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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: PPSS - Polity Political Sociology series
- Sprache: Englisch
War is a paradox. On the one hand, it destroys bodies and destroys communities. On the other hand, it is responsible for some of the strongest human bonds and has been the genesis of many of our most fundamental institutions.
War and Society addresses these paradoxes while providing a sociological exploration of this enigmatic phenomenon which has played a central role in human history, wielded an incredible power over human lives, and commanded intellectual questioning for countless generations. The authors offer an analytical account of the origins of war, its historical development, and its consequences for individuals and societies, adopting a comparative approach throughout. It ends with an appraisal of the contemporary role of war, looking to the future of warfare and the fundamental changes in the nature of violent conflict which we are starting to witness.
This short, readable and engaging book will be an ideal reading for upper-level students of political sociology, military sociology, and related subjects.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Notes
1. The Nature of War
Violence and Aggression
War as Organized Violence
A Paradox of War: Organization and Anarchy
War as a Human Construct
The Causes of War
Explaining War
Notes
2. War of the Warrior
The Horror of Battle
Brutality
Making Warriors
Military Values
Duty and Discipline
Notes
3. War of Armies
Origins of Battle
The Phalanx, the Fleet, and the Legion
The Return of the Horse
Military Revolution: Gunpowder
The Birth of Total War: Napoleon’s Revolution and the American Civil War
A Century of War
Explaining the Progress of War
Notes
4. War of Societies
Conquest
Genocide
Strategic Bombing
Nuclear Armageddon
Notes
5. How Wars Build
Wars and Big Outcomes
Militaries and the Individual
Notes
6. War and Society in the Twenty-First Century
An Unseen Global War?
Return of the Warrior
The End of Empires
The Limits of Firepower: Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq
Who Will Serve? The Changing Demographics of the Military
Conclusion
References
Index
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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War & Society
Miguel A. CentenoElaine Enriquez
polity
Copyright © Miguel A. Centeno and Elaine Enriquez 2016
The right of Miguel A. Centeno and Elaine Enriquez to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2016 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0822-8
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Centeno, Miguel Angel, 1957- author. | Enriquez, Elaine, author.Title: War & society / Miguel A. Centeno, Elaine Enriquez.Other titles: War and societyDescription: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity, 2016. | Series: Polity political sociology series | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2015029522| ISBN 9780745645797 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745645803 (paperback)Subjects: LCSH: War and society. | War--Causes. | BISAC: POLITICAL SCIENCE / Peace.Classification: LCC HM554. C46 2016 | DDC 303.6/6--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015029522
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
We have many people to thank for their contributions to the development of this book. Our gratitude goes out to Randall Collins and Siniša Malešević, who each gave invaluable feedback on early material. We also would like to thank two anonymous reviewers who provided thorough readings and productive critique of the manuscript. Their responses improved the book considerably. Jonathan Skerrett has gone beyond the call of duty in his patience and support as an editor. Thanks are also due to the myriad students and assistants-in-instruction of the Princeton University course on which this book is based, The Western Way of War.
Miguel Centeno has far too many people to thank and fears that any listing will unjustly exclude too many. Students, colleagues, staff, family, and friends have lived for years under the specter of the “war book.” I hope they find the result worth their patience and good will (but reading not required!). Three women helped raise me and taught me most of what I know: Ana Maria Gutierrez, Marta Souza, and Amalia Dahl – I owe them all everything.
In addition to those listed above, Elaine Enriquez would like personally to thank Lauren Lynch, who graciously provided space and time to complete this manuscript, and whose hospitality and patience were unending. I dedicate this book to the many people in my life who have served in the military and with whom I have had countless invigorating discussions – Joann Enriquez and Christopher-Ian Reichel among them.
Introduction
This book is the culmination of over a decade and a half of teaching the course The Western Way of War at Princeton University. The course, as does this book, analyzes the development of warfare in the Western world – Europe, the Americas (primarily the United States), and, to some extent, Japan. Other societies are touched upon, but for the most part this book is a survey of wars and conflicts in these parts of the world. It uses the historical comparative method to glean sociological insights about the nature of warfare and how it reflects and shapes social dynamics and institutions.
Hundreds of undergraduate students have heard these arguments, read the books referenced, and contributed to the thought-provoking discussion that the topic deserves. It is a pleasure to put those years of claims and evidence into book form for other students of war and history, academic and lay alike. We do so in the hope that this work encourages a re-awakening of interest in war on the part of sociology.1
After a discussion of the nature of war and its origin, we have organized the book around two separate claims. The first is that the history of human warfare is one of increasing size, complexity, and organization over the longue durée. Most certainly the first coordinated efforts at violence were little more than collections of individuals – men fighting for a common cause that was temporary and circumscribed. Whatever the source of hostilities, whether scarcity of resources or the need to defend a settlement, these conflicts were limited in scale.
As group conflicts developed, it was still the actions of prominent characters – fighters like the valiant warriors Achilles and Hector and leaders like Alexander the Great – which affected the turn of warfare. Warriors were called to fight, and outcomes could depend on the actions of a few.
Eventually, through a mutually reinforcing relationship of conflict, capital, and politics, war developed into actions between nation states involving armies. Particularly in Europe, we see the development of a series of armies, from mercenary to standing, at the service of a single political entity. These wars of armies would, in turn, be an important foundation for nationalism and statecraft.
The increasing scope and complexity of conflict would continue until history would see veritable wars of societies. European colonialism would forever alter the trajectories of civilizations, from Latin America to Africa to the Pacific. Warfare on a scale heretofore unknown would follow the turn of the twentieth century and would involve the very real threat of total annihilation. Industrialized genocide would become a fact of the human chronicle, and utter destruction would touch the lives of the European peninsula and beyond – not once, but twice.
This, however, brings us to our second claim and organizing principle. Parallel to this historical arc of increasing scale and complexity of conflict, the nature of war has proven to be at all times paradoxical. Its essence is brutal, destructive, and chaotic. Yet war also demands the very best of its participants – heroism, bravery, and inventiveness. It has often been enacted for the greater good, for the betterment of a society, and to protect and extend life. And, incredibly, through its drive for greater lethality, it has been an engine of stunning creation.
The increased numbers of men fighting over greater and greater distances would see the development of a number of state institutions and technological innovations. Census, taxation, citizenship, and the technologies of destruction and communication would all be a result of constant battle. Modern communication systems, including the Internet and global positioning systems, are the direct products of the practice of warfare. And participation in war, ironically, has led many to a better life than they would have otherwise had, socially and economically.
World War II is without question the apotheosis of the massification of war that we trace throughout this book. And now that we are already more than half a century beyond its closure, we conclude the book looking to the future of war. We argue that, particularly as a function of the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the nature of war has changed. The empires of Europe came to an end, often violently, in part because the politics and morality of post-war Europe simply could not sustain such forced colonization and occupation. Guerrilla warfare and insurgency are now the hallmarks of conflict in the world, although there are still certainly the threats of large land wars. But attendant with the development of fantastic technologies of war has come a dramatic change in military composition, particularly in the West. We argue that these three developments – the end of empire, insurgency, and a dramatic shift in military service – are what characterize this new future of war in the world.
The literature of war is vast – so vast as to be daunting to all but the most dedicated pupil. We sincerely hope that this volume allows the reader some appreciation of all that makes the subject so fascinating to so many people – its drama, its pathos, and its brilliance. This book may answer some questions, but the greatest of them all – what means war? – may never be satisfied.
Notes
1
As a short survey, this book cannot touch upon all of the facets of the sociology of war, much less summarize the entire literature on war. Other excellent surveys of the sociology of war include Malešević (2010) and Wimmer (2014). For a discussion of war and sociological theory, see Joas (2003).
1The Nature of War
What is war? It is foremost a social fact. War is a reflection and consequence of social structure, group norms, and relations. As such, war can be studied using the very same principles and methods that social science has used to understand other social phenomena, whether marriage or market exchanges. War may be a traumatic and gory social fact, but we cannot allow the horror of it to obscure the underlying principles behind it and its very real political and social consequences. Moreover, war is a critical force in shaping those very structures from which it stems, such as the state, as well as related institutions such as citizenship and class.
In the past one hundred years, the toll from armed conflict has been so high and the pain caused by it been so great that distinguished political and philosophical thinkers have made important arguments about its inherent insanity and the need for its prohibition.1 There is no question that war is chaotic – the very roots of the word in several European languages denote confusion.2 Yet, a central theme of this book is that to dismiss war as irrational, stupid, horrific, and evil is to accomplish very little. We write this in full awareness of the myriad costs of war – social, fiscal, and ethical. In the twentieth century, over 150 million people died as a result of war (Clodfelter 2008). To these we may add more hundreds of millions whose bodies were disfigured or whose homes were destroyed during war; a significant percentage of all those who lived in the past century saw their lives shattered by war.3 It should come as no surprise then that, beginning with the late nineteenth century, accelerating after the First World War, and culminating with the opposition to nuclear Armageddon after 1945, some of the wisest voices of the planet have called for an end to war.
War is a social fact, and we must appreciate that war is responsible for some of our highest achievements and deepest held values as a society. The organization required to conduct war is intimately tied to the organization of statecraft. The technologies of destruction have often come from and been translated into technologies of development and production. The highest awards in the military celebrate honor, courage, and selflessness – values we hold to be positive and life affirming. Further, despite the antibellic clamor of the past century, there is arguably a much longer literature extolling war as the righteous acts of the chosen.
It is also important to study war in a contemporary world dominated by market pricing as the basis of social relationships.4 The relative peace in the developed world of the past few decades has made market dynamics and behavior the central template for much of social science at individual and group levels. Yet war and conflict represent a form of social interaction considerably older than truck and barter. While economic and rational-actor models may help explain why groups fight (even as these models have explanatory limits), they become much less useful in explaining what happens in battle. Appreciating the power of hatred, aggression, discipline, and bonding as complements to optimization in human behavior is an important task for any sociological perspective.
Violence and Aggression
War is about violence. This is one reason why the use of the word “war” to describe a broad array of political campaigns and policy efforts is so often contentious. Efforts to stymie the flow of drugs, to end poverty, or to assure adequate energy supplies are not wars. Wars involve physical assaults on human beings. The instruments of war are weapons designed to damage, mutilate, and destroy the bodies of enemies. War is about inflicting as much pain as is necessary to other human beings until the point that they cease to exist or are willing to accept another’s absolute authority over them. In turn, war is also about enduring as much pain as opponents may hurl so as to outlast them in the path to victory.
While wars are necessarily violent, or at least involve the threat of violence, there are many forms of violent behavior we should distinguish from warfare. To begin, we need to discriminate between what we might call hostile or impulsive and instrumental forms of aggression (McEllistrem 2004). Aggression or violence that is hostile and impulsive is associated with anger and emotion. It is aggression or violence that is out of control and originates in rage or madness; it is violence as an end in itself. This form of aggression is closely linked with biochemical processes as well as with reactions to particular environmental stimuli. Thus, impulsive aggression is often associated with either some form of intoxication or some abnormal chemical state or with the immediate sensation of fear or danger. This form of violence is also associated with low levels of socialization. This is the violence of the socially marginal: football hooligans, drunken louts, or plain old thugs.
We do often see this type of violence in war, and certainly it is difficult to avoid it in the midst of battle, where the emotional states of combatants will be primed for aggressive behavior. Thus, war may be partly defined as the social and political space in which this kind of aggression is allowed and encouraged. The very same acts that might condemn a young man to jail when at home, might earn him a medal in battle. But war as a social fact is not about and cannot depend on the individual acting out of aggressive impulses. It is a product of coordinated efforts and motivations.
War is a function of what has been called “coalitionary aggression” (D. L. Smith 2007). That is, wars involve aggression not of some completely independent individuals but of groups of people united in some way to act in concert. In contemporary wars, the numbers involved can be in the tens of millions. Can we really say that the millions of men who fought for control over Flanders from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries were uniformly suited for and comfortable with violent behavior? What about the multitudes supporting them or waiting for their moment on the battlefield?
War involves a very different form of aggression: instrumental or premeditated. This is violence as a tool in the pursuit of some other end. If the first type of violence is associated with the classical conditioning of innate reflexes, this form is about operant conditioning driven by expectation of a desired re-enforcement (McEllistrem 2004). It is associated with the most socialized and most valued members of a society: those willing to make the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of their social unit.
What makes war sociologically fascinating is that it makes horrible brutality part of a rational course of action for huge numbers of people – people who would otherwise not act out in particularly lethal ways. Understood as a social phenomenon, war is about how human beings are made to do the impossible and bear the unbearable. The whole point of studying war sociologically is to find out how this happens.
War as Organized Violence
With this distinction in mind, we can come to better comprehend what Clausewitz ([1832] 1984) means when he refers to war as “an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.… [A] true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means” (75, 87). This idea of war as a political instrument has been very productive in the academic world, and much has been written in political science and international relations about the ways political entities use and manage violence and conflict. Part of what makes war an excellent candidate for sociological study is the way in which it is an example of micro-level motivations and activity (soldiers, officers), meso-level coordination and strategies (group training, particular engagements and wars), and macro-level political coordination and intent.
The purpose of war as organized coercion is often latent – that is, underlying, but this is true of the logic of most social behavior, whether it be patterns of discrimination or courtship practices. Similar to the social organization of tribes, educational institutions, or business corporations, wars are too complex a form of behavior and coordination to be spontaneous. The sociological perspective helps us to see the latent organizational purposes and to uncover the ways that these three levels – the individual (micro), the intermediate (meso), and the large scale (macro) – combine to create outcomes that are greater than the simple aggregation of individual efforts.
If we are to distinguish between war and simple violence, another key difference is the numbers involved. To merit the name of a war or war-like conflict, the acts of violence to which we are referring must involve a significant number of people. In standard social scientific analysis, the threshold for deaths necessary to call a violent conflict a war is one thousand (Small and Singer 1982). This is a purely arbitrary number and reflects the technological capacity of contemporary wars. Certainly conflicts between ancient Greek poleis could be classified as war even if it is unlikely that more than a few hundred men might have perished during a particular struggle.
Also central to our notion of war is that these individuals not be randomly associated. Somehow they must belong to whatever organized political groups are in an armed struggle. War is a form of aggression between groups that can be institutionally distinguished from each other (Bull [1977] 2012, 178). In contemporary times, this means states or groups that aspire to statehood, but in prior centuries the units involved could be as small as cities or even (with some caution) tribal entities.
The organization of war also requires a significant degree of social cooperation on at least three meso- to macro-sociological levels – the intra-group interactions and organization, the inter-group or society level, and coordination and organization at the institutional level. These levels of organization create observable social facts that are far greater than the aggregate of the individuals they comprise, and, in fact, often outlast those specific people involved in their initial interactions, creating long-lasting social artifacts.
First, organization is required within the groups in conflict in order to assure that enough of their partisans not only show up to fight, but also come willing (or coerced) to do so. They must also arrive with the relevant materiel needed to make the battle possible. A second and more interesting form of cooperation is that which occurs between the warring parties. In many battles, negotiations have preceded the encounter in order to assure the participation of all groups at a particular moment and place. Even when this explicit cooperation does not take place, both sides share a significant number of expectations and norms that make the battle possible.5 On the broadest level, war also requires the cooperation of members of a global or even regional political system. American political scientist Quincy Wright emphasized that war involves the “sanctioned use of lethal weapons” and that it is a “form of conflict involving a high degree of legal equality” (1964, 7). A state of war requires that the combatants recognize each other as such. This does not necessarily imply mutual agreement to fight, but it does mean that the groups battling recognize their mutual existence as institutionalized bodies. At this third level of social cooperation, war as a classification of violence implies that the aggression observed and measured has a certain degree of political legitimacy. As Norbert Elias ([1939] 2000) argued, in our daily lives violence is taboo and punished, but we expect states to be constantly ready to inflict carnage on possible competitors.
A Paradox of War: Organization and Anarchy
War is a paradoxical form of violence in that it requires a great degree of cooperation and coordination prior to the actual outburst. Before war can occur, individuals must unite as a group in order to fight yet another. Consider, for example, one of the earliest literary testaments of war and one filled with the madness, rage, and carnage associated with it. The Iliad is full of combat and its descriptions of what happens to those who lose are quite explicit. Yet, before any blow is struck, before the rages of Achilles (first at Agamemnon, then at Hector), consider the social effort expended in building the ships, coordinating allies, organizing embarkations, and the order necessary to maintain a camp for nine years. The earliest part of the narrative has little to do with Troy and much more about the problems of hierarchy, exchange, authority, honor, and duty that beset all social groups.
War thus reflects what could be called our animal instincts in that it can turn us into beasts – insatiable but with buckets of blood. But it is also a very human creation requiring the resolution of collective action problems, the creation of rationales and beliefs, and the planning of complex actions. The question of what war is must address both aspects. This dual face of war is often portrayed as a contrast between the ideas of seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes and eighteenth-century Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For the former, war is inevitable in that the natural state of humans is aggression and this is only controlled through the development of hierarchical and authoritative institutions. In this way “society” – and in particular the social and political institution of the state (“Leviathan”) – is what makes us behave less like the beasts we might be and more like the civilized humans we can become. For Rousseau, however, our natural state is a peaceful one and it is the development of these very same institutions, such as private property, that produces aggression.
The debate has been going on for years, from elevated philosophical and scholarly salons, to arguments over beer and coffee in bars and dorm rooms. We want to suggest that the answer, if such a definitive word can be used, is to consider how both Hobbes and Rousseau are right and wrong. Rousseau is right in that war would be impossible without some form of political authority. This is not because such institutions pervert our better natures, but because they make organized violence possible. Without the rudiments of a command structure, war dissolves into nothing more than the simultaneous, barely instrumental, acts of aggression and individual struggles for survival. Hobbes is correct in that the imposition of the monopoly over the means of violence6 is a first step toward peace (at least within the Leviathan), but he neglects the potential, and likely, competition and violence between rival leviathans.
In the next section we explore this fundamental question of whether violence and war are inherent to human nature or a human construct by examining four major questions about the nature of war. This requires us to examine archeological and anthropological evidence, socio-biological arguments, as well as questions of gender and culture.
War as a Human Construct
Was the first contact between Homo sapiens unknown to one another fraught with violence? Have we been fighting each other since we began collectively organizing? We can never know exactly what humans were doing at the beginning of our existence. We can, however, use archeological and anthropological evidence to estimate whether we “invented” warfare and, if so, at what point. In order to organize the empirical evidence available, we have broken down this debate into four questions: (a) Is war unique to humans? (b) Is war natural or instinctual? (c) Is it a particularly male phenomenon and (d) Is it universal across humanity?
Is Human War Unique?
One strategy in attempting to define the nature of war is to compare human behavior with that of animals, specifically with that of other primates. The rationale behind such a research strategy is to determine the extent to which war is a form of biological fact that we share with other creatures. The consensus of research on these topics is that (a) humans are certainly not the only species that shows aggression against its own, (b) coordinated aggression by groups is also not unique to humans, and (c) other animals engage in aggressive behavior that looks remarkably like ours, including war-like behavior.
Humans do not have a monopoly over individual aggression and violence (Huntingford 1989). The number of species that exhibit these behaviors is very large. Many species’ individuals respond to frustration, fear, or danger with displays of aggression and many fight members of their own species in competition for resources and mates. Most attention has been paid to violence among non-human primates and particularly chimpanzees. The evidence indicates that some chimpanzees can be extremely violent with each other and that they use aggression as a way of establishing, challenging, and defending hierarchies within groups (Wrangham and Glowacki 2012).
Coordinated behavior may be observed in many species, particularly while hunting, and the link between hunting and war has an illustrious intellectual history (Ehrenreich 1997). We are developing more evidence of coordination in aggression against members of the same species or within immediate groups, including wolves and primates (Wrangham 1999). But the most impressive non-human organized violent effort is that by several species of ants (Moffett 2010). These exhibit complex tactics and strategies and appear to be able to change these in light of new events or contexts. They even have complex shows of aggression and elaborate outcomes to wars including slavery.
What may best distinguish human violent behavior from that of animals is that we are the only species that is reflexive about its own capacity for violence. We have a considerable archive of moral condemnations of violence and also just as large a stack of literary and philosophical justifications and invocations of it. Especially when considering instrumental violence, we ponder alternatives and circumstances. Arguably we are the only species that plans and executes mass killing, while being quite aware of what we are doing. But this begs the question: how much of a choice do we have?
Instinctive Brutes
Konrad Lorenz, a twentieth-century Austrian ethologist, famously maintained that aggression was instinctively bred into us and that we ran the danger of using the very cognition we developed in our own destruction: “… the Prometheus who learned to preserve fire used it to roast his brothers” (Lorenz 1966, 231). More recently, Potts and Hayden (2008) have made the case of an evolutionary predisposition toward violence. To what extent is aggression and war-like behavior instinctual and inescapable?
There is considerable evidence that aggression in part is a natural, adaptive response to certain situations and stimuli (Nelson 2006). Attack behavior, for example, appears to result from the stimulation of the hypothalamus. Aggressive behavior can be induced by increases in male sex hormones, especially testosterone. A great deal of work has been done on the regulation of aggression by neurotransmitters. Continuing research is attempting to establish whether pathologically violent people share physiological or genetic characteristics that help explain their behavior.
One interesting new indication is that violent or brutal individuals may not be programmed for such behavior, but actually lack the equivalent programming for empathy (Baron-Cohen 2011). “Dehumanized perception,” which may facilitate violence and brutality, is not just the province of a few, but may be elicited in broader groups with particular signals (L. T. Harris and Fiske 2006; L. T. Harris and Fiske 2011). But there is equal evidence that we have instincts for cooperation and for affection. That human beings are hard-wired for behaviors is clear; but it should also be obvious that the on/off switches of these are not deterministically pre-set.
Perhaps the best way of thinking of the relationship between our physical makeup and war is that part of the brain is programmed to respond to some circumstances aggressively, but that this does not control every one of our actions. We are not the perfect utopian pacifists of some dreams, but nor are we the predatory sharks of our worst nightmares. Perhaps the best way to understand the complex relationship between nature, society, and war is by focusing on the relationship between it and sex.
War, Sex, and Gender7
War has been nearly the exclusive domain of men. Males make up more than 99 percent of global military forces throughout history, and even today, with the increasing participation of women in the military, global forces are still 97 percent male (J. S. Goldstein 2001, 10). But why is this the case? Are males biologically more prone to fighting, or are they taught to do so?
There is a history of controversial arguments about gendered violence and warfare originating in biology and psychology,8 much of which rests in and echoes arguments described in the previous section. While the fields are distinct, they both argue that “nature” is the source of drives, tendencies, and behaviors that respond in particular ways to environments, leading to the social organization of life, including violence and war, that we see today.
Sociobiology, the study of the biological basis of social life, argues that the male of mammalian species has an innate predisposition to aggressiveness, violence, and physicality, all leading toward a particular gendered practice of warfare. Sociobiologists highlight that males of mammalian, and particularly human, species are on average bigger, stronger, and have considerably more testosterone than females. Greater testosterone levels are associated with competitive, aggressive, and violent behavior, although there is also evidence that competitive activities themselves can precede testosterone production as well (Mazur 2005; Mehta and Josephs 2007). E. O. Wilson, the founder of sociobiology, has argued that males have a functional role in protecting the group, and are thus primed to act as soldiers, whereas females are innately passive and less aggressive (E. O. Wilson [1975] 2000).
A related field, evolutionary psychology, argues that society as it exists is the product of cognitive developments toward the evolutionary necessity of reproduction. The field was founded by John Tooby and Leda Comides, and their work (Tooby and Cosmides 1988, 2010) argues that males have been biologically and cognitively selected to be stronger, more aggressive, and adopt a “male combat identity” (2010, 196–7). An interesting suggestion from evolutionary psychology notes the relatively low value of males to females in the process of reproduction. In order to survive for more than one generation, a human group needs many females, but relatively few males (Daly and Wilson 1994). The resulting competition rewards the most aggressive males who, as in some non-human primate species, can establish their monopoly over reproduction. These genetic selections have, over the millennia, produced the stereotypical “violent male.”9
While there are biological and psychological arguments for the gendered nature of war, the strongest arguments for the gendered nature of war come from culturalist explanations (Malešević 2010; J. S. Goldstein 2001). Military service is overtly associated with masculinity and the onset of manhood (rituals for acceptance as a warrior and as an adult male are often the same), while femininity is associated with submission to and support of the warrior. In some ways, women serve as the enforcers of the masculinity of war. Women are meant to gaze at soldiers and see them (in Virginia Wolf’s phrase) “at twice their natural size” (Marshall [1947] 2000). Mothers and lovers have historically urged their men not only to take their weapons to battle, but also to either carry them back in triumph or lie upon them in death and defeat. Joanna Bourke speaks of women “buckling men’s psychological armor” (1999, 303).
Even the most prominent exceptions to the male monopoly in many ways support it or help justify it. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus has his Amazons claiming, “To draw the bow, to hurl a javelin, to bestride a horse, these are our arts; of womanly employments we know nothing” (Herodotus 1997, 177). What is interesting here is that the Amazons do not dispute a gendered division of violent labor, but claim exemption from it, even practicing self-mutilation in order to be more masculine. This has been the historical pattern with female participation in war: allowed because of special circumstances, obtaining an honorary male status, but not challenging the underlying sexual specialization.
Examples of “real life” Amazons further underscore this pattern. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Dahomey, a kingdom in present-day Benin, had an all-female military corps. They were segregated, as male military corps often are, trained intensively, and displayed ferocity in war. They did not, however, upset or transform the male hierarchy of power or expected gender norms of their culture. They would call cowardly male soldiers “women” and “sissies,” re-enforcing the association of weakness and fear with traditional women (Malešević 2010; Edgerton 2000). Similarly, during World War II, Soviet female soldiers proved to be particularly ruthless and efficient at war, but they did not disrupt the gender hierarchy, rather being seen as outside of the norm (Malešević 2010; Cottam 1983).
Generally the likelihood of women participating in battle increases when they are on the side of a radical social change, when they belong to a marginal group, or when they find themselves geographically or politically distant from the center of social power. That is, the more transgressive the group may be, the higher the likelihood of females fighting for it. Thus, frontierswomen in a variety of settings can ignore the taboo on armed females, particularly if they are fighting an enemy recognized as even more alien than an armed woman – e.g. natives in the colonial hinterlands. Similarly, guerilla armies in the twentieth century have often prominently featured female combatants. Despite these exceptions, in the twenty-first century, female participation remains rare. Even the heralded Israeli experiment, female military participation, stops short of combat (J. S. Goldstein 2001, 86), as do current US regulations. Of course, in some settings the distance between combat and support roles can be reduced to almost nothing.
The evolutionary functionality (if there ever was any) of the biological basis of the gendered nature of war disappeared long ago, and the different roles have been maintained through cultural and social expectations. Whatever its origins, once the male monopoly was established, cultural reproduction would assure that this division of labor would be perpetuated and appear “natural.” But why would males want to “own” war? While the costs of battle are obvious and women may be supposed to be spared these, they are also kept from the privileges associated with participating in them. The monopolization of violent labor may have its costs for men, but it also assured or supported their exclusive access to political and economic authority. The link between military service and citizenship or property ownership, for example, has been historically rooted, as you will read about in Chapter 5. Even today, one path to citizenship – with its rights to legitimate political and economic participation – is through military participation.
The broader nature of war may parallel the same arguments made regarding the sexual division of military labor. Yes, it is based on some inherent physiological conditions and predispositions: humans are capable of violence and it may even make evolutionary sense for us to have a threshold of danger or fear which elicits aggression in self-defense. Yet, war is too varied and too complex to be derived from individual cognitive or biological responses. War is a creation, not just of our genes, but also of our societies. The social cohesion, coordination, and political and economic production required for war have nothing to do with individual propensity for aggression or the physical dimensions of a person – particularly when we compare body types across history and cultures – and have more to do with the social organization of power and politics, more of which is discussed in Chapters 3 and 4.
Universality of War
Has war occurred everywhere and in every era? This is a critical question because if the answer is yes, we can be relatively certain that, in the words of William James, nineteenth-century philosopher and brother of Henry James, “our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won’t breed it out of us” ([1910] 1995, 19). If, on the other hand, we find significant historical or geographical pockets of peace, then we can identify the conditions that seem to produce warfare as well as its absence, and even construct a space in which this form of violence will be impossible.
The argument for the temporal and geographic universality of war has been best made by Lawrence Keeley (1996) and supported by the work of Steven LeBlanc (2003). According to this broad and deep scholarly accounting, there does not appear to be a time period or global region, or even a level of civilization immune from war. According to Keeley, the minute Homo sapiens appear on the scene, definitive evidence of homicidal violence becomes more common. He attests that there is simply no evidence that warfare in small-scale societies was more rare or a less-serious undertaking than among more “civilized” societies. We may not even make the argument that contemporary war is more violent than its pre-historic antecedents. According to Keeley, the killing ratio of “primitive” war appears to be the same or higher than in “modern” war.
This position of the historical pervasiveness of war, however, is contested. Scholars including Douglas Fry (2007; Fry and Söderberg 2013) and Brian Ferguson (2003; 2008) strongly disagree with Keeley. For them the critical moment is the Neolithic Revolution of roughly 10,000 to 8,000 BCE, when sedentary life became possible thanks to agriculture, and when we also see first evidence of permanent settlements. For these authors, the evidence cited by Keeley reflects the existence of inter-personal violence,10 but it does not provide confirmation for the existence of their more demanding definition of war – which we largely parallel here. For example, in looking at pre-Neolithic depiction of inter-personal violence, they note that it is restricted to a few individuals and does not indicate the presence of mass groups in conflict. War, they suggest, is a product of the creation and the aggregation of a stored surplus which is only possible with the Neolithic era.
This argument is supported by the work of Guilaine and Zammit (2005). They suggest that both Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons were clearly capable of violence, but that this tended to be fairly individualistic and not necessarily approaching the organization required by war. The key turning point for them is the Mesolithic (roughly 12,000 to 10,000 BCE). They emphasize two sites from roughly this time period: the first are the famous paintings in Ares del Meastre (roughly halfway between Barcelona and Valencia). These paintings clearly depict a number of individuals working in unison and fighting another group doing the same. The second site is the burial site in Djebel Sahaba in Northern Sudan where the remains of at least fifty-nine individuals have been found, most of which exhibit damage from some kind of human wielded weapons. These authors suggest that at least some of these conflicts are linked to increasing competition for control of land and water (the latter the subject of perhaps the oldest “war speech” we posses in the Epic of Gilgamesh), as well as the first indications of social inequality and competition for control. The Mesolithic thus serves as the prehistoric bridge to the “invention” of agriculture following 10,000 BCE and the subsequent creation of permanent settlements. Obviously, the dating of these periods and subsequent first indications of war varies by region (Ferguson 2008), but the key insight is that warfare as we have defined it seems closely associated with the establishment of more sedentary living arrangements.11 The same linkage between social complexity and new forms of conflict may be seen in Mesoamerica (Hassig 1992).
The evidence in this debate is tricky and may be a perfect example of how hard it is to confirm falsifiable statements in social science. First, archeological evidence only reveals what is found. Archeological analysis may be an extreme example of looking for lost or dropped items only below the street lamp – not because they are more likely to be there, but because that is the only place where we can see them. We may never know if many incidents of organized violence preceded the Mesolithic – we simply have not found evidence of them. What we do know is that certainly from that point onward (with different dates for different regions), warfare appeared practically everywhere. More contemporary anthropological evidence can be read in conflicting ways as well. The behavior of the famous Yanomamo of Venezuela can and has been read as evidence of their inherent violent natures as well as the more benign nature of humanity (Ferguson 2003).
The positive correlation between social complexity and war making is quite strong among anthropological studies (Fry 2007; Eckhardt 1990). If civilization is about the process of orderly aggregation of humans and synchronization of needs and hierarchies, then war may not only be conducive to it, but it may be the ultimate expression of it. Certainly the apparent coincidence of the appearance of organized violence and the very first agriculturally fed permanent settlements suggest that war and civilization are anything but antagonistic. Similarly, the apparent rise in violence accompanying increases in social, political, and economic complexity during the Neolithic Era also supports some sort of relationship between social, economic, and political complexity and war. The very victory of agricultural civilization, which is at the core of our contemporary life (Massey 2005), may have been as a result of war. While previously most had considered that the craft and science of agriculture was diffused peacefully from a few centers, increasing evidence points to a process of conquest and colonization by our farming ancestors. It is also possible that the greater likelihood of conflict further encouraged urban concentrations and the development of walls, thereby further privileging the central role of cities in social life.
The conclusion we can come to from the evidence available is that while inter-personal violence may be a part of our physical and cognitive composition, the more complex process which we call war is not.12
