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Ten Points on War
Abstract
This article is a highly distilled summary of conclusions from three decades of research on war, involving examination of tribal societies, ancient states, recent civil wars, archaeology, biology and culture, and primatology. The key points are the following: (1) our species is not biologically destined for war; (2) war is not an inescapable part of social existence; (3) understanding war involves a nested hierarchy of constraints; (4) war expresses both pan-human practicalities and culturally specific values; (5) war shapes society to its own ends; (6) war exists in multiple contexts; (7) opponents are constructed in conflict; (8) war is a continuation of domestic politics by other means; (9) leaders favor war because war favors leaders; (10) peace is more than the absence of war. Each point is applied to the contemporary wars of the United States.
... Warfare to praktyka, w której przypadku realizacja założeń politycznych schodzi na dalszy plan. Często jedyną motywacją jednostek biorących udział w walce są względy ideologiczne lub partykularne interesy, kształtujące się odmiennie w zależności od zajmowanej pozycji społecznej (Otter bein 2004;Ferguson 2008). Ponadto ze względu na brak jednostki lub instytucji obdarzonej prawem do bezwzględnej egzekucji posłuszeństwa wojownicy są niekarni i w każdym momencie mogą odstąpić od dalszego uczestnictwa w wyprawie wojennej. ...
The paper’s aim is not to provide a profound reflection
on the origin and nature of conflicts between people, but
rather a description of warfare in a specific time interval,
namely the Bronze Age. Then, changes in warfare paralleled
those in social and ideological spheres. Active participation
in war became an elite occupation — the privilege of few individuals with appropriate economic means. Owing to their
PAULINA SUCHOWSKA-DUCKE1, RAFAŁ P. SKRZYNIECKI2
Opowieść o chwale i mieczu.
Kilka uwag o wojnie i wojownikach w epoce brązu
membership in higher social strata, they could concentrate
exclusively on improving their martial skills. The changes,
however, had their roots in the processes set in motion
already in the Neolithic. Had it been otherwise, a ‘warrior
package’, suggestively conceptualized by researchers, could
not have emerged in so refined a form.
Keywords: warfare, warriorhood, institutionalization of
violence, battles, Bronze Ag
... Osterholtz (2012) discussed how social control can be gained over both witnesses and victims of direct violence by exercising performative violence against only a limited number of individuals. This is because the threat of violence is equally as powerful as direct violence (Ferguson 2008;Krohn-Hansen 1994;Parsons 2007). Consequently, social control can be imposed on a large number of people by a relatively limited number of enforcers, if one establishes a credible threat of violence (Osterholtz 2012). ...
A massacre took place inside the Sandby borg ringfort, southeast Sweden, at the end of the fifth century. The victims were not buried, but left where they died. In order to understand why the corpses were left unburied, and how they were perceived following the violent event, a theoretical framework is developed and integrated with the results of osteological analysis. I discuss the contemporary normative treatment of the dead, social response to death and postmortem agency with emphasis on intergroup conflict and ‘bad death’. The treatment of the dead in Sandby borg deviates from known contemporary practices. I am proposing that leaving the bodies unburied might be viewed as an aggressive social action. The corpses exerted postmortem agency to the benefit of the perpetrators, at the expense of the victims and their sympathizers. The gain for the perpetrators was likely political power through redrawing the victim's biographies, spatial memory and the social and territorial landscape. The denial of a proper death likely led to shame, hindering of regeneration and an eternal state of limbo.
In our interconnected world, exposure to hate, fear, violence and adversarial communication is commonplace. Yet, this exposure underscores the urgent need for a more just, peaceful, and inclusive society. While research stresses the importance of nurturing peace, compassion and empathy for enhanced well-being and social justice, these three terms are rarely discussed at length in linguistics and communication studies. Little systematic work explores how language and semiotic resources actualise these ideals across contexts. This special issue, grounded in systemic functional linguistics, addresses this gap. It aims to contribute to a more just world, promote non-violent efforts for social justice, and lay the foundation for future research on the semiotics of peace, compassion and empathy. This paper outlines key definitions and contributions.
This article lays out the work of Costs of War, a project of scholars creating public‐facing knowledge toward the goal of challenging US militarism. Emerging from literature that critiques US imperial violence and deconstructs the commonplace understandings that support it, our efforts identify and confront pillars of belief about war that are shaped by the powerful military‐industrial complex and rooted in an underlying devaluation of the lives of Muslims, people of color, women, and oppressed groups who bear the brunt of militarization both at home and abroad. We use our research and associated website (costsofwar.org) to reach out to journalists, editors, Congress, policymakers, civic groups, social movements, and the US public. In contesting the soundbites about the post‐9/11 wars that allow these wars to be seen as inevitable and to continue uncontested, we hope to help avert the next war championed by those least likely to live with the horrific and decades‐long consequences. We describe our approach, its successes, and its stumbling blocks in hope of offering insights for scholars in the social sciences who wish to use their research in service of activist goals and social justice movements, antiwar and beyond.
The Anthropological Analysis of War: The Micro-Level Perspective in Ethnography The article aims to analyse the micro-level perspective in ethnography, highlighting the main features of the anthropological analysis of war. The focus of this article is the discourses that the Polish-English anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski applied in the general discipline of anthropology and in micro-level war studies. The article reveals that war is a complex process, inseparable from the daily lives of societies. This is reflected in the theoretical and practical work of anthropologists, who develop academic knowledge and apply anthropology for political purposes. Finally, the micro-level perspective is an example of interdisciplinary thinking that combines anthropological, sociological and historical approaches. Key words: anthropology, ethnography, individual, micro level, war.
La violencia tiene una larga historia en nuestra especie, ha impactado las experiencias de vida de todos los seres humanos desde el paleolítico —o incluso antes— hasta nuestra época; es, ha sido y seguirá siendo parte de la existencia humana (Keeley, 1996, 2014; Guilaine y Zammit, 2005; Gat, 2006; Tooby y Cosmides, 1988). Este fenómeno multidimensional, históricamente contingente y especifico en el tiempo y en el espacio, adquiere su significado en el contexto cultural e histórico en donde se circunscribe. Por consiguiente, no todos los actos de violencia son expresados, comprendidos, ni xperimentados de manera idéntica por todos los individuos de la misma población o de diferentes poblaciones; lo que para unos es un comportamiento violento para otros no lo es, así como, lo que hoy consideramos violencia es probable que en el pasado no haya sido castigado o definido de esa manera (Koziol, 2017; Scheper-Hughes y Bourgois, 2004; Ralph 2013).
The author reflects on the possibility of implementing the idea of sustainable development in the environment of human life in various areas and between them. He begins by answering the question what is the human living environment, presents the typology of the areas that make up this environment and indicates the role of human in destroying it. Then, he analyzes selected pairs of areas of the human living environment that are opposite to each other (genuine – artificial, external – internal, natural – social, real – virtual, as well as local – global) because of the possibility of maintaining a balance within them and between them. The balance is a prerequisite for effective implementation of the idea of sustainable development. Finally, he made several conclusions resulting from his reflection.
La guerra y la conquista fueron dos elementos claramente presentes en el proceso de construcción del reino visigodo hispano. El presente trabajo pretende ofrecer explicaciones alternativas al expansionismo territorial de los visigodos en Hispania por la vía armada, considerando las campañas ofensivas visigodas no como la consecuencia última de un proyecto secular dirigido a la consecución de la unidad peninsular bajo soberanía goda, sino de motivaciones mucho más inmediatas, que distaban del maximalismo. En este sentido, y sirviéndonos de los postulados de la historia social y de la antropología consagrada al estudio de la guerra, pondremos de relieve el papel de las motivaciones personales de los monarcas, en concreto su búsqueda de supervivencia política, y de las colectivas de la comitiva armada, en especial sus ansias de botín, como móviles principales de la actividad militar ofensiva visigoda.
The paper is the 2018 Political Geography invited lecture. I discuss the geographical component to early state formation and its impact on theories of human nature. Ever since Rousseau accused Hobbes of taking post-state passions as constitutive of human nature and projecting them onto pre-state peoples, the question of whether or not early state formation produced qualitative changes in human emotional and cognitive structures has been debated in anthropology and philosophy. The work of James C Scott, especially in The Art of Not Being Governed and Against the Grain has emphasized the geographical component of early state formation and the concomitant and often futile attempts of states to stop flight from states as in the proverbial “run for the hills!” I will put Scott's work in dialogue with the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as well as with new anthropological theories of human evolution, including the Human Self-Domestication thesis of Brian Hare, and the obligate collaborative foraging thesis of Michael Tomasello. At stake will be attempts to account for prosocial egalitarian sentiments and their conflict with hierarchical states.
For decades, there have been three primary anthropological perspectives on why people make war: materialist, cultural, and biological. Each has a long history of application to the Yanomami. This paper considers these three alternatives. First, it summarizes the author's materialist models and what they are purported to explain. Second, it discusses more cultural explanations offered by several field researchers, concluding that some might be synthesized with a materialist perspective, while others seem irreconcilable. Finally, a range of hypotheses invoking evolved predispositions are considered and found to be directly contradicted by Yanomami ethnography, even if limited to the works of Napoleon Chagnon.
This article argues that reported wars among Native peoples of Amazonia are not representative of pre-Columbian warfare. The well-known cases that are the bases for our conceptions of Amazonian warfare, as well as dozens of less prominent instances of war, can be attributed largely to circumstances created by the European intrusion. The broader implication is that anthropological theory and teaching about war are distorted by an unexamined premise that reported cases of war among nonstate or tribal peoples are self-generated phenomena. [warfare, Amazonia, Western contact, anthropology and history, the Columbian encounter]
Our job as intellectuals, this article argues, is to struggle to understand the crisis presented by terrorism in all its forms. This can center on a theoretical account of militarization and its relationship to broader social changes, from the emergence of nationstates to the course of racialization and other inequalities to the convergence of interests in military spending. The article gives a terse historical account of the 20th-century history of the militarization process and of the distinct modes of warfare that have developed over that time. To account for the growth of militarization over the last half of the century requires a focus on the growth of U.S. hegemony and the naming of the empire that dominated the global scene as the most recent crisis opened on September 11, 2001. This account suggests how we can connect these global and national histories with specific ethnographically understood places and people, giving some examples from ethnographic and historical research in a military city, Fayetteville, North Carolina. Finally, this review of militarization suggests that the attacks on the United States, and the war that followed, represent a continuation and acceleration of ongoing developments, rather than sharp openings in history. These new developments include reasons for hope that the legitimacy of violence and empire may also be under challenge. [Keywords: militarization, modes of warfare, United States, ethnography of empire]
Research at the frontlines of wars shows that the realities of war are quite different from the public presentations of war. The experiences of those surviving in the midst of war are frequently worlds apart from the “images” of political violence (mis)portrayed in public media, formal military texts, the literature, and war museums. This has allowed for a number of myths about war and human aggression to hold sway in both academic and popular culture that, as the basis for policies, can actually further harm those subjected to war. For example, although the vast majority of cultural and military treatises on war focus on soldiers, more children than soldiers are killed in wars in the world today. If this core reality of war is omitted from analyses, solutions become impossible. On the other hand, people often look at statistics like these and decry the inevitability of aggression in human nature and society. Yet, data from combat soldiers have shown that through much of modern history, the majority of combat soldiers on the front lines do not fire their weapons, at least not at other humans. They do not flee war, but they cannot bring themselves to kill others. When these facts are excluded from public discourse on political violence, we sacrifice our potential for understanding the human capacity for peacebuilding. Without actual war zone research—research conducted at the front lines of wars—it is impossible to distinguish between fact and fiction in these formal presentations of war. In exploring some of the common myths about war and comparing them with data collected at the front lines, this article examines the question of why these myths emerge with such force and chronicles the cultural construction of aggression. In conclusion, the article suggests that a new kind of empiricism is necessary for studying such difficult, dangerous, and complex phenomena as political aggression and peacebuilding. It is an empiricism that necessitates both sophisticated methodological tools attuned to wartime realities and theoretical insights capable of explaining them. Examples take the reader through key dilemmas and solutions in the search for a more representative, and responsible, understanding of political violence and peace. Aggr. Behav. 24:147–159, 1998. © 1998 Wiley-Liss, Inc.