Sources on War and Violence

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Contextual Quote

"Pinker, Rosling, etc. seem to define violence in anthropocentric terms, whereas I think a case can be made on non-anthropocentric grounds that violence has increased dramatically if one factors human violence against other life and the planet – including impacts into the future. The climate crisis is a slow moving form of large-scale violence – also against the human population, across generations (past and future) – destroying life support systems and habitability. One can factor in expected increases in famine, migration, conflict, etc."

- Andrea Owe (email, June 2023)


Directory / Bibliography

This is material collated form this wiki:

War Cycles


War and Peace and War


War_and_Social_Organization

"Jonathan Haas correspondingly concludes that "the level, intensity, and impact of warfare tend to increase as cultural systems become more complex."


Evolution_of_War-Making_Capacity_Throughout_Human_History

book: Ian Morris. War! What is it Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots. Farrar, Straus & Giroux,

"In his book Morris argues that “the main function of war in cultural evolution across the past 15,000 years—and particularly across the past 500 years—has been to integrate societies, increasing material wellbeing.” It was war, strangely enough, that made our societies larger, wealthier, and safer. It must be understood that the argument here is “over the long run.” It goes without saying that wars created, and continue to create an enormous amount of human misery. But warfare creates an environment in which only societies that are strongly cooperative manage to persist and expand at the expense of less cooperative ones. Without war (or more broadly, without competition between societies) cooperation would unravel and disappear. Thus, wars have not only a destructive side, but also a creative one. I am in complete agreement with Ian that this general insight is very valid."

(https://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/war-what-is-it-good-for/)


Violence_and_the_History_of_Inequality_from_the_Stone_Age_to_the_Twenty-First_Century

"Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes."

"The book's focus, of course, is on the recent past (since Industrialization) and whether —and, if so, how—societies have managed to achieve something like an equitable distribution of income and wealth, at least for short periods. Scheidel's answer is that, although most societies throughout human history have generally supported sharp distributional inequities, yes, some societies have seen this pervasive inequality, but unfortunately only as the result of major, devastating, violent shocks.

Scheidel further offers a taxonomy of such shocks, which he dubs the 4 Horsemen:

1. Mass Mobilization Warfare;

2. Transformative Revolution;

3. State Failure/Collapse;

4. Lethal Pandemics."


Lester_Ward_on_Conflict_as_the_Source_of_all_Social_Creation


War Before Civilization

Book: War Before Civilization: the Myth of the Peaceful Savage (Oxford University Press)


Study of War

(discussion: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Fluctuations_in_the_Intensity_of_War)

Wright does, however, delineate four long-term periods (about 150 years) that define the stages of development of military technology in Europe:

1450–1648: Experimental adaptation of firearms and religious wars

1648–1789: Professional armies and dynastic wars

1789–1914: Industrialization and nationalist wars

1914–: The airplane and totalitarian war"(http://www.joshuagoldstein.com/jgcyc05.pdf)


Fluctuations_in_the_Intensity_of_War

distinguishes four types of violence:

(1) revolutionary violence directed against exploitation (vertical violence from below);

(2) counterrevolutionary violence (vertical violence from above);

(3) horizontal violence between equals over some incompatible goals; and

(4) random violence "related neither to interests nor to goals."(http://www.joshuagoldstein.com/jgcyc01.pdf


Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution

Book: The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution. by Richard Wrangham.

"The book states that “the execution hypothesis” is key to the process. Capital punishment practiced in small human groups gave rise to a less aggressive psychology that uniquely defines Homo sapiens compared with other primate species. Executing the most antisocial individuals selected against aggression in favor of greater docility and conformity. There are physical characteristics associated with human self-domestication, including neotenous facial features, reduced sexual dimorphism, and smaller teeth. Our ancestors, before the self-domestication, had a more mature appearance, larger brows, larger teeth, and greater visible sex differences existed between men and women. In the course of evolution, human communities selected against reactive aggression. In other words, early humans united to inflict penalties (including death) on impulsive and domineering members of their communities."


Civilization and Violence

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42709844 french

This article concludes that there is an effective lowering of homicidal violence over time, linked to the civilizational process as first identified by Norbert Elias, and addresses the critiques:

"This discussion article confronts the criticism levelled at the theory of civilization, in so far as it pertains to violence. It deals with four broad clusters of problems:

(1) the reliability and validity of the evidence for the longterm trend of declining violence;

(2) the character of violence, in particular its function as an indicator for the level of behavioral control;

(3) the interdependence of long-term change in the field of aggression and human emotions on the one hand and the overall development of society on the other;

(4) the new wave of interpersonal violence in the Western world in the late twentieth century. It will be concluded that research on the long-term development of homicide over the last twenty years has yielded impressive new evidence for the theory of civilization, which some historians nevertheless tend to ignore or attempt to explain away. "


Statistics

""The absolute number of war deaths has been declining since 1946. In some years in the early post-war era, around half a million people died through direct violence in wars. In recent years, the annual death toll tends to be less than 100,000. The decline of the absolute number of battle deaths can be seen in the visualization here that shows global battle deaths per year by world region. There are three marked peaks in war deaths since then: the Korean War (early 1950s), the Vietnam War (around 1970), and the Iran-Iraq and Afghanistan wars (1980s). There has been a recent increase in battle deaths driven by conflict in the Middle East, particularly in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan."


"The levels of violence in prehistoric times (archeological evidence) and in non-state societies (ethnographic evidence) differed widely between different societies. On average it tends to be significantly higher than in modern state societies and in the world today. This is what the data tells us, and I have visualized this evidence in a series of charts. Homicide rates for modern times are routinely published by statistical offices or other state agencies, and research institutes publish reliable data on war deaths. For the study of lethal violence in non-state societies we have generally two different sources of information; for the more recent past (since the late 19th century) abundant ethnographic evidence is available. For the more distant past, we have information on the prevalence of violence from archeologists who have studied violence in past societies by studying archeological sites and skeletal remains. They present data on the share of people that died in violent conflict with other humans in scientific studies. Data from both archaeological and ethnographic studies is presented in the dataset on this website, but it is not all the information we have on violence in different societies. Non-quantitative information on violence is abundant; for example through forms of art."


The five historical forces behind the reduction in violence are:

Nation-states: the rise of societies ruled by a central government, in particular democracies, with a “monopoly on the legitimate use of force” Commerce: trade between nations allows us to engage in positive-sum interactions meaning our neighbors are worth more to us alive than dead Feminization: increased role of women in society and positions of power Rationality: Increased reliance on logical thinking instead of tradition for making policies and interacting with other humans Mass media and communication: made it possible for people to see outsiders not as dangerous, but as humans with a common humanity"


" aggression in mammals, including humans, has a significant phylogenetic component. By compiling sources of mortality from a comprehensive sample of mammals, we assessed the percentage of deaths due to conspecifics and, using phylogenetic comparative tools, predicted this value for humans. The proportion of human deaths phylogenetically predicted to be caused by interpersonal violence stood at 2%. "


"The medieval period was a particular killer, with human-on-human violence responsible for 12 percent of recorded deaths. But for the last century, we’ve been relatively peaceable, killing one another off at a rate of just 1.33 percent worldwide. And in the least violent parts of the world today, we enjoy homicide rates as low as 0.01 percent."

"for the first time in human history we actually have a pretty good understanding of how and why previous outbreaks of political violence occurred. Furthermore, we also have a number of examples when historical societies managed to navigate through structural-demographic crises by adopting the right mixture of political responses and social reforms. We can, and should, use our understanding of the causes of instability waves and the successful (if rare) examples of avoiding massive outbreaks of political violence in history. Over the last years I have amassed a large amount of data on many different structural-demographic indicators. As I just said, they all trend in ways that should make us take notice. The purpose of this web resource is to present both summaries of these trends and the rich data that underlie them. My goal is to show that structural-demographic theory makes sense of this bewildering variety of demographic, economic, social, and political data.""


Pinker critiques

" I agree with much of what Pinker has to say. His book is stocked with seventy-five charts and graphs that provide incontrovertible evidence for centuries of progress on many fronts that should matter to all of us: an inexorable decline in violence of all sorts along with equally impressive increases in health, longevity, education, and human rights. It’s precisely because of the validity of much of Pinker’s narrative that the flaws in his argument are so dangerous. They’re concealed under such a smooth layer of data and eloquence that they need to be carefully unraveled. That’s why my response to Pinker is to meet him on his own turf: in each section, like him, I rest my case on hard data exemplified in a graph."


"As to my actual claims about the past, my argument was straightforward.  I simply pointed out that we cannot ignore the fact that the period 1820 to circa 1950 was one of violent dispossession across much of the global South.  If you have read any colonial history, you will know colonizers had immense difficulty getting people to work on their mines and plantations.  As it turns out, people tended to prefer their subsistence lifestyles, and wages were not high enough to induce them to leave.  Colonizers had to coerce people into the labour market: imposing taxes, enclosing commons and constraining access to food, or just outright forcing people off their land.

You ask for citations.  Here are some you might try: Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton, Ellen Wood’s The Origins of Capitalism: A Longer View, Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts, Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, and of course Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation.

The process of forcibly integrating colonized peoples into the capitalist labour system caused widespread dislocation (a history I cover in The Divide).  Remember, this is the period of the Belgian labour system in the Congo, which so upended local economies that 10 million people died – half the population.  This is the period of the Natives Land Act in South Africa, which dispossessed the country’s black population of 90% of the country.   This is the period of the famines in India, where 30 million died needlessly as a result of policies the British imposed on Indian agriculture.  This is the period of the Opium Wars in China and the unequal treaties that immiserated the population. And don’t forget: all of this was conducted in the name of the “free market”."

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