Is War Declining – and Why?

journal of pR eaceESEARCH Review Essay Journal of Peace Research 50(2) 149–157 Is war declining – and why? ª The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0022343312461023 jpr.sagepub.com Azar Gat Department of Political Science, University of Tel Aviv Abstract The article reviews and assesses the recent literature that claims a sharp decrease in fighting and violent mortality rate since prehistory and during recent times. It also inquires into the causes of this decrease. The article supports the view, firmly established over the past 15 years and unrecognized by only one of the books reviewed, that the first massive decline in violent mortality occurred with the emergence of the state-Leviathan. Hobbes was right, and Rousseau was wrong, about the great violence of the human state of nature. The rise of the state-Leviathan greatly reduced in-group violent mortality by establishing internal peace. Less recognized, it also decreased out-group war fatalities. Although state wars appear large in absolute terms, large states actually meant lower mobilization rates and reduced exposure of the civilian population to war. A second major step in the decline in the frequency and fatality of war has occurred over the last two centuries, including in recent decades. However, the exact periodization of, and the reasons for, the decline are a matter of dispute among the authors reviewed. Further, the two World Wars con- stitute a sharp divergence from the trend, which must be accounted for. The article surveys possible factors behind the decrease, such as industrialization and rocketing economic growth, commercial interdependence, the liberal- democratic peace, social attitude change, nuclear deterrence, and UN peacekeeping forces. It argues that contrary to the claim of some of the authors reviewed, war has not become more lethal and destructive over the past two centuries, and thus this factor cannot be the cause of war’s decline. Rather, it is peace that has become more profitable. At the same time, the specter of war continues to haunt the parts of the world less affected by many of the above devel- opments, and the threat of unconventional terror is real and troubling. Keywords declining violence, declining war, evolutionary psychology, human history, human violence When quite a number of scholars simultaneously and (Gat, 2006), I agree with the authors’ general thesis. independently of one another arrive at very similar con- However, their unanimity falters over, and they are less clusions on an issue of cardinal theoretical and practical clear about, the historical trajectory of and the reasons for significance, their thesis deserves, and has received, great the decline in violence and war, questions that are as attention. The thesis is that war and violence in general important as the general thesis itself. have progressively decreased in recent times, during the modern era, and even throughout history. Of course, despite their unanimity, all these scholars could still be Hobbes was right, and Rousseau wrong, about wrong. Indeed, each of them tells a similar story of peo- the state of nature ple’s disbelief at their findings, most notably that we live in the most peaceful period in human history. Some of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) them even explain the general incredulity by the findings towers above all the other books surveyed here in size, of evolutionary psychology according to which we tend scope, boldness, and scholarly excellence. It has to be overly optimistic about ourselves but overly pessi- mistic about the world at large. Having myself written Corresponding author: about the marked decrease in deadly human violence [email protected] Downloaded from jpr.sagepub.com at Masarykova Univerzita on January 23, 2015 150 journal of PEACE RESEARCH 50(2) deservedly attracted great public attention and has in 1788. And the evidence shows that the Australian become a best-seller. Massively documented, this 800- tribes fought incessantly with one another. Even in the page volume is lavishly furnished with statistics, charts, Central Australian Desert, whose population density was and diagrams, which are one of the book’s most effective as low as one person per 35 square miles, among the low- features. The book, spanning the whole human past as est there is, conflict and deadly fighting were the rule. far back as our aboriginal condition, points to two major Much of that fighting centered on the water-holes vital steps in the decline of violence. The first is the sharp for survival in this area, with the violent death rate there decline in violent mortality which resulted from the rise reckoned to have been several times higher than in any of the state-Leviathan from around 5,000 years ago. This state society. In most other places, hunting territories conclusion is based on the most comprehensive studies were monopolized and fiercely defended by hunter- of the subject published over the past 15 years (Keeley, gatherers because they were quickly depleted. Even 1996; LeBlanc, 2003; Gat, 2006), which demonstrate among the Inuit of Arctic Canada, who were so sparse on the basis of anthropological and archaeological evi- as to experience no resource competition, fighting to dence that Hobbes’s picture of the anarchic state of kidnap women was pervasive, resulting in a violent death nature as a very violent one was fundamentally true. Pin- rate 10 times higher than the USA’s peak rate of 1990, ker rightly summarizes that violent mortality with the itself the highest in the developed world. In more hospi- rise of states dropped from a staggering estimated 15% table and densely populated environments casualties of the population, 25% of the men, in pre-state societies, averaged, as already mentioned, 15% of the population to about 1–5%. The main reason for this drop is the and 25% of the men, and the surviving men were cov- enforcement of internal peace by the Leviathan, but also, ered with scars (Gat, 2006: chs 2, 6). less noted by Pinker, lower mobilization rates and a We are not dealing here with a piece of exotic curios- smaller exposure of the civilian population to war than ity. Ninety-five percent of the history of our species with tribal groups, as will be explained shortly. Homo sapiens sapiens – people who are like us – was This conclusion regarding the dramatic drop in vio- spent as hunter-gatherers. The transition to agriculture lent mortality with the transition to the state is at odds and the state is very recent, the tip of the iceberg, in with the claim made by Jack Levy & William Thompson human history. Furthermore, the human state of nature in their book, The Arc of War (2011). As the book’s title turns out to be no different than the state of nature in implies, Levy & Thompson posit a great increase in war- general. Here too, science has made a complete turn- fare during history, before a decrease during the past two about. During the 1960s people believed that animals centuries. Thus, the book claims that mortality in fight- did not kill each other within the same species, which ing greatly increased, ‘accelerated’ in the authors’ lan- made humans appear like a murderous exception and fed guage, with the transition to the state. They reach this speculations that warfare emerged only with civilization. conclusion by making several mistaken assumptions. Since then, however, it has been found that animals kill First, although professing ignorance about the distant each other extensively within species, a point pressed on past because of the lack of evidence on the behavior of every viewer of television nature documentaries. There is hunter-gatherer societies before the adoption of agricul- nothing special about humans in this regard. Thus, lethal ture some 10,000 years ago, they cite and are heavily human fighting did not ‘emerge’ at some point in his- influenced by the old Rousseauite anthropology of the tory, as Levy & Thompson posit. generation after the 1960s, which recent studies have refuted. Violent death sharply decreased with the rise of Obviously, one does not have to accept the above findings regarding the pervasiveness and great lethality the Leviathan of prehistoric warfare. But Levy & Thompson simply As mentioned earlier and as Pinker well realizes, violent do not engage with them. They accept as true the Rous- mortality actually dropped steeply with the emergence of seauite premise that sparse human population could not the state-Leviathan. Here is where Levy & Thompson possibly have had that much to fight about. However, make a second mistake. For measuring the lethality of recently extant hunter-gatherer societies prove the oppo- warfare they use evidence of battle mortality, but this site. Australia is our best laboratory of hunter-gatherer is highly misleading for various reasons. First, pre-state societies, because that vast continent was entirely popu- tribes’ main fighting modes were not the battle but the lated by them and ‘unpolluted’ by agriculturalists, raid and the ambush – capturing the enemy by surprise pastoralists or states until the arrival of the Europeans and often annihilating entire sleeping camps: men, Downloaded from jpr.sagepub.com at Masarykova Univerzita on January 23, 2015 Gat 151 women, and children. Second, the size of battles merely also grew in size. Yet it was the anarchy and feudal frag- indicates the size of the states and their armies, which are mentation in Europe between the fall of the Roman obviously larger than tribal groups in absolute terms. Yet Empire and 1200 that were responsible for the pervasive the main question is relative casualties, what percentage of insecurity and endemic violence that characterized the the population died violently.

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