The Nature of Intractable Conflict

Resolution in the Twenty-First Century

C. Mitchell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781403945181
• eBook ISBN: 9781137454157
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Building upon Mitchell's earlier work, The Structure of International Conflict, this volume surveys the field of conflict analysis and resolution in the twenty-first century, exploring the methods which people have sought to mitigate destructive processes including the creative and innovative new ways of resolving insoluble disputes.

1

Compulsion

Natural Born Killers?

Before embarking on a work that seeks to answer some questions about why and how human societies engage in protracted, violent and “intractable” conflicts, and what might be done about it, it really behoves an author to pause and consider a question – or a set of questions – that might render the whole exercise pretty pointless. After all, if – as some authors have implied or openly argued (for example, Ardrey, 1961; Morris, 1967; Buss, 2005) – the answers lie buried in “human nature”, in the fact that human beings are naturally or biologically programmed to be aggressive, to utilize violence, to organize so as to be able to kill large numbers of their fellow beings, to be compelled by their “nature” to engage in violence and destruction, then the analysis of conflict becomes relatively straightforward. It can focus on the nature of aggressive “drives”, on chemical processes within the brain, on the role of testosterone in fomenting wars, and on intra-personal tensions that lead to confrontations and conflict. Within this “natural born killers” framework, coping strategies logically take the form of therapy, behaviour modification including channelling of aggression, incarceration of the most violently aggressive, the pacifying use of drugs and, ultimately, the manifest forms of deterrence.

1. Nature–nurture revived

Even if one believes in a more benign view of “human nature”, the possibility of important theoretical and conceptual connections between the study of human aggressiveness and the study of human conflicts seems obvious. If human beings are (even if differentially and individually) programmed to harm others, if our behaviour is controlled (or even significantly influenced) by inherited “drives” or automatic responses that are “hard wired” into our biological make-up, then not merely violence between individual members of our species but wars, civil strife, turf wars between rival urban gangs, protracted feuds between rival clans, semi-organized football hooliganism and domestic violence (mainly) perpetrated by the strongest member of a family are all simply a matter of the arousal, organization and channelling of these common aspects of “human nature”. All exist latent, but ready for mobilization. In other words, we all can and might become natural born killers.

1.1. Parallel developments

Before revisiting this fundamental argument, however, it should be pointed out that there is also a historical connection between the systematic study of aggressive behaviour by humans, or their near relatives, and the study of human conflicts. Roughly speaking, both grew up together. Just as some of the pioneers of the scientific and academic study of conflict and conflict behaviour were trying to develop their field in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, so were some of the early pioneers of the study of human nature. In the former case, Lewis Richardson (1960) was working on the development of his arms race models and the statistical analysis of “deadly quarrels” in the 1920s and 1930s, and in the latter decade Quincy Wright began his massive “Study of War” project at the University of Chicago. Pitirim Sorokin (1957) had left the Soviet Union for the United States in 1922 to work on social dynamics, and, a few years later, Kurt Lewin began advocating the need for practical theorists in the field of conflict analysis (Lewin, 1948).

The inter-war years saw pioneer ethologists such as Konrad Lorenz, Nikolaas Tinbergen and Irenaus Eibl-Elbesfeldt begin to explore animal behaviour and to speculate about whether this kind of understanding could throw some light on the basic nature of the human species. They were then working on what, in the mid-1930s, one reviewer described as “the stimulatingly chaotic controversy about man’s place – physically, paleaontologically and behaviourally – among the primates”¹ and inevitably there were some false starts. In 1931 the 28-year-old Solly Zuckerman published his pioneering study of the behaviour of a baboon colony at London Zoo under the title of The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes, a work which had an enormous influence on primate studies for the next 30 years.² Much of the later criticism of Zuckerman’s work focused on his tendency to extrapolate general lessons about primate behaviour largely from his observations of a colony of captive baboons (a species within which males are far larger than females), where the imbalance between males and females was originally 90:6 (to which were later added a further 6 males and 31 females), and where 60 males and 30 females “died” over a number of years. Significantly, the underlying implication of much of this later criticism was that such lethal behaviour might not occur in a different, non-captive environment, or with a different male to female ratio, and furthermore that extrapolating the behaviour to other primate species required an unjustified leap of logic. In other words, even among baboons – let alone other primate species – there was nothing innate or inevitable about what Zuckerman had observed and a changed context might have produced alternative behaviours.

Of course, one dominant figure in this early period of thinking about the connection between “basic human nature” and the human practice of making war was Sigmund Freud, and in the subsequent decades the correspondence between Freud and Einstein on the subject became required reading for anyone studying the nature of conflict and the origins of war. The concept of aggressive “drives” that became a focus for much research and writing by the 1940s and 1950s clearly has a strong Freudian connection, while the pioneering work on the connection between the frustration of aspirations, goal-directed behaviour and subsequent aggressive reaction exemplified by the work of John Dollard and his colleagues (1939) – and later by Leonard Berkowitz (1962; 1993) – was clearly a reaction to the Freudian idea of “innate” aggressive drives in human beings. However, perhaps what brought about the real revolution in this biological approach to explain all human behaviours and not simply those leading to conflicts and wars was Crick and Watson’s (see Watson, 1968) revelation of the structure of DNA and the dynamics of inheritance in the mid-1950s, the same decade that saw the beginning of strong efforts to have the study of human conflict and peace established as a respectable and worthwhile academic discipline.

By the early 1960s, then, the emergence of a group of scholars calling themselves “conflict” or “peace” researchers had been paralleled by the growth of a number of fields of study concerned with the overall understanding of human behaviour, including behaviour leading to and during conflicts. Ethologists were starting the widespread study of the behaviour of animals in captivity but also increasingly in the wild, while those who specialized in studying the great (and lesser) apes were differentiating themselves as “primatologists”. Biologists, psychologists and neurologists were beginning to expand research on DNA and what this inheritance mechanism meant for human activity. Ethnographers, anthropologists and palaeohistorians were examining human societies to see what varieties of society human nature (whatever it might be) could construct. In the early 1960s these two groups of scholars had begun to talk seriously to one another and to exchange ideas about why one group’s work mattered to the other. One anthropologist reviewing a book on aggression actually suggested that the year 1964/1965 should be called “the International Year of Violence and Aggression” because of the number of conferences and symposia that were then being organized (Fox, 1967), although, in contrast to the current situation, there were as yet no specialist journals and only a few books on the subject.³ Among the latter was a collection of papers resulting from a symposium organized by the Institute of Biology in London in 1963, which naturally contained contributions from zoologists, physiologist and psychologists but also from sociologists, political scientists and international relations scholars (Carthy & Ebling, 1963). Another pioneering work, the focus of which pointed to an approach that was to become prominent in the search for answers over the next four decades, was published by Claire and Bill Russell in 1968 and entitled Violence, Monkeys and Man (Russell & Russell, 1968). Efforts to learn lessons about the nature of humans by drawing parallels with the nature of primate cousins – and especially other species – was to encourage much vehement argument from that point onwards.

1.2. The early debates

Given the centrality of “human aggressiveness” in efforts to explain violence, conflict and war, but given also the relative absence of systematic and comparative research into both aggression and conflict, it should not be surprising that the earliest debates about the “fundamental and basic” sources of conflict should have generated much heat but a bit less light. During the 1960s and 1970s, much of the discussion and debate in the new field of conflict and peace research centred on the issue of whether aggressive behaviour in humans was actually the result of genetic programming and could only be channelled into non-destructive activities if individual and social conflict – and ultimately war – were all to be avoided. A major sub-theme in the general debate involved asking whether humans were unique in their destructive, war-making propensities or whether other species engaged in intra-specific killings⁴ as opposed to simply killing for food – which did not count as “aggression” any more than eating a good steak. Another was whether human aggressiveness – and war – were connected in any way with a genetically programmed drive to defend a given territory, even allowing for the fact that “our” (or my) territory that actually needed defence against intruding “Others” could be culturally or historically defined. A third sub-theme took a methodological turn and focused on the appropriateness of transferring insights, ideas and theories from the study of other species (especially remotely related ones, such as sticklebacks, wolves or fruit flies) to the explanation of human behaviour. Linked to these issues was the whole question about the “functionality”⁵ of aggressive behaviour and violence – modified by what Konrad Lorenz described as “aggression inhibiting mechanisms” – for the survival or even flourishing of a particular species. The issue also involved the statistical probability of carrying through (presumably via genetic transmission) these inheritable characteristics into the following generations, which thus – over time – would come to display these survival-enhancing traits to a greater and greater degree. The last argument easily linked ideas about human aggression, skills in dominating and adeptness in combat with popularized Darwinian ideas about processes of natural selection, producing a revival of “social Darwinism”, with “survival of the fittest” being interpreted as the survival of the most effectively aggressive.

The debates and disagreements over such issues during the 1960s and early 1970s took place only partly in specialist circles – in a few quarterly journals, especially in their review columns – but largely at a more popular level. To some degree, this occurred because a number of popular and best-selling books were published at about the same time, bringing the whole issue of human aggressiveness, violence and territoriality into a public debate in a way not seen for many years, perhaps since Darwin and Huxley’s time. Works by Robert Ardrey and Desmond Morris took up what little was known with any certainty within the scientific community about the links between human aggression, violence and war, and about recent and tentative findings from ethology, biology and genetics. By extending and extrapolating from them, the books produced a number of alarming portraits of human beings as being dominated by preprogrammed tendencies towards violence and destruction. Works like Morris’s The Naked Ape and Ardrey’s two paperbacks The Territorial Imperative and African Genesis popularized many of the ideas contained in somewhat more professional works. Among the latter were Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression, based upon his studies of behaviour among greylag geese that he had domesticated and raised, and wolves and fish that he had observed; and Anthony Storr’s Human Aggression, based upon his observations and conclusions from his psychiatric practice over a number of years.

Given Lorenz’s position of one of the respected founders of animal behaviour studies, his ideas on intra-specific aggression in On Aggression (1966) came in for the most attention and the most criticism. This was not least because of his adoption of the idea of instinctive and inherited aggressive drives shared by most animals and – given that humans were also a species of animal – also by humans. The basic drives affecting behaviour were hunger, fear, reproduction and aggression, and Lorenz’s argument that seemed to have most relevance for the understanding of human conflicts involved his assertion that while other species had developed over time effective “aggression inhibitors” that prevented widespread intra-species killing, humans had changed, socially, so rapidly that they had outstripped the kind of natural inhibitor – signals of submission that stopped violence – which worked effectively for other species.

Within the professional community of ethologists and biologists, Lorenz’s ideas were greeted with less enthusiasm. Particularly scathing of the whole “natural instinct for aggression” approach was the anthropologist, M.F. Ashley Montagu, (1968) who, along with others, argued that the very concept of aggression itself was so ill-defined and open to different interpretation as to be meaningless, and thus a bad tool for analysis.

Other critiques of the “natural aggression” approach revolved around two main themes. The first was that, whatever the sources of human “harming behaviour” or “hostile destruction of others” turned out to be, they were likely to be complex, interactive and context affected. Moreover, their nature and effects would be made even more complicated by the fact that human beings had a considerable capacity for learning and a unique capacity for organizing, which was a necessary concomitant for making war as opposed to bashing someone in a bar. The second theme was that, at the then state of research, there was simply insufficient knowledge even to begin to answer questions about what might be termed genetically programmed and predetermined (“instinctive” if you would) behaviour or about what was learned, socially determined and culturally specific – and how these two clusters of factors interacted. Therefore the proper task for ethologists, primatologists, biologists, psychologists and anthropologists was to continue the detailed search for answers about the nature of “human nature”, and whether such a thing actually existed.

1.3. The Seville Statement on Violence – and beyond

In spite of the professional and specialist criticism of the popular “natural and instinctive aggression” approach, the idea that human genetic, biological and physiological make-up must have some impact – and possibly a major impact – on human behaviour (not just at the individual but also at a social level) remained, and remains a persuasive one. Its cruder version linking human biology inevitably to organized violence through preprogrammed drives remained fairly widespread through the 1970s and early 1980s.⁶ This persistence eventually led to a professional attempt to lay the “man as an instinctive killer” ghost finally to rest by developing a summary of what ongoing research had actually revealed about war, conflict, violence, aggression and their connection – or lack of connection – with human nature.

In May 1986, the UN’s International Year Of Peace, following a UNESCOsponsored colloquium on “Brain and Aggression” in Seville, a group of specialists from a variety of disciplines related to the study of human and animal behaviour drafted a statement attempting to summarize the then consensual position on linkages between human biology, aggression and war, and to lay to rest the common, popular belief that war was a part of human nature. Those drafting the Seville Statement on Violence included ethologists, specialists in animal behaviour, psychologists, anthropologists and biochemists.

The lead in drafting the statement was taken by Dr David Adams, a psychologist at Wesleyan University specializing in brain mechanisms underlying aggressive behaviour. He may have been responsible for the challenging tone of the statement, which some of the signatories later seem to have regretted, but he presumably wished to make a clear and unambiguous statement that no one could misunderstand or misinterpret. Each of the five propositions making it up starts with the phrase “It is scientifically incorrect”.⁷ The first disputes the idea that humans have inherited a tendency to make war from our animal ancestors, and the third challenges the idea that, throughout human evolution, there has been a tendency to preserve those who employ aggression to achieve status or a dominant position within their group. The second proposition attacks the idea that war or any other form of violent behaviour is genetically programmed into “human nature”, arguing that genes only provide a “developmental potential that can be actualized only in conjunction with the ecological and social environment”. The statement’s fourth proposition argues that humans do not have a “violent brain” but rather a neural apparatus that “filters stimuli” before determining what an appropriate reaction might be – and, by implication, this could well be non-aggressive depending on circumstances and could vary, depending on an individual’s socialization. The final proposition states flatly that it is scientifically incorrect to assert that “war is caused by “instinct” or any single motivation” and the statement ends by concluding that “biology does not condemn humanity to war”.

The statement was greeted with widespread approval, especially within the conflict and peace research communities that had long argued against the image of human beings as ineradicably wedded to violence and war. However, a number of specialists working in fields directly implicated in some of the statement’s assertions, most particularly sociobiologists who had been energized by the publication of E.O. Wilson’s new synthesis of ideas and the biological bases of social behaviour (1975), took issue with it on a number of grounds. One common criticism was that it started by setting up straw men, and that no one then working professionally in any field connected with what one critic called “an evolutionary perspective” would possibly hold the beliefs attributed to the statement’s ostensible target of “biologically pessimistic straw scientists” (Beroldi, 1992). Others argued that, while biologists had perhaps overemphasized competition and aggression in the past, more recent studies of primates, for example, had discovered other common patterns of behaviour, such as reconciliation and cooperation, that made “built-in behaviour” a far more complex and environment-dependent phenomenon (de Waal, 1992). The anthropologist Robin Fox was even more scathing, calling the statement “a shop worn denunciation of ideas that no one ever really had in the first place” (Fox, 1988 p.4).

All of this may have been true, of course, and contemporary evolutionary scientists in the 1980s might have been appalled at the idea that all or any of them believed that “war is caused by instinct”. However, this does not seem to have been equally the case for political leaders and even reasonably well-educated members of general publics. Really, it was the myths held within these circles, and the misunderstanding and misuse of findings from research, that the statement was designed to undermin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1. Compulsion: Natural Born Killers?
• 2. Formation: Sources and Emergence
• 3. Classification: Intractable Conflicts
• 4. Perpetuation: Dynamics and Intractability
• 5. Prevention
• 6. Mitigation
• 7. Regulation: Conflict within Limits
• 8. Institutionalization
• 9. Termination I: Stopping the Violence
• 10. Termination II: Addressing the Issues
• 11. Innovation
• 12. Reconciliation: Ending the Hatred
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index