microcosmic theories of violent conflict

Microcosmic theories of violent conflict

Human motivations and conflict

            In his significant work man, the state and war, Kenneth N. Waltz distinguished three image of international relations in terms of which we usually try to analyze the cause of war. According to the first image, war is traceable to human nature and behavior. Partisan of the second image seek the explanation of war in the internal structure of the state, and this group includes both liberals ( who believe that democracies are more pieceful than dictatorship ) and marxis-leninists (who believe that capitalist state fomen war while socialism leads to peace ). The third image postulates the couse of war in the condition known to the classical political theorists ( included Kant, Spinoza, Rousseau, and in modern time, Hedlev Bull ) as “international anarchy” that is, the absence of thos instrument of low and organization that would be efficacious for peace keeping. In other words, a deficiency in the state system makes it necessary for each state to pursue its own interest and ambitions, and act as judge in its own case when it becomes involved in disputes with another state, thereby making the recurrence of conflict, including occasional wars, inevitable and giving rise to “expectation of war” as a normal feature of the state system. It is a provocative thought that nonexistenceof something ( an effective peace enforcer ) might be a cause of something else, namely, war. In this chapter, we shall be concerned initially with the “first image” explanations of conlict those microcosmic theories pertaining to individual human nature and behavior and subsequently with the macrocosmic theories that deal with large social and political force.

            The historian is usually interested in the specific and unique events the lead to the outbreak of a particular war. The theorist of international relations cannot ignore the concrete circumtances in which wars occord these have to be taken into account in the theory. But the theorist seeks to go beyond specific wars in an effort to explain the more general phenomenon of war it self that is, large-scale fighting or other acts of violents and destruction involving the organized military forces of different state. The causality of international war may be, and probably is, related at least in part to the causality of other forms violent political conflict, such as civil war, revolution, and guerrilla insurgency but international war is a specific phenomenon, different from the others, and it requires a specific explanationof it own.

            Waltz, in the treatmen of first image theorist, noted that both optimists and messimists utopians and realist, agree in diagnosing the basic cause of war as human nature and behavior, but disagree in their answers to the question of whether that nature and behavior can be made to undergo a sufficient change to resolve the problem of war. It is doubtful that either the traditionalists or the behavioral scientists will ever be able to isolate a single dominating causa factor adequate for explaining all violent conflict. Human life is much too diserve and complez to permit such an explanation. A more reasonable presumption is that all forms of violence, whether individual or social, have in common a few explanatory factors, related to what we refer to here as human nature. Microcosmic and macrocosmic theories of human aggression, violence, and war cannot be neatly separated from each other. International war cannot be adequately explained solely by reference to biological and psychological explanations of individual aggressiveness nor can be latter phenomenon be comprehended purely “internally” without reference to social factors. In all fields that study human social behavior, micro and macro approaches must be appropriately blended.

Modern studies of motivations and war

            In the twentieth century, social scientists have turned increasingly toward motives, reason and causal factors that may be operative both in individual human beings and in social collectivities even though people are not immediately aware of them and do not become consciously aware of them except as a result of scientific observation and methodical analys. Why do individuals behave aggressively? Why do state wage wars? The two question are related, but they are not the same. The former pertains to the inner springs of action within individual human beings, the latter to the decision making processes of national governments. Violent revolution constitutes yet another phenomenon, different from individual aggressiveness, which is rooted in the biological-psychological charakteristics of human beings, and from international war, which is highly politized and institutionalized form of learned social behavior. Revolution it self, insofar as it requires organization, leadership, ideology and doctrine, propaganda, planning, strategy, tactics, communications, recruits and supplies, and very often a diplomacy for the acquisition of foreign support, assumes a highly politized character with the passage of time. Thus it requires more of a macrocosmic than a microcosmic analysis.

            Psychological and social psychological factors alone might go far to explain instances of anomic violence, such as a food or language riot in India, an outbreak of fighting at a sport event, or a rasial disorder at a public beach. But even In these cases, social psychologists would be wary of “the fallacy of the single factor” and social scientists would argue that some instances of apparently anomic violence might involve an element of political organization and can be adequately comprehended only when placed in their total sociological and political context. In all cases of social violence it is probably wise to assume the presence of multiple explanatory factors.

            The phenomenon of international war is the most complex and difficult of all to explain. It is impossible to describe the cause of war purely in term of individual psychology, as if it were a case of psychic tensions within individuals mounting to the breaking point and then spelling over into large scale conflict. Analogies between psychologically based explanations of aggression by individuals and explanations of international war confront yet another problem. In the case of war, those who takethe momentous decisiom to lead a state into war do not themselves do the fighting on the battlefield, even tough in an age of total war the distinction between the battlefield and the home front has sometimes ben blurred beyond distinction. Conversely, those who actually engage in battle are likely to have had little or nothing to do with the actual decision to fight. Feelings of hostility, moreover, might indeed be widespread within a nation vis s vis another nation and yet war might be averted by astute statemenship. By the same token, a government can lead a people into a war for a which there is little enthusiastic support, if not overt opposition. On this subject, Werner Levi Suggests :

            When for instance will certain natural traits or psychological drives find out lets in war, and when in something more pieceful? What these explanation fail to do is to indicate how these human factors are translatedinto violent conflict in volving all cityzens, regadless of their individual nature, and performed through a highly complex machinery constructed over a period of years for just such a purpose.

            There is always the missing link in these fascinating speculations about the psychological causes of war between the fundamental nature of man and the outbreak of war. Usually, the psychological factors and human traits can be classified as conditions of war more correctly than as causes

Biological and psychological theories

            Conflict has an inside and an outside dimension. It a rises out of the internal dimensions of individuals acting singly or in group, and also out of external conditions and social structures. At all levels of analysys, larger organized aggregates of human beings effect smaller aggregates and individuals, and vice versa. Individuals and groups are in constant interaction. Which is more important, the large or the smaller? Scientists from the many disciplines interested in conflict will probably never be able to agree on an answer to this fundamentally important question. The only available solution to this dilemma is to regard social situations and individual inner processes as an organic whole. We shall begin at the microcosmic level.

            Peter A. Corning has noted that without an understanding of the evolutionary and genetic aspects of behavior, we cannot fully comprehend the inner principles by which human life is organized, and that social scientists must attend increasingly to the interaction between the organism and the environment. It makes sense to begin with the biological foundations of behavior. Within recent years, a controversial new field has made its appearance in academe sociobiology. Sociobiologists study the genetic roots of social behavior in insects, animal, and human beings, and the seeks the bridge the gap between the genetic inheritance of individuals on the one hand and social processes and institutions on the other. It is still too early to predict how the new discipline will fare?

            All living organism have certain fundamental, species specific biological requirements. Those of the members of human society are the most complex of all “these needs include a reasonable pure atmosphere, numerous nutritional requirements. Fresh water, sleep shelter and clothing (or, more, generally, maintenance of body temperature), health care, including sanitation, physical security, procreation and the nurture and training of the young.” Over the world as a whole, the greater part of all economic activity is devoted to meeting basic biological needs. Among humans, biological needs quickly shade off into higher psychological needs that are often even more difficult to satisfy sense of belonging, self esteem and prestige, self actualyzations, and so forth. Much of the political and economic competition and conflict among human societies is traceable to the fact that the demand for things required to satisfy biological and psychological needs always exceeds the supply. This does not mean that any theory arising from a Darwinian evolutionary model of the natural selection process necessarily leads to the conclusion that nature is “red in tooth and claw” and that violence aggression and war are inescapable among human societies. Several biologists have insisted that fitness for survival dictates cooperation and mutual aid at least as often as aggressive conflict.

Instinct theories of aggression

            The key microcosmic concept developed by biologists and psychologists for the explanation of conflict aggression. Normally, we think of aggression as a form of violent behavior directed toward injuring or killing a human being, or damaging or destroying a nonhuman entity. Some writers have distinguished between hostile aggression, the aim of which is to inflict injury, and instrumental aggression, the purpose of which is to secure extraneous rewards beyond the victim’s suffering. This distinction has ben criticized as misleading by Albert Bandura, who argues that most acts of hostile aggression serve ends other than the mere production of injury, and hence are instrumental. Bandura defines aggression as behavior that result in personal injury (either psychological or physical) or in destruction of property, but the insist on the important of the “social labeling process” that is, on social judgments that determine which injurious or destructive acts are to be called “aggressive”. Neither the surgeon who makes a painful incision nor the bulldozer operator who razes a comdemned  building is accused of committing aggression.

            Do human beings carry within their genetic or psychic atructures an ineradicable “instinct” or predisposition for aggression? Given the way in which the debate about instinctive behavior has developed in this century, it will be useful to examine first the positions taken earlier by certain psychologists. Generally, psychologists have long agreed that aggression is to be understood in some sort of stimulus respone framework. A basic issue that arose in their field early in this century was whether aggressive tendencies are innate, instinctual, and ever present in humans, or whether they appear only as a result of externally produced frustration

            Leading figures identified with the instinct theories of aggression during the early decades of the century were William James ( 1842-1910 ) and William McDougall (1871-1938). McDougall, the leading British psychologist of his day, considered instinct as a psychopsysical process inherited by all member of a species it was not learned, but could be modified by learning. McDougall took issue with the psychoanalysts who considered the aggressive impulse as ever present in humans an constantly seeking release. McDougall insisted that the “instinct of pugnacity” as he called it (one of the II he identified) become operative only when instigated by a frustrating condition. He did not look open human aggressiveness as a built in impulse  constantly seeking release. Thuse he placed himself mid way between the pure “instinctivists” and the “frustration aggression” scholl, seeking this understanding of aggression in neither the organism nor the environment alone, but in their interaction

            The most famous and most controversial of the “instinct” theories was that of the “death instinct” put forth bu Sigmund freud. Originally, freud. Originally, freud was inclined to the view that aggression result from frustration, especially the frustration of the sexual impulse. But after world war I, freud postulated the existence in the human being of a fundamental eros, or life instinct, and a fundamental thanatos, or death instinct. In no other way was the Austrian psychoanalyst able to explain why millions of men went to their death on the battlefield between 1914 and 1918. For Freud, all instinct were directed toward the reduction or elimination of tension, stimulation, and excitation. The motivation of pleasure seeking activity is to attion an unstimulated condition a sort of Oriental Nirvana or absence of all desire. Death involves the removal of all excitation. Hence all living things aspire to “the quiescence of the inorganic world”. But the people go on living despite the death instinct, because the life instinct channels the annihilative drive away from the self toward others. Aggressive behavior thus provides an outlet for destructive energies that might otherwise lead to suicide. According to this hypothesis, the recurrence of war and conflict becomes a necessary periodic release by which group preserve themselves through diverting their self destructive tendencies to outsiders. This, in brief, is the psychoanalytic foundation for freud’s view, which he exchanged in correspondence with Albert Einstein that is, a person carries within “an active instinct for hatred and aggression”.

            Most contemporary psychologists reject Freud’s hypothesis of the death wish of the basis for aggression theory. Professor Leonard Berkowitz called it “scientifically unwarranted”. He cited two principal grounds on which it is deemed deficient one from positivist logic and one from modern experimental science. He maintained thet Freudian theory is unacceptable because of its teleological character. In other words, the theory attributes the cause of present behavior to a future goal, that is, the reduction or removal of excitation.

            As for the experimental evidence, Berkowitz argued that research permorfed with animals (principallycats, rats, and mice) negates the validity of the notion that all behavior is aimed at tension reduction, inasmuch as “organisms frequently go out of their way to obtain additional stimulation from their external environment”. It should be remembered that Freud never adduced any compelling body of evidence in support of this hypothesis, hence, there is no scientific need to disprove it. Yet Freud’s position in the field of psychoanalysis is so dominant, and his influence on modern Western thought so pervasive, that psychologists sometimes seem anxious to discredit this particular aspect of this theory not only because of its scientific weakness but also because of its rather pessimistic connotations for society.

Animal Behavior Studies

            In recent decades, one of the must rapidly advancing branches of biological sciencific has been ethologu the study of animal behavior in all its aspect, with particular emphasis on the four basic animal drives of reproduction, hunger, fear, and aggression.

            Human behavior and animal behavior are quite dissimilar in some respects, though, they may be analogous, and comparisonof basic similarities and subtle difference can help us to avoid oversimplified single factor explanations. From a knowledge of animal behavior we cannot directly infer anything about human behavior. “work on one species” according to Elton B.McNeil, “can serve as a model only for the formation of hypotheses about other species”. Thus, although an examination of animal studies can furnish to direct proof as to the way human beings act it can suggest fruitful areas for future research. The advantage of animal investigation is that it admits of a freedom of experimentation that would be impossible in the case of humans, and it permits the scientist to observe several generations of a species withina short time. The principal caveats to remember, of course, are that humans are vastly more complex than even the most highly developed animals, that the computing organism of the human nervous system lends it self to almost unlimited learning and adaptation, and that, above all, human beings exist in a moral spiritual order.

            The couse of aggressive behavior in animals are relatively few. Males, for example, fight over food, females, and territory females to protect the young. All exhibit hostility when strange members of their own species are introduced into their midst, when others make off with objects toward which they have become”possessive” and when their expectationshave been first aroused and then frustrated. Researchers have found that there is a relationship between aggressivenessand the production of the male hormone (even though in a few species the female is more aggressive than the male) that within a species, some breeds may be more aggressive than others that the so called instinctive targets of aggression (such as the mouse for the cat) appear to be more a matter of learning than of heredity that fighting within a species may produce intricate patterns of submission and dominance that an animal will fight rather than be deprived of status that repeated success in fighting can make an animal more aggressive and that various can produce predictable alterations in animal aggressiviness. Studies have also indicated that the same principles of learning on which the stimulation of conflict behavior is based may be applied in reverse, as it were, to control and reduce the aggressive urge.

            John Paul Scott, an experimental biologist who has based his study of individual aggression and its causes on animal research, denies that there is any psysiological evidence pointing to a spontaneous “instinct for fighting” within the body. There is no need for the organism to fight, aparts from happenings in the external environment. “there is, however, an internal physiological mechanism which has only to be stimulated to produce fighting. As Scott sees it, aggression is the result of a learning process in which the motivation for fighting is increased by success the longer success continues, the stronger the motivation becomes. He favors a multifactor theory of aggression, based on a complex network of physiological causes that eventually are traced to external stimulation. If the stimulation is sufficiently high, it may activate unconscious motor centers for fighting that, in the absence of the stimulus, are usually repressed as a result of training. Scott therefore roots the aggressive impulse in physiological processes but demands a stimulus from the environment and rejects the concept of self activation.

            Generally speaking, biologist have been less reluctant than psychologist to speak of “instinct” not so much as an explanationof an inherited pattern of behavior (through genetic transmission) as a short hand description of those behavior differences that are determined by the interaction of heredity and environment. However, a growing humber of biologists now prefer the term innate behavior over the older term instinct.

Lorenz Intraspecific Aggression

            New light has been cast upon the nature of aggression by Konrad Lorenz, of the Max Planck Institute of Behavioral physiology. Lorenz recognized that there is a subtle relationship between the two factors of evolutionary adaptation innate behavior and learning in the environment. From studies of aggression in certain species of fish, dogs, birds, rats, deer, and farmyard animals, Lorenz concluded that aggression is something very different from the destructive principle expressed in the Freudian hypothesis of tanathos. According to Lorenz “aggression, the effects of which are frequently equated with those of the death wish, is an instinct like any other and in natural conditions it helps just as much as any other to insure the survival of the individual and the species.

            Lorenz found that aggression, as he defined it, occurs primarily among members of the same species, not between members of different species. When an animal of one species kills an animal of another species for food, this is not aggression in killing the prey, the food gatherer exhibits none of the characteristics of genuinely aggressive behavior. The typical aggressive instinct, according to Lorenz, is not interspecific but intraspecific, and can best be illustrated by the tenacity with which a fish, an animal, or a bird will defend its territory against members of its own species. Aggression is seen as serving a species preserving function in the Darwinian sense, because it prevents the members of aspecies from excessive bunching together and spaces them out over the available habitzt. Lorenz noted that among animals who hold sway over a particular territorial space, the readiness to offer combat to an intruder is greatest at the center of the individual’s territory the part of the habitat with which it is most familiar. This is the concept which Robert Ardrey has popularized (probably too simplistically and misleadingly, especially in its application to human) as “the territorial imperative” Paradoxically, as Lorenz noted, the sexual and family bond must overcome the tendency toward repulsion of others that is at the very heart of an individual’s territory, where intraspecific aggression ought to be strongest.

            According to Lorenz, nonaggressive species do not form love bonds, while all species that exhibit bond behavior are highly aggressive. Some birds and animals are bonded only during the mating and rearing seasons, at which times they are aggressive. Bonding therefore protects the partnerts against each other and ensures the safe rearing of the young, but it increases the aggressiveness of the male against the territorial neighbor. Lorenz concluded that analogous processes play a significant role in the family and social life of many higher animals and of the human species.

            Besides helping to keep the species spread over the widest area, the aggressive urge as manifested in the rival fight, usually between males, contributes to the selection of the fittest for reproduction. But the aim of aggression, Lorenz insists, is to ward off the intruder, to take possession of the female, or the protect the brrod. Its object is never to exterminate follow members of the species. Among several species species Lorenz observed a phenomenon he termed the ritualization of aggression, by which he means a fixed motor pattern involving a ceremonialized series of inciting or menacing gestures by one individual toward off an interloping member of the same species. This form of aggressive expression seems to achieve the positive species preserving purpose of the aggressive instinct without resort to actual violence.

            In summary, Lorenz depicts aggression as benign instinct among animals. He points out that several animal species have developed some remarkable aggression inhibiting mechanism or appeasement gestures. The wolf, for example, is armed with such an array of powerfull weapons that it had to develop strong aggression inhibitors (such as baring its neck to the fangs of a victorious foe, thus giving the latter pause) otherwise the species might have destroyed itself. Lorenz and other scientists hope that humans will manage to ritualize and control their aggressive impulse as well as some of the lower orders of animal have done. But weak creatures (e.g. doves, hares, chimpanzees, and humans) that normally lack the power to kill a foe of their own size and that can rely upon fight or other forms of evasion have not been under much pressure to develop inhibitons against killing their own kid. Lorenz laments that human biological evolution did not include the development of similar inhibitory mechanism.

            Lorenz’s concept of the aggressive impulse should not be confused with that of the Freudians or others who subscribe to the notion of a self stimulating urge to destroy. For Lorenz, the purpose of the instinct is to warn outsiders to keep their distance it apparently comes into play only when the proper stimulus is applied, although it has been construed by some as a spontaneously operating urge. Lorenz does not insists, as some writers do, that human are uniquely vicious as killer of their own kind. We know that rats, ants, hyenas, and  certain monkeys can be lethally aggressive against member of their own species. New male lions, when taking over a pride, are also likely to kill whatever cubs are already there in order to stimulated the reproductive processes of the females. But Lorenz exhorts human beings to acquire a proper humility and to conquer the pride that prevents them from acknowledging their evolutionary origins and the natural causation of human behavior. He has no doubt that humans represent the highest achievement of evolution, and that they are essentially more advanced and complex than all other primates, but he warns that the very faculties of conceptual thought and verbal speech that elevate them to a uniquely high level above all other creatures also pose the danger of extinction to humanity.

            Lorenz puls little faith in the power of reason alone to evercome the aggressive instinct in individuals. Nevertheless, he strikes a note of cautious optimism. Even though hmans cannot develop aggression inhibitors through biological evolution in time to save themselves (sice this process might take hundreads of thousand of years). They are capable by combining the rational calculus of the consequences of nuclear war, the dynamics of the instinctive drive of species preservation, compassion for the species, culturally ritualized behavior patterns, and the contolling, self disciplining force of responsible politics and morality of developing aggression inhibitors in the form of sociopolitical structure within a relatively short time, once the mayor powers become genuinely convinced that large scale nuclear war would be a mutually suicidal enterprise. Human beings possess a culture, and that means that when the cultural environment affecting human behavior changes, the acquired characteristic can be directly transmitted to the next generation.