1 War in Human Nature?

1.1 The 1971 Tanzanian war

1.1 Notes

  • Peaceful inter-community relations until 1971.
  • Late 1970: President Leakey dies.
  • Coup from General Humphrey
  • Challenged by Hugh and Charlie in the South
  • Immediately, two factions emerge: North and South
  • Communities that were interconnected fall apart, inter-community exchanges decrease
  • The war lasts four years. Humphrey decimates the south and ultimately wins.
  • Men were systematically beaten, killed, disemboweled or castrated
  • Women were often beaten or raped
  • Babies often stolen or killed
  • … but this was not an actual war!

1.2 The 1971 Tanzanian war The Gombe war

  • Chimpanzee conflict
  • recorded by Jane Goodall
Chimpanzees fighting

Chimpanzees fighting

1.3 Is war a human specificity?

  • Standard view until 1960s: intraspecies killings are specific to humans
  • But much evidence to the contrary
    • Chimpanzees
    • Lions
  • At the same time, other species can also cooperate
    • Trees
    • Sea rocket
    • Ground squirrels

1.3 Notes

We used to think so up to the 1960s. Yet there is large evidence that animals are no more peaceful than we are.

  • In particular, we used to think that intra-species killing were rare, but they are in fact one of the main causes of mortality.
    • Chimpanzees are highly territorial:
      • Males patrol the boundaries of the group’s territory and attack intruders
      • Raid foreign territories.
    • Infants very vulnerable
      • New leader of a lion pride kills the cubs of the previous leader.
      • Siblings often kill/canibalize each other, esp. when food is short.
    • Intraspecific killing among humans \(\leq\) other animal species.
      • According to some, it is many times inferior to that of any mammalian species studied
    • Overall, humans are not an exception in killing their kind.
  • Yet, not all species are equally violent
    • Common chimpanzee is violent
    • Pigmy chimpanzee or bonobos less so
  • Are humans closer to the Bonobos?

1.4 Is war a human specificity?

1.5 Is war a human specificity?

1.5 Notes

  • Douglas fir and paper birch trees transfer carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus between them via mycelia
  • Large trees help out small, younger ones

For more info: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141111-plants-have-a-hidden-internet

See also Suzanne Simard’s Ted talk (optional):

1.6 Humans in the state of nature

  • Hobbes
  • Rousseau

How do we know?

1.6 Notes

  • The two philosophers travel and meet aboriginal peoples.
  • Hobbes:
    • Endemic ``war’‘, murderous feuds for gain, safety, and reputation, a war of every man against every man, which made life ‘poore, nasty, brutish, and short’ (Leviathan, 1651, 13).
    • The creation of the state—the leviathan—was the only system that could guarantee at least internal peace.
  • Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins and Foundation of Inequality among Mankind (1755):
    • aboriginal humans lived harmoniously in nature, with abundant resources
    • But with the coming of
      • agriculture
      • demographic growth
      • private property
      • \(\Rightarrow\) war
  • So who was right? And how do we know?

1.7 Humans in the state of nature: Three sources of information

  • Study of animal aggression and fighting
  • Hunter-gatherers
    • surviving ones
    • prehistoric evidence
  • Evolutionary theory

1.7 Notes

For more on war in the state of nature, see Azar Gat’s War in Human Civilization, part I

1.8 Did hunter-gatherers fight?

  • The problem of evidence
  • Contamination problems
  • Today’s hunter-gatherers are different: isolated, poor environments
  • Evidence from the Pleistocene is inconclusive
  • Best: Australian Lab

1.8 Notes

  • Problem: Hunter–gatherers have no written records, so the evidence comes from those in contact with them. Recent and historical hunter–gatherers interacted with agriculturalists and pastoralists, often fighting over products and livestock \(\Rightarrow\) violence. These are contaminated samples.
  • How do we observe `pure’ examples of hunter–gatherers?
  • Evidence from archeological records, esp. bones: at least some of them were injured in combat (note: we know it’s in combat by examining the damage to the bone. Damage to a living bone is different from damage incurred after death).

1.9 Did hunter-gatherers fight?

  • The myth of the peaceful savage
  • 1960s: peaceful aborigines, e.g. Arctic Eskimos But:
    • harsh environment -> thinly spread
    • Diffuse resources, hard to monopolise
    • High level of violence
    • 90% of hunter-gatherer societies have intergroup warfare at least every 2 years

1.9 Notes

  • The surviving hunter-gatherer groups have survived perhaps for a reason. I.e., they are not representative of the prehistorical hunter-gatherers.
    • Largely confined to poor environments (Arctic, deserts) unsuitable for agriculture
    • Low population densities
    • Move a lot to subsist
    • Few possessions
  • Poster case was the central Canadian Arctic Eskimos
    • Not surprising given harsh environment and thinly spread. Resources very diffuse and hard to monopolize
    • Even then, they had a very high rate of quarrels, blood feuds, and homicide (often to kidnap women). 10 times higher than USA at their peak of 1990
    • Other Eskimos living in different conditions (e.g., Greenland and coastal Alaska) were strongly territorial and war-like.
  • Another poster case: the Kalahari Bushmen, east African Hadza, and central African Pygmies, celebrated as peaceful.
    • Yet clear evidence that there was fighting not only with their agricultural neighbors, but also among themselves even before contact with non-hunter–gatherers.
    • Homicide rates very high, far higher than US or any other state society
    • Much of that fighting centered on the water-holes vital for survival in this area,
    • Only with enforcement of law by Canada and southern Africa did violence rates decrease.
  • A comparative study of 99 hunter-gatherer groups, belonging to 37 different cultures, found that nearly all engaged in warfare. Most engaged in intergroup warfare at least every two years (on par with other human societies)

2 The decline of war (?)

2.1 Three major steps in the decline of violence

  • Rise of the state-leviathan
  • 1815–1945
  • 1945–

2.2 Hobbes was right

Percentage of deaths in warfare in nonstate and state societies (Pinker, p. 49)

Percentage of deaths in warfare in nonstate and state societies (Pinker, p. 49)

2.2 Notes

  • Rise of states \(\rightarrow\) mortality drops from 15% of pop (25% of men) to about 1–5%. Why? enforcement of internal peace by the leviathan
  • Notes on graph, from Pinker:
    • ``The topmost cluster shows the rate of violent death for skeletons dug out of archaeological sites. They are the remains of hunter-gatherers and hunter-horticulturalists from Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas and date from 14,000 BCE to 1770 CE, in every case well before the emergence of state societies or the first sustained contact with them. The death rates range from 0 to 60 percent, with an average of 15 percent average of the rates of death by warfare is within a whisker of the average estimated from the bones: 14 percent, with a range from 4 percent to 30 percent.
    • In the next cluster I’ve lumped pre-state societies that engage in some mixture of hunting, gathering, and horticulture. All are from New Guinea or the Amazon rain forest, except Europe’s last tribal society, the Montenegrins, whose rate of violent death is close to the average for the group as a whole, 24.5 percent
    • Finally we get to some figures for states. The earliest are from the cities and empires of pre-Columbian Mexico, in which 5 percent of the dead were killed by other people. That was undoubtedly a dangerous place, but it was a third to a fifth as violent as an average pre-state society. When it comes to modern states, we are faced with hundreds of political units, dozens of centuries, and many subcategories of violence to choose from (wars, homicides, genocides, and so on), so there is no single “correct” estimate. But we can make the comparison as fair as possible by choosing the most violent countries and centuries, together with some estimates of violence in the world today. As we shall see in chapter 5, the two most violent centuries in the past half millennium of European history were the 17th, with its bloody Wars of Religion, and the 20th, with its two world wars. The historian Quincy Wright has estimated the rate of death in the wars of the 17th century at 2 percent, and the rate of death in war for the first half of the 20th at 3 percent. If one were to include the last four decades of the 20th century, the percentage would be even lower. ’’

2.3 But the 20th century was the bloodiest, right?

  • Yes, in terms of absolute casualties.
  • But not in terms of % of population killed

2.4 But the 20th century was the bloodiest, right?

Source: Pinker p. 197

Source: Pinker p. 197

2.5 But is war-deaths per capita the right metric?

  • Maybe fewer people exposed to risk of death (i.e., not less war-prone)
  • Death may decrease because medicine improves
  • Population growth is exponential
  • Leaders never know ex ante how many deaths

2.6 Better measure of war-proneness: of Arsonists and Trees

Deaths per capita may be the wrong measure of war-proneness

2.7 So, has the NUMBER of wars decreased?

2.7 Notes

But why limit our attention to Europe?

2.8 So, has the NUMBER of wars decreased?

2.8 Notes

The result is the opposite of what one would expect if war were on the decline: uses of force held more or less steady through the first World War but then increased steadily thereafter.

Are we satisfied with that?

Problem: no correction is made for the number of interaction opportunities in the international system. Ther are far more states now than 100 years ago.

2.9 So, has the NUMBER of wars decreased?

2.9 Notes

To correct for this issue, divide the number of uses of force in a given year by the number of pairs of states (` dyads’) present in the international system.

Are we satisfied with that? No. Most states cannot project power beyond thier own region. A clash between Bolivia and Botswana is unlikely, because they are too weak and do not care about each other

We need to include political relevance.

2.10 So, has the NUMBER of wars decreased?

3 The long peace (1945–)

3.1 What is the long peace?

  • 0 nuclear weapons used
  • 0 tactical nuclear weapons used
  • 0 war between great powers
  • 0 interstate wars in Europe
  • 0 interstate wars between major developed countries
  • 0 forced territory expansion by developed countries (exception: Israel)
  • 0 states have disappeared through conquest

3.1 Notes

The proponents of the end of war argument counter by saying that the period since the end of World War II has been remarkably peaceful.

3.2 Why the long peace?

  • Territorial integrity norm
  • Democratization
  • Decline of role of state to preserve honor
  • Commerce
  • The bomb?

3.3 Is the long peace really surprising?

3.3 Notes

Related discussion (optional):