscation provided by the US Constitution. The consequence was, of course, the unleashing of private incentives, greater economic dynamism, as well as more enduring domestic peace. Just as the rise of the nation-state centralized political power, the evolution of capitalism served to socially disperse power. The rising wealth of the bourgeoisie prompted this class to demand a share of political power. At times this demand expressed itself violently, as in the English Glorious Revolution and the French Revolution. But more frequently, political rights were acquired slowly, bit by bit. With the rise of industrialization and extensive urbanization, the working class also began to demand not only better wages and living conditions, but also political rights and a share of power. Although their struggles were often violently crushed by states representing the interests of capital, for the most part workers gained rights slowly, progressively. Considerably later, women and minorities would also petition for their share of political power. The upshot has been that over the history of capitalism, power has come to be evermore widely shared. As a result differences have come to be resolved more frequently within a peaceable political arena as opposed to through civil strife or civil war.

Is War Natural? Is warlike behavior part of the very nature of human evolution? Evolutionary, anthropological, archeological,

and historical evidence suggests that war and warlike behavior have been an ever-present part of the human experience. As social animals, it would appear that humans have always divided themselves into groups with radically different attitudes toward members versus nonmembers. Violence against members has been discouraged, often by violent punishment. Violence against nonmembers, by contrast, has often not only been tolerated, but encouraged and rewarded as well. War as Economic Behavior As we saw earlier, in a world of scarcity social groups struggle against each other, perhaps war with each other, for control or possession of limited resources such as, first, women and hunting and gathering territories, and later, cultivable land and slaves. War, then, can be a form of competition for command over scarce resources. Anthropological studies have found that in general, the scarcer resources are, the greater the likelihood of war. But where resources have been abundant and widely distributed, competition has been rarer. Much has been made of a number of societies, such as the Bushmen of Africa’s Kalahari Desert, or the Eskimos, that have been relatively peaceable. Clearly resources were not abundant for such peoples. But what explains their peacefulness is that they were uniquely situated in territories where competition through war for scarce resources could not have paid off. Because global human population has been rising ever more rapidly since the beginning of the adoption of agriculture, all societies would ultimately face others in competition for scarce resources. The central problem of the science of economics, the problem of scarcity, has meant that human groups were bound to war against each other whenever the payoff was adequately attractive. War as Evolutionary Strategy War would also seem natural from an evolutionary perspective. Groups that were most successful in increasing their command over scarce resources would have a survival advantage that would permit them to increase their populations, and thereby pass on their genes or culture to more progeny. Evolutionary biologist David Barash addresses the naturalness of war by noting the fitness argument: ‘‘The fitness of individuals within a group suffers most when that group is forced to share resources with individuals of another group. The personal fitness of these individuals could therefore actually be increased by warfare, provided that the cost of waging war is less than the benefits received.’’ Thus from both economic and biological vantage points, it would appear that at least in the early history of humanity, war was not the consequence of some selfdestructive passion run amok. Instead, it would appear to


have been critical to the very process of human social and cultural evolution. Indeed, Darwin and others since have suggested that the evolution of human intelligence is linked to the pervasiveness of warfare in the human experience. Barash suggests that ‘‘Our most dangerous predator may well have been ourselves, and selection would have favored those individuals whose brains were large enough to permit them to enter into workable alliances and to coordinate defense – and aggression – against other groups.’’

What Economists Have Had to Say about War and Peace Although war made sense from an economic perspective until fairly modern times, economists have had relatively little to say about it. Indeed, until fairly recently, most economists who expressed an interest in the economic aspects of war and peace were outside the mainstream of the profession. War and peace have simply not been given enough attention within the profession for a general consensus to evolve as to their causes. In this section, the major contributions will be briefly surveyed. Heterodox Economic Thinking on the Causes of War and Peace Early modern economic thinkers, Adam Smith and the classical school, generally believed that commerce, and this evolving system that was to be called capitalism, would engender greater peace among nations. They did not greatly expound on the topic. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, however, were of a different mind. They saw war as part of the process of what they called primitive accumulation in the early evolution of capitalism, whereby violence was used by the capitalist-controlled state to expand profitable opportunities. At the turn of the nineteenth century, theoreticians of imperialism – some Marxist, others not, believed that imperialism in search of resources and markets was necessary to avoid economic stagnation. State capitalist rivalry for imperial domains would likely lead to war. Two non-Marxist heterodox economists who discussed war were Thorstein Veblen and Joseph Schumpeter. Both essentially viewed participation in war by capitalist societies as irrational: Veblen saw such participation in war as a cultural perversion, stemming from an earlier predatory stage from which humanity might never escape. Much of his biting pessimism was grounded in the proclivity of humans to ‘‘sink their force in the broad sands of Patriotism.’’ Schumpeter also saw war as atavistic behavior, and optimistically as something that capitalistic rationality – which he saw much in the manner of Max Weber’s spirit of capitalism – would move us beyond.

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More recently, a group of neo-Marxists, often referred to as the monopoly capital school, adopted a Keynesian inadequate-aggregate-demand framework. Keynes had argued that government spending is necessary to maintain adequate aggregate demand to prevent an economy from falling into recession or depression. The monopoly capital school argued that the capitalist-controlled state could only spend on those activities that might enhance capitalist profits, and the spending which was most easily justifiable to the greater public was on war. Consequently, they argued that capitalist states were destined to maintain warlike postures towards other states in order to maintain profits and avoid economic crises. Since the early 1960s, attention has also been focused on what outgoing President Eisenhower termed the ‘‘military–industrial complex.’’ The general idea has been that the military and industries that benefit from military spending work together to generate public anxiety concerning external threats to the nation and its interests. This view often shared much with monopoly capital theory, as well as the long-standing charge that, because war frequently is good for the armaments industry, and profits generally, capitalism as a system is prone to war or warlike behavior. Most economic research in this area has been descriptive and not highly theoretical. It has also been performed by mainstream as well as heterodox economists. Mainstream Economic Theories of War and Peace When mainstream economists have taken up the topic of war, it has usually been in terms of viewing state actors in the same manner that individual behavior is viewed. That is, they have extended the neoclassical economic model to an analysis of the behavior of rivals in war. Central to this model is the assumption that actors are rational, self-interested maximizers, and that decisions are made at the margin. War and warlike behavior are depicted as rational for one or more parties. By rational it is meant that war follows some sort of at least rough and ready calculation of the estimated costs and benefits of varying degrees of warlike behavior. These calculations include assessing the rationality of bluffing, or mere warlike behavior that can not only be rational, but even superior to actually going to war. For instance, a weaker power, knowing it would lose a war, might nonetheless pretend that it would fight if provoked. Only by threatening the stronger power with losses might the weaker discourage the stronger from actually attacking. Mainstream economists have also taken note of the parallels between the strategies employed by a small number of firms within an industry (e.g., duopolies and oligopolies) and the behavior of states in potential

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military competition (incidentally, the famous early nineteenth-century German military theoretician, Carl von Clausewitz, had also compared war to business competition). The models of game theory especially have been used in trying to better grasp the options available to military rivals. Within such models, war is viewed as a negative-sum game. That is, whereas war might be rational for one or more parties, it is irrational for all participants taken together. It might be tempting to think of it as a zero-sum game, whereby whatever one participant wins, the other loses. But war is in fact a negative-sum game because the gains of the winners will be less than the losses of the loser. War costs resources, and thus if war could be avoided, these resources could in principle be allocated to meet other needs. The particular strength of this sort of modeling is that it makes clear how we would expect rival parties to behave in their strategies toward one another on the field or at the bargaining table. In fact, this basic framework of analysis has been widely used by noneconomist students of international relations and politics such as Robert Gilpin and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. Although this model possesses considerable explanatory power, its limitation is that it focuses on individual decision makers as rational, self-interested maximizers. It ignores and thus sheds no light on how individuals are socialized, on how their preference functions are formed. It does not tell us how or what individuals come to understand as their self-interest. Moreover, although the model of rational maximizing behavior may characterize the strategies rivals adopt toward one another, it appears limited in two interrelated senses. First, it presumes that the self-interest of political leaders and their constituents are essentially the same. Second, when it comes to actual conflict, the model of rational maximizing behavior does not seem to fit the varied accounts we have of how individual participants behave in battle. More to the point, it would appear that when members of one side behave as purely self-interested actors, they decrease their side’s chances of success. The reason, of course, is what economists call the free-rider problem. If individuals self-interestedly shirk their fair share of the battle effort, a breakdown in cohesion threatens. Success in battle, and especially extraordinary upsets where a physically weaker side trounces a stronger opponent, typically is found to involve a certain esprit de corps – an especially strong commitment on the part of individuals to the group – precisely what the mainstream model has difficulty explaining. This suggests, then, that whereas war may be rational for a group, it requires nonrational motivation on the part of individual actors, especially those who do the fighting. But if this is the case, how might it have come about in terms of human evolution?

The Socioeconomic Dynamics of Peoples at War and Peace As noted above, war and warlike behavior are understandable from both evolutionary and economic perspectives. Through evolution, war and warlike behavior appear to have been selected. Some evolutionary biologists and ethnologists argue that this selection was genetic. Others, perhaps wishing to hold out for greater optimism, suggest that it was not genetic, but instead that such behavior has been culturally selected. But the dominant view among evolutionary biologists and ethnologists today is what they term ‘gene-culture co-evolution’, by which they mean that there are, as Charles Lumsden and Edward Wilson have put it, ‘‘reciprocal effects of genetic and cultural change within the human species.’’ Cultural change prompts genetic change and vice versa.

Group Commitment Just as warlike behavior appears to have been selected, so, too, it would appear, have two correlative social tendencies: The first is the extraordinary commitment of members to the group during war or its threat. This is hardly surprising, since a group for which such commitment was weak would be at a severe disadvantage in a struggle for resources, and therefore would be at a disadvantage in terms of survival, in terms of passing its members’ genes or culture on to progeny. It is even plausible that our very sociability, at least to some extent, was selected for as a result of the benefits of social cohesion during threats from external aggressors. Evidence of this group commitment under threat is everywhere in our cultural history: War occasions the most splendid acts of heroism. It is during war that individuals most readily sacrifice their lives for others. Nietzsche and many others since have noted that men are more tightly bonded together in combat than at any other time. This bonding appears to be pleasurable. Indeed, there appears to be an exhilaration in identifying with a group in conflict with others. We also see this proclivity for group commitment in sports. For instance, rarely is anything really to be gained by spectators if their team wins, yet at times there is actual carnage among spectators not content with the outcome of the game. Clearly something other than rational self-interest is at play here. Indeed, evolution may have selected a tendency always to locate an external foe. Societies rarely seem to be without one. Thus, for instance, is it more than mere coincidence that in the US the two great political purges of the twentieth century came in the wake of each of the two World Wars, when new serious external threats had yet to be clearly identified? If such a tendency always to locate an external foe had been selected in evolution, the


payoff would be the social cohesion that would better enable society to minimize the free-rider problem. Loyalty to Leaders The second corollary of warlike behavior that appears to have been selected has to do with the degree of loyalty given to leaders when the group is threatened. Such loyalty would enable a more coordinated, quicker response to an enemy attack or change in strategy. In fact, it seems that leaders rarely achieve as high a degree of loyalty from their followers during peace as during war. As biologist John Alcock has put it, ‘‘paradoxically, war depends on the cooperative, group-bonding, authority-accepting aspect of human behavior.’’ Because leaders more readily receive stronger loyalty and respect from followers when external aggression threatens, they face an all-but-irresistible temptation: They can benefit if they can convincingly keep alive a perception of an external threat. They might even be expected to craft measures against other powers that will provoke a limited amount of real threat. Hegel made note of this phenomenon when he wrote that ‘‘peoples involved in civil strife . . . acquire peace at home through making war abroad.’’ Loyalty to Leaders in Modern Times As to the social functioning of loyalty to leaders, an important difference exists between early human society and quite recent history. Most of our human past occurred prior to the adoption of agriculture. Presumably, during this long period of human evolution, a tendency for group commitment and loyalty to leaders in times of danger was being selected for. Note that during war leaders were the most vulnerable to injury or death. They were literally leading the band into battle. Hence, any temptation to reap loyalty and respect by showing courage before the enemy had to be tempered by the risk of serious injury or death. Since the adoption of agriculture, however, human society has become progressively more complex: differentiated in terms of economic function through the division of labor; and stratified with respect to wealth, status, and power. There are two consequences of this that are of interest for grasping the nature of modern war. First, what is rational for certain segments of society is no longer necessarily rational for all. Some may disproportionately reap whatever benefits there might be from war, whereas others, especially those who go to the front lines, may disproportionately bear the costs. The second consequence of this explosion in social complexity is that there has been a decreasing cost to leaders of yielding to the temptation to seek the loyalty and respect of followers by keeping alive the perception of a threat of external aggression. As societies have become

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increasingly complex, their leaders have progressively retreated from the front, such that failure in war has generally become personally less costly to them. This does not, of course, imply that leaders could with impunity maintain loyalty by generating external hostilities. If they pushed too hard, a catastrophic war might result, robbing them of power and even life. On the other hand, if members of the group view the alleged threat as either not real, or as not sufficient to merit the cost, then the leader loses credibility and possibly also power. In the US during the Vietnam War of the late 1960s, this appeared to have been the fate of President Lyndon Johnson, and the Iraq war appears currently to pose the same threat to President George W. Bush. It may be the case that leaders do not always consciously and in a calculatingly rational manner weigh the political benefits against the costs of warlike behavior. Such behavior might come forth spontaneously, in a manner akin to group commitment or the followers’ allegiance to the leader. Ideology also comes into play. Since the evolution of complex language, ideology is likely to have been important in maintaining group cohesion and effectiveness in warlike behavior. But in the earliest eras of human history, a threat was generally visible for all to see. In more modern times, by contrast, a threat may be protracted or not always clearly in evidence. Here ideology becomes more critical for maintaining loyalty both to the group and to the leader. Indeed, ideology production becomes an industry, keeping alive depictions of enemies as not actually or fully human; or as godless; or as advocates of barbarian social institutions; or as people of an Evil Empire or members of an Axis of Evil or as terrorists. Alternatively, a society’s ideology may vest its distant leader with supranatural powers such as quasi-godhood, divine status, or divine rights. In modern times there is reason to believe that it has been during periods of economic instability that leaders have been most tempted to use the external threat strategy to achieve support. During economic crises, leaders would be most tempted to craft limited measures against another power in order to provoke a manageable amount of real threat. The reason is that beyond providing for defense and domestic law and order, the most important criterion for judging leadership today is its ability to maintain material or economic prosperity. A number of events in recent times lend support to this hypothesis. World War II grew out of the worst economic depression in the history of capitalism. By contrast, a widespread peace movement and detente came forth during the extraordinary worldwide economic progress of the 1960s. When economic dynamism began to falter in the 1970s, detente began to be drowned out by rattling sabers. Note also that during the 1960s there was widespread confidence in governments’ ability to use Keynesian

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tools to insure macroeconomic stability, whereas during the late 1970s and early 1980s laissez faire doctrine resurfaced, arguing that governments are essentially powerless to stabilize economies. There are many examples of how the threat of foreign aggression has served to legitimate political power. For instance, the rise of the first socialist country following upon the Bolshevik Revolution provided the capitalist power elites in Western countries with a powerful ideological tool for delegitimating the progressive aspirations of the working class. The foreign threat was far more than just an enemy country, it was an insidious ideology – communism. Communism was likened to a metastasizing foreign cancer that was ever-threatening to enter all parts of the social body with disastrous consequences. It was godless, soulless, and if not successfully fought, it would make slaves of everyone. Progressive ideas were readily depicted as communistinspired and those who advocated them as secretly working for the worldwide communist conspiracy. The Bolshevik Revolution granted capitalist interests an ideal foreign enemy. This foreign threat was continually used to legitimate intervention in the internal affairs of Third World countries. Communism had to be stopped from expanding into other parts of the world, even if it meant overthrowing democratically elected governments, propping up dictators, or backing death squads. A second successful, long-lasting modern example of how the threat of foreign aggression served to legitimate political power was the Soviet Union. From 1917 until its fall, it was relatively easy for the Soviet power elite to maintain the credibility of a constant external threat. No sooner had the Bolsheviks taken power than England, France, and the US set out to undermine the socialist experiment, especially by arming and financing the White Russians. Throughout the 1920s there was a perceived threat that the socialist experiment would be undone by hostile capitalist countries. So strongly did Stalin feel this that in 1931 he announced: ‘‘We must make good this distance (to become a first-rate economic and political power) in ten years. Either we do so, or we shall go under.’’ His words were to be prophetic – the Germans crossed Soviet borders 10 years later. And then, at the end of World War II, the US dropped atomic bombs on civilian populations in Japan, suggesting to the Soviet peoples how ruthlessly inhumane the capitalist US might be in the pursuit of its interests. In good part due to geography, few peoples have suffered the ravages of war as much as the Soviets – 20–30 million perished during World War II. Consequently, in a sense, the Soviet political elites had it made. They could justify the lack of democracy or civil rights, and the sorry state of their economy, as necessary for defense in an aggressively hostile capitalist world bent on their destruction. The same dynamic may well explain Fidel Castro’s prolonged dictatorial control of Cuba. Since his revolutionary assumption of power, the US has maintained a

highly visible hostile stance towards his rule, supporting an invasion by counterrevolutionaries, maintaining economic sanctions, and, it has been rumored, planned or supported assassination attempts. A more contemporary example is what occurred in the wake of 9/11. George W. Bush assumed the US presidency in early 2001 with what many judged as inadequate electoral legitimacy. And the economic conditions during his first years in office were disappointing. Most visible was the sharp collapse of stock market prices: During Bush’s first 2 years in office, the S&P 500 declined by 33%; $4.9 trillion in equity assets evaporated. Unemployment during this period increased by 40%, from 4.2% to 6%. Between January 2002 and January 2003, the dollar declined by 20% against the Euro. Such conditions would usually result in low popularity ratings. And President Bush’s ratings were quite low until the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC. In the ensuing 2 weeks, as Americans joined in solidarity, his popularity rating soared. Within the US he came to be widely seen as a great leader. And thereafter, the threat of terrorism was used to legitimate considerable restrictions on civil liberties.

The Socioeconomic Dynamics of Peace Creation As noted earlier, the evolution of capitalism made economic production more profitable than war. Indeed, as it made war ever more destructive, it eventually made it economically unprofitable even for the winner. Capitalism generated and fed upon evermore sophisticated technology and evermore sophisticated social coordination. The two world wars of the last century – separated by a mere quarter century – made strikingly clear capitalism’s destructive potential. Approximately 8 million died in World War I, approximately 50 million in World War II. And then the cost of a major war between the US and the USSR became potentially infinite. The threat of species extinction as a consequence of a US–Soviet war meant that leaders were once again on the front lines. They would also perish in a full war. Their ability to play the external threat card to rally support was constrained. And in spite of slogans such as ‘better dead than red’, popular support for a major war was unlikely to materialize. Quite convincingly, sophisticated atomic weapons and the means of delivering them over great distances are widely credited with effectively ending major wars. When viewed in the full sweep of human existence, there is an interesting sense in which humanity has come full circle. In its earliest history as hunters and gatherers, war did not have a very high economic payoff. There were simply too few material benefits to win from military


victory. Warlike behavior in the form of bluff might pay off, but actual combat with the threat of serious injury or death was not generally a good risk from an economic point of view, although as noted earlier, there may have been attractive sexual payoffs for warring individuals that augmented their potential for passing their genes into future generations. Today major war has again become a poor economic risk. Destruction might be total. But even if more limited, it is likely that no power would win economically. It would appear that there is no remaining economic rationale for war. However, it is not just the threat of species suicide or the lack of an economic payoff that is turning peoples in the advanced wealthy nations against war. Capitalism has set in motion a number of dynamics that serve to increase the probability of peace. Capitalism took war to its necessary conclusion. It produced the wherewithal that enabled total war and ultimately total destruction. But capitalism has done more than this to give peace a chance. It has changed how people think about the world and themselves. It has made them evermore critically minded. The most frequently noted consequence of capitalism is that it has brought forth a level of affluence that even the most starry-eyed of past visionaries could hardly imagine. Less noted is that as people become materially wealthier, they come to value their lives more. Note for instance that with ever-greater wealth, people generally become more cautious. They eat more healthily, they smoke less, drink less, wear seat belts, and in general place a higher value on personal safety. This latter point is strikingly obvious to anyone from a rich nation who has the opportunity to drive on the roads of a relatively poor country. With so much more to lose, increasingly wealthy populations might be expected to show less willingness to engage in war. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels argued that under the regime of capitalism, ‘‘all that’s solid melts into air.’’ Economist Joseph Schumpeter referred to this dynamic character of capitalism as ‘‘creative destruction.’’ What these social thinkers were alluding to is the tendency of capitalism to destroy all traditional social institutions, beliefs, and attitudes. Believing that the ‘dead weight of the past’ fettered human progress, they by and large thought this was a good thing. However, not all social thinkers have been so sanguine. Capitalism has acted as a ‘corrosive acid’ upon the extended family, traditional communities, rigid class distinctions, and the authority of traditional religions. In doing so, it has thrust humans into social worlds where they sense themselves as increasingly alone. Capitalism means that individuals relate to each other not as traditional norms dictate, but as markets dictate. And in markets, individuals are encouraged to be rational and calculatingly selfinterested. The increasing intensity of competition has

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meant that those who are most successful in pursuing their own self-interest become wealthy, the least successful, poor. Traditional values such as honor, glory, courage, patriotism, and sacrifice for the greater good of the whole have suffered as people become evermore calculating of their own narrow self-interest. The downside of all this is all too obvious and is widely lamented. A clear upside, however, is that individuals are less willing to sacrifice themselves or their economic well-being in war. In pre-capitalist societies, a religious framework served as the central referent of all behavior and understanding. The evolution of capitalism slowly eroded religion’s dominance, and with it the promise of an afterlife. This loss in belief in an afterlife increases the value of this worldly life. Loss of one’s life in war means loss of one’s total personal existence. Finally, for reasons discussed earlier, capitalism has tended to decentralize political power. It has, especially in its advanced form, provided a fertile ground for democracy. Yet ironically, democracy increases the ease with which a leader might lose power, and thus might enhance the temptation to rattle sabers. The 2003 US invasion of Iraq in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 seems to confirm this point as well as cast a shadow on optimism as to the end of wars. However, because a democratic society is, by definition, a more open society, claims about threats can be more openly challenged. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, empirical studies have found no significant differences in the involvement of democratic versus nondemocratic states in war. Yet democratic states have not warred against each other. During the Cold War, both the US and the Soviet Union propped up totalitarian regimes around the globe in a quest to hold them in their respective spheres of influence. Since the end of the Cold War, both capitalism, and to a lesser extent democracy have been rapidly spreading around the globe. But the record so far has been mixed. Authoritarian regimes repressed the violent expression of ethnic differences, and their sudden demise in some areas of the world has created a sesame in which ethnic violence has exploded. The lesson appears to be that democracy is far more complex than political freedom and the vote, and that consequently its peace-bearing benefits flow more readily from a slow relaxation of authoritarianism that provides adequate time for complex democratic institutions to evolve. However, although it may be the case that in the long-run capitalism and democracy evolve together within a nation, it is not so clear that they do so in the international sphere. Globalization has increased the gap between the rich and poor nations, leaving the latter, some contend, in yet more hopeless straits. To many, the failure of the Doha trade talks reveals advocacy for freer trade to be little more than a ruse of the wealthy nations for capturing yet greater shares of the world’s wealth and income for themselves. The go-it-alone

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political and military actions of the only remaining superpower have left serious doubts as to whether the world can generate sufficiently sophisticated international cooperation to effectively address severe environmental threats or the spread of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. Ideologically, capitalism appears to be the only remaining viable economic system. However, at present, it does not appear to promise the democracy of nations that the promise of world peace requires. See also: Economic Costs and Consequences of War; Economics of War and Peace, Overview

Further Reading Alcock, J. (1978). Evolution and human violence. In Farrar, L. L., Jr. (ed.) War: A historical, political and social study, pp. 21–27. Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio Press. Barash, D. (1979). The whisperings within. New York: Harper & Row. Barash, D. P. (1994). Beloved enemies: Our need for opponents. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Barash, D. P. (ed.) (2000). Approaches to peace: A reader in peace studies. New York: Oxford University Press.

Crumm, E. M. (1995). The value of economic incentives in international politics. Journal of Peace Research 32(2), 113–130. de Mesquita, B. B. (1981). The war trap. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gellner, E. (1992). An anthropological view of war and violence. In Hinde, R. A. (ed.) The institution of war, pp. 62–72. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Gelven, M. (1994). War and existence. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Gilpin, R. (2001). Understanding the international economic order. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Keeley, L. H. (1996). War before civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levy, J. S. (1989). Domestic politics and war. In Rotberg, R. I. and Rabb, T. K. (eds.) The origin and prevention of major war, pp. 79–100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mueller, J. (1989). Retreat from doomsday the obsolescence of major war. New York: Basic Books. Neild, R. (1995). Economics and conflict. In Hinde, R. A. and Watson, H. E. (eds.) War: A cruel necessity? The bases of institutional violence, pp. 126–207. London: Tauris Academia Studies. North, D. (1981). Structure and change in economic history. New York: Norton. Shaffer, E. H. (1996). Peace, war and the market. Canadian Journal of Economics 29(2), 639–643. Stone, G. R. (2004). Perilous times: Free speech in wartime. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Tullock, G. (1974). The social dilemma: The economics of war and revolution. Blackberg: University Publications.

Civil Wars Errol A Henderson, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Definition of Civil War Types of Civil War Correlates of Civil War Expansion of Civil Wars

Glossary Civil War A major, sustained, violent conflict between the military forces of a state and insurgent forces comprised mainly of residents of the state. Insurgency An armed conflict, wherein opponents of the government (insurgents) from within the state use organized violence against government forces to achieve their political aims.

This article is reproduced from the previous edition, volume 1, pp 279–288, ã [1999], Elsevier [Inc], with revisions made by the Editor.

Resolution of Civil Wars Conclusion Further Reading

Internationalized Civil War A civil war in which a third party intervenes on the behalf of the government forces or those of the insurgents. Rebellion An armed uprising, or insurrection, of citizens against their government. Revolution A violent attempt to overthrow both the political leadership of a state and the political system, itself. Secession Separation from a political union usually with the intent of establishing an independent state.

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Definition of Civil War A civil war is a sustained, violent conflict between the military forces of a state and insurgent forces comprised mainly of residents of the state. Civil war is not synonymous with internal or intrastate war. The latter also includes conflict between groups in the state that does not involve the armed forces of the state, such as recent conflicts between warlords in Somalia, which are internal wars but not civil wars. In addition, civil war is characterized by a much higher scale of violence than riots or civil disturbances, which are more often sporadic and relatively disorganized forms of civil violence that are often of short duration. Therefore, the urban riots that spread throughout the United States in 1992 and the mass civil disturbances in France in the 1960s fall well short of the level of sustained violence present in civil wars. Also, civil disturbances are often directed at groups and institutions in the society other than the central government, which is the main protagonist in civil wars. Violence directed specifically at the regime in power, such as coups d’etat also often fail to attain the threshold of civil wars. While such conflicts often involve the armed forces of the society, coups d ’etat are more explicitly extralegal executive transfers aimed at overthrowing the sitting regime’s leaders. Coups are rarely accompanied by the sustained violence that occasions civil wars; however, coups can often spawn civil wars as in the case of the 1966 coup in Nigeria that gave rise to the Biafran Civil War the following year. It is widely agreed that civil wars have three clear attributes: (1) they are primarily internal conflicts as opposed to conflicts between states; (2) the participants include the central government’s forces pitted against an insurgency as opposed to violence between groups in the society that does not include government forces (e.g., communal conflict); and (3) the insurgents must be capable of effective resistance, which is absent in cases of massacres and genocides that are prosecuted by states but often do not involve nonstate groups capable of effective resistance. Civil wars may also become internationalized, involving the intervention of third-party states on behalf of either the government or insurgents. Examples abound during the Cold War era, including civil wars that escalated into major interstate wars such as the internationalized civil war in Vietnam. It has been observed that civil wars have become increasingly destructive in the post-World War II era. For example, the Chinese Revolution from 1946 through 1950 resulted in approximately 1 000 000 battle deaths in this conflict between Chiang Kai-shek’s government forces and those of Mao Zedong’s communist insurgents. Yet it is not simply the greater availability of more destructive weapons of war in the modern era that has given rise to the prevalence of civil war. For example, the civil war in Rwanda in 1994 witnessed the massacre of

more than 500 000 persons carried out largely with machetes and small arms. The vast increase in the number of states in the global system since the end of World War II may be partly to blame for the greater frequency of civil war during the postwar era; however, even controlling for the increased number of states in the world, the incidence of civil war during the postwar period has been greater than during the period from the end of the Congress of Vienna to the onset of World War II. Not only have they been more frequent, but many civil wars in the postWorld War II era have been quite long. In fact, of the 15 longest civil wars in the period from 1815 until 1980, more than half occurred in the postwar era. All told, it is probably a combination of the severity of these wars, their greater frequency, and their protracted nature that has contributed to the perception of their increasing importance. From the end of World War II until the end of the Cold War in 1989, most civil wars occurred in the recently decolonized, or postcolonial, regions of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, and to a lesser extent in the Caribbean and in Central and South America. Civil wars during this period were virtually absent from North America and Europe, which experienced, at most, only two (the Greek Civil War and that in Cyprus). Only with the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union did the regimes in Eastern Europe experience the paroxysms of civil violence similar to those which have continued to ravage the postcolonial states. During the Cold War era, the poverty and minimal institutional development of postcolonial states reduced their ability to provide effective governance for their countries and often left them illequipped to deter the insurgency of their disaffected citizenry (especially their armed forces). Many of these states became highly militarized and their citizens suffered under authoritarian generals who often used their troops as agents of internal repression. Meanwhile, modernization also induced social change in these states as they attempted to industrialize. The record of successful industrialization among postcolonial states was mixed (though largely poor) and development was strained by bloated militaries, burgeoning bureaucracies, and rapidly expanding populations. Political elites in postcolonial states faced increased demands from both their military counter-elites and their increasingly urbanized citizenry who were both potential sources of insurgency. In addition, fissures in the culturally diverse and often rapidly urbanizing newly independent states often increased their susceptibility to institutional breakdown. Cultural diversity within the postcolonial states often provided a basis for ethnic, linguistic, or religious mobilization by political elites who appealed to ethnic nationalism, or religious fundamentalism – often euphemisms for chauvinism and demagoguery – to mobilize their followers for political protest and insurgency. Further,

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the mixture of ethnocentrism, nationalism, and the arbitrariness of colonial boundaries appeared to foment civil war, especially secession, throughout Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. The weak regimes in the former colonized states often lacked legitimacy, thereby reducing their ability to mediate intercultural conflicts borne of rising expectations among the diverse groups in their states. As it were, most state elites catered to their preferred ethnolinguistic audience(s) whom they relied upon for support. Abrogating their role as impartial arbiter, they often evinced a penchant for repression rather than representation. In addition, Cold War intrigue and exigency contributed to the escalation of conflicts in the postcolonial world. Since the United States and the Soviet Union were effectively deterred from engaging each other directly, the Third World became the battlefield upon which they prosecuted wars in attempts to solidify and expand their respective spheres of influence. Whether their policies were driven by fears of falling dominoes or imperialist expansion, the destructiveness of superpower intervention in the domestic politics of postcolonial states gave truth to the African saying that ‘‘when two elephants fight it is the grass that suffers.’’ Nevertheless, there is an emerging consensus that civil wars in the postcolonial world, even those during the height of the Cold War, resulted largely from internal factors. Fundamentally, postcolonial states were faced with the simultaneous challenges of state and nationbuilding. State-building involves the creation of effective institutions of government and the development of societal infrastructure to provide, at minimum, coordination for the executive, legislative, judicial, and military functions of the state as well as the establishment of institutional channels for political and social mobilization. In addition, it requires the development of the physical infrastructure of the society to include transportation networks, hospitals, schools, housing, sanitation facilities, and other public welfare assets that are necessary for the functioning of the society. State-building involves both coordinated planning and sacrifice; most importantly, it assumes a degree of social cohesion that generates among citizens a sense of identification with the state and a willingness to commit to the process of state-building and the sacrifice of parochial interests to more collective ones. Nation-building involves the creation of a national identity that supersedes local identities and loyalties that might compete with and preclude broader identification with the state. The objective in nation-building is to make the nation the primary political unit to which citizens swear fealty. Postcolonial states, especially, were almost always forced to build functional state institutions at the same time that they were attempting to galvanize a national consciousness and identity among the often diverse amalgamations of peoples in their territories. Where Western states were able to take each of these challenges

(state- and nation-building, respectively) in turn, often over several centuries, postcolonial states were forced to accomplish both simultaneously. Without the glue of a common sense of national identification, there was little motivation for individuals to sacrifice their local institutions in order to contribute to the establishment of the often competing institutions of the state. Rival elites fed this recalcitrance since they often viewed state institutions as competitors to their traditional positions of leadership. The result was fissures within postcolonial states across cultural, class, and regional lines. In addition, postcolonial states were obliged to forge their national identities and promote state institutions during the Cold War era and in an international political economy that often put draconian limits on their autonomous development. While the incidence of civil war has become more pronounced in the postwar era, especially among the former colonies, one should not assume that civil wars that occurred prior to World War II had only a negligible impact on world history. For example, the US Civil War (1861–65) is often considered as the first modern war where the full weight of industrialization in the form of machine-made arms and the use of railroads to move troops and supplies was applied to warfare. Not only that, this war of attrition that basically turned on the North’s success in disrupting the transportation and administrative systems on which the Confederacy relied for support of its troops in the field, actually presaged developments in World War I. Contemporaneous with the US Civil War, the Manchu government in China fought the forces of Hung Hsiu-ch’uan in the most destructive civil war in the last two centuries, the Taiping Rebellion, which ravaged China and led to the deaths of millions. In this century, the Spanish Civil War began as a revolt of elements in the army led by Franco and conservative Catholics against the Republican government of Spain. While the Western democracies, especially France and Britain, demurred from aiding their democratic brethren, the fascist governments of Italy and Germany assisted Franco’s forces. Ironically, much of the support for the Republicans came from the USSR. Only after Germany entered into a shortlived rapprochement with the Soviet Union through the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939 did Soviet aid to the Republicans end and Franco’s forces triumph. This internationalized civil war presaged the most destructive war in the history of humankind – World War II.

Types of Civil War There are generally three types of civil war as defined by the objective(s) of the insurgents: rebellion, revolution, and secession. Rebellion, or insurrection, refers to an armed uprising of citizens against their government, and it usually involves attempts to redress grievances with

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respect to a state’s policies. For example, the recent rebellion in the Chiapas region of Mexico was initiated by Zapatista rebels seeking a greater degree of autonomy and better representation of their predominantly indigenous populations, but it did not seek to overthrow or to separate from the Mexican state. During the civil war in Lebanon in 1958, Sunni Muslims mobilized for a more equitable distribution of government resources, but not to overthrow the political system or to erect different political structures. Where rebellion seeks the reform of the political system or a redress of grievances, revolution has as its objective the overthrow of both the political leadership of the state and the political system, itself. For example, the French, American, and Russian revolutions had as their objective the overthrow of the monarchical system, British colonial government, and Tsarism, respectively. The Cuban revolution had as its objective not only the overthrow of the Batista dictatorship but also the incipient capitalist system on the Caribbean island. Revolutions are often intended to overthrow colonial domination in pursuit of national selfdetermination for the colonized people(s). However, all of these cases of anticolonial conflict, or independence conflicts are not clearly civil wars. As a case in point, the independence struggle in Gandhi’s India pursued a relatively nonviolent strategy (although the British were quite violent) in their attempt to overthrow British colonial domination in a conflict that would not be categorized as a ‘civil war’. On the other hand, revolutionaries in Algeria, Angola, and Kenya utilized less nonviolent measures in their pursuit of selfdetermination and fought what were more clearly civil wars (technically, anticolonial civil wars) to extirpate themselves from French, Portuguese, and British colonial domination, respectively. Unlike rebellion and revolution, secession has as its objective the separation of a political entity from a larger political unit, usually with the intent of establishing an independent state. The US Civil War of 1861–65 was a prototypal secessionist civil war. Because of the centrality of territory and population to a state’s power calculus, secession is often the most severe form of civil war because states rarely accede to the loss of their territory without resort to arms. For example, in 1971 the eastern region of Pakistan was wrested free from the state of Pakistan, becoming the independent state of Bangladesh, in a bloody civil war that turned on the intervention of Indian troops in support of the insurgency. Secession wars are often of long duration such as the attempt by Eritreans to secede from Ethiopia, which precipitated a civil war that lasted more than 30 years. Often secession struggles involve a strong cultural component where culturally dissimilar groups attempt to separate from culturally heterogeneous societies, such as in the case of the Kurds, who have for decades fought civil wars in their attempt to secede from Iraq, Iran, and Turkey in order to form an independent Kurdistan.

Correlates of Civil War One can distinguish between human agency and contextual factors that increase the likelihood of civil war. The former relate to the individual and collective dispositions to insurgency that are the more immediate causes of civil war: these may derive from relative deprivation or rational actor motivations for collective action. The latter refers to the characteristics of the state, region, and global system that may be more remote, or permissive, factors associated with civil war. There is an absence of theoretical consensus on the role of human agency factors in civil war and this largely reflects the ongoing tension between relative deprivation and rational actor explanations of civil violence. Research findings on the role of contextual factors in civil war are less disputed but they are not conclusive. For example, it appears that states with higher levels of economic development are less prone to civil war than poorer states. In addition, more mature states are less likely to experience civil wars than younger states. States that are more militarized and those that have a history of past civil wars are more vulnerable to insurgency. Moreover, while there does not appear to be a direct relationship between the cultural diversity of a state and its likelihood of experiencing civil war, states in which ethnic, religious, linguistic, or racial groups are culturally polarized seem to be at greater risk for civil war. An interesting relationship emerges with respect to the association between a state’s level of democracy and its likelihood of civil war. Recent studies suggest an ‘inverted U’ relationship between a state’s level of democracy and its likelihood of experiencing civil war. The assumption is that states with higher levels of democracy are unlikely to experience civil war because of the availability of alternate channels for protest within the political system. States that are more autocratic, also, are less likely to experience civil wars because governments in those states are more likely to effectively repress dissent and stifle protest. However, states with intermediate levels of democracy, ‘semi-democracies’, such as those undergoing democratization – the transformation of a regime to a more democratic form of government – have the highest probability of experiencing civil war. These relationships are evident, for example, in India where the spread of democracy has increased access to education, technology, and political power for previously disenfranchised groups such as Muslims and ‘untouchables’ while also generating a backlash from segments of the Hindu community. This relationship is even more apparent in Africa, where autocratic regimes appear to enjoy greater stability than more democratic regimes that often fall prey to insurgency. For example, Uganda’s nascent democracy was terminated by the civil war in the summer of 1966, Nigeria’s Third Republic was overturned by the civil violence of 1984,

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and more recently, the civil war in Congo–Brazzaville began shortly after the country’s first democratically elected president took office. While African autocracies have endured for decades and the continent’s more mature democracies such as Botswana and Mauritius, have not experienced civil wars, Africa’s ‘semi-democracies’ are often victims of insurgency. It is important to remember that these state level factors do not operate in a vacuum. To be sure, both regional and systemic level factors also play important roles in dampening or exacerbating civil conflict. In particular, the intervention of a major (or regional) power in civil disputes may reduce the levels of civil conflict in a state. For example, the intervention of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces and the implementation of the Dayton Accords helped to reduce the level of conflict in the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. Similarly, the intervention of Vietnam in the civil war in Cambodia (Kampuchea) brought an end to the vicious regime of Pol Pot and the slaughter of millions of Cambodians in that country’s ‘killing fields’. What is no less likely is that the intervention of third parties may intensify ongoing civil wars as in the case of the Indian intervention in Sri Lanka’s civil war, US intervention in Vietnam’s civil war, the Soviet Union’s intervention in Afghanistan’s civil war, and South Africa’s intervention in Angola’s civil war. While maybe less straightforward, systemic level factors are no less important in understanding the onset and spread of civil wars. The most important of these systemic factors is the distribution of power in the global system, for example, whether there is a bipolar distribution of power such as during the Cold War standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States, or a multipolar distribution of power as was evident in the interwar period where power was clustered about several states including the United States, Great Britain, France, Japan, Italy, and eventually the Soviet Union and Germany. The most significant impact of system level variables on civil wars relates to their influence on the spread of civil violence beyond the initial participants to include the major powers. In bipolar systems, there appears to be a decreased likelihood that the major powers will be dragged into civil conflicts that expand to full-scale major power war (e.g., the United Stales and the Soviet Union never fought each other during the bipolar Cold War era). In addition, in bipolar systems, the two major powers may dominate their respective spheres to such an extent that they can stifle potential insurgency in the states within their blocs. This conflict dampening impact of systemic factors appears less obvious in multipolar systems. In multipolar systems, the likelihood of interstate war resulting from major power intervention in civil war is increased because the greater number of major powers in the system increase the probability of the intervention of at least one of them and the

subsequent intervention of others. The multipolar scenario is consistent with explanations of the onset of World War I insofar as the civil violence resulting from South Slav nationalism in Bosnia compelled AustriaHungary to attack Serbia, which was viewed as the nucleus of South Slav nationalism, following the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in Sarajevo. Austria-Hungary was supported by Germany and later Turkey and Bulgaria, while Russia, allied with the Serbs, came to their support and through its alliance ties brought in the major powers of France, Great Britain, Japan, and ultimately the United States and Italy to offset the Central Powers. In this way, one can appreciate the impact of a systemic level factor such as multipolarity contributing to the escalation and diffusion of the civil conflict in Bosnia into the most destructive war in the history of the world up to that time. In sum, the major impact of regional and systemic factors is their contribution to the expansion of civil wars. It is these matters that we turn to in the next section.

Expansion of Civil Wars Civil wars expand, or escalate, as a function of several factors that can be conceptualized in terms of vertical and horizontal escalation by both insurgents as well as governments. In vertical escalation, there is an intensification of the civil war usually resulting from changes in the political goals and opportunities of either the government forces, insurgents, or both. For example, civil wars can expand vertically when insurgents, encouraged by early victory, abandon more reformist objectives and strategies of rebellion and attempt full-scale revolution instead. In one case, the Hukbulahup (Huk) rebellion in the Philippines emerged from an anti-Japanese guerrilla movement in central Luzon that pushed for inclusion in the postwar Philippines government. The movement only turned to armed struggle when their reformist goals failed to materialize; however, the combination of land reform by the Magsaysay government, US assistance to the regime, a governmental policy of land reform, and the failure of the insurgency to expand beyond its original constituency served to undermine the rebellion. The popular insurrection against the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua gained in strength and eventually resulted in Somoza fleeing the country; however, an element of the insurgents, the Sandinistas, transformed the larger reformist objectives of the insurgency and pursued a Marxist style revolution of the Nicaraguan political system. For the government, expansion may involve a change of policy from accommodation or mediation of rebel demands to repression of dissent and destruction of the insurgency. For example, the genocide of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus by the Hutu-dominated Presidential Guard in Rwanda in 1994

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was preceded less than a year before by the settlement of that country’s civil war and an agreement on a powersharing arrangement between the parties. In Bangladesh, Yahya Khan’s attempt to deny Bengalis in East Pakistan an electoral victory and their quest for a degree of autonomy within the Pakistani state quickly became a policy of brutal repression of the Bengalis including the torture, rape, murder, and imprisonment of resistance members and sympathizers and ultimately a full-scale civil war. The more conflict-intensifying form of expansion, horizontal escalation, results from the intervention of third-party states (through the introduction of military forces or weapons transfers) on the side of the government or insurgent forces. What results is an internationalized civil war such as the ones that occurred in the following cases from the turn of the century to shortly after the end of the Cold War: Morocco (1907, 1911), Iran (1909), the USSR (1918), China (1927), Spain (1936), Greece (1944), Vietnam (1961), Zaire (1960), Yemen (1962), Laos (1964), the Dominican Republic (1965), Lebanon (1958, 1975), Angola (1975), Cambodia (1979), Mozambique (1979), Chad (1980), Sri Lanka (1983, 1987), Iraq (1985), Liberia (1989, 1992), Russia (1991), and Bosnia (1992). Civil wars expand as a function of several factors, and the most important appear to be (1) the spread of refugees into bordering states; (2) the presence of ethnic, linguistic, or religious confreres in neighboring states; and/or (3) shared ideology or alliances between the participants and potential patrons (or a combination of several or all of these). First, civil wars are more likely to spread in cases where they create refugees who flee across international borders to safer havens in adjacent states as in the case of Rwandan Tutsis who, in 1994, fled the genocide in their homeland into neighboring Uganda, which then provided support for the Tutsi-led forces who subsequently wrested control of the Rwandan state from the perpetrators of the genocide. In 1971, India’s Indira Gandhi was spurred to intervene in the conflict in East Pakistan as much by geopolitical reasons as her concern that more than ten million Bengalis had fled into northeast India to escape the brutal repression of Yahya Khan’s forces in the civil war in eastern Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Civil war may also spread into adjacent states as part of the purposive policy of one of the belligerents. For example, after West African states had established a regional multinational force, Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG), to help quell the devastating civil war in Liberia, Charles Taylor’s faction formed a spinoff group composed of mainly dissidents in neighboring Sierra Leone who spread the war to that country in an effort to pressure that state into withdrawing its military support for ECOMOG. Conflict between these forces and Sierra Leonean troops ultimately led to the overthrow of Sierra Leone’s president. South Africa’s apartheid regime followed a clear

policy of destabilizing the Frontline States (Angola, Botswana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe) not only to support their clients in the civil wars raging in several of them, but also to prevent aid from those states from reaching insurgent forces in South Africa. Second, the presence of ethnic or religious confreres in a warring state may compel leaders to intervene on behalf of their cultural cousins. For example, the Russian Federation has intervened in the civil conflict in Moldova on behalf of ethnic Slavs who organized a secession struggle to establish the Dniester Republic. Muslim-dominated Pakistan continues to support Muslim rebels in the Indian province of Kashmir. Similarly, predominantly Hindu India has intervened on behalf of predominantly Hindu Tamils in Sinhalese-dominated Sri Lanka. Third, shared ideology as well is often a pretext for intervention as in the case of Soviet and Western intervention in many of the civil wars during the Cold War era epitomized in the cases of Vietnam and Afghanistan. But minor powers may also intervene in civil wars in order to support their ideological fellow travelers. For example, Nasser’s intervention in the Yemeni Civil War was largely spawned by his antimonarchical stance and his vision of pan-Arabism. South Africa’s policy of white supremacy allowed it to find common cause with Rhodesia’s pariah regime and to support it in its civil war against the indigenous African-led insurgency in Zimbabwe. What is often more common is the support of international diasporas to their cultural kin abroad. For example, Chinese American, Greek Americans, Jewish Americans, African Americans, Polish Americans, and Irish Americans have provided material support for parties in civil conflicts in their cultural homelands. Similarly, various global diasporas including ethnic Chinese in Malaysia, ethnic Indians in Africa, Jews in South Africa and Europe, Arabs outside the Middle East, and Africans in the West are among the important sources of aid to parties of conflicts throughout the world’s regions. Importantly, just as civil wars expand they can also contract. This contraction involves the limiting of the goals or objectives of the parties of the dispute, for example, from secession to rebellion for the insurgents, as in the case of the Sudanese Civil War, or from repression to accommodation for the government, as in the case of the Russian response to the civil war in Chechnya. Contraction may result from several factors including a change in leadership toward one that seeks to resolve the conflict, the termination of military assistance to the belligerents, war weariness on the part of the belligerents, the successful intervention of third-party mediators, or the military defeat of one of the parties. If there is a successful contraction of the civil war then the opportunity for resolving the conflict is increased. In the next section titled ‘Resolution of civil wars’, we discuss some of the factors associated with the resolution of civil wars.

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Resolution of Civil Wars The resolution of civil wars can take the obvious form of the cessation of hostilities due to the military defeat of either party; nonetheless, even in the case of a clear military outcome, the manner by which the civil war ends might encourage dissatisfied factions to splinter off and generate further insurgency in pursuit of objectives denied by the outcome. This may occur even in the case of an actual settlement between the disputants. For example, dissatisfaction with the political settlement that allowed for the partition of Ireland following the armed conflict between Irish nationalists and British occupation forces in the 1920s split the insurgent forces between supporters of Michael Collins who (albeit reluctantly) accepted partition and those of Eamon de Valera who opposed it. This dissension within the insurgency following a settlement of the major conflict precipitated further civil war on the island, which continues in various forms up to the present. In another example (as noted earlier), while the civil war in Rwanda appeared to be settled, extremist Hutu elements who were dissatisfied with alleged government overtures to Tutsis assassinated the Hutu president and then set upon a coordinated plan to massacre hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Often, splinter groups may continue the civil wars years after the initial conflict has ended, as in the New People’s Army rebellion in the Philippines in 1972, which emerged from many of the unresolved issues related to the earlier Huk rebellion. In fact, the leader of the military arm of the insurgency, Commander Dante, was a former Huk guerrilla leader who had seceded from the Huk army. The clearest resolution of civil wars arises from the establishment of a clear preponderance of military power on the part of the government forces or the insurgents. For the government, this is usually a matter of reestablishing its authority and military preeminence within its territory such as was the case with the Union forces over those of the Confederacy in the US Civil War. Alternatively, the Russian Civil War is an example of insurgents overcoming the forces of the government – and as is often the case in these instances – with a sizable number of government forces switching sides in favor of the insurgents. In the nuclear era, where there was a real fear that civil wars would draw in the superpowers, there was an increased impetus for third-party resolution of civil wars whether through the good offices of outside parties, the mediation efforts of intergovernmental or nongovernmental organizations, or through the intervention of international peacekeeping forces. In one case, Zaire’s dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, was an unlikely – and unsuccessful – mediator of the Angolan Civil War, which was exacerbated by, among other things, superpower support for the opposing sides. More successful third-party conflict resolution was practiced by

Costa Rica’s head of state, Oscar Arias, who formulated the peace plan that bears his name and provided the blueprint for the resolution of the civil wars in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. To be sure, conflict resolution does not have to be generated by the actions of third parties; for example, in Colombia’s protracted civil war known as La Violencia, the rival political parties themselves adopted a consociational arrangement in which it was agreed that each would rotate in power from 1958 to 1974. The implementation of this agreement in 1958 did not end the conflict, although it helped to moderate the country’s protracted civil war. Negotiated settlements, however, may fall apart as a result of changing power relations among the factions involved. For example, the Lebanese Civil War of 1975–76 emerged, in part, from changing demographics among the primary communal groups within the state. These changes undermined the legitimacy of the powersharing arrangement, the National Pact of 1943, which relied on a census from the 1930s to determine the dispensation of important political offices in the state. The agreement determined that Christians comprised half of the population of the country and that Maronite Christians, in particular, were the preponderant communal group and therefore they were allowed to dominate the presidency. Seats in parliament were allocated in favor of Christians, with Sunni Muslims accorded a smaller role in the legislature. Shia Muslims were marginalized in this arrangement; however, by 1975, the Shias were the largest of all the communal groups and the Muslims, altogether, comprised a greater share of the total population than Lebanese Christians. What is more, the socioeconomic marginalization of the burgeoning Shia community in the context of these changed demographics was an important factor precipitating the civil war in Lebanon in 1975. What is required for the successful resolution of civil conflicts, according to Zartman, is the presence of a mutually hurting stalemate, which is a condition wherein the parties are deadlocked and neither can gain effective advantage through further fighting. At this point, it is argued, both begin to search for alternatives and it is here that third-party intervention may contribute to the separation of the disputants, the effective deployment of peacekeeping forces, the mediation of the dispute, and the resolution of the conflict. For example, the South African government’s military forces were not militarily exhausted nor were they defeated in their civil war with African insurgents but they came to realize that the costs of maintaining the apartheid state was much too great to sustain. Similarly, the insurgents led by the forces of the African National Congress and the Pan-Africanist Congress realized that they did not have the military capability to defeat the government’s military forces even while they realized that the government could not destroy their movement.

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From this stalemate, a mediated settlement was forged that dramatically transformed the country, although economic and military power still remains primarily in the hands of white South Africans – those who profited most from apartheid – and that does not bode well for the peace process in that country. In a similar situation, the Sandinista regime was not militarily defeated although it was compelled to accede to popular demands for free elections during the US-supported insurgency in Nicaragua. Therefore, it is clear that civil wars can be resolved even where the parties have not won a clear military victory or suffered a clear military defeat. In recent years, the United Nations (UN) has intervened in several civil wars as peacekeepers and they have contributed (if in some cases only moderately) to the dampening of the conflicts in El Salvador, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Haiti, Namibia, South Africa, Cambodia, Tajikistan, and Western Sahara. The UN has been more successful in preventing civil wars from developing into superpower confrontations as in the civil wars in Congo, Cyprus, Lebanon, and Yemen; however, it has been less successful at preventing hostilities from reemerging later, as each of these cases demonstrates. In addition, there have also been some glaring UN failures, as in the civil wars in Burundi, Liberia, and Rwanda. UN peacekeeping initiatives have played more of a conflict-constraining role than a conflict-resolution role. Moreover, it appears that when the interests of the five permanent members of the Security Council (P-5) are not at stake, there is relative inaction on the part of the UN as in the recent civil wars in the interlacustrine region of Africa. When the interests of P-5 members (or their allies) are at stake – as in the case of the conflict in Cyprus or the former Yugoslavia – UN intervention is more likely. All told, the resolution of civil wars requires a nuanced strategy of multinational peacemaking and peacekeeping including the separation of the combatants, establishment of cease-fires, the promotion of confidence-building measures, reductions in arms sales to the belligerents, and mediation. However, the cessation of hostilities does not necessarily portend the actual termination of the conflict unless the underlying factors that gave rise to the conflict are adequately addressed. These issues might be quite extensive and complex, therefore, the best strategy for decreasing the probability of the recurrence of civil wars is to provide an environment for the peaceful resolution of civil disputes in the first place. This entails, inter alia, the development of democratic political systems, open and productive economic systems, civic – as opposed to racial, ethnic, or religious – requirements for citizenship, the professionalization of the armed forces, the teaching of a nonchauvinist curriculum in schools, the development of responsive institutions to redress citizen grievances, and the demilitarization of society.

In addition, the occurrence of civil wars often suggests that the process of state or nation-building in the affected country is far from complete. This was as much the case in the US Civil War in the nineteenth century as in the Biafran Civil War of the twentieth century. In some cases, it suggests that independent state-building has not been successful and that secession may be necessary, as in the case of Eritrea or the Czech Republic. Although it is not always clear whether the nature of a civil war suggests the need for integration or secession, the interests of the international community should be geared to what is in the best interests of the parties to these conflicts instead of what is the preferred strategy of the superpowers who, in the past, often seemed more interested in recruiting new states to their respective blocs and destabilizing states in the rival camp. What is important to remember is that civil wars often result from the internal demands on societies; nonetheless, an international environment that is conducive to the nonviolent resolution of such conflicts remains an indispensable element in promoting peace and preventing civil war.

Conclusion Civil wars have become increasingly prevalent in their incidence and increasingly deadly in their result. For the most part, factors that give rise to civil wars seem to be related to the problems associated with state- and nationbuilding in many of the world’s younger states. As noted earlier, postcolonial states, especially, are often forced to simultaneously attend to state- and nation-building and the problems related to both. Civil wars in the post-Cold War era emerge from a variety of factors and even the process of democratization – that is often viewed as a panacea for civil conflict – is implicated in some degree in the incidence of civil war. While mature democracies seem to be less prone to experience civil wars (as do mature autocracies), ‘semi-democracies’, or states with only moderate levels of democracy, evince an increased likelihood of experiencing civil war. Nonetheless, the development of democratic political systems is an important ingredient in the building of viable and less warprone states; however, we are cautioned that violence often accompanies this process. Our challenge is to attempt to find more nonviolent avenues for political and economic development. The international community has an important role to play in support of these objectives; nonetheless, the states themselves – their policies, practices, and programs – will ultimately determine their prospects for development and their likelihood of experiencing, or avoiding, civil war. See also: Warfare, Trends in

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Further Reading Brown, M. (ed.) (1996). The international dimensions of internal conflict. Cambridge: MIT Press. Byman, D. (2007). Things fall apart: Containing the spillover from an Iraqi civil war. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Collier, P. (2007). Ethnic civil wars: Securing the post-conflict peace. Harvard International Review 28(4), 56–60. Crocker, C. A., Hampson, F. O., and Aall, P. (eds.) (2007). Leasing the dogs of war: Conflict management in a divided world. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press. DeRouen, K. (2007). Civil wars of the world: Major conflicts since World War II (electronic resource). Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. Doyle, M. W. and Sambanis, N. (2000). International peacebuilding: A theoretical and quantitative analysis. American Political Science Review 94(4), 779–801. Fearon, J. D. (2004). Why do some civil wars last so much longer than others? Journal of Peace Research 41(3), 275–301. Gleditsch, K. S. (2007). Transnational dimensions of civil war. Journal of Peace Research 44(3), 293–309. Hartzell, C. A. (2007). Crafting peace: Power-sharing institutions and the negotiated settlement of civil wars. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Hegre, H. and Sambanis, N. (2006). Sensitivity analysis of empirical results on civil war onset. Journal of Conflict Resolution 50(4), 508–535.

Hegre, H., Ellingsen, T., Gates, S., and Gleditsch, N. P. (2001). Toward a democratic civil peace? Democracy, political change, and civil war, 1816–1992. American Political Science Review 95(1), 33–48. Henderson, E. A. and Singer, J. D. (2000). Civil war in the postcolonial world, 1946–92. Journal of Peace Research 37(3), 275–299. Kastfelt, N. (ed.) (2005). Religion and African civil wars. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Laband, J. (ed.) (2007). Daily lives of civilians in wartime Africa: From slavery days to Rwandan genocide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Lichbach, M. (1995). The rebel’s dilemma. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Licklider, R. (ed.) (1993). Stopping the killing: How civil wars end. New York: New York University Press. Mack, A. (2002). Civil war: Academic research and the policy community. Journal of Peace Research 39(5), 515–525. Midlarsky, M. (ed.) (1992). The internationalization of communal strife. New York: Routledge. Reynal-Querol, M. (2002). Ethnicity, political systems, and civil wars. Journal of Conflict Resolution 46(1), 29–54. Small, D. and Singer, J. D. (1996). International and civil wars. Correlates of war project data. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan. Small, M. and Singer, J. D. (1982). Resort to arms: International and civil wars, 1816–1980. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Zartman, I. W. (1995). Elusive peace: Negotiating an end to civil wars. Washington, DC: Brookings.

World War I Daniel Marc Segesser, University of Berne, Berne, Switzerland ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

World War I in World History Protagonists Features of World War I

Glossary Central Powers Alliance between Imperial Germany, Austria–Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire. Dominions Self-governing entities of the British Empire (i.e., in 1914): Australia, Canada, Newfoundland, New Zealand, and the Union of South Africa. Entente Alliance between France, Russia, and the United Kingdom named after the Entente Cordiale of 1904 between France and the United Kingdom. Franc-Tireurs (free-shooters) Term used for the first time during the Franco–Prussian War for volunteer detachments that harassed the German armies after the defeat of the Imperial French Army at Sedan. Civilian irregular soldiers or guerrillas were also called franc-tireurs by the German army, who had unsuccessfully tried to ban any civilian armed resistance at the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907.

Course of Events Peace Settlement and War Guilt Debate Further Reading

Great War Term by which World War I was known between 1918 and 1945. It was used to denote the new scale that warfare had reached in this conflict and the social, cultural, and demographical impact it had had. July Crisis Term used to denote the critical phase, in July 1914, between the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo and the Austrian declaration of war on Serbia. It was marked by diplomatic activity to avoid a war and at the same time keep the alliances intact between France and Russia on the one hand and Austria–Hungary and Germany on the other. League of Nations International organization for the maintenance of peace created after World War I according to the ideas of American President Woodrow Wilson and South African Defence Minister Jan Smuts. Militarism Principle of maintaining a large military establishment; tendency to regard military efficiency as

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the supreme ideal of the state and to subordinate all other interests to those of the military, and the process of the reshaping of society according to military principles and values. Mobile Warfare Method of fighting which characterized most of the fighting on the eastern front and in the Middle East. Its main characteristics were the high mobility of its operations and a tendency to try to outflank the enemy. On the western front, there were only two phases of mobile warfare – in 1914 up to the Battle of the Marne and in 1918 after the black day of the German army. Navalism Principle, prevailing in the United Kingdom, of maintaining a large naval force with a tendency to regard naval superiority as most important to the survival of the country. Schlieffen-Plan Operational plan originally conceived by field marshal Alfred Count von Schlieffen, Chief of the German General Staff from 1891 to 1905. It made provision for a two-front war by stipulating that the mass of the German army should move through Belgium to defeat the French army in the west first, while only small defensive forces should remain on the eastern front. Once the war had been won in the west – which was supposed to happen soon – the majority of the German forces should be committed against the Russians. Total War There is no final definition as to what constitutes a total war. Certain elements have, however,

been agreed upon. They are: total mobilization (material and personal), total war aims, and total conduct of war, centrally managed and conducted by a professional political and military leadership with the help of a huge bureaucratic apparatus. Trench Warfare Prevailing method of fighting on the western front in World War I. Once the front line stabilized at the end of 1914, the fighting parties dug trenches from where they continued to fight each other by artillery, machine gun, mortar and/or rifle fire. A whole system of frontline and support trenches was built. Attacks were, most of the time, only conducted after a long preparation by artillery fire and were extremely costly. War Crime Term for the first time used in German by Johann Caspar Bluntschli in 1872 and in English by Lassa Oppenheim in 1906 to emphasize the criminal character of violations of the laws of war. During World War I, British jurist Hugh H. Bellot used the term for the first time consistently. Nevertheless, the term was not used in the Peace Treaties and became common only during the interwar period. World War There is no final definition of what constitutes a world war, but it can best be understood as a phenomenon that connects regional wars in different continents into the framework of a great conflict which includes European powers as well as Europeanized and indigenous populations of non-European countries to a significant extent.

Although recent research has assigned the term ‘world war’ also to earlier wars like the French wars of 1792–1815, it is used here to denote the World War I of the twentieth century, which took place between 1914 and 1918 and was also called The Great War by contemporaries.

sure that the Great War, as it was called at the time, would be the last war in the history of mankind. The military analysis was quite different from the popular perception. Officers either tried to prove how effective their measures had been or criticized the ways in which the war had been conducted and offered alternatives for future war. A world without war was not a real possibility for them and they watched the League of Nations with deep mistrust. Many people in the Central Powers never accepted the verdict of the Peace Settlement and welcomed nationalist revisionism. After World War II, it seemed that the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and the consequences of that war had made World War I and its outcome less relevant for the modern world, even though there had been an enormous number of casualties. It was only in the 1960s that Fritz Fischer and Arthur Marwick rediscovered World War I as a relevant topic for historical analysis. While Fischer concentrated on the war-guilt debate, Marwick analyzed the destructionist dimension of World War I and its impact on society. Recent research on World War I has focused on many different fields. Among them were questions as to whether

World War I in World History For British prime minister David Lloyd George, the bell of Big Ben echoed ‘‘Doom! Doom! Doom!’’ in his ears like the hammer of destiny and his colleague, Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, saw the lamps going out all over Europe when World War I began. The two British statesmen did not stand alone in their analysis of the consequences of the war. Many observers agreed with them and after the war there was a growing desire in all countries and sections of society that war, with its enormous causalities, might become a thing of the past. A League of Nations was created to attempt to help resolve conflicts between nations by arbitration, so as to make

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World War I had really been a world war from the beginning, whether it had been a total war as many writers so far had assumed, to what extent women and children were included in the war effort, what the importance of medicine and medical development was on the war, or what impact religion had on the war or vice versa – the impact war had on religion. One of the problems in this context has been that the different fields of research began to drift apart in recent years. As the different methods of research can yield beneficial results only if the communication between them remains intact, it is important that the national and cultural barriers between researchers from different countries be overcome. What the research on World War I has shown is that this war was not just a predecessor of World War II, but can well and truly still be understood as the Great War it was to those at the time.

Protagonists The major powers involved in World War I were Austria–Hungary, also known as the Habsburg Monarchy or the Dual Monarchy; Imperial Germany; the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, with its worldwide empire; the French Republic; and Czarist Russia. The US, another major power, entered the war only in 1917. Minor powers involved included Belgium, Serbia, Italy, Rumania, Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire, and Japan. Austria–Hungary The Habsburg Monarchy had been divided into two roughly equal halves, Austria, or Cisleithania, as it was called, and the Kingdom of Hungary, in 1867. Both had separate governments sharing only three ministries, the Foreign Ministry, the War Ministry, and the Finance Ministry. Recruiting and the organization of national militias did not, however, fall into the domain of the central war ministry, but was the responsibility of the respective governments of Austria and Hungary. This meant that, in reality, there was no united central government agency able to coordinate the policy of the whole monarchy except for external affairs. The separate economic arrangements hindered war mobilization considerably, much more than the nationalist movements of the large ethnic minorities in both parts of the monarchy. The army was recruited in both halves of the monarchy on the basis of conscription. About a quarter of its rank-and-file came from the German, the Hungarian, and the southern Slav part of the monarchy each, the rest coming from the Czech, the Rumanian, and the Italian part. The officers were predominantly German (76.1% of the regular officers and 56.8% of the reserve officers) and German was also the official language in the high command of the army. Although the Austro–Hungarian

army was plagued by many internal organizational problems, this did not stop the officers of its high command from calling for war again and again and making military plans that saw no possibility for their country other than war. Imperial Germany The unification of Imperial Germany in 1871 had been the fulfillment of nationalist aspirations in Germany. Under the leadership of the Prussian king – who was at the same time the Emperor of Germany – and his ministers, the country became a major player, politically as well as economically, in Europe and throughout the world. Although its first chancellor (Reichskanzler), Otto von Bismarck, had been opposed to acquiring colonies, Imperial Germany became a colonial power by the end of the nineteenth century. Internally, Germany was dominated by a ruling elite, mainly aristocrats and bureaucrats, who were dependent on the confidence of the Emperor and, to a more restricted extent, on parliament (the Reichstag). The military had an extraconstitutional status in the German political system and they saw themselves – and were seen by many – as the founders of the empire and the guarantor of its stability. The rise of new classes, as a consequence of the industrial development of their country, threatened their social privileges. Only a war, they believed, would give them the possibility to keep their position in German society. At the height of the July Crisis they, therefore, demanded a military solution to the conflict even though they knew that the war would not be quickly won. The German army was recruited by universal conscription with a duration of service of 3 years. Conscription was, however, not vigorously enforced for fear of giving military training to potentially politically unreliable persons. During the war, the military were able to secure control not only over military affairs, but also over much of the interior organization of the country – including the economy – mainly because the civilian administration was weak and the politicians unable to come to an agreement. United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Up to the middle of the nineteenth century, the United Kingdom had been the undisputed world power, controlling large parts of the world without having to do so directly. In the second half of the nineteenth century, this position was challenged by the newly federated Imperial Germany and the growing United States. Overtaken economically by both these powers in 1900, the United Kingdom retained its predominant position mainly through its dominance in world finance and the control that its navy exerted, at least potentially, in the whole world. The governments of the United Kingdom tried to meet the military and naval challenges with a series of agreements with Japan in 1902

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and its main imperialist competitors, France and Russia, in 1904 and 1907, respectively. Domestically, the liberal government that came to power in 1905 tried to overcome the growing political and social tension with a series of social reforms and a form of local autonomy for Ireland. The latter, however, proved very difficult because of the strong opposition to it in the northern part and the island was on the brink of civil war in 1914. The small army – divided into the regular, the Indian, and the Territorial Army – as well as the Royal Navy were recruited by voluntary enlistment. The Dominions raised their own land and naval forces according to their own laws. The Imperial General Staff and the Admiralty guaranteed coordination, respectively. The war not only put an end to strife in Ireland, but also halted all further projects for social reform, although the government of liberal Prime Minister H. H. Asquith tried to pursue a policy of ‘business as usual’. Soon it became clear that it would be impossible to continue fighting the war on this footing, but Asquith and his cabinet refused major changes. In 1916, a coalition government headed by David Lloyd George, which tried to adapt the governmental structures to the war, replaced them. French Republic After losing the war of 1870–71, France had become a republic again, one of only three in Europe by 1914. Regaining the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine was one of the aims common to all of the many French governments, throughout the period from 1871 to 1914. Although France had a very high fluctuation rate in governments, many ministers and all the permanent heads of departments kept their offices for long periods and, thereby, provided the country with the necessary political stability. The parliamentary system in France continued to work throughout the war with the exception of two periods – one just after the outbreak of the war and another after the accession to government of Georges Clemenceau, when the French parliament voted extraordinary powers for the government. The governments continued to change rapidly in France, a fact that helped the military keep the great freedom from civilian control they had gained just after the outbreak of the war. In terms of global production, France ranked fourth before 1914. Its centers of industrial production were concentrated in the north and east of the country, close to the border of Imperial Germany and Belgium, which meant that they were, more or less, heavily affected by the conduct of operations in 1914 or even lost to the enemy for a longer or shorter period of time. Conscription was applied vigorously, in France, in order to keep pace with Germany in terms of wartime strength of the army. In 1913, the duration of compulsory military service was raised to 3 years. The French high command, which lost a lot of its power only after the accession of Clemenceau to government,

was committed to the offensive because it believed that France and Britain together would enjoy a decisive numerical superiority, permitting them to carry the war into enemy territory. Czarist Russia Russia was the fastest growing economy in the period between 1890 and 1914. Rapidly, it was modernized from a completely agrarian society and economy into a country with a substantial industrial production and a much more urbanized society. Large parts of the country, however, remained underdeveloped and agrarian. These formed the economic base of the ruling elite, which lived in the Czarist capital of St. Petersburg and rarely traveled to their large properties in the country. Czar Alexander II had tried to pursue a policy of limited social reform, but it had remained incomplete and his successors did not continue it, not least because radical anarchists had assassinated Alexander in 1881. The rapid modernization of the Russian economy and the wanting social and political reforms led to a growing uneasiness among the country’s small intelligentsia and working class. This could be seen more clearly after the Russian defeat in the Russo–Japanese War of 1904–05, when thousands of people took to the streets and Czar Nikolaj II was forced to accept some form of representation of the people. The newly formed parliament, the Duma, however, had only restricted powers and, apart from a plan for agrarian reform, it was not able to achieve much before the beginning of World War I. The Russian army was recruited by conscription, the soldiers serving between 3 and 4 years. As the Russo–Japanese War had shown, its training, leadership, and equipment were deficient, but no measures to remedy these problems were undertaken before 1914. Still, the Russian armed forces were taken as a serious threat to national security by the German and Austrian general staffs and as a potentially great aid by the French, mainly because of its enormous manpower resources. United States The United States entered World War I with an army that was neither equipped nor trained to fight a modern war and had to rely on the support of the military establishments of the allies, especially of France. Economically, the United States, first in terms of world production before the beginning of the war, had been involved in the delivery of arms and especially the procurement of capital, mainly for the Entente, since 1914. Still, most American politicians considered the war to be a European affair that the United States should keep out of. President Wilson therefore ran his campaign for reelection in 1916 under the motto ‘He kept us out of the war’. His aim was to establish the United States as a mediator in order to

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achieve ‘‘a peace without victory.’’ Wilson’s attempts, however, did not succeed and finally he saw no other way to end the war than to enter it as an associated power on the side of Entente. The American society, multiethnic in its composition and with a large group of recent immigrants, was split between people who wanted to fight on the side of the democracies in danger and others who wanted the country to be kept out of the war because they believed it to be the consequence of German militarism and British navalism.

Features of World War I Trench Warfare Trench warfare was the main characteristic of the war on the western front. The trench was in no way a new means of warfare – the Duke of Marlborough had used it at Malplaquet, Wellington at Torres Vedras, and so did both parties in the American Civil War. Before 1914, however, only the German army – to be able to withstand a Russian attack in the east and a French attack on some parts of the western front – had made any preparations for this contingency by stockpiling entrenching tools, various types of timber, hand and rifle grenades, searchlights, flares, periscopes, and trench mortars. By the end of September 1914 both sides had dug themselves in as a consequence of the stabilization of the frontline, building the trenches in a zigzag to avoid enfilade fire and to limit the effects of shell bursts. Protective aprons of barbedwire entanglements were used to check attempts to rush them and well-placed machine guns massacred attackers caught in the wire. Heavy artillery seemed the only way to make a successful attack on the enemy, but the everincreasing complexity of the trench system made even this a gamble that was always paid for in heavy losses for the attacker. New weapons like flame-throwers or torpedoes to blow gaps in enemy wire were brought to the battlefield, but none of them were able to break the deadlock in the trenches. The reasons for the end of trench warfare, in 1918, are a matter of debate among historians and military analysts. While some claim that it was only brute force that was responsible, others think that the use of new tactics – infiltration tactics – combined with the use of new weapons like tanks and airplanes were responsible for the return to mobile warfare. In the east, the German breakthrough at Gorlice–Tarnow ended the stabilization of the frontline by 1915 and even though there were attempts to return to a form a stabilized warfare, there was no return to trench warfare on this front. Use of New Weapons and Technologies New weapons such as gas, the tank, and the airplane were welcomed by all military high commands, as they seemed

to offer a way out from trench warfare that for many high military officers was not a ‘real war’. Gas was not an entirely new weapon in warfare, but World War I saw the first use of this weapon on a large scale. The debate concerning who started gas warfare already began during the war, with both parties accusing the other of having been the culprit. Today it seems fairly clear that both parties had not only made preparations for the use of gas, but were also prepared to make use of it. Neither of them, however, was sure of the effects that the use of gas would have at the operational level. On 22 April 1915, the Germans launched the first massive gas attack, with the release of 150 tons of chlorine from cylinders near Ypres. According to the most recent research a maximum of 800 to 1200 allied soldiers – the number is still a matter of debate – were killed. Many, however, simply fled their trenches in order to escape that fate. The German high command had, however, no reserves ready in the area to exploit the breakthrough they were able to achieve. So far, no satisfactory answer has been given as to why not. Gas was subsequently used by both parties on the western as well as the eastern front, but with no decisive success. The tank made its reputation in the Blitzkrieg operations of the German generals in World War II and many who had been involved in its development during World War I later claimed that they had always aspired to such a strategic use of the new weapon. These stories have since been proved wrong. The tank was, in reality, developed as a trench-warfare weapon, intended to break through the machine gun/barbed wire combination, which had led to the stabilization of the frontline by the end of 1914. It was first used by the British during the battle of the Somme in 1916, but with little success, mainly due to the little numbers, technical difficulties, and the fact that the troops did not know how to use them on the tactical level. Both the British and the French subsequently used tanks in several operations and achieved some success in breaking into enemy positions. They were, however, not able to break fully through enemy lines. Tank development on the side of the Central Powers was not substantial. Of all new weapons of World War I, it was undoubtedly the airplane that established itself most brilliantly. Tens of thousands of army and navy officers and noncommissioned officers were trained as aircrew and a substantial portion of ground artillery was adapted for antiaircraft defense. Air warfare not only brought a new dimension into the war, but also was for many the last refuge for honor and glory, as air fighting provided liberation from the horror of the trenches. A German pilot claimed that he was still fighting the honorable combat of man against man, which stood out like a thing of another age amid the din and shock of mass warfare. Air warfare was, however, much more than the fighting of two or more men in the skies, as planes and airships began to be used to drop bombs not only on the frontline, but also on civilian

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centers like London, Paris, Du¨sseldorf, Freiburg, or Cologne. Not only industrial areas, but also civilian marketplaces, were targeted by the air forces of both sides. Overall, however, the war in the air had little impact on the outcome of the war, whether they were used over the battlefield or to bomb civilian and industrial areas. Trench warfare also led to an enormous use of weapons and ammunition that had to be replaced at a pace never imagined before the war. Although the railway systems were expanded to a great extent, it was not possible to transport goods and troops by rail transport alone. Already, in the first months of the war, the military leaders had made use of improvised means of road transport by requisitioning private motorcars, taxis, and buses. The British army alone increased its number of motor vehicles from 1485 in 1914 to 121 720 at the time of the armistice in 1918. At the peak of fighting in Verdun in 1916, 12 000 vehicles used a makeshift road to supply the French defenders and an entire division was permanently employed to maintain the vehicles. Home Front Experiences After the opening months of the war, the development of military techniques and strategies brought about similar crises concerning munitions supplies for all warring parties. Comparable efforts were made to augment and rationalize production, and similar measures were instituted to resolve the conflict between industry and the military in their competition for manpower. There were, of course, differences between the different belligerents and democratic countries, like France or the United Kingdom, took somewhat longer to adapt to the changing conditions the war brought about, but war collectivism was a feature in all countries involved in the war. Its elements were the collaboration between organized capital and the state, the accommodation of the patriotic labor movement, and the exclusion and prosecution of all groups that could not be integrated into the war effort. Economic mobilization for war placed enormous pressures on civilian society, including population movements to industrial centers; price and wage inflation; shortfalls of labor and industrial skills; shortages of accommodations, food, and fuel; labor militancy; and profiteering, with its accompanying popular discontent. Everyday life, with its rhythms, social patterns, and customary social sanctions, was profoundly disturbed in every country involved in the war, even if the frontline was several thousand kilometers away, such as in the case of the Dominions of the British Empire. Worldwide Warfare World War I did not remain limited to the fighting in Europe, even though the major battles took place on this continent and the use of new weapons such as tanks and

gas was limited to this part of the world. The first shot of British troops in the war was, for example, not fired in Europe, but at Port Philip Heads near Melbourne to stop a German ship from leaving the harbor on the morning of 5 August 1914. The Dominions did not, however, restrict their war efforts to guarding their harbors and protecting their coasts from an enemy attack, but raised large forces to contribute to the allied war effort. Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, moreover, raised separate forces to occupy the German colonies in their neighborhood and even as far away as German East Africa, where the war only ended with the armistice in November 1918. Their governments also refused to acquiesce to British leadership during the war, sending their prime ministers or Ministers of Defence to London to confer with British authorities about the conduct of the war and asserting their right to representation at the Versailles Peace Conference and to separate membership in the League of Nations. They were also involved in the naval war effort and were responsible for the defense of their coastal shipping and the protection of adjacent waters. The ships of the Royal Australian Navy, especially, played an important role in driving the German East Asiatic Squadron from the Pacific. The United States only entered the war, militarily, in April 1917, but they had made a substantial contribution to the allied war effort before. Private firms had supported the allied governments in raising funds for their war effort and American productive capacities were used widely to increase allied war-related production. Even though the government officially pursued a policy of neutrality and even forced the British government to accept a loosening of its naval blockade of the Central Powers, it tolerated the open support to the allied war effort by private American enterprise. The sinking of the passenger ship Lusitania in 1915 led to the first wave of indignation against the Central Powers, but President Wilson remained firmly committed to a policy of neutrality and arbitration. Only after the renewed declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare did Wilson decide to break diplomatic relations with the Central Powers and to send American troops to Europe. He did this, however, not as an ally but as an associated power, thereby, signaling that he was not prepared to fight for the war aims of the allied countries. The arrival of American troops in Europe did have a significant psychological impact, but, although not negligible, the use of American troops did not prove to be decisive, militarily. The reasons were that they were not adapted to the new way of warfare and remained heavily dependant on the French for military equipment and modern weapons. Two major Asian countries also played an important role, namely Japan and India. Whereas Japan entered the war on its own, India was involved in the war as a part of the British Empire. The Indian war effort was, however,

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far larger than the Japanese one. Japan restricted itself mainly to the support of the Royal Navy in the Pacific and later in the Indian Ocean and in the Mediterranean as well as the occupation of the German colonies in China and in the Pacific north of the equator. India contributed a significant number of native troops not only to the campaign in Mesopotamia, but also in the Middle East and Europe. Large numbers of Indian troops were retained in India itself for fear of an Islamic uprising, which the Ottoman Sultan had called for as an Islamic leader. The Indian troops were not the only non-European soldiers on the western front. Moroccan and other indigenous units from the French–African colonies also fought on the western front. Atrocities and War Crimes When the German army invaded Belgium in August 1914, neither its high command nor its soldiers expected fierce resistance from that country’s armed forces. Faced with such resistance only a few miles inside Belgium in the region of Lie`ge, the German high command and its soldiers were sure that this was only due to the fact that treacherous civilians had taken up arms and ambushed German troops from behind. The memory of the franctireurs during the Franco–Prussian War and the fact that the governments of Belgium and other small states had opposed the inclusion into the Hague Rules of Land Warfare of a paragraph forbidding all armed civilian resistance, under all circumstances, strengthened the belief of the German High Command and later the German press that their troops were faced with an all-out popular rising. In fact this had never happened as John Horne and Alan Kramer have recently proved. As a consequence German commanders ordered harsh measures such as the bombarding or burning of cities (e.g., in Louvain, Aerschot, Andenne, Dinant or Tamines), the taking and/or shooting of hostages (e.g., in Aerschot, Lie`ge, Namur, Tamines, Lune´ville or St. Die´), and the imposition of collective fines. On the allied side the German measures were considered to be atrocities, violations of the laws of war or even ‘war crimes’, a term thrown into the debate by British lawyer Hugh H. Bellot. Soon, Allied propaganda published books, leaflets, and posters portraying the Germans as an atrocious species that had to be fought, at all costs, to the very end. Many jurists, on both sides, soon joined the discussion on whether at all crimes were committed and on how to deal with those responsible for such crimes. Although the focus was on Belgium for a long time, other violations of the laws of war in other places were also discussed. Among them were the illegal requisitioning of private property and the ill-treatment of civilians, especially Jews, during the Russian occupation of parts of the Bukowina, Gallicia, or Eastern Prussia or the killing of civilians and the destruction of private property by German and Austro–Hungarian troops in Poland or

Serbia. A lively debate ensued. In Germany a group of 93 German academics signed a manifesto (Appeal to the Kulturwelt) against the accusations that were at the time directed against their country and their military high command. On the allied side, most jurists replied by supporting the claims made against the German troops and by demanding that those responsible for these crimes be brought to court. Further incidents such as the sinking of the Lusitania, the shooting of nurse Edith Cavell and Captain James Fryatt kept the discussion on the possibility of the punishment of atrocities or war crimes alive. Nevertheless, except for some low-level military trials in France in 1915 and the short-lived imprisonment of German U-boat crews in Britain, no measures were taken by any of the governments for the punishment of atrocities or war crimes. Some crimes, such as those committed on the Eastern Front or in the Balkans were almost not discussed and the atrocities against the Armenians that have since become known as the Armenian genocide were only taken up by a few academics such as James Bryce, Arnold Joseph Toynbee, or Andrei Nikolayevich Mandelstam. It was only in the last year of the war that the British and the French governments became interested in postwar trials against the perpetrators of atrocities and war crimes. British prime minister David Lloyd George and his French counterpart Georges Clemenceau finally succeeded in introducing a couple of paragraphs into the Peace Treaties, which would have forced the Central Powers to hand over all relevant documents and to extradite alleged war criminals, including the former German Emperor William II, for trials in allied courts. For political reasons, these trials never materialized and only some low-level perpetrators were convicted in trials that were held in Germany and Turkey between 1918 and 1921.

Course of Events World War I began on 28 July 1914 with the Austrian declaration of war on Serbia as a consequence of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo by a Serb nationalist. Although the murder was the immediate cause of the declaration of war, the structural causes of the war lay much deeper. Among them were the development of national states and the rise of nationalism throughout the nineteenth century, the globalization of the world economy, the spreading of liberal and socialist ideas throughout the world, the imperialist expansion of all major European powers except Austria–Hungary, the complex structure of alliances that emerged around the turn of the century, and, as a consequence of the last two processes, the growing armaments race between the leading European powers. The German General Staff followed the adapted Schlieffen-plan and invaded Belgium and France

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on 3 August 1914 while leaving one-sixth of its forces in the east to resist a Russian attack on East Prussia. Although the German advance did not completely go according to plan – a fact that lead to many atrocities in parts of Belgium and northern France – it was finally only stopped at the Marne in early September 1914. There French commander-inchief Joseph Joffre succeeded in counterattacking the spread-out German forces and driving them back about 50 kilometers. French and Russian offensive plans failed – the latter at the battle of Tannenberg at the end of August 1914. A last attempt by the German high command to outflank the allied troops in western Belgium failed in October 1914. Thereafter, the frontline stabilized and the period of trench warfare began on the western front. On the eastern front the same happened in December 1914 and, in the south, Serbia had been able to withstand the Austrian offensive. Military operations were now characterized by massive firepower and the use of new weapons, but none of the warring parties were able to obtain any strategic success on the western front. Major allied offensives at the Somme, in 1916 (60 000 casualties on the first day only), and at the Chemin des Dames and Ypres, in 1917, were unsuccessful, as were German attempts to break the stalemate at Verdun in 1916 (about 695 000 casualties for the whole campaign). In the east, however, in 1915, the Central Powers were able to break up the deadlock and to force Russia to abandon Galicia, Poland, and Kurland. In the south, they were able to overrun Serbia. An attempt by Britain and France to come to its aid by landing troops in neutral Greece failed, as well as an attempt to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war by attacking the Dardanelles. In 1916, Russia tried to regain the initiative with the so-called Brusilov offensive, but had to withdraw after some initial success. This failure contributed largely to the demoralization of the Russian army and to the beginning of the Russian Revolution, which finally, in March 1918, forced the country out of the war. In 1915, Italy decided to join the Entente, but even though its activities bound up large amounts of Austrian troops in the border region, no decision was reached in this new theater either. In March 1918, the new German high command (Oberste Heeresleitung, OHL) tried to gain the upper hand by concentrating superior forces in the west before American troops would be able to join the allied war effort and thereby, they feared, tip the balance. Even though successful in the beginning, the German offensive failed mainly for logistical reasons, but also because of the enormous amount of material that the allied armies were able to mass against the German attack. In July 1918, the allied forces counterattacked and succeeded in breaking the German front. The last months of the war saw a return to mobile warfare, which finally led to the demand of an armistice by the German government in November 1918. The front in the Balkans broke in September 1918 and Bulgaria and Austria–Hungary sought an armistice at the end of the month and in October, respectively. The Italian front was not pierced before the armistice.

The war was, however, not only fought in Europe, but also in the colonies and at sea. Most of the German colonies in Africa had been occupied by 1915 by French, British, Belgian, or Dominion troops. Only General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck in German East Africa resisted until after the armistice and conducted a guerrilla war against British and South African troops. Although operations outside Europe remained sideshows of a war that was fought mainly by European powers for European objectives, the impact of the war outside Europe was at least as great as that in Europe itself. Few non-European families were unaffected by the war and, at the end, the transfer of territory that had begun four centuries earlier was completed with a number of casualties that was much higher than it had been in the pre-1914 colonial wars. At sea, the war was characterized by a similar stalemate as the land war. The British and German fleets only seldom came out from the safety of their bases and the only major sea-battle, the battle of Jutland, ended in a draw, which in effect meant a strategic success for the Royal Navy, as the German high-seas fleet remained locked up in the North Sea. The Germans tried to break the impasse by attacking British and other commerce shipping with submarines, but after some initial success they finally failed to hit British food supplies and war production in any significant manner. Commerce raiding was another way of attacking the resources of the allied nations, but most ships that had been transformed for that purpose were either destroyed by allied warships or interned in neutral countries. Rumors of new ships and the success of the few commerce raiders that were able to break the British naval blockade, however, kept naval authorities in Japan and the British dominions and colonies busy throughout the war (Table 1).

Peace Settlement and War Guilt Debate The war in military terms was over on 11 November 1918, but the decision as to what peace would look like still hung in the balance. The allied and associated powers decided to meet in Paris in January 1919. The United States president Woodrow Wilson had made clear in a statement in January 1918 that his aim in fighting was to construct a new world order. He would not agree to help the Entente to reach their war aims, which had become more and more extreme the longer the war had lasted and had been set in secret negotiations throughout the war, as did those of the Central Powers. In his famous Fourteen Points Wilson had set out to end the period of secret diplomacy; to restore the sovereignty of Belgium, Serbia, and Rumania, as well as to achieve the restitution of the occupied parts of Russia and France, including Alsace–Lorraine; to win the right of self-determination for the nationalities in Austria–Hungary and the Ottoman Empire; to create a League of Nations; and generally, to make the world safe

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July– September 1914

October– December 1914

Western front

Eastern front

Italy and Balkans

8/3: G Attack on B&F

8/26–8/30: Battle of Tannenberg

7/29: A-H attack on S

8/25–8/28: Sacking and burning of Louvain 9/6–9/9: Battle of the Marne 10/20–11/10: Battle of Ypres

January– March 1915

April–June 1915

War at sea

Home front

8/23: JP declaration of war on G

8/5: Beginning of the UK Blockade of G waters

8/30–9/17: Aus and NZ forces occupy G Samoa and New Guinea

9/22: G submarine sinks three UK armored cruisers

Solemn declarations of national unity in all countries 7/31: Assassination of F socialist leader Jean Jaure`s

9/9: First USA mediation attempt 12/6: G occupation of Lodz

12/2: A-H occupation of Belgrade

10/3–10/21: JP occupation of G Micronesia

12/5: S reoccupation of Belgrade

10/13: Boer Rebellion in SA

2/7–21: Battle of Masuren: 100 000 Ru soldiers taken prisoners

4/22: Second Battle of Ypres; first use of gas

War outside Europe

5/1–5/3: Breakthrough of CP troops at GorliceTarnow

5/23: I declaration of war on A-H 6/23–7/7: First Battle at the Isonzo

10/27: Occupation of G Togo by UK forces 11/2–11/5: Entente declarations of war on OE 11/7: Occupation of G Tsingtao by JP forces 11/14: OE sultan Mehmed V Reshad calls for holy war (Jihad) against the Entente in Muslim parts of the world 2/3: OE attack on the Suez Canal

4/25: Landing of allied forces at Gallipoli

11/1: UK squadron defeated by G Pacific squadron at Coronel (Chile) 12/8: Defeat of G Pacific squadron at the Falkland Islands

10/4: Appeal to the Kulturwelt by 93 leading G academics

1/24: Battle at the Doggerbank

1/19: First G air raid on London by zeppelin

2/4: Beginning of the first phase of submarine warfare 5/7: Sinking of the Lusitania by G submarine

3/20: First opposition against war credits in G

5/13: Partial G suspension of submarine warfare

5/26: Coalition government in the UK: Asquith remains Prime Minister

World War I

Table 1 Course of eventsa


9/22–11/11: F offensive in the Champagne


12/4: Execution of nurse Edith Cavell


2/21: Beginning of the Battle of Verdun

8/5: Occupation of Warsaw by CP

7/18–8/10: Second Battle at the Isonzo

7/9: Occupation of G Southwest Africa by SA forces

9/18: G stops submarine warfare against all neutral ships and passenger ships of all nations

8/19: War Aims Speech by G Reichskanzler Bethmann– Hollweg

10/5: Landing of allied forces in Salonika 10/14: Bu declaration of war on S 10/18–11/5: Third Battle at the Isonzo 11/10–12/11: Fourth Battle at the Isonzo 11/24: Occupation of S by CP

12/19–12/20: Allied withdrawal from Gallipoli

2/18: Occupation of G Cameroon by allied forces

2/29–5/4: Intensification of G submarine warfare

1/6: Introduction of conscription in the UK (exceptions for Ireland and married men)

4/29: British capitulation at Kut-el-Amara 5/16: Sykes–Picot Agreement

5/31–6/1: Battle of Jutland

3/1–3/15: Fifth Battle at the Isonzo April–June 1916


6/4: Beginning of the first Ru Brussilov Offensive

8/4–8/16: Sixth Battle at the Isonzo 8/27: Ro declaration of war on A-H

1/29: Zeppelin raid on Paris 4/24: Easter rising in Dublin 4/24–4/30: Kiental conference of antiwar European left

Continued

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7/1: Beginning of the battle of the Somme 7/27: Execution of Captain James Fryatt 9/15: First use of tanks

9/5–9/8: Zimmerwald conference of the antiwar European left

266 World War I

Table 1

Continued

Western front

Eastern front


Italy and Balkans

War outside Europe

War at sea

12/6: Occupation of Bucarest by CP

11/7: Reelection of Woodrow Wilson as USA President 11/21: Death of A-H emperor Franz-Joseph 12/6: Asquith Government replaced by war cabinet under the leadership of Lloyd George

11/3: UK occupation of Bagdad

January– March 1917 April–June 1917

July– September 1917 October– December 1917

3/14: G withdrawal to the Siegfried line 4/16: F offensive at the Chemindes-Dames 5/20: Mutinies in the F army 6/26: Arrival of the first USA division in Europe 7/31: Beginning of the third Battle of Ypres 11/20: First massive use of tanks at Cambrai

2/10–2/15: February Revolution in Russia

2/3: Breaking of diplomatic relations between the USA and G

6/30–7/11: Second Brussilov Offensive

4/6: USA declaration of war on G

9/3: Occupation of Riga by CP 10/25: October Revolution in Ru

2/1: G declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare

11/2: Balfour declaration in favor of a national home for Jews in Palestine 12/9: UK troops capture Jerusalem Dec.: UK Occupation of G Southeast Africa

3/15: Abdication of Ru czar Nikolaj II 4/7: G emperor announces an electoral reform for Prussia after the war 4/16: Return of Lenin to Ru

8/1–8/2: Mutinies in the G high seas fleet 10/24: I defeat at Caporetto

Home front

7/7: G Air Raid on London: 54 dead & 190 wounded


April–June 1918 July– September 1918 October– December 1918

3/21: Beginning of G spring offensive

3/1: Occupation of Kiev by CP

8/8: Allied counteroffensive; black day of the G army

8/3: Landing of UK troops at Wladiwostok; beginning of allied intervention in Ru 10/28: Czech declaration of independence

11/11: Armistice with G

1/8: Fourteen Points announced by USA President Wilson

1/8: War Aims Speech by Lloyd January: Strike by A-H munitions workers

9/15: Allied breakthrough in Macedonia

9/22: Collapse of G-OE front line in northern Palestine

9/29: G High Command demands immediate ceasefire and democratization of G

11/3: Armistice with A-H

10/30: Armistice with OE

3/3: Peace Treaty of Brest-Litowsk between Ru & CP

11/14: Capitulation of G forces in east Africa

10/20: Formal end of submarine warfare 10/28: Mutinies in the G high seas fleet

10/28: Constitutional changes transform G into a constitutional monarchy 11/3: Seamen revolt in Kiel; beginning of revolutionary unrest in G 11/9: Abdication of German emperor Wilhelm II 11/11: Abdication of A-H emperor Charles I

a Abbreviations: A-H ¼ Austria–Hungary; Aus ¼ Australia; B ¼ Belgium; Bu ¼ Bulgaria; CP ¼ Central Powers; F ¼ France; G ¼ Germany; I ¼ Italy; JP ¼ Japan; NZ ¼ New Zealand; OE ¼ Ottoman Empire; Ro ¼ Rumania; Ru ¼ Russia; S ¼ Serbia; SA ¼ South Africa; UK ¼ United Kingdom; USA ¼ United States of America.

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for democracy. The main European powers, however, did not share Wilson’s enthusiasm for a new world order and were rather oriented toward securing the best terms possible for their respective countries. Especially the French prime minister Georges Clemenceau, who at home was known as ‘‘the tiger,’’ opposed Wilson at the peace conference, claiming that his country, as the main victim of the war, had a right to security and territorial integrity. It was only by threatening to leave the peace conference and with the diplomatic support of South African Defence Minister and member of the British War Cabinet Jan Smuts that Wilson finally succeeded in overcoming the French opposition to the League of Nations proposals. The French, however, insisted on strict military terms in the peace treaty so as to make future aggression by Germany impossible. They were supported at first by the British and Belgian delegations. The British prime minister Lloyd George, however, returned to the traditional British policy of the balance-of-power as the conference progressed. In the final peace treaty, Germany was declared solely responsible for the war, forced to agree to the extradition of its former Kaiser and of any other war criminals, to be tried in allied courts as well as to abandon most of its fleet, forbidden to have an air force and tanks, and its armed forces were limited to a 100 000-man professional army serving long-term only. Moreover, it had to pay 269 billion Gold mark in reparations for the damages caused during the war, lost all its colonies, which were given to different allied countries as mandates by the League of Nations, and had to agree to the occupation of the Rhineland (the western border area, including a large part of the country’s economic capacities) for 15 years. The peace treaties also defined the new national borders of Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria, the main profiteers being the newly founded states of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia as well as Rumania. The delegations of the Central Powers were given no hearing at the conference and had either to accept or refuse the treaties, the latter signifying the resumption of military operations. All countries, except the United States and Soviet Russia, accepted the treaties, the former making a separate peace treaty with Germany in 1921, which excluded the paragraphs concerning the League of Nations and War Guilt from the original Versailles Peace Treaty (Table 2). Article 231 of the Versailles Peace Treaty stipulated that Imperial Germany had been the only power responsible for the outbreak of the war in 1914. Many in Germany viewed this as a humiliation of their nation and demanded a revision of the peace treaties. Nationalist parties took up their claim and brought it into the political arena, thereby weakening the traditional parties who were trying to bring stability to the newly democratic German nation. Hitler finally made a revision of the Versailles Peace Settlement one of his chief political aims. Allied politicians like Lloyd George agreed with those in Germany outraged by the accusation of war guilt. They were, however, not able to

Table 2 Peace treaties 28 June 1919 10 September 1919 27 November 1919 4 June 1920 10 August 1920

In Versailles with Germany In St. Germain-en-Laye with Austria In Neuilly with Bulgaria In Trianon with Hungary In Se´vres with Turkey

make the French government change its position, as France was very much afraid that a revision of the peace treaty would only be the first step toward renewed German aggression. After 1945, the Germans accepted the fact that they had been responsible for the outbreak, or, better, the unfettering of World War II very early on; they refused, however, to say the same about 1914. In 1961, Fritz Fischer was the first to challenge this position, claiming that France and Russia had only been passive in the July Crisis and that Germany had wanted the war. His book Germany’s Aims in the First World War caused a general uproar in Germany and many other historians tried to prove that Fischer had been wrong. They claimed that the influence of the army had been strong in all countries and Imperial Germany had acted out of a strategic necessity and that, generally, the war had been unavoidable. But now, not many historians believe it to be worthwhile to have a large-scale debate on Fischer’s theses, especially after Stig Fo¨rster proved, in 1995, that the German general staff had acted in exact knowledge of the fact that the coming war was not going to be a short and limited war. Even though they did not expect to win it, they demanded that their government give the order for the troops to march. Fischer’s theses, however, inspired the research community to dig deeper and, in this, caused a large variety of studies in many different fields. See also: World War II

Further Reading Burk, K. (1985). Britain, America and the sinews of war 1914–1918. Boston: George Allen & Unwin. Chickering, R. and Fo¨rster, S. (eds.) (2000). Great War – Total war: Combat and mobilization on the Western Front, 1914–1918. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ferro, M. (1990). La Grande Guerre 1914–1918. Paris: Gallimard. Fischer, F. (1967). Germany’s aims in the First World War. London: Chatto & Windus. Gilbert, M. (1994). The First World War. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Halpern, P. G. (1994). A naval history of World War I. London: UCL Press. Herwig, H. (1997). The First World War: Germany and Austria–Hungary 1914–1918. London: Arnold. Hiery, H. (1995). The neglected war: The German South Pacific and the influence of World War I. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Hirschfeld, G., Krumeich, G., and Renz, I. (2003). Enzyklopa¨die Erster Weltkrieg. Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Scho¨ningh. Horne, J. and Kramer, A. (2001). German atrocities, 1914: A history of denial. London: Yale University Press. Kronenbitter, G. (2003). ‘Krieg im Frieden’: Die Fu¨hrung der k.u.k. Armee und die Grossmachtpolitik O¨sterreich–Ungarns 1906–1914. Mu¨nchen: Oldenbourg.

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Lepick, O. (1998). La grande guerre chimique, 1914–1918. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Marwick, A. (1991). British society and the First World War, 2nd edn. Basingstroke, UK: Macmillan. Segesser, D. M. (2002). Empire und Totaler Krieg: Australien 1905–1918. Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Scho¨ningh. Segesser, D. M. (2006). The international debate on the punishment of war crimes during the Balkan Wars and the First World War. Peace & Change 31, 533–554.

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Strachan, H. (2001). The First World War, vol. 1: To arms. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Strachan, H. (2004). The First World War in Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Terraine, J. (1992). White heat: The new warfare 1914–1918, 2nd edn. London: Leo Cooper. Trask, D. F. (1993). The AEF and coalition warmaking, 1917–1918. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

World War II Charles S Thomas, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Origins of World War II The Expansion of the Axis (1939–42) The Turning of the Tide (1942–43) Nations at War

Glossary Blitzkrieg Literally, German for ‘lightning war’. Term coined by Western journalists to describe the potent combination of armored and air power that Germany employed in the opening phases of World War II. German–Soviet Nonaggression Pact Agreement signed on 23 August 1939, wherein Germany and the Soviet Union publicly promised not to aid each other’s enemies in the event of war and privately drew up the plans for the partition of Poland. Kamikaze Literally, ‘divine wind’. Japanese term for the suicide pilots who crashed their aircraft into Allied ships in 1944–45. Lebensraum Literally, ‘living space’. German term referring to territorial acquisitions necessary for providing mineral and especially, agricultural resources to sustain a world power in its competition with other world powers.

World War II was the largest conflict in human history and devastated Europe, Asia, North Africa, and large portions of the Pacific. It began as two separate wars: one involving Japan against China in the 1930s; the other involving Germany against Poland, France, and Great Britain in 1939. With the entry of the United States into both wars in December 1941, the two conflicts merged into a single global struggle during which a coalition of Allied powers (the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, China, Free France, and a host of smaller nations) defeated a coalition of Axis states (Germany,

The Defeat of the Axis (1943–45) Aftermath Further Reading

Manchukuo Japanese name for the puppet state created by Japan in Manchuria in 1932. Panzer Literally, ‘armored’. German term for the armored divisions that formed the major ground component of the Blitzkrieg. Peace of Paris Collective term for the five peace treaties that ended World War I between 1919 and 1920. The treaties were signed between the victorious Entente powers and individual members of the Central Powers: Germany, Treaty of Versailles; Austria, Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye; Bulgaria, Treaty of Neuilly; Hungary, Treaty of Trianon; and Turkey, Treaty of Se`vres. Tripartite Pact Pact signed between Germany, Japan, and Italy on 27 September 1940, promising mutual aid in the event that one of them was attacked by a power not currently involved in either the European or Asian wars. The pact sought to deter the United States from entering the war.

Italy, Japan, and smaller satellites). This article uses a largely narrative approach, interspersed with a separate section on economic, psychological, and demographic aspects of the conflict, to describe the origins, course, and consequences of the war.

The Origins of World War II The Peace of Paris (1919–20) left an assortment of states dissatisfied with the outcome of World War I. All of the

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vanquished Central Powers (Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Turkey) endured territorial losses, reparations, and quantitative or qualitative limitations on their armed forces. Although not a signatory of the Peace, the newly founded Soviet Union, likewise, lost territory to a tier of successor states, in Eastern Europe (Finland, the Baltic States, Poland, and Romania), that were either reestablished as states or enlarged following the collapse of Tsarist Russia. Even minor members of the victorious Entente complained that their wartime sacrifices far outweighed their gains and that the interests of the major victors – France, Great Britain, and the United States – had taken precedence over theirs. Italian patriots, for example, decried the ‘mutilated’ peace that failed to bring Italy all of the territorial acquisitions promised by Entente statesmen in 1915. Similarly, although Japan fell heir to Germany’s forfeited island holdings north of the equator in the Pacific, Japanese expansionists lamented their country’s failure to gain additional territory on the Asian mainland at the expense of China. Dissatisfaction over newly redrawn frontiers sparked a host of smaller conflicts in the immediate aftermath of the Great War. Between 1919 and 1921, Poland engaged in border struggles with Germany over Silesia, with Lithuania over the city of Vilna, and with Czechoslovakia over the region surrounding Teschen. Similarly, disputes over Poland’s eastern border with the Ukraine (briefly independent after 1918) and the Soviet Union led to prolonged struggle, culminating in a full-scale Polish–Soviet war that only ended with the Treaty of Riga in 1921. Elsewhere, Italian irregulars skirmished with Yugoslav partisans over the city of Trieste in 1919, and in 1923 the new Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, sent forces to bombard and briefly occupy the Greek island of Corfu, following a boundary dispute between Greece and Italy’s client state, Albania. Greek forces also waged a bitter war with Turkey between 1920 and 1922 that produced approximately 1 400 000 Greek and 400 000 Turkish refugees. Elsewhere in Eastern and Central Europe, the presence of significant unassimilated national minorities continued to complicate international relations. Nevertheless, by 1924, with the peaceful resolution of the Franco–Belgian dispute with Germany over war reparations and the Ruhr, it appeared that a tenuous peace had at last returned to Europe. Developments in the mid- to late 1920s reinforced the appearance of normality. At the Locarno Conference of 1925, Germany voluntarily recognized its western frontiers with France and Belgium, and the following year, Germany entered the League of Nations. Although the absence of the United States and the Soviet Union from membership in the League weakened the effectiveness of that organization, both countries became signatories (along with Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, China, and 52 other states) of the Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1928, renouncing offensive war as an instrument of national policy.

The coming of the Great Depression in 1929–30 altered this picture of international harmony. Most industrialized countries reacted to the Depression by adopting protectionist policies and emphasizing national solutions to the world economic crisis; gone was the spirit of international cooperation that had characterized the mid1920s. The effects of the Depression also undercut both the military capability and the resolve of the major status quo powers, Great Britain and France, to uphold the Peace of Paris. The greatest impact of the Depression, however, was in those countries that would challenge the international status quo in 1930s. In Germany, economic catastrophe dramatically eroded public support for the Weimar Republic and immeasurably aided in the assumption of power by Adolf Hitler’s aggressive and expansionist National Socialist (Nazi) Party. In Japan, the reduction in international trade occasioned by the Depression highlighted the Japanese home islands’ paucity of natural resources and reawakened interest in expansion on the Asian mainland as a means of achieving autarky and reestablishing economic prosperity. The first evidence of the changed international circumstances occurred in the Far East, where ultranationalist Japanese army officers initiated the conquest of Manchuria from China following a staged incident at Mukden in September 1931. Chinese military resistance was ineffective, and League of Nations condemnation of Japanese action merely resulted in Japan’s withdrawal from the League in 1933. That same year a truce left the Japanese in de facto control of ‘Manchukuo’, as they now termed Manchuria. The year 1933 brought changes in Europe as well, where, on 30 January, Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Hitler immediately began laying the foundations for a program of aggressive continental expansion, which he had outlined in his autobiography, Mein Kampf (1925/27). On 3 February, he met with leading generals and admirals to accelerate the small and secret rearmament program that the Weimar Republic had undertaken in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, that portion of the Peace of Paris pertaining to Germany. At the same meeting, he revealed the underlying purpose of rearmament – the seizure of living space (Lebensraum) in the east and its ‘‘ruthless Germanization.’’ In October 1933, Germany withdrew from both the world disarmament conference and the League of Nations. In March 1935, with rearmament already under way, Hitler announced the resumption of conscription and the reestablishment of an air force (Luftwaffe), both violations of the Treaty of Versailles. For a time, it appeared that Hitler’s measures would meet with a firm international response. In April 1935, at a meeting in Stresa, Italy, leaders of Britain, France, and Italy formally expressed their misgivings over Germany’s action of reestablishing conscription. They also reaffirmed the independence of the most likely target of German

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aggression, Austria, which was a fellow German-speaking nation and the land of Hitler’s birth. Two months later, however, on 18 June, Britain concluded a separate agreement approving the expansion of Germany’s navy, the one branch of the Reich’s armed forces that still labored under restrictions imposed by Versailles. All remnants of the so-called Stresa Front disappeared the following October, when Britain and France condemned Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia. The resulting rift between the two Western democracies and Italy resulted in Italy’s withdrawal from the League of Nations. It also distracted international attention from the continuing process of German rearmament, including Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936, and helped to pave the way for an ItaloGerman rapprochement that same year. The Spanish Civil War, which broke out in July 1936, had much the same effect. While France, and a decidedly more reluctant Britain, provided marginal support for the established Spanish republic, Germany and Italy furnished substantial economic and military aid for Francisco Franco’s insurgents, who would ultimately secure power after a 3-year struggle. Mussolini’s pronouncement of a Rome–Berlin ‘‘Axis’’ on 1 November 1936 provided further evidence of closer Italo-German relations. That same month, Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, pledging mutual cooperation against the machinations of the Communist International, a Soviet-sponsored organization that had loudly championed world revolution since its foundation in 1919. Not to be left behind, Italy joined the Anti-Comintern Pact in January 1937. Although neither the Rome–Berlin Axis nor the AntiComintern Pact represented formal military alliances, the increasing community of interest between Germany, Italy, and Japan was evident. In July 1937, renewed fighting broke out between Japan and China. During the ensuing struggle, which lasted until the end of World War II 8 years later, the nominal leader of China, Chiang Kai-shek, was unable or unwilling to forge an effective united front against the Japanese invaders. Instead, Chiang’s Kuomintang (Nationalist) Party, Mao Tse-tung’s Chinese Communist Party, and a host of independent warlords pursued largely distinct policies that were aimed as much at each other as they were at the Japanese. Coupled with China’s notorious backwardness, these internal divisions facilitated Japanese efforts to occupy vast areas of China, including most of its major industrial centers and ports. Another feature of the war was its exceptional brutality. Both sides routinely slaughtered each other’s wounded and prisoners, and Japan’s greater arsenal of aircraft enabled it to launch terror raids on those cities that remained beyond Japanese control. Perhaps the most horrible atrocity of the Sino-Japanese War, however, was the so-called Rape of Nanking in December 1937, during which Japanese soldiers ran amuck in the former Nationalist capital and murdered between 200 000 and

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300 000 Chinese civilians. Perhaps because of this event, and others like it, public and official opinion in Britain and the United States gradually tilted in favor of Chiang, whose government relocated from Nanking to Chungking, in the interior of China. Most support from the Western democracies was initially moral rather than material. Eventually though, small amounts of military and economic aid would begin trickling into China via French Indochina or, after March 1939, the famous Burma Road. While Japanese troops engaged in bloody fighting in China, Hitler’s Germany enjoyed a series of bloodless triumphs in Central Europe. In March 1938, German troops occupied Austria without opposition. Many, within both countries, saw this as the logical reunion of kindred people who had been wrongly separated by Otto von Bismarck’s exclusion of Austria from German affairs in 1866. Despite some reservations, the governments of Britain and France found it difficult to deny the logic of this argument, and Mussolini, who had earlier opposed union (Anschluss) between Germany and Austria, now gave his blessings to Hitler’s action. The German dictator wasted little time in moving toward his next objective. Throughout the summer of 1938, Hitler encouraged the largely German-speaking populace of the Sudetenland, the frontier region of Czechoslovakia, to demand union with Germany. Czechoslovakia’s international standing was outwardly more secure than Austria’s had been; it was allied with France and had recently negotiated a defensive pact with the Soviet Union that was conditional upon activation of the French alliance. Unfortunately for Czechoslovakia, French action was unlikely without British support. In September 1938, at meetings at Berchtesgaden and Bad Godesberg with Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, Hitler delineated the stark choice between international acquiescence to German demands on Czechoslovakia, or war. On 29 and 30 September, at a four-power conference at Munich, which included Germany, Italy, Britain, and France and which excluded both Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, Britain and France approved of German acquisition of the Sudetenland in exchange for Hitler’s guarantee of the integrity of the remainder of Czechoslovakia. Abandoned by the Western democracies, Czechoslovakia reluctantly implemented the provisions of the Munich Pact in October. Munich represented the high point of the Western democracies’ strategy of ‘appeasement’ – that is, the attempt to maintain peace by making concessions to aggrieved states such as Germany. Hitler kept the promises he made there for less than 6 months, for on 15 March 1939, German forces occupied Bohemia and Moravia, the Czech-speaking portions of Czechoslovakia. The following day, Hitler announced their conversion into a German ‘Protectorate’. Although Slovakia remained nominally independent, its status as a German puppet-state was

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equally evident. On 23 March, Germany re-annexed Memel from Lithuania, which had occupied it in 1923. Any thoughts that Hitler’s appetite for territory was sated now disappeared, and on 31 March, Britain and France guaranteed the independence of Poland, a state which German diplomats had been seeking to cajole into concessions and which, like the recently dismembered Czechoslovakia, contained a large German minority. Hitler’s demands on Poland concerned two vital issues: reacquisition of the Free City of Danzig, a largely German port city on the Baltic that had been separated from Germany and placed under League of Nations supervision in 1919, and Polish cession of extraterritorial transit rights across the Polish Corridor separating Germancontrolled East Prussia from the rest of the Reich. Polish leaders, including Foreign Minister Josef Beck, feared that any alteration of the status of the Corridor or Danzig would be the first step in transforming Poland into a Nazi satellite. Consequently, during the winter, spring, and summer of 1939, Poland politely but firmly rejected German approaches. Hitler responded by accusing the Poles of atrocities against the German minority in Poland and by solidifying his own alliances. On 22 May, Hitler and Mussolini concluded the Pact of Steel, an offensive alliance that outwardly cemented the Rome–Berlin Axis. Far more surprising, however, was the signing of a German–Soviet Nonaggression Pact on 23 August, wherein the two countries publicly pledged not to aid each other’s enemies in the event of war. A secret annex to the agreement stipulated the partition of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union in the event of German–Polish hostilities. Hitler clearly intended that the public rapprochement between the Soviet Union and Germany – bitter ideological enemies since 1933 – would discourage British and French intervention on Poland’s behalf. On 25 August, however, Britain and Poland concluded a formal treaty of alliance, thus complementing the preexisting Franco–Polish alliance; that same day Hitler’s own ally, Mussolini, privately informed him that Italy was not yet prepared for war. These latest developments notwithstanding, Hitler initiated the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. In contrast to the experiences in Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939, the Poles resisted, and on 3 September, Britain and France declared war upon Germany.

The Expansion of the Axis (1939–42) The German invasion of Poland revealed many of the features that were to become hallmarks of the war. Although only 16 of 55 German combat divisions employed in Poland were heavily mechanized (6 Panzer and 10 motorized infantry), their level of training and ability to coordinate closely with units of the Luftwaffe

gave the German army huge advantages over the Polish army, which relied primarily on traditional infantry and cavalry formations. Exploiting a potent combination of firepower and mobility that Western journalists subsequently styled Blitzkrieg (‘lightning war’), German forces reached Warsaw on 15 September. The indiscriminate aerial bombing of the Polish capital during the ensuing siege foreshadowed the fate of many cities, great and small, European and Asian, during the war. Likewise, isolated acts of violence against civilians, including the murder of Jews at places such as Lukow and Czestochowa, anticipated Hitler’s more radical measures in 1941–42. The war’s tendency to make strange partners became evident on 17 September, when, in accordance with the secret provisions of the German–Soviet Nonaggression Pact, Soviet forces swept over the lightly defended, eastern border of Poland and began the occupation of the eastern half of that unfortunate country. On 27 September, Warsaw surrendered to German forces, and, by 6 October, all organized resistance within Poland had ceased, leaving the Germans and the Soviets in de facto control of the country. A Polish government in exile ultimately settled in London, the first of many refugee governments that would locate there during the war. While German and Soviet forces completed the conquest of Poland, Britain and France sought to mobilize for a longer and more deliberate struggle. Although Hitler pressed for an immediate offensive against France, the onset of winter forced the postponement of major action in the west until the following spring. In Scandinavia, however, conflict broke out in two separate arenas. In November 1939, the Soviet Union initiated a brief but costly war with Finland in order to secure a more defensible frontier in the northeast. The Soviet Union’s aggression resulted in its expulsion from the League of Nations, a unique event in the history of that organization, but, on 12 March, the Finns signed the Treaty of Moscow, thereby relinquishing more than a tenth of their territory to the Soviets. Then, on 9 April 1940, German forces invaded Denmark and Norway in order to protect German access to Swedish iron ore and to gain bases for expanded naval operations against the British. Danish forces capitulated within a day, after which the Danish government continued to hold office under a German Reich Plenipotentiary. Abetted by Allied expeditionary forces, formal Norwegian resistance continued until the country was overwhelmed in June 1940, after which a Norwegian government in exile formed around King Haakon VII in Britain. Allied failure in Norway prompted the fall of the Chamberlain Cabinet in Britain and its replacement by one headed by Winston Churchill, on May 10. That same day Hitler began his long-awaited offensive in the west. German troops rapidly overran Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Belgium. On 20 May, German tanks

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reached the English Channel, thereby cutting off the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and much of the French army, which failed to use its own substantial armored force effectively. In the air, the Luftwaffe provided effective close support for ground troops and, on 14 May, leveled the center of the undefended city of Rotterdam. By 26 May, the Allied position in the Low Countries was hopeless, prompting the British to evacuate approximately 340 000 Allied troops, roughly two-thirds of whom were British, from the port of Dunkirk (Operation Dynamo). Although the BEF would live to fight another day, virtually all of its heavy equipment had to be abandoned on the continent. Buoyed by its recent successes, the German army then turned on France, whose forces had already suffered severely during the campaign through the Low Countries. French attempts to restore the situation by replacing Maurice Gamelin with Maxime Weygand as supreme military commander proved unavailing. The French debacle prompted Mussolini’s Italy to declare war on Britain and France, on 10 June, in a belated effort to share some of the spoils of the anticipated Allied collapse. Italy’s underequipped and poorly led ground forces made no significant difference to the campaign. Nevertheless, the Wehrmacht’s continued successes in the north resulted in the occupation of Paris on 14 June, and Premier Paul Reynaud’s resignation and his replacement by the aged World War I marshal, Philippe Pe´tain, 2 days later. Pe´tain sought and received an armistice, which was signed on 22 June and which went into effect on 25 June. By its terms, German forces occupied three-fifths of metropolitan France, including Paris, the Channel coast, and the Bay of Biscay coast. The remaining two-fifths of France remained under the control of the Pe´tain government, which relocated to Vichy. From that small spa, the Pe´tain regime retained control over a small army, a substantial fleet, and the greater part of France’s overseas empire, whose garrisons, generally, chose to follow the lead of Vichy rather than the small Free French movement that was forming under Charles de Gaulle. Germany’s stunning victory had taken scarcely 6 weeks. Many observers, including Pe´tain, now anticipated British entreaties for a negotiated settlement with the Axis powers, and on 28 June, Pope Pius XII made offers to Britain, Germany, and Italy to mediate between the warring parties. The Churchill government, however, proceeded with its own plans for continuing the war. On the same day as the Pope’s mediation effort, Britain officially recognized de Gaulle as the leader of Free France, and on 3 July, the Royal Navy launched a destructive attack on Vichy French naval forces at the port of Mers-el-Ke´bir in North Africa to preclude their use by the Axis. Despite Britain’s show of resolution, Hitler evidently still anticipated peace overtures. Thus, although he approved limited air raids on British ports and convoys in July and issued a directive, on 16 July, for the armed forces to

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prepare for the eventual invasion of Britain (Operation Sealion), in a speech on 19 July, he also hinted at a compromise peace that would allow Britain to retain its empire in return for recognition of Germany’s gains on the continent. When the British government rebuffed this overture on 22 July, Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to accelerate its campaign to achieve air supremacy preparatory to a cross-Channel invasion of Britain in the early fall. The resulting air campaign, known as the Battle of Britain, proved noteworthy for a number of reasons. In the first place, the Royal Air Force (RAF) was able to deny the Luftwaffe air supremacy, ultimately prompting Hitler to postpone Sealion indefinitely, on 17 September. The cost in men and material in this first major German setback was significant for both sides; between 10 July and 31 October, the Luftwaffe lost over 1300 aircraft, while the RAF sustained almost 800 aircraft destroyed and over 500 aircrew killed. Losses to aviators, however, paled in comparison to civilian losses, for after an initial period in which each side avoided densely populated targets, the Luftwaffe and RAF Bomber Command engaged in bombing strategies that knew fewer and fewer restraints. The two national capitals figured prominently in the mutual escalation of terror. Accidental German bombing of London on 24 August, for example, prompted a British retaliatory strike on Berlin on the night of 25 August. Hitler responded with a series of attacks on London, initially by day, and later, as Luftwaffe losses mounted, by night. Between 7 September and 12 November, the Luftwaffe undertook 58 major raids on London. The Luftwaffe also attacked Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Clydebank, Plymouth, Coventry, and a host of other industrial centers and ports, killing approximately 42 000 British civilians and seriously wounding another 50 000, in the process. Most German cities were initially spared major British raids, partly because the RAF was busy trying to disrupt preparations for Sealion by bombing invasion craft in the Channel ports in France and the Low Countries, and partly because of the RAF’s initial difficulties in finding even city-sized targets at night. The ordeal of the German cities would come later. In the meantime, the other powers of the world sought to adjust to the changed circumstances occasioned by France’s fall. In spite of the German–Soviet Nonaggression Pact, the ease with which the Wehrmacht had crushed the French army caused deep concern for the Soviet Union. Although Josef Stalin continued to seek good relations with Germany, during the summer of 1940, Soviet forces annexed Bessarabia and northern Bukovina from Romania and formally integrated Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which had been occupied the year before, into the Soviet Union. Coupled with the earlier seizure of eastern Poland, it was hoped that these annexations would form an advanced bastion against a potential German invasion.

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The United States also took precautions. In July, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Two-Ocean Navy Expansion Act, which, when completed, would give the United States a navy that would dwarf any potential competitor. In August, the United States began transferring 50 overage destroyers to the British in exchange for longterm leases on bases in the western hemisphere. Nor were American preparations confined to naval matters, for on 16 September 1940, the United States Congress enacted limited conscription. Clearly, the German conquest of Western Europe had sent alarming signals across the Atlantic. If Germany’s success threatened the United States and the Soviet Union, it seemed to offer opportunity to Japan, which, by 1940, was mired in a seemingly endless war with China. The German conquest of the Netherlands and France meant that those countries could deploy only weak forces to defend their holdings in the Far East – the Netherlands’ East Indies and France’s Indochina. Britain’s navy, long a bulwark of Western influence in the Far East, was likewise stretched to the limit by the fall of France and the addition of a significant Italian fleet as an adversary in the Mediterranean. Particularly within the Imperial Japanese Navy, expansionists hoped that the conquest of Southeast Asia and Indonesia would, simultaneously, give Japan the resources necessary to finish the war in China and allow it to withstand any pressure by Britain and the United States to relinquish its gains. In September 1940, Japanese forces occupied northern Indochina as a first step in the acquisition of the so-called Southern Resources Area. On 27 September, Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, wherein each party pledged to come to the aid of the other should one of them be attacked by a power not currently engaged in either the Sino-Japanese War or the war in Europe. Since a special clause of the agreement excluded the Soviet Union as a possible adversary, the Tripartite Pact was an obvious warning to the United States to stay out of the conflicts in Asia and Europe. For a time, in the fall of 1940, German leaders contemplated luring the Soviet Union into the Tripartite Pact as well. In November 1940, the German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, sought to persuade his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov, to join an anti-British bloc consisting of Germany, Japan, Italy, and the Soviet Union. Hitler’s and Stalin’s suspicions over each other’s designs in Eastern Europe as well as continued signs of British resilience precluded such an arrangement. By early winter, Hitler had returned to earlier plans to attack the Soviet Union. Conquest of the Soviet Union, he reasoned, would destroy British hope of a continental ally (thereby encouraging a victorious peace with Britain), gain the Lebensraum that National Socialist ideology claimed was indispensable for Germany’s survival as a great power, and, by removing the Soviet threat to Japan

in the Far East, free Japan to menace the United States. On 18 December 1940, Hitler ordered completion of preparations for the invasion of the Soviet Union, code named Operation Barbarossa, by the following May. By spring 1941, however, the strategic situation was changing rapidly. During the winter, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria had tilted toward the Axis by signing the Tripartite Pact. On the other hand, Italian offensives from Libya into Egypt (September 1940) and from Albania into Greece (October 1940) had been turned back by British and Greek counteroffensives during the winter. In March 1941, Yugoslavian army officers balked at their country’s adherence to the Tripartite Pact, and, after a coup d’etat on 27 March, Yugoslavia signed a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union the following month. Although the vast seas of mud resulting from the spring thaw would probably have delayed the start of Barbarossa in any case, the deteriorating Axis position in the Balkans and in the Mediterranean necessitated German action to shore up the southern flank before the invasion of the Soviet Union. In February 1941, Hitler dispatched General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps to bolster Italian forces in North Africa. In April and May, German forces overran first Yugoslavia and then Greece. The monarchs of both nations joined a lengthening list of refugees in London; meanwhile, their two countries became the scene of some of the most ferocious guerrilla activity of the war. All previous campaigns of the war, however, were dwarfed in size and ferocity by the implementation of Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941. On that day, over 3 000 000 German soldiers and 500 000 soldiers (from an array of allies that would ultimately include Finland, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, and Italy plus a volunteer division from Franco’s Spain) began the largest offensive thus far seen in European history. Aided by the element of surprise and the employment of huge armored encirclement battles, Axis forces inflicted massive losses on the Red Army. By mid-September, German forces had taken Kiev in the Ukraine and were besieging Leningrad in the north; by 5 December, amid rapidly deteriorating weather conditions, the German army had driven to within 19 miles of Moscow. That same day, however, the Red Army began a series of counterattacks which, over the next 2 months, would drive the German army back from the gates of Moscow and ensure that the Soviet Union would remain in the war, at least for another year. The campaign on the eastern front reached levels of savagery that, with isolated exceptions, had not been seen elsewhere in the European war. Excluding the sick, casualties in the German army during the first year of war with the Soviet Union totaled almost 1 300 000; Soviet losses were vastly larger. In addition, both sides used the age-old policy of ‘scorched earth’ to deny resources and shelter to the enemy. The impact of modern ideological training was also more evident on the eastern front than it

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had been in the western campaigns. In 1941, the German army encouraged its soldiers to make free and easy use of a series of Commissar Orders to execute Red Army political leaders on the spot. Depending on the circumstances and the proximity of SS Einsatzgruppen (Action Squads), other categories of Soviet citizens – members of the Communist party, intellectuals, common soldiers, civilians, and especially Jews – risked falling victim to a similar fate. Maltreatment, starvation, and overwork awaited even those ‘lucky’ soldiers of the Red Army who managed to attain the status of ‘normal’ prisoners of war; of approximately 5 700 000 Soviet soldiers captured during the war, 3 300 000 died in captivity. In 1941, the advancing German army lost far fewer prisoners to the Red Army. Nevertheless, the initiation of partisan warfare behind German lines guaranteed an endless cycle of atrocities by both sides. In December 1941, the war took another major turn with the entry of the United States into both the war in Europe and the war in the Far East. Since the signing of the Tripartite Pact in September 1940, the relations of the United States with the Axis powers had deteriorated markedly. In March 1941, the Roosevelt administration had shepherded through a Lend-Lease bill, a formal extension of military and economic aid to Britain and China. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the United States had included the Soviets in Lend-Lease as well. In the fall of 1941, as United States naval forces began assisting in convoying war material to Great Britain, an undeclared war had broken out at sea between the United States and Germany. It was Japan, however, that initiated formal hostilities with the United States. This decision came after the United States had frozen Japanese assets and imposed an oil embargo following Japanese occupation of southern Indochina in July 1941, a measure that American diplomats correctly saw as a preparatory step toward further Japanese expansion into Southeast Asia. After successive Japanese and American negotiations revealed the fundamental incompatibility of the two countries’ aims, Japan’s government decided on war rather than retreat. Although Japanese planners intended for the declaration of war to be delivered minutes before the scheduled carrier air strikes on Pearl Harbor, delays in decrypting the wording of the announcement at the Japanese embassy in Washington meant that formal notification of war occurred after the devastating attack on United States forces in Hawaii. That same day, Japan also declared war on Great Britain. In view of the brazen nature of the Japanese attack, the other signatories of the Tripartite Pact were not technically bound to come to Japan’s aid; nevertheless, on 11 December, both Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, thus transforming what had been two parallel regional wars into a true world war.

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The next 6 months brought a string of Japanese successes. Between December 1941 and May 1942, Japanese army and naval forces conquered Guam, Hong Kong, Wake Island, Malaya, the Netherlands’ East Indies, most of Burma, the Philippines, and a host of smaller islands in the Pacific. In the process, the Japanese army inflicted a stunning defeat on the British army at Singapore, taking over 100 000 British and Commonwealth prisoners. The Japanese also captured large numbers of American prisoners at Bataan and Corregidor in the Philippines. Allied prisoners would suffer terrible privations over the next 3 years, in forced marches to prisoner of war (POW) camps (such as the Bataan Death March), in forced labor, or simply in the camps themselves. Japan’s remarkable successes in the Pacific and Southeast Asia coincided with the renewal of offensive action by Axis forces in North Africa and Russia. In June 1942, German and Italian forces recaptured the Libyan fortress of Tobruk from the British. Rommel’s subsequent advance into Egypt was halted, later that summer, at El Alamein by logistical difficulties and determined British resistance. In Russia, German forces sought to capture the Caucasus, at that time the main oil producing region of the Soviet Union, and the city of Stalingrad, a major industrial and transportation center on the Volga. Although the Red Army resisted doggedly, by November 1942 much of the Caucasus and approximately 90% of Stalingrad were in German hands. Anticipating the fall of the city, Hitler assured the German public that Stalingrad was his.

The Turning of the Tide (1942–43) In fact, Axis claims to final victory were premature. The first faint signs of this became evident in the Pacific where, at the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942, an American carrier task force, forewarned by decrypted enemy radio transmissions, compelled a Japanese invasion fleet to turn back from its intended target, Port Moresby, New Guinea. Although tactically a draw, the battle represented the first significant strategic setback for the Japanese in the Pacific war; it was also noteworthy as the first fleet engagement on the high seas in which all offensive action was undertaken by carrier-based or land-based air units rather than surface vessels. In June 1942, American carrier forces again exploited Allied code-breaking abilities and inflicted a devastating defeat upon the Japanese at the battle of Midway in the central Pacific, sinking four irreplaceable Japanese fleet carriers at the cost of one of their own. In August, United States marines began the invasion of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, initiating a bitter 6-month campaign of attrition that imposed further losses on the Imperial Navy and culminated in American conquest of the island in February 1943. By the end of 1942,

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the United States had clearly wrested the initiative from the Japanese, in the Pacific. The Axis also sustained setbacks in North Africa. On 23 October, General (later Field Marshal) Bernard Montgomery’s British 8th Army began an offensive to drive Rommel’s German and Italian forces from their positions at El Alamein. When Axis troops finally began to retreat on 4 November, Montgomery pursued cautiously but relentlessly, bringing his army to the gates of Tripoli by the end of the year. Moreover, Allied exploitation of the success of Operation Torch, the Anglo–American invasion of the Vichy French colonies of Morocco and Algeria on 8 November 1942, would confine Axis forces in North Africa to a narrow bridgehead in Tunisia by the following spring. In the Mediterranean as in the Pacific, the initiative now rested with the Allies. The winter of 1942–43 brought a devastating blow to the Axis in Russia. On 19 November 1942, Sovietmechanized forces undertook a massive pincer movement (Operation Uranus) against the German forces besieging Stalingrad. When Soviet formations linked up with one another 4 days later, they isolated over 200 000 German soldiers in the Stalingrad pocket. Partly because of the symbolic value he attached to a city bearing the name of Stalin, Hitler refused to approve a German withdrawal. Bolstered by Luftwaffe assurances that the pocket could be resupplied by air, he ordered the German commander at Stalingrad, Friedrich Paulus, to maintain his position at all costs. By late January 1943, the situation was clearly hopeless. On January 30, Paulus received notification of his promotion to the rank of field marshal, along with Hitler’s pointed reminder that no one holding such an exalted rank in the Prusso-German pantheon had ever been captured. The following day, Paulus surrendered those portions of the Stalingrad force that were still under his effective command, and by 2 February all resistance at Stalingrad had ceased. In the course of the battle, over 100 000 German soldiers had fallen prisoner to the Red Army; the overwhelming majority of these would never see Germany again, succumbing instead to exposure, a devastating typhus epidemic in the summer of 1943, or persistent overwork in Soviet prison camps. Stalingrad was perhaps the most dramatic and highly publicized turning point of World War II. It was, however, a different victory – the defeat of the German submarine threat after a much less visible but even more prolonged campaign – that marked the final step in the annus mirabilis of the war. In late 1940, and again from 1942 until early 1943, Allied merchant ship losses to German submarines severely threatened Great Britain’s economic survival. Yet even as the Battle of the Atlantic reached its climax in the spring of 1943, developments were underway that would doom Axis efforts. Buoyed by a tenfold increase in cargo ship construction in the United States and Canada, available Allied shipping capacity had begun to outpace

continued heavy losses to German wolfpacks in the winter of 1942–43. In the spring of 1943, moreover, Allied countermeasures, including the use of escort carriers, long-range patrol aircraft, airborne radar, and improved search-and-destroy techniques by surface escorts, began to inflict heavy damage on Germany’s submarines. In May 1943, Germany lost 47 U-boats while Allied shipping losses dropped dramatically. Confronted with such losses, the head of the German navy, Grand Admiral Karl Do¨nitz, reluctantly withdrew his submarines from the vital north Atlantic convoy routes to safer but less crucial areas. Thenceforth, the sustenance of Britain and the transatlantic mobilization of men and material for the liberation of Western Europe could proceed without major impediment.

Nations at War Allied victory in the Battle of the Atlantic was partly the result of the vast disparity between the economic power of the Atlantic Allies – the United States, Britain, and Canada – and that of Germany. This disparity was evident in the land and air campaigns in Europe and in the Allied war against Japan as well. Indeed, it was in the economic sector of warfare that the shortcomings of the Axis vis-a`-vis the Allies were most glaringly evident. A comparison of national consumption of modern energy sources – coal, petroleum, natural gas, and hydroelectricity – offers a rough indication of the disparity in the opposing coalitions’ potential for waging an industrialized war. Expressed in equivalents of million metric tons of coal, approximate energy consumption, in 1938, for the three major partners of the Axis was: Germany (228), Japan (96.5), and Italy (27.8), a coalition total of 352.3 million metric tons. Equivalent figures for the future Allied coalition were: the Soviet Union (177), Great Britain (196), and the United States (697), a coalition total of 1070 million metric tons of coal equivalent. These figures, however, tell only part of the story. Because of the lingering effects of the Great Depression, much of the United States’ industrial work force and infrastructure was underutilized in 1938. Nevertheless, in that same year, with two-thirds of its steel mills idle, the United States produced almost as much steel (26.4 million tons) as Germany and Japan combined (26.7 million tons) and with German and Japanese mills working near their full capacity. Once war production began, the United States could exploit its reserve capacity to achieve far greater levels of production. German conquest of France and the Low Countries in 1940 and of the western part of the Soviet Union in 1941 should have partially offset this imbalance by bringing new resources to the Axis in Europe, but Axis gains in the Soviet Union were partially offset by a number of factors. By utilizing draconian evacuation measures, the Soviets were able to relocate many skilled workers and

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large amounts of industrial equipment farther to the east, beyond the reach of German forces. Moreover, ‘scorched earth’ policies and partisan activities severely hampered industrial production in German-occupied territories. A final factor, however, was the nature of German rule in Russia, for wasteful looting of resources, mass deportations, and maltreatment of the remaining workforce also took their toll. As a result, in 1943, the German-occupied portions of the Soviet Union produced only one-tenth of their prewar industrial yield. Decisions as to what to produce and when to produce it also dramatically affected the war-making capabilities of the two coalitions. Early in the war, Hitler’s conviction that the collapse of the home front had caused German defeat in World War I prompted him to allow considerable consumer spending in Germany. Similarly, his confidence that the war would be short resulted in cutbacks or timeconsuming shifts in armaments production in 1940, after the fall of France, and again in the fall of 1941, when the success of Operation Barbarossa seemed certain. It was only in January 1942, after his failure to take Moscow, that Hitler yielded to the prodding of Fritz Todt, his Minister of Armaments and Production, and ordered massive increases in war production. Thereafter, by shifting production priorities, eliminating overlapping agencies, and transferring millions of German and foreign workers into key industries, Todt’s successor, Albert Speer, achieved noticeable armaments increases, even as the Allied strategic bombing campaign reached its crescendo. Taking the combined production of tanks, assault guns, and self-propelled guns as a measure, Germany’s total rose from 5200 in 1941 to 19 800 in 1943 and peaked at 27 300 in 1944. Britain’s war mobilization offers an interesting contrast with the German experience. Fully a year and a half before his initial setbacks in Russia drove home the same lesson to Hitler, the fall of France, in 1940, shattered the illusion that the Allies could win the war without undue disruption of civilian life. In the wake of Dunkirk, British men and women were subjected to more stringent rationing, greater taxation, and more extreme demands on their labor than their German counterparts endured. As a result, British war production compared favorably with that of Germany, despite Britain’s smaller population and its aging industrial plant. British vulnerability to air attack had prompted crash programs in fighter production even before the outbreak of war, and by the time of the Battle of Britain in 1940, Britain’s annual production of aircraft already outstripped that of Germany (15 049 to 10 826). Britain’s ascendancy in this sector continued until 1944, when Speer’s belated efforts resulted in 39 275 German aircraft (mostly less expensive single-engine interceptors) to balance Britain’s annual production of 26 461, including many four-engine bombers. By that time, large numbers of Soviet and American aircraft were deployed in Europe to keep the balance firmly tilted in favor of the Allies.

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Soviet war production suffered severely from the German conquest of heavily industrialized regions in western Russia and the Ukraine. Nevertheless, the relocation of capital goods and workers beyond the reach of the Germans and the prewar industrial development of areas east of the Urals meant that Soviet production of basic armaments remained formidable. Soviet tank production exceeded that of Germany in every year of the war, as did Soviet aircraft production in all years, except 1940. Perhaps, more threatening to Soviet survival was the loss of fertile agricultural land and farm workers to German control. In 1942–43, Soviet agricultural production fell to less than 40% of the level in 1940. In view of this, it was in the delivery of foodstuffs as well as over 400 000 trucks and jeeps that United States Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet Union proved most vital. That the United States could provide enormous amounts of military and economic aid to its allies while equipping its own forces was testimony to American economic muscle. Nevertheless, although early British and French purchases, prewar naval expansion, and Lend-Lease all helped to ‘jump start’ American mobilization, it was not until mid-1943 that United States production began to reach peak efficiency. Once underway, however, the flood of American war material was spectacular. One measure of this may be seen in the wartime production of aircraft carriers, the key to the gigantic naval engagements between the United States and Japan in the Pacific. Between 1941 and 1945, the United States built 18 fleet carriers and 116 light carriers compared to 6 fleet carriers and 14 light carriers for Japan. Such an overwhelming disparity radically narrowed Japanese options. Indeed, to many Japanese, by late 1944–45, the only viable alternatives open to their country appeared to be surrender or the suicide tactics of the Kamikaze pilots. The Kamikaze represented an extreme and, to Western observers, unfathomable example of the attempt to redress material weakness with psychological or spiritual strength. Yet, what the Kamikaze pilots attempted at the individual level was paralleled throughout the war, in a much more general way, by the propaganda efforts of all belligerents. Indeed, despite the negative connotation now associated with propaganda, Allied and Axis leaders recognized that winning the war meant exploiting the psychological resources of their nation and targeting those of their enemies. Propaganda efforts, naturally, differed according to available resources, sophistication of the media, national traditions, and how the war was going at the time in question. Although it is difficult to generalize, the propaganda campaigns of Germany and Britain offer instructive examples of both the possibilities and limits of propaganda. Germany’s initial propaganda efforts benefited both from its Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels’, long experience in the field and from Germany’s early military successes. Goebbels’ exaggerated ‘Blitzpropaganda’ brought

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domestic support for the National Socialist regime to an all-time high following the conquest of France, while the carefully cultivated image of an invincible Wehrmacht was a powerful deterrent to neutrals who were contemplating joining the Allies. After the tide of war turned against Germany, Goebbels’ manipulation of popular fear of Bolshevism and of the unforeseeable consequences of the Allied demand for Germany’s unconditional surrender meant that the National Socialist regime retained an astonishing amount of domestic support until the closing days of the war. On the other hand, premature assertions of final German victory and implausible claims of success in the face of obvious failure meant that German propaganda ultimately lost most of its effectiveness among Allied and neutral citizens. Given the early failures of British arms, Britain’s propaganda effort faced initially greater challenges than Germany’s did. Britain’s domestic propaganda, however, benefited from Churchill’s inspiring rhetoric and his projection of bulldog tenacity. Moreover, by insisting that British pronouncements adhere as closely to the truth as was possible in wartime, the director of the British Political Warfare Executive, R. H. Bruce Lockhart, ensured that BBC broadcasts, generally, retained a greater degree of credibility among listeners in neutral and Axis-occupied countries than Axis broadcasts did. Whether this British advantage also held true for many Axis citizens and whether concrete advantages accrued from it is debatable. One feature common to both sides’ propaganda efforts was the tendency to dehumanize the enemy. Although the consequences of this were felt on all fighting fronts, they were most evident in the German–Soviet and Japanese– Allied conflicts, where both sides presented their enemies in racist or demonic terms and adopted combat measures to suit their rhetoric. Perhaps because of this, the Pacific war and the eastern front also witnessed the disturbing spectacle of mass deportations of suspect civilians. In the United States and Canada, fear of Japanese military successes in the Pacific and prewar resentment against Japanese immigration led to forcible deportation of over 100 000 Japanese-Americans and Japanese-Canadians from the west coast to relocation camps in the interior, in 1942. Although the circumstances of Japanese deportation were reasonably humane, they were nevertheless accompanied by considerable losses of property and needless assaults on human dignity. Paradoxically, perhaps because they were indispensable to that territory’s economy, only about 1% of the 150 000 Japanese-Americans living in Hawaii were deported. Soviet authorities also undertook mass deportations of suspect populations, beginning with the forcible resettlement of Poles during the period of German–Soviet cooperation between 1939 and 1941. Later, suspected or actual collaboration with the Axis led to the removal of dozens of groups of ethnic minorities, including Kalmyks, Chechens,

and Crimean Tatars, from vulnerable areas to regions further east in 1943–44. Supervised by the Soviet secret police, these migrations were usually chaotic and accompanied by substantial loss of life due to overexertion, maltreatment, and exposure. All deportation measures paled in comparison, however, with the actions that the German government undertook against the Jews of Europe. Initial German wartime measures ran the gamut between policies designed to expel the Jews from Europe (to Madagascar, according to one unlikely scheme), forcible resettlement in ghettoes such as Warsaw and Lo´dz, and sporadic killings by Einsatzgruppen in Poland in 1939. Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, in June 1941, brought a marked increase in the mass murder of Jews; at Babi Yar in September 1941, for example, approximately 33 000 people of all ages were shot with machine guns. Einsatzgruppen figured prominently in most atrocities, but were sometimes aided by other Germans, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Romanians. By the end of 1941, roughly one million Jews had been killed in the German-occupied portions of the Soviet Union. During the winter of 1941–42, German authorities began implementing a more systematic extermination policy via the Final Solution. At a conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on 20 January 1942, Reich officials adopted a series of measures aimed at relocating all European Jews, including those residing in neutral countries and in the as-yet unconquered British Isles, to death camps in Poland. By the time of the Wannsee conference, one such camp at Chelmno was already in operation, and within months, additional ones went into operation at Sobibor, Belzec, Treblinka, Maidanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Between 1942 and 1944, the systematic killings of most of the Jews of occupied Europe took place, either in gas chambers at the camps, in mobile gas vans, or through chronic overwork. Some governments were able to protect their Jewish citizens, either in full (Bulgaria, Finland, and, to a large degree, Denmark) or in part (Italy). Elsewhere, in Croatia, Slovakia, and Vichy France, collaborationist governments cooperated willingly in delivering Jews to their murderers. In 1944, the Soviet liberation of Poland prompted German authorities to begin shunting surviving Jewish captives to older concentration camps in Germany. Even then the killing continued as emaciated prisoners succumbed to forced marches, abuse, and disease. By war’s end, approximately 6 million Jews had died at the hands of the Nazis; only the complete collapse of the Third Reich had prevented the total destruction of European Jewry.

The Defeat of the Axis (1943–45) Hitler’s defeat – and that of his coalition partners – was due primarily to the combined efforts of the three main

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powers of the Grand Alliance (Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States). Between 1943 and 1945, the Soviet Union continued to bear the lion’s share of the land war against Germany. At Kursk in July 1943, in the largest tank battle of the war, the Red Army thwarted a German attempt to regain the initiative on the eastern front, and in the fall of 1943 the Soviets began the reconquest of the Ukraine. In June 1944, Soviet troops began the destruction of German Army Group Center (Operation Bagration), while supplementary offensives drove Romania and Finland out of the war in August and September, respectively. In January 1945, Russian and Polish forces finally liberated Warsaw, which had been devastated by German suppression of uprisings by Jews in the Ghetto, in 1943, and by the Polish Home Army, in 1944. By March 1945, Russian troops under Marshals Georgi Zhukov and Ivan Konev were poised on the Oder River for the final assault on Berlin. Until June 1944, American and British land operations against the Axis in Europe remained confined to the Mediterranean. In May 1943, Allied troops drove the Axis out of their North African bridgehead in Tunisia. That summer, the Allied invasion of Sicily prompted the fall of Mussolini’s government and its replacement by one headed by Marshal Pietro Badoglio. Although Italy surrendered to the Allies in September, German forces successfully disarmed most of the Italian army, occupied much of the mainland, and reestablished Mussolini as a puppet in northern Italy. Allied landings in southern Italy, in September 1943, and at Anzio, in January 1944, eventually led to American entry into Rome on 4 June, but German resistance in Italy continued unabated. Meanwhile, Allied solidarity threatened to founder on Soviet impatience over Britain’s and the United States’ delay in opening a more effective Second Front in Western Europe. One response to Soviet complaints was the Western Allies’ combined bomber offensive. Initiated by Churchill and Roosevelt at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, the campaign combined nighttime ‘area’ attacks on German cities by RAF Bomber Command with supposedly more precise daylight attacks on industrial sites by American bombers. For a time, in late 1943 and early 1944, heavy Allied aircraft losses and the apparent resilience of German morale and German industry called into question the efficacy of Allied bombing strategies. By spring 1944, however, newly introduced long-range fighters such as the P-51 Mustang were beginning to destroy the Luftwaffe in the skies over Germany and compel its withdrawal from tactical missions in Russia, Italy, and Western Europe. The United States’ and Britain’s hard won air superiority paid huge dividends during Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Normandy. There, on 6 June 1944, 12 000 Allied aircraft and 6000 Allied merchant and naval vessels overwhelmed German coastal defenses, and by day’s end over 150 000 British, Canadian, and American

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combat soldiers had established the long-awaited Second Front in France. Tenacious German resistance initially limited expansion of the beachhead to a narrow front. In late July, however, Allied troops began to break out from Normandy. During the late summer and early fall, Allied troops liberated Paris (25 August), linked up with Free French and United States forces that had launched a supplementary invasion of southern France (Operation Anvil/Dragoon), and pushed to the German and Dutch frontiers. There in mid-September, stiffening German resistance thwarted Operation Market Garden, a daring Allied attempt to end the war by a narrow thrust into Germany’s industrial heartland in the Ruhr. The last winter of the war in Europe brought continued fierce struggle. On 16 December 1944, Hitler attempted to divide Allied forces in Western Europe via a desperate armored thrust through the Ardennes. The resulting Battle of the Bulge ended with the bloody repulse of German forces and the exhaustion of most of Germany’s mobile reserves. In March 1945, Allied forces breached the Rhine River barrier in a number of places. While British, Canadian, and Free Polish forces fanned out onto the north German plain, United States troops encircled the Ruhr and invaded Bavaria. On 25 April, American troops met up with Soviet forces at Torgau on the Elbe, thus severing the Reich in two. Hitler committed suicide in Berlin, 5 days later, as Red Army soldiers battled their way into the capital. With German resistance crumbling, Hitler’s successor, Grand Admiral Do¨nitz, accepted Allied demands for unconditional surrender, and at ceremonies at Rheims (7 May) and Berlin (8 May) the war in Europe came to an end. By spring 1945, Japan was also in desperate straits. Japanese troops continued to occupy substantial parts of China, but many had been reduced to conducting ‘rice offensives’ in order to sustain their presence there. Elsewhere, in Southeast Asia, a Japanese thrust into India, in 1944, had been repulsed with heavy losses, and in 1944–45, General William Slim’s British 14th Army had reconquered much of Burma. During the same period, American submarines and aircraft had virtually destroyed the Japanese merchant marine. These difficulties, however, paled in comparison with the threat posed by two American offensives across the Pacific. In the southwest Pacific by the end of 1944, General Douglas MacArthur’s United States and Australian forces had recaptured New Guinea and begun the liberation of the Philippines, thus threatening Japan’s already tenuous connection with the Southern Resources Area. In the central Pacific, Admiral Chester Nimitz’s forces had advanced across the Gilbert, Marshall, and Mariana island chains. During the two-pronged offensive, the American navy had virtually destroyed the Japanese navy at battles in the Philippine Sea (June 1944) and Leyte Gulf (October 1944).

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Nimitz’s conquest of Saipan and Tinian in the Marianas brought the Japanese home islands within effective range of American aircraft, which began using incendiary bombs to systematically destroy Japanese cities, in March 1945. Nevertheless, desperate Japanese resistance in fighting on outlying islands such as Iwo Jima and Okinawa as well as suicide missions by Kamikaze pilots testified to the Japanese military’s willingness to continue the war and to the losses the Allies could expect in an invasion of the home islands. The United States’ use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima (6 August) and Nagasaki (9 August), coupled with the Soviet Union’s declaration of war on Japan (8 August), at last brought home the futility of further struggle. Prompted by the intervention of Emperor Hirohito, Japan surrendered on 2 September 1945, bringing World War II to a close.

Aftermath It is difficult to exaggerate the impact of World War II on the modern world. First and foremost an exercise in human misery, the war claimed approximately 55 million dead and left approximately 35 million wounded. Passions and political changes stirred by the war resulted in a further 20 to 30 million postwar refugees and deportees, as states in Europe and Asia sought to make nationality lines conform with international boundaries; the westward movement of the Soviet Union’s border, for example, displaced over 4 million Poles, while as many as 12 million ethnic Germans were driven from Eastern Europe and the Balkans into a divided and geographically reduced Germany. The economic costs of wartime destruction, taxes, debts, lost opportunities, and postwar resettlement are incalculable. It is easier to assess the political impact of the conflict. The war left the Axis powers defeated, physically devastated, and psychologically traumatized. In addition, Italy and Japan were shorn of their colonial holdings in Libya, east Africa, east Asia, and the Pacific. Although nominally a victor, China had likewise suffered immense destruction and was ripe for the renewal of a civil war that culminated in the triumph of Mao Tse-tung’s Communist Party, 4 years later. The war also severely strained the economies, societies, and political systems of France and Great Britain. One manifestation of this was both countries’ retreat from empire in the postwar era. Decolonization came in various ways, with a measure of good grace, as in India in 1947, or after a bitter war, as in Vietnam in 1954 and Algeria in 1962; whatever the case, the British and French examples were followed by the Dutch, the Belgians, and, belatedly, the Spanish and Portuguese. The war affected international and intranational relations in other ways as well. The explosion of European anti-Semitism in the form of the Holocaust convinced

many Jews that a Jewish national state was the only alternative to extinction, and Jewish suffering during the war played an immense role in rallying international support for Israel’s establishment in 1948. Bitter Arab resentment against Israel would help to fuel a succession of wars in the latter half of the twentieth century. The Allies’ wartime crusade against Nazi racism also revealed profound contradictions in American society, as the United States’ military had campaigned against the supposed Nazi ‘master race’ with racially segregated units and racially segregated blood supplies of its own. It was no accident that many of the local leaders of the postwar civil rights movement in the United States were returning African-American servicemen whose awareness of their second-class status had been sharpened by their experiences abroad. Changes in the United States were not, however, confined to domestic matters. One of only two of the world’s powers to emerge from the war with its strength enhanced, the United States benefited from its gigantic and intact economy, its enormous military strength, and its leadership in science (enhanced by the infusion of European and Asian refugees) to become a superpower. Half a world away, despite catastrophic human and economic losses, the Soviet Union also emerged as a global power. For the next two generations, the relative decline of its neighbors, its retention of powerful military forces, its occupation and exploitation of a tier of states extending from Poland to the Black Sea, and the legitimizing effect that victory over Nazi Germany conveyed upon communist ideology, both domestically and abroad, would sustain Soviet power. Given the bipolar configuration of the postwar world, the profound ideological differences between communism and capitalism, and both countries’ access to nuclear weapons after the Soviet Union acquired nuclear capability in 1949, the emergence of a ‘‘Cold War’’ between the Soviet Union and the United States was, if not inevitable, at least not surprising. That both states would seek allies, even among former enemies, and that Europe would soon be divided by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO, 1949) and the Warsaw Pact (1955) was equally unsurprising. Yet curiously, the memory of World War II may have also helped to play a major role in defusing the Soviet–American confrontation that it had helped to create. Unwilling to repeat the sacrifices of the world wars, statesmen from both superpowers sought alternatives to war when confronting one another directly. Universal revulsion over the immense human and economic cost of the wars formed the bedrock for the United Nations and for regional associations that sought to achieve peace through mutual consultation or economic interdependence. Perhaps the most successful of the latter was the experiment in European economic and political integration which stemmed from its founders’ conviction that Europe

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could not sustain another fratricidal war and which culminated in the formation of the European Community between 1957 and 1992. In time, the spectacle of reconciliation and shared prosperity between former members of the Allies and the Axis in Western and Central Europe, most notably France, Great Britain, and West Germany, would be a major factor in the voluntary retreat of the Soviet Union from Eastern Europe and in the peaceful dissolution of the Warsaw Pact.

Further Reading Bartov, O. (1992). Hitler’s army: Soldiers, Nazis, and war in the Third Reich. New York: Oxford University Press. Bell, P. M. H. (1986). The origins of the Second World War in Europe. New York: Longman. Dear, I. C. B. (1995). The Oxford companion to World War II. New York: Oxford University Press. Dower, J. W. (1986). War without mercy: Race and power in the Pacific war. New York: Pantheon. Dreyer, E. L. (1995). China at war, 1901–1949. New York: Longman.

Ellis, J. (1990). Brute force: Allied strategy and tactics in the Second World War. London: Andre Deutsch. Ellis, J. (1993). World War II: A statistical survey. New York: Facts on File. Higonnet, M. R., Jenson, J., Michel, S., and Weitz, M. C. (1987). Behind the lines. Gender and the two world wars. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kennedy, P. (1987). The rise and fall of the great powers: Economic change and military conflict from 1500 to 2000. New York: Random House. Messenger, C. (1989). The chronological atlas of World War II. New York: Macmillan. Noakes, J. (ed.) (1992). The civilian in war: The home front in Europe, Japan, and the USA in World War II. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press. Overy, R. (1998). Russia’s war: A history of the Soviet effort, 1941–1945. New York: Penguin. Parker, R. A. C. (1989). Struggle for survival: The history of the Second World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parshall, J. and Tully, A. (2005). Shattered sword: The untold story of the battle of Midway. Washington, DC: Potomac Books. Spector, R. (1985). Eagle against the sun: The American war against Japan. New York: The Free Press. Weinberg, G. (1994). A world at arms: A global history of World War II. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wright, G. (1968). The ordeal of total war, 1939–1945. New York: Harper & Row. Wynn, N. (1976). The Afro-American and the Second World War. New York: Holmes & Meier.

Genocide and Democide Allen D Grimshaw, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA Published by Elsevier Inc.

Introduction Some Complexities of Definition(s) A Goal-Oriented Typology of Democide A Sampling of Cases

Some Patterns in Democide, in Genocide, and in Other, Large-Scale Killing Intended Mass Extinctions of Human Beings at the Millennial Turn Further Reading

There is probably no area of contemporary scholarly research in the social historical disciplines and the social sciences that generates more bitter contention over facts, such emotional turmoil over theorizing on causes, motives, and intentions, or such barrages of conflicting ideological claims as the area addressing matters of state-sponsored or -condoned large-scale killing of groups or categories of domestic or foreign civilian populations. Different constituencies have stakes in inflating or minimizing estimates of numbers killed in historical instances of such killing; there have been denials that the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide ever actually occurred. There are students of the Holocaust who insist that that terrible event was unique; other scholars disagree. Experts who read various drafts of the following article have taken sharp issue with this version of reported facts and with sources selected in this article. They have

disagreed no less sharply with each other. Readers should keep in mind that the topic is profoundly controversial. The author simply hopes that they will be sufficiently stimulated/distressed by what is reported here and that they will look closely at more comprehensive and betterdocumented sources.

Introduction Rummel devoted three decades to compiling documentation of the numbers of victims of internal and international war and government killing in domestic and international democide (in their several manifestations) and to analyzing the causes of these behaviors and their differential distribution across nation states. After tracking down estimates for these behaviors from the beginnings of record-keeping,

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Table 1 Democidal and war deaths, Pre-twentieth century and twentieth century Period

Deaths by democidea (thousands)

War deaths (thousands)

Total killing by government (thousands)

Pre-twentieth century Twentieth century Total recorded historyb

133 147 169 198 302 345

40 457 34 021 74 478

173 604 203 219 376 823

Subsumes genocide and politicide, domestic and foreign. Extrapolated from 1900–87 figures. Source: Adapted from Rummel, R. J. (1994). Death by government. New Brunswick: Transaction and Rummel, R. J. (1997). Power hills: Democracy as a method of nonviolence. New Brunswick: Transaction. Rummel’s estimates are largely low to mid-range across multiple sources.

a

b

Rummel concluded that in every period, governments have killed more of their own subjects than they have foreign enemies by substantial margins (Table 1). Even low-end estimates suggest close to 400 million victims of large-scale killings by governments, and some estimates are considerably higher. Roughly four times as many people have been killed by their own governments (or in killing sponsored by their governments) as have died in war. The number of magnitudes of difference between democidal deaths and those in war has increased over time (three times as many in the earlier period and five times as many in the current century). At the same time, both have decreased with the increase in democratic governments; democidal killings in twentieth-century democracies are massively lower than those in totalitarian states of any period (Kressel). While there are no worldwide or over-time data on homicide, the numbers killed by governments must be massively greater than those murdered by individuals. The proportionate risks of dying by homicide or as a casualty of war, or as a victim of slaughter by the government to which one is subject, are not reflected in public attention to different ways of dying. Perhaps in part because of the mind-boggling enormity of the facts of genocide and other democide, there has been much less research on them than on other varieties of violence that have taken fewer lives. The Oxford English Dictionary gives 180 inches to war, 80 to murder (plus another 10 to homicide), and two and a half to genocide and genocidal (the terms democide and politicide have yet to make their way into standard references). Author’s local research library subject index lists fewer than 844 items under genocide, 3589 on murder, and 84 977 on war. Similar patterns exist in papers presented at professional meetings. In the following the author: (1) discusses some problematic dimensions of labels and definitions for largescale government killing and identify criteria that should be considered in such discussion; (2) provides a synthesis of some goal-oriented typologies and a sample of exemplars from different historical periods and geographic areas; (3) focuses on select patterns in genocide and other state-sponsored large-scale killings; (4) directs attention to popular and scholarly interpretations of and

explanations for genocidal and other democidal behavior, and to official reports about specific instances; (5) considers issues of forecasting and controlling democidal behaviors; and (6) comments very briefly on issues of morality and inevitability.

Some Complexities of Definition(s) Social violence is violence directed against individuals or their property solely or primarily because of their membership in a social category, whether that category be age, cohort, socioeconomic class, dependency status, educational attainment, ethnicity, nationality, native language, occupation, political affiliation, religion, veteran status, or a fan, or not, of a particular sports team. Fatal social violence sponsored or condoned by states is the topic of this article. For an initial working definition we can say that all murder of members of social categories by governments constitutes what Rudolph Rummel has called ‘democide’. Rummel includes in democide (1) mass murders and massacres such as reprisal, murder by quota, and the sack and rape of captured cities and (2) state terror such as death squads, purges, and ‘disappearances’. Democide where the group or category assaulted is ethnic, national, or religious (or possibly linguistic) constitutes a special subcategory called ‘genocide’. Politicide (Harff and Gurr) is government murder of people because of their politics or class status or for political purposes, and is manifested in assassinations as well as mass murder. (A government may be under attack, and both sides can be responsible for democide in civil wars, revolutions, uprisings, and so on.) It will be evident that conceptual boundaries are permeable. While it seems likely that there has been large-scale killing of subject populations by governments as long as there have been governments, terms for identifying different varieties of such slaughter are fairly recent (at least in English). The term genocide was coined by Lemkin, who, writing for the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, observed:

Genocide and Democide 283 New conceptions require new terms. By ‘‘genocide’’ we mean the destruction of a nation or ethnic group . . . . Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when it is accomplished by mass killing of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves . . . . Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against the individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group. (Lemkin 1944)

Lemkin was writing about events in Europe during World War II; his term gained widespread currency during the post-World War II war criminal trials and in 1948 was incorporated into international law in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of the United Nations (UNGC). Article II of the Convention reads: . . . genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. (Cf. Levy, two of whose four conditions which will terminate the existence of a society are (1) the biological extinction or dispersion of the members and (2) the absorption of the society into another society.)

The initial draft of the Convention contained language that would have extended protection to political groups and would have criminalized ‘cultural genocide’ via destruction of languages, religions, or cultures. These protections were never enacted because of resistance from countries of varying political structure and cultural diversity, who all likely believed they would not themselves practice genocide, but that other countries might try to infringe on their sovereign rights to restructure their political life or favor one or another language or religion (Reisman). A number of problems have contributed to dissatisfaction with the terminology of the UNGC (and therefore to the appearance of supplementary nomenclature) and disappointment with the UN’s inability to do anything about genocide (or other varieties of democide). Many observers were unhappy with (1) gaps in coverage and (2) the ambiguity of the notion of destroying a group ‘as such’. This vagueness along with a general unawareness of the pervasiveness of democidal phenomena historically and comparatively has contributed to both (1) the development of

new terminology and typologies and (2) a contentious and continuing dispute over whether the Holocaust was a manifestation of a widespread phenomenon of the human species or whether, rather, the Nazi killings of the mid-twentieth century were somehow unique. This same vagueness, along with the specification that only states can invoke the Convention and the inability to provide means of enforcement, has meant that attempts to curb genocide and other democide in the 50 years since passage of the UNGC have been largely unsuccessful. Acceptance by the UN itself of the Genocide Convention did not come easily. Power reports that Lemkin, carrying a bulging briefcase filled with new proposals and answers to complaints about earlier versions, was a familiar figure, frequently avoided by delegates as he grew old in service of his dream. In the years immediately following UN passage of the Convention it was ratified by a substantial majority of member states, not including the United States of America. Ratification of the Convention by the Senate was pursued by Senator William Proxmire, who vowed to give a speech in favor of ratification everyday the Senate met until the Convention was ratified and fulfilled the vow, by an increasing number of senators of widely varying political persuasions, ultimately by a President Reagan somewhat chastened by widespread negative reaction to his visit to Bitburg, and, finally, by increasingly strong support from citizens and citizen organizations of a general liberal bent, and by opinion-influencing print and electronic media. There was strong resistance from The Liberty Lobby, the John Birch Society, and other archconservative organizations, from a small but implacable rear-guard of Senators with coherent ideological positions opposed to ratification, and their media allies. Those opposed argued that US sovereignty would be lost, US citizens would be subjected to UN rule, and the US could be accused of genocide for its treatment of current and past domestic and foreign minorities. When the Senate finally ratified the Convention it did so with a: stringent Senate ‘‘sovereignty package that included RUDs,’’ or reservations, understandings and declarations. These interpretations of and disclaimers about the genocide convention had the effect of immunizing the United States from being charged with genocide but in so doing they also rendered the US ratification symbolic. (Power, 2002)

The net effect of the RUDs in the three decades since ratification has been to completely hamstring any efforts by ‘any’ US administration to act effectively against ongoing genocides anywhere in the world. What Genocide Is Not The term genocide is often used for behaviors and events that meet neither the formal definition of the UNGC nor

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the more global characterization that this article is intended to convey. Three usages are particularly problematic because they apply the term to behaviors or events that, however unsavory, cannot be accurately characterized as, ‘‘committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such.’’ First, pogroms and punitive raids are not genocide, even though there may be large numbers of fatalities; their aim is not to destroy a group but rather to intimidate members or perhaps even to have some fun bullying the weak (Brass). (Such events may be democidal.) Selfdestruction by cult members may be intended to destroy a ‘religious group’; it is not state sponsored and thus does not meet the UNGC definition. Horowitz also argues for a different status for ethnic riots, semispontaneous attacks by civilian members of one group on civilian members of another. Nor do government shootings of political protesters meet the genocide standard; the victims are not members of the kinds of groups listed. Second, while many millions died in the African slave trade (in Africa itself, in the Middle Passage, and in an often brutal socialization into slavery), they were not victims of genocide. The intent of those who enslaved them was not to ‘‘destroy any national, ethnical, racial or religious group’’ or any social or political category. The motivation of participants in the slave trade was profit – slaves themselves were viewed as a (too slowly) renewable resource. Slavers were not indifferent to the health of their human cargo; illness on board threatened slave and slaver alike. Slave owners in the new world were generally similarly motivated to keep their property healthy and productive. Third, teaching immigrant or minority children in a majority language with the end of enhancing their success in the majority-dominated society is not genocide. Nor is provision of birth control education and devices to poor women who are members of minorities. Nor is criminal law (e.g., on drugs), which disproportionately imprisons members of a minority population. Nor is revocation of affirmative action. While such actions may make life more difficult for subordinated populations, their intent is at least putatively benign. Uses of the term genocide for nongenocidal events allows publics to disattend reports of actual genocide/ democide on grounds that many behaviors so characterized are aberrations, not very significant, or even benignly intended. In the remainder of this section on definition, this article comments briefly on (1) active and passive methods of democide, and (2) variations in killing by scope, a sort of scalar approach. Active and Passive Democide The most visible and obvious killing by governments is active killing (sometimes after assembling large numbers

of victims) of known or identifiable members of target social categories. Killing is done by asphyxiation, beating, bombing, burning, burying alive, crucifixion, decapitation, defenestration, and other pushing or throwing from high places (including aircraft), disembowelment, dismemberment, drowning, electrocution, explosion, exposure, gassing, hanging, impalement, lapidation (stoning or burying under stones), mines (land and other antipersonnel mines as well as marine mines), poisoning, ‘putting to the sword’, shooting, strangling, torture, and various combinations of ‘punishments’ from this unfortunately incomplete listing. Readers may think some of these methods are archaic; there is documentation that all are currently in use. Other methods, such as the large-scale use of ‘weapons of mass destruction’, including biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, are in only limited use at this writing, but they are ready for use at any time. Some scholars include the sterilization or other prevention of births to members of social categories, or rape of women members with intention of denying the group new members. Some of these methods, such as the large-scale gassing associated with Nazi ‘death camps’, require a substantial infrastructure; large numbers of people can be forced to cooperate in their own slaughter by having them dig their own mass graves with little more equipment than shovels and firearms (or even axes and swords). Or, victims may simply be marched to the banks of swiftly flowing streams, murdered, and dumped in. The choice of methods of killing reflects the size of the job to be done – a few hundred indigenes ordinarily constitute a lesser logistical challenge than millions of members of racial, ethnic, or religious categories. All of these methods have been used for both genocide and politicide. Those responsible for killing may be more willing to acknowledge using more ‘respectable’ methods, such as hanging or firing squads, but all are used. Large numbers have been killed without the benefits of modern technologies. The active killing just described is clearly intentional. The intended effects of other actions by governments (including inaction) are often unclear. Still, they result in deaths of millions of their own subjects and those of other countries; these are example of passive democide. Widespread death from starvation results from wartime blockades (Biafra, Bosnia, Congo, Eritrea, Somalia, and some of the post-Soviet states are late twentieth-century examples), from ‘scorched earth’ tactics of armies that are retreating in transit, from government seizure of harvests, levies of agricultural supplies, and collectivization or other reorganization of agriculture. Tens of millions died in the one-time Soviet Union and in the People’s Republic of China as a consequence of governmental policies reorganizing agriculture; smaller numbers have died elsewhere. Millions have also died from famines in which governments have failed to move available food to where it was needed and the effects of famine and


epidemic have been exacerbated by ‘withholding’ of food, shelter, medical assistance, clothing, and so on. Millions of people have died ‘incidentally’ as a result of forced labor (often with minimal sustenance) ranging from galley slavery to heavy toil in miasmic plantation swamps or always dark and noisome mines or dangerous factories. ‘Incidental’, too, were at least some of the millions of deaths that resulted from fatigue and exposure of populations, particularly the very young or old and weak and disabled, and so on, on marches (or trips on densely crowded trains) of expulsion and forced relocation to Indian reservations in the United States or across Russia to Siberia or to defeated Germany (after World War II). Countless additional millions have died as the result of usually unintended introduction of disease – or failure to control known causes of disease. Epidemics often followed initial contact with Europeans, particularly in the Americas and the Pacific. Governments have often spent immense sums on arms instead of the provision of pure water, thereby ensuring continuing endemic status of cholera and other water-related diseases (Sivard). The United States is a major exporter of tobacco products in spite of known linkages to mortality. The extent to which these various causes of large-scale death can or should be considered as democide seems ultimately to come down to questions of intent. Four government perspectives can be identified: (1) the view that as many should die as needed to break a population’s spirit and will to resist (blockades, sieges, embargoes, etc.); (2) a position parallel to depraved indifference or disregard for life or criminal negligence in criminal law (some forced labor, some relocation, some collectivization); (3) the orientation that costs are inevitable, some will die but ‘‘you can’t make omelets without breaking eggs’’ (some collectivization, some relocation); and (4) a sort of fatalistic acceptance of impotence to prevent deaths (famine, environmental toxins, etc.). Individuals, bureaucracies, and entire governments may delude themselves; instances where massive killings are accompanied by the first two perspectives are candidates for characterization as (passive) democide. Some count as genocide attempts to insulate children from their native culture through quarantine away from home, often in boarding schools where they are forbidden to speak their native languages or engage in native cultural practices. Indeed, such action may constitute genocidal practice under the UNGC definition. Similarly, some members of minorities consider cross-racial adoption as genocidal. The practices may result in ‘culturecide’; they do not involve killing. How Many at a Time, How Many Altogether There have been times and places where a glimpse of a lone member of some category, or a small party, would set a hunt in motion. We associate such ‘hunts’ (sometimes

seen as ‘sport’) with settlers hunting and killing indigenes in the Americas, in Australia, and in South Africa. Many American ‘Westerns’ portrayed Indians as equally likely to track down and kill small parties or individual Whites. In more modern times sighting of members of minorities or stigmata associated with education or class (e.g., glasses or soft hands) have set off similar chases and precipitated similar deadly outcomes. Individuals have also been selected and slain (periodically) as religious sacrifices or to assure the health and vigor of tyrants or in reprisal or simply to intimidate subject populations. Many but not all ‘individuals’ killed are nonanonymous and perhaps even known to their killers. (Goldhagen writes of men, women, and children and their German executioners marching two by two, side by side, into the woods where killing was to be done.) Anonymity is more likely when governments (or their agents or allies) kill people in ‘batches’ in mass executions by gassing (as in Nazi Germany) or by firearms or sharp-edge weapons or in siege warfare and subsequent sacking and slaughter of inhabitants. Even more ‘distancing’ is involved when large numbers of anonymous people are killed by so-called strategic bombing, ship sinkings, or the use of ‘weapons of mass destruction’. While it may seem that these last kinds of slaughter are behaviors associated only with war between foreign powers, it has been alleged that Iraq has used both bombs and chemical weapons against minority Kurds (attempted genocide?) and both sides used bombs in the Spanish and other civil wars. There are, finally, killings on a grander scale. Throughout history, some regimes have stated (and published) goals to exterminate peoples and social categories. The Nazis wanted to destroy Jews (and possibly Gypsies), and long-term accommodation of the handicapped and of homosexuals was not in the future of the Reich. The Soviet Communists wanted to exterminate old-style kulaks (a category for which they developed an extremely elastic definition) and other ‘enemies of the state’; Cossacks and other ethnic and nationality groups became defined as such enemies. The Romans hunted down Christians. Some United States Army officers would have liked to slaughter not only all adult Indians but children and infants as well. Most Americans of European origin in both hemispheres grew up hearing some version of the ‘‘The only good Indian is a dead Indian’’ mantra attributed to General Philip Sheridan. The difference among these last cases is that the Soviet and Nazi democides were explicit government policy, while the government of the United States, however much its officials may have condoned genocidal actions against Native Americans, did not enunciate any such policy. What does ‘how many’ mean? More than 60 million people were killed in the Soviet Union in the 70 years after 1917, about 55 million by various regimes in China in the 70 years after 1923, and more than 21 million by Nazi Germany in the shorter period of 12 years ending in

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1945. Only two million were killed in Cambodia in the 4-year Khmer regime (1975–79). Still, the Cambodian politicide was much greater proportionally; while more than 8% of the entire Cambodian population was killed annually during this period, the ‘rate’ of death in the USSR was less than one half of 1% during the various communist regimes between 1917 and 1987. In the USSR one person in 200 was being killed, in Cambodia one in about 11. The totals are staggering, but the distinction between absolute and relative numbers should be kept in mind. The percent of Jews who became victims varied across countries under Nazi influence or domain, and urban and rural Khmer had different likelihoods of victimization in Cambodia.

A Goal-Oriented Typology of Democide In a later section, this article reviews a number of behavioral science perspectives that seek to explain social violence, whether manifested in atrocity, massacre, rioting, varieties of democide, or war. Most students of genocide have limited their explanatory efforts to eclectic invocation of elements of various general theories to account for specific genocidal events, or have developed classification schemes that try to make sense of these behaviors in terms of apparent goals of perpetrators. In the following prototaxonomy, the author draws on typologies developed by a number of scholars of genocide. The terms they use overlap, are sometimes contradictory, and vary, as does what gets included in a specific type. Economic There are at least three varieties of economically based democide. ‘Predatory’ democide occurs when a victim population is in possession of valuable commodities (precious minerals of the Aztec, Maya, and Inca) or land (North American natives), or are themselves potentially valuable as slaves. ‘Developmental’ democide occurs when conquerors convert land use or otherwise alienate resources necessary for indigenous ways of life. This has occurred everywhere colonial powers have initiated latifundiary economies. Related to this is ‘structural’ democide, where similar disruptions occur to already established societies, as by the introduction of cotton culture and the subsequent desiccation of the Aral Sea or damage to Native American and Black populations in the United States through the presence of reservations and ghettoes. Retributive A first variety of retributive genocide occurs when a group which believes (frequently correctly) that it was victimized in the past, or is currently being victimized, gains

power and takes revenge, or simply rebels against those who have power and control. Historical instances of such ‘subaltern’ genocide in the eighteenth century include the Haitian revolution led by Touissant L’Ouvreture and Dessalines, the Sepoy Mutiny in colonial British India, and a number of Native American insurgencies in the Americas (Robins). A second variety occurs when a dominant group visits massively disproportionate reprisals on minorities for delicts such as stock stealing or justified homicide by individual members of the group. Norton reports that during White settlement in Northern California in the 1850s entire bands of Native Americans were killed by Whites as punishment for what amounted to attempts by Native Americans to protect themselves. In the latter part of the twentieth century retribution has been visited by Serbs on Croats and Muslims, by Hutu on Tutu and the reverse, by Hindus and Muslims on each other in the Indian subcontinent, and by Tamils on Sinhalese and Sinhalese on Tamils. Memories are long; Serbs punished Croats for events during World War II, and Muslims for events that putatively occurred four centuries ago. While many events in the second half of the twentieth century have involved ethnic and national groups, retributive politicide has also occurred, as when the Chinese Communists successfully ousted the Nationalists (Kuomintang), or peasants rebelled against their masters. In at least some of these instances violence was certainly not official state policy and quite possibly not state-condoned. Despotic/Hegemonic/Repressive Subjects of despotic rulers are subject to abduction, enslavement, torture, and death at the whim of the tyrant. Members of elites and of police and the military are no more insulated from risk than are slaves, peasants, merchants, or the intelligentsia. Villages or neighborhoods can be destroyed because of inconvenience suffered in passage through them, or extended families wiped out because of imagined plots, or individuals regularly forced to kill one another in fights to the death, and so on (Hinton). Killing goes on not because of any specific concern to instill terror but because, as Acton says, ‘‘Absolute power corrupts absolutely.’’ Ancient African and Asian empires and the USSR under Stalin and Hitler’s Third Reich are classic examples of such regimes; Amin’s Uganda and Haiti under Duvalier are among better-known examples in the second half of the twentieth century. Strategic-Tactical: Dominance Maintaining/ Intimidating/Threat Controlling Other despotic and totalitarian regimes are reputed to employ terror more deliberately. Reports on the Mongol hordes frequently express the belief that Ghengis Khan slaughtered all the inhabitants of cities which dared resist


to intimidate rulers and residents of cities yet to be attacked, so that the latter would surrender easily in hopes of being spared. Nazi forces in conquered areas of Europe and the Japanese in Asia slaughtered hostages and potential leaders to reduce resistance and facilitate control. This sort of pragmatic democide also differs from the despotic variety in that it is likely to be foreign rather than domestic. Ideological The potency of ideological belief in motivating behavior is well established; three varieties of ideology closely associated with democide can be identified. ‘Political’ ideologies often combine elements of idealism and selfinterest as when it is anticipated that a new order will make everybody’s life better, including one’s own, or where protecting one’s position of privilege is equivalent to defending natural or god-ordained order. ‘Manifest destiny’, the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, ‘death to the American imperialist infidels’, and the ‘thousand year Reich’ have all resonated, and have all been associated with democide. ‘Religious’ ideologies have been major factors in genocide from the first emergence of coherent religions. Pagan Romans killed Christians and Christians killed pagans and animists the world over for centuries. Major democide occurred between Christians and Muslims, particularly during the Crusades. Shortly afterwards, Protestant and Catholic Christians began killing each other. Hindus and Muslims engaged in mutual slaughter from the first appearance of Islam on the Indian subcontinent. Din (religion in danger) and jihad (holy war) have been rallying calls for Islam for more than a millennium (there have also been long periods of both local and national amity). Similar slogans reflect other religious ideologies and have been similarly invoked in large-scale killing. Racial ideologies about the superiority of one or another group and the inferiority of others seem always to accompany contact between groups. In some cases, as in antiSemitism, characterization of Jews as inferior has been comfortably accommodated with portrayals of them as successful schemers and exploiters. Slogans here include ‘final solution’ and ‘only good Indians’ and lead to colonialist open seasons on wogs and kaffirs, eliminationism in Nazi Germany, and the ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Yugoslavia as it dissolved in the 1990s. Habitual/Inertial/Institutionalized/Traditional There are many societies that have populations of minorities which constitute recognizable and more or less permanent underclasses. Blacks, Mexicans, and Native Americans constitute such categories in the late

twentieth-century United States, as do Native Americans in some central and south American countries; even Western-educated Indians constituted such an underclass in British India along with Africans in British colonies in Africa and Filipinos in the American-controlled Philippines. In such circumstances members of the underclass are subject to social, economic, and political discrimination and are more likely to be subject to police brutality, execution, and killings classified as ‘justifiable police homicide’. While the killings are not large scale in the short term, they are in the aggregate. While racial ideologies are likely to be invoked in explanation for democide of this variety, but it is also likely to be explained as just ‘what happens’, in much the same sense that people have fights when they drink lots of alcohol and kill one another when weapons are part of the scene.

Genocidal and Other Democidal Massacres Massacres minimally require that armed military or paramilitary units of some sort be co-present with members of a target population, and legitimated by governmental or subgovernmental authority. Sometimes massacres are the direct result of orders from higher authorities. In other instances the likelihood of massacre increases with fear among military (or quasi-military) units that they may themselves be attacked by the target population. The combination of arms, fear (and sometimes fatigue), and vulnerable populations can be a lethal one; whether killing actually occurs depends in part on actual policies and intentions of governments and military superiors and, particularly, on field commanders’ perception of policies and wishes. Massacres occur in the course of war. Toward the end of World War II in Europe SS troops slaughtered unarmed prisoners at Malmedy, and during the war in Vietnam US troops killed nearly all the Vietnamese of every age and gender in My Lai. While the Germans were engaged in the ‘Final Solution’, there is no evidence that either the military or civil authorities intended the elimination of American captives. Nor, however some senior officers in Vietnam may have encouraged high ‘body counts’, was there any American ‘policy’ of genocide. The shooting of hundreds of unarmed Indians at Jallianwala Bagh by General Dyer’s troops, which was a major impetus for the independence movement in India, did not reflect government policy, nor, again, did the shooting of Native American women and children at Wounded Knee reflect that of the US government. It has sometimes been the case that governments or government officials have acquiesced in or even encouraged vigilante killings, and there are instances where officials have joined mobs. In short, genocidal massacres can occur that are not expressions of government policies intended to encourage democide.

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A Sampling of Cases Table 2 lists some of the major democides (including genocide but excluding war casualties) of the twentieth century. Rummel, from whom the table is adapted, has detailed lists and tables of democides of varying size both for this century and for the previous three millennia or so of recorded history. It will be seen from discussion elsewhere in this article that with the exception of efficiencies introduced by the availability of explosives and biological and chemical weapons, democide has not changed much over recorded history. Justification for killings is much the same, as are effects on victims, socialization of perpetrators, variations of in responses from bystanders, and so on. It cannot be argued, even ironically, that civilization has humanized democidal practice. There are, nonetheless, differences across cases of genocide, massacre, and other democide. Ten of the books included in the bibliography (Andreopoulos; Chalk and Jonassohn; Charny; Jongman; Markusen and Kopf; Rummel; Rummel; Staub; Totten, Parsons and Charny; and Uekert) each contain modest to quite detailed descriptions of four or more instances of democide; several also

contain extensive bibliographies. Several of the books contain detailed personal and eyewitness accounts (as do others, e.g., Goldhagen). Stiglmayer focuses primarily on mass rape in a single location, Bosnia-Herzegovina; there is more than enough detail in the book to provide a sense of the phenomenon and its many dimensions of pain. It is not possible to convey the full diversity of democide over the millennia, by world regions or by characteristics of victims or offenders. This article only illustrates the diversity of democidal events (excluding war) by offering a sample varying on several dimensions and with features that make the chosen instances notable in some way. Examples from each of three bounded time periods are listed. Documentation of particulars and even of general magnitudes for each event is variably persuasive; that they occurred is undeniable. Pre-Twentieth Century Documentation for the last four of five centuries is substantial. Surprisingly, a combination of archaeological records, contemporary inscriptions by rulers, complementary accounts by contemporaries with quite different

Table 2 Twentieth-century Democide (thousands)a Regimes

Years

Total

Domestic

Genocide

Megamurderers (10 000 000 and more) USSR China (PRC) Germany China (KMT) Lesser megamurderers (under 10 000 000) Japan China (Mao soviets) b Cambodia Turkey Vietnam Poland Pakistan Yugoslavia (Tito) Suspected megamurderers North Korea Mexico Russia Lesser murderers (100 000 to 999 999) Top five lesser murderers (China [warlords], Turkey [Ataturk], United Kingdom, Portugal [dictatorship], Indonesia) Lesser murderers (under 100 000) World total

1900–87 1900–87 1917–87 1949–87 1933–45 1928–49 1900–87

151 491 128 168 61 991 35 236 20 946 10 075 19 178

116 380 100 842 54 769 35 236 762 10 075 12 237

33 476 26 690 10 000 375 16 315 nil 6184

1936–45 1923–49 1975–79 1909–18 1945–87 1945–48 1958–87 1944–87 1900–87 1948–87 1900–20 1900–17 1900–87

5964 3466 2035 1883 1678 1585 1503 1072 4145 1663 1417 1066 14 918

nil 3466 2000 1752 944 1585 1503 987 3301 1293 1417 591 10 812

nil nil 541 1883 nil 1585 1500 675 602 Nil 100 502 4071

1900–87

4074

2192

1078

1900–87

2792

2335

1019

1900–87

169 202

129 547

38 556

Includes genocide, politicide, and mass murder; excludes war dead. These are most probably mid-estimates in low to high ranges. Figures may not sum due to rounding. b Guerrilla period. Source: Adapted from Rummel, R. J. (1994). Death by government. New Brunswick: Transaction. a


stakes in event outcomes, and religious or mythological renderings where a deity is credited with democidal destruction has allowed historians to write with cautious confidence about a number of these earlier events. In the earliest records, democide is known primarily from the boasts of rulers who claim to have killed many people and to have terrorized many more. Ancient middle east

According to self-reports ancient rulers, particularly the Assyrians, slaughtered foreign civilians during times of war, tortured and mutilated military and civilian captives, raped, pillaged, destroyed. Quotas for slaughter were set, with sliced off ears and noses as documentation. Captured nobles were thrown from towers, flayed alive, slow roasted. Populations were smaller, so killing was sometimes near total (some observers note that only elites may have been eliminated with serfs simply continuing to labor for new masters). Total destruction of cities and all within them was not limited to the Middle East. Schoolchildren learn about the destruction and leveling of Carthage and the slaughter of all survivors of its siege by the Romans. Indeed, similar events accompanied the Crusades, particularly those directed against heretics in Europe itself (Christian Crusaders also kept count with cutoff bits and pieces) and continued in European wars well into the late Middle Ages and occasionally later. Melos

The Athenians led the Greeks in their successful wars against the Persians. They demanded not only credit for that success but tribute and allegiance as well. Late in the fifth century BC the Athenians demanded assistance from the Melians (descended from Spartan colonists) in the Peloponnesian War against Sparta. They warned the Melians they would be annihilated if they did not cooperate. After debate between the parties the Melians declined the Athenian demand. The Athenians laid siege to Melos and after victory executed all the men on the island and enslaved the surviving women and children. Mongol Hordes, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries

While schoolchildren know little about democide, many remember tales about mounds of human heads/skulls outside of destroyed cities. Successive invasions of Mongol ‘hordes’ brought terror to those in their paths; they are memorable both for their magnitude and their alleged cruelty. Saunders (quoted in 1994 by Rummel) reported that every resident of an ancient Persian capital was murdered, ‘‘and even cats and dogs were killed in the streets.’’ Here and elsewhere, the few who escaped were tracked down and killed. Rummel estimates 30 million killed in successive sweeps across Asia, mostly killed one at a time with hand weapons.

Native American empires

Just a short time after the Mongols and just years before Europeans began the large-scale slaughter of Native Americans throughout the hemisphere, the Aztec and Maya empires were engaged in democide, principally through widespread human sacrifice (Davies, Hassig). Similar practices were common throughout the world. The Aztec sacrifices were notable both because of their numbers (claims were made that thousands would be sacrificed for a single ceremonial) and their method (hearts cut out and offered to the gods while still beating). The purpose of Aztec warfare was putatively to take prisoners for sacrifice; it has been asserted that it was because of this that a small number of Spanish soldiers with better weapons and with no interest in taking prisoners was able to defeat them. (One commentator disputes the religious explanation and asserts that the Aztec intensification of sacrifice was merely part of a strategy of rule by intimidation.) The Spaniards, at the time in the midst of the horrors of the Inquisition, justified their slaughter of the Aztecs on grounds of the necessity of stopping the un-Christian practice of human sacrifice. ‘American Holocaust’ (Churchill, Rummel, Stannard, Thornton)

There is no consensus on how many native Americans died from direct violence, disease, or despair after the arrival of Europeans. Stannard cites sources that depict precontact population of the Americas as greater than those of Europe and Africa. He reports that 8 million Native Americans died within 21 years of Colombus’ landing, and estimates that the numbers at the end of the fifteenth century declined from more than 100 million inhabitants to about 5 million a few hundred years later. Thornton reports that late twentieth century estimates for the earlier period ranged from 15 to 112 million; his own estimate is around 79 million, compared to a world total population of about 500 million. Churchill uniformly accepts higher estimates for this hemisphere. Rummel more cautiously estimates is a bit below 14 million deaths during the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The small numbers of Europeans, at least initially, means that a substantial proportion of the millions of deaths were caused not by direct violence but by disease (and as Stannard says, by despair). There is no consensus on numbers. Almost certainly more deaths resulted from disease than from democide. Killing on a massive scale ‘did’ occur, and Europeans (and their descendants) in many venues in the hemisphere have continued to engage in mass killing, mutilation, torture, and rape into the current century. Twentieth Century through 1945 Rummel estimates four democides in which more than 10 million were killed in the millennia of recorded history

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before the twentieth century. According to his calculations 34 million were killed in China between 221 BC and the end of the nineteenth century AD, 34 million were killed by the Mongols during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, 17 million died as a result of African enslavement (as noted above, democide but ‘not’ genocide), and 14 million died in the Western Hemisphere between the arrival of Europeans and the end of the nineteenth century. These four democides alone account for close to 100 million deaths. Between the end of World War I and the end of the twentieth century, four democides began in which more than 128 million people have already perished (two, those of Nazi Germany and of Kuomintang China, are over) (Table 2). Of all the democides between 1900 and the end of World War II, those of Turkey (Armenia) and Nazi Germany are probably best known; reports in recent years have informed people about the democides of Soviet and Chinese Communism and Japanese atrocities in Asia from 1936 onwards. Democide by the Nationalist Chinese (Kuomintang), by their antagonists (the Chinese Soviets), in Tsarist Russia, and in Mexico are largely unknown except for people whose lives were affected by them. For brief description here two lesser known instances, one small and one massive, have been chosen. They are: (1) the revolt of the Hereros (Bridgman) and (2) the multiple democides in China by warlords, the Nationalists, the Communists, and by the Japanese in the 1930s. The Hereros of German southwest Africa (contemporary Namibia)

In 1903 there were 80 000 Herero (a Bantu tribe) and something under 5000 German settlers in the German colony. Two years later there were somewhere between 15 and 20 thousand surviving Herero and a growing colonial population. The scenario was a familiar one: increasing encroachment by Whites, unheeded indigene complaints, discriminatory treatment, individual homicide, and rape. The Herero were promised that if they surrendered their weapons they would be protected from further abuses. They turned in their weapons, but abuses continued. In early 1904 they rose up and attacked Germans, primarily farmers and settlers distant from German population centers and German troops. They specifically told nonGermans that they intended them no harm. By late spring German troops were arriving in great numbers: in October the German commander published a ban of all Herero from the country on pain of being shot on sight. In a separate order he advised that German soldiers should not shoot at women and children – but only over their heads ‘to force them to run faster’. However, when Herero fleeing the country were caught they were shot and bayoneted with no recorded concern about age or gender. The German official historians remarked that ‘‘The Hereros ceased to exist as a tribe.’’

The Herero case is interesting primarily because the slaughter was neither ordered nor endorsed by the military high command in Berlin but was in large part the initiative of local commanders. Many Germans were temporarily embarrassed by the episode but no punitive action against the German military is recorded, and once over the episode was quickly forgotten. The combination of predatory and retributive democide was overshadowed by other events in Europe. 1930s China

While more than 60 million were killed in the USSR between 1917 and 1987 and while the absolute toll of Native Americans killed throughout the hemisphere may have been as large, the highest closely documented cumulative figure for democide in a single country is clearly that for China. Including pre-twentieth century deaths along with those killed in the twentieth century by warlords, the Nationalists, Mao (during the guerrilla period), the Communist regime, and the Japanese during their invasion, Rummel estimates somewhat more than 85 million killed, exclusive of combatants. During one span of two decades (1928–49) 35 million died (this figure does include war dead), very roughly 40% of all the Chinese democides. Rummel succinctly summarizes what happened to these millions: They have been slaughtered because they happened to live where nationalists, warlords, communists, or foreign troops fought each other. They have been executed because they had the wrong beliefs or attitudes in the wrong place at the wrong time. They have been shot because they criticized or opposed their rulers. They have been butchered because they resisted rape, were raped, or tried to prevent rape. They have been wiped out because they had food or wealth that soldiers or officials wanted. They have been assassinated because they were leaders, a threat, or potential antagonists. They have been blotted out in the process of building a new society. And they have died simply because they were in the way. These poor souls have experienced every manner of death for every conceivable reason: genocide, politicide, mass murder, massacre, and individually directed assassination; burning alive, burying alive, starvation, drowning, infecting with germs, shooting, stabbing. This for personal power, out of feelings of superiority, because of lust or greed, to terrorize others into surrendering, to keep subjects in line, out of nationalist ideals, or to achieve utopia. (Rummel, 1991)

Twentieth Century after 1945 The USSR and the People’s Republic of China, the two largest and most populous Communist dictatorships, continued to be major contributors to democide after


1945. (Rates were declining in the USSR before the regime collapse and dissolution of the Union.) On a smaller scale, some states in the Americas continue to discriminate against, kill, rape, and torture Native American populations; in some places Native Americans have been victimizers as well as victims. The highest rate of democide (primarily politicide but including some genocide) ever calculated, over 8% annually of the population, occurred in this period in Cambodia, also a Communist state. While inaccessibility has made democide (largely politicide) in North Korea (a fourth totalitarian Communist state) difficult to document, reports characterize the state as being high both in absolute numbers of dead and in annual rate. For brief description here, two post-1945 democidal episodes – one in Poland and other areas of Eastern Europe occupied by the Germany during World War II, and the other in Pakistan, because they are little known and somewhat surprising – have been selected. Previously Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe

This section draws heavily on de Zayas and Wiskemann for historical reviews and on Rummel 1994 and 1997 and his multiple sources for numerical estimates. There were two waves of democidal actions in Eastern Europe at the end of World War II and immediately afterwards. First, as the Red army and its Polish allies drove toward Berlin they raped, tortured, mutilated, murdered, and pillaged Germans living in Nazi-occupied areas in the USSR, Poland, and other countries in Eastern Europe, both prewar residents and participants in the Nazi occupations. De Zayas estimates that 4–5 million Germans fled or were forced by the Nazis to evacuate and that as many as a million may have died. Some news of this filtered into the West, but awareness was low. After Germany fell many of those displaced earlier tried to return to their homes in the East. After the Potsdam agreement (July 1945) that Germans would be repatriated (humanely) they, along with millions who had not fled earlier, were subjected to evictions and confiscation of property along with murder, rape, and beatings throughout the region. Germans were forced to wear identifying armbands, just as Jews had been earlier, and they were subjected to much of the same treatment that had been meted out by the Nazis. Former forced laborers, national and local committees, militias, remnants of national armies that had been fighting alongside the Soviets, partisans and partisan armies, local gangs, and sometimes groups of neighbors joined in assaults on and eviction of Germans (and others as well, including occasionally Jews and other recently released concentration camp inmates). Expellees were marched to existing or hastily constructed concentration camps and packed into railway cars and taken long distances without food, water, or heat. Columns of old men and boys, women, and disabled German soldiers were driven on long marches from the Baltic

States, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia, sometimes through frozen mountain passes. Adolescent boys and men were rounded up, held under life-threatening health conditions, and shot without justification. Rummel estimates roughly 15 million expelled in the second wave by postwar governments (or with tacit government assent) and somewhat less than 2 million killed; he notes that estimates for this genocide/democide vary even more than most in an area of scholarship fraught with controversy. Some of this could be labeled ‘retributive’ genocide. Some in the new regimes tried to protect the victims, or at least provide due process. As elsewhere, there were rescues by neighbors and protection accorded by individual officers and soldiers. Senior officials in the Allied military and diplomatic establishment were aware of these activities and there were protests, intervention, and rescue, but there were limits to what they could (or would) do. Publics in the victorious countries were aghast at unfolding awareness of the Holocaust, concerned about their own recovery (and in western Europe, with pursuit and punishment of collaborators) and, in the United States, with the final agonies of the war with Japan. The reaction of distant observers if and when told about these events may well have been that imputed to American soldiers in Vietnam when told about My Lai, ‘‘it never happened and besides they deserved it.’’ East Pakistan/East Bengal/Bangladesh

The Indian subcontinent has witnessed substantial democidal violence during the latter part of the twentieth century. At the time of Independence and Partition in 1947, there were massive movements of population as Hindus sought safety in India, Muslims in the new state of Pakistan, and Sikhs with concentrations of their coreligionists. More than 15 million people became refugees and as many as a million may have been killed in communal violence in a short span, notwithstanding efforts by the new Indian government to control the violence. Violence continued on a smaller scale in the 1990s. The government of India was embroiled in attempts to pacify tribal peoples in Assam. Violence in Sri Lanka increased between the Hindu Tamil minority and the Buddhist Sinhalese majority, Bihari-Pathan violence was endemic in Pakistan; beatings, bombings, and riots were commonplace in the subcontinent (Tambiah). The greatest sustained violence, and that of the greatest magnitude, however, was that of the government of West Pakistan and its army against the population of its so-called Eastern Wing, now the country of Bangladesh (this account draws heavily on Payne (see also Chalk, Jonassohn, and Totten et al.)). During the two decades after Independence the Bengalis of East Pakistan became increasingly unhappy, and vocal, about their underrepresentation in government and the civil service and military, about denial of national status to the Bengali

292


language, and about what they considered to be unfair shares of national development funds. Even their piety as Muslims was questioned. When in 1970 East Bengal was struck by a major cyclone (and associated floods) in which as many as half a million may have died, help from West Pakistan was slow and modest in extent. Outrage grew, ignited political mobilization and electoral action in which the Awami League of the dissident Easterners gained an absolute majority in the Pakistan National Assembly. The government postponed the Assembly, and Bengalis went on what amounted to a general strike. In 1971 West Pakistan moved to subdue the rebellious province. Initial targets were police (and the East Pakistan units of the military) and intellectuals, including college teachers and students, writers, newspaper journalists and editors, cultural leaders, the entire political establishment of East Bengal, and in many instances the families of these leaders. Students at the University of Dacca who survived point-blank shelling by American-built tanks were forced to dig mass graves and were then themselves shot. A slum area in Dacca, occupied mostly by Hindus, was set on fire and thousands of its inhabitants were shot. The industrial base was destroyed in order to assure the dependent status of the province. Rape, murder, beatings, mutilation, and torture spread from Dacca to outlying rural districts. There were death camps. Thousands of Bengalis were marched into a river, shot, and pushed into the current. By the time the blood bath was ended with the defeat of Pakistani forces by an intervening Indian army, about a million and a half were dead and 10 million Hindus had fled into India. A successful war of independence soon followed, and victorious Bengalis killed about 150 000 Bihari residents and about 5000 suspected collaborators in retributive genocide. Summary Democide and genocide have occurred on every inhabited continent and during every historical epoch into the present. Victims have included entire populations or categories within populations. Numbers of victims have ranged from a few thousands to tens of millions.

Some Patterns in Democide, in Genocide, and in Other, Large-Scale Killing With more than 300 million people killed, it should not be surprising that there are differences in occurrences of genocide and other democide. There are also patterns, both in democide itself and in differences from other varieties of social violence ranging from riot to war. This section identifies some patterns in democide, looking particularly at aspects of large-scale killing not discussed in other sections. Patterns in events leading up to democide will be discussed in the last section of this article.

Ecological Patterns There are no particular venues in which democide is uniquely concentrated; there are few inhabited places where it has not occurred. It is neither an urban nor a rural phenomenon, for example, although some ‘types’ of genocide, such as that of indigenous populations, most often occurs in areas far away from metropolitan centers. Jews were herded into urban ghettoes during the Nazi Holocaust, and Einsatzkommandos went to towns and hamlets to kill Jews there. Indeed, one ecological pattern of democide has been the transport of victims to places where they are killed, often with stops at concentration camps or other collection centers, and of executioners to places where victims are located. Victims are also driven on deadly forced marches to new locations. Unknown numbers have died in transport (Elkins calculated that only 5 of 15 million captured Africans survived the trip to slavery; see also Conquest on the USSR). Efforts may be made to collect victims at less visible times and places (e.g., in the early morning hours and at unfrequented railway sidings); the principal consideration most often is to cope with logistical problems. Temporal Patterns Riots usually occur during daytime hours and in good weather. Political disappearances usually occur at night. Genocide, in contrast, occurs continuously once begun, postponed only because of shortages of killing space or personnel or because of weather severe enough to disrupt transport. Killing is ordinarily limited only by technological and logistical constraints. Lifton found stages in the Nazi genocide, during which the variety and number of victims increased; there is too much diversity in instances of genocide and democide to say with what frequency such temporal stages occur. Participants A very considerable amount is known about victims, perpetrators, and bystanders (Hilberg) and, somewhat more recently, rescuers (Fogelman) and refusers (Goldhagen). There are available detailed studies of killing professionals and of professional executioners (Goldhagen), of rape victims (Stiglmayer), and of survivors. (With the exception of Stiglmayer these books focus on the Holocaust; there have not been specialized monographs on participants in other democides.) The numbing statistics of millions of casualties from contemporary democide (including genocide) are depressing; the eyewitness accounts and recountings of personal experiences (and occasional photographs) are truly unremittingly distressing. (Lifton writes with clarity, honesty, and remembered pain about the personal costs of research at the individual level.)


Victims

When mass killing outside of military combat occurs, no category is spared by reason of weakness or age or handicap. (This is equally true, of course, of bombing in the course of so-called total war.) Distinctions are made, however, as when healthy and strong individuals or those with needed technical skills or perhaps physical attractiveness are temporarily spared. Additional distinctions are neither cheering nor comforting. Are individuals or families or extended families or communities killed or transported? Are there warnings, or do prospective victims wait in terror for knocks on their doors or lists of names? Are the criteria of selection predictable or not? Are all victims treated the same or can the rich, skilled, beautiful, sophisticated, or the simply determined buy time or even escape? What is the nature of assault? Immediate and efficient death? Arson with death coming as victims run from their burning homes? Incarceration in ‘camps’ or churches or public schools with minimal or no food or water punctuated (or not) by beating, torture, and rape? Primarily physical restriction of movement and starvation, or assault or execution? Primarily physical harm, or physical harm along with symbolic and psychological injury such as rape, forcing families to watch mothers and daughters and sisters raped, forcing males to rape or castrate one another, forcing parents to watch their children sexually assaulted and then killed, cutting fetuses from their mothers’ wombs and then slitting their throats? Stripping victims of all their possessions including, just before death, the clothing they wear? Cutting off their hair (or in the case of adult Jewish males, their beards)? Forced motherhood or forced prostitution and pornography followed by execution? All of these things and others have happened in the second half of the twentieth century and many continue today. An obvious question is, why don’t victims more often resist their attackers or at the very least attempt escape? There are variations here. Critical considerations include the disbursement of victimized groups, distance to possible safe havens, past traditions of resistance in the attacked community, prospects for assistance from within the perpetrating or bystander communities and, importantly, psychological denial of the possibility of what is happening. Many have feelings of powerlessness very similar to those experienced by civilians after massive (or nuclear) bombing or destruction of their homes and communities, by survivors of large-scale natural disasters, and by the bereaved. In some cases victims go beyond compliance and even cooperate or collaborate. In the case of ghetto Jews, particularly outside of Germany, community elders often discouraged resistance or escape on grounds that punishment would be visited on the rest of the community. Others are simply immobilized by the enormity of ongoing events or are unwilling to abandon their families. Motivations are obviously complex. Attempted and successful escapees and

resisters, there are always some, are overwhelmingly young, healthy, and without dependents; some older resisters engage in sabotage in camps and in factories where they are forced to work. Fein reviews studies of victims’ attempts to cope and concludes that those able to recreate social bonds were most successful. Perpetrators

Perpetrators are generally young postadolescent males. During full mobilization older males are recruited, some women become enthusiastic participants, and even children sometimes participate. Smith discusses women’s active participation in genocides. There are numerous reports of training youth to engage in torture and mass killing and of gradual socialization from being punished, to watching torture, to participating in torture and execution. Perpetrators ordinarily are members of the dominant group engaged in democide; when the killing is international, volunteers are frequently found. In the case of the Holocaust, volunteers and their effectiveness varied sharply from one Nazi-occupied country to another. Participants in Nazi genocide have been most studied. Hilberg distinguishes among reluctants (who approached their work with reservations and misgivings), evaders, volunteers (who sought participation in democide for personal advantage (sometimes because of hopes to punish particular Jews and/or acquire their property) because of hatred for victim categories, perhaps even because the ‘action’ seemed exciting), vulgarians (nonideological bullies and sadists), perfectionists (who set standards for others to follow), and zealots (who embraced both the ideology and its implied responsibilities). There are careerists and draftees. Responses to orders to kill included dutiful obedience, withdrawal and avoidance (sometimes permitted by superiors), enthusiasm, and frenzied over-achievement. There are few studies of the psychology or sociology of participation of perpetrators. Lifton studied the recruitment, socialization, and accommodation of physicians who participated in the Nazi genocide, and Goldhagen studied executioners of various sorts. It appears that the defense ‘following orders’ was not even germane in some cases; there is documentation that some perpetrators declined opportunities to avoid participation. The reasons for this are complex and apparently include a feeling of obligation to peers, fear of later reprisals, and a certain amount of opportunism. There are also reports, from both victims and perpetrators, of occasional kindnesses. Grossman studies the psychological aftermath of participation on perpetrators. Both Lifton and Goldhagen, studying quite different populations, reported that many years after their participation, many of their interviewees did not deny participation but justified it on ideological (anti-Semitic) grounds. Similarly, ideology was invoked in characterization of ‘kulaks’ in the USSR and the middle-class and intellectuals as enemies of revolutions (Melson). In the German and Turkish/Armenian

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cases, there have been manifestations of denial, of guilt, and of adherence to ideological justification. Corporate bodies, such as manufacturers who employ slave labor or judicial bodies that confiscate the possessions of victims or hospitals that sterilize or ‘euthanize’, are also perpetrators. So are legislative bodies that pass enabling laws. Bystanders

Only individual homicide is likely to ever be completely anonymous and unwitnessed. Countries are bystanders to war and democide, and majority populations are bystanders to domestic democide. Domestic educational, health-providing, financial, information, and other institutions also witness governmental actions. The governments, institutions, and people of other countries are, to varying degrees, witnesses and bystanders. Domestic and international bystanders at all levels play various roles. Some, discussed briefly below, become helpers or rescuers or even defenders. Some act opportunistically to obtain gain from the vulnerability and weakness of the victims. Just as some neighbors and pastors have sought to protect victims, some neighbors have blackmailed victims and stolen their possessions, and some ministers have closed their eyes. At the most, very few large-scale twentiethcentury democides have been secret from the world. The United States refused entrance to Jews, Swiss banks accepted Nazi deposits of Jewish gold and financial instruments, art stolen from Jews is in museums the world around, and the UN and major world powers looked on as Nigeria starved secessionist Biafra into submission (Jacobs). And, there are local onlookers, bystanders much like the ‘sidewalk superintendents’ who stop to watch buildings going up or passersby who stop to watch children’s ball games. The variety of responses reflects diversity in democidal events, patterns of prejudice and racism in bystander societies, cultural traditions of helping and privacy, socioeconomic characteristics of observers, perceptions of own danger and of potential economic advantage or disadvantage. The individual level responses to reports of democide include: approval (‘‘It’s about time’’), cupidity, cynicism, denial, ennui, horror, hyperidentification, immobilization, impotence, inability to act because of legal constraints, and indifference. Institutional, national, and international (e.g., the UN and the International Red Cross) reactions parallel a number of the individual responses, particularly those claiming inability to act. Helpers and rescuers

Some people give water to victims awaiting execution or transport, some give fleeing victims directions, some snatch children from the arms of dead family members and take them home to raise, some smuggle food to those being starved, some take strangers into their homes and hide them, some provide false papers, some smuggle those

about to be arrested to safety abroad. Some help but are unable to save a single life, others save hundreds. Some help is transitory, surreptitious, and risk free. Some is perduring and riskier. Some is particularistic (only for known others), some is universal. Some help is given only when requested and then perhaps reluctantly, while some is volunteered and even insistently so. Some is done by individuals, some is collective effort. Some helpers and rescuers are caught and become victims. Deniers

People in any of the categories just listed may deny that democide is going to happen, is happening, or has happened. Members of victimized groups often claim that reports are not true, or that law will prevail, or that they are not really members of the group being attacked. As the situation worsened in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, some Jewish intellectuals, including government civil servants, clung to the belief that Jews could not become a target victim population because ‘‘Germany is a society ruled by law.’’ Some of these people had to be almost kidnapped by less optimistic family members. Similar denial has been reported for most cases of democide for which there is more than the most superficial record. When democide is actually going on, it seems likely that fewer and fewer victims can cling to the belief that they are experiencing an aberration, a bad dream from which they will wake up. When, as in Germany, the actual killing is physically remote, transportation of victims is minimally public, and other preoccupations draw attention (such as combat deaths of family members, bombings of homes, and dire food shortages and illnesses), it is possible that some proportion of citizens either did not know or knew very little about ongoing democide. Similar claims of justifiable preoccupation are less persuasive in societies like Rwanda or Bosnia, where killing was local and visible. There are governments whose representatives deny that large-scale killing is occurring. There are perpetrators and government spokesmen who acknowledge that killing is being done, but characterize the democide as a social good for which enquirers should be grateful rather than critical. There are bystanders, individuals, and countries, that prefer to accept perpetrator denials than the evidence of their own eyes and ears. There are governments that acknowledge that terrible things are happening, but judiciously find that formal criteria for democide/genocide are not present. The latter has been the case with many of the governmentally condoned large-scale killing which have occurred and are occurring at the beginning of the new millennium. Causes of Genocide, Politicide, and Other Forms of Democide While there are exponentially larger literatures on war, riots, lynching, and murder, there is no dearth of


explanations for the social violence manifest in the variety of behaviors labeled democide. There is more literature on the Holocaust of World War II than on other genocide and probably more on genocide than on politicide. (There is a substantial literature on class violence in both capitalist and communist or socialist states (historical and contemporary).) The amount of attention given to various democidal events in the second half of the twentieth century has varied with their visibility to North American and European audiences; that visibility has been determined in part by actual physical remoteness and by perceived significance in terms of ‘national security’ of far-off events. That perceived significance is substantially influenced by media coverage and policymaker’s perceptions of interests and electorates. There are popular interpretations of democide, explanations by behavioral scientists, and findings of investigative bodies of various sorts. While there are some common threads, these have often given quite different conclusions and recommendations for solutions. Popular explanations

Popular explanations come from (1) individuals engaged in everyday interaction; (2) formal organizations of various sorts, including not-for-profit relief organizations, some professional associations, and human rights and related activist groups that attempt to prevent or stop large-scale killing in governments, increase political awareness, or lobby governmental and nongovernmental organizations; (3) apologists of the political right and left; (4) emergent spokespersons or experts who have opinions, share them freely, and come to be asked as social violence continues; (5) representatives of affected corporations, governments, or populations, and other lobbyists; and (6) the print and electronic media. Immediately or potentially affected governments provide interpretations supportive of victims or perpetrators. As democide has become both more commonplace and more widely reported toward the end of the twentieth century, popular explanations have increasingly incorporated elements of behavioral science theories and the conclusions of various investigative bodies (and, to some extent, claims and interpretations of groups with interests in forming public opinion). Folk explanations are variously favorable and/or sympathetic to victims or perpetrators. Perspectives appear to reflect social identities and location in the social structure, and to some degree the extent to which individuals and groups themselves feel threatened (‘‘It could [never] happen here’’); sympathies for victims in the abstract obviously affect some interpretations. Space constraints allow me to do no more here than list some popular explanations and interpretations for largescale killings by governments in the twentieth century: (1) human nature; (2) victims deserved it or ‘brought it on themselves’; (3) denial (it never happened); (4) it never

happened and besides they deserved it; (5) such events are the work of criminal groups, criminal states, and so on; (6) such behaviors are the result of prejudice and hate; (7) it’s all economic; (8) progress has costs (‘‘You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs’’ – a French proverb sometimes attributed to Lenin); (9) ‘‘what can you expect from such people?’’; (10) God demands the destruction of the wicked, of dissenters, of unbelievers, and so on. Some find an explanation in (11) the wickedness of individuals of great power (i.e., remarkable individuals) such as Genghis Khan, Hitler, Pol Pot, or Stalin. The kinds of ‘theories’ noted have appeared and reappeared over time; they have been applied in various forms to the whole range of violent behaviors, and they have been invoked (or rejected) with widely varying sophistication by the full range of those involved in democide and at all levels of society. Biological and behavioral science perspectives

My coverage of biological perspectives will be perfunctory. Given space limitations it is suggested that there are two major behavioral science perspectives on democide and its component behaviors: (1) those focusing on the individual, associated primarily with psychology and related disciplines, and (2) those focusing on groups and the social structure. Economic perspectives, including Marxist structuralism, are treated separately. Two excellent volumes, The Myth of the Madding Crowd (1991) and Theories of Civil Violence (1988), contain comprehensive discussions which together cover most of the theoretical perspectives mentioned below. Fein, Gamson, Kuper, du Preez, Rummel, Stannard (see, especially, appendix II), and Staub, among others, (1) review explanations more specifically focused on large-scale killing, (2) address questions of whether specific instances they discuss constitute genocide (or politicide or democide, etc.), and occasionally (3) suggest their own explanatory frameworks. Biological and sociobiological interpretations

Most scientists today deny that humans have an instinct for war, that humans are genetically programmed for war, or that human evolution has selected for aggressiveness. Some scientists find Wilson’s more sophisticated version of sociobiology with its emphasis on adaptive behavior whereby aggressiveness might be optimal in the short term (e.g., in driving other, genetically unrelated, humans from scarce land, or killing them and taking the land) more persuasive. Others question that war and democide can ever be adaptive for the species. None of this denies that there are humans who might not start wars or democide but who seem to enjoy destructiveness and slaughter once they get started, nor that we can be socialized into aggressive behavior and our inhibitions against killing dampened. The ultimate argument against human nature explanations of war and democide, including genocide, is

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that even ‘warlike’ societies have long periods of peace and some societies do not participate in wars at all. Economic explanations

There are essentially two economic interpretations of genocide and other large-scale killings. The first is that of pragmatism or what has been called ‘rational choice’ theory, an interpretation which says that people (and groups) engage in behaviors perceived as optimal paths to preferred worlds, for example, worlds without a disvalued minority, or where land or other resources previously possessed by a collectivity becomes available, or where the previously downtrodden become masters (Kaufman). Homer-Dixon’s perspective on environmental scarcity and violent conflict with its (unexplicated) implications for democide is congenial with such an interpretation. The second view consists of a collection of sometimes disparate Marxist and neoMarxist interpretations. A Marxist perspective suggests that large-scale killing associated with colonial expansion or assaults on domestic minorities results from the greed of capitalists, and that killings of internal ethnic minorities (e.g., Cossacks or Ukrainians, or Jews in the erstwhile Soviet Union) or of class or occupational groups (nobility, kulaks, intelligentsia, and so on) are necessary for completion of the struggle of the proletariat against feudalism or capitalism. One Marxist scholar (Cox) enriched his interpretation of large-scale killings (and individual discrimination or lynching) by incorporating a notion of race as caste into his identification of capitalism as culprit. Individually oriented perspectives

These perspectives generally look for explanations of violence in the personality characteristics or past experiences of violent individuals or some dynamic combination of the two. A view that human nature is at least predispositionally aggressive has been discussed earlier in this article. The psychoanalyst looks for violence proneness, rooted perhaps in early traumatic experiences but clearly the consequences of uniquely personal experiences in molding an individual psyche. Freud believed that all of us have aggressiveness in our makeups as well as a predisposition to ‘narcissistic rage’ and that whether or not we act aggressively depends on differential success in socialization for repression or control. Storr locates the propensity for mass outbreaks of cruelty in the imagination – as shaped by aggressive personality disorders, sadomasochism, and paranoid delusion. Lifton offers an explanation for individual participation in genocide as facilitated by ‘doubling’ – a process through which individuals develop a second self capable of demoniacal behaviors while retaining an earlier, more humane self. Proponents of the notion of ‘authoritarian personality’ assert that childhood socialization experiences transform relatively undifferentiated initial personalities so that some people become tolerant and others authoritarian and prejudiced. Authoritarian personalities are more likely to agree to and participate in democide. Other psychologists

simply postulate prejudiced personalities and then look at differences in their behaviors from the nonprejudiced. Fromm developed a theory according to which exposure to functionally debilitating social conditions generated ‘individual’ alienation and disconnectedness leading in turn to ‘malignant aggression’, including, presumably, enhanced likelihood of participation in genocide and other largescale killing. Clinical psychologists focus less on the individual personality than on the dynamics of the individual’s interaction with his/her environment. The frustration–aggression hypothesis has been attractive to both psychological psychologists and psychological political scientists, particularly quantitative scholars. Social psychologists have looked for explanations of violence in constellations of individual attitudes and have attended particularly to structural features of society fostering one or another attitude. ‘Relative deprivation’ or a ‘search for identity’ become independent variables related to specific attitudes, for example, isolation, powerlessness, and anomie, which in turn are linked to participation in group violence. Other social psychologists and anthropologists have drawn attention to the differences in societal socialization for aggression that result in ‘societies’ that are more or less prone to war and in which individuals are more or less prone to aggressive behavior. Some investigators, predicating a link between ideologies and behavior, note that we tend to share the ideologies of those around us and that some ideologies are more favorable to chauvinism or to democide of various sorts. Lifton discovers in the TurkishArmenian and Nazi genocides national ideological narratives of diseased societies cured by purification (destruction of the disease source) and regeneration. Hayden argues that exclusionary ideological justifications for ‘ethnic cleansing’ were written into the constitutions of the postdissolution republics of former Yugoslavia. Du Preez argues for an interaction between social events (wars, famines, and so on) and individual events (fear, insecurity, and so on), which serially and in parallel culminate in individual and collective readiness for social violence. Melson hypothesizes that democidal killing is often a consequence of successful labeling of victim groups as enemies of ideological revolutions. Staub has argued an incremental acceptance of evil, specifically including genocide. Part of such incremental acceptance results from processes of dehumanization, distancing, bureaucratization, and so on, persuasively described by Sanford and Comstock and their colleagues, and from ‘psychic numbing’. Related too, are notions of ‘spirals of aggression’ parallel to arms races. Some studies of war have observed that participation is massively satisfying for some. Men may feel that in fighting for a just cause they are doing something truly worthwhile; they may be exhilarated by actual fighting, or feel their masculinity enhanced by control over powerful weapons or the lives of others. Numerous investigators


have documented the gratifications that result from bonding experiences in combat and wartime experiences more generally. The obvious question is, are such positively valued outcomes likely from participation in genocide, politicide, and democide? Do mass murderers bond? Frenzied participation in slaughter of noncombatant men, women, and children in colonial assaults on natives, in Mongol devastation of medieval Asian cities, and the Japanese rape of Nanking (Chang) suggest that the answer must minimally be ‘at least to some degree’. Importantly, while early studies were primarily focused on describing attitudinal structures of individuals, more recent studies have looked at sets of attitudes associated with membership in social categories. Interpretations that focus on prejudice alone or that invoke concepts such as de-individuation or emotional contagion have waned; they have not sustained empirical test. Structural and processual perspectives

In recent years research on social conflict has become increasingly interdisciplinary as behavioral scientists in anthropology, cultural and social geography, economics, political science, psychology, and sociology, along with historians and philosophers, have very frequently borrowed from one another in their attempts to make sense out of social conflict and social violence. The resulting literature is too rich to even outline/summarize, let alone discuss, in a short encyclopedia piece. These wide-ranging interpretive theories generally come in about a dozen (the number is essentially an arbitrary artifact of how notions are divided up) varieties, most of which were developed in studies of other manifestations of social violence: (1) theories of the middle range or empirical generalizations based on empirical studies (e.g., that social conflict and violence increase in intensity to the degree that societal cleavages are superimposed (Coleman on community conflict, Lambert on communalism in India, Williams, et al., on race relations)); (2) theories that emphasize the explanatory utility of different versions of ‘culture’, ranging from anthropological notions of class or regional ‘cultures of violence’ to the Marxian use of the term as synonymous with ideology; (3) theories that find the roots of collective violence in the structural arrangements of hierarchy and social differentiation in societies (e.g., Marx on exploiting and exploited classes, the Tillies on structures of urbanization, industrialization, and state authority, Gamson on the criterial structural relation between authorities and potential partisans, or Grimshaw on ‘accommodative’ structures); (4) theories that focus on social processes/forms of interaction and/or social acts/behaviors (e.g., Coser, Dahrendorf, and Simmel on conflict as a social form or process or Tilly on repertoires of collective action or of collective behavior) or on social control as a societal structure and process (e.g., Janowitz); (5) perspectives that give special attention to

social violence (usually rioting in incidents used as documentation) as rational (in the means-end sense of that term – or even in the special ‘rational choice’ sense) and intentional behavior and as a successful agent for social change; (6) what Rule has labeled ‘value integration theory’, the quintessential exemplary of which is Smelser’s ‘valueadded’ theory with its five stages of: (i) structural conduciveness; (ii) structural strain; (iii) growth and spread of a generalized belief; (iv) precipitating factors; and (v) mobilization of participants; (7) theories that focus on the nature of the state, for example, Andrzejewski on military organization and society or Rummel on state power as a criterial variable in probabilities of participation in war or democide (cf. however, Krain’s argument that opportunity better predicts genocide and politicide than level of power concentration), and Freeman on bureaucracy, modernization, and genocide; (8) Actonian theories on the availability of power and its corrosive effects; (9) theories that weapons for largescale murder, just as those for individual homicide, will be used if available; (10) collective behavior theories such as Turner and Killian’s conceptualization of ‘structurally emergent collective definitions’; (11) McPhail’s integration of Mead on purposive problem-solving with Powers’ feedback perspective in which rational, autonomous, problemsolving individuals in difficult situations cooperate and coordinate their behaviors in attempts to achieve shared goals. Riots, or war, or lynchings, or democide, could all result from such a process. (12) Donald Black is developing an ambitious theory that may have important explanatory implications for large-scale killing by governments. Black’s premises for his ‘paradigm of pure sociology’ for the field of conflict often differ sharply from those reviewed in the paragraphs above, including the principles that: (i) conflict is not a clash of interests but of right and wrong and a matter of morality and justice; (ii) understanding individuals qua individuals, or personalities, will not provide understanding of social conflict and violence; (iii) conflict relations are determined by relations of spatial, social, and cultural distance; and (iv) conflict relations can be propositionally specified and are susceptible to quantification. Campbell applies these idea to genocide specifically. All of these theoretical perspectives seem reasonable on first reading and all have been shown to be compatible with some facts of some events. Sorting out which theories are truly falsifiable and which are most powerful will require considerable comparative research. The unfortunate likelihood is that there will continue to be opportunities for such research. Judicial and Other Archives, Investigations, and Reports There have probably been written reports on social violence, including large-scale killing, for as long as there have been written narrative reports of any sort. Large-scale

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killing in the name of maintaining the public order, or in retribution, or to put down revolt, has been employed by civil authority from its first establishment. Local officials and resident military commanders will have been asked to keep their superiors in metropolitan centers informed of local disruptions, particularly those that might be seen as harbingers of threats to the regime; it is reasonable to believe that private intelligence on democide of all sorts has an equivalently respectable antiquity. Accounts of pretwentieth century democide are based on government reports (often undistinguishable from myths and religious writing in earliest documents), biblical stories, despots’ boasts inscribed on desert cliffs, and, in the last half millennium, increasingly on accounts of contemporaries and the scholarship of historians. During the modern period official reports on wars and rebellions have become more or less routinized; in the second half of the twentieth century the same has become true of democidal events. At the international level the League of Nations and UN agencies have produced reports, as have organizations of victorious allies. Accused and accusing nations have also generated reports: Turkey defended its actions with its Armenian minority, the Vietnamese have reported on American atrocities. Neutral governments appoint bodies such as the British and Finnish Enquiry Commissions on Kampuchea. Organizations such as the International Red Cross report on their activities or, in some instances, defend themselves against accusations of neglect or timorousness (e.g., against charges that they had abandoned the people of Biafra during the Nigerian civil war). Countless ad hoc and self-designated international commissions exist, such as the East Timor Defense Committee or the Lawyers Committee on Human Rights. Organizations such as Amnesty International, Cultural Survival, and Human Rights Watch (initially Americas Watch Committee) publish regular and special reports on variously labeled manifestations of democide. Research institutes such as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research have counterparts in many other countries, as do university-based research centers. In the United States there have been Senate, House, State and Defense Department, Agency, and military commissions, boards, and reviews, at least part of whose findings are made public. These bodies, which sit from periods of weeks to periods of years or in some cases continuously, receive from no funding at all to millions of dollars. They are variously charged with finding facts of events (sometimes particular versions of facts), causal explanations, solutions, modes of prevention, and with assessing responsibility. Factual details, interpretations, and recommendations in reports of these various bodies reflect (1) the factual and interpretive biases and the social and political agendas of appointing and sponsoring entities; (2) the political

climate when investigating bodies are appointed; (3) the composition of the commissions (or other investigative bodies) and their staff; (4) the extent to which investigators are able to gain access to relevant documents, evidence, and witnesses; (5) the support, both moral and financial, provided; (6) the time allowed for the body’s investigation and report writing; (7) whether or not there were open hearings, particularly hearings in which public participation was invited; and (8) what sort of dissemination of findings was projected. Curiously, contemporaneous reporting practices may inflate the extent of democide ‘documented’ in later investigations, as when military officers or bureaucrats inflate the number of enemy casualties or those of ‘enemies of the people’ (e.g., ‘body counts’ in Vietnam and ‘quotas’ during democide in Stalin’s USSR). More accurate accountings can be equally damning, of course, as in Nazi records of their large-scale killings of civilians. Also curious, perhaps, is the fact that later governments of countries that have practiced democide have in some instances documented and apologized for the slaughter. At least tens of thousands of pages have been published (and perhaps millions written – see, for example, Goldhagen on his sources) about the extent, causes, and prevention of democide. Commissions, nongovernmental investigative bodies, and activist organizations have made basically two varieties of recommendations for prevention of genocide. The first set of recommendations aims at reducing what are seen as root causes of democidal phenomena by eradicating poverty and injustice and reducing prejudice. The second emphasizes social control through successful application of law, or increasing the control capabilities of international social control agencies such as UN peace-keeping units and changing sovereignty law so that peacekeepers can intervene in domestic democide. Additional suggestions are sometimes made, such as bans on certain kind of weapons or the invention of governmental structures which will allow at least partial autonomy for minorities, none of which have made much headway.

Intended Mass Extinctions of Human Beings at the Millennial Turn Whatever hopes there may have been that the end of Nazi Germany would also mean the end of what had come to be labeled as genocide were dashed by events that occurred as a new millennium approached and arrived. In the years immediately preceding and following the millennial year there were large-scale democidal events in Bosnia, Chad, Cambodia, Eastern Timor, Croatia, Gujarat, Iraq, Kosovo, Nigeria, the Sudan [Darfur], Rwanda, and many more government approved or condoned mass killings in African, Asian, and other venues. It will not be possible to provide details on any of these killings – in the small space


remaining this article briefly identifies and discusses some recent developments, namely, (1) the appearance, identification, and labeling of ‘ethnic cleansing’; (2) occurrence of government or quasigovernmental policies approving and (reportedly encouraging) policies of wholesale rape as an instrument in ‘ethnic cleansing’, (3) increasing public awareness of genocidal events (not necessarily accompanied by effective public demands for governmental action at any level); (4) broadening efforts to forecast/predict and (perhaps) prevent genocidal events; (5) attention to how democides are ‘remembered’. Ethnic Cleansing The Bassiouni Report to the United Nations observed: The expression ‘‘ethnic cleansing’’ is relatively new. Considered in the context of the conflicts in former Yugoslavia, ‘‘ethnic cleansing’’ means rendering an area ethnically homogenous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area. Ethnic cleansing is contrary to international law.

‘Ethnic cleansing’ itself is not a recent phenomenon. Consider three documented instances from twentiethcentury United States, that is, segregation of Native Americans in ‘reservations’, quotas for Jews in both undergraduate and graduate programs at elite American universities (and quite likely others as well (though Gentile summer resorts in the Catskills did not use quotas, they practiced total exclusion)), and the incarceration of United States citizens of Japanese origin in concentration camps during World War II – along with confiscation of their property. Many white Americans enthusiastically supported Marcus Garvey’s back to Africa movement; today many Americans of widely varying ethnicity support attempts of municipalities to purge themselves of Spanish-speaking ‘illegals’ (an emergent pattern pioneered in Pennsylvania). In Germany accelerating exclusion from prestigious and well-paying professions antedated transport to the death camps by several years. Rape ‘Recreational’ rape of women of all ages, particularly women deemed attractive or perhaps insufficiently cowed, has been an accompaniment of all democides about which detailed information is available; intimidation and/or ‘breeding’ of subject populations may be supplementary motives. Rape of target populations in transit (Armenians) and of conquered populations (Koreans forced to become ‘comfort women’ by the Japanese) has occurred, and concentration camp inmates were forced to become mistresses of camp personnel. However. governmental policies condoning, encouraging, or ordering rape appear to be recent developments in ‘ethnic cleansing’.

Allen’s first words on rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina are apposite here; these are quoted here at length: Genocidal rape: a military policy of rape for the purpose of genocide currently practiced in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia by members of the Yugoslav Army, the Bosnian Serb forces, Serb militias in Croatia and BosniaHerzegovina, the irregular forces known as Chetniks, and Serb civilians. Three main forms exist: (1) Chetniks or other Serb forces enter Serb, Bosnian Serb, and Croatian Serb Bosnian-Herzegovinian or Croatian villages, take several women of various ages from their homes, rape them in public view, and depart. The news of this atrocious event spreads rapidly throughout the village. Several days later, regular Bosnian Serb soldiers or Serb soldiers from the Yugoslav Army arrive and offer the now-terrified residents safe passage away from the village on the condition they never return. Most accept, leaving the village abandoned to the Serbs and thus furthering the genocidal plan of ‘‘ethnic cleansing’’; (2) Bosnian-Herzegovinian and Croatian women being held in Serb concentration camps are chosen at random to be raped, often as part of torture preceeding death; (3) Serb, Bosnian Serb, and Croatian Serb soldiers, Bosnian Serb militias and Chetniks arrest Bosnian Herzegovinian and Croatian women, imprison them in a rape/death camp, and rape them systematically for extended periods of time. Such rapes are either part of torture preceding death or part of torture leading to forced pregnancy. Pregnant victims are raped consistently until such time as their pregnancies have progressed beyond the possibility of a safe abortion and are then released. In the first case, the death of the victim contributes to the genocidal goal; in the second, the birth of a child does, for the perpetrator – or the policy according to which he is acting – considers this child to be only Serb and to have none of the identity of the mother. ... Rape/death camps: buildings or other enclosures where Bosnia-Herzegovinian and Croatian girls and women are kept and systematically raped for weeks or months at a time. These are restaurants, hotels, hospitals, schools, factories, peacetime brothels, or other buildings; they are also animal stalls in barns, fenced-in pens, and arenas. Testimony indicates that more than thirty such rape/death camps are currently in use. (Allen, 1996, vii–viii)

According to the 1948 UN convention, all of these constitute the crime of genocide. Public Awareness of Democide As the democides in Nazi Germany intensified in the 1930s, little was known about them outside of Germany

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and not much more inside; when foreign ministries and intelligence agencies of other countries learned of the increasing and increasingly systematic killing, the news seldom made its way to other governmental agencies, nor to media and publics at large. The situation was sharply different as the twentieth century moved toward its close. Democidal behaviors in Rwanda, in Bosnia, Croatia, in Kosovo, and most recently in Darfur have all been widely reported in the media and have been the topical focus of fiction and nonfiction books, films, and television documentaries. Presidents and Secretaries of State, freed from the constraints of actually having to do anything about democide/genocide other than decrying it, now use the ‘G word’ almost promiscuously. As the catastrophe in Darfur dragged on in the first decade of the twenty-first century, multicolor advertisements which would ordinarily have cost millions of dollars appeared in national media such as Time and The New Yorker. The advertisements were sponsored by the Save Darfur Coalition, an umbrella organization constituted by possibly hundreds of ameliorative and activist groups. The coalition has not publicly reported how much money it has raised or the expenditure of those funds. At the time of this writing, efforts by individual governments, by most philanthropic organizations, by the African Union, and by the United Nations have had some modest successes in delivering relief to some victims – but have not been able to reduce the rape, torture, and slaughter of targeted populations (Reeves). In 2006 even the conservative mass-circulation magazine National Geographic published an article on the Rwandan genocide and the mass murders perpetrated by the Iraqi Hussein regime, and about problems with findings and assessing evidence for such crimes. Forecasting, Predicting, Preventing, Ameliorating Democide Fear and loathing of members of a despised group (or category of people) in a shared space does not fully explain democidal social violence against them. In 1998, in response to President Clinton’s policy initiative on genocide early warning and prevention, Barbara Harff was asked to undertake research to establish an empirically grounded data-based system for risk assessment and early warning of genocidal violence. Harff lists six factors that jointly differentiate with 76% accuracy the 36 serious civil conflicts that led to episodes of genocidal violence in 1955–2004, and 93 other cases of serious civil conflict since 1955 that did not eventuate in democidal episodes. The six factors are as follows: . prior genocides and politicides since 1945; . political upheaval: the magnitude of political upheaval (ethnic and revolutionary wars plus regime crises during the previous 15 years, excluding the magnitude of prior genocides);

. ethnic character of the ruling elite (is elite a minority communal group?); . ideological character of the ruling elite: a belief system that identifies some overriding purpose or principle that justifies efforts to restrict, persecute or eliminate certain categories of people; . regime type: autocratic regimes are more likely to engage in severe repression of oppositional groups; and . trade openness (export þ imports as % of GDP): openness to trade indicates state and elite willingness to maintain the rule of law and fair practices in the economic sphere. Harff scrutinized the apparently deviant cases and concluded that accuracy increased to nearly 90% when temporal and other inconsistencies in the data were taken into account. Harff ’s study locates her firmly within the quantitative social science tradition. Stanton, in contrast, appears to have generated his ‘‘8 Stages of Genocide’’ from close readings of a wide variety of sources, including print and television journalism (both local and international), UN and other commission reports, personal documents and documentaries (see Table 3). Forecasting democidal events has vastly increased in accuracy in the past several decades. Unfortunately, it is not at all clear that preventive actions, such as those suggested by Stanton, could prevent genocide. These include steps such as prohibiting and punishing hate symbols and speech; outlawing membership in relevant militias and embargoing governments; isolating perpetrators by banning travel and freezing finances; supporting moderates and human rights groups; providing humanitarian and military support to victims groups; establishing safe areas and escape corridors for refugees; and, finally, conducting international trials. Others run campaigns to pressure investors to divest from companies involved in genocide. In addition, governments are often reluctant to take these steps. Casual Remembrances, Unforgettable Memories, Vague Recollections We are all aware that what we remember of an event (or a thing or person) is influenced profoundly by more variables than can be easily identified or labeled – one party’s genocide may be another’s ‘necessary social control’, one party’s terrorism another’s ‘liberation struggle’. Levy and Sznaider, using contemporary political events and memories of the Holocaust in Germany, the United States, and Israel, raise critical issues about how historical and contemporary contexts influence perceptions and judgments of genocidal events and of how politicians and social movements use such events to advance their own agendas. Explicit comparisons are made of memories of the Holocaust in the three countries from immediately after World War II to contemporary times. They attend to the changing role and influence of various media, which have

Genocide and Democide 301 Table 3 The eight stages of genocide Stage

Description

1. Classification 2. Symbolization 3. Dehuminization 4. Organization 5. Polarization 6. Preparation 7. Extermination 8. Denial

Categorization into ‘‘us and them.’’ Symbols are associated with specific groups. Members of one group are equated with animals, diseases, etc. Training and drafting of plans: may be state-led, directly or through militias, informal, or decentralized. Extremists use hate groups and laws to drive groups apart with propaganda and segregating policies. Victims are identified and isolated, death lists are made. Killing of one group; reciprocal/revenge killing may develop. Evidence concealed, witnesses blamed, investigations blocked.

Source: Adapted from Stanton, G. H. (1998). The 8 Stages of Genocide. Yale Genocide Studies Paper GS-01, http://www. genocidewatch.org/18 stages1996.htm (accessed on Nov 2007).

expanded in range and at the same time have been affected by both global trends toward homogenization and local anti-entropic and differentiating forces. Older readers will recall the quite different memories of the American Civil War among mid-twentieth century residents of former Confederate states and residents of other states. Still older readers will recall how warmth for Finland survived even after that country had become an ally of the Third Reich. Denial will continue to thrive; there will be new events to deny.

Further Reading Allen, B. (1996). Rape warfare the hidden genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Andreopoulos, G. (ed.) (1994). Genocide: The conceptual and historical dimensions. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Andrzejewski, S. (1954). Military organization and society. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Barash, D. P. (1991). Introduction to peace studies. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Black, D. (1989). The social structure of right and wrong. New York: Academic Press. Brass, P. R. (1996). Introduction. In Brass, P. R. (ed.) Riots and pogroms, pp. 1–55. New York: New York University Press. Bridgman, J. (1981). The revolt of the Hereros. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Campbell, B. (2005). Genocide as social control. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Charlotte, NC. Chalk, F. and Kurt, J. (1990). The history and sociology of genocide: Analyses and case studies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Chang, I. (1997). The rape of Nanking: The forgotten holocaust of World War II. New York: Basic Books. Charny, I. W. (ed.) (1988). Genocide: A critical bibliographic review. New York: Facts On File Publications. Charny, I. W. (ed.) (1991). Genocide: A critical bibliographic review, vol. 2. New York: Facts on File Publications. Churchhill, W. (1997). A little matter of genocide. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books. Conquest, R. (1986). The harvest of sorrow: Soviet collectivization and the terror famine. New York: Oxford University Press. Coser, L. A. (1998). The functions of social conflict. London: Routledge & K. Paul. Cox, O. C. (1948). Caste, class, and race: A study in social dynamics. New York: Doubleday. Dahrendorf, R. (1959). Class and class conflict in industrial society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Damrosch, L. F. (ed.) (1993). Enforcing restraint: Collective intervention in internal conflicts. New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press.

Davies, N. (1981). Human sacrifice in history and today. New York: William Morrow. De Zayas, A. M. (1994). A terrible revenge: The ethnic cleansing of the east European Germans, 1944–1950. New York: St. Martin’s Press. (trans. Koehler, J. A.,1993, The German expellees: Victims in war and peace). du Preez, P. (1994). Genocide: The psychology of mass murder. London: Boyars/Bowerdean. Elkins, S. (1959). Slavery: A problem in American institutional and intellectual life. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fein, H. (1979). Accounting forgenocide: National responses and Jewish victimization during the Holocaust. New York: Free Press. Fein, H. (ed.) (1992). Genocide watch. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Fein, H. (1993). Genocide: A sociological perspective. London: Sage. Fogelman, E. (1994). Conscience and courage: Rescuers of Jews during the holocaust. New York: Anchor. Freeman, M. (1995). Genocide, civilization and modernity. British Journal of Sociology 46, 207–225. Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from freedom. New York: Rinehart. Gamson, W. A. (1995). Hiroshima, the holocaust, and the politics of exclusion. American Sociological Review 60, 1–20. Goldhagen, D. J. (1996). Hitler’s willing executioners: Ordinary Germans and the holocaust. New York: Knopf. Gottlieb, G. (1993). Nation against state: A new approach to ethnic conflicts and the decline of sovereignty. New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press. Grossman, D. A. (1995). On killing: The psychological cost of learning to kill in war and society. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Hale, C. R. (1997). Consciousness, violence, and the politics of memory in Guatemala. With commentary by Arturo Arias, Ricardo Falla, Jorge Ramon Gonzalez Ponciano, David McCreer and David Stoll. Current Anthropology 38, 817–838. Harff, B. and Gurr, T. R. (1989). Victims of the state: Genocide, politicides, and group repression since 1945. International Review of Victimology 1, 23–41. Hassig, R. (1988). Aztec warfare: Imperial expansion and political control. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Hayden, R. M. (1996). Imagined communities and real victims: Self-determination and ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia. American Ethnologist 23, 783–801. Hilberg, R. (1992). Perpetrators, victims, bystanders: The Jewish catastrophe 1933–1945. New York: Harper-Collins. Hinton, A. L. (1996). Agents of death: Explaining the Cambodian genocide in terms of psychosocial dissonance. American Anthropologist 98, 818–831. Homer-Dixon, T. (1994). Environmental scarcities and violent conflict: Evidence from cases. International Security 19, 5–40. Homer-Dixon, T. F. (1991). On the threshold: Environmental changes as causes of acute conflict. International Security 16, 76–116. Horowitz, D. L. (2001). The deadly ethnic riot. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Jacobs, D. (1988). The brutality of nations. New York: Paragon House. Janowitz, M. (1996). On social organization and social control. In Burk, J. (ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Jongman, A. (ed.) (1996). Contemporary genocides: Causes, cases, consequences. Leiden: Interdisciplinary Research Program on Root Causes of Human Rights Violations. Kaufman, S. J. (1996). Spiraling to ethnic war: Elites, masses, and Moscow in Moldova’s civil war. International Security 21, 108–138. Kaufman, S. J. (2006). Symbolic politics or rational choice? Testing theories of extreme ethnic violence. International Security 30(4), 45–86. Krain, M. (1993). State-sponsored mass murder: The onset and severity of genocides and politicides. Journal of Conflict Resolution 41, 331–360. Kressel, N. J. (1996). Mass hate: The global rise of genocide and terror. New York: Plenum Press. Kuper, L. (1985). The prevention of genocide. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lemkin, R. (1944). Axis rule in occupied Europe. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Levy, M. J. (1952). The structure of society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Levy, D. and Sznaider, N. (2005). The holocaust and memory in the global age (trans. Oksiloff, A.). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Lifton, R. J. (1982/1967). Death in life: Survivors of Hiroshima. New York: Random House. Lifton, R. J. (1986). The Nazi doctors: Medical killing and the psychology of genocide. New York: Basic Books. Markusen, E. and Kopf, D. (1995). The holocaust and strategic bombing: Genocide and total war in the 20th century. Boulder, CO: Westview. Mazian, F. (1990). Why genocide? The Armenian and Jewish experiences in perspective. Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press. McPhail, C. (1991). The myth of the madding crowd. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Melson, R. (1992). Revolution and genocide: On the origins of the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Norton, J. (1979). When our worlds cried: Genocide in Northwestern California. San Francisco, CA: The Indian Historian Press. Payne, R. (1973). Massacre. New York: Macmillan. Power, S. (2002). A problem from hell: America and the age of genocide. New York: Basic Books. Reeves, E. (2006). Watching genocide, doing nothing: The final betrayal of Darfur, Dissent, Fall: 5–9. Reisman, W. M. and Antoniou, C. T. (eds.) (1994). The laws of war: A comprehensive collection of primary documents of international law covering armed conflict. New York: Vintage. Robins, N. A. (2005). Native insurgencies and the genocidal impulse in the Americas. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Rule, J. B. (1988). Theories of civil violence. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Rummel, R. J. (1990). Lethal politics: Soviet genocide and mass murder since 1917. New Brunswick: Transaction. Rummel, R. J. (1991). China’s bloody century: Genocide and mass murder since 1900. New Brunswick: Transaction. Rummel, R. J. (1994). Death by government. New Brunswick: Transaction. Rummel, R. J. (1997). Power hills: Democracy as a method of nonviolence. New Brunswick: Transaction. Rummel, R. J. (1997). Statistics of democide: Genocide and mass murder since 1900. Charlottesville, VA: Center for National Security Law, University of Virginia. Sanford, N. and Comstock, C. (eds.) (1971). Sanctions for evil. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Schwartz, B. and Zerubavel, Y. (1986). The recovery of Masada: A study in collective memory. The Sociological Quarterly 27(2), 147–164. Simmel, G. (1908). Conflict. (trans. Wolff, K. H., 1955). Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Sivard, R. L. (1991). World military and social expenditures 1991. Washington, DC: World Priorities. Smith, R. W. (1994). Women and genocide: Notes on an unwritten history. Holocaust and Genocide Studies 8, 315–334. Stannard, D. E. (1992). American holocaust: Columbus and the conquest of the new world. New York: Oxford University Press. Stanton, G. H. (1998). The 8 Stages of Genocide. Yale Genocide Studies Paper GS-01, http://www.genocidewatch.org/ 8stages1996.htm (accessed on Nov 2007). Staub, E. (1989). The roots of evil: The origins of genocide and other group violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stiglmayer, A. (ed.) (1994). Mass rape: The war against women in Bosnia–Herzegovina. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Storr, A. (1991). Human destructiveness. New York: Grove Weidenfeld. Tambiah, S. J. (1996). Leveling crowds: Ethnonationalist conflicts and collective violence in south Asia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Tilly, C. (2006). Regimes and repertoires. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Thornton, R. (1942). American Indian holocaust and survival: A population history since 1492. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Totten, S. E., Parsons, W. S., and Charny, I. W. (1997). Century of genocide: Eyewitness accounts and critical views. New York: Garland Publishing. Uekert, B. K. (1995). Rivers of blood. Westport, CT: Praeger. Wiskemann, E. M. (1956). Germany’s eastern neighbours: Problems relating to the Oder-Neisse Line and the Czech frontier regions. London: Oxford University.

Chemical Warfare J Berberich, Agentase, Pittsburgh, PA, USA ã 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Use of Chemical Weapons Classification of Chemical Weapons Vesicants

Glossary Acetylcholinesterase An enzyme found in the blood and at nerve endings that catalyzes the hydrolysis of acetylcholine.

Nerve Agents Miscellaneous Lesser Chemical Warfare Agents Further Reading

Blister Agent A chemical compound that burns the eyes, lungs, and skin and typically forms blisters on the skin.

Chemical Warfare

Blood Agent A chemical, typically containing a cyanide group, that prevents the normal utilization of oxygen by tissue. Chemical Warfare Intentional use of chemicals, typically poisons, contaminants, or irritants, in order to kill, injure, or incapacitate. Choking Agent A chemical agent that prevents normal breathing and causes a victim to suffocate. Lachrymation Excessive secretion of tears. Miosis Contraction of the pupil of the eye in response to increased light or to certain chemicals or pathological conditions.

Use of Chemical Weapons World War I was the beginning of large-scale chemical warfare. The Germans first used chlorine and phosgene gas released from gas cylinders and artillery shells; 85% of all deaths resulting from exposure to chemical warfare agents during World War I were caused by phosgene. The first use of sulfur mustard was also by the Germans during World War I. Sulfur mustard was such an effective chemical warfare agent that it became known as the king of the battle gases. The Germans began designing a second generation of chemical weapons, the nerve agents, before World War II. Although they were never used, the Germans maintained large stockpiles of the nerve agents tabun and sarin. After World War II, the British synthesized the very potent nerve agent VX. Even after World War II, chemical warfare agents were still in use. During the 1960s, mustard agents, riot control agents, and perhaps nerve agents were used by Egypt during the Yemen War. Iraq used sulfur mustard, tabun, and soman during the war with Iran, and it is believed that they may have used cyanide against the Kurds. There is some speculation that Iraq used chemical weapons during the first Persian Gulf War (this being the cause of Gulf War Syndrome). Many veterans of this war complain of a number of symptoms, including recurrent headaches, joint stiffness, nausea, anxiety, and depression. No conclusion has been drawn on the cause of Gulf War Syndrome, but many conclude that multiple chemical exposure, contact with pesticides, negative reactions to vaccines or side effects of chemicals given to protect against nerve agent exposure may have caused some symptoms. Terrorist groups are now the biggest threat for using chemical weapons. Sarin was used by the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan in the mid-1990s. It was first used in Matsumoto in 1994 and killed seven and injured over 600. The second occurrence was in the Tokyo subway in 1995, which killed 12 people and injured more than 5000. This cult had also used VX for the assassination of important political leaders.

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Nerve Agent A chemical agent that inhibits the enzyme acetylcholinesterase and prevents the transmission of nerve impulses. Toxic Industrial Chemical Chemicals from industrial processes that may be hazardous to individuals. Vesicant A chemical compound that burns the eyes, lungs, and skin and typically forms blisters on the skin.

Chemical warfare presents a number of unique physical and psychological stresses to an individual. Military personnel not only risk the physical stress and damage caused by contact with chemical warfare agents, but also cope with the severe psychological stress that comes with the fear of risk of exposure. Wartime already presents significant fear and confusion for a soldier, and the threat of chemical warfare exacerbates this. The first responders who must respond to chemical warfare incidences also experience significant stress caused by the need to wear cumbersome protective gear, the potential accidental exposure to the chemical warfare agent, and the obligation to help the injured, dying, or dead. For those living with the dread of war or terrorism, the stress, fear and worries can lead to severe anxiety and have a serious impact on normal life. People’s mood, cognition, and behavior may be disrupted as a result of the fear, uncertainty, and panic that may accompany a chemical warfare incident, a training drill, or a hoax. In fact, the psychological stress itself may mimic many of the physiological effects caused by exposure to chemical weapons.

Classification of Chemical Weapons A variety of chemicals exist that may be used as chemical warfare agents. Those considered to be the biggest threat for the modern soldier are the nerve gases and mustard gases. These agents are actually liquids at ambient temperatures and are generally aerosolized in order to be efficiently dispersed. The low volatility of these agents allows them to persist in the environment for a long period of time. It is the persistence of these agents that poses a great risk for first responders and health-care workers. Other toxic chemicals such as cyanide, chlorine, and phosgene are true gases at ambient conditions and rapidly dissipate from the environment, making them less of a long-term hazard. However, some of these gases are

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heavier than air and may remain in low-lying areas for extended periods. Chemical warfare agents may also include riot control agents, such as tear gas and pepper sprays, and even herbicides. Agent Orange was a herbicide used during the Vietnam War to remove foliage and expose hidden enemy soldiers. With the growing fears of terrorism, two of the largest classes of chemicals of concern are the toxic industrial chemicals (TICs) and toxic industrial materials (TIMs). If a terrorist organization were to release any of these chemicals into the environment, the impact would be devastating.

Vesicants The vesicants are a broad class of chemical agents that produce vesicles or blisters on the skin and the mucous membranes. These chemicals include sulfur mustard, the nitrogen mustards, Lewisite, and phosgene oxime. Sulfur mustard was developed by Germany before World War I and was noted to smell like mustard and taste like garlic. Pure sulfur mustard is known as HD; it is a strong alkylating agent, known for its ability to react with a number of biomolecules, including proteins, DNA, and RNA. The organs most commonly affected by mustards are the skin, eyes, and those in the respiratory system. Sulfur mustard does not have an effect at first contact, and a dose-dependent latent period exists before effects begin to occur. Nausea and burning of the eyes are often the first symptoms of mustard exposure. Blistering and itching of the skin, chest pains, coughing, lesions, or blindness may begin to occur within a few hours or days after exposure. There is a poor understanding of exactly how mustard produces blisters. Most symptoms begin to heal within few weeks of exposure; however, neurosis, depression, and continuous eye problems have been noted as long-term effects. Of the soldiers exposed to mustard gas during World War I, only 3–4% died of its direct effects. Death typically occurs due to secondary infections, shock, or respiratory insufficiency. There also exists some data that suggest that chronic exposure to mustard may increase the likelihood of developing cancer of the mouth, throat, and respiratory tract. The nitrogen mustards, referred to as HN1, HN2, and HN3, are also potent vesicants. Although the nitrogen mustards are structurally similar to the sulfur mustards and have common chemical reactions, they have never found use as weapons. They produce damage to the eyes, respiratory tract, and skin similar to sulfur mustard; however, onset may take place more rapidly. Nitrogen mustard (HN2) was manufactured and used for a number of years in chemotherapy. Lewisite was developed during World War I to be less persistent than mustard since waging an attack on

mustard-containing areas was difficult. Lewisite was never used in war. The toxic effects of Lewisite are similar to those of sulfur mustard; however, the onset of effects occurs within seconds of exposure. Like other vesicants, Lewisite is a potent inhibitor of enzymes, inhibiting via the interaction of the Lewisite arsenic group with enzyme cysteine residues. Like sulfur mustard, the exact mechanism of toxicity is poorly understood.

Nerve Agents The nerve agents are a class of organophosphorous esters, similar to pesticides, that are rapidly lethal via any route of exposure. There are two major classes of nerve agents: Vand G. The G series agents include tabun (GA), sarin (GB), soman (GD), and GF. The V series agents include VX and Russian VX. The relative toxicity of the nerve agents is VX > GD GF > GB > GA. The nerve agents are about 1000 times more potent than the most potent commercially available pesticides. VX is especially potent since it has a low volatility, making it a serious contact threat, and it is stable in the environment. The G series agents are more volatile and do not pose as much of a contact hazard. The nerve agents act by irreversibly binding to esterase enzymes, especially acetylcholine esterase, which is present in the blood and at the neuromuscular junctions in the peripheral and central nervous systems. The binding of nerve agents to acetylcholine esterase causes inhibition of the enzyme and leads to an accumulation of acetylcholine. The clinical effects of nerve agents are due to the build-up of acetylcholine within the nervous system, which, depending on dose and route of exposure, may lead to a variety of symptoms, including miosis, nausea, tightness in the chest, vomiting, increased sweating and salivation, lachrymation, headaches, weakness, twitching, muscular and abdominal cramps, diarrhea, blurring of vision, anxiety, and tremors. Death can occur through respiratory arrest or cardiac arrhythmia. Severe poisoning by nerve agents may cause long-term physiological, psychological, and neurological effects such as cerebral impairment and cardiac malfunctioning as well as posttraumatic stress disorder and differences in intellectual and motor skills. Exposure to small concentrations of nerve agents may cause depression, forgetfulness, inability to concentrate, bad dreams, insomnia, and irritability.

Miscellaneous Lesser Chemical Warfare Agents The cyanides, often referred to as blood agents, were used as chemical weapons during World War I by the French and Austrians. Cyanides have also reportedly been used during the Iran-Iraq War. The cyanide gases are difficult

Chemical Warfare

to deliver since they rapidly disperse into the environment due to their high volatility. There are three main types of cyanide: hydrogen cyanide (AC), cyanogen chloride (CK), and cyanogen bromide. The cyanogen halides (cyanogen bromide and cyanogen chloride) react in the body to produce hydrogen cyanide and hence have a very similar toxic effect. The target of cyanide toxicity is cellular respiration in the mitochondria. The cyanide ion reversibly inhibits cytochrome oxidase, which is the terminal oxidase in the mitochondrial respiratory chain. Inhibition leads to tissue asphyxia, resulting in central respiratory arrest and death. In addition, cyanogen chloride and cyanogen bromide act as irritants and may cause ocular and respiratory tract irritation. Recovery from cyanide poisoning, if it is not fatal, is typically rapid. Phosgene and chlorine comprise a class of chemical gases called pulmonary agents (also referred to as choking agents) since they cause severe lung irritation that leads to fluid accumulation in the lungs (pulmonary edema), which can choke the victim. Phosgene injury is caused by hydrochloric acid that is formed in the lungs and by diamide formation that cross-links cellular components. Chlorine (often referred to as CL) and phosgene (designated CG) were used during World War I. Phosgene accounted for 85% of all World War I deaths caused by chemical weapons. The risk of use of chlorine and phosgene remains high since they are used extensively in industry, making them readily available for use by terrorist groups. Riot control agents, most commonly referred to as tear gases, are nonlethal compounds used to temporarily disable individuals by irritating exposed mucous membranes and skin. Most tear gases are effective within seconds to minutes, but their duration of effect is brief once an individual has been removed from exposure. Common riot control agents include chloroacetophenone (CN), the active ingredient in Chemical Mace, and o-chlorobenzilidene malonitrile (CS). These chemicals are ideal for use as riot control agents since the dose required to be effective is significantly lower than the lethal dose. These agents are typically aerosolized or released as smoke, and they cause burning irritation in the eyes, lachrymation (tear production), chest tightness, cough, sneezing, and a burning sensation of the skin. Oleoresin capsicum (OC), commonly referred to as pepper spray, is also considered a riot control agent. Incapacitating agents are anticholinergic compounds that affect the central nervous system. These include the compound 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate (BZ) and also lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). Those exposed to incapacitating agents suffer from drowsiness, poor coordination, slowed thought processes, and delirium. Hallucination may also be experienced. These effects can last from a few hours to a number of days. The Bosnian Serbs were alleged to have used BZ against civilians. Biological toxins are sometimes referred to as chemical weapons since they are not living organisms. Many

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biological toxins mimic a number of chemical weapons. For example, the effects of capsaicin (from the oil of hot peppers) mimic those of artificially manufactured lachrymators. Other toxins include botulinum toxin, ricin, and mycotoxins. Botulinum toxin may cause paralysis and death and is about 15 000 times more potent than VX. Ricin is a plant toxin that is easily produced from castor beans and inhibits protein synthesis in the ribosome. Botulinum toxin and ricin have been used to perform assassinations. Tricothecene mycotoxins are produced by molds. Exposure to mycotoxins resembles exposure to vesicants. Soviet-supported forces have been alleged to use tricothecene mycotoxins in aerosolized droplets against Afghanistan, Laos, and Kampuchea. They may have also been used during the Iran-Iraq war. Although not commonly referred to as a chemical warfare agent (since it was not specifically used to cause direct harm to individuals), the herbicide Agent Orange was used extensively in Vietnam to remove foliage and expose enemy soldiers. Agent Orange is a mixture containing the phenoxyacetates 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T; some preparations contained tetrachlorodibenzodioxin (TCDD). TCDD is a dioxin that may be a carcinogen and a teratogen. Following the Vietnam War, veterans began to report a number of health problems, including skin rashes, cancer, psychological symptoms, birth defects, and handicaps in their children. Agent Orange may affect the nervous system causing psychiatric illnesses and problems with the nerves responsible for movement and sensation. Finally, there is a growing fear that terrorist organizations will move away from the more traditional chemical warfare agents and begin using so-called agents of opportunity. These include a number of common and not-so-common industrial chemicals, TICs and TIMs. Examples include chlorine, ammonia, formaldehyde, fluorine, and sulfur dioxide. These are chemicals that are commonly used in industrial processes, relatively available, easy to disperse, and significantly toxic. Release from a chemical plant could produce a large plume, threatening nearby communities. Also, a truck carrying these chemicals could easily be hijacked and its contents released in a highly populated area. It is this ease of availability that potentially makes TICs and TIMs more ideal than traditional chemical warfare agents for use as a terrorist’s weapon. See also: Gulf War Syndrome, Psychological and Chemical Stressors; Persian Gulf War, Stress Effects of; Terrorism

Further Reading Brown, M. A. and Brix, K. A. (1998). Review of health consequences from high-, intermediate- and low-level exposure to organophosphorous nerve agents. Journal of Applied Toxicology 18, 393–408.

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Gunderson, C. H., Lehmann, C. R., Sidell, F. R., and Jabbari, B. (1992). Nerve agents: a review. Neurology 42, 946–950. Marrs, T. C. (1996). Chemical warfare agents: toxicology and treatment. Wiley: Chichester. Maynard, R. L. (1999). Toxicology of chemical warfare agents. In Ballantyne, B., Marrs, T. C., and Syversen, T. (eds.) General and applied toxicology, 2nd edn., pp. 2079–2109. London: MacMillan. National Research Council (1999). Chemical and biological terrorism: research and development to improve civilian medical response. Washington, D.C: National Academy Press.

Reutter, S. (1999). Hazards of chemical weapons release during war: new perspectives. Environmental Health Perspectives 107, 985–990. Suchard, J. R. (2002). Chemical and biological weapons. In Goldfrank, L. R., Flomenbaum, N. E., Lewin, N. A., Howland, M. A., Hoffman, R. S., and Nelson, L. S. (eds.) Goldfrank’s toxicologic emergencies, 7th edn., pp. 1527–1551. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Chemical and Biological Warfare Howard S Levie, Saint Louis University Law School, St. Louis, MO, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Introduction Chemical Weapons Bacteriological (Biological) Weapons

Glossary Bacteriology The science that deals with bacteria, the microscopic organisms whose influence in the biosphere is incalculable but some of which cause disease. Biological Warfare Warfare that makes use of bacteria, viruses, toxins, and so on, to disable or destroy man, animals, and food crops. Anthrax and nerve gases are examples of these weapons. Biology The science of life or living matter in all its forms and phenomena.

Chemical and biological warfare generally refers to the use of chemical and biological agents as weapons of war. Chemical weaponry in the form of poison gas (e.g., chlorine) was a significant feature of World War I, and though gas warfare was generally condemned afterward, it has been noted, or at least alleged, in various subsequent conflicts. In the current era, the term ‘chemical warfare’ has been extended to apply to, among other actions, the use of herbicides to destroy foliage on a large-scale basis. Biological warfare refers to the use of harmful organisms, chiefly pathogenic bacteria or viruses (e.g., the anthrax

This article is reproduced from the previous edition, volume 1, pp 213–222, ã [1999], Elsevier [Inc], with revisions made by the Editor.

Conclusion Further Reading

Chemical Warfare Warfare that makes use of disabling and deadly chemicals that disable or kill members of the enemy community, military and civilian, and that contaminate territory. Phosgene, chlorine, and mustard gas are examples of these weapons. Precursor Any chemical reactant that takes part at any stage of the production (by whatever method) of a toxic chemical. Toxins Any of a group of poisonous, usually unstable, compounds generated by microorganisms or plants or of animal origin, the causative agents of a number of diseases, including tetanus, diphtheria, and so on.

bacillus). At the present time, the intentional deployment of toxic microorganisms as weapons of war remains a potential threat rather than an actual strategy. Nevertheless, the devastating effect of disease on wartime populations, as in the flu epidemic of 1918, is well documented, and the world community has taken steps to outlaw biological warfare.

Introduction The first specific reference to either chemical or bacteriological (biological) weapons contained in the conventional international law of war appeared in Declaration IV of the 1899 International Peace Conference, which


met in The Hague from May to July of that year on the initiative of Czar Nicholas II of Russia. That Declaration stated: The Contracting Powers agree to abstain from the use of projectiles the sole object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases. (Declaration IV, 1899)

France, Germany, Great Britain, and Italy all ratified that Declaration. The United States neither signed nor ratified it. (Article 70 of the 1863 Instructions for the Government of the Armies of the United States in the Field (the so-called ‘Lieber Code’) had prohibited the use of poison in any manner. However, this applied only to the Union Army during the American Civil War (1861–65) and had no international status although the Code itself served as a source for subsequent international conventions on the law of war.)

Chemical Weapons World War I Despite its adherence to Declaration IV of the 1899 International Peace Conference, the German Army used gas shells in Poland on 31 January 1915. However, because of the frigidity of the atmosphere the gas projectiles proved ineffective. The Germans next used chlorine gas against the French at Ypres on 22 April 1915. This time its effect went far beyond any expectations, with the result that the Germans were unable to capitalize on their success. (It is sometimes alleged that the German action at Ypres was not a violation of the Declaration because the gas was released from barrels, not projectiles, and was carried over the French lines by the wind.) During the remainder of World War I both sides used various types of gas (chlorine, phosgene, mustard, etc.) and there were more than 1 000 000 gas casualties, more than were caused by any other form of warfare. (Despite this, there are those who claim that it is the most humane method of warfare!) The Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I, contained a provision forbidding Germany all such weapons. The 1922 Treaty of Washington, while basically a treaty dealing with submarine warfare, contained a provision prohibiting the use of ‘‘asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases and all analogous liquids, materials or devices.’’ As France failed to ratify this treaty, it never became effective. World War II In 1925 an international arms control conference meeting in The Hague drafted a Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare. Its operative provisions stated:

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Whereas the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices, has been justly condemned by the general opinion of the civilized world; Declare: That the High Contracting Parties, so far as they are not already Parties to Treaties prohibiting such use, accept this prohibition, agree to extend the prohibition to the use of bacteriological methods of warfare and agree to be bound as between themselves according to the terms of this declaration. (The Hague Protocol, 1925)

A number of the more than 100 nations that ratified this Protocol did so with a reservation that it was only binding as regards to other parties to the Protocol and with the so-called ‘first-use’ reservation pursuant to which a party was released from its obligations under the Protocol in the event that its enemy failed to respect its obligations thereunder. Italy admittedly used poison gas against Ethiopia in the 1935–36 war between those two nations, justifying it as a reprisal against violations of the law of war by Ethiopia. Despite the provision of the Treaty of Versailles mentioned earlier, Nazi Germany had chemical weapons in its arsenal during World War II. However, on the advice of his military leaders, Hitler wisely refrained from using them because of the knowledge that the Allies also possessed large supplies of chemical weapons and could devastate Germany with them should they find it necessary to retaliate. As a result, gas was not used during World War II. While the United States signed this Protocol at the time of its drafting in 1925, it did not ratify it until almost 50 years later in April 1975. Its ratification included the ‘first-use’ reservation. However, contrary to the position taken by the International Committee of the Red Cross that herbicides and riot control weapons are both chemical weapons and that fire weapons such as napalm burn oxygen and are, therefore, ‘asphyxiating’, an executive order issued by the President prior to the effective date of the 1975 ratification, contains the following provisions: The United States renounces, as a matter of national policy, first use of herbicides in war, except under regulations applicable to their domestic use, for control of vegetation within U.S. bases and installations or around their immediate defensive perimeters, and first use of riot control agents in war except in defensive military modes to save lives such as: (a) Use of riot control agents in riot control situations in areas under direct and distinct U.S. military control, to include rioting prisoners of war. (b) Use of riot control agents in situations in which civilians are used to mask or screen attacks and civilian casualties can be reduced or avoided.

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(c) Use of riot control agents in rescue missions in remotely isolated areas, of downed air crews and passengers, and escaping prisoners. (d) Use of riot control agents in rear echelon areas outside the zone of immediate combat to protect convoys from civil disturbances, terrorists and paramilitary organizations.

because of their direct toxic effects on man, animals or plants; (b) Any biological agents of warfare—living organisms, whatever their nature, or infective material derived from them— which are intended to cause disease or death in man, animals or plants, and which depend for their effects on their ability to multiply in the person, animal or plant attacked.

The reasons for these reservations are obvious. Herbicides had been widely used in Vietnam, not as an antipersonnel weapon, but to clear away foliage around US military installations so as to prevent sneak attacks (their usage is claimed to have adversely affected the growth of millions of tons of rice). Riot control agents (basically, gas grenades) had been used to overcome rioting prisoners of war in Korea and clear openings for helicopters to rescue downed airmen in Vietnam. They consist of a temporary disabling tear gas that causes no permanent harm, only temporary disability, and are used by police all over the world. No specific mention of napalm, a chemical fire weapon, was made at the time, and the United States continues to consider it a legal weapon. While Protocol III to the 1980 Convention on Prohibitions and Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons Which May be Deemed to be Excessively Injurious or to Have Indiscriminate Effects does not specifically mention napalm, it does place restrictions on the use of incendiary weapons. The United States has not ratified this Protocol.

(Resolution 2603A (XXIV), 1969) (This Resolution was adopted by a vote of 80 to 3, with 36 abstentions. The United States cast one of the 3 negative votes. Most of its allies abstained.)

Post-World War II While, as noted earlier, gas was not used in World War II, it was used by belligerents on several occasions thereafter. For example, Egypt has been charged with using gas against Yemen; the Soviet Union is alleged to have used gas in Southeast Asia; Iraq is reputed to have used gas against the Kurds; and so on. It was well known that a number of countries had been experimenting with nerve gases, gases that are far more deadly than any previously known gas. The international community continued its efforts to effectively outlaw the use of all chemical weapons. As early as 16 December 1969 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted Resolution 2603A (XXIV) in which it Declares as contrary to the generally recognized rules of international law, as embodied in the Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare, signed at Geneva on 17 June 1925, the use in international armed conflicts of: (a) Any chemical agents of warfare—chemical substances, whether gaseous, liquid or solid— which might be employed

As we shall see, in 1972 a convention with respect to bacteriological (biological) and toxin weapons was drafted and widely accepted by States. Article IX of that Convention provided: Each State Party to this Convention affirms the recognized objective of effective prohibition of chemical weapons and, to this end, undertakes to continue negotiations in good faith with a view to reaching early agreement on effective measures for the prohibition of their development, production and stockpiling and for their destruction, and on appropriate measures concerning equipment and means of delivery specifically designed for the production or use of chemical agents for weapons purposes. (Article IX, 1972)

It required 21 years for this undertaking to reach fruition! In January 1989 a Conference of States Parties to the 1925 Geneva Protocol and Other Interested States on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons adopted a Declaration that stated in part: The participating States are determined to promote international peace and security throughout the world in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and to pursue effective disarmament measures. In this context, they are determined to prevent any recourse to chemical weapons by completely eliminating them. They solemnly affirm their commitments not to use chemical weapons and condemn such use. They recall their serious concern at recent violations as established and condemned by the competent organs of the United Nations. They support the humanitarian assistance given to the victims affected by chemical weapons. (Declaration, 1989)

Finally, the international efforts with respect to outlawing chemical weapons culminated in the drafting and adoption on 13 January 1993 of a Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction. It is a very lengthy Convention (24 articles covering 36 pages and Annexes that exceed 100 pages). A few of the most relevant provisions follow:


Article I: General obligations

1. Each State Party to this Convention undertakes never under any circumstances: (a) To develop, produce, otherwise acquire, stockpile or retain chemical weapons, or transfer, directly or indirectly, chemical weapons to anyone; (b) To use chemical weapons; (c) To engage in any military preparations to use chemical weapons; (d) To assist, encourage or induce, in any way, anyone to engage in any activity prohibited to a State Party under this Convention. 2. Each State Party undertakes to destroy chemical weapons it owns or possesses, or that are located in any place under its jurisdiction or control, in accordance with the provisions of this Convention. 3. Each State Party undertakes to destroy all chemical weapons it abandoned on the territory of another State Party, in accordance with the provisions of this Convention. 4. Each State Party undertakes to destroy any chemical weapons production facilities it owns or possesses, or that are located in any place under its jurisdiction or control, in accordance with the provisions of this Convention. 5. Each State Party undertakes not to use riot control agents as a method of warfare. Article III: Declarations

1. Each State Party shall submit to the Organization, not later than 30 days after the Convention enters into force for it, the following declarations, in which it shall: (a) With respect to chemical weapons: (i) Declare whether it owns or possesses any chemical weapons, or whether there are any chemical weapons located in any place under its jurisdiction or control; (v) Provide its general plan for destruction of any chemical weapons production facility it owns or possesses, or that is located in any place under its jurisdiction or control, in accordance with Part V, paragraph 6, of the Verification Annex; (e) With respect to riot control agents: Specify the chemical name, structural formula and Chemical Abstract Service (CAS) registry number, if assigned, of each chemical it holds for riot control purposes. This declaration shall be updated not later than 30 days after any change becomes effective. Article IV: Chemical weapons

1. The provisions of this Article and the detailed procedures for its implementation shall apply to all chemical

2.

3.

4.

5.

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weapons owned or possessed by a State Party, or that are located in any place under its jurisdiction or control, except old chemical weapons and abandoned chemical weapons to which Part IV (B) of the Verification Annex applies. All locations at which chemical weapons specified in paragraph 1 are stored or destroyed shall be subject to systematic verification through on-site inspection and monitoring with on-site instruments, in accordance with Part IV (A) of the Verification Annex. Each State Party shall, immediately after the declaration under Article III, paragraph l (a), has been submitted, provide access to chemical weapons specified in paragraph 1 for the purpose of systematic verification of the declaration through on-site inspection. Thereafter, each State Party shall not remove any of these chemical weapons, except to a chemical weapons destruction facility. It shall provide access to such chemical weapons, for the purpose of systematic onsite verification. Each State Party shall provide access to any chemical weapons destruction facilities and their storage areas that it owns or possesses, or that are located in any place under its jurisdiction or control, for the purpose of systematic verification through on-site inspection and monitoring with on-site instruments. Each State Party shall destroy all chemical weapons specified in paragraph 1 pursuant to the Verification Annex and in accordance with the agreed rate and sequence of destruction (herein- after referred to as ‘order of destruction’). Such destruction shall begin not later than two years after this Convention enters into force for it and shall finish not later than 10 years after entry into force of this Convention. A State Party is not precluded from destroying such chemical weapons at a faster rate.

Article VI: Activities not prohibited under this convention

1. Each State Party has the right, subject to the provisions of this Convention, to develop, produce, otherwise acquire, retain, transfer and use toxic chemicals for purposes not prohibited under this Convention. 2. Each State Party shall adopt the necessary measures to ensure that toxic chemicals and their precursors are only developed, produced, otherwise acquired, retained, transferred, or used within its territory or any other place under its jurisdiction or control for purposes not prohibited under this Convention. 11. The provisions of this Article shall be implemented in a manner which avoids hampering the economic or technological development of States Parties, and international cooperation in the field of chemical

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activities for purposes not prohibited under this Convention including the international exchange of scientific and technical information and chemicals and equipment for the production, processing or use of chemicals for purposes not prohibited under this Convention.

Article IX: Consultations, cooperation, and fact-finding Procedure for challenge inspections

8. Each State Party has the right to request an on-site challenge inspection of any facility or location in the territory or in any other place under the jurisdiction or control of any other State Party for the sole purpose of clarifying and resolving any question concerning possible non-compliance with the provisions of this Convention, and to have this inspection conducted anywhere without delay by an inspection team designated by the Director-General and in accordance with the Verification Annex. 10. For the purpose of verifying compliance with the provisions of this Convention, each State Party shall permit the Technical Secretariat to conduct the onsite challenge inspection pursuant to paragraph 8.

Article XII: Measures to redress a situation and to ensure compliance, including sanctions

1. The Conference shall take the necessary measures, as set forth in paragraphs 2, 3 and 4 to ensure compliance with this Convention and to redress and remedy any situation which contravenes the provisions of this Convention. In considering action pursuant to this paragraph, the Conference shall take into account all information and recommendations on the issues submitted by the Executive Council. 2. In cases where a State Party has been requested by the Executive Council to take measures to redress a situation raising problems with regard to its compliance, and where the State Party fails to fulfil the request within the specified time, the Conference may, inter alia, upon the recommendation of the Executive Council, restrict or suspend the State Party’s rights and privileges under this Convention until it undertakes the necessary action to conform with its obligations under this Convention. 3. In cases where serious damage to the object and purpose of this Convention may result from activities prohibited under this Convention, in particular by Article I, the Conference may recommend collective measures to States Parties in conformity with international law.

4. The Conference shall, in cases of particular gravity, bring the issue, including relevant information and conclusions, to the attention of the United Nations General Assembly and the United Nations Security Council. The Annexes include one on chemicals, one on verification, and one on confidentiality. When President Clinton of the United States and President Yeltsin of Russia met in Helsinki in March 1997, before either country had ratified the Chemical Convention, they issued a joint statement that included the following commitment: The Presidents reaffirmed their intention to take the steps necessary to expedite ratification in each of the two countries. President Clinton expressed his determination that the United States be a party when the Convention enters into force in April of this year, and is strongly urging prompt Senate action. President Yeltsin noted that the Convention had been submitted to the Duma with his strong recommendation for prompt ratification. (Joint Statement, 1997)

By December 1997, 106 nations, including the People’s Republic of China, India, Iran, the Republic of Korea, Mongolia, the Russian Federation, and Vietnam, had ratified the 1993 Convention. Notable for their absence from the list of signers and/or ratifiers were Iraq, Libya, North Korea, and Syria. Although the United States did not wait 50 years before ratifying the 1993 Convention, as it had done in the case of the 1925 Geneva Protocol, in finally giving its advice and consent to the ratification of the Convention by the president in April 1997, the Senate attached 28 ‘Conditions’, conditions that in some instances largely rewrite the Convention. (It should be pointed out that, contrary to most newspaper and other reports, the Senate does not ratify treaties. The Executive Branch drafts a treaty with other nations, either bilateral or multilateral, and the president then submits it to the Senate for the latter’s advice and consent, by a two-thirds vote of those present and voting, to ratification by the president, an authority that he may decide not to exercise, but that he, of course, usually does, barring some major development in the intervening period. This is mentioned in Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution of the United States.) Originally, there were 33 Conditions contained in the Senate’s advice and consent to ratification, the last five being so-called ‘killer conditions’ as they would have made it impossible for the United States to become a party to the Convention. Many of the remaining 28 Conditions are completely internal, concerned as they are with the constitutional relationship between the President and the Congress. (See S. RES. 75, 105th Cong., 1st Sess., 24 April 1997.) On 25 April 1997 the President certified to the Congress his compliance with the Conditions and


immediately submitted the ratification of the United States to the depositary, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, before the 29 April 1997 date of the entry into force of the Convention, thus making the United States eligible to participate as a voting member in the Conference of States Parties to the Convention which met in The Hague on 6 May 1997. (The Russian Federation did not ratify the Convention until October 1997 when the Duma approved it unanimously.) The nature of a few of the more controversial Conditions adopted by the United States Senate were as follows: Condition 1: The Senate reserved its Constitutional right to include reservations in its advice and consent to ratification, despite the fact that Article XXII specifically prohibited reservations to the Convention. (This right was also to apply to amendments to the Convention.) (Convention, 1997)

What the Senate is saying here is that it has a Constitutional right to take an action forbidden by an international agreement to which the United States desires to become a party. (Although Article 1(5) of the Convention prohibits the use of riot control agents as a method of warfare, Condition 26 requires the president to certify to the Senate that the Convention does not prohibit the United States from using riot control agents in a number of specified circumstances. This is, in effect, a reservation. However, Article III (l) e), mentioned earlier, appears to indicate that despite the provision banning riot control weapons, it is contemplated that states parties will continue to possess them. In his letter to the Congress, dated 25 April 1997, prior to the filing of the ratification, the president stated that all states parties to the Convention had been advised of the retention by the United States of a right to make reservations, notwithstanding the provisions of Article XXII of the Convention. Condition 2: The Executive Branch is prohibited from making any payment to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) without the authorization and specific appropriation by Congress.

Here the Senate is, in effect, admonishing the Executive Branch that all expenditures must be authorized by the Congress, a matter that obviously is an internal constitutional matter and not one with which the state’s parties to the Convention can be concerned. The president did not even deign to refer to this Condition in his letter to the Congress! Condition 9: The President is required to certify before ratification and annually thereafter that the ‘‘legitimate commercial activities’’ of the affected industries in the United States are not being ‘‘significantly

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harmed’’ by the limitations contained in the Convention. (Convention, 1997)

The president so certified in his letter to the Congress. This is undoubtedly the intent of Article VI, quoted earlier. Condition 15: The President is required to certify to the Congress that the United States will not contribute to a fund, nor provide assistance, for States Parties which are ineligible for United States assistance under certain laws of the United States. (Convention, 1997)

The president certified in his letter to the Congress that no assistance, other than medical antidotes and treatment, would be provided for state’s parties that are ineligible for assistance under certain specified laws of the United States. Condition 26: Requires the President to certify to the Congress that the United States is not restricted in the use of riot control agents for specifically mentioned purposes. (Convention, 1997)

The president so certified in his letter to the Congress. This Condition is, of course, directly contrary to Article I, paragraph 5, of the Convention, supra, which flatly prohibits the use of riot control weapons as a method of warfare. This Condition actually amounts to a reservation as it enables the United States to do something that the Convention appears specifically to prohibit. Nevertheless, the president certified compliance with this Condition in his letter to the Congress inasmuch as the Condition relates only to instances where the United States is not a party to the conflict, but is acting in a peacekeeping capacity. Condition 28: Requires the President to certify that an appropriate search warrant will be obtained before any search of any facility in the United States unless the owner or operator consents. (Convention, 1997)

In his letter to the Congress delivered before the filing of the ratification, the president certified that appropriate search warrants would be required. As of 29 April 1997, when the Convention became effective, 165 States had signed it and 87 of those States had ratified it. It is interesting to note that Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, North Korea, and Syria had neither signed nor ratified this Convention. (This was the basis for one of the so-called ‘killer’ conditions.) Iran, Russia, and Yemen had signed it but had not as yet ratified it. (Russia has since done so.) While North Korea is not a member of the United Nations and is not recognized by most other nations, this would not prevent it from becoming a party to the Convention, as has the Republic of Korea. However, it has not done so.

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Bacteriological (Biological) Weapons

Article I

Historical

Each State Party to this Convention undertakes never in any circumstances to develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain:

While the 1925 Geneva Protocol included a ban on bacteriological weapons, it was generally regarded as solely a limitation on the use of gas in warfare and the fact that it likewise contained a ban on bacteriological weapons is rarely mentioned. Similarly, this is true of many of the other actions taken with regard to gas warfare, which contained references to bacteriological weapons as well. This was probably because little experimentation had been made in the bacteriological field and no national army actually had usable bacteriological weapons at its disposal. World War II During World War II both sides experimented with bacteriological (biological) weapons, but fortunately these were never used in the European war. The Japanese Army had two units in China that conducted experiments with bacteriological weapons, allegedly using Chinese prisoners of war as guinea pigs, and in 1949 the Soviet Union conducted a war crimes trial in Khabarovsk of 12 Japanese, all of whom confessed and were found guilty of preparing bacteriological weapons (germs of plague, cholera, gas gangrene, anthrax, typhoid, paratyphoid, and other diseases) for use by the Japanese Army in China. In 1982 the Japanese government officially acknowledged that during the war a detachment of the Japanese Army in China had engaged in experiments with bacteriological weapons. It did not admit that prisoners of war had been used in the experiments. Post-World War II After the war a number of nations were known to be experimenting with bacteriological weapons, particularly anthrax. There was apparently less reluctance on the part of nations to ban bacteriological weapons than there was to ban chemical weapons, perhaps because far fewer nations had conducted experimentation in this field and far fewer were technically competent to do so. Accordingly, with considerably less controversy than in the case of gas warfare, on 10 April 1972 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a resolution recommending that states ratify a convention drafted by the Committee on Disarmament titled Convention on the Prohibition of Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction. The most important provisions of this Convention state:

1. Microbial or other biological agents, or toxins whatever their origin or method of production, of types and in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes. 2. Weapons, equipment or means of delivery designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes or in armed conflict. Article II

Each State Party to this Convention undertakes to destroy, or to divert to peaceful purposes, as soon as possible but not later than nine months after the entry into force of the Convention, all agents, toxins, weapons, equipment and means of delivery. Article IV

Each State Party to this Convention shall, in accordance with its constitutional processes, take any necessary measures to prohibit and prevent the development, production, stockpiling, acquisition or retention of the agents, toxins, weapons, equipment and means of delivery specified in Article I of the Convention, within the territory of such State, under its jurisdiction or under its control anywhere. Article VI

1. Any State Party to this Convention which finds that any other State Party is acting in breach of obligations deriving from the provisions of the Convention may lodge a complaint with the Security Council of the United Nations. Such a complaint should include all possible evidence confirming its validity, as well as a request for its consideration by the Security Council. 2. Each State Party to this Convention undertakes to cooperate in carrying out any investigation which the Security Council may initiate, in accordance with the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations, on the basis of the complaint received by the Council. The Security Council shall inform the States Parties to the Convention of the results of the investigation. Article VII

Each State Party to this Convention undertakes to provide or support assistance, in accordance with the United Nations Charter, to any Party to the Convention which so requests, if the Security Council decides that such Party has been exposed to danger as a result of violation of the Convention.


Article X

1. The States Parties to this Convention undertake to facilitate, and have the right to participate in, the fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials and scientific and technological information for the use of bacteriological (biological) agents and toxins for peaceful purposes. Parties to the Convention in a position to do so shall also co-operate in contributing individually or together with other States or international organizations to the further development and application of scientific discoveries in the field of bacteriology (biology) for the prevention of disease, or for other peaceful purposes. 2. This Convention shall be implemented in a manner designed to avoid hampering the economic or technological development of States Parties to the Convention or international cooperation in the field of peaceful bacteriological (biological) activities, including the international exchange of bacteriological (biological) agents and toxins and equipment for the processing, use or production of bacteriological (biological) agents and toxins for peaceful purposes in accordance with the provisions of the Convention. As of October 1997, 142 states parties had ratified this Convention and 16 had signed but had not yet not ratified it. Among the ratifiers are the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of Korea, Mongolia, the Russian Federation, and Vietnam. Strange to relate, but also among the ratifiers are Iran, Libya, and North Korea. Several of the other nations that are not considered completely trustworthy have signed the Convention but have not as yet ratified it. The cease-fire that ended the Gulf War authorized representatives of the United Nations to make inspections in Iraq to ensure that it had no bacteriological (biological) weapons or means to produce them. Iraq has used every available subterfuge to circumvent these inspections, which would appear to indicate an intention to disregard the obligations specified in the Convention and that is likely to result in military action to enforce the relevant provisions of the cease-fire agreement.

Conclusion From the preceding facts, it is clear that the world community as a whole desires to eliminate from the use in war of

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chemical, bacteriological (biological), and toxin weapons and has taken action to accomplish this purpose. It remains to be seen whether, in the event that some outlaw nation, counting on the inability of its enemy to retaliate in kind, makes no commitment or violates its commitment with respect to these weapons, the other parties to the Conventions will unite in taking action against the renegade nation. See also: Weaponry, Evolution of

Further Reading Aronowitz, D. S. (1965). Legal aspects of arms control verification in the United States. New York: Oceana. Fitch, J. P., Raber, E., and Imbro, D. R. (2003). Technology challenges in responding to biological or chemical attacks in the civilian sector. Science 302(5649), 1350–1354. Fricker, R. (2002). Measuring and evaluating local preparedness for a chemical or biological terrorist attack. Santa Monica, CA: Rand. Fyodorov, Y. (1987). The silent death. New Delhi: Progress Publishers. Greenfield, R. A., Brown, B. R., Hutchins, J. B., et al. (2002). Microbiological, biological, and chemical weapons of warfare and terrorism. American Journal of the Medical Sciences 323(6), 326–340. Harbour, F. V. (ed.) (1990). Chemical arms control. New York: Carnegie Council on Ethics. Kelsall, H., Macdonell, R., Sim, M., et al. (2005). Neurological status of Australian veterans of the 1991 Gulf War and the effect of medical and chemical exposures. International Journal of Epidemiology 34(4), 810–819. Levie, H. S. (1991). Nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. In Robertson, H. B. (ed.) International law studies, Vol. 64: The law of naval operations, p. 331. Newport: US. Naval War College (1975). Weapons of warfare. In Trooboff, P. D. (ed.) Law and responsibility in warfare, p. 153. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Mauroni, A. (2003). Chemical and biological warfare: A reference handbook. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Noah, D. L., Huebner, K. D., Darling, R. G., and Waeckerle, J. F. (2002). The history and threat of biological warfare and terrorism. Emergency Medicine Clinics of North America 20(2), 255–271. Ritchie, E. C., Friedman, M., Watson, P., et al. (2004). Mass violence and early mental health intervention: A proposed application of best practice guidelines to chemical, biological, and radiological attacks. Military Medicine 169(8), 575–579. Roberts, B. (ed.) (1992). The chemical weapons convention: Implementation issues. Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies. Robinson, J. P. (2004). Public health response to biological and chemical weapons: WHO guidance, 2nd edn. Geneva: World Health Organization. United Nations (1969). Report of the Secretary General. Chemical and Bacteriological (Biological) Warfare and the Effect of Their Possible Use. (A/7575/Rev. 1, 1969).

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Nuclear Warfare

Nuclear Warfare Dean A Wilkening, Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA Published by Elsevier Inc.

What Are Nuclear Weapons? How Have Nuclear Weapons Affected Military Strategy? The Two US Strategic Problems of the Cold War

Glossary Central Deterrence The strategy wherein a nuclear-armed state dissuades an opponent from attacking its homeland by threatening nuclear retaliation. Chain Reaction A process wherein the neutrons released from a single fission reaction cause fission in several nearby nuclei, the neutrons from which subsequently cause fission in other nearby nuclei and so on. Counterforce An attack aimed at destroying an opponent’s nuclear forces in a pre-emptive attack. Countervalue An attack aimed at destroying that which an opponent values most, usually thought to be the opponent’s cities. Deterrence A strategy aimed at dissuading another party from taking some proscribed action by threatening to inflict consequences that outweigh the gains expected by taking the action, relative to maintaining the status quo.

Technology has always had a profound influence on the character of war. In the past century alone the industrial revolution, culminating in the development of modern aircraft, tanks, artillery, and naval vessels increased the lethality of war manifold. However, the advent of nuclear weapons in 1945 represented a quantum jump in the lethality of war. Looking ahead, one wonders how emerging information technologies and biotechnologies might revolutionize warfare in the future. The history of the Cold War reflects the confluence of two factors: the development of nuclear weapons and the rise of the former Soviet Union and the United States as the two dominant military powers after World War II. It may seem paradoxical that the development of the most destructive form of warfare, nuclear warfare, led to a period of relative peace, the Cold War. In fact, nuclear weapons have been used only twice in war – the US bombings of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 and Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. This is not to say that wars on the

The Role of Arms Control Where Are We Today? Further Reading

Extended Deterrence The strategy wherein a nuclear-armed state dissuades an opponent from attacking its allies by threatening nuclear retaliation. Fission A nuclear reaction in which the nucleus splits apart after absorbing a neutron, releasing substantial amounts of energy and several additional neutrons in the process. Fusion A nuclear reaction in which two light nuclei stick together to form a heavier nucleus, thereby releasing substantial amounts of energy and an extra neutron. Secure Second Strike The ability to retaliate with nuclear weapons after absorbing a counterforce first strike, which requires that nuclear command and control systems survive to direct the retaliation, and that sufficient nuclear forces survive the attack and penetrate the opponent’s defenses to inflict unacceptable damage on the state that initiated the attack.

periphery of US and Soviet interests did not occur, but simply that war between the major powers was absent. This article discusses the development of nuclear weapons, their effects, and the impact they have had on the character of war and military strategy. The ascendance of deterrence as the central strategic concept for nuclear warfare helps explain the apparent paradox mentioned.

What Are Nuclear Weapons? Fission Bombs The 1930s witnessed rapid developments in our understanding of the atomic nucleus – the small positively charged core that contains most of the mass of all atoms and around which a cloud of electrons swirl. The nuclear force, which holds the nucleus together, is approximately one million times stronger than the electromagnetic force that binds the electrons to the nucleus. For our story, one

Nuclear Warfare

discovery was particularly important. In 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman, two Germans, discovered that the uranium nucleus splits apart, that is, undergoes fission when bombarded with neutrons, liberating considerable amounts of energy. Within a year, several research teams discovered that extra neutrons were also emitted, a fact of considerable significance, as Leo Szilard recognized years before, because it meant that large amounts of energy could be released by a chain reaction. The reaction that Hahn and Strassman discovered is n þ U235 ! fission fragments þ 2 3n þ energy

where n represents a neutron, the fission fragments are nuclei (usually highly radioactive) with a mass roughly half that of U235 and the energy is released as kinetic energy of the fission fragments and neutrons. However, this reaction occurs only with one isotope of uranium, U235, at least for relatively low-energy bombarding neutrons. Natural uranium consists of 99.3% U238 and only 0.7% U235. Somewhat later a similar reaction was discovered in an isotope of plutonium, Pu239. Several isotopes of other nuclei also undergo fission but, for technical reasons, none are as well-suited for making nuclear weapons as these isotopes of uranium and plutonium. The key to extracting large amounts of energy from a macroscopic amount of fissile material, for example, in nuclear bombs or nuclear power reactors, is to create a chain reaction, as depicted in Figure 1. In a chain reaction the neutrons released from an initial fission reaction are absorbed by neighboring U235 nuclei, which subsequently undergo fission. This process keeps multiplying until nearly all the U235 (or Pu239) is consumed. Of course, some neutrons will escape without hitting other U235 nuclei. If too many neutrons escape, the chain reaction will not proceed very far. Therefore the shape and amount of U235 present influences the amount of energy released. The amount of material needed for a self-sustaining chain reaction is called the critical mass, which is the approximate amount required for a simple fission bomb.

n n

U235

n

U235

n

U235 n n

n n n

U235 n

n

U235

U235 n

n n

U235 n

Figure 1 Fission chain reaction.

315

The critical mass for U235 is approximately 30 lbs. and for Pu239 is approximately 10 lbs. The acquisition of fissile material (i.e., U235 or Pu239) is the principal technical challenge in developing nuclear fission bombs. Since U235 is only 0.7% of natural uranium, it must be separated from the more common isotope, U238. This is challenging because these isotopes have nearly identical chemical properties. Gaseous diffusion (originally used by the United States in the Manhattan Project), gaseous centrifuge techniques (the most common current method for producing highly-enriched uranium), electromagnetic separation (the method used by Iraq in the late 1980s), and laser isotope separation are among the techniques used. For efficient bomb designs, highly-enriched uranium, that is, uranium enriched to approximately 90% U235 or more, is required, although one can fashion a crude fission bomb with uranium enriched to only 20% U235. Plutonium does not exist in the earth’s crust because all of its isotopes decay in a relatively short period of time (Pu239 has a half-life of approximately 20 000 years). However, Pu239 can be manufactured in a nuclear power reactor by bombarding U238 with neutrons and then chemically separating the Pu239 from the radioactive waste in a reprocessing facility. The crux of the nuclear proliferation problem, as with all proliferation problems involving dual-use technologies (i.e., ones with civilian and military applications), is to devise arms control regimes that allow states to develop nuclear power while at the same time restrict the development of nuclear weapons. This is the central challenge of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Nuclear Suppliers Group that coordinates export controls on sensitive nuclear materials and facilities, and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitors the nuclear nonproliferation regime. Once sufficient fissile material is obtained, two designs can be used to make a bomb. The first is the ‘gun-type’ design where a subcritical mass of U235 is shot into another subcritical mass, thereby creating a supercritical mass for a brief time. A neutron source injects a few neutrons to start the chain reaction at the proper moment. For technical reasons, this relatively simple assembly technique works only with U235. A bomb of this design was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, exploding with a force of approximately 12 500 tons (12.5 kilotons (kT)) of TNT, killing approximately 70 000 people and wounding another 80 000. Because of its simplicity, this bomb design was not tested before it was used, which makes it of interest to states that wish to develop fission bombs covertly because nuclear tests are not essential. South Africa took this approach to build an arsenal of six gun-type U235 bombs in the 1980s. The second fission bomb design creates a critical mass by crushing a sphere of fissile material, thereby creating very high densities. This implosion design is more

316

Nuclear Warfare

challenging technically, but is more efficient with respect to the use of fissile material. Moreover, it works with both U235 and Pu239. A bomb of this design was tested at Alamogordo, NM on 16 July 1945 and a second bomb of this design was dropped on Nagasaki on 9 August 1945 which exploded with a force of nearly 20 kT of TNT. It missed the center of the city and killed approximately 40 000 people and wounded another 20 000. The major technical hurdle to developing implosion bombs, besides acquiring the fissile material, is to perfect the implosion mechanism, that is, to develop explosive lenses that can crush a sphere of fissile material in a perfectly symmetric manner to create a supercritical mass. Small deviations from spherical symmetry cause the bomb to fail. Hence, implosion designs are usually tested. The former Soviet Union was the second country to test an implosion device in August 1949. Great Britain followed suit in 1952, France in 1960, and China in 1964. India tested a ‘peaceful nuclear device’ probably of this design, in 1974, and again in May 1998. Pakistan followed suit later that same month, although it is not clear whether their tests involved implosion or gun-type uranium devices. Israel is also thought to have developed implosion bombs; however, the evidence for an Israeli test is equivocal. On 9 October 2006, North Korea became the latest country to test a nuclear weapon based on a plutonium design, although the test was a partial failure because the yield was less than 1 kT. In general, first-generation fission bombs of the sort described above weigh between 1000 lbs. and 10 000 lbs., and detonate with an explosive force between 5 kT and 20 kT, unless the device fizzles. Fusion Bombs Nuclear energy also can be released when two light nuclei fuse together. Nuclear fusion describes the process by which two light nuclei, usually isotopes of hydrogen, fuse together to produce heavier elements. The standard reaction is, D þ T ! He4 þ n þ energy

where D stands for deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen with one proton and one neutron in the nucleus), T stands for tritium (an isotope of hydrogen with one proton and two neutrons in the nucleus), He stands for a nucleus of helium, and n is a neutron. More energy is released in this reaction than in a fission reaction. In fact, fusion reactions are the source of energy within stars. The critical challenge with fusion weapon designs is heating the deuterium and tritium to temperatures high enough so the kinetic energy overcomes the electrostatic repulsion between these two positively charged nuclei. This is done by detonating a fission bomb next to the fusion fuel (usually Li6D, which creates D and T when bombarded with neutrons). Acquiring Li6D is

less difficult than U235 or Pu239. Fusion bombs usually require testing because of the difficulty coupling the energy from the fission trigger to heat the fusion fuel sufficiently before the bombs blow apart. Finally, the neutron emitted from the fusion reaction is of sufficient energy to fission U238. Therefore, if the fusion bomb is surrounded by a U238 jacket (or tamper), a fission–fusion–fission reaction occurs. Although a relatively small fraction of a fusion bomb’s yield comes from the fission trigger (e.g., several kTs), fission within the U238 tamper can contribute a significant amount to the total weapon yield (e.g., several hundred kTs for a megaton-size fusion bomb). Very large fusion bombs (also called hydrogen bombs or thermonuclear bombs) can be made by increasing the amount of fusion fuel. Typically, fusion bombs are 100 to 1000 times more powerful than fission bombs. The first US fusion bomb test occurred in November 1952. The Soviet Union was quick to follow in August 1953. The largest fusion bomb ever tested was one of Soviet design which detonated with an explosive force equivalent to 60 megatons (MT) of TNT, or 3000 times the yield of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Most nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the five declared nuclear powers (i.e., the United States, Russia, France, Great Britain, and China) are fusion bombs with yields ranging between a few kTs to 1000 kT or more. The smaller yields are usually associated with tactical nuclear weapons – intended for threatening an opponent’s military forces on the battlefield – and the larger yields are associated with strategic nuclear weapons – intended for threats against an opponent’s homeland using long-range delivery vehicles. Modern nuclear weapon designs are much smaller and lighter than the original US and Soviet fission bombs, ranging in size from that of a suitcase to a refrigerator and in weight from around 100 to 2000 lbs. The fact that they are small and light imply that they can be delivered in a variety of ways (e.g., ballistic missiles, aircraft, cruise missiles, artillery shells, torpedoes, etc.). Finally, nuclear weapons are relatively cheap. The initial investment cost to produce fission weapons is around $2 to $10 billion for indigenous programs; however, the marginal cost thereafter can be as low as $1–2 million per nuclear bomb for large programs of the sort that existed in the United States and the former Soviet Union during the Cold War. The Effects of Nuclear Weapons Despite the fact that several nuclear weapon designs exist, the effects of nuclear explosions are essentially the same for all types. In particular, the intensity of nuclear weapon effects depends almost entirely on the bomb’s yield. However, the effects vary depending on the environment in which the explosion occurs (outer space, the atmosphere, underwater, or underground). Most discussions of nuclear

Nuclear Warfare

weapon effects refer to weapons that detonate within the atmosphere because, if nuclear war ever did occur, this would be the most common type of explosion. When a nuclear weapon explodes, the kinetic energy from the fission fragments, neutrons, and helium (for fusion reactions) heat the weapon debris to approximately 20 million degrees centigrade (the temperature of the sun) within a few microseconds. This hot core radiates energy like the coals in one’s fireplace. However, because the temperature is so high the radiation is in the x-ray band of the electromagnetic spectrum. As the hot core expands, it begins to cool. The result is a huge sphere of very hot air or fireball (approximately 1 mile in diameter for a 1-MT explosion) that begins to rise, eventually creating the mushroom cloud so often associated with nuclear explosions. Ultimately, the energy from a nuclear explosion appears as five weapon effects: blast, thermal radiation, prompt nuclear radiation, fallout, and an electromagnetic pulse. There are two aspects to blast – the shock wave and winds. The shock wave (so-called peak overpressure) is a wall of compressed air traveling outward from the explosion at speeds above the speed of sound, dissipating as it goes. It crushes objects in its path. The wind (so-called dynamic overpressure) follows behind the shock wave, blowing over objects in its path. Houses can withstand peak overpressures of approximately 5 pounds per square inch (psi) whereas hardened military structures can withstand peak overpressures above 1000 psi. Blast waves are lethal to humans primarily because the wind picks up objects that become lethal projectiles. The lethal range for winds against humans is roughly equivalent to the range of the 5 psi shock wave. Table 1 shows the distance out to which various blast effects extend for 20-kT and 1-MT explosions. For atmospheric bursts, blast carries away approximately 50% of the energy of a nuclear explosion. Moreover, blast is the principal cause of damage, accounting for between 55% and 75% of the casualties at Hiroshima. As the fireball cools, the radiated energy shifts in wavelength until most of it occurs in the visible and

317

infrared portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. This heat flash occurs within a fraction of a second after the explosion and, depending on its intensity, can melt objects, start fires, burn flesh, or cause blindness. The intensity of this radiation drops off faster than the square of the distance from the explosion and is affected by the weather and the presence of clouds, smoke, or haze. Thermal radiation comprises about 35% of the energy released in an atmospheric nuclear explosion. Approximately 20–30% of the casualties at Hiroshima have been attributed to thermal radiation. Firestorms are a related effect. They occur when several fires coalesce in an urban area, regardless of whether the fires start from the thermal pulse or the blast (e.g., causing electrical fires). Winds up to 100 mph rushing inward are created as the hot air at the center of the firestorm rises above the city. Firestorms tend to destroy everything within their periphery. However, they also tend to be self-limiting because the in-rushing winds limit their outward expansion. Moreover, firestorms are not unique to nuclear explosions. During World War II, firestorms from incendiary bombs occurred in Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo. A firestorm was produced by the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, but not on Nagasaki. Prompt nuclear radiation is the third nuclear weapon effect. It consists of an intense burst of gamma rays and neutrons coming from the nuclear explosion. This effect is unique to nuclear weapons. If sufficiently intense, prompt nuclear radiation can kill or incapacitate humans or other living organisms, and destroy or upset electronic circuitry. The lethal dose for humans is approximately 500 rads. Prompt nuclear radiation accounts for about 5% of the energy released in a nuclear explosion and its intensity falls off quickly with distance. Hence, it is not a principal cause of damage, especially for high-yield nuclear weapons (>20 kT) although it can be significant for lower-yield weapons (2000 900

4

0.9

5

50

160

8

0.5

2

30

70

Melts metal Ignites wood, 3rd degree burns 1st–2nd degree blindness

Prompt nuclear (rads) 1 MT

20 kT 5

Melts metal Ignites wood, 3rd degree burns 1st–2nd degree blindness

1 MT

>10 350

>106 34 000

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