Conflict and the Social Bond: Peace in Modern Societies 9781138298002, 9781315098869

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of figures
List of tables
Preface
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction: human sociality and the origins of conflict
Conflict or peace
Cooperation
Theories of conflict: internal social differentiation
Theories of conflict: external differentiation
Theories of conflict: biosocial traits
Conflict and the effects of a new, limited world
Violence and togetherness
Notes
2 Conflict as closure
Peace and the decline of community
Becoming ‘we’
Openness and closure
The role of institutions
‘Late modern’ versus ‘traditional’ settings
Conclusion
Notes
3 Conflict as change
Sociodiversity and the conscious path to peace
Change and legitimacy of outcomes
Belonging, sacrifice, division
‘Branching out’
Conclusion
Notes
4 Persistence of conflict and conversion to the enemy
Perceptual proximity
Cycles of uncertainty
The social cycle of conflict
Conversion to the enemy
Conclusion
Notes
5 Plurality and the rise of the individual
The dark side of democracy – and the luminous one
Pax mercatoria
Individuation and plurality
Alternatives within tradition
Conclusion
Notes
6 A turn in human sociality
From direct to institutional sociality
Institutional control and conflict
Conclusion: conflict dissolves into individuality
Notes
A coda on peaceful social change and the benefits of sociodiversity
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

Conflict and the Social Bond

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 or war studies, as well as conflict and peace studies. Michalis Lianos is Professor at the University of Rouen and the editor of European Societies, the journal of the European Sociological Association. He is the author of The New Social Control (2012) and numerous other publications in the domain of late modern sociality. He has conducted several international research projects in the areas of risk, uncertainty, insecurity and conflict, and has taught in various European countries.

Routledge Advances in Sociology

262 The Social Structures of Global Academia Edited by Fabian Cannizzo and Nick Osbaldiston 263 Citizenship in the Latin Amer­ican Upper and Middle Classes Ethnographic Perspectives on Culture, Politics, and Consumption Edited by Fabian Cannizzo and Nick Osbaldiston 264 Youth and the Politics of the Present Constructing the Future Edited by Enzo Colombo and Paola Rebughini 265 Trade Unions and European Integration A Question of Optimism and Pessimism? Edited by Johannes M. Kiess and Martin Seeliger 266 Globalization, Modernity and the Rise of Religious Fundamentalism The Challenge of Religious Resurgence against the “End of History” (A Dialectical Kaleidoscopic Analysis) Dimitrios Methenitis 267 Urban Environments for Healthy Ageing A Global Perspective Edited by Anna P. Lane 268 Conflict and the Social Bond Peace in Modern Societies Michalis Lianos For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-­Advances-in-­Sociology/book-­series/SE0511

Conflict and the Social Bond Peace in Modern Societies

Michalis Lianos

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Michalis Lianos The right of Michalis Lianos to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-­in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-29800-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-09886-9 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

To Sylvie

Contents



List of figures List of tables Preface Acknowledgements

1

Introduction: human sociality and the origins of conflict

ix x xi xiii 1

Conflict or peace  1 Cooperation  4 Theories of conflict: internal social differentiation  9 Theories of conflict: external differentiation  15 Theories of conflict: biosocial traits  18 Conflict and the effects of a new, limited world  20 Violence and togetherness  21 2

Conflict as closure

26

Peace and the decline of community  26 Becoming ‘we’  26 Openness and closure  30 The role of institutions  33 ‘Late modern’ versus ‘traditional’ settings  35 Conclusion  39 3

Conflict as change Sociodiversity and the conscious path to peace  42 Change and legitimacy of outcomes  47 Belonging, sacrifice, division  52 ‘Branching out’  54 Conclusion  58

42

viii   Contents 4

Persistence of conflict and conversion to the enemy

61

Perceptual proximity  61 Cycles of uncertainty  65 The social cycle of conflict  76 Conversion to the enemy  82 Conclusion  88 5

Plurality and the rise of the individual

92

The dark side of democracy – and the luminous one  95 Pax mercatoria  100 Individuation and plurality  109 Alternatives within tradition  112 Conclusion  118 6

A turn in human sociality

121

From direct to institutional sociality  121 Institutional control and conflict  125 Conclusion: conflict dissolves into individuality  130

A coda on peaceful social change and the benefits of sociodiversity

137



References Index

140 155

Figures

2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1 4.2

Dynamics of conflict onset Inequality in human development Dynamics of conflict duration Status of political transformation and conflicts Status of economic transformation and conflicts Social power and conflict Probability of dispute initiation as domestic unrest increases, comparing regime types: all dyads 1946–2000 4.3 The social cycle of conflict

31 37 45 49 49 69 72 76

Tables

2.1 A hypothetical map of prescribed beliefs as part of a dynamics of conflict 3.1 Sociocultural consequences of armed conflict 4.1 Uncertainty and perceptual proximity 4.2 Perceptual proximity and social division 4.3 A typology of mass political violence 5.1 Comparative test of democratic peace and market civilisation 5.2 Nations with contract-­intensive economies, 1776–2007

29 51 66 67 75 103 107

Preface

It is high time in human history to challenge Heraclitus: Πόλεμος πάντων μὲν πατήρ ἐστι, πάντων δὲ βασιλεύς, καὶ τοὺς μὲν θεοὺς ἔδειξε τοὺς δὲ ἀνθρώπους, τοὺς μὲν δούλους ἐποίησε τοὺς δὲ ἐλευθέρους. War is the father and king of all, and has produced some as gods and some as men, and has made some slaves and some free. Between the fall of ‘applied socialism’ and the World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle in 1999, only a decade elapsed. History does not need intentional help to continue. But it keeps continuing through conflict. Each time, a new framework for enmity arises and new fault lines form themselves in consequence. New geopolitical enemies emerged in the last 30 years out of unsuspected origins (religious belief!) to challenge the military superpower of our era. A communist regime challenges both Europe and America in the globalised free market. The list of paradoxes is long. What is short is the conclusion: humans continue to generate tensions and antagonisms that often lead to brutal violence. Despite the fact that the species dominates the planet to the point of damaging its own existence, division is everywhere and conflict frequent. There is no reason to believe that violent conflict is inevitable or indispensable in evolutionary terms. There may be avenues of coexistence that efficiently avert the probability of conflict, just like politics or the market avert imposed conformity and partially release the individual from group control. The essential aim of this book is to look at the parameters that govern the aggregation of human energy that is necessary to conduct collective violent conflicts. Why we coalesce in order to commit acts against each other has not been researched enough in the social sciences. It is a phenomenon that we all understand and fear. It is also a part of our sociality that we cannot access easily because it involves emotions that are transmitted from the outside, from others around us, to whom we also retransmit them. Military sociology tells us that even professional soldiers primarily ‘fight for each other’. So, this is a social trait that persists despite structure, hierarchy and organisation.

xii   Preface On the other hand, there are hopeful developments such as the fact that democratic societies involve less violent conflict within their borders and towards each other. This also tells us that some changes in our organisation might supply alternatives to violent conflict. Even if that were a historical blink, something is to be learned from it. How our social bond works around conflict is a matter of great importance for understanding our own sociality. I have carried this question consciously with me since I was 14 and our school basketball team was playing against a school from another area. ‘We’ – in fact the players from our school – were losing. Those who pretended to know thought the referees were unfair, and the supporters of the other team chanted irritating slogans. To this day I remember with awe how I was engulfed in a movement of my fellow students and found myself running with bad intentions towards the opposite grandstand. The puzzled look in the eyes of my preferred teacher as she got in the middle to stop us, my immediate sense that ‘this was not like me’, will always remind me that we need to be prepared against some parts of ourselves, for there is not always a Mrs Binga to stop us with her charming authority at the right time. I believe that the social sciences have a strong role to play in this reflexive work and I hope this book is a contribution to that endeavour. Paris, January 2019

Acknowledgements

Over the years, my colleagues taught me much about conflict and the formation of packs that conduct it. I also had the opportunity to exchange ideas with the numerous partners of a series of international research projects, where I met extraordinary people who were able to organise and conduct surveys amidst terrible civil wars around the globe. I would particularly like to thank Mansoob Murshed and Tilman Brück for our discussions. I thank Denis Duclos, Catherine Peyrard, Myriam-­Odile Blin and Martine Blanc for their support over the many years that this project took to complete. My discussions with Aldo Haesler on sociality were always a great source of pleasure and improvement. Among my students in Rouen, Ellie Mevel’s excellent fieldwork with the Palestinian diaspora in France helped keep my focus and commitment to the subject of conflict and its social alternatives. The support of Agnes Skamballis has been important and our weekly online meetings regarding the journal European Societies have always reassured me that things would not go off the rail in other areas as I was writing this book. Finally, I would like to thank my children, Rania, Nikias and Alkion, for being moderately comprehending about what I do, how long it takes, and for trying not to appear bored when I turn daily conversations into full-­blown theoretical arguments. Above all, my wife Sylvie. Her energy and ideas keep life going intelligently and smoothly.

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

2   Introduction 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.

Introduction   3 2

3

4

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. 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. 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

4   Introduction 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:

Introduction   5 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

6   Introduction 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 diktats and the only freedom we have is to voluntarily do what we involuntarily desire. That vast, collective cerebral foundation that unites humans more than other animals is definitely there to ensure cooperation and increased fitness for our species. This is precisely where things become complicated with regard to conflict. Intra-­species cooperation is not undifferentiated. It may follow the rules of “inclusive fitness” (Marshall 2015) or some form of group selection but one thing is certain: there are individuals to whom we are emotionally linked more than to others, or – to put it differently – groups to which we are more attached than to others.6 The challenge that conflict poses to humans is therefore that it involves a second level of consideration, which opposes the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation based on emotions. Conflict among humans is about intra-­species harm. As such, undertaking conflictual action – at least at first sight – looks like a clear exemption from the general tendency to cooperate towards increasing species fitness. A shortcut to understanding the structure of that exemption is given in every written and unwritten penal code on the globe that prohibits murder except for special circumstances that can be easily summarised to one condition: defence. In these circumstances, defence will often be qualified as ‘legitimate’ because it concerns the emotional link to a shorter perimeter (e.g.

Introduction   7 one’s family) within which the bond is stronger. The hierarchy of values involved in that penal exemption explains quite clearly that it is very difficult to attack others in any form if there is no high-­level social, emotional and – consequently – ethical justification. Let us see now what can provide that justification in conflict by starting with an extreme case which greatly exemplifies the underlying mechanism: the conflict initiated by the Nazis, which is historically recent, intensely studied, perfectly documented and well known. Yet for those who did not live through the events, it is a mystery how millions of NSDAP members and sympathisers rallied along the idea that Germany was a victim of a minority population. Let us look for example at the ten points that Joseph Goebbels proclaimed on 16 November 1941 in his editorial in the weekly newspaper Das Reich: 1. The Jews are our downfall. They have instigated and brought about this war. With it they wanted to destroy the German Reich and our people. This plan must be destroyed. 2. There is no difference from Jew to Jew. Every Jew is a sworn enemy of the German people. If he does not show his enmity then [that is] only because he is either a coward or he is shrewd, but not because he does not carry hate in his heart against us. 3. Every German soldier who falls in this war, is on account of the Jews. They have him on their conscience and that’s why they will have to pay for it. 4. When you see someone with the Jew star, then know that he is an enemy of our nation. Whoever associates with him privately belongs to the Jew and must be evaluated and treated like a Jew. He deserves the contempt of the whole nation whom he cowardly and meanly deserts in her hardest time to join the side of our enemy. 5. The Jews benefit from the protection of the enemy countries. There is no further proof necessary of their malign role against our nation. 6. The Jews are messengers for the enemies amongst us. Whoever is on their side, has joined the enemy in this war. 7. The Jews have no right to claim having the same rights as us. Wherever they agitate against us on the street, in the lines in front of the stores, and in public transportation, they are to be silenced. Not only because what they say is foundationally false, but because they are Jews and have no voice in our community. 8. If the Jews approach you sentimentally, remember that this is done speculating that you are forgetful; show them immediately that you can look through their deceit and punish them with disdain. 9. To a decent enemy we grant generosity after their defeat. But the Jew is not a decent enemy, he only pretends to be. 10. The Jews are responsible for the war. They are not receiving any injustice from us by the way we treat them. They have more than deserved it. To find a final solution for them is the responsibility of the government. No one has the right to act in his own behalf, but instead everyone has the duty to honor the measures against the Jews and to represent these measures amongst everyone. In recognition of the danger of the Jews, it is the duty [of every German] to not be confused by their tricks and chicanery. This is demanded of all of us for the security of our country. (Goebbels 1941)

8   Introduction The chilling cruelty of this text cannot conceal its obvious absurdity. These ten points are probably one of the best concentrations of enemy-­building discourse in human history. Defending the magnanimous German people before they are destroyed by the pernicious Jews is the duty of every German. It is also proof of being a real German for otherwise point 4 makes of him or her a Jew. All is there in this evil catalogue: • • • •

the clear separation of the world in peers7 and enemies and the suppression of any ‘middle ground’; the legitimacy of defensive conflictual action; the moral inferiority of the aggressive enemy and the moral superiority of the defending noble subject; the nature of the conflict as necessary action and just punishment.

What is, however, of even greater interest is the foundation upon which the entire approach rests. This is no less than a redefinition of what it means to be German, namely the determination of a new link between Germans via the threat posed by the Jews. That new link is tighter, more intense and impressively constraining. It regulates belonging to the national community via a new criterion: the wholehearted contribution to the struggle against Jews and enemies in general. In sociological terms, the important aspect here is that this link remains an emotional bond which promotes cooperation. The issue is the precedence of one cooperation over another (national community over humanity). The social mechanics remains therefore completely stable in the sense that the same moralistic and altruistic emotional basis is used to overcome the reasonable objections that it might itself produce. This is a very sophisticated example of evolutionary iteration. The simplest solution to the problem is being applied by modulating the social bond in terms of the collectivity to which it applies. The paradoxical aspect is the capacity to delineate so easily an imaginary community (in this case, a ‘nation’) as a separate entity within the human species and project the emotional obligations of cooperation on that entity to the exclusion of all others. My contention here is that conflict is before everything else adherence to an imaginary state of emotional duty to a community of peers or to oneself as a member sharing the values of such a community. It is essentially inclusion which produces excluding consequences; it is a moralistic representation of togetherness before it becomes an inimical reaction. This is intrinsically linked with the dynamics of human sociality because values cannot exist outside social negotiation in an environment of peers (Lianos 2012: 45ff.) In this respect, it is best to look at things from a functionalist point of view and suggest that values and other shared mental and symbolic entities are not mere characteristics of social collectivities but their very constitutive components. In that sense, all conflict beyond physical self-­preservation is an axiological process and one is never alone in conducting it.

Introduction   9

Theories of conflict: internal social differentiation I will now turn to the collectivities of reference in order to illustrate these necessary social dynamics, and briefly comment on how various theorising routes on conflict exemplify it. Let us start with the theoretical perspective that focuses on internal social differentiation.8 Under this category it is possible to classify every theory that looks at conflict as tension between parts of the same social collectivity. Obviously, ‘social conflict’ theorisation belongs here but so does any functionalist perspective on deviance, i.e. both Marxist and Durkheimian perspectives. What these perspectives have in common is their reasoning on the basis of social regulation and normativity. A society is seen as a system that tends to establish a power equilibrium around which representations of normality develop. These representations inherently carry the presumption that every member of the society adheres to that equilibrium. A tension then can arise between that sociocultural hegemony and a series of conceivable differentiations that remain unacknowledged. An important aspect here is that in order to bring a differentiation into existence one needs precisely to build a collective representation for it. Depending on the nature of the differentiation on which one focuses – for example social hierarchy, wealth, a specific capacity or trait – a collectivity emerges with a claim towards the modification of established normality. Emotional adherence to that collectivity is accordingly the cooperative foundation on which a conflict can develop, depending on a series of parameters that I will be exploring in the next chapters. One of the forgotten precursors of conflict theory, Ludwig Gumplowicz, tries to resolve that process of internal differentiation that leads to conflict in a more or less axiomatic manner (1899 [1885]: 196): If mankind is conceived to be a unit, the condition necessary for the action of opposing forces is by supposition absent. Besides, nowhere on the earth, and at no time either in the present age or in remotest antiquity has mankind been found to be a simple substance. It always consists in a countless number of distinct (Heterogen) ethnical elements. We should keep in mind that this is the time of Spencerism, where social processes are being heavily and hastily modelled on Darwinian theory in order to antagonise the sociopolitical critique of modern societies. The plasticity of humans and other animals in terms of genetics and epigenetics is unsuspected at the time but there is an imperative need to conceive of conflict in terms of differentiation and attachment to partial collectivities. Class-­based thinking will at the same time place that attachment on the foundation of political consciousness in order to generate the degree of adherence necessary for conflict. The particularity of this approach on emotional attachment is the process of dialectical materialism. Internal social differentiation is elevated here to the degree of an eternal struggle between classes that represents in practice the entire human history. One is aware of it or not, but conflict is not only ever present but the very substance of human sociality, at

10   Introduction least until communism takes humans to a new era. The emotional duty to develop a (low) class consciousness and conduct the conflict continually and without interruption towards its culmination – the revolution – is presented as the essence of human existence and often as an inescapable destiny. Marx and Engels devote the entire Section III of the Communist Manifesto to this specificity. There is no margin for thoughts and wishes that contain other classes, no place for “fantastic pictures of future society” and other socialist utopias that can include all members of a society. Only via and for the proletariat can one feel, think and act adequately. That is undoubtedly why the word “conflict” is never mentioned in the Communist Manifesto. There is no specific, limited or temporary issue or problem to be addressed; there is no compromise to be achieved: there is only victory or defeat for the proletariat. Therefore, there is only a constant condition of conflict until that victory, i.e. a “struggle”. And it is precisely in order to safeguard that all-­ encompassing permanence that Marx and Engels impose upon the communists with the very last words of the Manifesto a heavy commitment: The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite! (Marx & Engels 1888 [1848]) The commitment to declare one’s revolutionary ends in conditions of illegality and persecution is for all practical purposes the ultimate tool for suppressing any middle ground between the conflicting parties. Marx and Engels explicitly set up the typical ideological configuration to rearrange sociality on a binary mode on the basis of emotional attachment and ethical obligation, a condition that I will describe in the next chapter as ‘closure’. Functionalism produces another theoretical nuance on internal social differentiation. As the overall paradigm focuses on the complementarity of variations in social behaviour, the perspective on conflict is more directly linked to conformity and deviance. Durkheim’s analyses exemplify this stance. In The Rules of Sociological Method (2013 [1982]: 60), he is very explicit on how social normality is to be understood both at the lived and the evolutionary level: 1. A social fact is normal for a given social type, viewed at a given phase of its development, when it occurs in the average society of that species, considered at the corresponding phase of its evolution. 2. The results of the preceding method can be verified by demonstrating that the general character of the phenomenon is related to the general conditions of collective life in the social type under consideration. 3. This verification is necessary when this fact relates to a social species which has not yet gone through its complete evolution.

Introduction   11 Expectedly, this functionalist approach exemplifies conflict via the general category of deviance. Durkheim establishes as a result his famous views on crime as a non-­pathological phenomenon that conflicts with established normality and is indispensable in generating moral boundaries, reinforcing social cohesion and testing for social change. Durkheim’s epistemological ambition is the scientific study of social relations and this leads him to consider internal social differentiation – and accordingly conflict – in different terms than Marx and Engels: For the socialists it is capitalist organization, despite its widespread nature, which constitutes a deviation from the normal state and is an organization brought about by violence and trickery. On the other hand for Spencer it is our administrative centralization and the extension of governmental power which are the radical vices of our societies, in spite of the fact that both have developed entirely regularly and universally over the course of history. The belief is that one is never obliged systematically to decide on the normal or abnormal character of social facts according to their degree of generality. It is always by a great display of dialectic that these questions are resolved. However, by laying this criterion on one side, not only is one exposed to confusion and partial errors like those just discussed, but science itself becomes impossible. Indeed its immediate object is the study of the normal type, but if the most general facts can be pathological, it may well be that the normal type has never really existed. Hence what use is it to study facts? They can only confirm our prejudices and root us more deeply in our errors, since they spring from them. (Ibid.: 65) It is not an exaggeration in my view to see in these thoughts the reflection of the evolutionary paradigm. Durkheim states that all social forms that exist in a recurrent, durable manner have been selected for their ‘utility’. They are by definition neither absurd nor useless. At the same time, they can become absurd, useless and ‘pathological’ in the future under the constant challenge of all forms of deviance. This is the standard configuration of what we now call coevolution, i.e. either an antagonistic or a cooperative relation that increases the fitness of both parties involved in it via a continuous cycle of efficient responses that produce a new ‘normal’ equilibrium. A distinct current of theorising conflict on the same basis of internal social differentiation has been formed in Western societies over the 1960s and 1970s (for an early theorisation see Mills 2000 [1956]). That is more a de facto aggregate of ideologies and practices that lead to conflict than an analysis focused on conflict. It is intimately linked to the rise of the individual as an expansive agent claiming freedom in all areas, from formal citizen rights to sexuality and from consumption of material and immaterial goods to self-­defined identities. There is a very large spectrum of movements that maintain the necessity and reproduction of conflict, some of which are more radical than others, with a considerable degree of osmosis and solidarity between them. One of the

12   Introduction best moments to observe that nebulous structure was the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, which brought together an impressive gamut of claims against a global system without addressing a specific government or society (Wolfson 2014; Ayres 2004). A series of academic sub-­disciplines, founded after the Second World War in the social sciences and the humanities, represented the influence of this current. All domains of conflict – social, political, cultural, economic, racial, ethnic, gender related – were immediately represented, as were the inequalities among societies around the globe, the claims for world peace and conflict resolution, and respect of the natural environment and other species. I will extensively discuss the structure and consequences of this plurality from Chapter 3 onwards. For now, it is important to keep in mind that the development of a multitude of conflict lines leads inevitably to a different understanding of conflict as such, an understanding that is less predictable both in its eruption and in its shape. In particular, the binary division that prevails in the previous forms of approaching conflict is in this case attenuated by the various concurrent emphases that cooperate and compete to determine the terms of the conflict. This is a radical change whose implications for understanding conflict remain largely unacknowledged. Although the bibliography in all these areas is more than abundant, the paradigmatic shift in considering conflict is not given attention as a significant matter in its own right. Conflict shifts towards tension in social relations while the collectivities of reference become ever smaller and less permanent. ‘Issues’ emerge that are often indifferent to the majority of the societies involved but condense some symbolic transition that brings to the fore developments that are often completed. Gay marriage is a good example. Governments and political parties bring it up in order to rekindle the attenuated left–right polarisation in a world where economic policies do not differ enough to divide the electorate. Conservative minorities oppose it in principle, but only the very small radical minorities feel strongly enough about it to take any kind of action. Majorities think that people do as they please and move on to the issues that count for their individual lives, while the radical parts of the alternative movements, including some radical gay movements, see gay marriage as a clear regression given that it endorses the main historical institution of heterosexual oppression. Still, other minorities, e.g. anarchists or radical racial movements, see the whole gay marriage issue as a matter of political disorientation in order to stop people thinking about the real political issues and priorities. This differentiation can be endlessly expanded since almost every ‘issue’ produces a stance on every other, and the nuances and differentiations in each conflict multiply; for example, does “yes” to gay marriage mean “yes” to: homosexual couples raising children as a ‘family’? surrogate mothers for male couples? extending adoption to homosexual couples? insemination – by known or unknown donors – for lesbian couples? etc. The examples of such multiplicity abound even in more ‘traditional’ conflict settings. The European ‘movement of the squares’ (wrongly labelled by the media ‘the movement of the indignant’ or the ‘anti-­austerity movement’) and the various clashes of the summer of 2011 in various cities, followed by the Occupy

Introduction   13 movement in the USA and its continuing various expressions (e.g. the 2016 Nuit debout and the 2018 ‘yellow vests’ movements in France), show that this mixed mode of debate-­protest-and-­conflict is here to stay. Many analyses were devoted to the function of these movements (Peterson, Wahlström & Wennerhag 2015; Flesher 2017; Postill 2014) but we still do not know why they emerged in that form, particularly at a time of economic ‘crisis’ when long-­established modes of trade union action and political party mobilisation should normally thrive. Still more impressive, those previous modes had to submit to the new model and make themselves invisible in order to reap any electoral benefits (van Biezen & Poguntke 2014; Saward 2008). The sheer force of that development shows that we are probably dealing with a new basis for conflict referring to loosely structured collectivities. That also points to a new condition of the social bond. At the same time, the conceptualisation of conflict between parts of a society necessarily slides towards a palette of representations that allow for the continuous participation of the various perspectives involved. If you were in one of these squares in 2011, you probably know that the strictest Marxist discourses on class struggle had to coexist with seminars on our relation to non-­human animals or on starting cooperative vegetable patches on inner-­city roofs, and an endless series of other issues that were considered either marginal or outright risible by established political forces some weeks before the squares were filled with huge, socially heterogeneous crowds. This brings us to the utopian perspective (Manheim 1936 [1929]) which is among those approaches to conflict that seek or hope for internal social differentiation on the basis of extensive individual adherence to principles, beliefs and values. Various forms of anarchism belong here. The conflict – armed, violent or non-­violent – is centred on the continual effort to abolish ‘power’ to the benefit of all people rather than a specific collectivity. This is a very high order of conflict mobilisation because the only collectivity of reference is the human species, and one is a peer on the sheer basis of ideology and the self-­discipline needed to refrain from exerting power on others when the situation allows for it. To all other perspectives on conflict, the anarchist approach appears as ‘conflict without a cause’ in the sense that it does not focus on any concrete benefit apart from a general condition of ‘freedom’. It is, however, of significant analytical interest to point out the marginal influence of that approach. A general condition of liberty should normally appeal to the largest part of postindustrial societies, for which freedom in all its practical forms is the determining priority and the foundation of individual selfhood. The reason why that failed to happen is that an anarchist political view is not inherently conflictual since it does not seek to impose on others the constraints that guarantee freedom for oneself. From that fact, we can safely draw two conclusions inasmuch as internal social differentiation is concerned: 1

An adequate motivation for collective conflict must involve a circumscribed collectivity of reference and the desire of that collectivity to impose hard and permanent constraints on those who do not belong to it: the ‘non-­peers’,

14   Introduction

2

so to speak. Apart from marginal exceptions, conflict cannot be perceived as a reflexive process whose meaning and effects go back to its actors. It needs to generate externalities via the line of victory and defeat. Consequently, conflict cannot be pursued as mere structural change that will rid its actors of specific constraints and let them think again of the nature of post-­conflict conditions. The projection of these conditions must involve a certainty based on the link that keeps the motivated collectivity together. There is nothing real about that certainty apart from the crucial fact that it helps the social bond contract in order to generate the necessary motivation for conflict. It is an effective evolutionary illusion.

These two conclusions are also corroborated by the fact that there are other belief systems which are supposed to seek reflexive change and prove to be at the same time very effective in generating conflict: religions. They will be discussed in the next section but I should note here that, contrary to anarchic radicalism and the weight it places on the individual, religion externalises all responsibility towards the skies as divine volition. It secures the best possible position to the actors of the conflict who can then perceive themselves as mere instruments of ultimate justice. Finally, the bridge between internal and external differentiation is ‘civil war’. Here the contraction of the social bond is such that it can generate representational differences within collectivities which have spent time under one symbolic roof (e.g. a state) and in some cases formed a genuine community of peers (as happens in politically motivated civil wars without an ethnic or religious dimension involved). The sociocultural forces necessary for the emergence of such a ridge are by definition enormous, and the ensuing brutality very intense. That is why civil wars have attracted great attention in conflict studies.9 What makes civil war so intense is precisely that the social bond must contract so radically as to exclude one’s neighbours and sometimes extended family members. While in other types of conflicts there is a measure of distance, in a civil war that distance needs to be emotionally generated, practically ex nihilo. As a result, all possible foundations are used to that purpose, such as buried and forgotten – real and imagined – feuds and grudges. Noble envies, ambitions, rivalries that would normally lead to emulation and competition will now be exaggerated and mobilised when violence is needed to fight against armed opponents and terrorise civil population into submission and cooperation. This is necessary because the collectivity of reference for the conflicting actors is the same and cannot accordingly justify violent conflict as such. Those who undergo violence must therefore deserve that as individuals, since they cannot deserve it in their capacity as peers who belong to the same community or former neighbours with whom generations lived in peace. To put it simply, the only emotion that we can mobilise against a cousin with whom we grew up can probably be based on the fact – or the figment – that they were given a better part of our grandparents’ heritage or that they did not support us in our dispute with someone who we suspect to have injured our interests etc. When this dynamics is built up, the slightest snippet of

Introduction   15 discontent in the past and of opportunism in the present can be augmented into a justification for violence. The main issue from the point of view of sociality is then how this strong dynamics can develop so that emotions accrue. For people cannot attack other people – even less so their peers – simply because their ideologies differ. They need to rework that emotionally to a point where their opponents appear to them as detestable enemies unworthy of living. This is a deep-­seated emotional mechanism that seems to be operating at the basic level of contagion for individuals, groups and collectivities (McDoom 2013; de Waal et al. 2014; Vasquez 1992). Undoubtedly, some of us are more inclined to be killers than others, but the dynamics in place allows that section to express themselves and drag along those who did not feel any particular animosity before. As a result, it is important not to account for the onset of a civil war on the basis of what happens after that onset. It is not because people had feuds, grudges and other tensions that they ended up in some cases persecuting each other; at any rate, that reverse causality is invalidated by the fact that, even in the most peaceful times, people have such tensions. It is rather because a civil conflict started minimally that people will enter the path of violence when conditions particularly facilitate that and will follow the lead of a small number prone to all sorts of aggression. When the situation is objectively pressing towards taking a side, then actors will need to search for emotions that justify their decision and the brutal acts that it entails.10 The growing difference between these conditions and the postindustrial ones have led to theorising conflict in ‘development’ settings. Current influential perspectives (e.g. ‘greed’ and ‘grievance’) silently sidestep conflict as a horizontal mode in human sociality and focus on developing countries. I will address that bifurcation in the next two chapters.

Theories of conflict: external differentiation The distinctive aspect here is that there are no peers or former peers among the opponents. The departing point when envisaging conflict is that the enemies are outsiders. The dynamics of external differentiation is linked to a community as an established self-­contained environment. A circumscribed identity is therefore inherent and implies automatically the given collectivity of reference (national, ethnic, tribal, racial or otherwise). We can safely assume that this is the ‘typical’ conflict process in evolutionary terms and is why collective conflict generates social externalities in all cases. It seems natural to us but there is no absolute necessity for the collectivities involved to be kept apart once the conflict is over.11 The fact that cerebral operation has selected this process as a definitive collective trait allows us to think that conflict is linked to a paroxysm of belonging in order to mobilise every possible resource in the collectivity of reference. External differentiation benefits from lower empathy for non-­peers and the unapologetic protection of peer interests, given that these are processed via an altruistic duty to one’s community. By opposition to civil war, conflictual behaviour here can be based on positive emotions towards one’s peers rather

16   Introduction than hatred and abomination towards one’s opponents. This is a great advantage both in terms of efficient organisation and in terms of emotional clarity and lack of guilt. It fits perfectly in an evolutionary framework where patterns of conflict emerge from inter-­species competition and occasional violence. The development of empathetic emotions is expectedly subsequent to defence (and aggression) and weaker as we move from the core of genetic proximity to the periphery. One of the highly interesting pieces of evidence for this mechanism is the capacity to develop a reverse emotional disposition in view of conflict. The portrayal of imminent opponents as “cockroaches”, “snakes” and a series of other widely detested beings (Pacilli et al. 2015; Andrighetto et al. 2016) demonstrates the capacity to generate emotional distance by severing the obvious link of physical and mental resemblance. It should be noted that this is a collective, i.e. an interactional, ‘contagious’ process that cannot be undertaken individually. One cannot decide on one’s own that black people, Gypsies or homosexuals are not really human. A contraction of the bond with one’s immediate peers is necessary in order for the distancing representation of other humans to operate. It is in this context that the frameworks of distancing that now have specific names (e.g. racism or homophobia) developed along with the increasing power of some collectivities over others. Travel and trade brought their specific contribution to this configuration. Colonialism and slavery can be seen from that point of view as a legitimating amalgamation of externality and conflict. Sheer interest can be combined with the development of distancing emotions in order to justify large-­scale violence and long-­term exploitation.12 Conflict can take the form of a durable operation of domination and exploitation based on difference, and can thus become an ideal framework for the double-­headed approach of defending a civilisational model as part of attacking a collectivity of sub-­human beings. That approach is a tried and tested part of empire-­building. But advancement towards modernity covered it with a new sense of entitlement directly linked to various views on ‘natural’ selection. Paradoxically, Spencerism, which is probably a much better concept instead of the boo term “social Darwinism” (Crook 1996; Stewart 2011: 392), reversed that sense of entitlement by its insistence on personal liberty.13 On the other hand, it is clearly important not to stretch the link between peers to the point where we look at the collectivity of reference as utterly homogeneous. In practical terms, the social bond is best understood as the sum of the links between the members of the collectivity which are by definition differential. There is no undifferentiated social relation on earth, even when it concerns a very small number of individuals; so to speak, ‘people’ are never of the same age, sex, health, thoughts, talents, desires, position etc. Any collectivity should be understood as an extended line of ‘Chinese boxes’ where a social mode contains a variety of other modes. Among the theoretical approaches that have dealt with the complexity of the phenomenon, I will mention here that of Johan Galtung, who has focused his sociological and mathematical skills on conflict over many decades and sought to categorise in detail the configurations that shape its various dynamics. Galtung does not deal with my main question, i.e.

Introduction   17 the mode of sociality that leads to conflict, but with the frames in which conflict operates both within a collectivity and between collectivities. The cornerstone of his thinking is to be found in the understanding of satisfying interests and pursuing goals as continuous ‘human needs’ that apply constant pressure in social interaction but are not necessarily constantly expressed. As he puts it: “[…] conflict in latent form, as conflict of interest, does not have an independent life, remaining the same, but will be heading for transformation into manifest form, as conflict of values” Galtung (2017: 31). Galtung’s approach both converges with and elucidates in some ways the perspectives that seek to justify conflict as pre-­existing dissonance that is not necessarily directly linked to the symbolic framing of the conflict. That contribution is significant because, instead of the reverse causality fallacy that I mentioned in the previous section, it is possible to attribute a different, suitable dynamics to each phase of a conflict. Another perspective that addresses conflict in terms of the social bond is that of ‘cultural theory’, which is a theory of organised sociocultural biases or ‘thought styles’. Initially based on the anthropological research of Mary Douglas, it was further developed by a series of authors in various directions. Among those, Michael Thompson (2008) provided a breakthrough in terms of institutional configurations and, with Marco Verweij (Thompson & Verweij 2006: 241–249), in terms of applications in politics and policy analysis. I will return to this theoretical perspective in the last chapter, but for the time being I should mention the main methodological advantage with regard to conflict. The theory bridges with great simplicity the gap between conflict and cooperation because it links the modulation of the social bond both to factual conditions and to a standardised division of thought styles that applies to all collectivities and everywhere. As a result, the line between one collectivity and another is always continuous and the Chinese boxes of all sub-­groupings can be similarly understood even if the collectivities are in violent conflict. The model very much follows the Durkheimian tradition and a comprehensive understanding of its development can be found in 6 and Richards (2017). The advantage here is that we can refer to ‘external differentiation’ with regard to conflict from the perspective of the overall potential of belonging to the larger collectivity without implying that internal differentiations do not exist. Our essential point is precisely that the contraction of the social bond suspends these internal differentiations in view of the conflict. For example, those who are exploited by their own collectivity cannot abstain, abscond or – worse! – defect to the enemy without suffering the disgrace and punishment reserved for ‘traitors’. Metaphysical beliefs have precisely evolved to keep humans together14 via the invention of entities which make coordinated human behaviour compulsory. Undeniably, conflict is one of the best mechanisms to guarantee stronger bonds in the collectivities involved. But there is more to the symbolic efficiency of God as He (often a male) artificially externalises the process both in terms of increasing legitimacy and in terms of avoiding reflexivity. His role perfectly bans uncertainty. Contrary to the irreducible individual anarchist responsibility, religion

18   Introduction removes the full mental weight of the conflict not only from the shoulders of the individual but from those of the community too. That is why its conflict potential is formidable as it provides the ultimate ethical legitimacy as an undisputed externality and combines it with utter certainty in the form of the divine will. There are no anomalies and contradictions when all thought and action is guided by divine volition. Thinking and obeying merge. Individual responsibility disappears and polarisation appears to be a natural phenomenon, like rain. People try to take cover.

Theories of conflict: biosocial traits We know enough on the processes of life to conceive of sociality as one of its evolutionary dimensions. Although we are far from understanding how sociality operates as one phenomenon from the level of the cell to that of the human species, there can be little doubt that it is a trait which links individual living units so as to augment their collective potential. ‘Eusocial’ species, such as ants, bees and termites, show that one of the avenues to intensify the social bond is … differentiation; eusocial species have indeed specialised castes organised around the basic aspects of collective survival (e.g. procreation, breeding, feeding and protection in the form of elaborate housing). In sociological terms, this level of sociality consists in three major aspects: division of labour, stratification and altruism, mainly in the sense of sacrificing individuals in favour of collective survival. Humans are considered ‘prosocial’ in the sense that they display more elaborate supportive behaviour towards individuals of their own species and to an extent towards other animals too. It is a matter of debate whether altruism really exists as a pure form of disinterested behaviour or as an expression of deep-­ seated reciprocity. However, recent works are in my view right to support the idea that there is a state of fusion within community that leads to the conditions of a ‘devoted actor’, particularly when violent conflict is concerned (Atran 2016). At any rate, there is little doubt that human sociality is based on the dipole of empathy and influence, i.e. between being receptive to other people’s wishes and needs and exerting one’s wishes and needs upon others. It is notable that both tendencies lead to obtaining the appreciation of others, either in terms of moral superiority or in terms of fearful docility. It is of interest here to consider Niccolò Machiavelli’s (1903 [1513]: Ch. XVII) notorious opinion regarding the difference between appreciation that can be withdrawn at will and compulsory compliance: it is much safer to be feared than loved […] for love is held by a chain of obligation which, men being selfish, is broken whenever it serves their purpose; but fear is maintained by a dread of punishment which never fails. Machiavelli’s discerning – albeit cynical – recommendation helps us realise that power, force and violence are means to avoid dependence on other people’s

Introduction   19 will. Seeking that independence is a singular trait of the human species and this is why humans are the only animals to collectively organise in order to consciously shape the thoughts and actions of both other humans and other animals. Seeking to impose compliance rather than avoid harm is a cause of conflict specific to humans and that is why totalitarian conquering behaviours such as slavery – if distinguished from eusocial and parasitic behaviours – are unique to humans. There is accordingly good reason to believe that collective violent conflict is a trait that operates in a prosocial manner within the limits of delineated collectivities, and can be seen as a control interface appearing as altruistic behaviour to one’s own community and atrocious brutality to those who are defined as enemies, which is typically the configuration of relations in the phenomena that we conceive of as ‘wars’. Given the symmetry of this behaviour and its historical depth, we can safely assume that the plasticity of the social bond in human societies includes the conduct of conflict as altruistic behaviour. The stages that we can define in this process tell us a great deal about the function of the social bond across a spectrum of behaviour ranging from empathy to aggression. 1

2

3

4

Understanding – The development of emotions and the consequent capacity for empathy make the contraction of the social bond possible in order to add several levels of proximity, originally linked to individual and inclusive fitness. Belonging – A concentric scheme of increasingly weaker proximity allows for the emergence of categories of Others. As in other animals, immediate offspring are differentiated from everyone else. But in humans, proximity additionally involves organisational interdependence and socioculture. The mutation from a nomadic hunter-­gatherer mode of living into a sedentary agricultural mode ‘imprisoned’ humans in intergenerational groups of strong ties and high interdependence. This allowed for endless nuances of proximity to others on the basis of numerable criteria, ranging from shared experiences to shared beliefs and from common physical traits to common interests. The social bond modulates according to those criteria in terms of placing others at a specific distance. As a result, individuals divided themselves into polysemic groups by combining various criteria of proximity, i.e. ‘communities’ to which they belong. Deindividualising – Communities are social expressions of emotional proximity. Their main characteristic is the consciousness of belonging and the social control that they impose on their members in the form of an ‘identity’. The contraction of the social bond is as such the foundation of allegiance since it represents what is common in all members of a community. The process of belonging is naturally centripetal and this is why communities naturally tend to impose strong norms and suppress individual deviations. Differentiating – Tighter community links and deindividualising tendencies lead to higher potential for differentiation between communities. An easy

20   Introduction

5

way to understand this process is the remarkable sociocultural and linguistic variations between human communities (Hammarström 2016) in relatively short time, currently estimated at 100,000 years. The stronger the compliance that each community imposes, the higher the variation between communities as time advances.15 Fighting – Differentiated communities exist as self-­referential and self-­ contained units of internal loyalty. Their spatial and social delineation and the control over their internal structure are their absolute priorities. As a result of this collective alignment, all community members are spontaneously expected to conform to a single perception of what constitutes a threat to these priorities. Communities can therefore only interact peacefully with other communities when no risk of material or symbolic loss is involved. It is, however, certain that such a risk will arise in the long run, since interacting social units will inevitably go through periods of antagonistic interests at some point in time. It is accordingly also certain that the contraction of the social bond will lead to collective conflict when such antagonistic interests arise and structured alternatives are not in place to provide peaceful solutions.

These five stages represent in many ways the social development of the human species from the Neolithic revolution to the dominance of the nation state. What that time span has in common – despite its numerable historical segments – is the establishment and development of sedentary, identifiable communities. This involves the development of two intertwined aspects of the social bond that gave human societies their form until the beginning of the postindustrial era: a territory (i.e. spatial enclosure) and an identity (i.e. social enclosure).

Conflict and the effects of a new, limited world Hunter-­gatherers lived in an unlimited world. Access to resources was a matter of mobility and luck. Group disagreements could be resolved by dividing the group and following separate ways. There was no reason why different opinions on the best course to follow could not lead to new groups taking different directions. Life presented itself sometimes in a precarious form but choices about continuing always included the tolerance of considerable uncertainties. Openness and flexibility were both possible and necessary. Hunter-­gatherers were discoverers by nature. The world was limitless and there was always an unoccupied part further away. They were not frequently compelled to face zero-­sum games where someone else had to lose what they gained. As usually happens among nomadic species, tensions were resolved by mutual avoidance. Often the weaker party took some distance or avoided openly challenging stronger individuals, as still happens with other evolved apes than ourselves. Conflict made sense as an inter-­species phenomenon limited to the cases where one could not flee one’s predators or pests, and as an intra species one only when indispensable scarce resources were exclusively appropriated by another group.

Introduction   21 The Neolithic revolution drastically changed that configuration. Horticulture, agriculture, animal breeding and a sedentary lifestyle produced a new social world. The simplest way to summarise that change is to say that humans imprisoned themselves in rigid and complex relations; relations of power and hierarchy. But why did they do so? This is a social evolutional change and needs to be understood in terms of new conditions generating new types of interaction that are then imposed as external conditions on every member of the social collectivity involved. The first step of the process is certainly the capacity to generate resources on a specific piece of land and to settle in that area. Once that happened, humans could not any longer abandon what they had built in terms of resources and settlements. This is the problem of dependence upon one’s investment. It should be understood as the fundamental problem of modernity in the sense that the cycle of investment–accumulation–improvement was launched in that era. The freedom of an open, unlimited world ended at that point. In fact, what we now call freedom as well as the close link between freedom and mobility is most probably the remembrance of that long-­time condition of our species which ended only 15,000 years ago;16 a deep nostalgia for a lost paradise of open relations and the possibility to socially opt out when coexistence becomes unpleasant or stifling. For agropastoralists, resources were not only linked to a specific piece of land; they were now attached to the effort invested in producing and maintaining them. For the first time, plants, animals and spaces became permanently owned. Property emerged as an exclusive control over specific resources and as a defensive practice against any claim on these resources. Land became territory, i.e. space under someone’s power; individuals became unequal in their owned resources via talent, force or hazard, and accordingly dependent upon each other. Those who could produce more in terms of material resources or aggression had now the possibility to subordinate others by offering food or protection. Complex hierarchical relations had been born and institutions stabilising those relations immediately followed. Human groups became distinct communities with durable social systems. Individuals now belonged to a collectivity to which they owed loyalty and obedience. The great unlimited world disappeared, giving way to closed, delineated collectivities of ownership, defence and identity. The effect of this new configuration in human sociality was drastic and immediate. Its outcome in less than 12,000 years – our world! – shows that in a twentieth of his time on earth, Homo sapiens radically changed the planet. One can contemplate whether that change was a good development, but what is certain is that it came at the price of division, suffering and violence. We must understand the conditions and motivations for this change in order to conceive of the link between human sociality and conflict.

Violence and togetherness There is no point in collective conflict when there is no stake, symbolic or otherwise. Sedentary communities very quickly became functioning units with their

22   Introduction own social order, capable of production and accumulation of resources in a specific place. This means that for the first time it was possible to find in a known area a complete and constant production unit. What is more, its members could not flee since they did not any longer know how to live a nomadic life and they were tied to their possessions and to each other. That new condition could now be exploited as a socioeconomic machine. From that point onwards, it became possible to have a community produce wealth for those who could be persuasive or coercive enough to control the process. For the first time, having other people depend on you was a benefit rather than a burden, for they could not any longer live without working and producing to sustain themselves. It made sense to conquer other communities and tax them down to their subsistence line. This is how conditions that we now call slavery, colonialism or occupation started making sense. This new setup turned human relations into levers of power. Force could now be permanently turned into wealth, spatial expansion or extensive procreation. Advantages and disadvantages could be transmitted in time across generations. Being part of a dominant or a subordinate community determined all that one was. Collectivities could be used as tools. It is no wonder then how very shortly after the hunter-­gatherers settled, the first empires were formed. In these circumstances, individuality rapidly regressed. A settled community was a community of destiny and there was no option of breaking away to start a new path. The social bond drastically contracted to accommodate this interdependence. Since survival depended on constant coordination and reliance on others, social structures became rigid and collectively imposed rules multiplied in order to ensure conformity. Community traditions and religions proliferated and this imposed on members a deep sense of belonging and identity. This is the time when human collectivities could for the first time prey on each other on the basis of abstract justifications and ideological reasons, such as different religions, lifestyles or modes of social organisation; culture could now serve as a platform for conflict. Wars and conquests became inevitable as communities could invoke noble causes to subject other communities, and conformity on both sides suppressed voices of dissension or claims for peaceful resolution. Altruist leaders could not promise wealth and expansion but warlords could. Political ambition and aggression converged. Via this dynamics, neighbouring communities with different cultures became competitive by definition. Suspicion and offensive/defensive capacity became crucial. Pre-­emptive strikes evolved into full military strategies. This is when the link between conflict potential and community belonging was firmly established and would continue to govern human history to our age. Only under such a social regime, loosely connected individuals would ‘gang up’ and form a deeply homogeneous pack that would develop the necessary, coordinated degree of aggression in order to effectively face a collective threat. There is a seamless transition from defensive to offensive aggression, i.e. from being hunted to hunting others. This is a trait that natural selection has forcefully retained. The link between collective aggression and strong conformity is – sadly – very strong in our species because it ensures unwavering loyalty and solidarity.

Introduction   23 Human history as such is a continuing testimony to this phenomenon. Every war, conflict, persecution or genocide poses the question of ‘ordinary men’17 becoming ‘monsters’, and of humans turning against unknown individuals or even their neighbours as part of a duty to some symbolic line of division that invents the limits of a community of belonging. That formidable contraction of the social bond in view of defensive or offensive aggression is a trait that still underlies our sociality. It is social control at its hardest and fastest, a configuration that at the same time mentally constructs a threat and practically responds to it. The evolutional selection of such a social trait is the foundation of every collective conflict. At the same time, it is clear that what was often devastating at the level of human suffering rendered a distinctive aggregate result: the phenomenal increase of scale in human cooperation. It is sad that coercion, subordination and violence contributed to the exponential progress in complexifying social systems and increasing human control over the entire planet. There is no reason to suggest that things could not have happened more peacefully; but that is how they did happen, and our sociality bears the marks of that evolutional process. These marks can be summed up in three relations that underpin all processes of collective conflict. 1 2 3

The link between the incapacity to flee one’s conditions and the tightening – or ‘contraction’ – of the social bond, which leads to the regression of individuality. The link between increasing conformity and forming identities which demand unwavering loyalty and obedience. The competitive relation and consequent suspicion between neighbouring collectivities of different identities, which generate the fear of likely loss or subordination.

The convergence of these links is necessary and sufficient for enabling conflict but not for producing it. Conjunctures do the rest, and they can be considered in this context as social or natural contingencies that come in different shapes: new types of resources to compete for, natural catastrophes, economic crises, technological inventions, rapid social changes, charismatic leaders.… This is an endless and unpredictable series of conditions inherent in the process of life. Although it is impossible to know which factor will emerge when, it is absolutely certain that one or more conflict-­favouring factors will emerge at some point. The paradox of hazard is that its occurrence is certain, unlike its time. But what does hazard provide in order to turn the possibility of conflict into reality? In a nutshell, it provides the degree of uncertainty that is indispensable to generate a stake. No conflict is possible if the parts believe that the outcome will be the same without engaging in conflict. Even when collectivities are convinced of their right to act in a certain way or to benefit from a certain condition, they will not engage in violent conflict if that makes no difference. A stake is necessary, and a stake is another name for uncertainty over a practical outcome.

24   Introduction It is therefore right to say that we fight over a stake but we fight because of our sociality. And it is also right to say that togetherness and uncertainty are the two vectors that our sociality has selected as the fundamental ingredients of collective violence.

Notes   1 The conceptual contour of ‘collective violence’ is interestingly discussed in Tilly (2003: 3ff.). I mainly focus in this book on all forms of collective violence where a degree of reciprocity among the parties is possible. When the capacity to react is very limited or negligible (ibid.: 14–15, 102ff., 130ff.), violent behaviour does not amount to conflict.   2 This is not always the case, for example when there is repeated and increasing suffering in order to avoid the risks of conflict. In the long run, the sacrifices made to maintain peace in such circumstances may outweigh the consequences that conflict would have had.   3 I should remind here the distinction between collective violent conflict and mere violence. I do not claim that late modern societies are free of violence.   4 I distinguish in this book between ‘evolutional’ and ‘evolutionary’. Evolutional will signify the consequences of evolution in a specific historical period, often the present; evolutionary signifies phenomena, traits or aspects that pertain to the eternal process of evolution. I feel that for the social sciences this distinction is helpful.   5 This perspective has also led to the ‘competitive altruism’ approach, which commits the epistemic error of attributing rational intentions to social traits. Nonetheless, all empirical work within that approach confirms the symbolic dimensions of heroic behaviour (Hardy & Van Vugt 2006).   6 Every time a conflict along ethnic lines erupts in Africa, journalists are keen to remind their readers of the Somali proverb: “Me and my clan against the world, me and my family against the clan, me and my brother against my family, me against my brother.”   7 I use the term in this book as a compromise between evolutional and sociological terminology to mean ‘beings that one classifies as of the same sort with oneself ’, which has a larger contour than the term ‘friends’. This allows me to keep a constant reference for a varying and shifting gamut of projections that change according to circumstances, ideologies, thought styles, interests, information, knowledge, beliefs, etc.   8 I circumvent the term ‘social conflict’ in order to avoid its established focus on stratification and include the broader spectrum of other bases of conflict, such as identity, gender, the environment, public policies (e.g. “not in my back yard” or NIMBY syndrome), deviance and security responses, struggles against specific institutions, etc.   9 For a comprehensive discussion of the causes of civil war, see Murshed 2015. 10 There are extensive discussions on the causes of civil wars in political science, economics and history, converging upon the domain of peace and conflict studies. Van der Maat (2018) makes a worthy attempt to organise this complexity into ‘attributes’, i.e. favouring conditions, and ‘predictors’, i.e. triggering factors. As he puts it in a graphic metaphor: With respect to conflict, for example, attributes determine which countries are at risk and predictors determine which at-­risk countries experience conflict. The Netherlands, for example, is not at risk of conflict based on its attributes; it has a high GDP per capita, a small population, a long democratic tradition, is embedded in the EU, and bridges are its main source of elevation. Owing to these attributes, a predictor such as a severe economic crisis would cause problems, but would not lead to civil war. Yemen, conversely, is at risk; it has a low GDP per capita,

Introduction   25 mountainous terrain, an authoritarian government, and deep religious and ethnic divisions. Owing to these attributes, a severe economic crisis could potentially trigger civil war. To put in an analogy, attributes are the powder keg and predictors the spark. As such, the effect of the predictor is conditional on the values of the attributes – and vice versa. (van der Maat 2018: 4) 11 One should note here the great exception in this tendency following the Second World War. The fact that the very generations who fought against a country could visit it in great numbers 10 or 20 years later as migrants and tourists is in fact amazing from a sociocultural point of view. It is one of the many signs that something important changed in human sociality in general, and with regard to conflict in particular. Chapter 4 deals with that issue. 12 It is interesting to note the repeated cases of modern slavery where people that fully operate as postindustrial citizens not only develop that distance from domestic workers reduced to slavery but also transmit that emotional distance to their children, who have often been cared for by the domestic workers involved (Human Rights Watch 2014). 13 It is little understood that Darwin, who coined the phrase “the survival of the fittest” and acknowledged the contribution of war to social organisation in other eras, viewed war in modern times as obsolete because it turned human beings into slaves and increased authoritarian, centralising tendencies in government systems. 14 We start having some early biochemical evidence to confirm belief in God as a neurological phenomenon (Kapogiannis et al. 2009) based on evolutionary social traits (Fuller Torrey 2017). 15 The division of Germany and Korea are two highly illustrative contemporary examples in this regard. Significant cultural differences – and linguistic ones, too, in the case of Korea – took place over a very short period of less than 40 years. 16 Compared to 15 million years since the appearance of Hominidae and 300,000 years since the appearance of Homo sapiens. 17 There are naturally many conditions that modify this ‘ordinary’ aspect according to the circumstances. It is in all cases important to take Mann’s observations (2000) into account very seriously: like any other collective interaction, this is a social process in which a more committed core of individuals draws ‘ordinary men’ into the process via various means, ranging from hierarchical pressure to the supply of opportunities. See also Kallis 2007; Browning 1992.

2 Conflict as closure

Peace and the decline of community1 Conflict surrounds us in its many forms. From office politics to genocide, it is an identifiable aspect of human behaviour. It can involve individuals, groups, crowds or masses; be violent or not; seem reasonable or completely irrational; concern material resources and interests or collective identities and abstract ideas; follow ethnic, religious, political or class lines. Yet it is recognised as a single phenomenon across cultures and eras. What makes that diverse and timeless process a specific social phenomenon? How do we safely categorise it as ‘conflict’? My purpose here is to examine the link between sociality and conflict in order to better understand the conditions under which peace is maintained. At first, I will bring together some elements that determine conflict as a distinct process, separate from other forms of antagonism such as competition, emulation or mere rivalry.2 We often take conflict to be a ‘breakdown’ of existing social order, an anomaly in an otherwise peaceful world. This is a misconception, for any persistent social form should not be explained away as a disruption of other social forms.3 Conflict is a regular social process and should be seen as such.

Becoming ‘we’ There are many ways to form collective social entities. Nations could not have been built in the same way as nomadic groups, nor sects in the same way as sports clubs. Sociality is limitless in its variations but accurate in its outcome. It leads to belonging, a universal characteristic projected upon the members of a collectivity (Pólos, Hannan & Carroll 2002). There is nothing like conflict to determine, delineate and accentuate the sense of belonging. That is why conflict must be a matter of parties supporting different outcomes, otherwise it is mere disagreement. In fact, conflict could be defined as a line of division that cannot be crossed without betraying one’s belonging. This is precisely a crucial point in conflict dynamics.4 The capacity to polarise reality into two, or more, incompatible universes is not a given condition. Only some disagreements generate conflict and few conflicts lead to collective violence. Little is known of the processes

Conflict as closure   27 via which it becomes impossible to proceed with one’s life because others are such an obstacle that one needs to combat them, so as to neutralise or eliminate them. First, this is a collective social process rather than an individual condition. Even when it happens between two neighbours disputing a piece of land, it involves cultural norms and collective opinion. Before construing a neighbour’s act as usurpation, a collective representation of what is just must exist. Conflict is not mere predatory behaviour, it is hostile action that appears justified to those who undertake it. That justification can underlie both offensive and defensive behaviour (‘we’ attack ‘them’ because ‘they’ committed X offence against ‘us’; ‘we’ defend ourselves because ‘they’ attacked ‘us’ first). The justification of hostility is always based on values, even when material interests (e.g. looting) are flagrant parts of the motivation behind aggression. This is true to the point where Black proposes to look at almost all criminal violence as ‘moralistic’ behaviour (Black 1983, 1993: 144–157). It is certainly impossible to conduct conflict as a process pursuing objectives that are not related to any collectively observed values; negotiation via likely costs and benefits would otherwise suffice. This is why conflicts are neither rational nor irrational, but they combine these aspects at each level of interaction between the parties, as happens with any other social process.5 Value-­based polarisation is an indispensable part of the dynamics of conflict. This is not, however, a self-­evident postulate. It raises a set of questions. For example, why is the organisation of hostile actions not enough to generate aggression, particularly in conditions where a part of a society keeps a permanent arm of aggression, i.e. an army, ready to fight? Why do the parties turn towards an absolute observation of their own values, what we often call ‘radicalisation’, while in time of peace that does not appear to be necessary? Why do people tend to demand from each other a specific positioning regarding the conflict, i.e. ‘for’ or ‘against’ ‘us’? Why do people and groups endanger their lives and livelihoods towards an objective that is often abstract and, at any rate, much less significant than what they are willing to risk? To answer these questions, we need to look at the effects produced by the dynamics of polarisation. We often discuss the condition that precedes a conflict in terms of “tension” (Coser 1957: 204). Albeit necessary, tension is not sufficient to generate that binary polarisation that allows for conflict. It is a rather diffuse condition with opinions and actions concentrating on a spectrum of disagreement that leaves enough space for doubt, uncertainty and inertia. From an operational point of view, this means that individuals and groups still hold independent opinions which may converge, often to a high degree. Yet at the stage of tension, converging individuals and groups are not determined by their opinion on that matter, and their belonging to a greater social entity (society, nation, ethnicity, religion, political party or sports club) does not depend on that opinion. On the contrary, it is perfectly possible to belong without holding extreme views and even while expressing opinions that promote negotiation and compromise. At this stage, the social bond operates ‘as usual’, that is via the continuous negotiation of norms and values within a more

28   Conflict as closure or less supple framework bequeathed by history. In these conditions, conflict is often a projection that most actors participating in that tension wish to avoid, while at the same time they keep their diverging representations of what is just. That state of affairs may last for generations without leading to conflict. Views of various intensities are expressed, even actions of open hostility may take place, but contact between the parties is maintained, negotiation remains possible and peace is preserved, albeit with some sense of unease and fragility. At that stage the social bond remains determined by the multiplicity of parameters that give it a high degree of complexity. The margin of negotiating with dominant values and norms continues to exist, and a certain degree of deviance with regard to one or another norm is in practice tolerated. This may include social rule-­breaking by young people, testing the limits of established practices, or even a certain amount of non-­cooperation with dominant social patterns, e.g. what we understand as ‘incivility’ in postindustrial societies. Then, in some cases, a precipitated change happens. That is what conflict experts refer to as a ‘trigger’. Discourses change to become particularly radical, people feel that a new condition is developing, their options become suddenly more limited, and abstract questions start turning into demands for concrete decisions. Instead of thinking about what could be a just negotiated solution, people now need to think if they are willing to fight or flee. How does that change come about? As a Ukrainian proverb puts it: “When the flag is unfurled, all reason is in the trumpet.” But what makes the flag unfurl? Conflict experts know that conditions favouring conflict may exist for a long time without ending in conflict, and inversely in some cases things move very fast from peace to tension and to violent conflict (Roy 2008: 6). Instead of trying to predict where this will happen, we may usefully ask ourselves what in fact happens. In a nutshell, what happens is a ‘closure’ of the spectrum across which the social bond organises itself. While many criteria and several degrees of conformity determine social belonging on one instant, a single criterion and a given degree of conformity determine it on the next instant. Who ‘we’ are changes rapidly according to a binary division which polarises the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’. Suppose that two collectivities, the As and the Bs, reach that stage. Table 2.1 shows a hypothetical map of prescribed beliefs as part of a dynamics of conflict. What is significant here are not the beliefs as such but the organisation of these beliefs. As and Bs become incompatible in their existence to the point where they believe that their existence is mutually threatened. The fact that they have coexisted without conflict so far is irrationally eliminated in order to allow for adequate polarisation. However, this is not enough as such to generate conflict, even less so violent conflict. The most important part of the table is the left-­ hand side column, which we can call the criterion of conformity or social control. What this tells us is that the negotiable spectrum of the social bond has become very narrow. Instead of the multiplicity of parameters that could be considered in terms of belonging to the collectivity, now a single parameter is sufficient to eliminate belonging. Those previously undoubted As that now do not

Conflict as closure   29 Table 2.1  A hypothetical map of prescribed beliefs as part of a dynamics of conflict Views that As must conform to

Views that Bs must conform to

As, according to themselves, are: Members of X (tribe, ethnicity, religion, race …) Europeans Civilised Honest Rich Generous to Bs Exploited by Bs As, according to themselves, are not: Atheists Homosexuals Anarchists Black Soft Cowards

Bs, according to themselves, are: Members of X (tribe, ethnicity, religion, race …) Proud Warriors Civilised Generous to As Exploited by As Bs, according to themselves, are not: Disbelievers Homosexuals Anarchists Black Cowards

Bs, according to As, are:

Bs think that As are:

Members of Y (tribe, ethnicity, reli  Uncivilised Treacherous Corrupt Poor Interested and malevolent Greedy Duped by their leaders Bs, according to As, are not: Capable of understanding •  civilisation •  human rights •  proper organisation •  economic growth Peaceful Willing to negotiate within reason

Infidels Pigs Thieves Cruel Homosexuals Cowards Uncivilised Contemptuous Worthy of elimination Bs think that As are not: Beings whose life is worth as much as the life of Bs Capable of considering Bs as fully human

As, according to Bs, are:

As think that Bs are:

Members of Y (tribe, ethnicity, religion, race …) Uncivilised Immoral Cowards Homosexuals Disrespectful Arrogant As, according to Bs, are not: Honest Direct Generous Trustworthy Warriors

Inferior Expendable Uncivilised Black Handy to exploit

As think that Bs are not: Capable of civilisation Intelligent Capable of respect towards women Organised Strong

Views that both As and Bs As and Bs are mutually must conform to exclusive

conform to what is asked of them with regard to Bs, will soon not be considered ‘real’ As. And if they put their deviant beliefs into practice, then they will be considered traitors and treated as such. In fact, this scheme of conformity tells us that belonging to As depends on holding or accepting a set of beliefs on Bs and vice versa. In other words, enmity becomes the main criterion of belonging. This is invariably the outcome of a process leading to conflict. The social bond loses its elasticity and its polysemy and demands from each individual a specific type of conformity in order to keep belonging to his or her collectivity. From a ­structural point of view, the phenomenon can be described as a ‘closure’ of the

30   Conflict as closure sociocultural system. Men, women and even children find themselves bound by a dominant set of two ultimate mental outcomes (for or against) and very limited practical possibilities (fight or flee). The fulcrum of conflict dynamics is the closure of previously open or relatively flexible systems, towards a tunnel vision at the end of which is the enemy.

Openness and closure Societies both generate and absorb uncertainty. Depending on the condition of the social bond, i.e. the type of sociality in each society, uncertainties can be of apparently different nature. From weather conditions and their effects on harvest, to the labour market and its effects on a person’s livelihood, uncertainties continuously open up possibilities that affect social relations. In less planned and programmed settings – what we often call ‘traditional’ societies – uncertainties are absorbed through belief systems and community interdependence. People take, so to speak, uncertainties for granted and count on their social structure so as to react collectively and come out of a predicament, or to accept a loss and continue (Haram & Bawa Yamba 2009; Ainslie 2004; Herzfeld 2001: 133; van den Bos et al. 2005). In modern societies, uncertainties have been increasingly processed as targets of specific systems that are supposed to make the world certain and reliable. Particularly in late modernity, intolerance to uncertainty has drastically increased as people cannot depend on each other to overcome or accept a loss. Planning, preparation and insurance are supposed to be at the disposal of the isolated late modern individual who now bears full responsibility for her life trajectory. While the difference of these two socialities produces concrete effects, as we will see, they both possess a degree of openness with regard to possible outcomes for social participants, taken either individually or collectively. In traditional settings, one does not know what the developments will be for the whole community but trusts that his place will remain stable within that community. In late modern settings, one trusts that the society will continue in the same way but does not know what his place will be within society. Uncertainty is up to a point an excellent neutraliser of conflict because it does not allow for polarisation.6 When there are many possible outcomes of a different nature, it is less likely or altogether impossible that a binary possibility for the future will be accepted. But this is so when uncertainty can be socially absorbed, i.e. when the demand for certainty does not become so intense as to affect culture in a way that seeks to compensate for an intolerable degree of uncertainty. Let us take the hypothetical example of a society that finds itself in a condition of great uncertainty7 because it is going through an important change (see Figure 2.1). Up to a point, the ‘normal’ mode of sociality will absorb the uncertainties that the change produces, despite the Durkheimian anomic exceptions that may lead to numerous individual tragedies. But if the change surpasses a certain degree, then the culture of that society will prove inadequate to reassure social participants. A typical example is a rapid increase in wealth and individualisation, which leads to a spectacular reorganisation of ‘traditional’ values and

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norms around new modes of coexistence. For example, when bank loans to young couples replace marital dots, cohabiting extended families become inevitably rarer and values of dynamic individual competitiveness replace respect for older generations. But when the change is quite destabilising, the demand for certainty might also radically increase. This is precisely the point where culture may turn towards ‘closure’, i.e. towards a representation of the future that limits possible outcomes and invites everyone to bear upon these outcomes. Instead of the famous Marxian “melting into air of all that is solid”, a reverse cultural motion is possible whereby the solid is so needed so as to be produced via representations of the future. Through these representations a society tightens its ranks again into a coherent ‘we’. These are the representations that we often describe as radical, revolutionary, intractable, authoritarian, ethnicist, nationalist, orthodox, etc., i.e. the representations that polarise the understanding of the world and allow for conflict (Rickert 1998; Perrin 2005; Heydari et al. 2014). When material openness becomes particularly high, cultural closure is likely to balance that and polarise representations, sometimes with devastating consequences. Before turning to these consequences, let us look at another factor that seems to be particularly important for openness and closure of both material/organisational and cultural systems. It is well known that late modern societies are not as easy to radicalise along one single criterion of polarisation (Gat 2005; Azmanova 2010; Schneider & Esteban 2008; see also Collier & Hoeffler 2004: 587). This is not of course because late modernity is a superior humane culture that left

32   Conflict as closure c­ onflict and violence behind it. Late modern societies keep strong armies and use them when their interests are at stake, even against much weaker adversaries. Having conducted the greatest genocides (against native Amer­icans and against Jews, Roma and Sinti in Europe) and two world wars, modern societies cannot look at themselves as inherently peaceful. Far from being able to claim moral superiority, the reason why contemporary Western societies are unlikely to produce closure is their accentuated individuality; that is the link to low levels of conflict associated with postindustrial capitalism. In the simplest terms, capitalism produces options, real or imagined. At the same time, it distributes these options across a dense web of institutions and organisations and delivers them to each individual separately. As I have argued elsewhere (Lianos 2012: 163ff.), capitalism is the lowest common social denominator towards trumping community interdependence and moving human societies from the direct sociality of community settings to the institutional sociality of late modern conditions. That lack of social interdependence makes individual projections and aspirations possible, as individuals take for granted the efficient operation of the institutional web in late modern societies. Simply put, it is certain that, say, the transport or the multimedia sector of the market will keep on working in the future while it is not certain for each and every employee of those sectors that she will continue to be employed or even that she will continue to wish to be employed in the same sector. Seen from this angle, the closed system is the capitalist institutional web because it establishes the certainty of its continuation with specific outcomes. Paradoxically, however, that web generates openness in culture via individuality. Choices and options proliferate to the point where competition remains a standard internal characteristic of the system and can materialise among individual aims and objectives. There is no necessity, nor even likelihood, for the concentration of these objectives into foci of polarisation. People agree on one issue, disagree on another and are indifferent to a third one, so that they continuously represent their world as a large spectrum of possibilities that each individual chooses to pursue. The process of narrowing down these possibilities towards an incompatible coexistence of As and Bs is foreign to late capitalist culture. Other means need to be found in order to satisfy the high demand for certainty under these circumstances. Naturally, individuals seek to increase their certainty by reinforcing their personal socioeconomic position so long as the institutional web keeps delivering goods and services. Certainty has become a matter of investment, property, health and retirement plans rather than a matter of community and family links. Cultural closure is far away and violent conflict too. It would take a formidable, international breakdown of supply in goods and services to reverse that trend in late capitalist societies, which would mean material and organisational closure that would make conditions similar to those of ‘developing’ societies. This takes us to the possibility of looking at closure as a precondition of polarisation. The proposal that seems plausible is that only combined material and cultural closure brings about the necessary conditions for polarisation to emerge and prepare conflict. Otherwise, either material conditions or cultural

Conflict as closure   33 parameters, or both, will let tension off and defuse attempts at polarisation. We can look at polarisation as the point in time where a closed culture meets closed material8 conditions and the demand for certainty is accentuated. These settings produce a very limited number of choices for groups and individuals, and prepare them to make or accept clear collective decisions rather than seek to develop isolated strategies. This is therefore the point where polarised representations of the future suit the socioeconomic conditions in order to associate limited practical choices with ideological positions proclaiming clear-­cut rivalries.

The role of institutions I use here a specific definition of institutions which includes all structures that mediate human sociality as third parties (Lianos 2012: 16, 32). In this sense a web search engine or an online socialising site is an institution, just like a ministry, a hospital or even the local supermarket. Although their power varies, institutions determine, configure and often control how interactions take place within the field over which they exert their power. The main characteristic of institutions is that they influence sociality as third parties; that is, they have their own frameworks, agendas, interests and plans and mediate in human interaction accordingly. The local shop organises its space so that the flows of queuing move as fast as possible, just like the electricity company streamlines its procedures to avoid disruptions in the supply of current by monitoring our demand over the days of the week, and a search engine determines in its algorithms which associations of words are meaningful and in what sense. Less visibly, other more ‘traditional’ meanings of institutions do exactly the same thing: they configure social reality into stable forms that bind their subjects as configurations of sociality that are external to the interacting parties. This is why marriage or friendship, for example, indicate given relationships whose configuration is recognised by all members of a society as such. Be they traditional or late modern, institutions fragment human sociality into forms that differentiate communities in various ways. Communities are divided, for instance, into kinships, families, workers, guardians of the established order, leaders and, increasingly, clients and users of specific systems such as passengers, telephone callers, drivers, patients and so forth. As Haesler points out: “[…] institutions should be understood as obstacles in the first instance. They should be understood as third parties whose role is either to prevent fusion [in human relations] or to perpetuate incomplete relations” (Haesler 2005). Few forms of fusion are as strong as the togetherness that is generated within each party in a conflict. All institutional dimensions become rapidly and invariably subordinated to the overwhelming and all-­encompassing dynamics of conflict, even when there is no ‘total war’. For example, family subordinates itself to the conflict by supporting the young males in being courageous fighters for their party in the conflict. Sometimes this can be a value in itself, as exemplified by the famous farewell of Spartan mothers when their sons left for war: “Come back either with your shield or on your shield”9 – either a

34   Conflict as closure fighter or dead. What is a job at time of peace becomes a duty in time of conflict, and that is why the general ‘morale’ of the societies or communities engaged in conflict is so important. It diminishes differentiation and aligns everyone towards supporting his side. Because they fragment sociality, institutions obstruct the dynamics of conflict. They open up possibilities in social forms that diminish polarisation. Let us take political civil war as an example. Before any dynamics of conflict seriously arises, right-­wing people can use the services of a communist cobbler and left-­ wing people the services of a right-­wing grocer. In other words, ‘consumers’ is a category that properly exists in its own right and follows the rules of its institutional configuration. It obeys criteria such as proximity, price, quality, speed of delivery, etc., i.e. criteria that are internal to its own institutional configuration. Once the cultural spectrum starts narrowing, the institutional aspect of the transaction contracts in favour of the community aspect; togetherness trumps market efficiency and it suddenly is more important if one’s cobbler is a communist rather than a good cobbler. People look at the same choices that used to be banal with new eyes and it now becomes perfectly possible that buying a melon is a left- or right-­wing act, an act of support or betrayal. The institutional lines disappear into their new role of vehicles of a superordinate binary culture made of ‘for’ and ‘against’ positions and acts. The regression of institutions is the most telling sign of a conflict in the making. This is because the space claimed by community-­based cultural proximity expresses itself via a demand for decisions. Where there was no question as to what buying a melon meant, now one is aware that it will be interpreted as a politically meaningful act. The question then arises forcefully: “Where should I buy that melon?”, which now means: “I must decide on whose side I am.” The distance supplied by institutional neutrality is now withdrawn. Everything has new meaning and all that was an exclusively market transaction now inexorably becomes a grave and conscious decision with very serious potential consequences. Although more visible in modern and late modern societies, this institutional regression is in the same way present in more ‘traditional’ societies. Family, for example, weakens in favour of overall cultural closure. A left-­wing cousin is either a positive marker of political identity or an embarrassment. “Disown or not disown?” That is the question as the cultural environment contracts, demanding decisions. Family is not any longer an institution strong enough to stem the questioning force of conflict dynamics. Like other institutional configurations, such as marriage, religion, neighbour relations, professional partnerships or merely doing business with someone, family links are not strong enough to justify neutrality, ambiguity or externality to conflict. On the contrary, their importance is now inversely significant. ‘Coming from’ a left- or a right-­wing family may be incomparably more significant than having had a left- or right-­wing grocer. Public and express forms of disowning may make a difference but suspicion will always persist. In a secret police classification system, for example, one may never be part of the trustworthy right-­wingers

Conflict as closure   35 unless all his family has been right-­wing for at least three generations (Samatas 2004: 30ff.). Institutional regression can and often does include the institution of institutions: the state itself. The ‘weakness’ of institutions is often considered as a favourable condition for conflict without adequate explanation. (For a series of critical angles, see Tocci 2013; Cuesta & Murshed 2008: 6; Murshed & Tadjoeddin 2009: 102; Justino 2007: 10). A sense that ‘developing countries’ do not have powerful or efficient institutions casts a shadow over their association with conflict. Like other aspects of a late modern gaze on developing countries, this is a difference that comes to be seen as meaningful in itself. If these countries are poor and have weak institutions or little infrastructure, then that must explain why they are conflict ridden. More careful examination of the facts shows that conflict may be more likely as such societies get richer and, more generally, are in transition periods.10 Their institutions are in fact strong, for although those of the modern type are much weaker than in Western countries, the ‘traditional’ ones are much stronger. The reason must be found somewhere else why late modern institutions avert conflict more than ‘traditional’ institutions. In order to seriously look at the question, we must consider late modern societies to be as conflict prone as non-­late modern societies.

‘Late modern’ versus ‘traditional’ settings It is easy to observe that late modern societies produce much less material and cultural closure than other types of societies. For that reason, they are often portrayed as more tolerant, free, progressive, liberal or even humane. However, tensions are frequent and causes for dispute as easy to find as in other societies. Internationally, competition of geopolitical interests is permanent, and nationally political views are diversified and often organised around specific, clearly delineated foci of divergence. For example, it is often said among politicians and social scientists that we need an explanation why there has not been any violent conflict in Belgium since the 2000s. That sort of question can be asked for many more or less late modern countries where issues of competing identities and national minorities exist, e.g. the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Spain, Greece, as well as Poland, Romania and Hungary. Neither the ‘greed’ nor the ‘grievance’ hypothesis, nor any combination of both, seems to be relevant here. This is why Collier, Hoeffler and Rohner (2009) have moved towards the ‘feasibility’ hypothesis, i.e. the opportunity for conflict, and were obliged to represent differences in sociality via income. Less-­influential aggrieved minorities are financially strong enough to arm themselves and, in some cases, to oblige established states whose national identity they claim to support and protect them after starting a conflict. In other cases, like in the Basque country or in Corsica, permanent, limited rebel violence has existed for decades but it does not generate the polarisation that we see in non-­late modern societies. So even machine guns and bombs fail to bring cultural closure and can be portrayed as absurd expressions of marginal and dangerous extremist views. This is reliable historical

36   Conflict as closure e­ vidence that social culture in late modern societies is particularly resistant to closure. That is not a matter of inherent peacefulness but a matter of social organisation. Late modern societies do not easily turn into that superordinate communal ‘we’ that conditions conflict. We can look at this phenomenon as an apparent paradox since late modern societies are mass societies. A large number of people lead similar lives in similar settings to the point where 70 per cent among them have the feeling of belonging to an enormous ‘middle class’ or ‘working class’ in the sense that they are ‘normal people’ (Evans & Kelley 2004, 1995; Surridge 2007).11 However, the greatest part of this similarity has to do with the pursuit, expression and realisation of individual options. People resemble each other in that they consider themselves different. Like separate individuals who go to the supermarket and buy unique combinations of similar things, late modern subjects combine unique life trajectories using similar components provided by the institutional web. The building blocks of educational qualifications, personal relations, working environments, leisure pursuits, career objectives and retirement plans are ever-­present concerns for all, but they are individually and competitively pursued. It is precisely the efficient mediation of the institutional web which elevates individual differentiation to the ultimate competence and duty of the late modern subject. In this context, individuals use the resources provided by the institutional web to flee all sorts of community settings and obligations, for communities are formidable generators of social control and demand strong compliance in order to allow belonging and to perpetuate their structure. This is why late modern societies are thought to lack values and coherent norms projected upon all their members. In fact, they share the values and norms of individuality, not in the historically liberal, modern sense of a legally sovereign individual, but in the sense of the practical multiple operator of the institutional web. There are two main ways in which this configuration hampers the probability of conflict. First, it generates continuous uncertainty over life trajectories and individual social positions. Second, it breaks up all demands for certainty into projects of different direction and content. Let us see how these two dimensions operate. Stratification is an important parameter in conflict. A great body of literature supports this intuitive position. From inequality within the same society (vertical inequality) to inequality across different groups and societies (horizontal inequality), it is thought that class division is a significant aspect of conflict dynamics (Stewart 2008). Although how this happens is not established (Justino 2007: 15–16) and there is controversy over the conditions that surround the link (Collier & Hoeffler 2004: 587; Stewart 2008; Grafton, Knowles & Owen 200412), it is rather likely that a sense of injustice can be a powerful reinforcing or triggering factor in a pre-­conflict condition. As Murshed and Tadjoeddin (2009: 108) put it: Grievances and horizontal inequalities may, after all, be better at explaining why conflicts begin, but not necessarily why they persist. Neither the presence of greed or grievance is sufficient for the outbreak of violent conflict,

Conflict as closure   37 something which requires institutional breakdown which we describe as the failure of the social contract. There is no denying that late modern societies can contain immense concentrations of wealth in the hands of the few. However, “inequality in human development in high income countries is significantly lower than in middle- and low-­income countries” (Grimm et al. 2010: 204; see Figure 2.2). More importantly, the abundance of late modern societies is often systemic. Resources are increasingly accessed, not possessed. Wealth is largely a matter of participating in the function of a continuously working infrastructure that supplies a myriad of opportunities for all to see. Even social justice has its own powerful infrastructure with its transfers, benefits, tax credits, subsidies and compensations, its more or less inclusive access to basic healthcare, and its thousands of social workers and other ‘social sector’ jobs. This is why a new category of stratification, that of the ‘excluded’, has emerged in late modern societies. These people are usually, but not always, relatively poor, but they are most importantly for one reason or another unable to participate in the normally competitive access to resources. Surprisingly at first sight, these significant minorities have never formed the powerful social movement that one would expect from millions of educated people, possessing the precious postindustrial resources needed for organisation, i.e. information, communication (particularly after the development of the internet) and available time (since they are often unemployed, underemployed or retired). What is more, these large aggrieved minorities are not repressed or even particularly policed; on the contrary, they are invited to ‘participate’. Any

Figure 2.2  Inequality in human development.

38   Conflict as closure current understanding of conflict is inadequate before such a paradox and reinforces the idea that closure is an interesting category via which we can conceive of polarisation and conflict. Late modern societies have the greatest of difficulties to produce both material and cultural closure. Uncertainty and the responsibility for building an adequate individual life course are two well identified characteristics of late modernity (Lianos et al. 2004; Lianos & Douglas 2000; Beck 1992; Giddens 1991). Our view of conflict is incomplete until we understand how uncertainty operates in terms of openness and closure of social systems. Aspiration is a duty for late modern men and women (Lianos et al. 2004; Lianos 2017a, 2017b; Young 2007; Department of Work and Pensions 2006). Satisfaction with one’s condition is tarnished as lack of ambition or complacency and the dynamics of social existence finds some stability only when hopeful effort is underway. That type of aspirational uncertainty, albeit tyrannical, is a wonderful machine of neutralising ideological, collective utopias (Mannheim 1956, Turner 2003, Levitas 2000: 204). As objectives are set, pursued and reached in terms of individual aspiration, collective utopias become redundant for the very reason that they are collective. For example, acquiring a university degree is rarely seen as an instance of a mass process that produces banal qualified workers and, in some cases, unemployed people. It is rather the realisation of one’s competitive potential, since the type and class of the degree are thought to prove determining for the competitive advantages that the new graduate may or may not possess against others. Aspirational uncertainty is a rationalised system of hope that presents the future to each individual as a completely open set of almost limitless possibilities. In order to simply exist and build a basic selfhood, late modern men and women must believe in that openness. This condition is highly effective in preventing any type of closure because believing in closure automatically means reducing one’s appreciation of one’s own potential and social worth. The demand for certainty remains cast in personal circumstances without ever merging into a shared, collective projection. This is not to say that democratic capitalism is nothing but the sum of individual illusions. Contrary to appearances, late modern institutions are not at all weak; “in imposing order on the chaos of relations, institutions display that annoying tendency towards hegemony, which leads to a totalitarian order if pursued to its end” (Haesler 2005). Institutions may seem weaker only because they cannot operate in a sovereign or assertive manner (Dubet 2002). But their role is not to impose a unified vision of a society under a state, as it was in modernity. It is to penetrate society in all its expressions and interactions and ensure that their mediation is legitimate, continuously present and reasonably efficient. Seen from a structural point of view, they compete and win against direct sociality links by making them redundant and, eventually, leading them to wither away. Even the ultimate forms of intimacy are now perceived as regulated by institutional categories debating the limits of acceptable behaviour and the delineation of physical or emotional contact. Naturally, this is neither an institutional conspiracy nor a governmentality plan. It is simply the effect of fleeing the

Conflict as closure   39 strong restrictions of community belonging as we replace them with an efficient, omnipresent institutional web capable of permanently supporting our individuality. When understood in their real role, late modern institutions are remarkably strong and remarkably flexible at the same time. In social terms, that means much stronger and enduring than the sovereign and rigid institutions of modernity. That strength and flexibility does not avert conflict as such, but this is achieved via the two large avenues that institutions lay through late modern society: competitive individuality and organisational efficiency. The institutions of more direct forms of sociality that operate in non-­late modern societies are also strong but impose strict, value-­based social control. They lead to a centripetal dynamics which reinforces closure and, in this way, conflict. This explains why not all developing societies are involved in conflict, as well as why late modern societies are practically never involved in large-­scale violent conflict, either among or between them. Institutional weakness means in fact institutional strength but for a different type of institutions. Seeking to ‘strengthen institutions’ in areas where conflict exists or may arise is therefore useful only to the extent that it leads to the decline of ‘traditional’ institutions, such as family, marriage, symbolic debts, reciprocal gifts, tribe, community or religion. But this has only been possible, until today, through the competitive individualism of the capitalist market. When, typically, new institutions are grafted on to conditions that are not those of a capitalist market, these will be usurped or limited by the old institutions to a greater or a lesser extent, depending on the stage of market development and the cultural strength of the old institutions. The result appears to us as ‘corruption’, i.e. the application of direct sociality ties on institutional settings, and institutional ‘weakness’, i.e. the filtering of institutional action through direct sociality structures before it reaches its individual targets. This is not to deny that such aspects survive in late modern settings, particularly among the ruling classes who maintain autonomous decision powers. However, not only need these practices remain secret but they also do not permeate daily mass interaction with the institutional web. In other words, institutional efficiency may coexist with dysfunctional interstices as long as these are viewed as exceptional or abnormal.

Conclusion The close dependence of conflict on uncertainty and opportunity is caused by sociocultural conditions that limit choice and at the same time cannot absorb uncertainty via community belonging. As a regular form of social interaction, conflict is a combination of conditions and sociality, best comprehended in terms of closure. This explains the role of socially weak and organisationally strong institutions in deterring, averting or containing conflict, especially violent conflict. It also explains why some conflict cycles are longer than others, in an inverse relation with collective organisational capacity. Violence becomes endemic in settings where other options lead to destabilising uncertainty. Democratic capitalism opens up such options and generates aspiration, thus seriously

40   Conflict as closure diminishing the probability of violent conflict. It is a separate matter whether the development of liberal individualism is the only durable avenue for expressing conflict without having recourse to violence. In order to attempt any answer to this question, we must comprehend the role of conflict in social dynamics, the very raison d’être of having conflict ascribed to human sociocultures in practically ethological terms. To address this issue, in the next chapter we will turn towards the link between conflict and social change.

Notes   1 Research for this chapter has directly benefited from public funding via the EC projects A Micro Level Analysis of Violent Conflict (MICROCON, CIT4-CT-­2006–028730) and Uncertainty and Insecurity in Europe (UIE, HPSE-­CT-1999–00006).   2 In this sense, the approach followed here differs from that of authors who define conflict as a continuous line expressing antagonism and divergence, e.g. Simmel and Coser (Coser 1956). Of course, my purpose is not to argue that this continuity is untrue, but to determine points and mechanisms of qualitative transformation of collective behaviour which lead to ‘open conflict’ and, following that, to violence or threat of violence. At the same time, I should also clarify that I look at these mechanisms here from a point of view of developments in sociality.   3 Simmel’s observations in this matter seem to be as interesting as they were a century ago (1904: 492): That which was negative and dualistic may, after deduction of its destructive action in particular relationships, on the whole, play an entirely positive role. This visibly appears especially in those instances where the social structure is characterized by exactness and carefully conserved purity of social divisions and gradations. For instance, the social system of India rests not only upon the hierarchy of the castes, but also directly upon their reciprocal repulsion. Enmities not merely prevent gradual disappearance of the boundaries within the society – and for this reason these enmities may be consciously promoted, as guarantee of the existing social constitution – but more than this the enmities are directly productive sociologically. They give classes and personalities their position toward each other, which they would not have found if these objective causes of hostility had been present and effective in precisely the same way, but had not been accompanied by the feeling of enmity. It is by no means certain that a secure and complete community life would always result if these energies should disappear which, looked at in detail, seem repulsive and destructive, just as a qualitatively unchanged and richer property results when unproductive elements disappear; but there would ensue rather a condition as changed and often as unrealizable, as after the elimination of the forces of co-­operation-sympathy, assistance, harmony of interests. (See also Simmel 1971: 70ff.)   4 As a field report puts it: Political extremism and the Manichean nature of many of its ideological currents stand in direct opposition to the bargaining and accommodation inherent to democratic processes. Countries undergoing democratization and liberalization are especially vulnerable here. Bringing extremist protagonists into the fold of a comprehensive reform effort may prove complex, exhausting and, at the end of the day, futile or counter-­productive. Excluding extremists, however, might hand them exactly the legitimacy they need to gather popular support for the use of violence. Political violence, on the other hand, being a threat to the life and

Conflict as closure   41 ­ ell-­being of every citizen, raises the stakes for political decision-­makers and w engaged citizens. By intimidating and polarizing the public, political violence saps the will to reform and undermines civil society’s engagement. As violent attacks bring greater risks to both lives and resources, consensus-­building grows increasingly difficult for advocates of reform. (Bertelsmann Stiftung 2006: 7)   5 For a precious insight into the micro-­level mechanisms that govern conflict-­related choices, see the special issue of the Journal of Peace Research edited by Verwimp, Justino and Brück (2009).   6 It is interesting to link this point to the pioneering work on ‘clumsiness’ produced in the context of the grid/group theory developed by Mary Douglas. Thompson’s arguments on requisite cultural variety (2008) and the entire work on “clumsy institutions” (Thompson & Verweij 2006; Verweij 2011; Verweij, Thompson & Engel 2006) demonstrate from a different angle how important is the avoidance of polarisation and the preservation of cultural variety for peaceful coexistence.   7 To avoid confusion, I should clarify here that I am referring to all forms of social uncertainty, not uncertainty about us–them boundaries (Tilly 2003: 76ff., 229) or other operational aspects of a conflict.   8 I should remind that in this context ‘material’ includes socioeconomic and organisational conditions.   9 Dropping one’s shield and abandoning fighting was the ultimate shame for a Spartan. 10 For example, Justino found that “states with higher economic growth may expect to experience larger amounts of civil unrest” (2011: 21); Cuesta and Murshed observe that transitions are important in terms of explaining conflict (2008: 8; see also Guichaoua 2010: 1659); a series of national cases is used to illustrate the link in Cawthra and Luckham 2003. For an argument on power transition, see Geller 1992. 11 Albeit not a reliable indicator of class in sociological terms, self-­reported class belonging is a strong indicator of the perception of one’s position in society, therefore a strong determinant of social culture. 12 This is a particularly interesting analysis from a reverse point of view and produces longitudinal evidence that higher levels of social divergence are, both statistically and economically, associated with significantly lower levels of total factor productivity and per capita income.

3 Conflict as change

Sociodiversity and the conscious path to peace1 We view conflict as an irregular condition that breaks with ‘normal’ sociality. But conflict is everywhere in its various forms. Office blocks, factory shop floors, villages, neighbourhoods and often households are full of it. Courts and other institutions are there to stop or avert it, armies to conduct it, and all individuals experience it from the very early days as they crawl on a playground. Although rarely violent, conflict is an omnipresent mode of human interaction, an organised disposition of individuals and groups who can shift into a conflict mode from one moment to another with remarkable sense of timing and precision when an invisible signal says so. Those who have been part of crowds in conditions of tension know how overdetermined each individual is by others, how football fans may turn into fighters, peaceful protesters into rioters and groups of friends into camps attacking each other. Despite its importance, relatively little is known of this process. It is hardly a coincidence that social psychology is somewhat more advanced than sociology in this area. Muzafer Sherif ’s seminal Robbers Cave experiment and Realistic Conflict Theory (for example, Duckitt 1994) have interestingly systematised what we know from observation about conflict between both equal and unequal collectivities. On the other hand, the process is so familiar and reliable that repeated conflict experiments have even been marketed as antidiscrimination courses2 and bestselling common sense (Friedman 2007) on economic, thus geopolitical, interdependence. An interesting “peace ethology” perspective (Verbeek 2008) has emerged too. The success and proliferation of conflict resolution programmes, theories, projects, workshops, research institutes and organisations around the globe is a testimony to the dominant approach of the issue, which is that of ‘conflict resolution’, i.e. a post-­conflict approach. The entire issue of conflict is all the more naturalised by the fact that we only look at its consequences as external observers expressing regret. This is a very odd state of affairs for the social sciences in particular. Taking the phenomenon to be obvious and its consequences to be highly unnatural is certainly not the best way of studying conflict. We need to ask why we are all equipped with that pristine comprehension of the mechanics of conflict. What is

Conflict as change   43 the role of that comprehension in our social lives? Why is the mutual understanding of conflict one of the universal aspects of human sociality? Could conflict be just another operational face of human collectivity? A digression is necessary here. If we need to look at conflict, it is useful to get a better idea of how collective aggression works. For example, the literary consensus around ‘crowd madness’ does not stand to empirical examination. Crowd violence is not irrational. It is rather a concrete expression of how socioeconomic and cultural closure leads to outbursts of aggression. For example, Tolnay and Beck (1995: 27) note the conditions that drove racial segregation in the Amer­ican South in the 1910s: “Reinforcing the caste boundary and affirming white racial superiority diminished the odds that an alienated white lower class might unite with blacks to challenge the privileged position of influential whites.” They also note: A few weeks [after the 1919 Chicago riot] an unknown black man travelling by train through Georgia […] boasted to his fellow travellers that he was from Chicago, and that the blacks of Georgia should do what the blacks of Chicago had just done. He was taken from the passenger train by a mob of enraged whites and hanged from a small tree near Cochran for his incendiary comments. Crowds are not blind homogeneous collectivities (McPhail 1991). They are mostly patchworks of smaller units that may or may not adhere to a dynamics of violent conflict (idem 2008). Closely linked people remain together and maintain interaction over crowd formation and movement (Cornwell 2003). However, the dynamics of conflict is constructed as an interaction game between actors who built up opposition. For example, in the context of a protest, the approach used by the police may change the initial positioning of the majority of the protestors: […] there is a dynamic whereby police assumptions concerning the homogeneity of the crowd, and police practices which impose a common fate on all crowd members lead to a self-­fulfilling prophecy on a collective scale. That is, the initially heterogeneous crowd becomes homogenous. Moreover, to the extent that police action is seen as not only indiscriminate but also illegitimate (e.g., denying the right to protest and using offensive tactics to disperse the crowd) then the entire crowd will unite around a sense of opposition to the police and the authorities they are protecting. This will be reflected in behavioral changes – notably, a willingness to enter into conflict with the police. It will also be reflected in psychological changes. That is, those who initially saw themselves as moderates change their understanding of their relationship with the authorities and hence their own identity. Being treated as radicals, they came to see themselves as radical. In addition, the emergence of a common radical self-­categorization within the crowd leads to feelings of consensus and to expectations of mutual support which

44   Conflict as change empowers crowd members to express their radicalism and to take on the police. (Drury & Reicher 2009: 713) More generally, this model applies to all conditions of what the authors call the Elaborated Social Identity Model: […] people’s sense of their social position (social identity) changes to the extent that, in acting on their identity (participating in a crowd event), they are repositioned as a consequence of the understandings and reactions of an out-­group (treated as oppositionalists by the police), and this repositioning leads both to a new sense of identity and new forms of action (oppositional violence). (Ibid.) People are seen as possible violent opponents and they may become so as they are empowered by the collectivity surrounding them. Their position changes in proportion to the possibility of changing their view of themselves from peaceful disagreement to violent conflict. Closure leads to a game of reciprocal symbolic escalation3 that artificially augments claims to power, domination and prevalence. Other solutions, much more peaceful, are always possible but they are set aside by the mutual determination of positions as increasingly incompatible and inimical. This process is not irrational, either, if we look at it from the point of view of representing closure at an operational level. When cultural and social conditions favour closure, then various conflicts continually test the potential of making that closure materialise as a dominant collective choice. Collective empowerment is from that point of view an accentuated misunderstanding that works. It brings the parties from a temporary rivalry expressed in terms of public order to violence constituted as conflict. Rebel groups of all kinds are first cast as a problem of restoring order by the police or the army, not as durable challengers of established power. But as governments seek to suppress them rather than to achieve compromise, their identity changes and the binary representation of reality gathers momentum. Support and rejection need to become clearer, and intermediate positions disappear. The question is why this process develops. Conflict is visibly present in its nascent form of rivalry and tension whenever closure is possible. Each time a collective action, e.g. a protest march or a strike, expresses conflict, closure is put to the test. Will it be strong enough for the misunderstanding of positions to take place? In most cases, this will not be so and the conflict will be local, temporary, limited to a specific issue and non-­violent. But in the rare cases where closure will make the collectivity strong enough, the threshold will be overcome and violence will trigger a new phase that may or may not be durable. In terms of the conflict timeline, things can be represented as shown in Figure 3.1. Duration is a factor that depends on the continuation of the conditions in  which conflict arises. High or low conflict intensity is another important

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46   Conflict as change differentiation which will depend on several socioeconomic and situational parameters. International and geopolitical issues will at this stage also affect the structure of the conflict. At the same time, the availability of resources to the challenging party will also determine the degree of organisation of the conflict. Obviously, guns, vehicles, helicopters or a real, fully deployed army will not structure conflict in the same way as regular street protests or riots.4 However, the general scheme remains unaffected as closure, in combination with the accentuated demand for certainty, maintains the conflict alive. Conflict will only end if one or both of these essential conditions is not satisfied. We know from experience that conflicts often ‘spread’, but through this dynamics it is possible to understand why the self-­proliferation of conflict is likely. The stakes increase for the parties involved as defeat will certainly entail an aggravation of their previous position. At the same time, resources are being spent at a frenetic pace in order to conduct and sustain conflict while many other resources are simultaneously destroyed because of it. Households suffer stress, loss of income, displacement or even loss of life and react accordingly (Justino, Brück & Verwimp 2013). It is possible to enter in some cases a ‘normality’ of conflict, with resources and territories being exploited between sides in a way that increases duration and sometimes communities being largely instrumentalised into permanently providing human and material resources for the perpetuation of conflict, the so-­called ‘conflict trap’ (on resources and duration, see Ross 2004). All these probabilities that we see materialise around the globe rise within the dynamics described here. But what is the dynamics of decline for conflict? How does conflict as a social phenomenon end? By which processes does it lead to the establishment of some peaceful normality? We have seen that in a sense conflict never fully ends, since there are always small minorities to hold ideologies of closure that permanently test the conditions for conflict to arise. However, conflict ends in the sense that it does not occupy considerable parts of a society and that there exists no violent challenge to the established normality. There are several ways to look at this phenomenon but it is certainly a good start to admit that so long as people, particularly young males, are alive on both sides, then the conflict can continue. The idea that a conflict may simply ‘run out of steam’ is sociologically unacceptable, for it is conscience that makes peace an option or the outcome of lack of options.5 People must believe that there is an end to which they conform, otherwise they fight to the death. To come to this conclusion, they must feel quite certain that the conditions that surround them mean that conflict came or should come to an end; or they must believe that there are alternatives to conflict which allow them to pursue their aspirations. A continuous line links these two possibilities: either the aspirations expressed via conflict cannot be any longer pursued at that time or they can be pursued in other, more peaceful ways. Certainty on the one hand and openness on the other hand will put an end to conflict and this is in line with the analysis so far. But what is revealed to us at this point is that certainty and openness – or uncertainty and closure – regulate one essential aspect of the collectivities involved, i.e. their aspiration for change.

Conflict as change   47 From this point of view, conflict is the reaction of a collectivity that seeks change more rapidly than the conditions seem to allow. The orientation of that change may be the same or different from what future opponents would like to see. For example, enlightened middle classes may approve of specific changes in the long run but do not wish to see these changes happen very fast, revolutionise society and endanger their place in it. Lower classes on the other hand may feel that the time is right to pursue exactly the same changes but rapidly, precisely because it is that rapid pace that is likely to change their place in society. These social aspirations for rapid change interact with the two parameters that regulate it: uncertainty and closure. If very little can be offered in terms of certainty regarding these aspirations, the issue becomes a matter of alternative routes to pursue. Lack of openness is precisely what may bar these routes and lead to the pursuit of change via confrontation and possibly violence. Ideologies of polarisation will be adopted to handle the organisation of conflict and give the social aspirations involved the definitive qualities of a legitimate, just and necessary transformation of the world: a utopia worth fighting for. Conflict should be understood therefore as the aspiration for faster change than conditions allow, in a context which makes that rapid change seem the only possible choice.6 Implicit in this understanding is the condition of opportunity, which is often wrongly taken to be a conscious evaluation of possibilities as being advantageous. However, collective social interaction does not function along the lines of rational preparation in view of agreeing whether conditions constitute an opportunity or not.7 With regard to conflict, opportunity is the convergence of belief around uncertainty and closure. The existence of the circumstances that allow for the polarisation of the social world – and this includes of course both one’s strong points, such as resources, and the weak points of the adversary – exist only as representations on which the decision for action is being made. Although one should not deny the importance of structured preparation, planning and leadership in pre-­conflict conditions or movements (e.g. Stein 2012), these are aspects that seek to capitalise on representations that are favourable to conflict rather than generate such representations ex nihilo. Opportunity, either in the form of ‘greed’ or in any other form, is the collective understanding of the situation as leading to conflict.

Change and legitimacy of outcomes Conflict is a matter of pace in social change. This in itself means that it is also a matter of direction of social change, because the time when a specific social change happens or fails to happen makes for a different course of history. For example, an abrupt change in stratification, cultural beliefs or the economic mode, if combined with other concurrent changes, say a global financial crisis, will give a totally different outcome than it would have given if it happened slowly over decades as part of the consequences of that financial crisis. Through fast pace, conflict is meant to produce a visibly different world in the field in which it takes place. The social value of conflict is underestimated because of its

48   Conflict as change frequent ineffectiveness to produce a ‘positive’ outcome and the terrible consequences that it often has. But conflict always produces legitimacy in the sense that it accentuates claims to power on all sides and reinforces systems of belief that envisage the world in a particular manner. Conflict along ethnic or religious lines, for example, even when it fails to establish the challenging party as a dominant one, reinforces ethnicity or religion as a legitimate framework of comprehending the social world. In this sense, conflict never fails since it obliges everyone to consider and practice the world via the categories along which the conflict is structured. That is often misunderstood as a mistaken and backward view of the world, whereas it is in fact a product of social forces that do not have the conditions to envisage the world differently. What distinguishes ethnic conflict in Belgium from ethnic conflict in Rwanda is certainly not an abstract ‘will to peace’ but the fact that late modern, capitalist individuality side-­lines closure over ethnicity via the individuating processes described in the previous chapter. As the BTI report on violence and extremism puts it: [Our] findings challenge the view that democratization resolves internal violent conflict. Instead, BTI data show that fully institutionalized liberal democracies alone are predisposed to peace. Countries at some intermediate level of democracy, however, are more prone to intrastate armed conflict, and armed conflict in harsh and moderate autocracies is more violent than in defective democracies. Democracy and armed violence thus appear to be in an inverse relationship; the less democratic a regime becomes, the higher the risk of armed violence. BTI findings also show a similar relationship between the status of economic transformation and armed conflict: the better the state of economic transformation in a given country, the lower the likelihood of armed conflict. (Bertelsmann Stiftung 2006: 12; added emphasis) Indeed, the differences in the prevalence of conflict seem quite clear as shown in Figure 3.2 and Figure 3.3, which involve data from 119 countries. It should be remembered that mature democratic regimes and developed market economies do not necessarily coincide in the same countries.8 The indication that conflict varies with remarkable coincidence according to both of these parameters is in fact … not a coincidence at all. It is rather an expression of one specific category that is common to liberal democracy and to market economy and that, I argue, is individuation. Poor economic and organisational conditions favour collective representations around communal aspects such as ethnicity, religion or territoriality.9 These communal aspects are in pre-­modern or non-­late modern settings the only ties robust enough to conceive of the social world in terms of closure and to strongly represent the legitimacy and necessity of rapid change. For if the late modern individual will support conflict to see her ‘individual liberties’ continue and prevail, the non-­late modern community will expectedly support conflict to see community belonging continue and prevail.10 This is often misunderstood as an

100 90 80 70 Per cent

60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Moderate autocracies

Autocracies War

Severe crises

Defective democracies

Crises

Democracies

Manifest conflict

Latent conflict

Countries where no conflicts were observed

Figure 3.2  Status of political transformation and conflicts. Source: Bertelsmann Stiftung 2006: 30. 100 90 80 70 Per cent

60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Less developed or non-existent market economy War

Deficient market economy

Severe crises

Functioning market economy

Developed market economy

Manifest conflict

Latent conflict

Crises

Countries where no conflicts were observed

Figure 3.3  Status of economic transformation and conflicts. Source: Bertelsmann Stiftung 2006: 32.

50   Conflict as change identity-­bound phenomenon only in the second case, but it is in fact just as identity-­bound in the first one. The only difference is that identity in the first case is constituted via individuality and not via community.11 From that point of view, conflict paradoxically seems to be a highly relativistic process bringing into intimate, rival contact any aspects of social belonging that are established, independently of their content. Structurally speaking, conflict is a social process that checks with history if power is in the right place or can be redistributed. This is why, horrible as the process may be, the outcome of conflict is always legitimate. Power is asserted or reasserted and devastation, disaster and trauma become parts of a regrettable past without seriously affecting the legitimacy of the present. ‘Terrorists’ end up ‘freedom fighters’ or government ministers and vice versa, sanguinary oppression campaigns become objects of “pardon and forget” ceremonies, victims – dead or alive – have as their only right the vacuous magnanimity of abstract speeches on a ‘painful past’ and the world goes on without the outcome of conflict being seriously challenged. Like any other social process, conflict is not a rational process but a condition defending its own representation of rationality. From the point of view of its ending, conflict is a legitimising process. It asserts peace. It presents its outcome as the best possible one, given the circumstances. (Partial) winners and losers come under a regime of power practices and compete within the limits of peace as closure tendencies are kept at bay and certainty increases over what that regime entails socially, politically, economically and culturally. This is clearly illustrated by Table 3.1 which shows the findings of a survey conducted on behalf of the International Red Cross that posed the following question: For each description I read out, please say whether the armed conflict has made you feel more this way, less this way, or has it made no real difference? There are few exceptions (shaded boxes) – not particularly significant – to the main tendencies in this table. It is clear that the principal sociocultural victim of conflict is trust, but people focus on the change and its advantages (optimistic) instead of seeking to perpetuate violence (aggressive). Although uncertainty may be high in some cases, a condition often described as ‘instability’, the end of a conflict does produce a representation of where power lies and for what reason. People start to invest in possibilities that are compatible with that representation. Households and other actors adjust their strategies in order to make the most to survive and prosper in the new situation (Justino 2011), thus participating in enhancing the legitimacy of the new conditions. Peace, as such, now constitutes change and every actor needs to develop his strategy in order to benefit from it. This process is more than a wilful social change. It combines the determinism of social relations as it produces some outcomes that bear close relation to the intended outcomes and many others that, albeit foreign to what was intended, become equally legitimate. For example, displaced populations that were caught in the middle of conflict are

Conflict as change   51 Table 3.1  Sociocultural consequences of armed conflict Base: all who have directly experienced or been affected by armed conflict in any way

Optimistic for the future

Trusting

Violent/aggressive

TOTAL (2,783)

é ê

45 27

é ê

22 46

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13 36

Afghanistan (515)

é ê

30 29

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22 43

é ê

17 36

Colombia (154)

é ê

52 26

é ê

12 53

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 3 30

DRC (410)

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42 19

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25 21

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14 16

Georgia (78)

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36 42

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 7 67

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 6 57

Haiti (510)

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54 26

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33 49

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15 52

Lebanon (579)

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49 35

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20 54

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24 18

Liberia (478)

é ê

57 31

é ê

51 42

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19 56

The Philippines (59)

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38 11

é ê

5 40

é ê

 6 19

Source: Ipsos & ICRC 2009: 44–45.

obliged to create new conditions and populate new areas or introduce change to other societies, outcomes that were not at all part of the conflict agenda. One can look at unintended consequences like refugee and migrant movements due to conflicts as parts of the geometry of power that legitimises outcomes which would otherwise have been as incomprehensible as they are tragic. Conflict legitimises both change and horror as it works its way towards a new social regime. Even when that way lasts for many long years and brings ineffable destruction, it leads to a new historical legitimacy which from a social point of view asserts the character of conflict as a normal part of sociality, not a suspension of it. It is simply because the outcomes of conflict are historically legitimised that we think of peace as a sufficient and desirable social condition. Few of us would prefer to live in a world in which the French Revolution would not have happened. Modern and late modern sociality, however, has the pretention and the duty of seeking to avert suffering in many forms, ranging from accident to illness and

52   Conflict as change from environmental damage to conflict. Social processes in late modern society include an element of design and conscious orientation towards the decrease of all suffering. It is therefore only an apparent paradox that both conflict and our efforts to avert and stop it are parts of ‘normal’ human sociality. What may make these efforts more efficient is the initial admission that conflict is a process of change, not an irrational reaction to matters that could have been settled more peacefully. Understanding conflict as the social aspiration for rapid change brings us much closer to designing action that can at the same time predict, quell and avert conflicts. Such action needs to be just in increasing certainty and decreasing closure. That can mostly be done by seeking to bring about the outcomes of conflict before it takes place, not by focusing on the internal mechanics of the conflict itself. It depends on the specific circumstances what initiatives and resources will be effective in dealing rapidly with the demand for certainty and the credibility of alternatives that will break up closure into a series of parallel possibilities to pursue. But the essential recipe is the same: dancing faster than the social music in producing change. Offering other possibilities of pursuing change makes conflict appear an exaggerated and unnecessary response to prevailing conditions.

Belonging, sacrifice, division The fact that conflict is initially experienced as a ‘non-­routine’ situation resembles thousands of other situations for which standard parts of our sociality prepare us, such as heavy weather conditions, public feasts, protests and manifestations, or flight from dangerous places. From that point of view, conflict is not a failure of social mechanisms but a successful guarantee that sociality will always supply opportunities for change. A good way of understanding this aspect is by looking at a rare form of social behaviour which emerges when conflict is not yet likely, or power between the conflicting parties is unbalanced to the point where the weaker party might be in danger of abandoning the fight. It is interesting that under these circumstances instigation to start or continue with the conflict is given in the form of sacrifice. Self-­immolations, hunger strikes and other forms of self-­harming behaviour are individual acts that address a collectivity as a community that needs to think and act in terms of pursuing change via resistance to dominant violence, often via counter-­violence. Were violent conflict not a tool of social change, such behaviour would be not only ‘irrational’ but meaningless to those that it addresses. It is not. Opponents to oppressive regimes, terrorists, freedom fighters, pacifist monks and even civil servants12 – to name but a few – display that form of protest as an offering to the community that will inspire others to achieve change through conflict (Andriolo 2006). As Bobby Sands put it: I’m going to die, make no two ways about it. I know I am dying and I want to make it clear what I am dying for. It’s not about a suit of clothes or a food parcel. I’m dying to make sure that the struggle continues, that the struggle lives! (Quoted in Feldman 1991: 243)

Conflict as change   53 For this form of action to be meaningful, human sociality must contain a pre-­ existing ‘thermostat’ for considering conflict. If hostile action by a dominant adversary is not enough to generate a strong reaction, altruist sacrifice may influence closure and the pursuit of change just as well. We are strangely now in the Maussian territory of gift where self-­elimination is the ultimate, albeit unilateral, form of offering; for one cannot reciprocate and is for ever indebted. This remains true even when the party concerned is committed to peaceful resistance, as it is in Tibet: All the [Tibetan] monks I ask say they understand why their fellow clerics immolated themselves breaking Buddhist vows against the taking of life. “They did this not as individuals but for the Tibetan people,” says a 20-year­old monk. “I admire their courage.” (Beech 2011) There is little need to belabour the point when one knows how Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-­immolation on 17 December 2010 became the catalyst that sparked the series of revolutions known as the Arab Spring. The most significant deduction to draw from this type of motivating sacrifice is that it seeks to address a community and stimulate its values and belonging around the axis of conflict or struggle. If it is possible to use self-­destruction in order to incite others to do exactly the opposite, this means that community belonging and conflict are very tightly linked. Such a link would seem reasonable both from an evolutionary point of view and from a collective identity angle. Social diversity cannot be adequately expressed in community settings because there is no difference between belonging to the community and complying with community norms. In that context, it is necessary to have an efficient solution which makes possible the modification of the status quo. It is at the same time inevitable that such a solution breaks with community belonging. Thus it creates by definition a – partially or totally – new community identity for those who do not belong any longer. This is probably how we came to have a social form that constitutes at the same time a demand for change and an identity challenge. Consequently, conflict can be seen as a demand for change through division, therefore as a mechanism for creating new sub-­communities that generate belonging via that division. It is quite expectable from this point of view that when change is sought within an established collectivity, violence is the only way to polarise it around new lines of belonging. The perfect example here is civil war, where it is necessary to rapidly redetermine a part of ‘Us’ as ‘Others’. Notoriously, violence is used to swiftly destroy any neutral ground (Americas Watch 1982) so that recourse to the unifying, often national identity becomes impossible. The new criterion of belonging might be ethnic, racial, ideological, historical, political, moral or even aesthetic but division in terms of creating new communities of belonging is indispensable in the pursuit of change. A safe conclusion is therefore that inasmuch as tightly knit communities are concerned,

54   Conflict as change conflict is the main efficient way of representing and pursuing change, and violence the fastest way of realising conflict. The problem is then inversed. Instead of viewing conflict as inefficient destruction, we would need to wonder how we can match its great efficiency via processes that are not destructive. The multiple forms and models of peaceful negotiation (see for example MacGinty 2013; Webel & Galtung 2007) are of course attempts to do precisely that and they do contribute to pacification. However, they can only work in environments where any one of the conflicting parties cannot envisage a clear victory and where third parties, such as international organisations, can control the conflicting parties. This means that change will not only be a competition of force and endurance between the conflicting parties, but also an outcome compatible with the views and the interests of the third parties involved. This configuration can, however, contribute to long­lasting conflicts with varying periods of intensity (a good example is the ­Palestinian/Israeli conflict). This is not to suggest that a genocide or a political pogrom are better solutions because they bring conflict to an end much more efficiently, but it shows why violent means are still ‘spontaneously’ preferred by the conflicting parties over peace-­oriented mediation. Violence between the conflicting parties guarantees, so to speak, that the outcome is clear and legitimate in the sense that it represents sheer power rather than a more or less plausible appeal to reason, beliefs or values. The functional ‘preference’ for violent conflict is thus a consequence of community and identity dynamics; that is, a consequence of belonging to separate collectivities which increasingly perceive their coexistence to be impossible and their resources, territory or culture to be undividable. There is, however, another solution to this problem, which seems at the same time creative and peaceful.

‘Branching out’ There are communities that have totally or partially lost the possibility of envisaging internal conflict. Such are the minority communities that are unable or unwilling to respond to aggression with violence. They have specific belief systems and maintain their identity, their values and the boundaries, which separates them from the wider societies that surround them. Small utopian religious or ideological communities generate significant interest in the social sciences but they are expectedly difficult to access; however, they are well researched and documented in several cases (e.g. Hostetler 1997, 1993). One aspect that particularly concerns us here is the inexistence of violence and of most violent forms of deviance and conflict within such social enclaves. One may explain this away by vaguely linking conformity to an overall conservatism. But we know that social environments that demand a high degree of compliance are rather prone to deviance and corruption. Sects often end up as communities of sexual and financial exploitation (Shupe 2008; Stark & Bainbridge 1985), army units and university fraternities are regularly found to maintain rogue hazing practices (Østvik & Rudmin 2001; Evans 2013; Parks et al. 2014), schools are often prone to

Conflict as change   55 bullying (Swearer et al. 2010) and close-­knit village communities often have dark secrets of violent or deviant behaviour (Carrington et al. 2013; Murty et al. 2003; Baume & Clinton 1997). None of these seems to be true for some rare communities that persist in time. In a highly interesting comparison, Brumann (2000) delves into the factors that prolong the duration of communes that practice community of goods. Of the 277 communes established in the United States before 1938 […], a majority did not even survive a decade, and not more than a handful of the thousands of communes founded around 1970 – possibly tens of thousands in the United States alone […] – have retained community of goods until the present day [2000]. Some communes persist, however, and have reached life spans of many decades or even centuries, often sustaining a culture that is highly distinct from their ambient society. Thus, the explanation of survival has been a perennial concern of research on utopian communes. (Brumann 2000: 426) Brumann finds that strong domination of one leader and lack of the process known as ‘branching out’ lead to the decline of such communes via conflict or lack of motivation, or both. On the basis of extensive data, he convincingly argues that when the commune revolves around a towering charismatic individual whose presence fundamentally determines all aspects of belief and practice, the commune will often disappear because its structure will not be able to survive the decline or loss of that leader (ibid.: 427–434). Things are different with leaders that may be charismatic but assume a ‘normal’ role in the commune and do not seek or accept any privileges even though other members acknowledge them as first among equals. This difference between highly dominant ‘kings’ and moderately dominant ‘saints’ is at the heart of the longevity of the commune, because ‘saints’ allow for genuine collective expression and debate and consequently for a long-­term process of continuous adjustment to diverging trends and ideas. The overwhelming personality of the charismatic leader sets in these cases a convincing example to follow instead of imposing conformity on a personal basis. This critical margin of freedom avoids the emergence of conflict and implosion once the leader is gone. Although Brumann does not deal with the point, this aspect also seems to be related to the pragmatic stance of perennial communes which acknowledge the fact that human beings are weak and will not attain perfection in their individual or collective behaviour. Tensions, antagonisms and discords can thus explicitly be dealt with before they threaten community cohesion. The second crucial factor for commune longevity is the creation of new settlements once a certain threshold is reached. The threshold often relates to the size of the community but it can also take into account internal tensions. This process that brings to mind the cell division in our bodies is known as ‘branching out’. New settlements stem out of older ones, thus ensuring that numerical balance and organising principles remain stable.

56   Conflict as change Support among communal branches in the form of material resources, advice, work parties and capable specialists is most substantial for newly founded settlements, and even where it remains somewhat half-­hearted – such as in the precarious younger kibbutzim that are provided with financial support and advice by the long-­established branches, but not with permanent members – it usually still suffices to avoid total failure. Most famous in this regard is Hutterite ‘branching out’: whenever a colony has grown too large, the members and resources are divided into two equal shares. Then, the lot is cast over which half is to stay at the old location and which one is to move to the new site purchased and prepared for this purpose. The old colony is obliged to support the new one during the pioneer period, and both share the financial load involved. In later years as well, the two branches are the most likely candidates for economic cooperation and the exchange or marriage partners. Despite the effort involved, ‘branching out’ is highly valued as a visible and meaningful sign of expansion and as a means for establishing new and challenging positions of responsibility for younger members. It has also been identified as the chief motive for practicing austerity, thereby protecting the colonies from the temptations of increased private consumption and freeriding. Particularly among the Bruderhof communities in Yamagishi-­kai during the Shaker expansion into the Midwest, and in the early years of the kibbutzim, the founding of new branches seems to have aroused a similar enthusiasm. (Ibid.: 440–441) In a world that contrasts with their way of life in almost every sense, the Hutterites survive despite strict conservative values and androcracy. The reason for this extraordinary difference is probably their combination of several cultural and organisational factors. First, a culture of non-­violent beliefs; second, a fully pervasive community lifestyle; third, the possibility to leave the community and to come back; fourth, the absence of a culture of ‘progress’; fifth, ‘branching out’, i.e. reproduction by the division of communities when they grow and the creation of new communities, reinforced by the random selection of the members who will leave to shape the new community and those who will remain. The combination of these factors largely amounts to an alternative management of social change. Instead of seeking to control conflict, the community controls change itself. This happens through intense social control that practically eliminates extra-­communal experience and makes the individual behave in all cases so as to reproduce community culture. As this culture is not oriented towards voluntary aspirational change (i.e. ‘progress’), the emergence of alternative patterns of life and experience becomes irrelevant. In fact, this can be experienced as a conscious struggle.13 This is of course in line with the community of goods, since members are free to go but they cannot take any possession or savings with them. At the same time, random selection of those who will branch out blocks the formation of interest groups within the community and obliges individuals to link to each other through one uniform community link.

Conflict as change   57 […] a federative branch structure or semi-­independent settlements is a feature of communes that is consistently associated with longevity. Here, the size of single settlements can be held closer to the favorable range of 75 to 500 members than in the alternative of a single large settlement. Moreover, supporting one another in emergencies or even regularly, branches are much better protected against economic and other disasters than completely independent communes would be, and they have more leeway for risky experimentation in a limited number of branches, the results of which can benefit all others. To be effective, however, such a branch structure must be federative, meaning that no single branch may strongly dominate all others. If this principle is violated, the safety net fails: while crises in the peripheral branches can be solved by the center, the reverse is not possible. Just like the compartments in a ship’s hull, the single units will only afford protection against sinking if none of them is oversized. (Ibid.: 445) Interaction is concentrated around social reproduction. Opportunity and loss are thus taken out of the social equation, simultaneously suppressing grievances about unequal distribution of advantages in the present or the future. This social configuration would in many ways be totalitarian if exiting the community were not possible. Except for the rare, extraordinary exit towards the surrounding ‘modern’ society, ample exiting is designed into the system via division and creation of a new community, which is set up with the financial and technical help of the old one. It is highly significant to note that the new community is allowed to innovate and take risks with the support of the older community. Division, and minimal change, are then provided for in a way that regularly relaxes possible pressure without breaking shared identity, tight socioeconomic interdependence and endogamy. ‘Branching out’ can therefore be seen as an optimal mechanism that provides for the social management of change without the need for conflict. Bennett (1967: 252) has succinctly pointed out that the Brethren have managed to consciously control social change: the Hutterites achieve a level of rationality higher than that of most societies; Hutterian society and its changes are controlled not only by indirect ecological pressures, political factors, and individual responses, but also by the society’s collective will. The forces leading inevitably to change in other social systems are used by the Brethren to control and limit change in their own. Among the many interesting deductions that can be drawn from the process of branching out, one stands out: the potential for conflict depends on the representation of change. While in general this representation varies between possible and unlikely, branching out makes it simply a matter of time, i.e. certain. What is more, it combines the certainty of change and the relative permanence of established social forms into one planned future. To put it in Durkheimian terms,

58   Conflict as change not only is social change certain but it also does not entail anomy. Participants know what their world will be like when expected change happens and what their place will be in that world. While they will have the opportunity to amend some aspects of their lives that they may find unpleasant or less appealing, their sociocultural framework is not under threat. This vision seems to initially contrast with the dominant utopian representation in which significant – if not radical – transformations are at the heart of considerations around social change. What is more, these transformations are implicitly conceived of as planned, intended or intensely desired to the point of generating conflict and sacrifice, as we saw earlier. However, if we look at works on utopia (Levitas 1990), we see that things are not necessarily one-­dimensional. Mannheim’s work is helpful here as it distinguishes between four essential forms of utopia, one of which is, paradoxically, conservative (Manheim 1936: 206–215). The conservative mentality is the dominant one, Manheim argues, and represents essentially a ‘realistic’ majority stance towards the world in the sense that it accepts its determinacy. It becomes a conscious form of utopia only to the extent that it is challenged by other ideas. But as change is a necessary part of the social process, its dominant conservative representation lies in accepting the given historical conditions and adjusting while seeking incremental improvements. The essential consequence of this configuration is therefore the probability of conflict when an antagonism of utopias is at play. The dominant conservative forces become conscious of themselves and closure starts to build up towards a binary change/no change zero-­sum game. Otherwise put, closure is in the last analysis the radicalisation of conservatism, in the sense that dominant forces form an impasse in which challenging forces put themselves. The fundamental question here is if this frequently repeated process is necessary.

Conclusion Conflict exists as a social process because it is oriented towards change. When analysed as a meaningful collective process, it appears at the same time much less structured and much more efficient than we often perceive it to be. From that point of view, conflict can be understood as the reaction of a collectivity that seeks change more rapidly than the conditions seem to allow and as a social process that checks with history if power is in the right place or can be redistributed. Several types of behaviour, including self-­sacrifice, testify to the indispensable community link that underlies conflict. The functional ‘preference’ for violent conflict is thus a consequence of community and identity dynamics; that is, a consequence of belonging to separate collectivities which increasingly perceive their coexistence to be impossible and their resources, territory or culture to be undividable. There is, however, another solution to this problem, which seems at the same time creative and peaceful. ‘Branching out’ is a method that guarantees peace and community division in an environment of solidarity. Combined with some consubstantial factors, that process largely amounts to an alternative management of social change. In this

Conflict as change   59 case, instead of seeking to control conflict, the community triggers and at the same time controls change itself.

Notes   1 Research for this chapter has directly benefited from public funding via the EC projects A Micro Level Analysis of Violent Conflict (MICROCON, CIT4-CT-­2006–028730) and Uncertainty and Insecurity in Europe (UIE, HPSE-­CT-1999–00006).   2 For example, Jane Elliott’s Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes exercise which, interestingly, does not seem to have the same outcome in different cultures.   3 Bohorquez et al. (2009) examined the size and timing of 54,679 violent events reported within nine diverse insurgent conflicts in various parts of the planet. They statistically established that insurgent wars follow similar patterns of reaction to information; this is consistent with the thinking that insurgent forces seek to generate impact through information, most significantly the media. They conclude: “[Their] model’s specific mechanisms challenge traditional ideas of insurgency based on rigid hierarchies and networks, whereas its striking similarity to multi-­agent financial market models hints at a possible link between collective human dynamics in violent and non-­violent settings” (p. 914).   4 Most interestingly, Chiba, Machain and Reed (2014) have found that it is the resources of actors that determine propensity to conflict, not a different ‘culture’ of thinking about the conflict. Major powers view conflicts in the same way as minor powers, but they will engage in conflict more often and much longer merely because they have the capacity to last through the conflict and win.   5 McClelland’s fascinating paper on multiagent simulation elaborates on Collins’s theorisation (2012) and explains the interlacing of interaction and belief into a single structure (McClelland 2014: 117): Solidarity […] works best to increase the group’s effectiveness in conflict when its members coalesce around more extreme positions. Solidarity without polarization has little effect [my emphasis]. The model presented by Collins puts the polarization and solidarity variables into separate feedback loops, but my analysis suggests that the two factors might more properly be represented as working together in the same feedback loop.   6 This approach integrates a series of analyses on conflict which attach importance to the combination of dissatisfaction with existing conditions at a specific time and the lack of non-­violent means of action towards changing such conditions (see for example Walter 2004).   7 This is not to deny the possibility that small groups may plan and carry out actions that are meant to trigger conflict. Such actions are in fact tests of uncertainty and closure, and may partially succeed or fail, depending on the state of these two dimensions. Another useful clarification is that planned attempts to seize power, such as a coup d’état, can be explained by this theoretical framework only to the degree that they lead to conflict. For it is perfectly possible to seize power via tactical means and meet with mere passive acceptance by the collectivity involved.   8 This is also why Walter (2014) finds that: repeat civil wars are predominantly located in the Middle East and sub-­Saharan Africa – the two most weakly institutionalized regions of the world. It is not democracy or poverty per se, but very specific accountability mechanisms that make countries more or less likely to experience repeat war. The effects of a liberal market regime must be added to these mechanisms as de facto components of social accountability.

60   Conflict as change   9 Grafton, Knowles and Owen (2004: 309) note that the reverse is also true: The empirical results support our initial hypothesis that Total Factor Productivity is negatively related to three proxies for social divergence (income inequality, ethnic diversity and religious diversity) for our sample of countries. These three variables, and also the educational inequality variable, are shown to have a negative effect on per capita income. 10 For an analysis of the mechanisms that put this dynamics into effect, see for example Verwimp (2005) and McDoom (2012, 2013) on the Rwandan genocide. 11 This explains the apparent paradox of nationalism and ethnicism among lower social strata. Although people’s satisfaction with the condition of their nation affects their satisfaction with their own individual life, ‘national satisfaction’ is more important for poorer populations. On the contrary, the satisfaction of Western populations depends more on proximate individual elements (health, income, material convenience) than on considerations linked to national belonging (Morrison, Tay & Diener 2011; data from a Gallup sample representing 95% of the world’s adult population, N = 132,516). 12 In France, suicide has become a standard method of reaction to work-­related harassment. In the public sector, an association of ‘victimised civil servants’ monitors such acts (http://sos-­fonctionnaire-victime.com/spip.php?rubrique38, accessed 3 November 2012). There is an Observatory for Stress and Forced Mobility in France Telecom – Orange, which counts the suicides and attempted suicides by workers in the French  telecoms industry: there were 27 suicides and 16 attempts in 2010 (www. observatoiredustressft.org/images/stories/recensemt_suicides_27_oct_2011.pdf, accessed 12 November 2011). There were also 22 employee suicides at work in the public rail company (SNCF ) between January 2007 and April 2012 (Le Parisien, 20 July 2012). Self-immolation was also used as a protest against employer disciplinary action in the Lyon District Council (ibid.). 13 According to Kraybill and Olshan (1994: vii): […] the Amish struggle with modernity has been a war against progress, or at least the spirit of progress. They certainly are not opposed to everything new and […] they have acquiesced to modernity in many ways. But the Amish are engaged in a war against the spirit of progress – against arrogance, against progress as a goal [added emphasis], and against the social fragmentation and alienation that often accompany some forms of ‘progress’. It might seem odd to portray the pacifist Amish as engaged in warfare, even at the level of metaphor. But, in fact, the Amish see themselves as constantly fighting against the influence of worldly institutions. As one Amishman put it: “The Christian life is a warfare.” This takes its full meaning in the context of the Amish non-­resistance culture since “their teaching of non-­resistance prevents from taking coercive measures; offenses are reported to the police only as a last resort” (Hostetler 1993: 360).

4 Persistence of conflict and conversion to the enemy

In this chapter, I will concentrate on some considerations regarding the reproduction of conflict and the nuances that need to be introduced as the sociality and the means of the parties involved may increasingly change in the contemporary world. In some cases, these changes lead to defining the conflict as ‘asymmetric’, which is a way of describing the effects of the social bond in various types of collectivities. The fundamental point of departure is that conflict leaves traces. This needs explanation; it is not a self-­evident condition as it is often taken to be. Even when a settlement is achieved, for example via an agreement or a formal treaty, the ensuing condition is not taken for granted. At best, collective memory on all sides keeps enough symbolic material to reignite a conflict after decades or even centuries. At worst, the settlement is considered as a temporary stage of the conflict, particularly by the parties that consider themselves as losers. Experiences of the conflict are transmitted via collective memory both privately (via intergenerational contact) and publicly (via monuments and official narratives). This process can best be understood as the building of a collective sociocultural resource. Interestingly, we have seen it operate at all levels: from family vendettas to local, regional and ethnic settings, and to national and supranational entities (e.g. the imagined communities of a ‘free world’ and a ‘just and equal’ world over the Cold War period). Building and maintaining such a durable collective resource must have very serious evolutionary causes.1 To put it simply, why would someone carry the burden of what happened to unrelated and unknown people who often lived in another era? What is the point of maintaining a constant mental charge to perpetuate that burden? What is the point of projecting it onto other unknown people who are arbitrarily considered as continuers of those faced in a conflict, i.e. ‘enemies’? What is it that makes this process survive and locks us into clearly determined relative positions to people that we have never met and to events that we have not experienced?

Perceptual proximity All of us are born to a collectivity whose narrative of the past we learn. Written or oral narratives on the past (‘history’) are constraining and become part of the

62   Persistence and conversion to the enemy obligation to know how one should feel and behave (‘upbringing’). Conflicts occupy a great part of those narratives, a fact for which one can find a reasonable explanation: as I have argued, conflict is change and change is what gives rise to a narrative, which cannot be construed on the basis of a banal routine being reproduced. However, the real issue is why the impact of a conflict-­related narrative is not ‘neutral’ but remains vivid enough to construct Others and often act upon that inimical otherness. The transmission of experience is a matter of empathy.2 We are at the beginning of discovering the process of reproducing other people’s emotions as a fundamental social process and caution is certainly needed, as Lamm and Majdandžić (2015: 22) recommend in their review of the neuroscience literature.3 There is no doubt that emotions are the cornerstone of sociality, and empathy its most pronounced form. Being in someone else’s place is a very elaborate process whose evolutional benefits must accordingly be very high. Indeed, it is obvious that seeing someone suffer after an accident makes most of us more careful, at least for some time. As a species, adjusting exposure to risk is a major benefit and the great advantage of emotions is speed; so to speak, empathy short-­circuits understanding and analysis and transmits immediately a very forceful message that motivates specific behaviour. That behaviour mostly consists in assisting those who suffer and/or avoiding the cause that brought them to that predicament. This is a great process of speedy and precise coordination that works today across the entire human species, as any media report on a natural disaster can prove. The point that is of interest here is the selectiveness of empathy. At a first level, not all of us are equally empathetic, which means that degrees of empathy differ so that some are interested in helping others while the rest go on concentrating on improving their own well-­being. At a second level, different people in similar circumstances generate different degrees of empathy. For example, knowing that civilians are being ‘collaterally damaged’ in some Middle Eastern region may cause to most Westerners some temporary sadness, easily diluted in daily experience. Now imagine if your son or daughter, who you believed to be working as a medical doctor in a peaceful part of Europe, phoned to say that they are for two weeks with a non-­governmental organisation (NGO) in the zone of conflict and that you should not worry because they are all right, operating in a deep basement untouched by the bombs, and they will be returning to their European base soon. There is little doubt that the slightest snippet of information on a new attack would have you terribly worried. You would now look at the situation as a central problem to resolve, consider its causes and its consequences, apportion blame, even criticise the position of your own government or sign a petition for a just settlement of the conflict. In other words, you would get involved. All the intermediate positions between direct offspring and strangers form a spectrum of different degrees of empathy. Genetically speaking, this makes perfect sense as we are all operatives dedicated to the survival of our genes (Salmon 2015; Segal et al. 2015). But we do not currently live in clans

Persistence and conversion to the enemy   63 s­ urrounded by our relatives. We are in fact mostly surrounded by strangers. How does empathy work in these circumstances? Are we equally indifferent to all those people? The simple answer is “yes” in terms of distinguishing between these strangers in terms of individual persons. There is no difference to us between two random people walking around us in a city centre. Or is there? One hint on differentiation is prejudice. Multi-­ethnic/racial/cultural societies are natural-­scale experiments in that domain and the amount of social science research in that area testifies to the fact. What this research tells us is that we differentiate in terms of external likeness. People who do not look or do not behave like us belong to a different category. Then there is another aspect of differentiation. Here is a hypothetical example: a cousin of yours who you like and who lives in another city lets you know that she has had her flat broken into. Of course, you offer your genuine sympathy and possible assistance. Now compare this with learning that the sounds of a removal you thought was taking place yesterday in the flat opposite yours were in fact your next-­door neighbour being broken into. You do not know that neighbour, but what happened to them would probably make you feel a great deal more threatened and alert than what happened to your cousin. The proximity here is not genetic but social. It is a matter of likeness in circumstances. We are highly interested in what happens to people who we perceive to be somehow in a similar position to our own. In our world this can involve anyone, anywhere, and can depend on all kinds of stimuli. Examples include someone on another continent who got seriously hurt because a kitchen appliance that we also use exploded, people harassed for a sexual orientation that is the same as ours, travellers to the same area that we often choose for our holidays … the list is endless. Proximity to others is now a matter of perceived likeness in conditions, positions and circumstances. This brings us to the rearrangement of belonging categories via new criteria which need to satisfy a single condition, that of ‘people like us’, whatever the domain of likeness might be. We can term this phenomenon ‘perceptual proximity’. Its most significant side is the transition of evolutionary selection towards sociocultural aspects. Learned dimensions of our existence now determine our attachment to people, objects and symbols as it happened before with our genetic dimensions. That makes sense because in a world of people unknown to each other survival and well-­being are regulated by sociocultural links. We learn over time ‘who we are’ in the sense that we develop our selfhood with regard to the increasing number of options that our socioeconomic conditions offer. The more a society is close to late modern conditions, the greater the number of options available and the longer the list of criteria according to which perceptual proximity can develop. The more ‘traditional’ the society involved, the shorter the list of criteria of likeness. This distinction corresponds to the transition from direct to institutional sociality that I have developed in a number of works (e.g. Lianos 2012, 2017a, 2017b; Lianos & Douglas 2000) and is part of explaining a series of social changes on the basis of the social bond. That transition in sociality is naturally progressive and contains elements of various stages of our evolution, from immersive group-­belonging to recent

64   Persistence and conversion to the enemy t­endencies of individuation. The process allows for transpositions of one criterion onto another, and in our case of the direct genetic proximity with clan members onto the learned proximity with ethnic or national peers. An ‘imagined community’ comes into being via sociocultural processes and constitutes a major proof of the plasticity of the human social bond. This learned likeness is, however, selective. Perceptual proximity is not random. In fact, there is a very close link between perceptual proximity and danger (Lianos 2013: 1ff.), and that link is about the possibility to perpetuate not merely genes but entire ways of life: language, manners, possessions, mentalities, behaviours, laws, beliefs and everything else that can be transmitted to future generations – material or mental. This is another way of saying that evolution is a process that experiments not merely with physical life forms in the strict bodily sense but with entire environments to which these forms can lead. In that sense, every ‘culture’ every way of life is an avenue whose evolutionary potential should be explored, and that is why we are so well equipped to perpetuate our ways of life. This is also why respect is so important for human existence. It is not easy to accept that someone asks us to stop speaking our language or to go away and live in another area, or to change one of our customs and ban what was previously accepted or accept what was previously banned, or simply eat another type of food or listen to different music. All change must be wilful, all limits must come as social constraints. Otherwise we are prepared to defend the continuation of our way of living and thinking about ourselves, often with our own lives. And this is how wars happen. No rational choice proponent would defend such a line of behaviour, for adjusting our lifestyle to that of another imagined community (what we call occupation) is a small price to pay compared with risking our lives resisting that adjustment. Why do we do it then and why have we invented so rigid conditions of engaging with non-­peers, such as ‘sovereignty’? What is it that makes a living ethnic or national neighbour much more of a stranger than people who have died centuries ago and in the name of whom we should defend our link with our imaginary peers? This bizarre behaviour shows precisely that perceptual proximity is a process that selects very strongly for negative experience, most importantly conflict. When a conflict takes place the line of division becomes de facto a line of evolutionary bifurcation. We are then drawn into a polarised framework which makes us part of a community via successive degrees of perceptual proximity. We are automatically linked to all those who defend our side of the dividing line via the process that I have described, precisely because we are so strongly oriented towards perpetuating our way of life. Because the stake of the process – perpetuation – is by definition intergenerational, the process works not only towards the future but also towards the past! When a dividing line arises, those who we have been taught to consider as involved in keeping our side alive become part of our community as if they stood by us there and then, and those who we have been taught to consider as continuers of the opposite side become willy-­nilly enemies independently of what they might feel and think, individually or collectively.4 In other words, perceptual proximity is a process that selects for threats and in doing so separates the world into those who represent a threat and those who do

Persistence and conversion to the enemy   65 not, in enemies and friends. What this tells us is that the collective dimension that is necessary for a conflict is an evolutional artifice developed to test social directions that the species could take. The force of this artifice, for example ‘historical animosity’ between ethnicities, nations, religious communities etc., can be seen in the immediate motivation that it generates. Decades, centuries or even millenaries may separate the latest episode of animosity between supposed ancestors which can nonetheless rapidly become the basis of contemporary conflict (a look at what happens in the Middle East and in many Western countries today suffices to prove the strength of this process). The significant point here is that collectivity is an outcome of threat and conflict, not conflict the outcome of collectivity. Paradoxical as this reversal might seem, it explains why closure can operate fast when uncertainty rises. The social bond contracts as part of selecting criteria that add allies to our cause. In doing so, it clusters people, groups and communities around an alliance that seeks to become strong enough to generate a line of division that can lead to change, which normally appears as the avoidance of an unjust threat and the exercise of a reasonable right (a good example is the lebensraum cause for Nazi Germany). The tightening of the social bond is thus directly linked to perceptual proximity and, accordingly, socioculturally acquired categories of proximity transmit the potential for conflict through time. This is precisely what conflict reproduction is based upon.

Cycles of uncertainty Threat is an outcome of suspicion. There is no danger without its awareness. The process of building perceptions of Others is to a great extent an elaborate – often latent – development of suspicion. This means that perceptual proximity generates various degrees of trust and suspicion, largely based on past events and their biased uses and interpretations. Past tensions and conflicts are ideal sources of discourses oriented towards communal coexistence as they underline the need to be circumspect and ready to face threats. Readiness is the operationalisation of suspicion. It closes the circle by confirming that suspicion is justified in the first place. Under what I have called ‘normal’ conditions in the previous two chapters, collective readiness to face a threat can be a general principle of action. There is always someone to remind the saying si vis pacem, para bellum and call for caution. However, that is only of practical significance when there are conditions that generate uncertainty among the members of a collectivity and the dynamics of tightening the social bond starts operating. Which perceptual category will operate is a matter of best correspondence between the nature of uncertainty and the strength of available categories. To illustrate the probabilities of correspondence, we can draw a table (see Table 4.1). For each of these categories of perceptual proximity, there is a narrative that already exists. It typically contains as prominent references the threats undergone and the struggles that overcame those threats. These elements are broadly used to serve their cementing purpose. For example, when the middle classes feel threatened, they can very well tighten their bond around the notion of ‘the

66   Persistence and conversion to the enemy Table 4.1  Uncertainty and perceptual proximity Cause of uncertainty

Modulating factor

Perceptual proximity category

Horizontal economic crisis

Breadth of effect

National community

Fast loss of income by the middle classes

Downward social mobility

‘Normal’ working people

Usurping of natural resources (e.g. diverting upstream water)

Effect on livelihood

Regional or ethnic community

Increase of violent crime

Past monocultural ‘safe society’

Ethnic/racial majority

Usurping political power

Selective coercion

Ethnic community, class divide, ideological divide

Military build-up

Ancestral enemies

National community

Loss of basic resources (food, housing, health)

Ancestral enemies

Ethnic community

Active attack

Unprovoked

Any

people’ and the revolutions that gave ‘the people’ rights which led to a decent livelihood which is now under threat. It is really thrilling to observe under such circumstances how the privileged classes of a society, who normally consider themselves as special, meritorious and unrelated to the hoi polloi, feel immediately tied by a direct link to the English, the Amer­ican, the French or any other revolution. For everyone who has been part of such circumstances, it is obvious that those involved do not consciously pretend that they are the victimised ‘people’, they genuinely believe so. Even in countries which belonged to the ‘semi-­periphery’ and whose classes were not as lastingly divided as in core capitalist societies,5 such forceful reactions were spontaneous. For example, those classes that often had a clientelist rent on Argentinian society in the early 1990s or the Greek society from the mid-­1990s to the late 2000s and who had never considered the high proportions of poverty and inequality in their countries, suddenly saw themselves as the victimised ‘people’, adopting uncompromising discourses against the institutions that allowed them to attain middle-­class status, such as clientelist political parties and international free market organisations. Only those who have witnessed lawyers and bank executives fill main squares with angry threats against their governments and the parties that they always voted for can understand the surprising process under which the social bond contracts in order to generate a conflict-­oriented collectivity. It is a real evolutional wonder to watch how an unlikely artificial link becomes real in a few hours and gives rise to new enemies like ‘corrupt politicians’, ‘the idle privileged classes’ or ‘foreign forces’ who equally attack every well-­meaning, decent, normal citizen, including the previously despised and exploited populace.6

Persistence and conversion to the enemy   67 Inversely, under other uncertain circumstances, the same people can be separated via different lines of perceptual proximity which can be based on more recent narratives, often invented for that purpose. Typically, racial majorities fearing crime can develop that proximity and construe specific minorities as enemies (Webster 2017; Mann 2005a; Lianos 2014). Following the logic of perception, the lower the physical likeness, the higher the likelihood of inimical attributions. There is obviously nothing to prevent the process from operating on any basis when uncertainty is generated. A link of proximity will be found when the emotion is there and the social bond among those involved will contract. As a result, it is important to look at the process as a selective mobilisation of available sociocultural resources in conditions of uncertainty. Let us now look at conflict reproduction from that point of view. When concern and anxiety increase because of uncertainty, the process of perceptual proximity starts operating. Like all evolutionary processes, this one is omnidirectional in its beginning in order to determine its optimal paths. We can imagine this as a drop of water spreading on a surface. At the moment preceding impact, the drop is perfect and all directions are equally likely, but once contact with the surface has been established all imaginable factors play a role in shaping the direction that the water will take, from the microscopic irregularities of the surface to the precise atmospheric pressure and the viscosity of the specific quantity of water: everything will contribute to what we see as the easiest path of a water current, that is the most favourable conditions to the expansion of the water drop. Otherwise put, perceptual proximity seeks peers in all directions and enters where the reception is good. For example, a crime-­related media wave linked to a perpetrator coming from a racial minority will generate concern in some parts of society. Which are the most likely categories of people to tighten the social bond to the point of structuring the divide between ‘us’ law-­abiding natives and ‘them’ law-­breaking immigrants? See Table 4.2. Table 4.2 Perceptual proximity and social division Likely

Not likely

1 In competitive social contact with involved minority 3 Geographically remote, racial majority areas

2 Non-competitive contact (different socio-professional roles) 4 Young, multiculturally oriented, mobile urban singles or couples with no children 6  Same minority people

5 Socioculturally homogeneous collectivities 7 Other non-racial minority migrants carrying specific racial prejudice from their society of origin 9 Locked into unwanted ‘swamped’ school catchment areas (overlapping with 1)

8 Self-perceived as having liberal values (overlapping with 2) 10 Racially prejudiced elites (overlapping with 2 and 4)

68   Persistence and conversion to the enemy Established powers and interests will naturally play a crucial role in this process. A quick look at the table shows that groups under 2, 4, 8 and 10 are much more influential in determining political agendas and media content than all other categories. The issue is consequently unlikely to become an ‘official’ problem in the public domain but perceptual proximity will still operate among those on the left side of the table who will build a dividing line despite the disapproval of others. We are now entering the territory of enemy building, which in its early stages contains collective rejection and denigration. Interestingly, we have here two dividing lines. First, the obvious one of construing a racial minority as deviant, criminal and separating it from ‘normal society’. Second, another line construing those who established the first one as xenophobic and racist. Clearly, the difference in uncertainty and social influence between the left and the right side of the table is represented in this double process. The influential social categories on the right side of the table, via their control of the official framing of the issue and their accusations of xenophobia, place the less influential categories that experience uncertainty in an impasse. Interestingly, by doing so they generate closure and accentuate the contraction of the social bond among the uncertain classes, i.e. they increase the potential of conflict and at the same time control it. This is only an apparent paradox which represents a very efficient social dynamics. Basic levels of perceptual proximity always pre-­exist in many directions but they do not overcome the threshold of contraction needed to initiate conflict. For that to happen, an adequate proportion of the population needs to be involved after feeling exposed to a relatively high level of uncertainty. This is where the distribution of power in a society comes into play. When large homogeneous parts can be united under the same uncertain feeling, then the potential for conflict reproduction is much higher (Stewart 2008; Bishop & Jarowski 2003; Ruane & Todd 2004). That should be expected since perceptual proximity is a condition of mutual recognition of peers. When power is distributed via many channels and domains of competition, that mutual recognition becomes increasingly obstructed. Accordingly, existing inimical representations will not be easily shared to associate the diversified loci of power in various social categories and reach the threshold of generating conflict. Inversely, a society where power is concentrated in few places can much easier reach that threshold if its powerful classes adhere to the (re)activation of inimical representations and narratives. This is one of the reasons why ‘traditional’ and authoritarian societies are more prone to conflict (Burnell 2005; Cooney 1998; Vanhanen 1992; for specific aspects, see Urdal 2004 and Hudson & Matfess 2017). This double dynamics is at the foundation of conflict potential in most contemporary societies. It maintains the capacity for the reproduction of conflict via internal social division on the one hand and externalised enmity on the other hand. Figure 4.1 is a schematic representation of this dynamics. What regulates the potential for conflict in this collectivity is perceptual proximity around the specific issue (deviant racial minority). Given that only less-­ powerful social categories are exposed to uncertainty, they are also the only ones

Figure 4.1  Social power and conflict.

70   Persistence and conversion to the enemy intensely receptive to the specific enmity discourse, who then perceptually converge on the issue and have their social bond contract. But as the more powerful social categories do not do the same, this process cannot be officialised, thus provoking increasing closure. The more this happens, the more the conflict remains covert and takes place illegally (e.g. via spontaneous racist attacks, ‘self-­defence’ gangs, violent supremacist events such as looting of shops owned by racial minority individuals, or blockades of schools ‘swamped’ by minority children). The dynamics of interaction between and among social categories results in two apparently opposed outcomes at the same time: (a) it keeps at bay the influence of an inimical discourse; (b) it maintains the conflict potential of that discourse. In this sense, the reproduction of conflict appears as a social control process via which the powerful parts of a collectivity maintain a palette of ‘dormant’ enemies and regulate if and when a discourse can be officialised and give rise to the onset of conflict. Like every other social control process, this one is immersed in power struggles, all the more so because conflict involves the contraction of the social bond, which translates into strong motivation and solidarity. It is in this sense likely that the controlled social categories seek to organise and increase their power because of their conflict dynamic. In our example, this is precisely how nationalist, xenophobic or racist political parties are largely built and gain mainstream influence. In other words, if the social regulation of the inimical discourse is too strict for the circumstances, the risk is that perceptual proximity mechanisms will make larger parts of the population coalesce around the inimical discourse and the potential for officialising the issue and triggering open conflict will increase. Now let us look at the process from the point of view of two collectivities linked by a narrative of enmity, typically involving shared or bordering territories and ethnic identities. In that case, the two collectivities will have a memory of historical conflict with an inimical discourse attaining various degrees of intensity among different social categories. Again, the configuration is similar in the beginning for the two collectivities. Middle and upper-­middle classes can officialise their concerns and pursue their interests without focusing on conflict. It is mainly the lower classes who maintain the dormant enmity via lasting stereotypes banned from the formal public space. This state of equilibrium is maintained so long as the conditions remain stable. There are two main factors which can introduce change: hazard and elite behaviour. Hazard can self-­evidently intervene in limitless unpredictable ways. Geopolitical tensions (Medvedev 2018) are as likely as individual current affairs (Gupta 2001), natural disasters (Wisner et al. 2004: 54ff.), environmental pressures (Feitelson & Tubi 2017) or border incidents (Raghavan 2010: 81ff.; Kulesa, Frear & Paynova 2016; Brunet-­Jailly 2015). An episode of that kind increases uncertainty, first across the collectivity perceiving itself to be threatened. Depending on the circumstances, this can affect a collectivity even if it concerns an otherwise banal current affair (e.g. a group of As beat up a B citizen

Persistence and conversion to the enemy   71 while visiting the B country). At any rate, it is extremely rare that a direct collective act of violence will start the process of the conflict. Not only do invasions not happen frequently, but they also never happen without the invaders believing that they serve a just cause. At this stage, we need to introduce to this discussion the dimension of opportunity. A low- or mid-­level event cannot generate a massive conflictual reaction unless the threshold of perceptual proximity is overcome. This means in practice that the ‘non-­uncertain’ social categories will have to become uncertain, otherwise they will control the collective reaction as in the case of Figure 4.1 and the conflict potential will be kept at bay. To trigger the conflict, energy coming from the upper social categories is therefore indispensable. But who are those likely to jeopardise their satisfactory, safe, middle-­class position for a vague collective cause? Understandably, there is nothing positive to gain from that posture for the vast majority of the entire gamut of the middle classes. But there are parts of the upper social categories that can gain from change induced by conflict, namely the parts that are either losing influence or reasonably hoping to gain more influence, or both. A series of configurations can be envisaged here, outlined in the following sections. a  Re-­legitimation of elites Typically, governments and the sections of the ruling class supporting them may seek to massively focus attention on an issue that obliges the collectivity to rally behind them and suppress critiques or challenges to their primacy. This phenomenon is frequent enough to have its own designated term in conflict studies where it is known as a ‘diversionary conflict’. From the perspective of conflict being the ultimate unifier, any event likely to represent that probability of unification can be seen as an opportunity. All forms of power are sensitive to the opportunity of recovery when they are in decline, most of all military and political power because they mostly operate in a (perceived) zero-­sum game, unlike economic, social or symbolic forms of power. Feeney has focused on the use of diversionary conflict across a typology of political regimes around the globe (see Figure 4.2). In this graph (Feeney 2012: 249), he provides a comparison of diversionary dispute probabilities according to regime type for an extensive global dataset. He notes: Anecdotal evidence for the possibility that all four types of regimes [personalist, military, democratic, single party] engage in diversionary behavior exists. Examples of democratic diversion are abundant in the literature, particularly for the U.S. case. The U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989 as George H. W. Bush’s approval rating sagged early in his term has been suggested as one example of a U.S. diversionary use of force as well as Reagan’s intervention in Grenada in 1983.

72   Persistence and conversion to the enemy More recently, U.S. missile strikes against Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998 as Bill Clinton was embroiled in impeachment hearings over the Monica Lewinsky scandal have been cited as an example of diversionary behavior. The actions of Syria, a personalist regime, in recent years have been perceived as diversionary in nature. For example, the flood of Syrian protesters against Israel’s occupation of Palestinian and Syrian territory in May 2011 was labeled as a diversionary use of force by an Israeli Defense Forces spokesperson and by the Israeli Prime Minister. While this is not a conventional use of military forces of one state against those of another state, the June 2012 incident where Syria shot down a Turkish plane was. The Falkland Islands War between the United Kingdom and Argentina is often cited as diversionary use of force. Argentina, ruled by a military junta, experienced overt domestic unrest due to economic failures for several years leading up to the crisis. It was Argentina who precipitated the crisis and initiated the conflict by occupying the disputed but British-­held Falkland Islands. The territorial dispute, and Argentine occupation of the islands, was anticipated to provide a reinforcement of support for the military regime. A British response that the Argentine rulers failed to anticipate quickly unfolded – a military defeat and the acceleration of the fall of the military regime. Identifying clear-­cut examples of diversion by single-­party regimes is more difficult. One possible case is the brief invasion of Indian territory (whose ownership was disputed by the Chinese) by Chinese forces in 1967 at the height of unrest related to the Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Another potential example is Kenya’s dispute with Uganda following post-­election violence in Kenya. (Ibid.: 4–5) 0.006

Pr (dispute initiation)

0.005 0.004 0.003 0.002 0.001 0 0

5

10

15

20

25

Number of domestic incidents Personalist

Military

Democratic

Single party

Figure 4.2 Probability of dispute initiation as domestic unrest increases, comparing regime types: all dyads 1946–2000.

Persistence and conversion to the enemy   73 b  Elite uncertainty and rivalry For elites that are not fully socialised to systematic change of political parties in government – or to other equivalent alternations in more traditional settings – having recourse to the probability of conflict is a clear opportunity. In fact, there are many examples of such elites generating that opportunity themselves when hazard does not oblige (e.g. Goldstein 2001; Liao 2013). This is an expression of uncertainty in upper social strata, whose members have ample capacity to act before they face closure. Unlike other strata, elites can directly manipulate the social structure itself, both in economic and in sociocultural terms. As a result, an opportunity to ‘correct’ an unfavourable dynamics will be seized as part of normal defensive action. c  Challenge to elites by non-­elite actors Elites are by definition the strata where newcomers are not welcome unless their admission is irresistible because of benefit or fear. Of course, challengers in most cases become integrated into the elite process and take distance from the strata in which they originate. But this takes time and concessions, which is precisely what every elite is loath to accept. d  Conflict among parts of the elites strong enough to lead to (usually temporary) division Elites are internally competitive. Their structures are rarely liable to change as the distribution of power in their midst depends on the general socioeconomic and political stability. The paradox is that, despite their fierce internal competitiveness, elites cannot afford to rock the collective boat as they would expose their privileges to uncertainty. As a result, partial elite replacement may be quite possible in non-­autocratic environments, but a challenge to the structure of the elites is among the least likely social challenges. It usually requires a revolution or a war, i.e. collective violent conflict (van der Maat 2015). Inversely, the probability of conflict is a unique opportunity for classes denied elite status – or their ‘fair’ elite status, to put it paradoxically. For example, the discourse of the middle classes against the aristocracy that led to the revolutions of the eighteenth century was founded on social utility and productivity, precisely in order to claim that there was no reason for the wealthy not to be admitted to the elites. It should be remembered that Saint-­Simon’s socialist discourse and his famous parable on productive bees and idle drones places the bourgeois on the side of the bees as late as 30 years after the French Revolution (Saint-­Simon 1869 [1819]). At the same time, that discourse had to appeal to the lower classes so as to gain their support. The division between the productive and the idle was the precise fault line around which the upcoming elites could challenge the existing ones by generating conflict.

74   Persistence and conversion to the enemy e  Sheer elite ambition to achieve historical status This factor is more likely to express itself in authoritarian regimes that are not exclusively based on coercion. The representation of the elites must be meritorious enough to allow for collective adherence which is then transformed into some vision of seeking a great destiny. It is not unrelated that this configuration has constantly operated throughout history. From Alexander the Great to Napoleon and Hitler, generating conflict as a duty to destiny has constantly plagued human existence. A strong reminder to this configuration is that associated formulas persist in that dormant institutional state. A good example is this passage: All my life I have had a certain idea of France. This is inspired by sentiment as much as by reason. The emotional side of me tends to imagine France, like the princess in the fairy stories or the Madonna in the frescoes, as dedicated to an exalted and exceptional destiny. Instinctively, I have the feeling that Providence has created her either for complete success or for exemplary misfortunes. If, in spite of this, mediocrity shows in her acts and deeds, it strikes me as an absurd anomaly, to be imputed to the faults of Frenchmen, not to the genius of the land. But the positive side of my mind assures me that France is not really herself unless she is in the front rank; that only vast enterprises are capable of counterbalancing the ferments of dispersal which are inherent in her people; that our country, as it is, surrounded by others, as they are, must aim high and hold itself straight, on pain of mortal danger. In short, to my mind France cannot be France without greatness. One would have thought that these reflections date from medieval times or at the latest have been proposed by Napoleon, not by the leader of a defeated country that largely collaborated with Nazi occupation. It is striking to realise that they are from de Gaulle’s memoirs (1955: 1). and that they guide a large part of the French elites to this date. One should not think, however, that this configuration lacks collective support because it is often strongly personified. On the contrary, an elite figure incarnates a vision that contracts the social bond via belief in a destiny. It would also be wrong to think that this configuration has irreversibly disappeared after the Second World War. The support for Vladimir Putin in contemporary Russia (Frye et al. 2016) is there to prove that as long as authoritarian regimes exist, this configuration for generating conflict is perfectly likely. Although democratic regimes impose checks and balances on personified power, there is no reason to believe that they render such ambitions impossible, particularly when the opportunity of a historical conflict presents itself. In all previous cases, van der Maat’s work is very useful as it monitors the link between conflict and elite rivalry and includes even ‘consolidatory genocide’ as a mode of serving elite interests (see Table 4.3). There is little doubt that elites can and do instrumentalise large populations in order to stabilise their position or avoid losing it.

Persistence and conversion to the enemy   75 Table 4.3  A typology of mass political violence Elite politics Technology of violence

Between-group competition Within-group competition

Conventional conflict (no identification problem)

Conventional betweengroup conflict: Allied bombing of Germany, Second World War 1942–45 Arab–Israeli wars, 1948, 1967 and 1973 Amer­ican Indian Wars and resettlement, 16–19th century

Diversionary violence:

Irregular between-group conflict: Spanish Civil War violence, 1936–39 Boer War civilian internment, 1900–02 Guatemalan counterguerrilla genocide, 1981–83

Consolidatory genocide:

Irregular conflict (identification problem)

Iraqi invasion, Kuwait, 1990–91 Gulf War Falklands War 1982 Nazi invasion, Poland, Second World War 1939

Cambodian Killing Fields 1975–79 Rwandan genocide 1994 Stalin’s collectivization campaign 1928–40

f  Genuine elite belief in a collective vision A particular case where elites may genuinely represent the beliefs of other social categories (e.g. deliverance of an ethnic collectivity or a social category), or where members of elites may be influenced by social or national movements (Whitmeyer 2003). In this configuration, elites naturally focus on overcoming the threshold for action and seize the opportunity for conflict in order to increase and expand perceptual proximity among those eligible to recognise themselves as members of the parts of society involved in the projected vision. The setup here is at the same time the most genuine and the clearest in terms of elite behaviour. Leaders must display a high level of altruism if they wish to maintain any hope of success against superior forces. A ‘fusional’ relation between elites and other classes needs to develop in order to transform a condition of closure into a process of struggle. Conflict is indispensable in this transformation. The list above, albeit indicative, illustrates that chance does not operate on itself in social dynamics but should be treated as an exogenous change rearranging and often enhancing the opportunity for action, particularly when it comes to aspiring parts of the upper-­middle classes and the elites. This makes hazard by definition directional in social matters, or to put it in more political terms, it makes hazard a biased force prone to serving the interests of social categories

76   Persistence and conversion to the enemy whose influence is increasing. This is exactly why the reproduction of conflict is likely: it is tied to the pursuit of social influence in all collectivities involved. In that sense, an ‘established’ enemy is one of the strongest sociocultural resources for the powerful strata of any collectivity and the easiest one to use in order for them to direct the social bond towards specific aims and reach their goals in very short time. Since there is no process as strong as collective violent conflict when it comes to dampening diversity and silencing opposition, the reproduction of conflict is anything but a blind repetition of the same problem in time. It is a deep bias built into the social structure of human societies.

The social cycle of conflict It is possible to divide the cyclical dynamics of conflict in seven phases (see Figure 4.3). The initial phase of the conflict (phase 1 in the figure) involves a condition or an event which survives in the socioculture of the collectivities ­concerned. That can be war, attack, occupation, usurping territory or symbols,

Figure 4.3  The social cycle of conflict.

Persistence and conversion to the enemy   77 persecution, genocide, oppression and a long series of other traumatising events (or events retrospectively perceived as such). The causes, content and consequences of such an event are often disputed, and its description and interpretation form a significant part of maintaining inimical discourses. By the same token, historical precision and detailed knowledge of that initial cause play a decreasing role as time goes by. In parallel, as the narrative develops intergenerationally, it permeates the socioculture of the parties and binds to their social structure (phase 2). As a consequence, knowledge and admission of that narrative becomes a precondition of belonging to the collectivity. One cannot be a ‘real’ A if he or she does not know the significance of what happened with the Bs. Emotional involvement with the narrative is also a criterion for distinguishing between core identities and peripheral ones. For example, migrants and their descendants are excluded from an ethnic community precisely because they are not (supposed to be) emotionally involved in that process even if they have been taught the same history in their formal education.7 Inversely, not being emotionally involved makes one liable to exclusion from the core identity to which he or she ‘naturally’ belongs. When the propagation of this process persists for some time, the reciprocal perception of the parties as enemies of each other becomes hegemonic. An ‘established enemy’ (phase 3) is someone whose negative status can be invoked without any justification or explanation. It is taken for granted by those who refer to it. On the contrary, any attempt to question or even interrogate that established status bears an immense burden of proof and is looked upon with deep suspicion. The perception and the discourse pertaining to enmity is now part of the socioculture and as such contributes to the regulation of the social structure. We enter the configuration via which enmity is conserved in that dormant, inert or frustrated state where it cannot be officialised and is not operational in terms of triggering a new cycle of conflict. This can be a long period (phase 4) in which an established enemy remains an actionable but latent sociocultural resource conserved by the lower classes, who are often blamed by the upper classes for doing so. Accusations of bigotry, excessive nationalism, inaptitude to understand (geo)political negotiations, lack of caution, and the like are often levelled against those who focus on the enemy and appeal for firmness, defensive preparations or offensive action. The threshold of legitimating such views and spreading perceptual proximity beyond those classes cannot be overcome without some significant change of circumstances. As in other social processes, facts may count here less than representations. A hazardous event (phase 5), or something set to appear as such, will interrogate the latency of inimical perceptions. The keepers of the discourse will spontaneously appeal for a strong reaction and their perceptions will start appearing more legitimate. This is the crucial point at which the upper strata regulate social processes, filter claims for change, and either reject them and return the process to the previous phase or proceed. The situation can be summarised in a question: are there enough powerful actors to look at the propagation of that conflictual discourse as an opportunity for advancing their positions and interests? If so,

78   Persistence and conversion to the enemy then they will seek to instrumentalise inimical claims as deserving consideration in order to apply pressure to the entire social structure. These initiatives will lead to phase 6. They need not be coordinated to produce their outcome. For example, broadcasting content on the basis of a collective threat in order to increase viewing is not normally linked to seeking to increase arm purchases in view of the conflict. However, both converge towards the same effect and that is not a coincidence; it is an effect of powerful actors seeking to increase their influence by exploiting the probability of conflict. There is a dimension of self-­fulfilling prophecy in that process since the more that probability is used, the more it appears plausible. Each powerful actor seeking to pursue that representation inevitably adds to its propagation and, as happens with all competitive structures, the actors involved need to outbid their competitors. The aggregated effect of this configuration is largely unintended among the elite actors and consists in the officialisation of the inimical discourse. This will allow in turn for a strong feedback cycle where competitive powerful actors maintain a spiralling dynamics and increasingly attain their goals, be they political, economic or ideological. At this stage, a crucial condition develops. Large parts of the collectivity have been drawn into the process and perceptual proximity regarding the threat covers by now the middle classes who have been subjected to the officialising signals emitted by the elites. The tipping point towards the next phase depends on whether elite goals have been achieved to a satisfactory extent, so that the process can be reversed via an ‘end of the crisis’ and a progressive return to phase 4. Although it is reasonable to presume that elites would not wish to jeopardise their position by letting the conflict materialise and take the risk of uncontrollable eventualities, their control over the process is not total for four reasons. First, because outbidding may include radical elite actors or newcomers who do not have much to gain from the return to ‘peace’ and may have not been offered enough by other powerful actors to consider disengagement from the bidding process. Second, because elites may have gone too far into the uncoordinated process of fuelling perceptual proximity, which is particularly possible when there is not a strong state (or equivalent central actor) to limit elite competition. Third, because of random effects that may supersede very fast the limits of the circumstances (e.g. an unintended engagement between military forces). Fourth, because of the uncoordinated complexity of the concurrent, interactive development of this cycle across the enemy parties. This last case is of particular interest. Only the first phase and the last phase of the cycle, i.e. the phases of open conflict, are coordinated between the parties. The five other phases are interactive but they do not entail any specific correspondence of actions between the collectivities. These phases involve the perception and representation of each other’s developments on the basis of each collectivity’s internal dynamics. An additional factor to take into account is that these reciprocal representations are largely controlled – when they are not entirely generated – by elites involved in information and governance. Processing or manipulating the representation of what the As say, intend or do is in fact

Persistence and conversion to the enemy   79 part of the internal cycle of the Bs, and vice versa. For example, representing phase 4 as phase 5 is not particularly difficult if that bias is favourable to powerful actors in politics or media. This manipulation can in fact be operated at any time, given that phase 4 generates constant pressures which lead to regular incidents that can be exploited. Chanting insults at a stadium, brandishing offensive pickets by a marginal group, burning a flag or a symbol, and an endless series of marginal events of the same sort can easily be used to ‘prove’ the generalised hostility of the established enemy and the consequent need to take steps to either respond to alleged threats or pre-­empt them. These representations – albeit unfounded – are immediately known by the general population of the opposite collectivity via an extremely short feedback cycle fuelled by contemporary media.8 Once more, a social representation produces factual consequences independently of its causal reliability. A great deal of research into the well-­known process of conflict escalation and ‘intractable’ conflicts has established that link in very different settings (Đurić & Zorić 2009; Daskalowski 2009; Zeitzoff 2018; Bădulescu 2017; Banerjee & Stöber 2016). Although the cycle of reciprocal interpretations may be largely or partially unintended, its ascending dynamics is structurally tied to sociality. Social beings in general, and humans in particular, are equipped with the propensity to intensify their links when they share the representation of a threat.9 This constitutes in itself one of the most consistent pieces of evidence that emotions are evolutional consequences and causes of social relations, i.e. biochemical developments that increase fitness at the collective level (Collins 2004; Carter 2014). As a result, it would be misleading to think that manipulation of the social bond reinforced by the elites is easily governable. As the social bond contracts, the less-­powerful classes increasingly commit themselves emotionally to the probability of conflict, which is the main focus of the newly found condition of increased proximity. They inform themselves more and more and as a result expose themselves more and more to the narrative of enmity, which reinforces their belief that the threat is real and imminent. The social bond now starts depending on maintaining the representation of the threat and – increasingly – of the inevitability of the conflict. Contrary to the elites, who because of their internal competition remain concentrated on rational goals even when these are ideologically motivated, the lower classes feel the thrill of merging into the collectivity and developing a formidable force of consensus and conformity. That empowerment is accordingly dependent upon maintaining the representation of the threat to the point where there is now an implicit but powerful social demand for continuing in the same direction. The elites must now satisfy that demand or take the risk of being rejected and replaced by more radical competitors waiting in the wings to represent them as cowards and traitors. That pressure is felt across the parties involved because they now start entering synchronisation. Action sought by considerable parts of one collectivity increases the dependence of the other on continuing the process. Another structural dynamics will be involved at this stage. Research into tactical competitive action and deterrence (Dodge et al. 2015; Hall et al. 2017)

80   Persistence and conversion to the enemy shows that when faced with (perceived) hostile intent, we are evolutionally oriented towards the simplest of relations: tit-­for-tat10 or reciprocal retaliation. This is a simple binary scheme of communication via discourse and action to convince an adversary that they cannot win. At best, they will suffer at least as many losses as they will inflict; at worst, they will be heavily defeated. From funny statements in preschool sandpits to superpower declarations of measures taken against uncooperative states, tit-­for-tat is used identically. In the pre-­conflict configuration discussed here, tit-­for-tat presents a considerable disadvantage. It allows each party to proceed with symbolic projections and construct further animosity on arbitrary scenarios and conjectures. There is an obligation to respond to any stimulus in order not to ‘lose face’ and a mutual commitment not to lose face leads inevitably to conflict (Black 1993; Polk 1994), particularly when male actors are involved, i.e. in most conflict settings. There is little hope for natural withdrawal from this conflictual reciprocity:11 first, because any random event can – and thus will – be interpreted as hostile action; and second, because enmity is by now explicit and consequently much more likely to last and fuel the tit-­for-tat exchange. This is the point where the loss of control over the process is possible. In both collectivities, all classes – low and middle and upper – are likely to have surpassed their initial intentions as they are pushed by the force of the general dynamics to which they have, each one of them, partially contributed. Decision-­ making elites in particular are likely to have by now made their leadership dependent upon their active hostile stance and may fear that they will lose their credibility if they soften their approach. They are also acutely aware that their competitors will immediately denounce them if they do so. For everyone else, perceptual proximity makes disengagement difficult as it would mean that those who backtrack are likely to be considered cowards or traitors. The problem with avoiding the conflict now12 is that the process needs to be reversed as collectively as it started in order not to single out any social categories as responsible for breaking the bond that has been formed. The contraction of the social bond generates a community and communities demand strict conformity to what unites them, be it beliefs, actions, traditions or emotions. No member can deviate unpunished. The only solution towards avoiding conflict at this stage is to act on generalised representations and to develop counter arguments against engagement. These counter arguments, however, cannot be based on claims that engaging in conflict would be unnecessary, unjustified or absurd. No one could assume the risk of such a brutal about-­turn and the violent rejection that would most probably ensue. Retreat to previous phases must be equalised among all involved and gradual in its progression. A series of discourses can be employed to that effect, all of them directed towards alternative, bloodless forms of achieving victory which are in reality dissimulated attempts at not ‘losing face’. Among others are: (a) intelligent victory – “We are able to outsmart our obtuse adversaries; why suffer any losses when we can suffer none?”; (b) recourse to a third party (a stakeholder in the conflict, an ally, an international organisation etc.) will “get us a fast and definitive result, which is better than having to deal with

Persistence and conversion to the enemy   81 another cycle of conflict in some time”; (c) “A great opportunity for our collectivity has recently emerged; we should exploit it first then go back to conflict.” If collective pressure is very high and the circumstances deeply unfavourable, riskier discourses may be adopted, e.g. (d) “What our adversaries seek is not as significant as they believe it to be, while what we will get out of a compromise is much more important.” Like every other social process, conflict reproduction is characterised by strong inertia towards the projected outcome that brought its participants together. Economists would readily speak here of path dependence or market inefficiency, or even market failure (Dobusch & Schüßler 2013). From a sociological point of view, however, this is a great success of the social bond over rationality, since the evolutional priority of human socioculture is the generation of tight community links when a threat emerges. Reason is a distant second priority, recently added to the repertoire of collective human action. From an evolutionary point of view, an unnecessary conflict is much more efficient than the risk of lacking solidarity and preparation for threats. This is to say that two evolutionary tendencies are at work at the same time. 1 2

Evolution is not a process concerned with individuals and even less with their suffering. Evolution is not concerned with present conditions, either. It maintains a palette that can face adjustment to unanticipated conditions.

The first statement is very important for understanding the link between conflict and the social bond. We cannot count here on a deep-­seated social mechanism of avoidance that will take into account the enormous suffering that conflict entails for everyone involved on all sides (except for certain elites). The tightening of the social bond is as such a development of reciprocal empowerment to overcome all thinking about future negative consequences. Courage, bravery, heroism and the like are precise and acute forms of that disregard for suffering, both one’s own and that of others. The only opposite tendency to that force is empathy which, contrary to collective aggression, is an individual development and has no equivalent in terms of conformity at the level of society. This is easy to understand via the fact that empathetic action is always discretionary while participation in collective aggression is not only compulsory but abstaining from it is harshly punished. Empathy is only socially rewarded by some consideration and the lack of it is socially and legally acceptable.13 No one is punished, shamed or even disapproved of for not sharing his or her home with a homeless person, although most of us think that ignoring the conditions of such a person is not the peak of human ethics. This difference is a fundamental indicator of what the social bond actively supports via contraction, leading to conformity and finally to coercion. Conflict is definitely on that side. Empathy is not. The second statement concerns an evolutionary aspect of great relevance to conflict, which unfortunately adds to the effects of the first phenomenon. Our sociality addresses conflict in terms of inimical relations with other species and

82   Persistence and conversion to the enemy with other groups of our own species. The focus is naturally on relations, not on conditions, because conditions change frequently while relations are part of the internal architecture of the species. To put it simply, the stakes involved in conflicts will constantly vary in time and space. The means employed will also vary. Chance may determine the terrain, the position and the weather, and what can be used as a weapon greatly depends on external factors. On the contrary, competition for survival does not vary and understanding one’s position as advantaged or disadvantaged regarding a specific stake is practically a universal trait of conscious life. It is in that sense to be expected that our sociality prepares us for conflict without taking into account contemporary weapon technology, political negotiation, economic sanctions, complex knock-­on effects and a long series of other conditions that are closely related to conflict. This seems like a highly imperfect solution to selection pressures if one disregards the long evolutionary time. But if one does so, it makes sense to leave that part to short-­term self-­ preservation on the one hand and reasoning on the other. Inversely, it is important that whatever the outcome, the species will maintain its capacity to contract rapidly and forcefully in order to respond to a threat. Developing a shared representation is from that point of view much more important than reasoning to establish if that representation is right. Belief is among the social priorities of evolution. Rationality is not. These two traits underlie the dissonance between social dynamics and rational analysis, a dissonance which creates the paradox of being drawn into a conflict that could have been avoided if it were a matter of individual option for each member of the collectivities involved. Withdrawal from the edge of phase 6 is accordingly difficult and requires favourable conditions that do not exacerbate the contraction of the social bond.

Conversion to the enemy The relation to the enemy is close and increasingly intimate. We have seen so far that phases 6, 7 and 1 are deeply interactive, as much between as within all involved collectivities. The architecture of two collectivities engaging in a tit-­ for-tat relation is different from that of individuals doing the same (see for example Potter et al. 1999; Nisbett and Cohen 1996). The most significant particularity of a retaliatory exchange among collectivities is that it increasingly reduces plurality on both sides as the social bond contracts. The anticipation of retaliation configures every move. As a result, the spectrum of opinions on what action should be taken depends on consensus regarding the next move of the opponent and the consequences of that move. Accordingly, not only converging on a representation of the situation is unavoidable but it also involves seeking to predict what the opponent will do. As these interpretations and predictions are reciprocally imposed on all parties, their interdependence increases rapidly and the understanding of gains and losses, victory and defeat, is progressively shared. For example, there can be no stake in the process to which the opponent is indifferent. The game becomes ‘zero sum’ not for a rational reason but because the

Persistence and conversion to the enemy   83 opponents cannot oppose each other differently. They are now synchronised with each other and very conformist within their collectivity. A process where the actors shape each other’s moves via symmetrical interpretations is a homeomorphic process. It gives its participants a similar shape.14 Conflict-­induced homeomorphism does not only concern inward conformity and outward aggression in the collectivities. It also increases the tunnel vision of the opponents who are increasingly unable to consider alternatives. Internal processes and external conditions are then locked in a configuration where uncertainty is constant and any move by the other side is to be analysed and interpreted under the unique perspective of conflict. The opponents now exist in their own unique, shared universe where detailed mutual monitoring is compulsory and second- or third-­level guessing is the norm. The quest for information increases drastically. Spying, observing and studying the enemy is indispensable. If the conflict is finally avoided, all this will become part of history and most of it will survive into the latent phase 4, ready to be activated when the conjuncture lends itself to closure. However, if the conflict erupts, another dynamics will start. There is one shared assumption at that onset, namely that victory is possible. Although all parties may not have the same representation of that possibility and all parts of each collectivity may differ regarding the probability of victory, the projection of victory needs to exist in order for the engagement to continue. Between mere hope when engaging against a superior adversary and buoyant confidence in the opposite case, a collectivity generates a constant flow of positive representations for a short and victorious conflict without significant losses. All scenarios are possible, but superiority ‘on paper’ will usually realise itself on the field; Vietnams are rare and usually due to tactics that oblige the superior collectivity to limit the force of its engagement because the use of massive force is not accepted by its own members.15 Typically, this involves asymmetric engagement and civilian deaths. At any rate, the assumption of victory at the onset of the conflict is a significant homeomorphic point because it attributes to the enemy a mirror position where the same assumption is expected and understandable, even if it is perceived to be wrong. Violence as such is rightly considered the ultimate form of power and the absolute tool of domination. It is another consequence of the fundamental evolutionary endowment of life with suffering. The capacity to inflict suffering is the most reliable source of control. However, violence is also – paradoxically – a great equaliser from one specific point of view, because it obliges those exerting it to reveal that they have no other means of influencing the behaviour of their opponents. Persuasion, negotiation, inspiration or authority are now irrelevant and the enemy is morally naked, symbolically weak, and reduced to wielding brutal power.16 It is a situation of a human against another human where all other forms of alleged superiority have disappeared and only inflicting suffering counts. In that condition, the transparency of similarity is perfect.17 The varnish of civilisation and its nuances in differentiating among individuals and among collectivities disappears and there is nothing apart from force that discriminates between the collectivities involved. Violent conflict is in that sense

84   Persistence and conversion to the enemy the ultimate confirmation for its participants that all human collectivities are of similar worth and function in the same way. At that initial stage of the conflict, homeomorphy is confirmed down to the existential level. The enemy can only be different as an operational actor, i.e. in terms of capacity and tactics. Accordingly, the conflict introduces its participants to the idea that capacity and tactics are the only aspects that count in order to engage efficiently and obtain the best possible result for their side. This evident condition has critical – and far less evident – consequences for the consciousness of the conflicting parties. The parties naturally associate that reduced margin of human existence to their capacity for prevailing and the consequent survival of their collectivity. Not only one’s enemy but oneself is a competent human when one prevails via operational means. As a result, tactical force becomes the only principle that governs human behaviour at that stage, a principle that is reciprocally reinforced and intensifies the homeomorphy of the opponents. We thus move towards a deep level of convergence where the opponents interlock both in terms of action and in terms of values in order to combat each other efficiently. The more one engages in conflict, the more one converges with one’s enemy in order to win. This phenomenon is often seen as simply absurd from an external standpoint and battles like those of Somme or Verdun in the First World War exemplify this perception. So much literature, art, history, diplomacy and politics has been devoted to the futility of that seemingly absurd behaviour of being locked into conflict (Coleman 2003; Crocker, Osler Hampson & Aal 2005). But from an internal standpoint, the homeomorphic relation of the opponents cannot end without an official recognition of an outcome (victory and defeat on the one hand or truce and peace on the other hand). Perfect convergence is the ultima ratio of conflict. As the process has by now been stripped from all axiological dimensions and is strictly tactical, each party will follow the other to any length in order to match its destructive capacity. This is the stage where all kinds of atrocities are being committed while even the broader collectivities involved may in fact disapprove (Golby, Feaver & Dropp 2017; BVA Institute 2013; YouGov 2018; Carden 2018).18 But for those who are not directly engaged, homeomorphy does not operate as intensely while for the fighters themselves it is an established evidence that they must conform to enemy behaviour (Osiel 1998). This is also the main reason why returning fighters rarely share their experiences even with close ‘civilians’ in their own collectivity, as they are unable to explain the homeomorphic necessities of their engagement, which give their actions a very different meaning than the one they would have in more peaceful settings (Seal et al. 2007; Litz et al. 2009). Following that main stage, whose duration will depend on the relative capacity of the parties, an outcome will emerge. The representation of that outcome is of course a social process subject to all forms of influence and negotiation. For winners, this is a condition where the elites will try and often succeed in asserting that their existence and all their choices are confirmed and should be celebrated. The other strata will follow on that path proportionally, according to their losses and future consequences. However, there is little probability that any

Persistence and conversion to the enemy   85 critical thinking will emerge in the aftermath of a victorious outcome, even when that outcome is in fact largely ambiguous or simulated.19 For the defeated, the ­spectrum of possibilities is broader, depending on the extent of the losses and ranging from contesting defeat to acknowledging catastrophe. When the clear representation of defeat is inevitable, however, a degree of self-­interrogation within the collectivity is also inevitable. More than any other failure, defeat in a violent conflict leads to the question of “What went wrong?” The processing of that question involves an invisible but very energetic activity to avoid blame by the more powerful strata. The lower strata are in the rare position of holding others to account. Since it is clear that the less powerful ‘did as they were told’, carried the main burden of the engagement and suffered the main part of the physical consequences, responsibility cannot lie with them. This is a direct challenge for the other classes. A series of issues will be raised in various fields, e.g. Were we unprepared for this conflict? Why did the military and the politicians not ensure the appropriate level of preparedness? Why did they decide to engage knowing that we were not likely to win? Were tactical and operational mistakes made? Should we have concluded a truce earlier to avoid unnecessary losses? Such questions are by their nature oriented against the elites and may jeopardise the entire social structure of a collectivity. A great deal of energy will then expectedly be devoted to bridling their scope and potential impact while directing everyone towards other explanations. At the same time, the end of the conflict has also brought the homeomorphic relation to the enemy to a brutal end. And the paradox is obvious: if we did more or less the same things, how did we end up in so different positions? In other words, what did the enemy do that made the difference for them to win? There is a rare opportunity here for elites of defeated collectivities to suggest that the outcome of the conflict should be examined in terms of being more principled or less unprincipled than the enemy. That sort of discourse directs blame to the enemy and flatters the entire collectivity while it neutralises at the same time destabilising questions. Praising one’s own and blaming the enemy makes the real political and operational issues related to the defeat evaporate. This process is efficient in saving the heads of many decision-­makers and powerful actors.20 But at the same time it introduces a durable aspect to the understanding of the conflict, i.e. that the defeated should have acted more like the winners if they wished to be in their place. Homeomorphy and stratification converge towards externalising the concrete causes of an unwanted outcome and replacing them with the appropriation of negative traits displayed by the enemy. Although this dynamics is powerful enough to make a collectivity convert to (the representation of ) the approach of its enemies, it is not sufficient to make that conversion durable because it is conjunctural. When that first stage of self-­ interrogation passes and people need to face continuity in the aftermath of defeat, this new normality makes the two pillars of the conversion to the enemy – homeomorphy with the opponent and threat to the elites – disappear. People need to find ways to go on living and absorb the trauma of the defeat both individually and collectively. Apart from material and economic difficulties, this

86   Persistence and conversion to the enemy also involves the sense of futility of all the losses suffered, the feeling that ‘it was all for nothing’. A durable sociocultural foundation is needed at this stage to avoid the rational explanation of defeat, i.e. that the defeated have been weaker and/or less smart, since all that counted during the conflict was capacity and tactics. Conversion to the enemy is an ideal way out and the path is already traced by the previous stage. This is the period of solidifying the collective memory of the conflict and creating a lay historical narrative. The brutality of the enemy, the perfidy of third parties that should have been allies and the moral high ground of fair play will merge into a shared representation via which two major outcomes will be served: (a) our fault was to have been more principled; (b) our opponents behaved in a way that justifies our continuing hostility and awards them the position of established enemies (phase 3). As a result, the long-­ term memory of the conflict carries the elements of conversion to the enemy both as balm for a collective trauma and as a basis for the eventuality of a new conflict. This is a great evolutional example of socioculture killing two birds with one stone in obtaining a soothing effect and an augmented potential for aggression in one efficient development. There are two alternative courses with regard to that phenomenon that I have not touched upon and will briefly address now. The first one is when the elites of the collectivity do not manage to externalise the causes of defeat and are removed from power, then usually banished or punished. Although one would think that the change obtained via the conflict, even if it is a lost one, will considerably absorb the trauma of defeat, this is not so. The new elites, necessarily of rebellious origin versus the old ones, need to use the defeat as a legitimating factor of their power and as a constant reminder of the failure to which the collectivity was led by their predecessors. A defeat becomes an enormous and durable political capital if exploited in this sense and few elites would pass on such an opportunity. As a result, the outcome of the process is not likely to substantially differ. Significant change and elite overthrow do not necessarily curb conversion to the enemy. Another possibility is that of overwhelming defeat which leads to occupation or a substantive degree of control by the opponent. In these conditions, there are dramatic changes. The elites are usually eliminated, except for the parts that did not directly prompt or conduct the conflict and are considered useful by the new powers. The interesting sociocultural bifurcation here involves not the fact of converting to the enemy but the mode of that conversion. The starting position in the frame of the conflict is an important criterion for that mode. If the defeated collectivity initiated the conflict under a superior or conquering and aggressive representation, the most likely mode of converting is embracing the values of the enemy as a new ethical, social and economic set leading to a new era (post-­ Second World War Germany and Japan are good examples here). If the starting position was incommensurably weak or if there was no intention for conflict by the defeated party, the dynamics shifts towards that of a victimised collectivity which will have to consider the contradiction between the guilt of having been found weak or defenceless and the will to find itself in a position capable of a

Persistence and conversion to the enemy   87 level of aggression that will build its strength even at the expense of other collectivities if that is necessary (the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is a perfect example here since it can be considered a knock-­on effect of the Second World War). The process of converting to the enemy is a sophisticated expression of how different human sociocultures co-­evolve. The inevitable outcome in all configurations is that when we engage in conflict our opponent changes us. This indicates a strong evolutionary dynamics whose causes are not obvious. On the surface it is a counter-­intuitive phenomenon since we all consider ourselves by definition very different from those against whom we fight. Yet both rejection and conversion are true at the same time. One plausible line of explanation is that it makes sense for the defeated to learn from the victorious. This is not because the victorious are in any way right or better, but because they influence more the direction of the species. To put it inversely, values work until they are challenged by violence and every collectivity must be ready to overcome such a challenge in order to participate in the sociocultural fitness of the species. An adequate potential for deploying violent force can be seen as the thermostat for the viability of a collectivity and its socioculture. At some point, a violent challenge is likely to rise, even when a collectivity is completely unaware of that probability. All ‘indigenous’ people from Oceania to America and from Africa to Asia and the Arctic Circle have exactly faced the terrible consequences of not having co-­evolved with these new enemies coming from another context. Their cultures and values are often seen today as superior – particularly from an environmental point of view – but their potential for violent conflict could not defend that superiority. Thus, it is a much slower, inverse conversion that will integrate some centuries later certain sociocultural snippets of the defeated collectivity into the victorious one. This will happen as a matter of utility rather than principle and will shape to an extent that new socioculture which will in its turn need to maintain a significant potential for violent conflict. This is a neutral equilibrium like that of a sphere. There are no privileged positions that will prove more stable than others. All that counts is the inclination of the social surface on which collectivities exchange, clash or, more rarely, merge peacefully. Conversion to the enemy is an interlacing process of exchanging sociocultural aspects via violent force. It is particularly efficient and accurate but cruel and indifferent to individual suffering. Yet it is out of the capacity to suffer that all ethical considerations and altruistic tendencies arise. These include limits to violence as well as the avoidance of conflict. The paradoxical appearance of that permanent contact with both sides reminds the typical capacities of the Möbius strip which is often used to depict evolutionary phenomena. In our case, the two original sides of the strip, which become part of a single path, would be aggression and solidarity or indifference and empathy. However, the neutrality of the conversion process implies that the social bond within collectivities plays the fundamental role in social evolution. As it contracts or relaxes, it generates capacities that build on the circumstances and increase or decrease the influence of each collectivity. There is obviously no

88   Persistence and conversion to the enemy ideal social bond for all eras but there are advantageous forms depending on the prevailing conditions. At any rate, when it comes to conflict, the contraction of the social bond is critical. But there is a novelty regarding the prevailing conditions, namely the consciousness of belonging to social systems whose dynamics are inscribed in us and turn us into operatives of an evolutionary process that we increasingly comprehend. We are already past the point of reflexivity and rapidly move towards the point of systemic consciousness, which both allows and compels us to think individual actions in terms of their presumed collective effects rather than simply act under the influence of conformity and let the social bond contract unimpeded. The advent of modernity and the changes that it entailed for human sociality have expectedly affected conflict as they establish new relations within and between collectivities. Via various processes which include conversion to the enemy, late modern societies are less prone to internal and external conflict, despite their unprecedented capacity to exert violent force. This paradoxical relation to conflict will be the main focus of the next chapter.

Conclusion The fundamental precondition for conflict is community and the generation of community links are not self-­evident. Seeing others as similar to ourselves is a sophisticated process that depends on the criteria that we apply each time. ‘Perceptual proximity’ is necessary to generate representations of collectivities capable of engaging in conflict, but it is not sufficient. Enmity does not develop spontaneously but follows a process which can be divided into seven stages and can reproduce itself. Reciprocal retaliation (tit-­for-tat) is a constitutive aspect of the cycle of conflict and favours escalation, particularly when elite interests are not homogeneous and elite competition is strong. Randomness may contribute in those cases to a loss of control, leading to dynamics that surpass the intentions of all parties involved. When this happens, the parties engage in a lasting relation which can reproduce conflict via the exploitation of collective memory being kept among the less powerful classes. Conflict, as an evolutionary process, includes a strong component of conversion to the enemy. Sociocultural structures and modes of action are being transmitted between the parties as they engage in a homeomorphic relation. It is a cruel but reliable outcome that victorious parties leave highly enduring traces in the defeated collectivities. However, postindustrial societies seem to be developing a different pattern where reflexivity and systemic conscience transform the dynamics of conflict.

Notes   1 Gabriel Tarde’s ground-­breaking – and marginalised – approach of social relations is a testimony to the difficulty of looking at social life as a natural part of life (see for

Persistence and conversion to the enemy   89 example Tarde 2012 [1893]). Current attempts to build a ‘naïve sociology’, with a bottom-­up methodology, are based on the assumption that the order of social facts precedes the order of psychological facts (see for example Kaufman & Clement 2003).   2 Empathy is not identical to sympathy or love, mainly in the sense that it involves understanding other people’s emotions rather than permanent emotional investment in others. For a detailed discussion of the nuances, see Batson 2016; for a concise review of theories on human altruism, see Feigin, Owens and Goodyear-­Smith 2014.   3 They write: The intention of our review was to highlight some key issues relevant to our understanding of the phenomenon of empathy and the neural mechanisms supporting this complex and important social skill. The significance of these issues partly stems from the fact that they are intimately related to empathy and as such are keenly discussed in the public discourse, but at the same time due to their complexity might seriously obscure our insights into this topic. For instance, an overly enthusiastic tendency to interpret shared neural activations in a certain functional direction, to causally link empathy to our presumed mirror neuron system, or to assume that a move toward relying onto our empathic ‘gut’ sentiments will make our society more prosocial, all seem to be popular outcomes of our increased scientific knowledge on empathy but might actually make us drift away from the facts. Therefore we would like to encourage researchers to more explicitly separate neural and conceptual–psychological levels of descriptions in their discussions of empathy, in order to avoid misinterpretation of the concept. (Lamm & Majdandžić 2015: 22)   4 There are accentuated forms of that tendency that testify to its evolutionary depth, such as the veneration of dead ancestors in many cultures or the continuous, regulatory presence of dead ancestors as spirits in the daily world, e.g. in Confucianism or Shintoism.   5 See Mouzelis 1985 and Tomba 2014.   6 This point owes a great deal to my long observation of the ‘movement of the squares’ in the early 2010s in Greece.   7 This involves the absence of a moral duty, e.g. African migrants in Europe are largely not considered obliged to have a perception of Germany and Germans linked to the Second World War. Albeit never explicated, the cause of this distinction implies the presumption that somehow maintaining such perceptions is a duty to one’s ancestors. Enmity is inherited and one must be entitled to claim it, like any other inheritance.   8 In fact, we have reached the advanced point where the parties monitor their opponents’ reaction to that feedback: What is perhaps most unique and important about social media and its role for future conflicts, is the speed at which it is able to disseminate information to audiences, and for those audiences to provide feedback. Social media allowed Israel and Hamas to tailor their message to their international supporters, and monitor their feedback extremely quickly. (Zeitzoff 2018: 49)   9 Just as they avoid each other when the threat affects specific individuals, e.g. in conditions of disease or accident. 10 This is not to say that altruist possibilities are left unexplored by evolution; quite the contrary is true (Vakoch 2014). 11 This point is limited to sedentary, non-­postindustrial societies. There is evidence that hunter-­gatherers were much less prone to violent conflict (Fabbro 1978). 12 At the level of institutions and international relations, this objective is often referred to as de-­escalation.

90   Persistence and conversion to the enemy 13 Except for the extreme case of being in a position to save someone’s life without endangering one’s own. 14 Here is a graphic depiction with regard to the 9/11 attacks (Juergensmeyer 2006: 133): So religion can be a problematic aspect of contemporary social conflict even if it is not the problem, in the sense of the root causes of discontent. Much of the violence in contemporary life that is perceived as terrorism around the world is directly related to the absolutism of conflict. The demonization of enemies allows those who regard themselves as soldiers for God to kill with no moral impunity. Quite the opposite is true: They feel that their acts will give them spiritual rewards. Curiously, the same kind of thinking has crept into some of the responses to terrorism. […] Among some who espouse a war on terrorism the militant language is more than metaphor. God’s blessing is imagined to be bestowed on a view of confrontation that is, like cosmic war, all-­encompassing, absolutizing, and demonizing. What is problematic about this view is that it brings an impatience with moderate solutions that require the slow procedures of systems of justice. It demands instead the quick and violent responses of war that lend simplicity to the confrontation and a sense of divine certainty to its resolution. Alas, such a position can fuel the fires of retaliation, leading to more acts of terrorism instead of less. The role of religion in this literal war on terrorism is in a curious way similar to religion’s role in the cosmic war imagined by those perpetrating terrorism. In both cases religion is a problematic partner of political confrontation. Religion brings more to conflict than simply a repository of symbols and the aura of divine support. It problematizes a conflict through its abiding absolutism, its justification for violence, and its ultimate images of warfare that demonize opponents and cast the conflict in transhistorical terms. 15 This is not unrelated to the brutality of war tactics employed by authoritarian regimes. 16 A clarification is necessary here. I use the term ‘conflict’ when there is a minimum possibility of engagement by all parties involved. For example, massive armed violence against unarmed civilians in my view cannot justifiably be assimilated to conflict. It is mere predatory behaviour. In these cases, it is noticeable that those who undergo violence are not considered by external collectivities as opponents but as victims, meaning that the behaviour of the aggressor is simply seen as criminal. It is also important that there is no equalisation of perceptions in those cases and the moral equilibrium is inverted. It is those who undergo violence that are morally superior. This explains why the position of a collectively recognised victim is so important from a symbolic point of view in human societies and increasingly carries immense credibility in contemporary societies. 17 As an ex-­combatant puts it: [Soldiers] are just that [human], no less, no more, no matter which side they fight on. Even the most brutal and misguided of us is fully human. That is not meant to be consoling. It’s war’s humanness, not its monstrosity, that bothers me the most. (van Reet 2017) 18 This has led to the externalisation of violent action, which is often referred to as “surrogate war” (Krieg 2016). 19 For example, the representation of France as a victorious country at the end of the Second World War operated without any influential critique for many decades, until critique could safely be cast as an issue of specialist debate among historians, not entailing any consequences for the French society. The official archives of that period remained secret until the end of 2015.

Persistence and conversion to the enemy   91 20 It is not a coincidence that the rare expressions of power by the lower social classes are often linked to defeats in wars: the Paris Commune in the aftermath of the Franco-­ Prussian war, the Russian Revolution and its link with the First World War; the end of the Japanese Empire after the Second World War; the collapse of the Argentinian junta after the Falklands; the Yugoslav wars and the collapse of several regimes and political forces in its aftermath – all send a clear cautioning messages to elites everywhere. It is also true at the same time that autocratic regimes initiate wars more frequently and suffer the consequences of defeat (Geddes, Wright & Fran 2014).

5 Plurality and the rise of the individual

My analysis so far suggests that the link between individuals who recognise themselves as belonging to a collectivity, i.e. the social bond, can contract and relax itself depending on a series of conditions. This is true at every level of observation, from the smallest group to the entire species. There is clearly one obvious precondition to collective violent conflict: community. Before this statement is interpreted as inherently tautological, I should recall the significant distinction between collectivity and community which consists in the degree of interdependence and control between individuals. Since the contraction of the social bond is a precondition for conflict, it makes sense to look at the opposite side and see what are the possible conditions that favour the relaxing of the social bond and to what extent this is related to conflict. I will do that later in this chapter but let us consider first some relevant aspects of community that we have not yet seen. Cooney (1998: 149) offers a poignant introduction to the matter: Insofar as the strong community thesis is inconsistent with much thinking about homicide, it is likely to be controversial. But many people, social scientists among them, romanticize the idea of community. Far from invariably being sites of harmony and cooperation, communities are often riven by competition, back-­biting and fighting. Actual communities may in fact be harmonious, but they need not be. The evidence, modern and premodern, is clear that when homicide flourishes it does so in settings with strong social ties such as modern low-­income urban enclaves, agricultural villages and aristocratic society. Conversely, in at least one setting where community is weak – suburbia – homicide rates are extremely low. As suburban life continues to expand nationally and, perhaps, internationally, homicide may increasingly come to be a thing of the past. The wise have long taught that there is no such thing as an unambiguous human good. Like everything else people value, strong ties have an aspect that many would regard as less attractive. Violence is the dark side of community. One necessary clarification is that Cooney is aware that a long series of socioeconomic factors are involved here and that big houses with gardens are a matter

Plurality and the rise of the individual   93 of income. The interest of his argument is precisely that it starts beyond that point. In the context of ‘pure sociology’, to which Cooney is explicitly committed, he is concerned with the outcome, i.e. that when for whatever reason people get to have more distant distended links, they kill each other less. This is not to deny that in order to do so they may need to be wealthy, or live in sparse nomadic conditions, or have a hermit penchant. The fact remains that community favours violence. Of course, things may be more complicated than that because collective aggression surging out of tight links may burst against weak link settings (‘terrorist’ acts follow exactly that pattern, for example). But again, the idea is that strong ties are needed to generate violence. Another aspect that adds to the link between community and violence is the centripetal dynamics of community. As de Soham et al. (2015: 5) found: mobility plays a crucial role in the evolution of ethnocentrism in a society. More specifically, we establish that low mobility leads to in-­group cooperation and out-­group hostility. High mobility, on the other hand, leads to more individual-­entitative behavior, where agents take actions based on the specific individuals with whom they interact, rather than the groups to which those individuals belong. […] Mobility might reduce ethnocentrism when agents move for economic reasons, but mobility might not reduce ethnocentrism if agents move primarily to be among other in-­group members. In all, our work shows for the first time that mobility is a critical factor that affects ethnocentrism with important implications for theory and policy. This is a very sophisticated degree of evidence that tells us that mobility is beneficial only when it trumps community. In the terms of my argument so far, only when perceptual proximity is avoided is mobility contributing to blurring the lines of division. To put it more sociologically, it is the individuating consequences of mobility that make the crucial difference, not the change of one’s environment as such. Anthropological evidence on the connection between tight community links and collective violence is anything but scarce. In fact, the link is rather striking if one considers the recent transition of the human species from the nomadic to the sedentary condition during the Neolithic revolution (Apostolou 2017). This transition is often poorly understood by sociologists as the mere emergence of agropastoral communities. Of course that was the case, but what stemmed from that change was a new sociality based on the closure of group boundaries and the radicalisation of belonging. At the same time, because group belonging became rigid and communities could not any longer move, it became possible for one community to ‘conquer’ another and benefit from its accumulated resources: Building on both the evidence previously available for the LBK [Linearbandkeramik]1 and the evidence presented here, we suggest that the repeated occurrence of almost indiscriminate massacres, the possible abduction of

94   Plurality and the rise of the individual selected members, and the patterns of torture, mutilation, and careless disposal all fit into the concept of prehistoric warfare as currently understood within anthropology. Particular LBK groups were singled out for as yet unknown reasons, attacked with brute force, and annihilated by others, probably close neighbors and very likely other LBK groups of the wider region. […] The massacres now known from three widely separated localities but dating to a rather short period give direct evidence that outbreaks of lethal collective violence unquestionably occurred repeatedly within the later LBK. Although the particular trigger for each massacre might have been different, the overarching patterns of extreme violence and the atypical treatment of the dead are recognizably similar. In this context, it is especially telling that all three of the unequivocal massacre sites currently known date to the later phases of the LBK, but there is no evidence for comparable levels of violence in the earlier periods. (Meyer et al. 2015: 11221) The much freer hunter-­gatherers could previously move in relatively small groups and consume natural resources where they found them. When conditions became unfavourable for whatever reason, including the competitive presence of another group, they could simply move to their next temporary habitat. In that unlimited world, conflict made much less sense and intra-­species conflict probably no sense at all, a phenomenon that is generally observed in nature. The main reason humans developed collective violent conflict is that following the development of agriculture their interdependence increased exponentially to the point where they developed new kinds of links. Production, property and territoriality tied them inextricably since they could not any longer either abandon or take with them what they had already invested in, i.e. arable land and permanent homes. Everything was now tied to space and to the other members of the group. But this led to another outcome that remains overlooked in the literature: that the new sedentary community was now a fully operational, self-­contained unit, a ‘human machine’ so tightly linked in its interior that it could be made to operate for the benefit of another unit. This is another way of saying that collective violence now became a very interesting strategy as it offered increased access to indefinitely renewed additional resources and forced sexual partners.2 Enslavement and colonisation became possible. This was precisely because of the closure of human groups, whose members were now bound to interdependence and incapable of simply breaking up, leaving and establishing themselves elsewhere, so that their predators would have no interest in persecuting them. The contraction of the social bond during the Neolithic revolution is precisely the origin of our social world, not because of the introduction of agriculture but because that introduction led to ‘conquerable’ social units via collective violence. That is why only a blink separates the end of hunter-­gatherers from the emergence of the first empires, usually placed at the beginning of the third millennium bc. The very scale of human collectivities changed and violent coercion became the source of surplus labour, wealth and further increase in the scope of

Plurality and the rise of the individual   95 ‘conquests’. This is in a nutshell the continuous thread of human history from the Neolithic revolution to the emergence of modernity, when seen through the lens of the social bond. Tight links both generate and attract violence because they lead to operational and sociocultural closure. Communities are collectivities where action and thought are aligned for all involved into a shared pattern (Douglas 1996: 117ff.). Social control mechanisms maintain a constant, high level of perceptual proximity that is ideal for leading to conflict when a certain degree of uncertainty arises. Although that dynamics of assimilation has not been missed by sociologists,3 the main focus has been on social differentiation rather than on social proximity and conformity. This is easily explained by the great interest of the social sciences in the division of labour at a time when modernity produced a formidable new world via attributing specialised administrative and economic roles across the impressive capacity of industrial production. It was normal to look at what modernity brought to the social bond rather than what it took out of it. But it can be argued that the latter is as important as the former.

The dark side of democracy – and the luminous one There is converging evidence that contemporary democracies do not initiate conflicts with external opponents and also avoid violent internal conflicts. Several authors have dealt with the causality of that correlation. (For a critical review of the literature see Hegre 2014). But first let us consider an apparently diverging stance, which in fact reinforces the line of analysis that I follow in this book. Michael Mann has made a major contribution to the debate on conflict by revealing the “dark side of democracy”. He proposes that there is an obvious disadvantage to democracy, i.e. that majorities can dominate minorities and in doing so coerce, exploit or exclude them. From the beginning, Mann (2005: 2) clarifies his ideological position: Let me make clear at the outset that I do not claim that democracies routinely commit murderous cleansing. Very few have done so. Nor do I reject democracy as an ideal – I endorse that ideal. Yet democracy has always carried with it the possibility that the majority might tyrannize minorities, and this possibility carries more ominous consequences in certain types of multi-­ethnic environments. His argument is that ethnic and religious majorities can and do use their democratic predominance to cleanse the society of their state from ethnic and religious minorities. Mann is careful to show that this is rarely an organised conspiracy, a monstrous plan of extermination. It is the result of a sociopolitical dynamics that draws majorities towards an increasingly exclusive identification with the state and a belief in their legitimacy to ban everyone else from existing under an alternative ethnic or religious condition. But we should ask: where does this

96   Plurality and the rise of the individual fundamental tendency come from? In other words, why does ethnic or religious identity trump citizenship? Here is Mann on Yugoslavia, one of the cases that he examines (ibid.: 424): One was forced to be a Serb, a Croat, a Bosniak, or an Albanian, regardless of class, region, and gender. Only a tiny minority of Serbs, Croats, or Muslims can have actually killed or raped. Even the killing of 100,000 civilians and prisoners across Yugoslavia (a high estimate) might require only 10,000 perpetrators. That sounds like a lot, but it is a very small proportion of Yugoslavs. Many more hung around the fringes, jeering, shouting, full of righteous rage. But we have seen ample evidence (as in other cases) of very varied behavior and attitudes within each community. Sizable dissidence was driven underground or into exile by radical pressures, including many murders; expressions of dismay were driven into muted forms. The keyword here is community. Being ‘forced to be’ is being obliged to belong. A community is a totalitarian unit of social control where functional participation, personal life and moral duty are merged into one condition: the condition of conformity. There will be killers and rapists and there will be righteous supporters. Dissidence – in fact any form of disownment – will not be tolerated and will be suppressed. This is closure at its strongest, the social bond contracting under the uncertainty of existential threat. Mann’s work is particularly valuable because it shows what community does despite other forms of collective coexistence. When uncertainty operates and closure takes over, then community relations outperform legally instituted political forms. Even dormant fragments of dividing lines will suffice to enable that process. The inhabitants of the proudly multi-­ethnic pre-­war Sarajevo with their inter-­religious exchanges and mixed marriages have much to say about this irresistible regression into community links and collective violence that appeared unlikely and inexplicable before it drew them into its maelstrom. The conclusion that must be drawn from Mann’s extensive inquiry is that the contraction of the social bond can take over any form of coexistence and generate conflict. That is why ethnic and religious lines are much stronger in their contracting capacity than lines of stratification. Class is a matter of social position that can be changed, which is precisely the objective of class-­related conflict. Inversely, ethnicity and religion are the major examples of what people would not wish to change and believe that they are meant to be until their death. The more inalienable the identifying categories, the more likely to serve the tightening of the links in a collectivity.4 Interestingly, provided that uncertainty is high and closure strong, the process can be ‘reverse engineered’ so that the circumstances can generate identity via the contraction of the social bond. The typical case here is the United States where national identity is born out of conflict with native Amer­icans and their genocide, and conflict with the English in order to break away from the historic colonial identities (Kurtiş, Adams & Yellow Bird 2010; Gellner 1983; Stratton & Ang 1994). As a result, the division

Plurality and the rise of the individual   97 that persists, despite the coalescence of many heterogeneous origins into the new Amer­ican identity, is with those who cannot be historically linked to that original collective violence, i.e. those who were brought to the country as slaves and who share a special identity. Conflict not only results from communities but also builds them. Now we can revisit Mann’s argument for our purposes and look at the luminous side of democracy. As mentioned, Mann clearly acknowledges the fact that democracies rarely lead to collective violence, which is of course a question in itself. If the contraction of the social bond and the consequent engendering of communities is how they produce conflict, should we not wonder why this does not happen in democracies more frequently? If one adds to this the point that democracies always produce minorities and that conflict in itself can produce communities, then there must be something particularly effective in stopping that process from happening all the time. The link between democracy and peace is naturally a major theme in the area of conflict studies. We have seen some aspects of this theme in Chapter 2 (passim) and Chapter 3 (BTI tables). There are many others, for example the fact that democracies rarely fight each other, known as ‘democratic peace’. As Dafoe (2011: 247) puts it (emphasis added): The ‘democratic peace’ – the inference that democracies rarely fight each other – is one of the most important and empirically robust findings in international relations. The apparent empirical association between joint democracy and peace has been debated and challenged since its first discovery by political scientists to the present. […] It is important to be clear about what this empirical association implies about international politics. Despite the robustness of this result to different model specifications, this observational finding by itself does not prove that it is [among the] characteristics of democracies – such as regular competitive elections, constraints on the executive, liberal norms, or civil rights – that make these countries more peaceful toward each other. Even less does it prove that the forceful spread of democracy in particular regions of the world will reduce the frequency or severity of wars. Justifying causal claims such as these exclusively using analyses of observational data requires the leverage of strong assumptions. It is for this reason that there is less agreement about the actual causal mechanisms of the democratic peace than that around the underlying explanandum. Scholars have proposed that the democratic peace arises because of shared norms, restraint on democratic leaders, more credible communication through transparency or domestic audience costs, greater capacity to reach stable bar gains, and other possible causal pathways. On the other hand, it may not be a ‘democratic’ characteristic at all that accounts for the peace, but some other co-­occurring or preceding factor, such as shared strategic circumstances, shared political systems, capitalism, prosperity, liberal economic norms, or other factors.

98   Plurality and the rise of the individual Cuesta and Murshed (2008: 9) provide a concise reference to the variety of approaches to the link between democracy and peace: The famous Lipset […] modernisation hypothesis states that demands for democracy surely follow economic development and the attainment of a high standard of living; once a particular (high) level of average income is achieved violence becomes a very costly means of settling disputes. Instead, conflict theorists […] argue that the transformation towards capitalist market modern economies has more often than not resulted in an increasing inequality, unemployment and poverty. Similarly, Hegre et al. […] reject the notion of a virtuous circle between growth, democracy and peace, pointing out that the risk of conflict is lower in both well-­established democracies and autocracies perhaps because of greater state capacity. It suggests that conflict risk is at its highest during transitions to and away from democracy when state capacity is weak, and also in fledgling and imperfect democracies (anocracies) – an argument similar to the presence of systemic violence in ‘dysfunctional’ democracies […]. High or higher average incomes may well mask a widening gap among groups (or among countries), leading to sentiments of greed, selfishness and historical resentment all congruent with increasing violent conflict. (LaFree & Tseloni 2006) It is fair to say that the jury is out on this question for economists, political scientists and conflict scholars. This means that Dafoe’s warning on a non-­ ’democratic’ causal characteristic of ‘democratic peace’ is probably highly relevant. Furthermore, Mann’s demonstration of the nefarious effects of democracy in specific conditions drastically reinforces the feeling that there must be a deep-­seated social dimension reflected on the observable surface as a direct link between democracy and peace. Evidently, because the correlation is readily observable, that profound social dimension is certainly co-­occurring with contemporary democracy. Following a review of the literature on this issue, Hegre (2014: 168) concludes: The most fundamental challenge, in my view, is that there might be underlying social changes that explain both the development of democratic institutions and peaceful resolution of social conflicts. These changes are typically summarized as socio-­economic development, and typically work through the incentives for using physical force for political goals. At the same time, as recently seen in Syria, relative economic development in itself is not sufficient to prevent armed conflict. Democratic institutions are formal codifications of nonviolent conflict resolution procedures. Socioeconomic development is likely to change societies such that nonviolent conflict resolution is an underlying pareto-­optimal equilibrium, allowing actors to agree to such codifications. In the absence of formal codifications, however, actors may be unwilling to trust that this underlying equilibrium exists. Hence,

Plurality and the rise of the individual   99 democratic institutions may be necessary to allow the beneficial changes due to development to be manifested as more peaceful societies. Before turning to the disentanglement of that co-­occurrence and the pursuit of social causality, some clarifications are needed. The authors contributing to that debate do not share a unified and globally admitted concept of democracy. However, they strongly converge upon a political, economic, spatial and historical contour of the term. A series of aspects is largely, implicitly or explicitly shared and not all of them are formal preconditions of democracy. In fact, the general picture emerging from the debate on conflict is that of an integrated social, political and economic regime which possesses the following characteristics among many others: a b c d e

Freedom of the citizens, with emphasis on their effective capacity to contest and protest against all forms of power. Representation and participation in the political process beyond formal elections. Transparency in the public and the private sector, and effective investigation and information systems that alert the people of corruption. A certain degree of prosperity and infrastructure with a series of services and protections available to the citizens. Strong institutions – both state and civil society ones – that are not amenable to instrumentalisation by powerful individuals and groups.

The image composed by these five characteristics goes obviously beyond the formal understanding of democracy as a legal or even political concept. It clearly represents the conditions of contemporary democratic nation states. Unsurprisingly for all those who work on conflict and the international institutions that seek to avoid it, the understanding of democracy is aligned to ‘development’, ‘human security’, ‘civil society’, ‘capacity building’ and a series of other notions that represent the direction to take for all human societies, most particularly those that are at risk of being involved in violent conflict. This luminous side of democracy is not a mere amalgam of rights and rationality, it is an effective condition of the citizens that amounts to an integrated mode of collective coexistence. Now, one has to ask why this is so and what this coexistence represents. I think that the answer to that question is clear for any social scientist with a sense of history: modernity. But not all of modernity. For example, not social inequality, colonialism or the territorial ambition of nations. But certainly citizenship rights, social inclusiveness or entrepreneurship. Not massive national operations of internal alignment and external competition but focus on self-­determination and prosperity. It is not easy to disentangle the factors that compose that contemporary democratic condition and isolate those that causally contribute to collective violent conflict. Many authors have dealt with ‘democratic peace’ but there is one who dedicated his life’s work to the question of causality.

100   Plurality and the rise of the individual

Pax mercatoria5 I will reconstitute in this section the ‘economic norms’ model on the basis of which it is possible to draw several conclusions regarding my analysis so far and the arguments that will follow. Michael Mousseau is a political scientist with a very specific mission, namely to find what is behind the link between democracy and peace. He has lived and worked in four continents and many countries, which certainly influenced both the theme and the direction of his research. From the beginning of his work on conflict, Mousseau (1998) focuses his quantitative skills and analytical acumen on the impact of democracy on interstate conflict and finds that not only do democratic regimes never initiate militarised conflicts with similar regimes but they are also much more likely than any other regime to resolve disputes via compromise. An interesting secondary finding in Mousseau’s early work was that dissimilar regimes (democratic vs. autocratic) formed the most conflict-­prone dyads. This seems rather understandable since the asymmetry of their structures, organisations and values prevents them from adhering to a common narrative of compromise and from proposing such a narrative to their respective populations. Mousseau then naturally turned to the causality of the phenomenon that he had established by first making sure that his design was not flawed and no ‘reverse causality’ effects were involved in his findings, e.g. it was not the pre-­war period that led to autocratic regimes. Having established that “the direction of causation in the regime type and war relationship is unidirectional, from democracy to peace” (Mousseau & Shi 1999: 660), he then looked for a way to represent ‘democracy’ via readily measurable factors so as to operationalise his model in order to provide an explanation of the main link between democratic regimes and peace. He turned to the market and its contractual relations. He sidestepped all the complex debates on the links and causalities between economic prosperity and civic rights and liberties, and focused only on the result in terms of per capita wealth and income, which he took to represent strong contractual relations: If democratic legitimacy rests predominantly on the values derived from contract forms of economic cooperation, however, then democracies without prosperous market economies will tend to be unstable. The leaders of less prosperous democracies are not likely to be constrained by constituents to respect individual choice, free will, and the sanctity of the social contract. Instead, such leaders are likely to be constrained to pursue other values, such as religious norms, ethnic particularism, or some sort of nationalist revanchism. In the absence of the universal form of trust in the sanctity of contract, the model predicts no basis for the leaders of democracies without supplemental market economies to respect the rules and procedures of the democratic social contract. (Mousseau 2000: 480) The unsettling impression at times that Mousseau reinvents the wheel or is ­tautological do not invalidate the robustness of his demonstration. In fact, in

Plurality and the rise of the individual   101 constructing his variables he asks the question of the universality of Western values and builds on cultural differences between societies in order to understand their convergence when it comes to conflict-­related behaviour. It is also obvious that his motivation for such a long project is a contribution to attaining peace. Also in this matter, Mousseau finds against the transmission of political values as such and his recommendations are as always clear-cut. It makes no sense to seek to transmit or impose values on others; it is simply impossible. What one should do is help to accelerate the emergence of a complex, contract-­ intensive economy, which is what Mousseau means when he refers to the ‘market’ in this excerpt: […] this study demonstrates the wide explanatory power of the tenable, testable, and simple postulate that economic norms affect our social values and preferences. With the additional axiom that market prosperity is a complex division of labor linked by contracts, the postulate yields a single parsimonious explanation for a diverse range of political phenomena: democratic peace and cooperation, democratization and institutional consolidation, and the seeming existence of common norms and values across divergent indigenous but economically prosperous cultures – from Japan to Iceland. Moreover, the model brings economic structure and culture back together in comparative politics and, more important, does so without ethnocentric or evolutionary implications. If empirically true, the model also yields several clear and relevant policy recommendations: (1) that the developed democracies face a difficult task if they insist on enforcing their values and standards of democracy on less developed countries, (2) that believers in democratic peace should not expect poorer democracies to behave like the rich ones, and (3) if US. policy makers want real peace with Russia and China, they must tolerate their democratic imperfections, encourage their private sectors, and have patience. Democratic or not, only with economic development will these countries truly respect human rights and be allies as steadfast as are England, Germany, and Japan. (Ibid.: 502–503) Inevitably, Mousseau had to investigate the link between market, norms and values in order to provide some explanation of the aggregate effect that favours peace. By applying a rather idiosyncratic Marxist perspective, he concludes that the market ‘infrastructure’ gives rise to a cultural superstructure based on intense exchange, i.e. liberalism, to which he then attributes the foundations of avoiding violent conflict (Mousseau 2002: 103): In a non-­market economy with a complex division of labor production and consumption may be relatively intense, but economic transactions are arranged not through contract but by monopolies, bureaucrats, and familiar and political linkages. It is almost axiomatic that in all economies without complex divisions of labor integrated with exchange, individual survival

102   Plurality and the rise of the individual rests less on the successful and regularized engagement in contract than it does on the building and nurturing of various kinds of patron-­client relationships. In this way, what predominantly differentiates the day-­to-day life of ordinary people in advanced market economies from virtually all other economies is the intensity in which they regularly engage in contract forms of economic cooperation. Thus, the infrastructure of interest – the material – is the proliferation of exchange unique to developed market economies. What norms and values arise from a socio-­economy integrated with exchange? […] Specifically, the regularized engagement in contract affects the superstructure in at least five ways. It encourages the values of: (1) cooperation managed with exchange; (2) individualism and freedom; (3) negotiation and compromise; (4) equity, or legal equality, among individuals; (5) a universal form of trust and respect for the rule of common law. In continuing this Marxist line, he then reaches in his self-­evident – but n­ onetheless highly effective – manner the unsurprising conclusion that the market and not any specific collective culture, is the foundation of mature and stable democracy (ibid.: 120): If the model is correct, then liberal culture [is] not “Western” at all, but simply arises with a market economy. The market civilization of the present age originated in Western Europe by chance; it might just as easily have originated in twelfth-­century Mali. But because it began in Europe, almost everyone today confuses liberal political culture with “Western” indigenous culture. […] this confusion is unfortunate, for once alleviated we can see that the emergence of liberal political culture is not a threat to indigenous culture and identity. The rise of markets and liberal culture in Ghana will not make Ghanaians any more “Western” than the rise of a market economy in England made the British any more Dutch. Wearing Western suits may make Ghanaians more Western, but engaging in contract and voting will not. While it is easy for any expatriate from a market socio-­economy (such as myself ) to observe cultural mores in a developing society inhibiting efficient production, consumption, and democracy, it is much harder to observe that it remains the material infrastructure, in the long run, that ultimately affects the structure and superstructure. One of the misinterpretations of Mousseau’s approach can be to look at it as a theory that explains the dynamics of conflict, rather than the tendencies of interstate violence.6 In fact, the focus is precisely on a single outcome, i.e. the correlation between market, democracy and peace and the causal directionality of that correlation. As Mousseau, Hegre and Onea put it (2003: 277): Economically important trade has an independent, substantively important pacifying effect, but the conflict-reducing effect of democracy depends on

Plurality and the rise of the individual   103 the level of economic development. If the less developed state in a dyad has a per capita GDP below 1,400 USD, joint democracy is not a significant force for peace. Our results indicate that the vast majority of past research on the democratic peace is imperfectly specified because the character of states’ political institutions alone does not account for the likelihood of military conflict. To advance further the cause of peace, we must encourage increased global trade and development along with democratic institutions. In other words, only when there is a performing market, are (democratic) political institutions significant in maintaining peace: Democracy appears to be a significant force for peace only in dyads that are above the median income: the richest 45%. The results indicate that scholars of war should update the widespread prior belief that democracy, alone, causes [sic7] peace. (Mousseau 2005: 63) Mousseau provides a “comparative test of democratic peace and market civilization” (see Table 5.1) on the basis of his extensive quantitative findings and concludes that its results: indicate that it is thousands of times more likely that the democratic peace is a phenomenon limited to nations with above-­median levels of development Table 5.1  Comparative test of democratic peace and market civilization

Parameters DemocracyL DevelopmentL

Null model

Challenging model

Democratic peace –0.192 (0.075) 0.0108

Market civilization –0.003 (0.079) 0.9741

–0.208 (0.074) 0.0050

–1.273 (0.247)