How did World War One end? The most moving First World War poems. June 28, - Gavrilo Princip assassinates Franz Ferdinand. July 28, - Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia. August 2, - Ottoman Empire Turkey and Germany sign a secret treaty of alliance. August 3, - Germany declares war on France. August 4, - Germany invades Belgium, leading Britain to declare war on Germany.
August 10, - Austria-Hungary invades Russia. Which nation was the primary aggressor? Why did the US join the war? Is it wrong to try to point the finger? Can any individual be blamed for the First World War? Is Russia preparing to invade Ukraine? Getting to grips with. Quiz of The Week: 6 - 12 November. Quizzes and puzzles. The VP, GPs and refugees. The Bank of England official warning women against home working. Popular articles. Insulate Britain: what the protesters want.
A fourth motive—fear—enters the picture when reason is unable to constrain appetite or spirit. Fear is a powerful emotion, not an innate drive.
In real worlds, multiple motives mix rather than blend, giving rise to a range of behaviours that often appear contradictory. In modern times the spirit thumos has largely been ignored by philosophy and social science. I contend it is omnipresent. It gives rise to the universal drive for self-esteem, which finds expression in the quest for honor or standing. By excelling at activities valued by our peer group or society, we win the approbation of those who matter and feel good about ourselves.
Institutions and states have neither psyches nor emotions. The people who run these collectivities or identify with them do. They often project their psychological needs on to their political units, and feel better about themselves when those units win victories or perform well. Transference and esteem by vicarious association are especially pronounced in the age of nationalism where the state has become the relevant unit. I documented the relevance of the spirit for war in a series of case studies in A Cultural Theory of International Relations.
In Why Nations Fight Cambridge University Press, I extend my analysis to war throughout the modern era and analyse war initiation in terms of the relative power of states and their respective motives for war. I constructed a data set of all inter-state wars involving great and aspiring rising powers from to the present.
The data set identifies initiators of war often multiple ; their motives security, material advantage, standing, revenge, and domestic politics ; the outcome win, lose, or draw ; the nature of the rules, if any, governing warfare; the duration and intensity of the war; and the character of the peace settlement.
Contrary to realist expectations, I find security responsible for only 19 of 94 wars. A significant number of these wars pitted great powers against other great powers and none of them were associated with power transitions.
This does not mean that security is unimportant in international affairs; it was a primary concern of all states that were attacked. Material interests are also a weak motive for war, being responsible for only 8 wars, and most of those in the eighteenth century. Security and material interest sometimes act in concert with one another, and more often with other motives.
In some wars they are secondary to these other motives. Standing, by contrast, is responsible for 62 wars as a primary or secondary motive. Revenge, also a manifestation of the spirit, is implicated in another There can be little doubt that the spirit is the principal cause of war across the centuries, and that it and its consequences have been almost totally ignored in the international relations literature.
The character and robustness of domestic, regional and international societies and ideas about the efficacy of war determine the relative importance of various motives for war and its overall frequency.
Interest shows a sharp decline once mercantilism gave way to more sophisticated understandings of wealth. Security-motivated wars show no similar decline by century but come in clusters associated with bids for hegemony by great or dominant powers. The most recent clusters of security-related wars were associated with the run up and conduct of the two world wars of the twentieth century. They were in turn a product of the dislocations brought about of modernisation in an environment where great power competition and the drive for hegemony were conducted primarily by violent means.
Complex hunter-gatherers, in contrast, live in fixed settlements with populations in the hundreds. They maintain social rankings of kin groups and individuals, restrict access to food resources by lines of descent and have more developed political leadership. Signs of such social complexity first appeared during the Mesolithic. The appearance of complex hunter-gatherers can sometimes but not always mark a transitional stage to agriculture, the basis for the development of political states.
These groups, moreover, often waged war. The preconditions for war are only part of the story, however, and by themselves, they may not suffice to predict outbreaks of collective conflicts. In the Southern Levant, for instance, those preconditions existed for thousands of years without evidence of war. Why, though, was there an absence of conflict?
It turns out that many societies also have distinct preconditions for peace. Many social arrangements impede war, such as cross-group ties of kinship and marriage; cooperation in hunting, agriculture or food sharing; flexibility in social arrangements that allow individuals to move to other groups; norms that value peace and stigmatize killing; and recognized means for conflict resolution.
These mechanisms do not eliminate serious conflict, but they do channel it in ways that either prevent killing or keep it confined among a limited number of individuals. If this is so, why then are later archaeological findings, along with explorers' and anthropologists' reports, so full of deadly warfare? Over millennia preconditions of war became more common in more places.
Once established, war has a tendency to spread, with violent peoples replacing less violent ones. States evolved around the world, and states are capable of militarizing peoples on their peripheries and trade routes.
Environmental upheavals such as frequent droughts aggravate and sometimes generate conditions that lead to war, and peace may not return when conditions ease. Particularly notable was the intensification of the Medieval Warm period, from roughly A. In that period war increased in areas across the Americas, the Pacific and elsewhere. In most of the world, war was long established, but conflicts worsened, with mounting casualties tallied.
Then came European global expansion, which transformed, intensified and sometimes generated indigenous war around the world. These confrontations were not just driven by conquest and resistance. Local peoples began to make war on one another, drawn into new hostilities by colonial powers and the commodities they provided. Interaction between ancient and recent expanding states, and the ensuing conflicts, encouraged formation of distinctive tribal identities and divisions.
Areas still beyond colonial control underwent changes impelled by longer-distance effects of trade, disease and population displacement—all of which led to wars. States also stirred up conflict among local peoples by imposing political institutions with clear boundaries rather than the amorphous local identities and limited authorities they often encountered in their colonial forays.
But a careful examination of ethnographically known violence among local peoples in the historical record provides an alternative perspective. Hunter-gatherers of northwestern Alaska from the late 18th through the 19th centuries demonstrate the fallacy of projecting ethnography of contemporary peoples into humanity's distant past. Intense war involving village massacres lingers in detailed oral traditions. This deadly violence is cited as evidence of war by hunter-gatherers before disruption by expanding states.
Archaeology, however, combined with the history of the region, provides a very different assessment. There are no hints of war in early archaeological remains in the simple cultures of Alaskan hunter-gatherers.
The first signs of war appear between A. But these conflicts were limited in size and probably intensity. With favorable climatic conditions by A. After a couple of centuries, war became common. War in the 19th century, however, was much worse, so severe that it caused decline of the regional population. Debate over war and human nature will not soon be resolved. The idea that intensive, high-casualty violence was ubiquitous throughout prehistory has many backers. It has cultural resonance for those who are sure that we as a species naturally tilt toward war.
Broadly, early finds provide little if any evidence suggesting war was a fact of life. People are people. They fight and sometimes kill. Humans have always had a capacity to make war, if conditions and culture so dictate. But those conditions and the warlike cultures they generate became common only over the past 10, years—and, in most places, much more recently than that.
The high level of killing often reported in history, ethnography or later archaeology is contradicted in the earliest archaeological findings around the globe. Anthropologists are looking at whether closely related primates show an instinctive propensity toward group killing.
Delving into the question of human predisposition to war often involves looking beyond our species to examine the experiences of our chimpanzee relatives. Human warfare involves opponents that often include multiple local groups that may be unified by widely varying forms of political organization.
Despite these distinctions, some scientists have argued that chimpanzees demonstrate an innate propensity to kill outsiders, inherited from the last common ancestor of chimps and people—an impulse that still subliminally pushes humans as well into deadly conflicts with those outside their communities. My work disputes the claim that chimpanzee males have an innate tendency to kill outsiders, arguing instead that their most extreme violence can be tied to specific circumstances that result from disruption of their lives by contact with humans.
Making that case has required my going through every reported chimpanzee killing. From this, a simple point can be made. Critical examination of a recent compilation of killings from 18 chimpanzee research sites—together amounting to years of field observations—reveals that of 27 observed or inferred intergroup killings of adults and adolescents, 15 come from just two highly conflicted situations, which occurred at two sites in — and —, respectively.
The two situations amount to nine years of observation, tallying a kill rate of 1. The remaining years of observation average just 0. The question is whether the outlier cases are better explained as evolved, adaptive behavior or as a result of human disruption.
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