Anarchy and Culture:
Insights from the Anthropology of War
Jack Snyder
jls6@columbia.edu
February 5, 2001
Introduction
In the post-Cold-War era, both scholars and public activists have taken up a
debate of the most fundamental importance over the prospects for a dramatic
transformation in the very nature of world politics. Much of this debate hinges on
conceptions of the effect of culture on behavior in anarchy, that is, in situations where no
overarching authority has enforcement power over politically autonomous actors.
Those who foresee substantial opportunities to transform the lawless and warprone international system into a realm governed by benign norms contend that “anarchy
is what states make of it.”1 In their view, culture, defined as a system of symbols that
creates meaning within a social group, determines whether behavior in anarchy is bloody
or benign. If more benign ideas and identities are effectively spread throughout the globe
by cultural change and normative persuasion, then “ought” can be transformed into “is”:
support for warlike dictators can be undermined, perpetrators of war crimes and atrocities
can be held accountable, benign multicultural identities can be fostered, and international
and civil wars will wane.2
Alexander Wendt, “Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of
Power Politics,” International Organization 46 (1992), 391-425.
2
Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, “International Norm Dynamics and Political
Change,” International Organization 52:4 (Autumn 1998), 916; Thomas Risse and
Kathryn Sikkink, “The Socialization of International Human Rights Norms into Domestic
Practice,” in Thomas Risse, Stephen Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink, eds., The Power of
Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 1-38; Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 377-378; and almost any publication of
Human Rights Watch.
1
2
In contrast, skeptics about such transformations argue that anarchy, whether
among states coexisting in a self-help system or among contending groups inside
collapsed states, gives rise to an inescapable logic of insecurity and competition that
culture cannot trump.3 These skeptics fear that a transformative attempt to supersede
self-help behavior amounts to reckless overreaching that will create backlashes and
quagmires. Ironically, in this view, the idealist vanguard of the new world order will
need to rely increasingly on old-fashioned military and economic coercion in a futile
effort to change world culture for the better.4
This is a debate of compelling intellectual and practical import. It lays bare the
most fundamental assumptions about the nature of world politics that underpin real policy
choices about the deployment of the vast military, economic, and moral resources of the
United States and other wealthy democracies.
However, many of the leading voices in this debate, both in academic and broader
public settings, overlook the decisive interplay between situational constraints and the
creation of culture. Prophets of transformation sometimes assert that politics in anarchy
and society is driven by “ideas almost all the way down.” They dismiss as negligible what
Alexander Wendt calls “rump” material constraints rooted in biology, the physical
environment, or other circumstances unalterable through changes in symbolism.5 For
them, “agency” by political actors committed to social change consists primarily in
working to alter prevailing principled ideas, such as promoting the norm of universal
jurisdiction in the case of crimes against humanity. In contrast, working for improved
outcomes within existing constraints of material power, for example, by bargaining with
still powerful human rights abusers, does not count for them as true “agency;” rather it is
3
John Mearsheimer, Great Power Politics (New York: Norton Books, forthcoming);
Mearsheimer, “The False Promise of Institutions,” International Security 19 (Winter
1994/95), 5-49; Barry Posen, “The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict,” Survival 35:1
(Spring 1993), 27-47.
4
Christopher Layne and Benjamin Schwartz, “For the Record,” The National Interest 57
(Fall 1999), 9-16.
5
Wendt, Social Theory, chapter 3; also underplaying material constraints are Risse and
Sikkink, “Socialization,” 35-6.
3
mere myopic “problem-solving” within constraints.6 Conversely, when prophets of
continuity discuss culture at all, they treat it as a largely unchangeable force that may
have some effect in constituting the units competing for security, but that has at most a
secondary effect on strategic interactions between those units, which are driven mainly by
the logic of the anarchical situation.7
This is an unnecessarily truncated menu of possibilities for imagining the
relationship between anarchy and culture. Ironically, in light of the ambitiously activist
agenda of the proponents of cultural approaches to international relations, their onedimensional approach limits agents to a peculiarly limited set of tools for promoting
political change. Few serious social theorists over the past two centuries, including those
with a transformative agenda, have asked their readers to choose between analyses of
society that are either material or symbolic “all the way down.” The scholarly pantheon
populated by such figures as Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Antonio Gramsci,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, and even Clifford Geertz has
left a rich legacy of varying ways of thinking about the relationships among material
circumstances, social structure, and cultural symbolism.8 Some, like Marx, have leaned
toward reducing the cultural domain to the material, and others, like Geertz, have
expended most of their energy exploring the internal logic of the cultural realm, yet even
Robert W. Cox, “Social Forces, States, and World Orders,” in Robert Keohane, ed.,
Neorealism and Its Critics (New York: Columbia, 1986), 208.
7
Posen, “Ethnic Conflict;” Mearsheimer, “Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after
the Cold War,” International Security 15 (1990), 5-56; and works on ethnic partition cited
by Daniel Byman and Stephen Van Evera, “Hypotheses on the Causes of Contemporary
Deadly Conflict,” Security Studies 7:3 (Spring 1998), 49-50, including the somewhat
more constructed yet largely realist view of the role of culture in ethnic conflict presented
by Chaim Kaufmann, “Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Civil Wars,”
International Security 20:4 (Spring 1996), 136-175. More balanced views can be found
in the symposium on Wendt’s book in Review of International Studies, 26:1 (January
2000).
8
See the discussion of this problem in Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 1976), chapters 1-3, especially chapter 3 on Marx.
6
4
these two, not to mention the others, have offered a wealth of ideas about the mutual
interplay between cultural patterns and situational constraints.9
Current debates about anarchy and culture are impoverished not only theoretically,
but also empirically. To assess the claim that behavior in an anarchical system is what
the units and their culture make of it, the obvious methodological move is to vary the
culture of the units or the system as a whole, and then assess the effect on anarchic
behavior. Yet very little of the empirical discussion is set up this way. The contemporary
transformative agenda of those who see anarchical behavior as culturally constructed
leads many of them to look disproportionately at relatively contemporary changes, such
as the peaceful end of the cold war, the emergence of the democratic peace, and the
purported current strengthening of human rights norms.10 These kinds of tests, while not
irrelevant, are not well designed to disentangle the effects of autonomous changes in
ideas and culture from the effects of self-justifying American hegemonic power, an
ideological pattern that was quite familiar in the old world order, or to distinguish the
hopes of transitional moments from enduring trends.
Even when cultural constructivists do look at behavior in anarchies in cultural
settings radically different from our own, they sometimes fail to exploit obvious
opportunities for focused comparison. For example, Iain Johnston’s prominent book,
Cultural Realism, shows how the strategic wisdoms of the anarchical ancient Chinese
Warring States system were passed down to future generations to constitute a warlike
strategic “culture.” Yet his adherence to a cultural account of Chinese strategic practices
remains untroubled by his observation that these ideas and practices were quite similar to
those of the anarchic European balance of power system, the ancient Greek city states,
On Geertz’s materialist side, see William H. Sewell, Jr., “Geertz, Cultural Systems, and
History: From Synchrony to Transformation,” in Sherry B. Ortner, The Fate of
“Culture”: Geertz and Beyond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 35-55.
10
In addition to the works already cited, see Rey Koslowski and Friedrich Kratochwil,
“Understanding Change in International Politics: The Soviet Empire’s Demise and the
International System,” in Richard Ned Lebow and Thomas Risse-Kappen, eds.,
International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1995).
9
5
and the ancient Indian states system described by Kautilya, a set of cultures diverse in
almost every way except their strategic behavior.11
Insights from the anthropology of war
Fortunately, scholars outside the field of political science have already compiled a
body of research on the relationship between war and culture that is theoretically rich,
empirically substantial, and methodologically rigorous. The most systematic of this work
employs statistical research and qualitative case studies to examine war and violence in
stateless societies and pre-industrial anarchic systems. For decades, the main focus of
this energetic research program has been precisely to determine how inter-group warfare
and other forms of violence are related to variations in material circumstances, social
structure, and culture.12 Many of the causal factors and processes examined in this
literature will seem strikingly familiar to students of modern international relations: e.g.,
security fears, economic rivalry between groups, economic interdependence, the
institutionalization of cooperative ties across political units, the popular accountability of
decision-makers, and the nature of identities and cultural symbolism of the political units
and of the anarchic system as a whole.
Notwithstanding the familiarity of many of these categories, the kinds of societies
studied by anthropologists of war differ vastly from contemporary, industrialized,
bureaucratized societies, and thus research findings on the anthropological history of war
cannot simply be read off and applied to debates about the construction of culture in
today’s “new world order.” Indeed, a central part of the constructivist claim is that the
11
Alastair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in
Chinese History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). Christian Reus-Smit,
The Moral Purpose of the State: Culture, Social Identity, and Institutional Rationality in
International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), does compare
different anarchical systems, but the variation in outcome that he seeks to explain is the
style of diplomatic interaction, not the likelihood of war.
12
For surveys of this literature, see S. P. Reyna and R. E. Downs, eds., Studying War:
Anthropological Perspectives (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1994); R. Brian
Ferguson and Neil L. Whitehead, eds., War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and
Indigenous Warfare (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1992); Jonathan
Haas, ed., The Anthropology of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
6
spread of a new democratic culture may be on the verge of making obsolete all those old
cultural patterns, whether they are those of the Cold War, the ancient Chinese Warring
States, or rivalrous villages in the Venezuelan jungle.13 Moreover, evidence based on
technologically primitive societies, some of which lack the minimal economic resources
needed for assured survival, may load the dice in favor of explanations based on material
pressures. Thus, the main value of reviewing this research is not to report any universally
definitive findings on anarchy, culture, and war, but to expand our thinking about the
varied ways in which situational constraints in anarchy may be related to the emergence
of culture. Just as Geertz’s writings on Bali have stimulated constructivist thinking about
social relations in more familiar settings, so too a look at anthropological research on
warfare might help international relations scholars step outside of the limiting categories
that they take for granted.
Even so, the anthropologists have not solved all of our problems for us. Like
political scientists, some anthropologists are themselves mired in a debate between
unconvincing proponents of reductionist materialist and culturalist explanations of war.14
Moreover, many of those who have worked to integrate material and cultural elements
arrange them hierarchically, with the material situation establishing constraints or
problems that require institutional or cultural solutions. Yet this hierarchical approach, a
carry-over from earlier functionalists like Bronislaw Malinowski, is compelling only
when material pressures are overwhelming and cultural responses line up in a tidy fashion
with them, which is seldom the case. Some anthropologists do refrain from hierarchically
ranking the material and the cultural. Their case studies ably show how culture shapes
material goals and capabilities, and conversely how material tasks and tools shape culture
and institutions.15 Following their lead would require developing theories of behavior in
anarchy that integrate material, institutional, and cultural components through a systems
perspective.
13
Wendt, Social Theory, 323.
For a recent work characterizing this debate, see Clayton Robarchek and Carole
Robarchek, Waorani: The Contexts of Violence and War (New York: Harcourt Brace,
1998), 128.
15
Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason, chapters 2 and 5; on Malinowski, p. 74.
14
7
Anarchy as a material-cultural system
After reviewing this anthropological literature, I present some conjectures on the
role of anarchy and culture in shaping patterns of war and peace, including those of the
modern international system. I argue that anarchical systems are historical accretions of
material, institutional, and cultural constraints and resources whose workings as systems
can rarely be reduced to the effects of any single, hierarchically ranked element, whether
material or cultural. Scholars and activists who seek to promote change in the anarchical
international system need to understand the working of the system as a whole, not just
one or another of its individual components, and to identify emerging contradictions in
the system as opportunities for transformative action.
This means that the prospects for the transformation of behavior in contemporary
anarchical systems should be assessed not only in light of the rise of new ideas and
cultural identities, but also in light of the material and situational preconditions needed to
sustain these developments. The democratic peace provides a pertinent example.
According to the bulk of contemporary theory and research, the absence of war between
mature democracies depends on the material motivation of the average member of society
to avoid needless death and impoverishment (goals widely if not universally shared across
cultures), political institutions that predictably empower the median voter, and a set of
cultural symbols sanctifying civil rights, free speech, and electoral legitimacy in ways that
underpin those institutions, facilitate peaceful bargaining, and establish a non-threatening,
“in-group” identity among democratic states. The democratic peace works best when
these material, institutional, and cultural elements are all in place.16
Moreover, democracy itself has material preconditions. Adam Przeworski finds
that transitions to democracy are almost always successfully consolidated in countries
with a per capita annual income above $6,000 in 1985 constant dollars, whereas
democratic transitions almost always suffer reversals below $1,000 (with a few
16
Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1993); John M. Owen, IV, Liberal Peace, Liberal War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1997).
8
exceptions, such as India and Papua New Guinea).17 These economic levels may to some
degree be proxies for closely related factors such as literacy and the development of a
middle class. Between those levels, consolidation seems to depend on a number of
institutional preconditions, such as the strength of the rule of law and the development of
civil society organizations.18 The fact that these material and institutional preconditions
often arise along with symbols and ideas supportive of democracy does not mean that
democratic culture can somehow be a substitute for those conditions. Not surprisingly,
Western jawboning in favor of free speech, fair elections, and human rights has borne
little fruit in countries that lack these preconditions.19 There is no cultural shortcut to a
global democratic peace.
For these reasons, an escape route from the historically recurring pattern of
warfare in anarchy is likely to be a dead end if it is planned with a road map that depicts
ideas, norms, and culture going “all the way down.” Underestimating situational
constraints is just as dangerous and unwarranted as the opposite mistake of reifying them.
Instead of making either error, it seems more promising to grapple with the
interrelationship of situational constraints, social institutions, and cultural symbols as
factors that may influence the evolution of behavior in anarchical settings.
In developing these arguments, I first define basic concepts and justify my
approach to studying the effects of culture. Second, I review a variety of hypotheses that
attempt to reduce the explanation of war behavior in anarchy to one of three types of
causes: material, institutional, or symbolic-cultural. I examine their proposed causal
mechanisms, discuss some of the evidence bearing on them, and comment on inference
problems that arise in weighing this evidence. Third, I discuss two approaches that try to
integrate situational, institutional, and cultural factors in explanations of war behavior in
Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi, “Modernization: Theories and Facts,”
World Politics, 49:2 (January 19997), 155-183; see also Adam Przeworski, Michael
Alvarez, José Cheibub, and Fernando Limongi, Democracy and Development
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), ch. 2.
18
Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1996), 7-15.
19
For a balanced assessment, see Thomas Carothers, Aiding Democracy Abroad
(Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999).
17
9
anarchy: hierarchical nesting approaches and systems approaches. I briefly discuss how
these integrative approaches might be applied to understanding behavior in the anarchical
European balance of power system of 1914. Finally, I return to the democratic peace and
debates about transforming behavior in contemporary anarchies.
Behavior in anarchy: basic definitions and analytic concepts
The research program on war in the field of anthropology seeks to explain
variations in the degree of organized political violence between autonomous political
groups as a function of variations in (1) environmental, technological, and situational
constraints, including the strategic implications of anarchy, (2) social institutions, and (3)
culture. This literature assumes a variety of basic motives driving behavior, especially
the physical survival of individuals and their success in genetic propagation, but
sometimes posits additional social and psychological needs of various kinds. It examines
a number of potential causal mechanisms linking individual motives and constraining
structures to violent outcomes, such as selection through competition, strategic
interaction, institutionalization through converging expectations, socialization through
myths and rituals, and persuasive communication. Ethnographic case studies reconstruct
causal processes and cultural meanings. Correlations among variables are typically
established by statistical analyses of widely used, standardized databases, such as the
Standard Cross-Cultural Sample of the characteristics of 186 pre-industrial societies
during the nineteenth or twentieth centuries.20 Before discussing the findings of this
literature, its basic terms need to be defined and its epistemological assumptions justified.
Carol R. Ember and Melvin Ember, “Violence in the Ethnographic Record: Results of
Cross-Cultural Research on War and Aggression,” in Debra L. Martin and David W.
Frayer, eds., Troubled Times: Violence and Warfare in the Past (Amsterdam: Gordon
and Breach, 1997), 3. Other databases include as many as 565 units, such as Murdock’s
database on tribes, but most studies of war use more select samples in which the units are
adequately documented. See Stanton K. Tefft, “Warfare Regulation: A Cross-Cultural
Test of Hypotheses,” in Martin A. Nettleship, R. Dalegivens, and Anderson Nettleship,
20
10
War
Bronislaw Malinowski, a founder of modern anthropology, defined war as “the
use of organized force between two politically independent units, in pursuit of [the unit’s]
policy.”21 Similarly, a recent statistical study based on the Standard Cross-Cultural
Sample defines war as “socially organized armed combat between members of different
territorial units.”22 Such studies offer no quantitative cutoff point comparable to the
Correlates of War project’s benchmark of 1,000 battle deaths for distinguishing warfare
from lesser forms of violence, but they do normally distinguish qualitatively between
warfare organized by recognized group leaders and unsanctioned feuding activities by
certain in-group members against certain out-group members. Wars in the Standard
Sample often kill a higher proportion of the unit’s population than do modern wars.23
These studies and databases distinguish warfare between politically autonomous units
sharing a common culture from warfare between groups having different cultures.
Anarchy
As in international relations research, political autonomy in the anthropological
literature means the absence of an external enforcement authority wielding power over
the unit. Such autonomous units, whether they are villages or nation-states, may and often
do have social and normative ties linking them, but as long as the units enjoy autonomy
of political decision-making, they stand in an anarchical relationship to each other. Thus,
most anthropological studies of war are conceived in a way that structurally parallels the
concern of international relations scholars with warfare between autonomous states in an
eds., War, Its Causes and Correlates (Hague: Mouton, 1975), 699. Also, Lawrence
Keeley, War before Civilization (New York: Oxford, 1996), 28-29
21
Bronislaw Malinowski, “Culture as a Determinant of Behavior,” in Factors
Determining Human Behavior (Cambridge: Harvard Tercenary Publications, 1937), 142,
quoted in Robert Carneiro, “War and Peace,” in Reyna and Downs, Studying War, 6.
22
Melvin Ember and Carol Ember, “Cross-Cultural Studies of War and Peace: Recent
Achievements and Future Possibilities,” in Reyna and Downs, Studying War, 185-208, at
190.
23
Ember and Ember, “Cross-Cultural Studies of War and Peace in Reyna and Downs,
Studying War, 190.
11
anarchic setting. As Kenneth Waltz notes, when structural conditions permit or
encourage it, “many different sorts of organizations fight wars, whether those
organizations be tribes, petty principalities, empires, nations, or street gangs.”24
Sometimes identifying the valid units of these anarchical systems can be
problematic. Some of the most belligerent societies, such as those in Melanesia and
South American jungles, live in politically autonomous villages, each loosely led by a
headman. However, these villages sometimes split along the lines of kin groupings.
Even when they do not split, they normally maintain crosscutting kin ties with rival
villages, which often entail prohibitions on individuals killing their own kinfolk during
inter-village combat.25 Insofar as kinship lineages sometimes have a decision-making
structure that is no less authoritative than that of the villages, it may sometimes be
debatable which should be treated as the basic unit of the anarchical system. Just as
international relations scholars typically treat territorial units like states, rather than ethnic
groups or other crosscutting loyalty networks, as the basic units in anarchy, so too
anthropologists tend to treat residential villages as their units in anarchy, while also
recognizing that non-territorial lineages can play a decisive role, for example, in
mobilizing power at higher levels of aggregation, such as the tribe. Conceptually, the
24
Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley,
1979), 67.
25
Simon Harrison, The Mask of War: Violence, Ritual and the Self in Melanesia
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 47. For a well-known argument along
these lines, see also Napoleon Chagnon, “Yanomamo Social Organization and Warfare,”
in Morton Fried, Marvin Harris, and Robert Murphy, eds., War: The Anthropology of
Armed Conflict and Aggression (Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, 1968), 109159. Chagnon’s professional ethics have recently come under severe criticism from
Patrick Tierney, Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists Devastated the Amazon (New
York: W. W. Norton, 2000). One of Tierney’s charges is that Chagnon’s distribution of
trade goods intensified the warfare among the villages he was studying. This point,
established and integrated into scholarly interpretations earlier by R. Brian Ferguson,
Yanomami Warfare (New Mexico: School of American Research Press, 1995), bears on
some of the theoretical implications of Chagnon’s research. Moreover, Tierney and
others provide reason to believe that some of Chagnon’s basic data is unreliable. In this
paper, I occasionally mention Chagnon’s interpretations insofar as they have occupied a
significant place in the anthropological literature on war, but I do not rely on them in
support of my own arguments.
12
crucial criterion should be not territoriality per se, but which type of unit exhibits the
greatest decision-making autonomy.
Culture and institutions
Today most anthropologists define culture as a system of symbols that creates
meaning within a social group.26 This definition is generally in accord with standard
usage among social constructivists in the field of international relations, who see culture
(along with two of its components, norms and identity) as a central concept in their ideasbased account of politics. However, some anthropologists studying war define culture in
a more encompassing way that includes not only language and symbols, but also social
institutions and prevailing patterns of behavior. Indeed, the anthropological research
program on war and culture had its beginnings when culture was commonly defined in
this broad way, and this broad definition is making a comeback in some circles.27 In that
tradition, even recent statistical studies of culture and warfare, such as that by the political
scientist Marc Ross, are apt to define culture in the old way as “the particular practices
and values common to a population living in a given setting,” including “both beliefs and
norms about action and behaviors and institutional practices.”28 In this view, culture is
nearly everything except the weather.29
26
For the nuances of definitional debates about the concept, see Sherry Ortner,
“Introduction,” in Ortner, ed., The Fate of “Culture”: Geertz and Beyond, 7-11.
27
Richard Shweder, “Rethinking the Object of Anthropology (and Ending Up Where
Kroeber and Kluckhohn Began),” Items and Issues (Social Science Research Council),
1:2 (Summer 2000), 7-9; Shweder, “The Confessions of a Methodological Individualist,”
Culture and Psychology 1 (1995), 115-122.
28
Ross, The Culture of Conflict, 21. Note that Ross’s definition of culture has evolved in
his more recent work. Ross, Culture and Identity inn Comparative Political Analysis,” in
Mark Lichbach and Alan Zuckerman, Comparative Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), 42-80.
29
An anthropologist commented on an earlier draft: “maybe even including the
weather!”
13
One of the advantages of the newer definition, which limits culture to meaningful
symbols, is that it facilitates distinguishing culture from other social phenomena,
especially institutionalized patterns of behavior. This is important for scholars of
international relations, who have developed institutional theories of behavior in anarchy
(whether based on domestic institutions like the democratic peace or on international
institutions like multilateralism) that are generally seen as distinct from cultural theories.
Thus, most international relations scholars will want to distinguish institutional from
cultural hypotheses when reviewing anthropological research on war. To that end, I
define an institution as a conventional pattern of behavior around which expectations
converge.30 The habit of cross-cousin marriages, the holding of periodic elections, and
the coordination of military action by orders from a General Staff are examples of
institutions. War itself is an institution only if, as some anthropologists argue, patterns of
engagement with the enemy are governed to a significant extent by conventions, in the
manner rule-governed sporting events, rather than by unregulated strategic optimizing
behavior.31
Even with this definition, it is still not easy to draw a sharp line demarcating
institutions from cultural symbols in concrete social settings. Both institutions and culture
are part of the process by which people coordinate their behavior in groups. Symbols
(ideas) may serve as focal points to guide the coordination of expectations in cases where
purely pragmatic strategic calculations could yield multiple equilibria or no equilibria.32
Moreover, institutions tend to be shored up by symbols (norms) that convince people to
behave in accord with institutionalized practices for moral reasons, and not simply for the
practical benefits of coordinating behavior with the expectations of others. Nonetheless,
the distinction in principle remains clear: culture is a system of symbols; institutions are
conventional, repeated behavior.
30
Walter Powell and Paul DiMaggio, eds., The New Institutionalism in Organizational
Analysis (Chicago: University of California, 1991); Andrew Schotter, The Economic
Theory of Social Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 9.
31
For this view, see Harrison, Mask of War, 101.
32
Judith Goldstein and Robert Keohane, Ideas and Foreign Policy (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1993), especially the chapter by Barry Weingast and Geoff Garrett.
14
This distinction clarifies the nature of culture as an explanatory variable. This is
somewhat ironic, since anthropologists like Geertz who champion the newer symbolcentered definition of culture are often opposed to understanding social life in terms of
causal variables. In part, this is because they are more interested in understanding the
meaning that social life has for participants in it than they are in explaining or predicting
behavior, so treating culture as a variable would be pointless in terms of the objectives of
their research. In contrast, constructivist scholars in international relations adhere to the
symbolic or idea-based conception of culture in large part because it allows the posing of
non-tautological propositions about the effect of ideas on behavior.33
This epistemological move is warranted so long as it remains consistent with the
ontology underpinning the newer approaches to culture. This requires that culture not be
conceived as a mechanical causal attribute but as a medium of communication and
persuasion that enables and channels discussion about social relations.34 For this reason,
I prefer the definition of culture as a symbolic system used in communication. However,
some of the anthropological literature on warfare that I discuss subsumes institutions
under the heading of culture, and also treats culture as a set of reified attributes rather
than a symbolic medium. In referring to this work, I make clear how its definition of
culture differs from the strictly symbolic one.
Another methodological problem arises in defining the appropriate unit of
analysis for cultural propositions about behavior in anarchy. In principle, behavior in
anarchy might be shaped by the separate cultures of the politically autonomous units, by
the shared culture of the anarchical society as a whole, or by both. Ethnographic case
studies may discuss either or both. Quantitative anthropological literature typically
defines “external” war as organized violence between culturally distinctive societies,
whereas “internal” war takes place between politically autonomous units, such as villages
33
Johnston, Cultural Realism, 35-39; Peter Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National
Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press,
1996), 65-68.
34
For background, see Thomas Risse, “‘Let’s Argue!’ Communicative Action in World
Politics,” International Organization 54:1 (Winter 2000), 1-40.
15
or bands, that are culturally the same.35 This creates the opportunity to study whether
commonalities of culture affect the prevalence of warfare between groups. However, it
does not help to answer the question of whether warfare is more common in anarchical
than hierarchical settings, because even the “internal” conflicts are between autonomous
units.
The material and situational setting
It is difficult to draw a sharp line between explanations for war that focus on
material or situational constraints and those that focus on the groups’ institutions or
culture. Basic biological needs and features of the physical environment impose material
constraints that may affect the prevalence of warfare, yet at the same time, human
institutions and culture may exert powerful effects on the ecological setting in which
social competition and cooperation takes place. Also ambiguous is the category
“anarchy,” which is often considered one of the material explanations for war. However,
the very definition of anarchy is an institutional one: it is the lack of authoritative
institutions to govern social relations between autonomous groups. Yet the lack of such
institutions means that the relations between the groups are played out in a setting where
the material capabilities of the units and the material constraints on their strategies are the
ultimate arbiter. Finally, so-called material explanations for war sometimes hinge on
prevailing military or economic technologies, which are self-evidently products of human
ingenuity, institutions, and ideas. Alexander Wendt, for example, identifies technology,
including the “mode of production,” as one of the “rump material” factors that may to
some degree shape behavior in anarchy, whereas “the social relations of production” he
locates squarely in the non-material zone.36 While remaining mindful of the problematic
nature of the dividing line between material-situational and institutional-cultural
influences, I propose two rules of thumb for making this distinction:
35
36
Ross, Culture of Conflict, 81-89; Tefft, “Warfare Regulation,” in Nettleship, 694.
Wendt, Social Theory, 109.
16
(1) whether the material-situational constraint or capability arose for some reason
unrelated by intention or immediate functional necessity to the phenomenon under
investigation. For example, the rise of sedentary agriculture as a technology and mode of
production seems to have increased the frequency of warfare, but it was not developed in
order to fight wars, so it counts as an exogenous material-situational factor; in contrast,
insofar as the state was developed precisely in order to fight wars better, it counts as an
institutional factor.
(2) whether social actors can escape the material-situational constraint in the short
run by institutional or cultural innovations. Reciprocal fears of surprise attack in anarchy,
whether between Amazonian hunting bands or modern states, can often be mitigated by
phased reciprocal demobilization and mutual monitoring, combined with explanations of
intentions.37 With respect to this problem, anarchy may indeed be what the actors make
of it. In contrast, it may be much harder to devise a credible commitment not to exploit a
massive impending shift in relative power, since any assurances will be viewed as cheap
talk unless the institutional and cultural bases for trust have been established well before
the emergence of the trend in relative power.38 If so, actors may be captives of the logic
of a situation that their cultural ingenuity cannot appreciably change in time to avert
preventive war.
Hypotheses from anthropological research on war and peace in anarchy
In the following sections, I will review some of the most prominent hypotheses
examined in the anthropological literature on behavior in anarchy, laying out their
motivational assumptions and causal mechanisms, and highlighting some relevant
research findings. I will address in turn material-situational, institutional, and cultural
explanations of war and peace.39 In these three sections, I will assess reductionist
37
For an example, see Napoleon Chagnon, Yanomamo, fifth ed. (Fort Worth: Harcourt
Brace, 1997), 218-221.
38
Robert Jervis, “Cooperation under the Security Dilemma,” World Politics 30 (January
1978); James Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War,” International Organization 49
(Summer 1995), 379-414.
39
Ferguson, “A Savage Encounter,” in Ferguson, Tribal Zone, 201, calls these the
infrastructural, structural, and superstructural factors.
17
theories that attempt to explain war behavior solely in terms of variation of each of these
three kinds or that include the other types of variable only in a subordinate way. After
showing the shortcomings of the reductionist strategies, I turn in subsequent sections to a
fuller examination of the interrelationships between causal factors of these different
types.
Material-situational hypotheses
Anarchical environments may be conducive to war for a variety of material
reasons. International relations scholars have paid particular attention to the
exceptionally dramatic possibility that mutual security fears in anarchy may be sufficient
to cause war between groups that have no other reason to fight.40 In this sense, anarchy
might be seen as an active cause of conflict.
However, there are other material causes of war in which anarchy serves only as a
permissive cause or as an exacerbating factor. Groups in anarchy may fight in a zero-sum
competition over scarce resources that they both need to survive, because no superior
authority prevents this and because institutional mechanisms needed to implement less
costly methods of distributing and utilizing resources are missing. Groups in anarchy
may also fight over material and biological objectives that are not immediately necessary
for survival, yet are highly valued across most cultural settings, such as improving
opportunities for their members to procreate or gain material wealth. In addition, they
may fight to maintain their reputations for fierceness and bravery, not because these
qualities are arbitrarily valued in the culture, but because they are advantageous for
competing successfully in anarchy.
Whether mutual fear is the primary cause or merely a permissive cause, once the
cycle of warfare has begun, security fears may intensify and sustain conflicts beyond the
point that the material stakes would have otherwise warranted.41 Thus, according to the
Jervis, “Cooperation under the Security Dilemma.”
On the conceptual interrelationship between predation and insecurity, see Jack Snyder
and Robert Jervis, “Civil War and the Security Dilemma,” in Barbara Walter and Jack
Snyder, eds., Civil Wars, Insecurity, and Intervention (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1999).
40
41
18
realist perspective, groups in anarchy will resort to war recurrently as long as security is
scarce and war is feasible as a method of obtaining resources. Groups who do not seize
opportunities to improve their strategic position through warfare will, in this view, tend to
be selected out by the unforgiving process of competition with more warlike groups.
The findings of anthropological research on behavior in anarchy are quite
consistent with these hypotheses. Indeed, most anthropologists conducting systematic
research on this topic consider material-situational constraints and incentives to be the
necessary starting point for any analysis.42 Over 90% of the pre-industrial societies
sampled in quantitative studies experienced wars between autonomous units within the
cultural group (“internal wars”) at least once per decade, unless they had been pacified
through conquest by an outside power, and about half fought almost constantly. About
70% fought frequent wars against other cultural groups (“external wars”).43
This extremely high frequency of warfare in anarchy is not in itself proof of realist
hypotheses. Other theories might also predict frequent fighting. For example, Social
Identity Theory, based on laboratory experiments showing an almost universal tendency
to form instant in-group preferences and out-group stereotypes, predicts rivalry in anarchy
for the psychological reason that seeing one’s own group as superior bolsters an
individual’s self-esteem.44 In contrast, the near universality of warfare in anarchy does
not speak well for theories that rest on culture “all the way down.” It is difficult to see
why so many different cultures would wind up with war-fueling symbolic systems unless
some nearly universal features of situation, psychology, or biology were pushing the
development of culture in this direction. To solve this awkward problem, Wendt tries to
appropriate Social Identity Theory for the cultural approach, but since this is a theory
R. Brian Ferguson, “The General Consequences of War: An Amazonian Perspective,”
in Reyna and Downs, eds., Studying War, 85-111.
43
Ember and Embers, “Violence in the Ethnographic Record,” in Martin and Frayer,
Troubled Times, 5; Tefft, “Warfare Regulation,” in Nettleship, War, 701; Keith
Otterbein, Feuding and Warfare (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1994), 184. The way
these percentages are calculated is a matter of debate, but it is generally agreed that the
correct percentages are quite high.
44
Jonathan Mercer, “Anarchy and Identity,” International Organization 49 (Spring 1995),
229-252.
42
19
about alleged universal psychological tendencies, not about culture, it fits uneasily with
the basic ontology the cultural theorists propound.45
SECURITY FEARS IN ANARCHY
Anthropologists’ findings about the most prominent causes of wars offer further
qualified support to realist analyses. Security fears are high on the list. Anecdotally,
descriptions of life in some of the most warlike societies read like caricatures of the
historical European balance-of-power system on a particularly bad day. Hobbesian
analyses are also popular among scholars who have studied primitive warfare in such
culturally and ecologically diverse settings as highland New Guinea, the Amazon jungle,
and Central Africa.46 Similarly, statistical studies show that fear and mistrust of
outsiders correlate strongly with war-proneness. Some studies argue that this is a
function of cultural attributes, but others claim that it reflects real variations in the
intensity of the material insecurities facing the society. Where mistrust of outsiders and
war are correlated, it is normally hard to tell which is causally prior. However, Carol and
Melvin Ember have devised an elegant test that shows the independent effect of material
insecurity on both mistrust and war. The Embers find that in the societies they sampled
mistrust and war were both highly correlated with the experience of a natural disaster that
threatened the group’s food supply.47
It is less certain whether more routine or endemic food shortages due to periodic
drought, pests, or rising population increase war involvement, once the effects of
unpredictable food disasters are controlled for.48 For example, comparative studies of
45
Wendt, Social Theory, 241-2, 322-3, 350-1.
Bruce Knauft, From Primitive to Postcolonial in Melanesia and Anthropology (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan, 1999), 94, 135, 154, 166; Keeley, War before
Civilization, 5-8; Marshall D. Sahlins, Tribesmen (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall,
1968), 4-13.
47
Ember and Ember in Reyna and Downs, 192-93.
48
Ferguson, “Introduction,” in Ferguson, ed., Warfare, Culture, and Environment
(Orlando: Academic Press, 1984), ch. 1; Peggy Reeves Sanday, Female Power and Male
Dominance: On the Origins of Sexual Inequality (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1981), 174; Robert Carneiro, “Chiefdom-Level Warfare as Exemplified in Fiji and
the Cauca Valley,” in Haas, ed., 191; Ember and Ember, “Violence in the Ethnographic
46
20
different regions in New Guinea show that the ratio of population density to food
availability is not a good predictor of war, though perceptions of food scarcity may be.49
Foraging bands (hunters and gathers), which are on average less vulnerable to
unpredictable food crises than are settled agricultural groups, tend to fight wars somewhat
less frequently.50 However, this may reflect the more egalitarian social institutions
typical of foragers, rather than the direct effects of food shortages, and also the fact that
foragers’ mobile lifestyle makes the accumulation of wealth inconvenient, so there is less
to fight over.51 In short, apart from the extreme case of food disasters, it seems that
material shortage affects the likelihood of war only in conjunction with other social,
cultural, or perceptual conditions.
DISTINGUISHING MATERIAL AND CULTURAL CAUSES OF CONFLICT
Although material causes sometimes work in combination with cultural ones, we
should not assume too quickly that most material factors are really “culture.” Sometimes
the reverse is more nearly the case. Some practices in anarchy that at first glance seem
exotic and “cultural” turn out upon closer examination to serve a clear material and
strategic function. For example, the Yanomamo invite newly allied villages to feasts to
cement the pact and establish its terms. During these events, men from the respective
villages take turns slugging each other in the chest as a test of strength and toughness.
The outcome of the competition determines the terms of trade in exchanges of women
Record,” in Martin and Frayer, Troubled Times, 8, show weaker correlations for
predictably chronic or periodic food stress.
49
Knauft, From Primitive to Postcolonial ,124-5; M. J. Meggitt, Blood Is Their
Argument: Warfare Among the Mae-Enga Tribesmen of the New Guinea Highlands
(Palo Alto: Mayfield, 1977), 183
50
Embers in Martin and Frayer, 7, 10-13.
51
Ferguson, “Violence and Warfare in Prehistory,” in Martin and Frayer, 336. In another
purported example of the effect of material incentives for war short of threats to survival,
some authors argue that when food is not in short supply, groups turn their attention to
fighting for opportunities to procreate with the women of the vanquished foe. See
Chagnon, “Reproductive and Somatic Conflicts of Interest,” in Haas, 88-89. However,
Tierney, Darkness in El Dorado, chapter 10, casts doubt on this argument. Statistical
research, moreover, shows no correlation between scarcity of women and the frequency
of warfare. See Ember and Ember in Reyna and Downs, 191.
21
and goods between the villages, and also the allocation of rights to use hunting lands.52
Sometimes the feasts are a ruse, and the stronger village massacres its guests. This
coercive bargaining behavior, despite its partly conventional nature, can be interpreted in
large part in terms of material-situational influences on violence.
Material and situational factors affect the warlikeness of groups not only by
shaping their strategic calculations but also by selection through competition. Even
proponents of cultural explanations of war and peace generally acknowledge that
belligerence toward outside groups was functional among pre-industrial peoples. Warlike
cultures tended to displace non-warlike ones. The latter were either wiped out,
incorporated, pushed into inhospitable ecological niches, or forced to develop their own
warlike states in order to survive. Outlier cases for cultural theories, which show a
mismatch between benign internal cultural attributes and warlike external behavior, are
typically ones that were forced to adapt their foreign policies to an increasingly rough
neighborhood.53
Despite the undeniable fact that material circumstances may exert a strong impact
on culture, numerous attempts to entirely subsume cultural factors under material causes
have met with only limited success. Alan Barnard claims that “most anthropologists see
the relations between society and the rest of the world order in a hierarchical and
essentially Durkheimian way, with society sandwiched between the environment and the
cosmology, and with a causal transformative relation between these elements” such that
environment shapes society, which in turn shapes cosmology.54 Along those lines, a
number of scholars have examined whether the symbolic content of a society’s myths and
ideology can be predicted by knowing its material circumstances or mode of production.55
Some of their findings are consistent with this hierarchical view of causation, in which
Ferguson, “A Savage Encounter,” in War in the Tribal Zone, 219-220.
Ross, Culture of Conflict, 94, 142-3; see also Ferguson in Reyna and Downs, 103,
Gregor in Haas, 107.
54
Alan Barnard, “Modern hunter-gatherers and early symbolic culture,” in Robin Dunbar,
Chris Knight, and Camilla Power, eds., The Evolution of Culture (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1999), 50-70.
52
53
22
cultural symbols are the epiphenomena of material factors, but for the most part their
relevance to war behavior seems tenuous. Hunting societies, for example, have origin
myths in which the creator is masculine, whereas gatherers may have either masculine or
feminine mythic creators. Hunting groups are somewhat more war-prone than gatherers,
though agriculturalists, which have both masculine and feminine mythic creators, are
more war-prone even than hunters.56 Both hunting and gathering societies have no social
stratification except by age and by gender, and correspondingly have conceptual world
ordering principles based on binary oppositions (such as male and female), whereas
agricultural societies tend to have social status hierarchies and conceptual principles
based on symbolic triadic divisions into upper, middle, and lower categories.57 Arguably
this hierarchical symbolic universe helps to underpin the hierarchic social order that
makes war more likely. More directly related to war is the materialist-reductionist
finding that cultural narratives featuring capricious violence correlate with ecological
threats.58 Overall, however, anthropological research offers only limited support for the
view that war-related cultural ideas can simply be read off from material circumstances.
MATERIAL MOTIVES OF SUBUNITS
The unit of analysis in studies of pre-industrial warfare is the politically
autonomous unit. Because of the small size of the units, it is easy for ethnographers to
trace the connections between the micro-motives of individuals and the strategies adopted
55
For example, Marvin Harris, Cultural Materialism (Vintage 1979); Morton Fried, The
Evolution of Political Society (New York: Random House, 1967); Sanday, Female
Power, 174; Ross, Culture of Conflict, 33-7.
56
Sanday, Female Power, 69.
57
Barnard, “Modern hunter-gatherers and early symbolic culture,” 58; R. Needham,
Symbolic Classification (Santa Monica: Goodyear, 1979), 6-15.
58
Also potentially related to war through the mechanism of the marking off of rivalrous
group boundaries is the practice of totemism, whereby the social group reinforces its
sense of identity through symbolic association with the characteristics of a particular
animal. This might count as a materialist explanation for group rivalry if totemism were
clearly linked to a particular mode of production, but it is not. In Australia, totemism
appears among hunter-gatherers, whereas in Africa it is associated with settled agriculture
(and in North America with sports teams). Barnard, “Modern hunter-gatherers and early
symbolic culture,” 59-61.
23
by their groups. In some cases, the material objectives of the group are essentially the
same as the benefit that accrues to the typical members of the group. Survival of the unit
and survival of the members may go hand in hand. In other cases, however, war
strategies of the group may benefit a segment of the group’s members at the expense of
the rest: e.g., a stronger lineage at the expense of a weaker one, men at the expense of
women, leaders at the expense of followers. Brian Ferguson argues that the “master
variable” explaining the war-proneness of the group is the “material self-interest of those
who decide military policy,” which may or may not coincide closely with the material
interest of the average group member.59 Thus, unlike many realist scholars of modern
international relations, “realist” anthropologists of war are less wedded to the fiction that
it is the autonomous political unit that seeks to survive and prosper rather than the
individuals and coalitions that comprise it. They observe, as in the case of the
Yanomamo, that units may fission when disadvantaged subgroups enjoy exit
opportunities, as calculated in terms of adequate group size for self-defense, available
allies, or secure locations to start a new village.60
Understood in this fashion, a material-situational view of behavior in anarchy
leads naturally to an interest in internal institutional arrangements that affect who decides
on war, who benefits from it, and how tensions between members’ motives affect the
formation and survival of groups. Anthropological research finds that the material basis
of a society strongly affects its likelihood of adopting a particular set of domestic
institutions. Sedentary agriculture, for example, is associated with the rise of the state
and with increasing inequalities of wealth and status, both of which, according to many if
not all studies, increase the unit’s frequency of war involvement.61
WHEN DO MATERIAL EXPLANATIONS WORK BEST?
59
Ferguson in Martin and Frayer, 336.
Ember and Ember in Reyna and Downs, 200-203; Chagnon, “Effects of War on social
Structure,” 146-7, 150.
61
For a critical review of hypotheses linking material infrastructure to patterns of social
structure and war, see Ross, Culture of Conflict, chapter 3.
60
24
In short, the anthropological literature suggests that material and situational
factors are among the better predictors of war in pre-industrial anarchies. Nonetheless,
strong qualifications must be introduced before drawing conclusions about the relevance
of straightforwardly realist theories to politics in anarchies in our own day.
The direct effects of material-situational factors on pre-industrial warfare seem to
have been strongest for societies living close to the margin of survival, where the
combined effects of economic scarcity and reciprocal fears in anarchy were unusually
compelling. Politics in these situations of extreme security compulsion may be somewhat
analogous to the contemporary behavior of predatory warlord groups in failed states.62 As
in Somalia at the beginning of the 1990s, in the midst of widespread famine and
government collapse, insecurity is especially intense where economic security and
security from attack are both scarce.63 This holds true both for pristine pre-industrial
societies and for ones in contact with economically advanced societies. Military rivalry
triggered by competition for Western manufactured goods among the Yanomamo
strongly parallels today’s power struggles among would-be tinpot dictators for privileged
access to the international gem trade, World Bank loans, and humanitarian aid.64
In contrast, anthropologists find that in more complex societies, the causes of war
are more likely to be found in the institutional arrangements of the society than in the
direct effects of ecological scarcity.65 Thus, patterns of anarchical behavior in
institutionally underdeveloped settings should not be unreflectively extrapolated to the
analysis of anarchical relations among rich, stable states. By the same token, solutions
that work in rich, developed societies should not be extrapolated to economically poor,
institutionally thin ones.
62
William Reno, Warlord Politics in African States (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1998);
Colin Kahl, “Population Growth, Environmental Degradation, and State-Sponsored
Violence: The Case of Kenya, 1991-1993,” International Security 23:2 (Fall 1998), 80119; Paul Collier and A. Hoeffler, “Greed and Grievance in Civil War,” World Bank
Policy Research Working Paper 2355.
63
David Laitin, “Somalia: Civil War and International Intervention,” in Walter and
Snyder, eds.s, Civil Wars, 146-180.
64
Compare R. Brian Ferguson, Yanomami Warfare, to William Reno, Warlord Politics in
African States (Lynne Rienner, 1998).
65
S. P. Reyna, “Preface,” in Reyna and Downs, Studying War, xxi, quoting Ferguson.
25
Even among simple societies hard-pressed by problems of security and economic
scarcity, direct material causes of war were closely bound up with patterns of social
structure and culture. Wendt gives away too much when he surrenders the explanation of
most of pre-industrial history, when the death rate of political units was high, to
materialist forces of competitive selection by war.66 Even in these settings, as the
following sections show, outcomes were shaped by the interaction among material,
institutional, and cultural facts, not by material ones alone. Ironically, the tendency to
assign phenomena to either material or ideal categories, rather than to the interaction
between them, leads Wendt in this instance to underrate the degree to which ideas and
identities shaped behavior.
Institutional hypotheses
Behavior in anarchy may vary with the institutional arrangements inside the units,
or with the strength and nature of the institutions that regularize links between the units.
Literature on the anthropology of war has examined institutional hypotheses that are
strikingly familiar to students of relations between modern states. Although many of
these studies see a significant causal role for institutions, they also find that the
significance of institutions in shaping conflict in anarchy needs to be interpreted in light
of environmental and cultural factors as well.
Institutional patterns within units may determine which interests are most
powerful, how accountable are the leaders, and how easily the group can mobilize its
capabilities for armed combat. Thus, internal institutions that allow elites to reap the
gains of conquest, insulate elites from accountability, privilege military specialists, and
facilitate military mobilization should make war more likely. Institutional patterns
between the units may affect the predictability and transparency of the units’ interests and
policies in ways that affect the likelihood of identifying mutually acceptable bargains.
Thus, effective institutions that regularize relations between units should reduce the
likelihood of war, except insofar as improved cooperation between some units comes at
66
Wendt, Social Theory, 323.
26
the expense of other units. Offensive leagues may facilitate conquest, for example, and
cartels may collude to bring rivals to their knees.
INSTITUTIONALIZED PATTERNS OF PARTICIPATION AND ACCOUNTABILITY
Both quantitative and qualitative anthropological research supports the hypothesis
that groups with widespread participation in decision processes and elite accountability
have been less war-prone.67 This finding applies principally to patterns of “internal” war
and peace, that is, to relations between autonomous political units within a homogeneous
cultural group. As with the democratic peace hypothesis about modern states, these are
units with widespread political participation that are not fighting each other. In contrast,
political units and societies characterized by insulated leadership, hierarchy, and
specialized military roles are more war-prone.68 For example, the Embers illustrate their
statistical findings on these institutional effects by contrasting the warlike Marshallese
Islanders, who were ruled by a stratified hereditary elite having absolute life and death
powers over their subjects, to the peaceful Cuna Indians of Panama, whose elected chiefs
could be sacked by popular demand at any time.69
Although this finding pertains on its face to the consequences of variations in
political institutions, material circumstances and culture are also relevant to the analysis.
In order to produce strong statistical results that “account for around 70 percent of the
cross-cultural variation in frequency of internal war,” the Embers controlled for variations
in the strategic setting, such as geographical isolation, and for the tendency of units to
split up as a result of internal disputes.70 Thus, groups like the Yanomamo that are
participatory but fission-prone are also war-prone. Since fissile groups wind up fighting
each other after the break-up, it is important to know the reasons for the tendency to
fission in the first place. Arguably, the Embers are smuggling the undertheorized fission
variable, which may reflect cultural differences in the management of conflicts of all
67
Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace, ch. 5, co-authored with Carol and
Melvin Ember.
68
Fried, Evolution of Political Society; but for a study that fails to find this effect, see
Ross, Culture of Conflict, 43-44.
69
Ember and Ember in Reyna and Downs, 202-3.
27
types, into what seems to be an institutional hypothesis. Finally, the fact that the
peacefulness of high-participation groups mainly affects the frequency of “internal” wars
among culturally similar units strongly suggests that culture, and not simply institutional
structure, is at work in some way.
INSTITUTIONALIZED PATTERNS OF KINSHIP AND TRADE
Even more research has focused on the consequences for warfare of variations in
institutionalized patterns of kinship and economic exchanges. Such ties may affect the
ability to sustain and mobilize fighting alliances. For example, when sons reside in the
same village as their father, local armed conflict is much more likely. However, the
causal direction is in dispute: some say that the institution of patrilocal residence
facilitates the formation of brotherly aggressor forces who pick fights with neighboring
villagers, whereas others say that in rough neighborhoods, parents keep their sons nearby
for enhanced protection.71
Conversely, when sons live in their wives’ villages, the chance of success in
external war (if not necessarily its frequency) is enhanced. The reason is that a wider net
of social ties allows the mobilization of a larger coalition against external foes. For
example, the dowry and residence customs of the Central African Nuer tribe created
strong social debts and kinship ties between individuals in distant villages, which could
be tapped to mobilize Nuer alliances to outnumber the hapless neighboring Dinka in any
dispute. Dinka social institutions lacked these extensive networks, so collective action in
wartime was harder to accomplish. As a result, the Dinka, a people otherwise at roughly
the same level of technology and resources, were gradually pushed back by the inexorable
Nuer depredations. This is an institutional explanation in the sense that it rests on social
relationships forged by conventional patterns of behavior around which expectations of
diffuse reciprocity converge. However, unless one takes the functionalist view that Nuer
bride-price habits were somehow caused by the need to mobilize allies for war, this
explanation rests also on the fortuitous normative (which is to say cultural) conviction
70
Ember and Ember in Reyna and Downs, 202.
28
that relations with in-laws ought to be managed through the prevailing pattern of feasting
and uxorilocal residence.72
Like theorists of “complex interdependence” and institutionalized cooperation in
the field of international relations, many anthropologists have argued that the
institutionalization of social or economic ties to out-groups is likely to mitigate the
chance of violent conflict with them.73 Some argue that this is accomplished through
marriage to potential enemies. As Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, groups in anarchy face the
“very simple choice of either marrying out or being killed out.”74
However, some
statistical findings suggest that exogamy is a two-edge sword: it creates bonds of
reciprocity, but it also gives people in neighboring villages issues to fight about, such as
the non-payment of dowry obligations. Some studies suggest that economic exchange
unlinked to kinship obligations is a better way of forging reciprocal ties that mitigate
conflict, at least with respect to “internal” wars between units that share a common
culture.75 Others argue that exploitative marriage and trade ties increase war, whereas fair
exchanges reduce it.76 What constitutes a fair exchange is likely to be determined by
cultural standards. Ethnographies point out that the exchange of goods to institutionalize
relations with potentially dangerous out-groups typically involves goods of mainly
symbolic value, as in the ritualized “kula ring” exchanges of the Trobriand Islanders.77
Otterbein, Feuding and Warfare, 174-5; Ferguson, “A Savage Encounter,” in War in
the Tribal Zone, 212; Ember and Ember in Martin and Frayer, 10.
72
Raymond C. Kelly, The Nuer Conquest: The Structure and Development of an
Expansionist System (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1985); E. E. Evans-Pritchard,
The Nuer (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940); Otterbein, Feuding and Warfare, 176. For a
statistical study that rejects the hypothesis that extensive kinship ties increase the
probability of external war, see Tefft, “Warfare Regulation,” in Nettleship, War, 702.
73
Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, Power and Interdependence (Boston: Little, Brown,
1977); John Oneal and Bruce Russett, Triangulating Peace (New York: Norton, 2000).
74
Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Family,” in Harry Shapiro, Man, Culture, and Society (New
York: Oxford, 1971), quoted by Siskind, 869.
75
Tefft, “Warfare Regulation,” in Nettleship, 703.
76
Leopold Pospisil, “I Am Very Sorry I Cannot Kill You Anymore: War and Peace
among the Kapauku,” in Reyna and Downs, Studying War, 123-5.
77
Rolf Ziegler, “The Kula: Social Order, Barter and Ceremonial Exchange,” in Michael
Hechter, Karl-Dieter Opp, and Reinhard Wippler, eds., Social Institutions: Their
Emergence, Maintenance, and Effects (New York: Aldine and de Gruyter, 1990), 14171
29
Indeed, since symbolic exchange is a sacred signal of an intention to enter into a normgoverned social relationship, exchanging symbolic goods may be more effective than the
exchange of utilitarian goods as a means to cement relations in anarchy. Once again,
institutionalized patterns of behavior interact with cultural understandings to affect the
probability of war.78
Cultural hypotheses
A people’s pragmatic ideas and cultural symbolism are problem-solving tools that
help them get what they need and in turn shape what they want. Ideas and symbols play
a crucial role in helping people maintain group solidarity, coordinate behavior with
others, bargain effectively, manage conflicts of interest, and predict the consequences of
their actions in natural and social contexts. Causal theories, rules of thumb, conventions,
norms, and myths all play a role in these essential tasks. While some of this problemsolving mental life may follow familiar rules of scientific inference through processes like
trial and error, much of it is conventional, ritual, arbitrary, and symbolic.79 Such
symbolism is valuable not only to provide people with reassuring notions about
unknowable aspects of life, death, and cosmology, but also as a set of costly, hard-to-fake
signals of commitment to the group and its norms. Even materially poor societies
commonly put a huge effort into conventionalized displays of solidarity, morality, roleinitiation, hospitality, status, or intimidation, taking pains to insure that myth-supported
rituals are carried out with no shirking and at a high level of transparently emotional
commitment.80 One reason that this is effective is that people internalize the symbolic
170; Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies
(New York: Norton, 1967).
78
For more on this, see Ross, Culture of Conflict, 40-4.
79
Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science, and Religion and Other Essays (Westport, CT:
Greenwood, 1984, orig. ed., Free Press, 1948), 17, 29; Marshall Sahlins, The Use and
Abuse of Biology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976).
80
Chris Knight, “Sex and Language as Pretend Play,” in Robin Dunbar, Chris Knight,
and Camilla Power, eds., The Evolution of Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
press, 1999), 228-231; Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1985; orig. ed. 1964), 17; Maurice Bloch, Ritual, History, and
Power (London: Athlone, 1989), 21-24.
30
message and are socialized to want what the culture prescribes. As Geertz says, “not only
ideas, but emotions too, are cultural artifacts in man.”81
The nature of the group’s symbolic life is sure to be reflected in the group’s war
behavior, and vice versa. Brian Ferguson remarks that “war is a virtual magico-religious
magnet,” because it “involves, in extreme form, virtually all of the circumstances which
have been invoked to explain religion and magic,” such as collective action, social
control, group survival, and hazardous unknowns, not to mention “tragedy, injustice, and
immorality” and therefore questions of ultimate meaning.82 Warfare occupies the terrain
of cultural symbolism. However, this very fact creates a problem in testing hypotheses
about the effect of the content of a culture’s symbolism on its war behavior. Insofar as
situations of personal and group insecurity heighten and shape the symbolic character of
politics, it could be the experience of war that calls forth certain kinds of myths and
values rather than the other way around.83 Therefore, it will be a good methodological
rule to look for connections not only between war behavior and overtly warlike symbols,
but also between war and other aspects of the groups’ cultural life that are not directly
functionally related to war.
Just as some theorists try to subordinate the cultural appurtenances of war to its
alleged material underpinnings, others try to reduce warfare to the status of a symbolic
artifact of culture. Such cultural explanations for war in anarchy face two tasks: first, to
explain why war has been so common in anarchy, and second, to explain variations in
war’s frequency or intensity. They do tolerably well on explaining variation, but find
explaining war’s near ubiquity more challenging.
EXPLAINING THE PREVALENCE OF WARLIKE CULTURES
As I mentioned above, recent proponents of the view that behavior in international
relations is determined by culture, ideas, and identity have been inclined to fall back on
psychological explanations such as Social Identity Theory to account for the
pervasiveness of violent rivalry with out-groups in anarchy. This is a theoretically
81
82
Sahlins, Use and Abuse of Biology, 14, quoting Geertz, 1973.
Ferguson, “Explaining War,” in Haas, 46.
31
unsatisfying move because it leaves culture little to explain in its own right: once it is
posited that the need for self-esteem leads directly to in-group favoritism and out-group
denigration, the development of rivalrous collective identities and cultures seems preordained. Moreover, when proponents of this view make the move to argue that
individualist cultures and democracies are less prone to this bias than are collectivist
cultures, it is hard to see how individualist cultures could arise in the first place if SIT is
so universal and powerful.84
Wendt tries out one more line of argument: groups in anarchy fight so frequently
because maintaining the identity of each leads to or even requires the enmity of the
other.85 As a cultural explanation, this is a more promising approach, better grounded in a
long lineage of social theory and research.86 Wendt develops this idea through the
unnecessarily limited example of symbiotic rivalrous military-industrial complexes. This
is by itself an insufficient explanation for near-universal warfare in anarchy, since many
societies lack military specialists but nonetheless fight lots of wars. However, the
underlying concept can be stated as a more general argument. Group solidarity depends
on costly investments in an elaborate set of practices that motivate contributors to
collective action, police boundaries, and sanction shirkers. These practices are backed up
by a host of cultural symbols, including religious myths and ethical norms, which
underwrite the kind of behavior and attitudes that make the group cohere and set it apart
from other groups. “Durkheim taught that in religious worship society adores its own
camouflaged image,” says Ernest Gellner. “In a nationalist age, societies worship
themselves brazenly and openly.”87 These symbolic systems that explicitly or implicitly
extol the in-group chafe on contact with rival cultures, say Peter Berger and Thomas
83
Edelman, Symbolic Uses, 30ff.
Wendt; Mercer.
85
Wendt, Social Theory, 274-5.
86
See works by Georg Simmel, Lewis Coser, and other functionalist in-group/out-group
literature reviewed in Arthur Stein, “Conflict and Cohesion,” Journal of Conflict
Resolution, March 1976. The latter shows that external conflict increases internal
cohesion only when the threat affects all group members, some cohesion existed before
the conflict, and group action can parry the threat.
87
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell, 1983), 56. Guy Swanson,
Birth of the Gods (1960), offers some quantitative empirical support for Durkheim’s
argument.
84
32
Luckmann: “The appearance of an alternative symbolic universe poses a threat because
its very existence demonstrates that one’s own universe is less than inevitable.”88
However, this argument fits awkwardly with the anthropological finding that
“internal” war among units of the same culture is more frequent than war between
societies with different cultures.89 For example, although Amazonian and Melanesian
villages do engage in out-group denigration and in-group chauvinism, this cannot be
caused by cultural differences, since different villages share the same myths, symbols,
and ethical beliefs. Thus, a cultural reductionist would need to argue that groups maintain
a common culture of symbiotic out-group rivalry in order to sustain the solidarity of the
separate village units.
This is exactly what anthropologist Simon Harrison argues based on his fieldwork
on Melanesian warfare. He notes that villages are highly problematic as political units in
the part of Melanesia he studied, because clans whose membership cuts across village
boundaries have a strong functional basis as trading networks and a strong cultural basis
in kinship norms. Thus, clan loyalties vie with village loyalties in the organization of
fighting alignments and economic relationships. This is particularly troubling for men,
says Harrison, because women play a key role in kin-based trading relationships, which
they can use to pursue their independent economic objectives.90 Consequently men have
an interest in reinforcing the priority of village-based loyalties and in policing the
territorial boundaries of the village. They do this, he argues, by forming non-kin-based
secret societies of the village’s mature men, who carry out deadly but highly ritualized
warfare in case of encroachments or transgressions by members of other villages.91 This
ritualized killing, which entails the only cannibalism permitted in a culture that otherwise
88
Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (New York:
Anchor edition, 1967; orig. ed. Doubleday, 1966), 100.
89
Moreover, Ferguson and Whitehead argue that “it would be an extremely rare
occurrence for members of one tribe to attack members of another simply because they
are different, apart from any other source of conflict.” War in the Tribal Zone, 28.
90
Harrison, 8, 47.
91
Harrison, 61, 75-77.
33
abhors it, implicates male members of all the clans in the village in a collective
transgression that reinforces village unity, in Harrison’s view.92
Harrison argues that his interpretation turns Hobbes on his head: “In Melanesia it
is not so much groups that make war, but war that makes groups. That is to say, war is
part of the way in which groups having claims or interests in resources assert their
existence in the first place. It is through conflict that these groups separate themselves
out from each other and constitute themselves as distinct entities capable of competing
for resources.”93 Moreover, he argues the war-making process accomplishes these ends
by its symbolic effects, not just by its strategic consequences: “What they were trying to
do in war and ritual was not simply use power against outsiders and act against them at
the level of force, but also to act ideologically against the perpetual moral accountability
to outsiders which implicitly threatened the idea of the community as a political entity.”94
Harrison’s interpretation is impressive, and its basic line of argument might be
highly generalizable once particulars are adjusted to take into account different social
settings. However, its theoretical implications are unclear. Instead of turning Hobbesian
or materialist-functionalist explanations on their heads, it might be seen as reinforcing
them: in the self-help situation of anarchy, where warfare is an ever-present possibility, a
self-interested group having a comparative advantage in the use of violence (in this case,
co-residential men) fights other groups (in this case, other villages of the same culture,
other villages of a different culture, and non-territorial kin-groups) to establish security,
economic advantages, and prestige defined in terms of power. The fact that this is
accomplished with a heavy overlay of highly dramatic symbolism does little to
demonstrate that cultural rather than material-strategic should take precedence in the
causal hierarchy. Moreover, invoking my methodological rule for establishing the
independence of cultural effects, nothing in Harrison’s story shows that the outcome was
driven by more general cultural patterns that were prior to or functionally unrelated to
warfare.
92
Harrison, 89.
Harrison, 18.
94
Harrison, 150.
93
34
In short, attempts to use culture to explain why war has been so prevalent in
anarchy run into serious theoretical and empirical problems. Insofar as many cultural
systems do feature warlike symbolism, this seems more readily explained as a by-product
of more basic causes: either the inherent insecurity of life in anarchy, as the realists have
argued, or perhaps some innate psychological bias in the way in-groups perceive outgroups, independent of culture.
CULTURAL EXPLANATIONS OF VARIATIONS IN WARMAKING
Culture is better suited to explain variations in the frequency of war in anarchy
than it is to explain its overall prevalence. Whether culture is conceived as a symbolic
system or as a set of norm-laden practices, anthropologists find that the frequency and
intensity of war correlates with a generalized culture of mistrust, fear, and harshness in
social relationships. The Embers find, for example, that fear of nature and fear of others
is one of the strongest correlates of war.95 Socialization to distrust seems to be more
fundamental than socialization to aggression itself. When war-prone societies are
pacified by outside powers, aggressive attitudes dissipate, but attitudes of generalized
mistrust tend to remain.96 Or put differently, aggression seems to be more situational,
mistrust more dispositional or cultural.
On the plane of ideas and symbols, myths in warlike societies often feature tales
of violence, threat, and fearful imagery. Likewise, folk tales in such societies, especially
ones that have experienced unpredictable food shortages, commonly depict capricious
aggression.97 For example, Yanomamo mythology centers on fierce jaguars with quasihuman traits and on the putatively historical self-destruction of the community through an
out-of-control episode of murder and rape.98 Yanomamo villages in the most conflict-
95
Ember and Ember in Reyna and Downs, 194.
Ember and Ember in Reyna and Downs, 192.
97
Alex Cohen, “A Cross-Cultural Study of the Effects of Environmental Unpredictability
on Aggression in Folktales,” American Anthropologist 92 (1990), 474-481; Ember and
Ember in Reyna and Downs, 193-5.
98
Sanday, 49-50.
96
35
prone regions believe that their people originated from blood falling from the wounded
moon, but Yanomamo in less conflictual areas lack that myth.99
Moreover, such cosmological myths may be closely tied to norms of everyday
behavior. Those Yanomamo areas with sanguinary myths are also are the epicenter of the
waiteri cult of fierceness, which motivates and regulates social practices like ritualized
tests of strength and aggressiveness at feasts, governs status relations within the village
through the distinction between men who have killed and those who have not, determines
opportunities to marry, justifies male-female violence within the village and raiding for
women from other villages, motivates men to participate in warfare, and destabilizes
alliance politics. Expectations of armed rivalry and the glorification of fighters affect the
material circumstances of conflict through female infanticide and the consequent need to
raid for mates. Moreover, the fact that slash-and-burn agriculture is a mode of production
that is consistent in other settings with minimal warfare suggests that material factors by
themselves provide little purchase on the self-destructive behavior of the Yanomamo,
which looks very much like a culturally-induced equilibrium.
Of course, fear-inducing myths that directly depict violence are just as likely to be
a consequence of warfare as a cause of it. The same may be true of indirect symbols and
norms that on their face seem unrelated to war. For example, Peggy Sanday reports that
the extensiveness of menstrual taboos correlates strongly with the war-proneness of the
society. Since neither of these correlates strongly with gender inequality in social
relations, Sanday contends that this is a matter of cultural symbolism, rather than a
consequence of warrior men using the prevalence of external violence to impose
restrictions of their women. Sanday argues that the blood of menstruation is symbolic of
the blood of battle, a link that is underscored by the fact that in these exogamous groups,
men marry the kin of the people they kill in war. “The perception of women as dangerous
may mirror the hostile relations with groups from which wives are acquired,” Sanday
conjectures.100 If so, it seems more likely that war gives rise to the symbolism than the
other way around. Although Sanday shows that this myth complex is more common in
99
Ferguson, “Savage Encounter,” in War in the Tribal Zone, 224.
Sanday, 104-5.
100
36
hunting societies than in gathering ones, the most well-known case of a war-prone people
with extreme menstruation phobias, the Mae Enga of New Guinea, are pig breeders who
live in exogamous warring villages.101 In this example, war, anarchy, the mode of
production, kinship systems, and symbolic culture seem tied to together in probabilistic
rather than deterministic ways, and the direction of causation is hard to trace and may be
reciprocal.
In a rigorous multiple-methods study of the relationship between war and culture
in anarchy, Marc Ross shows that the overall level of conflict, including warfare, is best
predicted by the harshness of a society’s child-rearing practices, the socialization of
children to generalized mistrust of others, and the level of male gender-identity conflict.
The latter variable is manifested in such forms as aloof relations with fathers, severe rites
of passage to manhood, and male ambivalence in relations with women, which is
exemplified by the Mae Enga’s extreme menstruation taboos and separate housing for
men and women.102 Social structure, including kinship patterns, affects whom people
will fight against, but these psychocultural variables determine how much they fight, Ross
says. Some of these statistical correlations may be consistent with a reverse causal
interpretation, in which boys are steeled for toughness in societies that face intense
security threats because they live in tough neighborhoods where the means of survival are
scarce. Ross does not statistically control for ecological scarcity, though in narrative
discussions he acknowledges that these factors can be important. Even so, it seems
implausible to explain away all of these correlations as indirect consequences of living in
dangerous circumstances.
Brian Ferguson’s case study research similarly observes that war-prone societies
often have harsh, fearful, vindictive cultural practices, but he is more skeptical than Ross
about the causal direction. Revenge rationales, he argues, are highly malleable. Groups
and individuals will take revenge on those who are weaker, but let bygones be bygones
with respect to stronger transgressors. Likewise, he argues, allegations of witchcraft are
not causes of conflict but rather are a mode of expressing a conflict that arises for some
101
M. J. Meggitt, Blood Is Their Argument: Warfare Among the Mae-Enga Tribesmen
of the New Guinea Highlands (Palo Alto: Mayfield, 1977).
37
other, more pragmatic reason.103 However, even if pragmatic factors are important, this
still raises the question of why hostility takes the form of witchcraft beliefs and practices,
and what independent effects these may have in increasing or mitigating armed violence.
The few societies that experience little or no war tend to have benign patterns of
social relations among group members, but this is not always the case. At the benign end
of the continuum, the peaceful Mbuti pygmies have dense, mutually supportive social
networks, collective child-care, rituals that stress nurturing relations with people and
nature, anti-competitive norms, high levels of in-group trust, no hierarchy, no wealth, and
forest homes that provide them something of a haven from Bantu neighbors.104 However,
some other societies take very different routes to peace. The peaceful Cayapa hunters,
who live in dispersed jungle households in highland Ecuador and Colombia, are the
biggest outliers in Ross’s dataset. They have harsh, capricious childhood socialization
practices, and adults are highly suspicious of each other -- so much so that they avoid
everyone who is not kin.105 This is reminiscent of Rousseau’s prescription for
overcoming the danger of war in an anarchical system of states: remain isolated and
materially poor so that nobody bothers to come calling.106 In contrast, the tribes of the
Upper Xingu region of Brazil maintain peace through a myth-reinforced system of mutual
deterrence under high levels of social and economic interdependence. They fear people
from neighboring villages, including their witchcraft, and therefore prudently avoid
showing anger towards them. As part of a self-conscious strategy of controlling impulses
to aggression, they avoid eating spicy food or red meat, which they worry will make them
choleric and bloody-minded. Myths drive home the dangers that lie in store for people
who lose self-control and become like the wild, animalistic, aggressive tribes who live in
the nearby hinterlands.107
102
Ross, Culture of Conflict, 60-64, 77-84, 125-6.
Ferguson, “Savage Encounter,” in War in the Tribal Zone, 223-4.
104
Ross, Culture of Conflict, 7-8. Similar examples are the Lepchas of Nepal, Culture of
Conflict, 89-92, and the !Kung Bushmen
105
Ross, Culture of Conflict, 136-8.
106
J. J. Rousseau, Paix Perpétuelle; Stanley Hoffmann, The State of War.
107
Thomas Gregor, “Uneasy Peace: Intertribal Relations in Brazil’s Upper Xingu,” in
Jonathan Haas, ed., Anthropology of War, 105-124.
103
38
CULTURE AS A TOOLKIT
Many scholars who see culture as an important element shaping behavior in
anarchy implicitly depict individuals and political units as passive captives in the grip of
group myths and norms. In contrast, and perhaps somewhat ironically, many material
determinists implicitly depict individuals and units as active agents strategizing within
constraints. A third view, however, sees neither material circumstances nor culture as
inexorably determining the strategies or routines of individuals or units, but as providing
a set of incentives and a toolkit for deliberation and problem-solving.108
Along these lines, Napoleon Chagnon tells the story of Yanomamo headman who,
realizing that his village was facing an adverse shift in the balance of power, decided that
he had no choice but to seek an alliance with a nearby village that had been a rival for
over two decades. (Even if we accept Patrick Tierney’s claim that Chagnon’s distribution
of machetes created the strategic incentives for such alliance adjustments, the story
retains its relevance for my present purpose.) Reaching into the toolkit of Yanomamo
culture, the headman astutely chose emissaries whose kinship ties to the key members of
the rival village permitted them to visit on the pretext of filial piety. The simple act of
visiting the rival village without getting ambushed in the jungle required a complex series
of culturally encoded signaling leading to a stand-down of weapons readiness. At a long
meeting with the leaders of the rival village, the headman and his entourage verbally
revised the entire history of their enmity. Earlier times of alliance between the two
groups were emphasized, and the breakdown of relations between them was falsely
blamed on a troublemaking subgroup that had subsequently split off from one of the
villages. Chagnon claims that these were outright lies, but because they were told in the
right way, and because there was a mutual strategic benefit to be gained, the alliance
worked.109 Although a realist would be happy with the main outlines of Chagnon’s story,
Ann Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological
Review 51 (April 1986); Elizabeth Kier, Imagining War: French and British Military
Doctrine between the Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 31.
109
Chagnon, Yanomamo, fifth ed., 216-226; Tierney, Darkness in El Dorado, chapters 6
and 7.
108
39
it nonetheless shows how an agent can use his cultural toolkit creatively to accomplish
strategic objectives.
In short, the practice of war in anarchy is intimately bound up with cultural
symbols. This is not surprising, because some of the main tasks of culture -- the
strengthening of group solidarity, the marking off of group boundaries, and the
motivation of contributions to collective action -- are most urgently needed in time of
war. However, the direction of causality running between war and culture is complex,
hard to establish, and in many cases appears to be reciprocal. In most circumstances,
understanding strategic choices in anarchy requires knowing both the situation that actors
face and the cultural equipment with which they devise and discuss responses to the
dangers of anarchy.
Theoretically integrating material, institutional, and cultural elements
Some anthropologists of war take into account the interrelationships among the
material-situational, institutional, and cultural causes of armed conflict between groups
without attempting to subordinate some kinds of causes rigidly to others. These scholars,
whether they are reporting fieldwork or statistical results, proceed inductively, as the
evidence seems to require. They may use culture to explain some aspects of the behavior
they observe and material circumstances to explain other aspects. However, international
relations consumers of this literature, embroiled in our own theoretical debates about
anarchy and culture, will insist on a more theory-driven way of integrating these material,
institutional, and cultural elements without falling prey to reductionism.
Here I will examine two such approaches, one conceived in terms of nested
constraints and the other in terms of historically developed systems of action constituted
jointly by material, institutional, and cultural factors.
Nested constraints
40
Emile Durkheim believed that “social life, in all its aspects and in every period of
its history, is made possible only by a vast symbolism.”110 However, he also believed that
the form that these symbols take depends in part on aspects of the material setting,
reflected in the division of labor in society, and that the “collective consciousness” of a
group mirrors its social relationships. Thus, while Durkheim hardly wanted to reduce
social symbolism in a crude way to brute material facts, he nonetheless nested the
symbolic in the material and institutional in ways that gave causal priority to the latter.
Many significant social theorists from Marx to Malinowski to Ernest Gellner have taken
this path. Some prominent students of the anthropology of war have likewise chosen to
nest material, institutional, and cultural elements in roughly this way.
Brian Ferguson, for example, depicts the causes of war as a “nested hierarchy of
progressively more limiting constraints.”111 The broadest constraints are set by what he
calls infrastructure: i.e., demography, ecology, and technology. To the list of
infrastructural characteristics, we might add the constraints that follow from the fact of
anarchy. These factors create a set of propensities that may directly affect the likelihood
of war and may also indirectly affect the chance of war by shaping constraints at other
levels. The next broadest level of constraints for Ferguson is the structural: i.e., the
structure of the economy, the pattern of kinship, and political institutions. As before,
these factors may load the dice for or against war directly, or they may do so indirectly by
affecting what Ferguson calls the superstructure: i.e., psychology and beliefs. In this
scheme, the likely configuration at each nested layer is bounded but not determined by
influences from the prior one.
Ferguson’s decision to start with the material is not arbitrary. It is based on his
empirically grounded claims that material constraints have causal priority. He admits that
different cultures may respond somewhat differently to similar material challenges, such
as contact with militarily and economically superior societies, depending in part on their
cultural repertoire of concepts and tactics. Yet these variations may simply reflect
rationally defensible differences in preferences over strategy, rather than cultural biases.
110
Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Free Press,
1965), 264.
41
Even within the same group, Ferguson notes, different leaders may urge different
solutions: fight, flight, assimilation, conciliation, or “fundamentalist” revival. Moreover,
Ferguson argues, “in all these cases, existing cultural patterns are reshaped and employed
practically, and in ways that show substantial cross-cultural uniformity.”112 Thus, while
the material does not fully subsume the cultural, according to Ferguson’s view, it is
possible to understand the role that culture plays only by taking into account the material
parameters that structure the situation to which the culture is responding.
In contrast, proponents of cultural theories of warfare, such as Harrison and Ross,
attempt to reverse the explanatory nesting, starting with culture and showing how it
constitutes patterns of social relations and even material arrangements. In principle,
rigorous testing may in a given case be able to establish which nesting sequence fits the
evidence best. In fact, many situations manifest reciprocal causality among material
conditions, social institutions, and culture. In analyzing Yanomamo warfare, it rarely
makes sense to ask whether its intensity and incessant nature is due to the strategic
incentives of anarchy or to the waiteri cultural complex of fierceness or to kinship
institutions that encourage the fissioning of villages, since these are all co-constituting
and mutually reinforcing. In such circumstances, nesting theories must give way to a
systems approach.
Material-institutional-cultural systems of action
In the social construction of reality in anarchy, it is not just the material or the
institutional or the cultural setting that confronts the individual and the group as a takenfor-granted inevitability; it is the whole of the multi-faceted anarchical system.113 When
acting in or analyzing a system, as Robert Jervis reminds us, it is insufficient to think in
terms of linear causality and the independent effects of separate variables, because
Ferguson, “A Savage Encounter,” in War in the Tribal Zone, 201.
Ferguson, “A Savage Encounter,” in War in the Tribal Zone, 18. See also Ferguson in
Martin and Frayer, 336.
113
Berger and Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Doubleday,
1966); Robert Grafstein, Institutional Realism: Social and Political Constraints on
Rational Actors (New Haven: Yale, 1992).
111
112
42
feedback processes often counteract expected linear consequences.114 Because of the
complex causal interconnections among their elements, systems have emergent properties
that differ from the independent properties of their parts.
No single part of a system suffices to define the system and its behavior. Even
anarchy itself, though it may load the dice probabilistically toward war, does not
predetermine action in the system. Nor does any specific institutional fact or cultural
feature determine the system’s behavior independent of the larger context of the system as
a whole. For example, witchcraft beliefs may deter aggression in some self-help systems,
whereas they may intensify it in others. Likewise, the ecological fact of food scarcity can
in itself produce war, trade, or state-building, depending on the other potentialities of the
social system and choices that its actors make. The technological fact of the huntergatherer mode of production (or the industrial mode) is in itself consistent with varied
outcomes in anarchy. Severe menstrual taboos may sometimes play a central role in the
legitimation of a warrior culture; conversely, their absence may reflect the social equality
of women who happily accompany their menfolk in homicidal raiding.115 Without
knowing how any particular system operates as a whole, changing one variable (if that
were possible) might not lead to the expected results: reducing scarcity might simply
make the units in a warlike system more capable of sustaining the fight; making units
more trusting in a warlike system might get them wiped out.
Research on the democratic peace illustrates the emergent properties of an
anarchical system. The functioning of the system as a whole cannot simply be reduced to
the properties of its separate parts. Before World War I, democracies were rather likely to
get into militarized disputes with each other.116 During the 1930s, liberal international
organizations did nothing to promote peace. Moreover, economic interdependence per se
does little or nothing to reduce the risk of war between states; in some circumstances,
such mutual economic vulnerability may increase the chance of war. But put all three of
114
Robert Jervis, System Effects (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
Robarchek and Robarchek, Waorani, 105.
116
Joanne Gowa, Ballots and Bullets: The Elusive Democratic Peace (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1999), 44-67; Christopher Layne, “Kant or Cant: The Myth
of the Democratic Peace,” International Security, fall 1994.
115
43
these ingredients together in a system in which these elements predominate, and the
democratic peace emerges.117
TYPOLOGIES OF ANARCHICAL SYSTEMS
If this perspective is correct, theorizing must proceed by studying systems as
wholes. One fruitful step in this direction would be to develop a typology of different
kinds of anarchical systems. The most common typologies in the existing literature tend
to focus on either the system’s material, institutional, or cultural elements. Based on
power distributions, Waltz proposes bipolar and multipolar types; based on ideas, culture,
and identity, Wendt proposes Hobbesian, Lockean, and Kantian types; based on political
institutions, Russett contends that democratic and authoritarian anarchies behave
differently.118 In a nesting approach to integrating material, institutional, and cultural
factors, such typologies organized around a supposed taproot factor might be adequate.
However, if anarchical systems are jointly constituted by all three of these kinds of
elements and not reducible to any one of them, a useful typology cannot be based on a
presupposition of linear, nested, causal relations among the elements.
One problem with a linear scheme is that the effect of the purported taproot
variables might have opposite effects, depending on other attributes of the system. For
example, a multipolar polar system is conducive to unconditional, “chaingang” alliances
when the prevailing strategic culture is characterized by a military cult of the offensive, as
it was in 1914, whereas multipolarity is conducive to “buckpassing” non-alignment when
defensive warfare is believed to have an advantage, as in the 1930s.119 In another
example, a decline in power relative to a rival state may goad an authoritarian state to
preventive war, but a similar decline is more likely to lead a democracy to seek allies or
117
Oneal and Russett, Triangulating Peace.
Waltz, Theory of International Politics, ch. 7-8; Wendt, Social Theory, ch. 6; Oneal
and Russett, Triangulating Peace.
119
Thomas Christensen and Jack Snyder, “Chain Gangs and Passed Bucks: Predicting
Alliance Patterns in Mulitpolarity,” International Organization 44:2 (Spring 1990), 137168.
118
44
appease the rival.120 Even the institutional features of democracy may have different
foreign policy consequences in different cultural contexts: insofar as the democratic
peace rests in part on mutual perceptions of a common basis of legitimacy, neighboring
democracies that base citizenship privileges on ethnically exclusionary principles may
wind up fighting over the mistreatment of each others’ minorities.121
In some circumstances, these conceptual problems might be handled simply as
instances of interaction effects between two variables. In that case, causality could be
treated as linear, but conditional. However, it seems likely that many cases will feature
not just interactions of variables, but strong systemic feedback processes. Before 1914,
for example, Social Darwinism, militarism, offensive military strategies, the rise of
nationalism in transitions to partial democracy, and shifts in relative military power were
not just interacting variables. These interrelated material, institutional, and cultural
features constituted a mutually reinforcing system whose amplifying feedback processes
heightened the security dilemma and pulled Europe toward war.
An analyst might accept this view, yet argue that a basically linear model captures
the essence of the system, because a single taproot is the source of all of the systems’
main properties. In the Primat der Aussenpolitik version, for example, the belated rise of
German power and its vulnerability in the heart of Europe drove its militarism, its
nationalism, and its offensive strategies.122 Conversely, in the Primat der Innenpolitik
version, Germany’s late industrialization perverted its path toward democracy, giving rise
to an authoritarian bourgeoisie that played the nationalist card and allied with feudal
militarists and encouraged their offensive military strategies.123 Perhaps less plausibly, an
Ideenpolitik approach might argue that ideas themselves – nationalism, Social
Darwinism, or the cult of the offensive – were the uncaused causes of the entire system of
Randall. Schweller, “Domestic Structure and Preventive War,” World Politics
(January 1992).
121
Oneal and Russett, Triangulating Peace, discuss whether the recent Kashmir fighting,
which has something of this character, should count as a war between democracies.
Numerous pairs of transitional states, such as Armenian and Azerbaijan or Serbia and
Croatia, illustrate this possibility. Jack Snyder, From Voting to Violence:
Democratization and Nationalist Conflict (New York: Norton, 2000), 352-53.
122
Mearsheimer, Great Power Politics.
120
45
action. Whether or not such taproot arguments are persuasive is an empirical question
that scholars debate constantly.
In light of this, how might typologies of material-institutional-cultural anarchical
systems be constructed? For taproot and linear nesting theories, the typology should of
course be based on the taproots of the different systems: “democratic anarchies,”
“authoritarian anarchies,” or “democratic-transition anarchies”. For systems shaped by
the interaction effects of two crucial variables, labels need both a noun and an adjective:
“multipolar cult-of-the-offensive anarchies,” or “authoritarian power-transition systems.”
However, for systems that cannot be convincingly reduced to a small number of standard
elements, characterizing the system will probably require a partly ideographic, partly
nomothetic reconstruction. Such a reconstruction of the system’s dynamics may draw on
a general knowledge of feedback effects in anarchic systems; on partial theories of the
workings of military, political, or cultural subsystems; and on detailed analysis of the
historically distinctive origins and interactions of these elements. Labeling the system
may require some combination of general concepts and historically specific designations,
such as “The Westphalian balance of power system” or “the Concert of Europe system.”
ACTING TO EFFECT CHANGE IN A SYSTEM
An anthropological anecdotes illustrate the role that new ideas may play in
transforming an anarchical system. A pair of Amazonian tribeswomen returned to their
murderous Waorani tribe in 1956 after a long sojourn among the Waorani’s foes, bearing
the news that these neighbors were not, as had been believed, a pack of untrustworthy
cannibals. These women’s information and interpretations triggered a reassessment of
the Hobbesian assumptions underpinning the Waorani worldview. As a result, the
Waorani started behaving more peacefully not only towards the outsiders, but also within
the anarchical Waorani society itself.124
123
Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire, 1871-1918 (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1985).
Robarchek and Robarchek, Waorani, 156. Some scholars who are knowledgeable
about the Amazon suspect that this account exaggerates the impact on Waorani warmaking of the returning tribeswomen.
124
46
Thus, despite the nightmarish weight of history pressing upon a Hobbesian
culture, a creative and resolute vanguard may be able to use information and ideas to
exploit openings for the possibility of change. Even so, the vanguard do not make history
as they please. They make the history that is enabled by historical possibilities. Among
the Waorani, the window for change was opened by missionaries that accompanied the
returning tribeswomen and by the availability of trade goods that made a change in
behavior seem materially attractive. In short, cultural entrepreneurs of political ideas
need to understand the material and institutional potentials of the system they are trying to
change.
In dynamically stable systems, negative feedback processes work to eliminate
perturbations and reestablish the system’s equilibrium. For example, if one unit becomes
too strong, other units gang up against it and reestablish a balance of power, as in the
historical European balance of power system. In dynamically unstable systems, positive
feedback processes work to overturn the equilibrium and transform the system into a new
configuration. For example, small advantages may lead to the disproportionate growth of
a unit of the system, making cumulative disproportionate growth of that unit unstoppable
until it dominates the entire system and turns the anarchy into a hierarchy, as in the
ancient Chinese Warring States system.125
Sometimes systems experience positive feedback in one part of the system,
leading to uneven development that disrupts the overall equilibrium of the system. What
Marxists call contradictions in a system might be thought of as developmental trajectories
that produce positive feedbacks disrupting the previous equilibrium among the system’s
elements. Viewed from this perspective, the economic successes of the late feudal system
touched off a set of interrelated economic and social feedback processes that gave rise to
powerful actors with an incentive to effect change in the system’s institutional and
normative structures.
125
Victoria Hui, Rethinking War, State Formation, and System Formation: A Historical
Comparison of Ancient China (659-221 BC) and Early Modern Europe (1495-1815 AD),
Columbia University dissertation in political science, 2000, points to advantages in the
state of Qin’s administrative system that created the potential for cumulative victories.
47
From the standpoint of systems dynamics, actors seeking to change the
equilibrium of the system need to identify contradictions in the system and opportunities
to promote positive feedback processes to heighten those contradictions. As we have
seen, one type of contradiction stems from uneven, self-amplifying growth of a unit that
allows it to achieve hegemony and turn the anarchy into hierarchy by coercion or
inducement. In the current unipolar moment, this appeals to some people as a feasible
option for promoting systemic change, at least as an element in a broader strategy.
Thomas Risse and Kathryn Sikkink, for example, are frank in acknowledging that
coercion and inducement may play a role in their discursive strategy for promoting
normative change on human rights issues in authoritarian regimes.126
Some exploitable contradictions may be built into the system from the start. For
example, realists might argue that the medieval political order of multiple, overlapping
obligations, called heteronomy by John Ruggie, had built-in contradictions in a self-help
anarchical system. If so, it was in the long run bound to shake down into a system of more
compact, functionally similar, fighting units such as sovereign states.127
Other contradictions may develop over time due to uneven growth or changes
within the material, institutional, or cultural aspects of the system. For example,
Durkheim argued that increases in the density of social interactions and the resulting
intensification of the division of labor in modern society eventually created a mismatch
between social facts and cultural norms. Today some argue analogously, though less
persuasively, that the increasing density of global economic and social interaction is
making the norm of sovereignty obsolete.128
In such situations, culture may play a key role in resolving a contradiction that is
presented by the material or social circumstances. Thus, Durkheim interpreted the
development of the norm of individualism in modern culture as resolving the
Risse and Sikkink, “The Socialization of International Human Rights Norms into
Domestic Practice,” in Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink, The Power of Human Rights, 9-10.
127
John Ruggie, “Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity,” World Politics
35:2 (January 1983), 261-285.
128
On dynamic density, see Durkheim, Division of Labor, and Ruggie, “Transformation;”
on the purported obsolescence of the state, see Jessica Mathews, “Power Shift,” Foreign
Affairs (Jan./Feb. 1997), 50-66.
126
48
contradiction between the increasing division of labor in society and the concomitant
destruction of the traditional normative bases of social solidarity. In another example,
Karl Polanyi (and later John Ruggie) saw the rise of imperialist nationalism and
Keynesianism as alternative ideational responses to the political contradiction between
draconian gold-standard adjustment strategies and the increased role of the popular
classes in modern democratic politics.129 Although material and institutional facts may
structure the problem that ideas and culture must confront, these parameters may not
dictate a single solution. Which solution is sought may depend on ideas and culture. If
Polanyi and Ruggie are right, this cultural effect may be much more than “fine-tuning.” It
may have made the difference between the two World Wars and the long post-1945 peace
among the great powers.
In short, culturally creative activists and thinkers may play an important role in
changing behavior in anarchical systems, but they must do so within a context that is
structured by the system’s feedback pattern, contradictions, and material and institutional
possibilities.
Conclusion: The Potential for Transforming Contemporary Anarchy through Culture
Anthropological research on culture and war casts doubt on one-dimensional
conceptions of behavior in anarchy. The radical constructivist notion that anarchy is
nothing more than ideas, culture, and identity “almost all the way down” is no less
misleading than the hyper-realist notion that the unchangeable situation of anarchy will
always make life nasty, brutish, and short, regardless of anarchy’s institutional and
cultural content. Those who seek to transform the culture of contemporary anarchy need
to work within an existing material and institutional setting that may enable, derail, or
pervert efforts to promote change. Salient features of contemporary international anarchy
place sharp limits on the speed and scope of such a transformation. Efforts to force the
129
Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press, 1984);
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon, 1944); John Ruggie,
“International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar
Economic Order,” International Organization 36 (Spring 1982), 379-415.
49
pace risk unintended consequences that could wind up hindering change and increasing
its costs.
If world politics is made up of nothing but ideas and culture, and if culture is
malleable and socially constructed, then the barriers to realizing our ideals may seem
insubstantial. Inspired by that heady notion, leading figures in many of the major,
respected, responsible institutions of our society sometimes talk as if international politics
in the post-Cold-War era were simply a matter of demanding compliance with
universalist norms. The editorial page of the New York Times regularly insists that some
country that is devoid of the material and institutional preconditions of democracy, such
as Congo, must nonetheless hold immediate elections. Similarly, increasingly prominent
non-governmental organizations like Human Rights Watch insist that human rights
abusers be indicted, not bargained with.
And yet when these recommendations are implemented in the real world, it
sometimes comes at a high cost. For example, inopportune voting demanded by the
international community in such places as Burundi in 1993 and East Timor in 1999 has
led directly to hundred of thousands of deaths and refugees.130 In part, this is because the
contemporary system of action in anarchy is not malleable ideas and culture “all the way
down.” Today’s historically constituted anarchical system, including the characteristics of
its units, is maintained not just by culture, but also by its material and institutional
circumstances. Even those characteristics that do reflect ideas and culture may not be
particularly malleable, and they often do not reflect the culture the activists want.
The democratic peace--with its mutually reinforcing feedbacks among
consolidated democracy, economic interdependence, and multilateral institutions—
constitutes an influential subsystem within the global anarchy. However, the prospect of
extending the democratic peace and its human rights corollaries to global reach faces
severe material, institutional, and cultural limitations:

The “third wave” of democratization, already eroding in some places,
consolidated democratic regimes mainly in the richer countries of Eastern
130
Snyder, From Voting to Violence, 296-306.
50
Europe, Latin America, and East Asia.131 A fourth wave would have to
take on harder cases: countries that are poorer, more ethnically divided,
and starting from a weaker base of governmental institutions and citizen
skills.

The spread of international human rights norms faces a similar problem:
many of the worst abuses take place in countries that completely lack
serious legal institutions or the personnel to create them.

Two of the great powers in the international system, Russia and China, are
not integrated into the democratic peace. Their stance toward the projects
of the advanced democracies is opportunistic and guided by a Realpolitik
sensibility. Arguably, pushing either of them to adopt pristine standards
of democracy and human rights might only increase the likelihood of
authoritarian crackdowns, backlashes, and nationalistic self-righteousness.

Non-governmental organizations’ principled efforts to transform
grassroots culture in areas such as female circumcision in Africa and
women’s rights in Islamic societies have few successes to report.132 If it is
true that patriarchal cultural practices prop up the institutional structure of
the traditional order, then the changes in culture and identity that need to
underpin the global extension of the democratic peace seem far off.

Globalization of the economy and social relations has at best an
ambivalent significance for the globalization of the democratic peace. No
one has yet devised satisfactory institutions of democratic accountability
for any unit larger than the state. In the unlikely event that the most
optimistic prophets of globalization are correct, the predicted loss of
control over political and economic outcomes by democratic states would
be unsettling news. It is unclear whether an increasingly transnational
131
Larry Diamond, “Is the Third Wave Over?” Journal of Democracy 7:3 (July 1966), 20-
37.
132
On indigenous resistance to adopting new human rights norms, see Richard Shweder,
“What about ‘Female Genital Mutilation’? And Why Understanding Culture Matters in
the First Place,” Daedalus 129:4 (Fall 2000), 209-232.
51
civil society would be “democratic” without an effective democratic
institutional framework to channel its activities.133
In short, strategies for the transformation of international anarchy, especially the
global extension of the democratic peace, need to be assessed in terms of the interplay
among diverse material, institutional, and cultural elements, not “ideas almost all the way
down.” Sophisticated international relations scholars like Alexander Wendt deny that
they are pure voluntarists or subjectivists who think that ideas can transform the world by
a wave from the magic idea-wand.134 Nonetheless, Wendt goes quite far in that direction.
He asserts that “anarchy as such is an empty vessel and has no intrinsic logic; anarchies
only acquire logics as a function of the structure of what we put inside them.”135 The
very notion of self-interest, says Wendt, is part of the cultural assumptions, sustained by
realist theory, that make behavior in anarchy what it has been. “If self-interest is not
sustained by practice,” says Wendt, “it will die out. The possibility of structural change is
born out of that fact.”136 The knowledge produced by realism unnecessarily sustains that
structure, he concludes, whereas “the knowledge produced by reflexive or critical theory
is generally more useful for changing the world than working within it.”137 “Although
there is no 1:1 correspondence between positions in the idealism-materialism debate and
beliefs about the ease of social change,” he says, “showing that seemingly material
conditions are actually a function of how actors think about them opens up possibilities
for intervention that would otherwise be obscured.”138
Sheri Berman, “Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic,” World
Politics 49:3 (April 1997), 401-429; Fiona Adamson’s forthcoming dissertation uses
Kurdish and Algerian case studies to explore the security consequences of changing
patterns of international labor mobility.
134
Wendt, Social Theory, 137. Wendt further qualifies his views in “On the Via Media:
A Response to the Critics,” Review of International Studies, 26:1 (January 2000), 123180.
135
Wendt, Social Theory, 249. See the compelling critique of this view by Dale
Copeland, “The Constructivist Challenge to Structural Realism: A Review Essay,”
International Security 25:2 (Fall 2000), 187-212.
136
Wendt, Social Theory, 369
137
Wendt, Social Theory, 378
138
Wendt, Social Theory, 371
133
52
Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink state the transformative moral goal of
theory even more directly: “For decades now IR research has been divorced from
political theory on the grounds (implicitly, if not explicitly, articulated) that what ‘is’ in
the world and what ‘ought to be’ are very different and must be kept separate, both
intellectually and in policy. However, contemporary empirical research on norms is
aimed precisely at showing how the ‘ought’ becomes the ‘is.’”139
Understanding the relationship between “is” and “ought” should indeed be a
central task of contemporary international relations scholarship. While undertaking that
task, however, it is important to avoid taking a one-dimensional, voluntarist view of
behavior in anarchy that could make more likely the kinds of outcomes that principled
scholars and serious-minded practitioners want to avoid.
Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, “International Norm Dynamics and Political
Change,” 916.
139