So why do people fight? Evolutionary theory and the causes of war

European Journal of International Relations

Volumn 15, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 571-599

  Gat, Azar ^a  

^a TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY   (Israel)

Author keywords

Causes of war; Critique of IR theory; Evolutionary theory; Human motivation

Indexed keywords

EID: 70450162809     PISSN: 13540661     EISSN: 14603713     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1354066109344661     Document Type: Article

References (72)

1. Abels, Richard (1988) Lordship and Military Obligation in Anglo-Saxon England. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
2. Bielenstein, Hans (1980) The Bureaucracy of the Han Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
3. Blainey, Geoffrey (1973) The Causes of War. London: Macmillan.
4. Boyer, Pascal (2001) Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books.
5. Burton, John (ed.) (1990) Conflict: Human Needs Theory. London: Macmillan.
6. Buss, D. and N. Malamuth (eds) (1996) Sex, Power, Conflict: Evolutionary and Feminist Perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press.
7. Buzan, Barry, Charles Jones and Richard Little (1993) The Logic of Anarchy. New York: Colombia University Press.
8. Cavalli-Sforza, L.L., Paolo Menozzi and Alberto Piazza (1994) The History and Geography of Human Genes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
9. Chagnon, Napoleon (1979) Is Reproductive Success Equal in Egalitarian Societies?, in N. Chagnon and W. Irons (eds) Evolutionary Biology and Human Social Behavior, pp. 374-401. North Scituate, MA: Duxbury.
10. Cook, J. (1985) The Rise of the Achaemenids and Establishment of their Empire, in I. Gershevitch (ed.) The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. ii. pp. 200-91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
11. Daly, Martin and Margo Wilson (1983) Sex, Evolution, and Behavior. Boston, MA: Willard Grant.
12. Darwin, Charles (n.d. [1871]) The Origin of the Species and the Descent of Man. New York: The Modern Library.
13. Dawkins, Richard (1989) The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
14. Dawkins, Richard (2006) The God Delusion. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
15. Diamond, Jared (1992) The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee. London: Vintage.
16. Divale, William and Marvin Harris (1976) Population, Warfare and the Male Supremacist Complex, American Anthropologist 78: 521-38.
17. Durkheim, Emile (1965) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press.
18. Finer, S.E. (1997) The History of Government from the Earliest Times. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
19. Frank, Tenney (1959) An Economic Survey of Ancient Rome. Paterson, NJ: Pageant Books.
20. Gat, Azar (2005) The Democratic Peace Theory Reframed: The Impact of Modernity, World Politics 58: 73-100.
21. Gat, Azar (2006) War in Human Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
22. Goldsmith, Raymond (1987) Premodern Financial Systems: A Historical Comparative Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
23. Goldstein, Joshua (2001) War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa. New York: Cambridge University Press.
24. Griffith, Paddy (1995) The Viking Art of War. London: Greenhill.
25. Hamilton, W.D. and Robert Axelrod (1984) The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books.
26. Heiden, Brian (2003) A Prehistory of Religion: Shamanism, Sorcerers and Saints. Washington, DC: Smithsonian.
27. Herz, John (1950) Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma, World Politics 2: 157-80.
28. Hitchens, Christopher (2007) God is Not Great. New York: Hachette.
29. Hopkins, Keith (1980) Taxes and Trade in the Roman Empire (200 BC-AD 400), Journal of Roman Studies 70: 101-25.
30. Ibn Khaldun (1958) The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History. New York: Pantheon.
31. Jervis, Robert (1978) Cooperation under the Security Dilemma, World Politics 30: 167-214.
32. Keeley, Lawrence (1996) War before Civilization. New York: Oxford University Press.
33. Keen, Ian (1982) How Some Murngin Men Marry Ten Wives, Man 17: 620-42.
34. LeBlanc, Steven with Katherine Register (2003) Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful Noble Savage. New York: St Martin's Press.
35. Levy, Jack (1989) The Causes of War: A Review of Theories and Evidence, in P. Tetlock, Jo L. Husbands, Robert Jervis, Paul C. Stern and Charles Tilly (eds) Behavior, Society and Nuclear War, pp. 209-333. New York: Oxford University Press.
36. Low, Dobbi (1979) Sexual Selection and Human Ornamentation, in N. Chagnon and W. Irons (eds) Evolutionary Biology and Human Social Behavior, pp. 462-87. North Scituate, MA: Duxbury.
37. Mann, Michael (1988) States, Ancient and Modern, in M. Mann, States, War and Capitalism, pp. 33-72. Oxford: Blackwell.
38. Martin, Daniel (1997) Does Christianity Cause War? Oxford: Oxford University Press.
39. Maslow, Abraham (1970) Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper.
40. Mearsheimer, John (2001) The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. New York: Norton.
41. Mercer, Jonathan (1996) Reputation and International Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
42. Modelski, George (2001) Evolutionary World Politics, in W. Thompson (ed.) Evolutionary Interpretations of World Politics, pp. 16-29. New York: Routledge.
43. Morgenthau, Hans (1961) Politics among Nations. New York: Knopf.
44. O'Neill, Barry (1999) Honor, Symbols and War. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
45. Peirce, Leslie (1993) The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire. New York: Oxford University Press.
46. Ridley, Matt (1994) The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature. New York: Macmillan.
47. Ridley, Matt (1996) The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Viking.
48. Rosen, Stephen (2005) War and Human Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
49. Rotberg, R. and T. Rabb (eds) (1989) The Origins and Prevention of Major Wars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
50. Schwartz, Regina (1997) The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
51. Schweller, Randall (1994) Bandwagoning for Profit: Bringing the Revisionist State Back In, International Security 19(1): 72-107.
52. Schweller, Randall (1996) Neorealism's Status-Quo Bias: What Security Dilemma?, Security Studies 5(3): 90-121.
53. Snyder, Jack (1991) Myths of Empire. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
54. Southern, Pat and Karen Dixon (1996) The Late Roman Army. London: Batsford.
55. Stark, Rodney (1996) The Rise of Christianity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
56. Stark, Rodney (2001) One God: Historical Consequences of Monothesim. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
57. Sterling-Folker, Jennifer (2001) Evolutionary Tendencies in Realist and Liberal IR Theory, in W. Thompson (ed.) Evolutionary Interpretations of World Politics, ch. 4. New York: Routledge.
58. Suganami, Hidemi (1996) On the Causes of War. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
59. Symons, Ronald (1979) The Evolution of Human Sexuality. New York: Oxford University Press.
60. Thayer, Bradley (2000) Bringing in Darwin: Evolutionary Theory, Realism, and International Politics, International Security 25(2): 124-53.
61. Thayer, Bradley (2004) Darwin and International Relations: On the Evolutionary Origins of War and Ethnic Conflict. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press.
62. Thompson, W. (ed.) (2001) Evolutionary Interpretations of World Politics. New York: Routledge.
63. Thornhill, Randy and Craig Palmer (2000) A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
64. Tooby, John and Leda Cosmides (1992) The Psychological Foundations of Culture, in L. Cosmides, J. Tooby and J. Barkow (eds) The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, pp. 19-136. New York: Oxford University Press.
65. van Creveld, Martin (2001) Men, Women and War. London: Cassell.
66. van Evera, Stephen (1999) Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
67. Walt, Stephen (1987) The Origins of Alliances. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
68. Waltz, Kenneth (1959) Man, the State, and War. New York: Columbia University Press.
69. Waltz, Kenneth (1979) Theory of International Politics. Reading, MA: Addison.
70. Wilson, David S. (2002) Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
71. Zakaria, Fareed (1992) Realism and Domestic Politics, International Security 17(1): 177-98.
72. Zerjal, Tatiana, Yali Xue, Giorgio Bertorelle, R. Spencer Wells, Weidong Bao, Suling Zhuet al.(2003) The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols, The American Journal of Human Genetics 72: 717-21.