Evolution of War

* Article: The Evolution of War. By Morris, Ian. Cliodynamics, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2012

URL = https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8jr9v920

Abstract

“War and governance have co-evolved across the last 15,000 years, but much remains unclear about the process because historical narratives have not been integrated well into social-scientific analyses. Under the conditions of circumscription/caging that emerged in a few places after the ice age, war became productive, in the sense of producing larger, safer, richer societies. However, the larger states produced by war changed the environment around them, and for more than 1,000 years war turned counterproductive in the places that it had previously been productive, breaking up large states. After about 1400 CE a new phase of productive war began. This too began turning counterproductive in the 20th century CE. The most important question for the 21st century is whether productive war is currently mutating into a new form.

Author Summary

Ian Morris:

“Collective violence is an evolved part of human biology, but war also evolves as part of culture. The evolution of agriculture subjected human societies to circumscription, making it harder for groups that lost conflicts to move away. Over the long run, such groups were absorbed into larger, more complex societies, which formed governments that pacified the group internally and as a side-effect increased its prosperity. In the short run, some wars broke down these larger, safer, richer societies, and in particular cases—such as much of Eurasia between about 200 and 1400 CE—the two effects of war settled into an unstable equilibrium. But 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. Even though wars became more and more destructive, internal pacification lowered the overall rate of violent death from 10–20 percent in nonagricultural societies to just 1–2 percent in the twentieth-century industrialized world. By the mid-twentieth century war had become so destructive that rather than unifying the entire planet, another great conflict could destroy it. However, there are numerous signs that institutions are evolving even faster than the means of destruction, and that the twenty- first century will see the emergence of entirely new forms of conflict Resolution.”