Conflict

Organised violence tends to appear where the substrate makes it the higher-return move, and to recede where it does not. That is one way to read the origins of war. Inverted, the same reading yields a second claim, less obvious and more useful. If war is what the ground rewards under some conditions, then peace is what the ground rewards under others, and neither is the default. A long stretch without organised violence is not the absence of something. It is the presence of conditions under which cooperation pays, and conditions like that can be built, and they can wear out. ...

Humans have probably always killed one another. Warfare is something narrower. It implies groups, planning, logistics, memory, leadership, and enough social organisation that violence stops being a personal act and becomes a collective institution. The interesting question is not when humans first killed. It is when killing acquired administration. Ask that question and a small crowd of theories turns up, each with its own literature, its own favourite dig site, and its own conviction that the others have missed the point. The Hobbesians say war is ancient. The Rousseauians say civilisation invented it. The circumscription theorists say geography did. The economists point at surplus, the anthropologists at prestige, the international relations scholars at the security dilemma. Each theory has evidence. Each has counterexamples. The usual response is to pick a champion and treat the rest as noise. ...

At eight in the evening on 31 August 1939, a small team in Polish uniforms seized a radio transmitter at Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia and broadcast a few minutes of anti-German agitation. By the following morning the event had a name, an author, and a consequence: a Polish provocation, answered by the invasion that began the Second World War in Europe. The name held for six years. The finding out took until December 1945, when the sworn affidavit of the SS officer who ran the operation was read into the record at Nuremberg, complete with the code name for the murdered prisoner left at the scene. ...

Reading the Substrate argued that analysis of conflict tends to read a story first and the ground beneath it late, and that the ordering is often backwards in its emphasis: ideas set a conflict’s direction, conditions set its reach. That was a claim using looking backwards, about explaining wars that have already happened. A fair question is whether the same method survives being turned around to face forward. If conditions set reach, can a reading of conditions say anything useful about what comes next? ...

By the time a clash in the central Sahel reaches a wire service, it has already been given its name: a jihadist attack, or ethnic violence between Fulani herders and settled farmers, with the dead counted under one heading or the other. What rarely travels with the dispatch is the thing underneath it: a rainy season that arrived late or not at all, a grazing corridor quietly ploughed under for cropland, a herd pushed a hundred kilometres further south than the route it followed a decade ago, into country that was never its own. The label arrives first. The condition that produced it, if it arrives at all, arrives as background colour. Between the two sits a gap, and what falls into it. ...