After watching https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kARkOdRHaj8 I had a search on Reddit for a community just like this one. Conflict is an every day battle that we have to face with others and ourselves. It sad to see not many people are interested in the study of it. If only it was taught in schools because truly conflict is the root of every war and every act of violence (sometime a conflict with self).

I would love to see and hear more, any stories people have, even if you come across this post in the years to come. Because understanding conflict is the important foundation for understanding ourselves and the very valuable relationships we have in life.

Conflicts are the part of society from very old time. Conflicts are the part of every relationship. There is no relationship exists in this world without conflicts. So, the best way to resolve every conflict is talking about it maturely instead of acting childish and manipulative. 

Most of the relationships does not work because they don’t want to listen each other, they constantly trying to prove themselves right and other one is wrong, they thought that everything wrong done but second party, they constantly try to satisfy their ego. They don’t want to solve anything, they don’t want to listen, pick calls, reply to text and they broke up. This will end a beautiful relationship and they become completely stranger start ignoring.for more

People are selfish

People are clanish

People are territorial

People form allies but those ties can break down if allies are busy with their own problems

Most wars have genocidal aims

War often works in accomplishing objectives

People don’t step in, nobody cares, wants to get involved

People with minimal provocation can do things they won’t normally do, riot syndrome

Family and society pressures are very powerful in more primitive societies

People think nothing about killing animals for food. So what stops them from extending that logic to other people?

Lots of people have gene for fighting. These are usually people who lean right politically. Usually find such types in law enforcement, EMT, fireman , contractors, handymen, etc..

Weapons give immense power to marginalized individuals

Terror states work

Women have some inexplicable attraction to violent men.. As they say, nice guys finish last

People would rather die than change lifestyle/religion/habits

Provides sense of purpose and pride to an otherwise boring existence where we have little control over our surroundings

I'm proposing an online platform which will mediate disagreements between its visitors. Here is how it will work:

1. A controversial political decision is considered (e.g. How Brexit should be resolved?).
2. Analysts of the platform create an influence diagram of the decision situation without specifying the parts which are controversial (e.g. How important is preservation of British identity?).
3. Arguers of the platform list argument about how the controversial parts should be evaluated.
4. Ordinary platform users explore the diagram, read the arguments and specify their opinions about the controversial parts similar to a questionnaire.
5. Based on the user's inputs, the influence diagram recommends the decision with the highest expected value. Different users get different recommendations.
6. Critical parts of the diagram which causes the most amount of disagreement are identified.
7. Analysts review and provide more detailed models for the critical parts. Arguers focus on the critical parts to have the most influence on the decision recommendations.
8. Steps 4-7 repeat until the diagram is so detailed and arguments are so comprehensive that the overwhelming majority of the participants have the same view of the decision situation.
9. Either the decision which satisfies overwhelming majority emerges or the shared understanding is used to run a successful negotiation.

Do you think such a platform will be effective? If not, why?

I'll be happy to provide more explanation and share the prototype if you are interested.

There is little doubt that conflict and conflict management have coevolved. Being competitive certainly has reproductive payoffs, but a capacity to end conflicts also is beneficial. It is this combination that defines much of today’s political life. Over the past 5 to 7 million years, humans have diverged from their two Pan congeners in several major respects that impinge on conflict and its management.

First, at the level of the phenotype, we temporarily lost the alpha male role by becoming politically egalitarian (40). This means that we lost both a selfishly efficient oppressor and a forceful, but altruistic, peacemaker. Second, at the level of genotype, we acquired a conscience (with a sense of shame) that made us moral. This changed the very nature of our group life (24), for now, in addition to primitive, fearfully submissive reactions to the power of others, moral hunter-gatherers follow rules simply because group values support them. It seems we have evolved to internalize such values (41, 42).

This thinking applies to all humans, but here we focus on how conflict and conflict management work in the simpler foraging bands we have been considering as later paleoanthropological exemplars. Today’s evolutionarily appropriate foragers are of the type who are spatially mobile and highly cooperative and who vigilantly keep their egalitarian orders in place with only muted leadership. Because there are no alpha males to intervene authoritatively in their disputes, a serious dyadic conflict can quickly result in homicide.

Indeed, the homicide rate per capita for egalitarian foragers is as high as in large American cities (5, 40, 43). Within the community, evidence for “homicide” in adult chimpanzees and bonobos is mostly inferential but highly suggestive. For example, at Gombe alpha-male Goblin would likely have been killed by solo challenger Wilkie had not a veterinarian intervened (16), whereas at the Mahale field site the alpha male was photographically documented as being killed by other males (18). Among bonobos, a savage attack by half a dozen united females may have killed an adult male (11). Thus, ancestrally within-group conflict likely had at least some modest effect on adult mortality.

Aside from the important issue of morality as a derived behavior that intensifies social control and makes it more effective, in the area of conflict there are several other significant differences between humans and the two other species in our small clade. One is weapons. Bonobos and especially chimpanzees may use tools, but the use of weapons as humans do, to hunt sizable mammals, is totally absent (44). Bonobos and chimpanzees do have the potential to kill a smaller mammal, mainly using their canines (45), and this is also true of conspecific group attacks (11, 14), which usually take at least several minutes for severe damage to be rendered. Human foragers use efficient hunting weapons to kill sizable mammals and members of their own species alike, and with these weapons they can do so much more quickly, at a distance, and often from ambush (46). These differences escalated the consequences of human conflict. Further escalation stemmed from the uniquely human propensity to lethally retaliate for the death of a close relative (47), a behavior that in all likelihood is not ancestral but which figures prominently in hunter-gatherer conflict. Thus, for humans the scope and consequences of serious conflict within the group would appear to be considerably greater than with ancestral Pan.

Another human difference is the understanding of death. When omnivorous chimpanzees or bonobos hunt, unlike dedicated carnivores, they have no evolved response that makes them into efficient automatic killers; in fact, prey may be eaten alive (14). When chimpanzee patrols savagely attack strangers they leave them battered and torn (25), but sometimes alive with some very small chance of recovery (14). This also is true of the one observed serious within-group attack by bonobos (11). In contrast, in spite of their diverse supernatural beliefs human foragers understand death as a termination of social responsiveness and muscular activity, and they inflict it deliberately. For instance, when egalitarian hunter-gatherers use capital punishment to eliminate despots, they shoot to kill (24). Humans readily become lethal revenge-seekers, and chimpanzees and bonobos may at least try to retaliate for a prior aggression (10, 14), so there were likely some modest ancestral preadaptations for such behavior (47). However, understanding how to kill with lethal weapons can lead to such motives becoming costly to groups, particularly when revenge becomes moralized as a matter of honor. On the other hand, being vindictive can be useful to a group if such a reputation keeps it from being attacked (48). This holds for foragers that are given to conflict and even more so for clannish patrilocal tribal farmers (49, 50). Among simpler hunter-gatherers, when a male kills another male, usually over a female, close relatives will predictably seek lethal retaliation (40), and the killer’s only recourse is to move away. But with those foragers who do develop active, intensive raiding and warfare patterns, revenge needs also can help to motivate much larger attacks by entire groups (51).

Warfare is a major problem for modern humans, and most theories of warfare focus directly on resource competition (52). However, materialistic theories fail to fully explain the warfare patterns of forager societies (31, 53). For instance, the Iñupiaq hunter-gatherers of northwest Alaska compete with some of their close neighbors for nearby natural resources, but at long distance they also conduct prolonged nonterritorial genocidal warfare against enemy bands, with surprise attacks and pitched battles motivated by retaliation (51). Here, I believe it is not necessary to favor one cause. A serious intergroup conflict may begin because of either resource competition or revenge, and the pattern can continue because of either factor, or both (47).

Unabridged source: C. Boehm, 'Ancestral Hierarchy and Conflict' (2012)

References:

5. R. W. Wrangham, Yearb. Phys. Anthropol. 42, 1 (1999).

6. F. B. M. de Waal, F. Lanting, Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape (Univ. of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1997).

7. I. Parker, New Yorker, 30 July 2007, p. 48.

8. J. Goodall, The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior (Belknap, Cambridge, MA, 1986).

9. J. Goodall, in Human Origins, vol. 1 of Topics in Primatology, T. Nishida, W. C. McGrew, P. Marler, M. Pickford, F. B. M. de Waal, Eds. (Univ. of Tokyo Press, Tokyo, 1992), pp. 131–142.

10. S. Ladd, K. Maloney, Chimp murder in Mahale, www.nomad-tanzania.com/blogs/greystoke-mahale/ murder-in-mahale (2011).

11. C. Boehm, Moral Origins: The Evolution of Altruism, Virtue, and Shame (Basic, New York, 2012).

12. M. N. Muller, J. C. Mitani, Adv. Stud. Behav. 35, 275 (2005).

13. R. C. Kelly, Warless Societies and the Evolution of War (Univ. of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2000).

14. B. M. Knauft, Curr. Anthropol. 32, 391 (1991)

15. H. Gintis, J. Theor. Biol. 220, 407 (2003).

16. H. A. Simon, Science 250, 1665 (1990).

17. R. W. Wrangham, M. L. Wilson, M. N. Muller, Primates 47, 14 (2006).

18. W. C. McGrew, The Cultured Chimpanzee: Reflections on Cultural Primatology (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2004).

19. C. B. Stanford, The Hunting Apes: Meat Eating and the Origins of Human Behavior (Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, NJ, 1999).

20. J. Woodburn, Man (London) 17, 431 (1982)

21. C. Boehm, Br. J. Criminol. 51, 518 (2011).

22. C. Boehm, Br. J. Criminol. 51, 518 (2011).

23. C. Boehm, Blood Revenge: The Enactment and Management of Conflict in Montenegro and Other Tribal Societies (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1986).

24. N. A. Chagnon, Science 239, 985 (1988).

25. K. F. Otterbein, C. S. Otterbein, Am. Anthropol. 67, 1470 (1965).

26. E. S. Burch, Alliance and Conflict: The World System of the Iñupiaq Eskimos (Univ. of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, 2005).

27. M. Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture (Thomas Crowell, New York, 1968).

28. N. Chagnon, Yanomamo: The Fierce People (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, New York, 1983).

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Decommissioned UNITA BMP-1 and BM-21 Grads at an assembly point

There is a wealth of literature on the best methods to achieve buy-in among key stakeholders in post-civil conflict peace negotiations. Rothchild (1995), Kingma (1997), and Gutteridge (1962) all argue that agreeing specifics, particularly with regards to security issues (Hartzell 1999, Rothchild 2002, Jarstad and Nilsson 2008), is key to ensuring a treaty that can be implemented without contention. Inbal and Lerner (2006), conversely, argue that specifics can be left outside the bounds of a treaty in order to secure sufficient stakeholder support.

To date, however, little academic research has focused specifically on the role that military officers can play in peace negotiations. Stedman (1997) and Atlas and Licklider (1999) highlight ways in which different actors can spoil peace negotiations from both inside and outside the room, especially as groups can splinter internally from negotiation pressures, but does not address military officers as a group. Cunningham (2006) notes that the more people at the table, the more difficult achieving any agreement will be, but again does not differentiate on the type of actors that should be included or excluded. Themner (2017) argues that it is important to consider military actors when discussing peace terms, he does not address the possibility of having military representatives at the table. Additionally, he discusses the impact of military leaders on negotiations, but argues that their background makes them more likely to seek military options rather than negotiate and compromise, a finding this piece challenges.

My research focuses on how to integrate opposing sides into a post-civil war unified military, and analyses the case studies of Angola and Mozambique to examine the peace negotiations and implementation processes in order to build more general principles about how to conduct post-conflict military integration.

Military personnel not only have important war-fighting capabilities, but also unique peace-making potentials that are often overlooked by current theory and doctrine. Soldiers are increasingly familiar with the growing list of demands and skills required of them in their deployments that go far beyond traditional understandings of what it means to be a soldier, which means their insights into conflict resolution can be extremely valuable. In particular, operating in environments without infrastructure and rebuilding after disasters are critical in the early post-conflict periods.

In Angola, there were three peace treaties, with negotiations starting in 1989 and the implementation of the final treaty concluding around 2005. In Mozambique, peace negotiations began around 1990 and implementation concluded around 1998. My argument is that, more often than not, it is useful to have military representatives at the negotiating table, both when discussing issues related to security but also more generally. My argument is comprised of two parts:

1. Military personnel bring unique knowledge to the table
2. The buy-in of military personnel into the peace process is necessary for peace to have a greater chance of occurring

For the first piece of the argument, the case of the Angolan civil war is illustrative. The Angolan civil war lasted from 1975-2002 and resulted in four peace treaties, with only the last one actually working in the long-term. What makes it an especially interesting case is that over the course of these four treaties, the role of military personnel and particularly the level of detail given to the discussion of security issues increased from one treaty to the next. Over the past few months, I have been interviewing diplomats and military actors from all sides of the negotiations in order to understand why this might be.

In most modern civil wars, by the time that generals get to the negotiating table, they have deeply personal understandings of exactly what is going on in their conflict. This knowledge is developed through personal exposure to the battlefield environment, providing insight that mediators would not otherwise have. They also have raw knowledge of events that are more up to date than the polished assessments the political elite receive from analysts and think tanks. Therefore, for example, when discussing where troops can move in order for a ceasefire to be implemented, the hard-won knowledge of battlefield dynamics could be useful in producing a plan that is practical as well as political.

Additionally, one common feature of both Angola and Mozambique’s civil wars, like many other conflicts throughout sub-Saharan Africa, was the importance of colonial infrastructure and the fact that there was not very much of it. Therefore, much of the fighting happened in “the bush,” a general term for geographically inaccessible places used to describe many rural places throughout African countries. One common treaty implementation challenge is simply reaching fighters in these areas, as often hiking on foot for days on end is the only method of reaching key strongholds. In Mozambique, for example, the headquarters of the rebel group RENAMO was a 10-day trek into the bush. Their leader Dhklama rarely left the compound due to fear of assasination and thus as peace negotiations proceeded in Rome, all decisions had to be run by Dhklama, who was 10 days away in the bush. Getting communications equipment to him was therefore a priority, but was made difficult due to the conditions. This purely logistical challenge continually threw up roadblocks and delays to negotiations. Relatedly, in both Angola and Mozambique, during the UN peacekeeping missions that were meant to verify and enforce the treaties, UN observers were constantly delayed in deploying due to inaccessible locations that could only be reached on helicopters with local pilots who could navigate the mountainous terrain.

These are all key issues to discuss during negotiations, as they directly impact what kind of timelines and troop movements can be accurately planned for. One common sticking point during treaty implementation is the perception that the “other side” is being unfairly advantaged by getting “extra” time to complete an agreed upon task, or by not being punished for a delay. Often, these delays are not in fact purposeful, but rather the unfortunate consequence of inaccurately planned timetables in the first place. Given their intimate knowledge of facts on the ground, military personnel are often better placed to understand these logistical details than politicians, and thus their involvement in these talks is more likely to yield practicable solutions.

Finally, the third type of specific knowledge that the military brings is their understanding of their troops. While there are often many motivations for fighting in a civil war, at the grand strategic political level, these motivations are often generalised or simplified into statements like “RENAMO are all former kidnapped child soldiers fighting out of fear,” or “UNITA are all anti-Communist pro-democratic freedom fighters,” et cetera. While perhaps that is true for some, the reasons why people decide to fight, and why they decided to keep fighting, are nuanced. These complicated motivations change within a person, between people, and between groups of fighters all the time. Thus, to understand how combatants are feeling, what is driving them, and what kinds of incentives they will respond to, it is best to solicit that information from those who interact with foot soldiers most closely, which tend to be military personnel rather than political ones.

This knowledge of motivation becomes particularly useful when determining what kinds of post-conflict options employment should be available to combatants, particularly if one of them is disarmament and a return to civilian life. Disarmament, the giving up of one’s weapons, is often the single most contentious issue in implementing a peace treaty due to the feelings of vulnerability it inspires in combatants. Therefore, one of the key issues to be resolved in any treaty negotiation is determining the process through which combatants disarm. While there are significant logistical aspects to sort this out, such as who should collect them, where they are stored, how they are transported, et cetera, there is also an important psychological aspect to consider. Namely, how can combatants be incentivised to participate? During the third attempted peace treaty in Angola, sorting out disarmament, which had failed twice before, was the key issue. Both sides, including military generals, agreed that the UN needed to be more involved in the entire implementation process than in previous treaties, including during disarmament. However, the specifics of the disarmament process kept getting stuck on how soldiers would actually turn in their weapons in a cooperative fashion, given the feeling that disarmament would be tantamount to losing the war. Finally, a government general hit on the idea of having fighters turn their weapons over to their commanders in a simple ceremony, which would then be handed to the UN, in order to preserve the dignity and honour of the fighters while also moving constructively towards peace. This was agreed upon eagerly by the rebel generals, allowing the plan to go forward.

Thus, military leaders provide three types of knowledge at the negotiating table that are likely to be unique and have direct bearing on enabling accurate treaty terms to be negotiated.

The second piece of the argument is that having military personnel at the negotiating table makes it more likely for key military figures to “buy-in” to the peace process, and then cooperate with its implementation. First, as previously discussed, if the military is involved in figuring out the specific plans for a ceasefire and treaty implementation, the plans themselves are likely to be more realistic, thus making everyone involved, including the military, more trusting that the plan will actually be pulled off close to schedule. Second, the psychological element is quite straightforward: if the military are involved in the negotiations, they will be more likely to consider themselves a part of the peace process, be more willing to take ownership of the compromises necessary to achieve agreement, and thus less likely to feel that the stipulations are imposed from above and thus not worth cooperating with.

To illustrate the importance of understanding military buy-in to negotiations, Angola is again a useful case study. In the negotiations between the government and rebels, one of the key divisions was within the government delegation: between the political figures and the military generals. The first attempt at a peace treaty in Angola took around two years to negotiate; as the talks got close to the signing ceremony, the government political leaders were nervous about the military capabilities of the rebel side and began trying to delay the actual signing in the hopes of changing the battlefield calculus. The government generals, on the other hand, knew that ammunition was running out, that morale was low, and that the rank-and-file was much more interested in moving to peace than eking out incremental wins in the jungle. In this situation, the international mediators led by the US had developed good relations with both the political and military leaders on the Angolan government side, and so knew from the generals that they were more willing to be pragmatic. Thus the mediators combined the political and military discussion rooms in order to lend emphasis to the generals’ pragmatism over political dogma. This ended up being successful and the signing ceremony proceeded with the government generals driving the implementation process even as politicians lent faint encouragement to the implementation process in the hopes of changing the facts on the ground.

To conclude, including military leaders at peace negotiations is beneficial because:

1. They bring unique knowledge to the negotiating table which has direct bearing on the quality of discussions and terms agreed on.
2. Their active participation and acquiescence to the treaty via involvement in its development increases the chances of military figures actively helping make sure implementation goes well (and builds trust between sides).

Source: https://defenceindepth.co/2019/10/21/military-involvement-in-post-conflict-peace-negotiations/

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The Course of Empire: Destruction, 1836, by Thomas Cole. Found in the collection of the New-York Historical Society.

In recent years, a person could be forgiven for feeling as if conflict is inescapable. Political polarization has increased. Levels of societal violence and terrorism are surging. Endless wars continue, with no conclusion in sight.

Why is there so much chaos? The history of violence offers one possible answer.

Scholars—from psychologists to political scientists specializing in conflict—are starting to understand that the desire to belong among humans plays an outsized role in generating group violence of all kinds. This evolutionary desire to belong does not mean belonging to just any group of humans, but to a cohesive social group that protects you from violence, and gives you access to resources and sexual partners. And for a social group to remain cohesive it needs to have norms and rules that solve five basic coordination problems inherent to groups. These five problems are: hierarchy (who makes the decisions), identity (who is in the group and who is out), trade (how do we trade or share resources), disease (how do we manage disease with so many individuals living in close proximity) and punishment (who are we allowed to punish as a group, and for what). If a group fails to solve these five problems, violence ensues and the group splinters and cleaves into smaller groups

As average human group sizes have grown over macro history—from family, to tribe, to the mega societies in which we now live—we’ve solved these problems at progressively larger scales. And as groups are by definition mostly non-violent internally, it is easy to see why bigger groups lead to lower levels of violence for most people.

Drawn on a graph, these processes look like the teeth of a saw. Just as a saw looks as if it were a straight edge when viewed at a distance, over the long sweep of human history, the trend is clear: violence and group size inversely correlate.

But measured over decades, or even hundreds of years, the jagged edge appears: bigger groups do crumble into smaller groups and levels of violence spike, and vice versa. This is what happened when the Roman Empire collapsed. The lessons from history are clear: bigger, well-organized, cohesive groups bring lower levels of violence for the average person—but those groups don’t eliminate violence entirely.

So, how does this happen? One factor, history shows, is communication.

Communications—everything from roads, to rivers, to writing and the Internet—enable groups of humans to share a consensus around the solutions to the five group problems. In short, communications allow a group to coordinate, and new communications technologies allow bigger groups to coordinate. The flip side of this is that communications technologies are disruptive. In laying the foundations for a larger scale of group coordination, they disrupt the balance of consensus. New methods of communication allow new voices—whether internal or external to the group, or both—to enter the group’s consciousness. New people—new to the group—do things differently. Suddenly, the consensus on how to solve the five problems breaks down, and the group begins to lose cohesion.

While this has happened multiple times during human history, there have been only three seismic communications revolutions.

The first was the development of writing, in approximately 3000 BCE. Initially used for accounting and taxation, writing enabled the ancient empires to grow out of chiefdoms and to bring together multi-ethnic societies. Among other things, it completely changed how we used agricultural resources (the “trade” problem of group coordination) and made hierarchies—who could write—that much more powerful. These ancient empires laid the foundations, nearly 2,000 years later, for the so-called Axial Age, in which Buddhism, Platonism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, Confucianism and other universalist ideologies began to flourish, spreading ideas that fit the significantly bigger consciousness of the multi-ethnic empires.

The second major communications revolution was the invention of the Gutenberg printing press in about 1400 CE. This development, and the mass communication it allowed, hugely disrupted the European spiritual authority of the time—the Catholic Church—by enabling the spread of Protestant ideas (the “hierarchy” problem of group coordination). The invention of the nation-state further reduced the level of violence experienced by the average person, but only after a spike in it: The Wars of Religion ravaged Europe before the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 established the primacy of state sovereignty.

We are currently living through the third communications revolution: the Internet. Invented late last century, its use has grown exponentially: by the end of 2018, more than half of the world’s population was online. It is currently disrupting our senses of nationhood, hierarchy, equality, resource sharing and employment, among other things. It is upending national consensuses on all of the five group problems at once.

The Internet is also laying the foundations for what could be a truly global society. Most of the largest problems that we face—climate change, corporate and personal taxation, data privacy, terrorism, oceanic pollution and inequality—sit between the level of the nation-state (the last successful level of human organization) and the global level. All of them are variants on the same five basic problems we have faced throughout our history. Solve these problems and we have taken a step closer to the global set of ideas—a global ideology—that would underpin a global society.

But what if we are on the other side of the sawtooth? What if we are unable to come together to formulate the new rules that we need to coordinate our quasi-global society? What if we are unable to recapture the societal cohesion that we previously felt? What if our disrupted sense of belonging drives us to war?

We cannot put the Internet back into a box and pretend that it does not exist. That we will end up living in a cohesive global society seems to be inevitable. Whether we will first suffer catastrophic violence, a possibility toward which history and evolution strongly hint, is still up for debate.

Source: https://time.com/5673224/violence-history/

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Battle of Antietam, 17 September 1862, during the U.S. Civil War that ended slavery.

Seven centuries ago, in what is now Italy, there were more than 200 distinct independent governing entities. Europe was governed by about 500 sovereign bodies: “empires, city states, federations of cities, networks of landlords, religious orders, leagues of pirates, warrior bands”. By World War I, fewer than 30 remained. A single political form had survived: the national state, a centralized bureaucratic structure maintaining order over a defined territory, with the capacity to mobilize substantial resources by taxation and borrowing and to deploy permanent armed forces.

What explains the competitive success of this novel form of rule? The simple answer is that national states won wars. An equally dramatic conflict-driven culling process took place in China between the fifth and third centuries BCE and may also account for the first emergence of states not only in China but also in Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, Peru, Egypt, and the Indus Valley. In Europe, success in warfare required mobilizing a willing or, at worst, compliant population. A system of taxation and military recruitment, coupled with the capacity to borrow large sums, made the difference, allowing rulers of national states to make war without resort to the unpopular ad hoc requisitioning of food, weapons, manpower, and animals. All of this required a flourishing economy, the availability of credit, tax compliance, and the willingness to serve rulers in war. These, in turn, were fostered by the diffusion of civic norms— voluntary tax compliance, willingness to risk danger in war for a ruler or nation, and respect for property rights—which, although costly to the individual, were essential to a nation’s success in war.

In part as a result of its success in Europe, replicas of the national state were exported, often at gunpoint, but also by emulation on the part of those seeking to preserve their own autonomy. The European model of government—often in highly authoritarian form, as in the colonies— flourished throughout the world, extinguishing competing forms of organization. With the national liberation wars and independence movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, together with subsequent social movements for expanded suffrage and civil rights, many of these states, too, would become democratic.

Some kinds of progress avoid the tragedies of war and civil strife: A more efficient energy source or an advance in personal hygiene comes along, and those who adopt it profit as a result. But the main dynamic of social norms and institutions has a different logic. A novel system of property rights, governance, or marriage, or a new medium of exchange or of communication, only works when it is widely adopted. These systems are termed conventions. Switching from one to the other is known as a coordination problem and, as the term suggests, this occurs through collective, not individual, action when the number of people rejecting the status quo is sufficient to tip the population to an alternative convention. A new convention is not something that you can opt out of, and it is often the powerful and wealthy in the status quo convention who will be the losers in the new. So it is no surprise that shifting from one to another generates conflict, whether violent or civil. This is why strikes, demonstrations, and wars provide so many of the punctuation marks of history (along with new technologies). The eventual democratization of the national state exemplifies just this process.

American high school students are taught that their democratic constitution was the gift of the landed and commercial elites of the 13 former colonies. James Madison and the other authors of The Federalist Papers, the story goes, convinced the haves that the have nots would never be able to unite sufficiently to redistribute wealth. The elites could safely take a chance on democracy. But that is just one of America’s national myths. The United States would wait more than a century and a half to meet the elementary standard of democratic rule by extending suffrage to virtually all adults (with the Voting Rights Act of 1965), a process propelled by the victories of abolitionists, slaves and their descendants, workers, and women demanding the vote.

Elsewhere, conflict played an even more critical role in the advance of democracy. With the exception of New Zealand, universal suffrage was not won anywhere until the 20th century, and elites rarely conceded it without a fight. Representative institutions with limited voting rights came first in Europe and its global offshoots, often as a result of the defeat of a landed elite, as in France. This was followed, in most cases much later, by the equally contentious extension of the vote. World War I sent millions of disenfranchised soldiers to their graves; in its course and immediate aftermath, nine European nations extended the vote to all males, most granting the vote to women at the same time. Democracy has belatedly come to El Salvador, South Africa, and many of the former Communist Party–ruled nations, but only because peasants, workers, and other ordinary citizens were willing to risk jail and much worse. A similar process may now be under way, if haltingly, in the Arab world. Conflict and elites’ attempts to forestall conflict were no less essential to the eventual adoption of policies to ensure the modicum of equality of opportunity and social insurance that most citizens of liberal democracies now take for granted.

Source: Bowles S, 'Warriors, levelers, and the role of conflict in human social evolution' (2012)

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https://preview.redd.it/89cndhgi9nt31.jpg?width=1334&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c32b631e3d96f19c3d53ef284736163da6092fc6

It seems that every few weeks we hear on the radio or the other media of a new violent conflict that has broken out in some part of the world either between nations or within them. And we very seldom hear that some existing conflict has been resolved; most of them go on and on.

The conflicts are the result of differences, often of the most radical sort, between groups of people. These may be differences simply in material interests, or in religion, or in ideology, or in anything else which can make people fight one another.

Can philosophy do anything to help resolve these conflicts? They will be resolved, if at all, either by rhetoric, often leading to violence, or by the use of reason. Philosophy contributes to both of these methods; but the second is preferable. There are many obstacles to the settlement of these differences. But one of the main obstacles is bad philosophy. Philosophy well done can help people to understand one another, even if they come from quite different backgrounds and have competing interests. But if done badly it can hinder this, or even make it impossible. I am going to describe various ways in which bad philosophers achieve this barrier to communication, and then I shall say how good philosophers can remedy the trouble.

There is a kind of philosophers - perhaps they are in the majority - who do not want to communicate, that is, make themselves understood. They think that if one writes exciting books or delivers exciting talks which one calls 'philosophical', one can make one's audience or one's readers feel good, and get a great name for oneself as a philosopher; and such people often do get a great name for themselves, because their public does not understand what philosophy is any more than the writers do. The easiest way to be exciting is to say things that nobody, not even oneself, can understand, but which sound as if there were some deep meaning underlying them.

I long ago adopted the following policy, which I recommend to all aspiring philosophers. When one picks up a philosophical book, one should read enough to determine whether the author is really wanting, and trying, to make one understand what he is saying, so that one can decide whether to agree with it or not. If, after reading enough to determine this, one comes to the conclusion that that is not what he is trying to do, then one should put the book aside and try another book, and another, until one finds a book that is intended to be understood. Why is this important? After all, one might say, if a lot of people get innocent pleasure and excitement out of reading books that they cannot understand, and their authors achieve fame and fortune, what harm does it do? The harm is that the real task of philosophy gets neglected. But what is this task? I can describe it quite briefly. It is to facilitate communication, and in particular to facilitate discussion of, and reasoning about, important problems. Many of these, though not all, are moral problems, and this is especially true of the problems that cause the conflicts I spoke of at the beginning. What, for example, would be a just solution to the Palestinian problem, or to that of Northern Ireland? It is these moral problems that most interest me as a moral philosopher.

When people from different backgrounds talk to one another about their differences, and try to reach conclusions that they can all agree to, what mainly gets in their way is language. The realization that this is so should make us resist the present tendency to denigrate linguistic philosophy (of which Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle were pioneers). For if language lies at the root of conflicts, the philosophical study of language might help to resolve them, as ontology, which is so fashionable now, never will. I am not speaking of differences between Arabic and English, for example. The problem goes much deeper than that; it seems to be fairly easy to translate Arabic into English at a superficial level. Even speakers of the same language (for example a Catholic and a Protestant in Northern Ireland) sometimes cannot understand one another (MacIntyre 1985, Hare 1986). So in their arguments with one another they often get at cross purposes. Philosophy, if done the way I think it should be done, could help to remedy this.

In order to explain how, I must say what I think philosophy essentially is. Of course the word does not matter. All sorts of people call themselves philosophers but are not doing philosophy in the sense in which it is a help to communication. Philosophy, as I am going to use the word, is essentially the study of arguments**, to tell which are good and which are bad ones.** That was what Socrates was doing when he started the business. And the study of arguments depends, as Socrates also saw, on the understanding of the words and the concepts or ideas which figure in the arguments (cf.Aristotle Met. 987bl). That is, in order to understand the arguments we have first to be sure what the arguments are. We have to understand both their conclusions and the reasons given for them. Above all, and first of all, we have to understand the questions we are trying to answer. The word 'understand' too is used in different senses; but I am using it in a rather obvious sense. To understand a question is to understand the meanings of the words in which it is posed.

Suppose that someone in Russia in the not too recent past asked 'Ought I to go along with what the regime wants me to do, or ought I to become a dissident?' Or, to take an even more dramatic example, suppose that a Chinese student asks himself, 'Ought I just to go home when the tanks arrive in Tiananmen Square, or stand in front of them in the hope of shaming the soldiers into abandoning their attack?' Faced with examples like these, many people will get cross with philosophers who ask 'What does "ought" mean in these sentences?' They will say that the philosophers are wasting their time on trivial verbal questions when there are more important, and certainly more exciting, things to be done. But I believe that philosophy, done in the way that I am going to describe, can help, as no other study can, to resolve the problems that give rise to these dramatic situations. If there had been better philosophy in Russia or China or elsewhere, there would not have had to be dissidents, only a legitimate, recognized opposition, or a variety of points of view freely expressed; and there would not have been tanks in Tiananmen Square, nor perhaps in the Middle East either.

Let me try to explain why. There are different ways in which people can settle their disagreements - moral disagreements, or political, or religious, or in other ways important. They can engage in a power struggle, often involving violence, fighting one another for the upper hand. Or else they can reason with one another, each producing arguments that the other can understand, and together scrutinizing the arguments to see which are good and which are bad ones. But in order to take the second way and reach agreement without violence, they have to understand each other's arguments. They have to be speaking the same language at least to this minimal degree, that crucial concepts, like 'ought' in the examples I gave, mean the same to both of them.

Let us see what happens if they do not mean the same. Take the Protestants and the Catholics in Northern Ireland. The Protestant says that Northern Ireland ought to remain part of the United Kingdom. The Catholic says that it ought to be part of the Irish Republic. If 'ought' did not mean the same in their two mouths, they would not be able even to use it to express their disagreement. If, using indices to express the difference in meaning, one of them meant that Northern Ireland ought! to be part of the United Kingdom, and the other meant that it ought to be part of the Irish Republic, the two opinions they expressed might be perfectly consistent with one another. It is only because 'ought' means the same in their two mouths that they are expressing a disagreement. So, unless they mean the same by 'ought', they cannot even begin to argue with one another. They will just have to fight.

But if they do mean the same (as I think they do in nearly all such cases) they can not only start arguing. They can be guided in their argument by the logic of the word. All words owe their meaning at least partly to their logic (all words, that is, that have logical properties). Therefore to understand the meaning of a word is to understand the logical implications of saying something containing the word. It is to know what would be consistent, or inconsistent, with a statement like 'Northern Ireland ought to remain part of the United Kingdom' - what it implies, or what it commits the speaker to. It might be that if the two parties to this argument understood what their different statements committed them to, one or both might stop making them. Moral argument, like any other sort of argument, consists in exploring the implications of various assertions, and seeing whether, in the situation as it is, one can go on making the assertions once one understands the implications. And the first step towards this is to understand the assertions.

The writers I have been attacking, because they are not seeking understanding, are no help in this. They merely add to the confusion, the misunderstandings and the violence. Of course they add to the excitement as well. But it is not the way to achieve peace or the reconciliation that comes from mutual understanding. A philosopher who is going to do that will devote his energies to studying the central concepts that we use in our moral thinking, like 'ought', and eliciting their logical properties, so that those who use them can, by appealing to these logical properties, discipline the arguments they have with one another, and thus possibly reach agreement.

Unabridged article: Hare, R. M. (1998). Philosophy and Conflict. Applied Ethics in a Troubled World, 295–305.

It's an old book, I know, and one that many of us have already read. But if you haven't, you should.

If there's anything in the world that deserves to be called a martial art of rationality, this book is the closest approximation yet. Forget rationalist Judo: this is rationalist eye-gouging, rationalist gang warfare, rationalist nuclear deterrence. Techniques that let you win, but you don't want to look in the mirror afterward.

Imagine you and I have been separately parachuted into an unknown mountainous area. We both have maps and radios, and we know our own positions, but don't know each other's positions. The task is to rendezvous. Normally we'd coordinate by radio and pick a suitable meeting point, but this time you got lucky. So lucky in fact that I want to strangle you: upon landing you discovered that your radio is broken. It can transmit but not receive.

Two days of rock-climbing and stream-crossing later, tired and dirty, I arrive at the hill where you've been sitting all this time smugly enjoying your lack of information.

And after we split the prize and cash our checks I learn that you broke the radio on purpose.

Schelling's book walks you through numerous conflict situations where an unintuitive and often self-limiting move helps you win, slowly building up to the topic of nuclear deterrence between the US and the Soviets. And it's not idle speculation either: the author worked at the White House at the dawn of the Cold War and his theories eventually found wide military application in deterrence and arms control. Here's a selection of quotes to give you a flavor: the whole book is like this, except interspersed with game theory math.

The use of a professional collecting agency by a business firm for the collection of debts is a means of achieving unilateral rather than bilateral communication with its debtors and of being therefore unavailable to hear pleas or threats from the debtors.

A sufficiently severe and certain penalty on the payment of blackmail can protect a potential victim.

One may have to pay the bribed voter if the election is won, not on how he voted.

I can block your car in the road by placing my car in your way; my deterrent threat is passive, the decision to collide is up to you. If you, however, find me in your way and threaten to collide unless I move, you enjoy no such advantage: the decision to collide is still yours, and I enjoy deterrence. You have to arrange to have to collide unless I move, and that is a degree more complicated.

We have learned that the threat of massive destruction may deter an enemy only if there is a corresponding implicit promise of nondestruction in the event he complies, so that we must consider whether too great a capacity to strike him by surprise may induce him to strike first to avoid being disarmed by a first strike from us.

Leo Szilard has even pointed to the paradox that one might wish to confer immunity on foreign spies rather than subject them to prosecution, since they may be the only means by which the enemy can obtain persuasive evidence of the important truth that we are making no preparations for embarking on a surprise attack.

I sometimes think of game theory as being roughly divided in three parts, like Gaul. There's competitive zero-sum game theory, there's cooperative game theory, and there are games where players compete but also have some shared interest. Except this third part isn't a middle ground. It's actually better thought of as ultra-competitive game theory. Zero-sum settings are relatively harmless: you minimax and that's it. It's the variable-sum games that make you nuke your neighbour.

Sometime ago in my wild and reckless youth that hopefully isn't over yet, a certain ex-girlfriend took to harassing me with suicide threats. (So making her stay alive was presumably our common interest in this variable-sum game.) As soon as I got around to looking at the situation through Schelling goggles, it became clear that ignoring the threats just leads to escalation. The correct solution was making myself unavailable for threats. Blacklist the phone number, block the email, spend a lot of time out of home. If any messages get through, pretend I didn't receive them anyway. It worked. It felt kinda bad, but it worked.

Hopefully you can also find something that works.

Source: Less Wrong