Sources on War and Violence
To be edited:
Directory / Bibliography
This is material collated form this wiki:
War Cycles
- https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/War_Cycles, compares war cycles and hegemonic cycles
War and Peace and War
- Turchin's work, based on his Shestra database, is solid:
- Book: War and Peace and War. Peter Turchin.
- video review by Joe Brewer at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUWc4H8WXDo#t=112
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
- https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Evolution_of_War-Making_Capacity_Throughout_Human_History: Ian Morris also very solid (update: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Evolution_of_War) /
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
- https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Lester_Ward_on_Conflict_as_the_Source_of_all_Social_Creation: 'telic intelligence' applied to conflict reduction
War Before Civilization
Book: War Before Civilization: the Myth of the Peaceful Savage (Oxford University Press)
Study of War
- https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Study_of_War: The Study of War. Quincy Wright.
(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
- Joshua Goldstein: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Fluctuations_in_the_Intensity_of_War"Galtung (1980:70)
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."