Goetze Pathways to Conflict ETPS 2010X

PATHWAYS TO ETHNIC CONFLICT* David Goetze Utah State University Abstract In recent years, the tidy framework of rational choice models and the untethered plasticity of culture models have come under challenge as approaches to explaining human social behaviors. Chief among scientifically-oriented competitors are biologic, evolutionary, and cognitive science approaches. This new work is helping to fill in the notorious “black box” that, in an earlier era, characterized human brain function. Reasoning in cognitive science and evolutionary theory is expanding our conceptual understanding of how the human brain really works and how it generates behaviors while a growing body of empirical work is enabling us to begin the testing of derived hypotheses. Even before the recent explosion of life science research, the modern synthesis of genetics and Darwinian natural selection solidified the underpinnings of evolutionary theory and paved the way for its use as a framework or paradigm for studying human social behaviors. This article asks what the evolutionary paradigm and life sciences can contribute to explaining one of the more important broad-scale behavior sets of the human species – those pertaining to warfare and, especially, to ethnic war, often cast as a primordial and seemingly ineradicable form of human conflict. The quick answer is that these modes of thought and research draw on evolutionary reasoning to formulate and constrain hypotheses about the causes and consequences of war; dispense with arbitrary and unduly limiting conceptions of human nature that stymied the search for genuine sources of warfare; and explore research areas, for example, human neurology and genetics, that were utterly untapped a few decades ago and are now offering a cornucopia of scientific evidence relevant to all types of human social behaviors. Here, we make no attempt to cover the gamut of topics unleashed by these new perspectives, but merely to trace broad outlines of these developments and to mention how some areas are progressing and might be mined for more knowledge about human warfare. *Presented at the conference on Evolutionary Theory and Political Science, 4-5 June 2010, San Domenico di Fiesole, Italy 2 PATHWAYS TO ETHNIC CONFLICT The phrase, “ethnic war,” conjures up visions of deeply bonded tribes fighting it out across ancient landscapes over grudges that have recurring qualities – blood feuds, battles for territory, raids over resources and women. In the 21 st century, however, ethnicity is hardly a relic of the past despite the predictions of Marxist and “modernization” theorists about its imminent demise. In contemporary times ethnicity seems to be the focal point for conflicts as destructive and lethal as any that played out in historical or prehistorical contexts. One only needs to witness the carnage of recent or ongoing conflicts in Sudan, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Chechnya, and Tibet to be persuaded. Even the state-inspired wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seem to have an ethnic subtext. A common fear expressed about Iraq, for example, is that it will degenerate into a full-blown ethnic war when the Americans finally withdraw. Indeed, ethnic warfare and related forms of ethnic group violence have been the scourge of the last half century accounting for upwards of some 20 million unnatural deaths, untold injuries, tens of millions of displaced refugees, economic destruction and unfathomable psychological anguish. Any improvement in our understanding of the sources of ethnic war has to be welcome. The claim here is that advances in the depth of understanding and expansion of the scope of application of evolutionary theory along with the explosion in the methods and quantity of life sciences research on human social behavior are offering new opportunities for expanding our understanding of human warfare. Of course, this work is not likely to result in critical and sudden revelations of the causes of ethnic war. Any progress is likely to be drawn out as with most scientific endeavors. In the short term, however, we can hope that some fresh approaches will be added to explanations of war, that new and interesting hypotheses will be formulated, and that novel sets of data will be generated that bear on these hypotheses. For that matter, even improved understanding of the multiple causes of ethnic war will not necessarily lead us to the steps needed for their prevention or resolution. Rather, we might expect that some expansion will take place in the tools employed to resolve and prevent warfare. Overall, these claims are modest but they do involve tapping pools of research resources that are fairly unexploited and may one day may yield important results. Past Approaches to the Study of Social Behaviors One way to put developments in the biologic, evolutionary, and cognitive sciences into context is to trace the emergence of novel approaches to the study of human behavior over the last half century. Every academic generation seems to tout at least one new approach and over the last fifty years several have taken shape that differ fairly drastically in their premises about the internal workings of the human animal and about how they translate environmental inputs into behavioral outputs. 3 Behavioral Revolution Sometime in the middle of the last century a new “revolutionary” approach to the study of human psychology and social life emerged. It was dubbed the “behavioral revolution” and took as its central premise that what goes on inside humans was largely unknown and unobservable. Since our knowledge about human internal functioning was speculative at best, we should worry about it less, treat it as a black, empty box (John Locke’s tabula rasa, recently and artfully examined by Stephen Pinker, 2002) and focus not on the internal workings of humans, but instead on the observable “inputs” to human life, that is, the stimuli that emanate from our external environments and impinge on our lives and, secondly and most importantly, the observable “outputs” of human functioning – human behaviors. This new approach was a Godsend and a field day for those who wanted to push the study of human activity into the realm of science. They could devise measurements of observable inputs and outputs and assess correlations among them. A parallel revolution in quantitative analysis began and lent a veneer, perhaps even the substance, of true science to the analysis of human behaviors. In the study of warfare, researchers could search for factors that had some plausible connection to the onset of war, measure these factors for a multitude of war contexts, and assess their correlation with the observation of actual wars. J. David Singer’s Correlates of War project (Singer and Small; Geller and Singer, 1998; Singer, 2010), Ted Robert Gurr’s (1970, 1996) research on ethnic conflicts and rebellions, and Rummel’s (1975, 1976) quantitative analyses are noteworthy examples of the genre and continue to shape contemporary research on warfare especially in the field of Political Science. The Correlates of War project has been especially influential spawning hundreds of studies ( www.correlatesofwar.org ) that utilize the extensive database amassed by Singer and his colleagues on the various features and hypothesized correlates of mostly interstate, modern wars. Through its use, researchers have thoroughly examined features of national capability, geography, structure of alliances and the international system, military buildups, trade, regime type, and culture. The fruitfulness of the behavioral approach in the general study of social behaviors was soon challenged, however, by the realization that there must be something of import going on inside the human brain moderating environment-behavior relationships and that those correlations would never be adequately understood without a grasp of the interceding human material. The problem was complicated even further in the case of war studies by the focus on structured collectivities, such as states, that were presumed somehow to be the primary actors in initiating and conducting wars. The building blocks of collectivities are people and if individuals are themselves little more than empty vessels, their aggregations must be tantamount to the outcome of multiplying by zero. In an article written more than a quarter century after the initiation of the Correlates of War project, Singer (2000) himself seemed to comprehend the nature of the problem, lamenting about the limitations of what had been accomplished through behavioral research on warfare and noting that the causes of war had still to be definitively identified. Initially, he blamed the problem on the complexities of social phenomena and the complexities of causality even wondering if causality itself was not a “chimera.” But 4 echoing a theme of the present article, Singer concluded that the way out of these perplexities was to focus the study of warfare on the construction of decision-making models, that is, articulation of how human brains operate to produce social behaviors and especially decisions about mobilizing for warfare. Those decisions, he surmised, would take into account the environmental variations that had been the target of so much prior study. Of course, a model of how humans made decisions and how the brain functioned was absent by design from the behavioral perspective. Long before Singer arrived at his own conclusions about the crucial role of human decision making, different approaches were being launched to fill in the void; to paint something

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