Will humans outgrow war?

The world seems poised for another round of bloodletting. Why are we increasingly turning to war and violence as a way of dealing with differences?

War is not merely large-scale violence—it is organised, collective violence conducted by social groups for political, economic or cultural purposes. This makes it distinct from acts of individual aggression. Humans—and even other primates—have always had the capacity for aggression, just as they have the capacity for empathy and care. But when an individual lashes out in anger, say, over the loss of a potential mate, the consequences are limited. Such acts rarely affect an entire community. Nor is war the same as feuding or seeking revenge; those are small-scale, personal responses and do not involve indiscriminate killing.

For most of the 300,000 years that humans have existed, we lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers. These societies did not wage organised war. The first archaeological evidence of war emerges only with sedentary societies—those with complex social hierarchies. This shift is closely tied to the rise of agriculture, which enabled a surplus of resources far greater than what hunting-gathering could yield. This surplus allowed for the creation of structured societies, where a few could accumulate and control more than others. Only in such settings—marked by wealth inequality and central authority—does war begin to appear, often led by a chief directing attacks or defences to expand or protect power, status or territory.

The growth of a State accelerates this process. States assume the responsibility of taking care of a social group, which leads them to centralise resources, establish permanent institutions, and build large, organised militaries. The State trains people to follow orders efficiently, without asking for reasons. A hunter-gatherer needed a personal reason to kill. A soldier in a modern army may kill simply because they were commanded to do so. With the rise of the State, the scale and effect of all institutions in societies increase rapidly. Everything becomes bigger. Their capacity to conduct wars too increases rapidly. Hitler’s Germany, for instance, took control of all the resources of the land and focused them on a total war. Never before was this done at such a scale.

States have promoted the refinement of the technologies of war. The development of human culture has ironically led it to a point where it can kill everyone through its technological prowess. 

States have also been a way of preventing war. They build a balance between different forces within their own boundaries. They serve out justice between contenders, and if they fail to do so, they see endemic conflicts or they fall apart. Today, States build political networks of millions of people through democratic structures, party organisations, the media, schools and the economy. They try to get all the —fairly or unfairly—to cooperate with each other. But what about cooperation between States?

Wars in recent centuries are mostly confrontations between States. What we lack are the machineries of resolving such conflicts peacefully. 

The League of Nations and, later, the United Nations were set up in response to the horrors of wars. While the UN has fallen short of many expectations, this should not discourage us. States did not emerge as a way of maintaining peace and justice inside a country in a short period. They took millennia to mature and are perhaps still maturing.  

Creating an international system that will maintain peace and justice between countries will take time to perfect. The political systems of nation-states can easily drift towards demonising ‘the other’ and making hatred the centrepiece of the ideology of the people in power. The fear of aggression leads a country itself into aggression. This is seen by the other country as a threat and fuels further aggression. An important benefit of the State was that it could guarantee arbitration during a quarrel and provide justice. There is now an urgent need to develop such a mechanism to provide justice across countries, too. 

Over the last two millennia the emergence of States provided at least some benefit to people, in spite of all the depredations they were responsible for. Now is the time to create international states, which can build peace and justice by converting rival political systems into partners. The United Nations tried this. We humans simply cannot afford to give up on its project.  

(The writer teaches at Azim Premji University, Bhopal)