Stephen Pinker and the long peace: alliance, deterrence and decline

Abstract

It is now widely accepted, at least among academic students of war, that there has been a great and generally benign transformation in the character of war. The sort of big wars involving the world's greatest powers, those that in practice or in prospect dominated international affairs from the rise of Napoleon to the collapse of communism, are now considered to be essentially obsolescent. But to what extent is that really true?

Notes

¹ Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman is Professor of War Studies and Vice-Principal at King's College London. He was awarded the KCMG (Knight Commander of St Michael and St George) in 2003. He was appointed in June 2009 to serve as a member of the official inquiry into Britain and the 2003 Iraq War. Email: [email protected]

² Stephen Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined, (London: Penguin Books, 2011). Other key contributors to this debate have been Joshua Goldstein, Winning the War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide, (New York: Dutton, 2011) and Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (Oxford: OUP, 2008). See also Azar Gat, “Is War Declining and Why?”, Journal of Peace Research 50, no. 2 (2013). A collection of pre-Pinker assessments is found in The Waning of Major War: Theories and Debates, ed. Raimo Väyrynen (London: Routledge, 2006). The post-Pinker debate is assessed in a number of contributions, including one by Pinker, to a symposium edited by Nils Petter Gelditsch, “The Decline of War – The Main Issues”, International Studies Quarterly 15, no. 3 (2013).

³ Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature, 50. Note, however, that this is based on including only the deaths of combatants, put at some 40 million, which is a lower number than that generally used for just the Second World War, which reaches 80 million on some estimates. Once one includes war related deaths from such causes as genocide and consequential famine and disease then the percentage rises to three percent, which does not suggest such great progress.

⁴ Human Security Report Project, Human Security Report 2013: The Decline in Global Violence: Evidence, Explanation, and Contestation (Vancouver: Human Security Press, 2013). A major source of information on conflicts since 1946 is the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). http://www.pcr.uu.se/research/ucdp/. For a report on their findings see Lotta Themnér and Peter Wallensteen 2013. “Armed conflict, 1946–2012.”Journal of Peace Research 50, no. 4: 509–521.

⁵ Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature, 361.

⁶ Ibid., 672.

⁷ Pinker takes the term from Norbert Elias who wrote of a “civilizing process” in a two volume book published in German on the eve of the Second World. See Norbert Elias, The Civilizing process: Sociogenetic amd Psychogenetic Investigations, edited by Eric Dunning, John Goudsblom & Stephen Mennell, (Malden. MA: Blackwell, 2000).

⁸ Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime”, in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 169–191.

⁹ For an example of the second view see John Mearsheimer The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003).

¹⁰ Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature, 672.

¹¹Human Security Report 2013, 36–7.

¹² Jack S. Levy and William R Thompson, “The Decline of War?” Multiple Trajectories and Diverging Trends', International Studies Review 15 (2013): 411–16.

¹³ Cited by Bruno Tertrais, “The Demise of ares: The end of war as we know it?”, Washington Quarterly 35, no. 3 (Summer 2012), 17. To be fair to Tertrais his article is generally supportive of the Pinker thesis.

¹⁴ See Thomas Otte, July Crisis: The World's descent into War, Summer 1914, (Cambridge: Cambridge, University Press, 1914).

¹⁵ John Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries Into the History of the Cold War, (London: OUP, 1989). This first appeared as “The Long Peace: Elements of Stability in the Postwar International System” International Security 10, no. 4 (Spring 1986).

¹⁶ C. P. Snow, “The Moral Un-Neutrality of Science,” American Association for the Advancement of Science, (1960).

¹⁷ Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature, 268.

¹⁸ John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War, (New York: Basic Books, 1990).

¹⁹ Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature, 216.

²⁰ Ibid., 250, 253.

²¹ Denis Healey, The Time of My life (London: Michael Joseph, 1989), 243.

²² Bradley Thayer, “Humans, Not Angels: Reasons to Doubt the Decline of War Thesis” International Studies Review 15 (2013): 405–411.

²³ Ibid., 411.

²⁴ Ibid., 257.

²⁵ On the role of war in creating strong states (as prelude to peace) see Ian Morris, War: What Is It Good For? The Role of Conflict in Civilisation, From Primates to Robots, (London: Profile Books, 2014). On the state's latent violence see Benjamin Ginsberg, The Value of Violence, (New York: Prometheus books, 2013).

²⁶ It is important to note that the two types of war interact, despite the tendency to treat them as separate for statistical and analytical purposes.

²⁷ Virginia Page Fortna, Does Peacekeeping Work? Shaping Belligerents' Choices After Civil War, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

²⁸ Håvard Hegre et al, “Predicting Armed Conflict, 2010–2050”, International Studies Quarterly 57 (2013): 250–270.

²⁹http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/the-future-of-war-is-looking-bleak-8344462.html