Conflict and the Social Bond

Peace in Modern Societies

Michalis Lianos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351581387
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Is violent conflict inevitable? What is it in our social nature that makes us conduct wars, genocides and persecutions? The answer lies in how we are programmed to bond and form communities that demand loyalty in order to let us belong. The analysis in this book cuts through the social sciences in order to show the fundamentals of violent conflict.

The book investigates conflict at the level of sociality. It reorganises existing theories of conflict under that perspective and brings them to bear upon the link between violence and togetherness. It introduces the key concept of closure to describe the conditions under which human groups start to perceive their position as similar and their reality as polarised. This is how normality starts breaking down and fault lines appear. Violent conflict is then analysed as a reaction that seeks change more rapidly than conditions seem to allow.

Global comparative data from numerous studies – including M. Mousseau's works – are used to disentangle the factors that contribute to "democratic peace", that is, the fact that democratic societies do not go to war with each other. This inquiry reveals the new dimension of sociodiversity, which allows societies where individuality is strong to constantly produce alternatives and avoid closure. The book concludes with a coda on peace and sociodiversity which explains how contemporary societies can ensure durable peace and adequate social justice at the same time.

Written in a clear and direct style, this volume will appeal to students, researchers and scholars with an interest in political sociology, anthropology, international relations, war studies, as well as conflict and peace studies.

1 Introduction

Human sociality and the origins of
conflict

Where there is conscience there is conflict. This is not a coincidence. Beings are interested in living and in keeping themselves satisfied; they may consider that other beings reduce their chances to do so. Adjusting one’s behaviour to that consideration is not a simple process. In a wide, open world there is rarely a reason to engage in a fight if one can just as well find a few hundred metres away all one needs, e.g. food, water or a new community better fitted to one’s lifestyle. There is accordingly a direct link between conflict and symbolic or material scarcity, or – to state this correctly – perceived scarcity.

That is the starting point of this book. Conflict, and violent human conflict in particular, involves the development of a requisite degree of inevitability when the actors assess their situation or instinctively react to it. A series of questions arise from this point: questions about the evolutionary origins of all the categories that pertain to conflict, such as violence, aggression, disgust, abomination or mere disrespect; also questions about the link between the conditions in which the actors are found and the role and frequency of conflict; and most importantly, questions about the modulation of all the conditions, perceptions and emotions whose synthesis leads to conflict or peace.

Conflict or peace

In order to avoid distraction from the main focus of my inquiry, I will maintain the polarisation between the two concepts of conflict and peace. However, I am aware of the nuances that all humans recognise as parts of this duality, e.g. tension, antagonism, friction, struggle, competition and many others. I will always remain vigilant to introduce some distinctions when it is necessary for my suggestions, but I invite the reader to implicitly make the necessary adjustments when they are not indispensable for the core of the argument, which mainly concerns collective violent conflict.¹

Conflict and violence are of great interest to all scientists working on individual or collective behaviour by humans or other animals. A sophisticated understanding of conflict is central to every life science and every social science. From biology and ethology to history and political science, there are many lines of inquiry and an enormous bibliography on the issue. It is neither useful, nor in fact possible, to provide a synthesis of that literature. That would essentially presuppose a full description of the evolution of social life. It is perhaps possible, or at least tempting, to limit the objective to the production of conflict as a condition of human sociality, i.e. a ‘mode’ of the social bond, a type of relation between social participants. That would be comparable to other modes of human relations, such as friendship, love, rivalry or indifference, and the configuration of social interactions that these modes generate.

In order to do so, it is important to clarify from the outset that conflict and peace are expressions of the same mode of human sociality, not different social conditions. In logical terms, peace is the absence of conflict. In social terms, the definition of peace includes the consciousness of that absence and the interactional consequences of that consciousness. People know that they live in peace, which is the same thing as saying that they are aware that they could have been in conflict instead. Although this admission sounds like a tautology, its methodological implications are of particular significance. Hence, the best way to look at conflict is as a constant modulation of the peace–conflict continuum. The fact that peace appears to us as a ‘normal’ condition and conflict as an abnormal one can be due to the obvious fact that conflict usually involves a higher risk of loss, injury and suffering than peace.² A myriad of secondary factors can also contribute to that normality, such as our decreasing exposure to violence and our civic education in contemporary societies. I will therefore look at the peace–conflict modulation as a parameter of human sociality, i.e. as a standardised aspect of our social interaction which works in a particular way, is largely understood in a common manner by the human species, and has its standard causes and consequences. One may even be tempted to speak about the social mechanism of generating conflict and peace, or – recklessly – about the ‘social laws’ of conflict and peace.

My brief definition of human sociality is ‘the condition of the social bond’ and I will use the two terms interchangeably since I believe that definition to be full and accurate inasmuch as the social life of humans at this stage of their evolution is concerned. There are several reasons why I am attempting to investigate conflict at the fundamental level of sociality. Among others:

1 I am not satisfied with the idea that contemporary ‘Western’ societies are more peaceful in some inherent way that is linked to their political or economic superiority when compared with ‘traditional’ societies. Not only were they the first to produce weapons of mass destruction, but they do not seem to hesitate to violently defend their interests outside the Western world. They are indeed more peaceful internally³ and with regard to each other, and there is no denying that this is a great development. It is at the same time a development which deserves an explanation at the level of how our species evolves since it concerns withholding collective violence in the most acute conditions of constant social competition that we have ever known. What is more, competition is acute at all levels from individual experience to geopolitics.

2 It is probably impossible to start or continue any conflict unemotionally. In social terms, emotion with regard to conflict can be defined as our mental capacity to place others on the dipole between desirability and abomination. But it would be wrong to assume that emotions are mere reflections of ideologies, interests, representations and perceptions. In fact, the same representations may generate different emotions in different circumstances. For example, we become more forgiving with others when we are particularly happy (Brown & Phillips 2005; Szcześniak & Soares 2011; Eldeleklioğlu 2015). Conversely, unhappy feelings decrease the probability of tolerating adversity caused by others and, as a result, increase the chance of triggering a conflictual representation of them and their actions. This is so before we even consider the ‘social emotions’ that we are all prone to, the collective emotional dynamics that can carry us like leaves in the wind for no other apparent reason than the fact that we share some condition of social belonging; Durkheim’s sacred contagion, Tarde’s magnetism, Lorenz’s militant enthusiasm and many other concepts describe this inexplicable social fusion via emotion. True, it is quite rare to experience it these days – which is part of the theme of this book – but you do not need to participate in a genocide to do so; a visit to the virulent supporters’ grandstand in a football stadium can teach you as much. Accordingly, looking at conflict as a matter of particular emotional dispositions appears a very fragile approach because the necessary negative emotional prefix is a matter of circumstances and as such unpredictable. No analytical argument could use such a basis, let alone a theoretical one.

3 Unlike physical scientists or IT specialists, we cannot count on the stability and repetition of long chains of interaction. The superposition of many layers of conditions, emotions, interactions and conscience annuls any utility of a theory which would be in a position to represent that complexity, assuming that such an extraordinary theory can be built. Monitoring social reality is not explaining it. This is not to say that the former is not indispensable for the latter, but there is always a missing link which needs to be constructed. That link can only be built on the heavy evolutional⁴ tendencies of social life which produce an infinite number of outcomes in various conditions. From that point of view, thinking at the level of the social bond is a simplification requirement. When it comes to collective violent conflict, that simplification is even more required because for the conflict to happen both representations and actions need to be deeply steeped in emotion. Therefore, until we get a full map of human cerebral processes, looking at how the social bond operates is our safest foundation for explaining the dynamics of conflict.

4 Existing literature – immense as it is – suffers in my view from a considerable focus on the circumstances that prevail each time. That is perfectly explicable if one thinks that conflict specialists deal very often with an area where people suffer terrible hardship and urgency is by definition involved. However, proximate causes are not always helpful in understanding social dynamics. Killing one’s neighbour or friend because he suddenly becomes an ethnic ‘Other’ may be a matter of petit interests, long-lasting grudges and envy which find their way out via collective processes. Those processes involve socioeconomic conditions, inflamed political discourses and all manner of justice being done to protect some superior symbolic entity, ranging from personal freedom to an ethnic community. But we need to insist in an infantile way in order to explore this and ask the question at the next level. Why in some cases is a collective dynamics shaped and not in others? Why do people live peacefully and put aside their interests, grudges and envy before that collective dynamics emerges, then find their feelings radically changed when it does? Is conflict essentially a matter of empowerment? Is peace a matter of enfeeblement?

Cooperation

The evolution of life forms is not a directional process. There is no reason why human sociality should be as it is other than hazard and adaptation. Accordingly, collective violent conflict must have been over a long enough period an efficient response to our environment. Logically, that response has developed along two main avenues. First, defence against predators, including human predators, that we cannot flee from. Second, expansive behaviour seeking to gain nutritional or sexual advantages, then socioeconomic and symbolic ones after the establishment of sedentary accumulating societies. We know that cooperative behaviour in conflict is ingrained in human conscience (‘selected’, in evolutional parlance) because of the enormous symbolic rewards and punishments that human communities attach to it⁵ (Norenzayan et al. 2016; Bateson, Nettle & Roberts 2006). Being in the first line against hungry felines in the African savanna, taking more risks than one’s fellow soldiers at war, or shielding with one’s body an unknown child during a terrorist attack is conflictual behaviour that is celebrated as ‘heroism’ and ‘bravery’ and invests the actor with the deepest respect of his or her community. Conversely, non-cooperative behaviour in the context of conflict is instinctively perceived as treason and leads to immediate rejection, humiliation and often the harshest of punishments. Conflictual behaviour is accordingly invested with very strong collective ethics in order to overcome fear and immediate interest and produce collective benefits in terms of ‘fitness’ at the level of a social environment of belonging (a society, a community, a caste, a clan, a family, a peer group, etc.). This takes us to the next step of both evolutional and sociological consideration. Conflict is very often structured as a justified, legitimate, ‘moralistic’ behaviour (Black 1993: 147ff.; Cooney 1998), sometimes even in the most expansive, greedy and predatory cases.

Let us take the classical example of interest-based predation that Thucydides provided for us – his famous account of the dialogue between the Athenians and the Melians – which is taught in universities around the globe as the ultimate description of brutal political ‘realism’. Here is an exchange which condenses the spirit of the dialogue:

MELIANS: And how could it be just as good for us to be the slaves as for you to be the masters?

ATHENIANS: You, by giving in, would save yourselves from disaster; we, by not destroying you, would be able to profit from you.

MELIANS: So you would not agree to our being neutral, friends instead of enemies, but allies of neither side?

ATHENIANS: No, because it is not so much your hostility that injures us; it is rather the case that, if we were on friendly terms with you, our subjects would regard that as a sign of weakness in us, whereas your hatred is evidence of our power.

(Thucydides 1972 [1954]: V, 92–95)

Impressively cruel as the Athenian stance is, Thucydides supplies some crucial information in the beginning of the dialogue whose significance is invariably missed:

[The Athenians] before doing any harm to their land, sent envoys to negotiate.

These the Melians did not bring before the people, but bade them state the object of their mission to the magistrates and the few; upon which the Athenian envoys spoke as follows:

ATHENIANS: Since the negotiations are not to go on before the people, in order that we may not be able to speak straight on without interruption, and deceive the ears of the multitude by seductive arguments which would pass without refutation (for we know that this is the meaning of our being brought before the few), what if you who sit there were to pursue a method more cautious still? Make no set speech yourselves, but take us up at whatever you do not like, and settle that before going any farther. And first tell us if this proposition of ours suits you.

The Athenians are aware that they would not be able speak to the Melian people otherwise than by using “seductive arguments”. They would have to justify their behaviour on reasonable moral grounds and credible benefits for the Melian people to submit to their rule without violence. By delivering the Athenians from that obligation, the Melian dignitaries set a terrible trap for themselves with devastating consequences for their people. What Thucydides describes here is that – like every public process – conflict cannot sidestep the representation of legitimacy. Despite elite planning and major interests, the actors involved in a conflict cannot conduct it without believing that their action is to a reasonable extent morally justified. Political manipulation by the elites remains discreet in all cases because there is always an insurmountable need to cast collective action in value-based terms, which the people are to follow and fight for their ‘side’.

This takes us to the link between conflict and cooperation. Why is it that the highly cooperative animals that humans are need to go through that process of principled belief in order to engage in conflict? It appears rather paradoxical, particularly since there is ample evidence in the last 25 centuries of our history that reason can on its own (or for the most part) underpin complex and challenging cooperative efforts, from building skyscrapers and sending rockets to outer space to setting up administrative procedures and multinational companies. To ask the same question in evolutional terms, why is that human sociality follows a different path when it comes to conflict than when other types of cooperative behaviour are involved?

There are at least two converging explanatory factors for this distinction. First, emotions. From what we know about evolution and the human brain so far, we gather that complex human emotions have in fact evolved as a trait that increased our capacity for cooperation and solidarity against predators (Turner 2000; for a critical discussion, Al-Shawaf et al. 2015; Cosmides & Tooby 2000). That capacity seems to be linked to our hominid ancestors coming down from the trees and being much more visible and exposed on the savanna. There are currently great debates about mirror neurons and their role in empathy, “theory of mind”, coordination, language, mimicking, simulating and learning (Schuler, Mohnke & Walter 2016). An undisputed point is, however, that the capacity to link individuals mentally without any decisions being made, i.e. emotions, is the great multiplying power of human social potential. Emotions are incentives towards continuous interaction with others and with ourselves. Accordingly, they unleash a phenomenal force that makes the human social bond so strong and nuanced as to build an impressive spectrum of relations and generate permanent representations and frameworks of these relational categories, i.e. institutions. From love to hatred, from admiration to disgust, emotions add to human sociality the thrust that makes cooperation possible at an unprecedented level of duration and polyvalence. This is why in fact reason executes emotional diktat...