The Handbook of Collective Violence

Current Developments and Understanding

Carol A. Ireland, Michael Lewis, Anthony Lopez, Jane L. Ireland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429588952
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Emotions in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The first of its kind, The Handbook of Collective Violence covers a range of contexts in which collective violence occurs, bringing together international perspectives from psychology, criminology and sociology into one complete volume.

There have been significant advances made in the last 25 years regarding how collective violence is conceptualised and understood, with a move away from focusing on solely individual forms of violence toward examining and understanding violence that can occur within groups. This handbook presents some of the most interesting topics within the area of collective violence, drawing upon international expertise and including some of the most well-known academics and practitioners of our generation. Structured into four parts: understanding war; terrorism; public order and organized violent crime; and gang and multiple offender groups, this volume provides academics and practitioners with an up-to-date resource that covers core areas of interest and application.

Accessibly written, it is ideal for both academics and policymakers alike, capturing developments in the field and offering a deep theoretical insight to enhance our understanding of how such collective violence evolves, alongside practical suggestions for management, prevention and intervention.

PART I

Understanding war

1

THE EVOLUTION OF WARFARE

Anthony C. Lopez

Introduction

The evolution and history of warfare has been investigated by philosophers, historians, practitioners, social scientists and life scientists. Common questions in this endeavour are: How far back into human evolution and history do we find evidence of warfare? How frequent was warfare in any given historical period? And how lethal was warfare? In short, scholarship on the evolution and history of warfare has focused on questions of origins, frequency, and intensity.

Despite the fact that scientific interest in these questions is perhaps broader and more methodologically sophisticated than ever, consensus on these questions remains elusive for at least two reasons. First, the archaeological record of warfare is incomplete. Second, we do not agree on what warfare is or how to unambiguously distinguish it from other forms of violence. Beyond an agreement that warfare is something more than violence between two individuals, there is little consensus on the proper scope of our main unit of analysis.

Given these hurdles, it would seem that an investigation into the evolutionary origins of human warfare is destined merely to perpetuate academic stalemates, in which old arguments are continuously repackaged with each new discovery of a mass grave or ‘peaceful’ society. Although this is a rather pessimistic view, I establish it at the forefront of this chapter since my argument will be that these hurdles (e.g. knowledge of ancestral phenomena and consensus on definitions) are not insurmountable. Entire disciplines thrive on their ability to successfully infer and model the unobserved past based on imperfect historical, geological and archaeological evidence. And the question of definitions must be placed in its proper scope – as a methodological, rather than ontological, consideration.

Again, most evolutionary approaches to warfare have focused on its ancestral or historical frequency and intensity, and although this has generated useful discussion, it is also incomplete. One of the core dynamics of the evolutionary process is natural selection, which is the only force known to organise biological design – that is; natural selection builds adaptations. Given that biological adaptations are solutions to recurrent and reproductively significant problems in an organism’s environment, these adaptations themselves convey some information about the environment in which they evolved. In other words, the form and function of adaptations contains information about the (socio)ecology in which they were built. Therefore, if there is an argument to be made about the ancestral frequency and intensity of warfare, we should expect that the form and function of our evolved psychology should reflect the ancestral existence of such challenges. This is a way of saying that if warfare was evolutionarily recurrent and reproductively significant for our ancestors, evidence of this fact lies in our very brains.

An evolutionary approach to behaviour investigates the link between ancestral selection pressures and psychological design. In general, we are asking: what were the evolutionarily recurrent and reproductively significant challenges that confronted our ancestors, and how – if at all – has natural selection shaped the human phenotype, and specifically human nervous systems, to deal with these challenges? Given this perspective, the relevant questions for scholars of warfare are: (1) what ancestral selection pressures might have favoured the emergence of a psychology capable of intergroup violence, and (2) how specifically is that psychology designed to shape reasoning, motivation and behaviour in contexts of intergroup violence, such as warfare?

From this perspective, we immediately err if we begin by asking: what is warfare? Instead, we must begin by investigating the socio-ecology of ancestral landscapes based on known and inferred data about such environments. From this, we gain a reasonable estimation of the character of ancestral intergroup violence. If there are psychological adaptations that operate in modern contexts of intergroup violence then they were shaped in response to these ancestral forms. Whether we call those forms “war”, “violence”, “feuds”, or “ritualised contests”, is entirely irrelevant.

There is growing evidence the human brain possesses the psychological tools of intergroup violence. This evolved psychology is laden with adaptively contextual triggers and moderators, and it also sits alongside other evolved systems, such as systems that regulate sharing, cooperation and forgiveness, which are largely outside this scope of this discussion. However, if there is any one lesson that the evolutionary sciences have revealed regarding human behaviour, it is that human nature is a complex motivational web of competing desires and interests. We are no more rabidly aggressive than we are blindly altruistic. Our evolved psychology is material, knowable, and highly contextual.

In this chapter, I outline a case for the evolutionary origins of warfare. First, I begin by briefly reviewing several definitions of war in order to make the case that such definitions should be seen as methodological tools, rather than as ontological claims. In this section, I also compare arguments for a long versus short chronology of warfare, concluding that although the evidence is inconclusive overall, a long chronology of warfare cannot be dismissed, and we are justified in more rigorously exploring ancestral selection pressures for intergroup aggression. Second, I therefore evaluate the evidence for ancestral selection pressures that may have favoured the emergence of an evolved psychology of intergroup violence, and I sketch some of the general features of these evolved systems. Third, and to briefly conclude, I explain that although humans seem to possess the psychological tools of intergroup violence, the form of this violence has changed both quantitatively and qualitatively over history. Thus, it may be useful to distinguish between the evolution of coalitional aggression and the historical emergence of warfare. This distinction is meant to acknowledge two points: first, that modern complex warfare can indeed be very different from the behavioural patterns that prevailed in ancestral environments, and second, that as different as it is, modern warfare nevertheless remains influenced and shaped by our evolved psychology of coalitional aggression.

Definitions of war and its chronology

Scholars who study group-based violence among a range of pre-state people (i.e. forager, hunter-gatherer, farmer, etc.) tend to define war more broadly than scholars of international relations, which should come as no surprise (Lopez and Johnson, 2017). Yet, unlike scholars of modern international war, in which there is some consensus on measuring war (Gleditsch et al., 2002; Sarkees and Wayman, 2010; Maoz et al., 2019), the study of simple or “primitive” war is fraught with raucous disagreement on definitions and core concepts. Anthropologists and archaeologists who believe that war is relatively recent claim that their opponents’ definitions of war are hopelessly all-encompassing, while those who see warfare as evolutionarily old claim that their opponents have simply defined war out of the ancestral record. What has emerged is a debate between two positions that Allen (2014) describes as a long chronology of war and a short chronology of war.

Short chronology of war

The short chronology can be summarised as follows: warfare is the cultural product of material necessity made possible by social complexity. It is a cultural product because it was invented, not inherited. It is the product of material necessity because it was not until historical developments relating to agriculture and sedentarism that the need to protect and the ability to seize resources became relevant. Finally, it was made possible as societies developed well-articulated social complexity, in the form of institutions such as political command and military organisation that made the practice of warfare available for the first time as an instrument of intergroup competition, or simply, “statecraft” (Ferguson, 1997; Otterbein, 2004; Kelly, 2005).

Advocates of the short chronology point to the fact that fossilised evidence of the weapons of war exists at most no earlier than about 40,000 years ago, and evidence of fortifications indicative of a need for defence against out-group aggression is even more recent. Furthermore, modern groups whose lifestyle and ecology are proposed to mirror those of our evolutionary ancestors are argued to be relatively peaceful and mostly egalitarian (Fry and Söderberg, 2013). In part because of this, advocates of the short chronology reject the comparison of humans to chimpanzees and instead suggest that the relatively peaceful bonobo is the more instructive comparison species (Fry, 2007).

How do proponents of the short chronology define war? Following Prosterman (1972, p. 140), Douglas Fry (2007), a leading example, defines warfare as:

A group activity, carried on by members of one community against members of another community, in which it is the primary purpose to inflict serious injury or death on multiple nonspecified members of that other community, or in which the primary purpose makes it highly likely that serious injury or death will be inflicted on multiple nonspecified members of that community in the accomplishment of that primary purpose.

This definition seems fairly broad at first, but Fry and others (Fry, 2013) are quick to argue that when violence occurs between kin groups it should not be considered warfare, but rather should be called either homicide or feuding. Fry’s review of the anthropological literature concludes that simple foragers exhibit high rates of homicide, moderate feuding, and little or no warfare. In sum, scholars of the short chronology date the origins of warfare to no earlier than that indicated in the fossil record, and see most forms of violence between groups as either kin-based (and thus feuds) or revenge attacks and raids that target single individuals (and thus homicide). If our ancestors engaged in anything close to warfare, it was extremely rare and of insufficient frequency to result in selection for biological adaptations for warfare (Ferguson, 1997; Otterbein, 2004; Fry, 2007, 2013; Fry and Söderberg, 2013).

Long chronology of war

In contrast to this position, proponents of a long chronology argue that warfare existed prior to the availability of military and social instruments to prosecute it. Warfare is a behavioural pattern of violence between groups, and does not depend on how (e.g. with fists; with weapons; with armies) or why you are fighting (e.g. for women; for territory; for revenge). The long chronology argues that pre-state and forager warfare was commonplace and lethal, rendering claims of the “peaceful savage” empirically false (Ember and Ember, 1992; Keeley, 1996; LeBlanc and Register, 2003; Otterbein, 2004). One common definition of warfare in this tradition is provided by Ember and Ember (1992, p. 172):

Warfare is defined as socially organized armed combat between members of different territorial units (communities or aggregates of communities). In the ethnographic record, such combat usually involves groups on both sides, but a warfare event could involve the ambush of a single person of an enemy or group. Thus, the phrase “socially organized” means that there is a group of combatants on at least one of the sides.

In keeping with this broader perspective on warfare, Mark Allen and Terry Jones, following archaeologist Steven A. LeBlanc, define warfare as “socially sanctioned lethal conflict between independent polities”, and acknowledge that “nearly any other definition would … drive us quickly (and incorrectly) to a conclusion that hunter-gatherers did not engage in war” (Allen and Jones, 2014, p. 354). This definition is also close to Wrangham and Glowacki (2012) and the economist Sam Bowles (2009), who define warfare as “relationships in which coalitions of members of a group seek to inflict bodily harm on one or more members of another group” (Wrangham and Glowacki, 2012, p. 8).

Some in this camp argue that not only does intergroup violence precede its material instruments, it can also be traced back to our common ancestor with chimpanzees several million years ago (Pinker, 2011; Tooby and Cosmides, 1988; Wrangham, 1999; Wrangham and Peterson, 1996). Although the comparison with chimpanzees is imperfect (Wrangham and Glowacki, 2012), the similarities are striking and suggest that evolutionary analysis provides an additional line of inquiry for thinking about the origins of human warfare.

This brief juxtaposition of the long versus short chronology reveals that there are two major nodes of contention regarding the evolution of warfare. First is our ability to date the emergence of warfare with reference to direct fossilised evidence of its occurrence. Second is our ability to infer ancestral behaviour based on comparisons with non-human primates and modern-day simple forager groups. Both nodes of contention are worth elaborating in some detail.

The fossil trail

The problem can be put simply: if warfare is defined in terms of war-related instruments and impacts that fossilise, then the beginning of the fossil trail signals the origins of the phenomenon itself. In other words, the emergence of warfare dates to the earliest direct evidence of instruments and impacts. However, if warfare is not defined in terms of things that fossilise, then the archaeological record can reveal only instances of warfare that happened to involve those things that fossilise. In short, one’s interpretation of the archaeological record as a reference to the origins of warfare is fully dependent on how one defines warfare. Although some behavioural patterns may leave unique archaeological traces in which there is a unique or singular interpretation, the case of intergroup violence is not so clear. For example, in the case of fossilised bone damage from weapon impacts, it is often difficult to distinguish between violence that is: accidental versus intentional; individual versus coalitional; and within versus between groups. Thus, Allen and Jones (2014, p. 354) complain that, “…the persistent problem with bioarchaeological evidence ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Foreword biography
• Foreword
• PART I: Understanding war
• PART II: Terrorism
• PART III: Public order and organized violent crime
• PART IV: Gang and multiple offender groups
• Index