Has War Declined Through Human History?

Ringvorlesung des Exzellenzclusters "Die Herausbildung normativer Ordnungen": The End of Pacification? The Transformation of Political Violence in the 21st Century

Prof. Michael Mann (University of California, Los Angeles)

11. Oktober 2018, 18.15 Uhr

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
Campus Westend, Hörsaalzentrum, HZ9

Abstract
For over 150 years liberal optimism has dominated theories of war. It has been repeatedly argued that war either is declining or will shortly decline. There have been exceptions, especially in Germany and more generally in the first half of the twentieth century, but there has been a recent revival of such optimism, especially in the work of Azar Gat, John Mueller, Joshua Goldstein, and Steven Pinker who all perceive a long-term decline in war through history, speeding up in the post-1945 period. Critiquing Pinker’s statistics on war fatalities, I show that the overall pattern is not a decline in war, but substantial variation between periods and places. War has not declined and current trends are slightly in the opposite direction. Civil wars in the global South have largely replaced inter-state wars in the North, but there is also Northern involvement in most of them. War for the North is now less “ferocious” than “callous”, which renders war less visible and less central to Northern culture, which has the deceptive appearance of pacifism. Viewed from the South the view has been bleaker both in the colonial period and today. Globally war is not declining, but it is being transformed.

CV
Michael Mann is Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology, UCLA, and Honorary Professor, Cambridge University. He has a BA and D.Phil. from Oxford University. He is a member of both the American and British Academies. His major publication project has been the four volumes of The Sources of Social Power published by Cambridge University Press: Volume 1: A History of Power from the Beginning to 1760 (published in 1986); Volume 2: The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760–1914 (1993); Volume 3: Global Empires and Revolution, 1890–1945 (2012); Volume 4: Globalizations, 1945–2011 (2013). He also has books on American imperialism, fascism, and ethnic cleansing. Two books of essays have discussed his work, The Anatomy of Power: The Social Theory of Michael Mann (2006), and Global Powers: Mann’s Anatomy of the twentieth Century and Beyond (2018). He is currently writing a book on war.

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Exzellenzcluster "Die Herausbildung normativer Ordnungen"