Anthropology of Conflict Research Paper

1. Goals Of An Anthropological Theory Of Conflict

An anthropological theory of conflict can

(a) Contribute to the explanation of violence. Conflict is, however, not the only element which will contribute to an explanation of violence. Violence may, for example, be needed as a strong symbolic marker for ritual purposes. And it has to be underlined against a popular perception of ‘conflict’ that not every conflict is violent.

(b) It can contribute to a theory of the attraction or displacement of emotions. The hatred against foes, for example, is not something natural but is an outcome of specific constructions of conflict.

(c) The theory of conflict competes with culturalist approaches as an explanation of social cohesion. Forms of conflict regulation can reduce the relative conflict intensity between persons and, thus, create their allegiance to the system or organization which provides for this conflict regulation.

(d) It contributes essentially to a theory of social evolution. The ways by which a society regulates conflict operate also as means for the selection of alternatives for its future.

2. The History Of Anthropological Research On Conflict

Anthropological research on conflict is a history of many hopes lost and few results kept. It was a classic conviction (going back to Thomas Hobbes) that a ‘primitive’ or ‘natural’ state of society would be characterized by omnipresent violence. Konrad Lorenz (1966) proposed a biological paradigm insisting on a genetic programme for violence which Ashley Montagu (1968) convincingly opposed. We find a broad variance of behavior toward potentially conflictuous situations in all different forms of human social organization. If something is encoded, it is both a potential for aggression on the one hand, and a potential for flight and conflict avoidance on the other.

Sahlins’ (1961) study of the Nigerian Tiv, of ‘lineages of predatory expansion,’ suggested to some that genealogical closeness generally made violent conflict less probable. Barth’s (1959) study on Swat Pathans has shown, however, that this pattern cannot be generalized, not even to lineage societies. Confrontation may follow from alliances against one’s closest competitors, even if they are close relatives.

Types of violent conflict had been associated with different ‘cultural levels’ even by Malinowski (1941). It was argued that on the first levels there would be less violence. Other authors (e.g., Chagnon 1968) assumed for these societies a specific type of resource com-petition as a strong motive for conflict (cf. against these Hallpike 1973). Helbling (1999), however, has shown that the occurrence and intensity of conflict is not directly correlated with different types of social organization, but rather to population density within a given type of social organization. Thus swidden agriculturalists or hunter-gatherers with a high population density may also show a high incidence of conflicts.

Marcel Mauss (1923 4) built his theory of exchange (‘the gift’) in order to provide a theory of peace. Relations of reciprocity which serve as a basis for exchange including market exchange are, however, compatible with relations of warring. Polanyi (1968) showed this for the seasonal warfare of the kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa.

For a long time one of the most prominent anthropological theories of conflict was Max Gluck-man’s (1956) theory of cross-cutting ties which would hinder the outbreak of conflict because the potential foes were always also indirectly linked by alliances. Hallpike (1977, cf. Schlee 2000) has shown, however, that cross-cutting ties may as well work the other way round, as an organization of competition, thus fostering conflict.

A stable achievement of anthropology is Sumner’s (1911) ethnocentrism theory. The organization of violence requires the definition of boundaries. Leach (1965) added dryly that killing is the most powerful tool of classification—for the survivors.

Another result, not so readily identified with a single name, is the perception that factors of social organization have a higher impact upon successful strategies of violent conflict than pure technology. Although early historical work insisted strongly upon the effect of the arrow, the warrior mounted on horseback and firing arms, or even more so bomber aircraft, later research, however, stressed rather the organization of access to technology, the transmission of knowledge and training of skills and, last but not least, the social organization of risk perception. Violent conflict re-quires that risks are played down against potential benefits.

3. Methodological Problems Of Conflict Research

That a human action is categorized as conflictive requires that it fulfills in its form some pre-established patterns. That pattern perception also means that contingent action without conflictive intention is likely to be interpreted as conflictive if it is harmful and if a meaning may be interpreted into it.

Societies tend to present conflict as unforeseeable or even chaotic. Sometimes conflict is even excluded from a society’s self-representation. Conflict may be characterized as evil, or as a psychological and not as a social phenomenon. The less conflict is ‘normalized’ in institutional forms of low intensity, the more difficulties will fieldworkers face when trying to learn something about existing conflicts or the pattern of their organization and resolution. The existence of conflicts may just be denied, or existent conflicts within a group may be hidden behind other conflicts with outsiders.

4. Conflict As Embedded Social Action

Anthropology has challenged the popular perspective of conflict as chaotic and disorderly. The image of chaos is, however, based upon experience: Successful conflict management in the interests of the actors requires surprise, which may create the impression of unforeseeability. Conflicts follow, however, socially ordered paths. Rather like in the case of avalanches, the exact moment and the intensity are difficult to foresee, but one knows in a given environment where they may happen and which path they will follow. Anthropological research has shown that even violent conflict follows culturally encoded patterns, has institutionalized forms, and is controlled and directed in its appearance. This has been called social embedding (Elwert et al. 1999).

Embedding is the ensemble of moral values, proper norms, and institutional arrangements which set limits to a specific type of action and make simultaneously the outcome of these actions calculable. The fact that conflict has both controlled and foreseeable aspects and an element of surprise creates a hybrid structure. Therefore one may speak of partial embedding.

Conflict situations are characterized by a relatively high autonomy of time use for one of the actors. The outcome in conflicts is unforeseeable in respect of the relative gains and losses. Society, on the other hand, creates foreseeability through routines and norms which channel the realization of conflict. Norms as a means of channeling conflict have a stronger effect than just routines, but are also much less flexible than routines. It is, therefore, inherent to the character of social norms that they will be ‘underlived’: One should therefore not expect norms regulating social conflict to be followed one hundred percent.

The concept of norms allows us to differentiate two types of conflict: normative conflict vs. actor conflict. In the former a person or a group of persons clashes with a norm when violating other persons’ or groups’ rights. In the latter individuals or groups clash and try to harm each other in a field of action which has normatively defined boundaries but where neither side can claim norms protecting its goals.

5. Forms Of Actor Conflict

The multitude of concepts used in order to describe conflicts (war, genocide, competition, feud, legal battle etc.) can be ordered in a field with four poles (see Fig. 1). To speak of poles means that the empirical cases and emic categories may be positioned between these abstract ordering categories. The criteria are more or less violence, and stronger or weaker embedding. The category ‘warring’ includes both feud and war. A war is a violent conflict which includes physical risks but is limited by some rules. A feud is a violent conflict with stronger embedding and in general also less violence than wars. It is defined as a violent conflict where the potential victims, the place of conflict, the time of conflict, or the weapons allowed may be the matter of a binding agreement. A necessary condition for the definition of feud is that the means to end the conflict is part of the agreement. Feuds and competitions cannot be clearly separated, as all these categories have a fluid transition. Competitions, however, should rather be seen as being part of procedures. Procedurally organized competition, measured in abstract parameters (e.g., money or speed), may allow for an almost continuous conflict without violence.

Whereas in legal studies procedures are defined by a specific—ritual—form, anthropology as a comparative science cannot only rely upon conceptualizations defined by the actors. An anthropological concept of procedure, therefore, has to take up suggestions formulated by Niklas Luhmann (1969). A procedure is distinct from daily interaction by its form and/ordered sequence of action. Elections, court cases, and auctions have also been seen as conflict resolution procedures. During a procedure some power differentials are suspended. It may, for example, be excluded that a stronger person physically harms a weaker person during the procedure. A procedure has an outcome with consequences in action. Who will profit from the outcome is, in principle, open. It should be called procedure only when it ends in a conclusion which has meaningful consequences for action.

The conclusive procedure has to be distinguished from the pending procedure: something which has the ritual form of the procedure but which never comes to conclusions which are consequential. Thus, the pending procedure is not a way of conflict resolution but a way of conflict perpetuation. Pending procedures can have a high annoyance potential and are rather forms of warring with reduced violence.

Destruction (e.g., genocide) is distinguished from warring as the goal is the total annihilation of the other. There is no agreement which binds both partners together. Nevertheless, the ways the other side is destroyed follow a culturally encoded pattern. There is no human society which allows killing that does not simultaneously have some rules for ‘proper’ killing.

Avoidance is a concept rarely included in theories of conflict (Radcliffe-Brown 1952), but to have a com-plete conceptual structure we need to consider also this ‘zero-case.’ In some societies avoidance is the dominant mode of dealing with conflict (see Elwert 2001 on the Byalebe of West Africa). In a situation where avoidance is dominant it is more probable that people switch to destruction than that they switch to procedure.

6. The Normative Conflict

A normative conflict is a conflict in which a person’s behavior toward another person or to a thing, which is meaningful to a person, conflicts with a norm. In this context, norm is meant in the strict sense; it requires both monitoring and sanction. Prescriptive or prohibitive formulas without a sanction probability should be considered moral values, not norms. This definition is different from those given within societies. There are, in general, more prescriptive or prohibitive formulas which are considered ‘norms’ than those whose infraction is really prosecuted.

The monitoring is necessary in order to create a sanction potential. Monitoring is a sensitive element of this process. In some societies monitoring is restricted to specialists or to persons with a recognized claim to competence (police, priests, soothsayers).

Reactions to norm infraction range over a wide spectrum. In state societies the dominant mode of reaction is typically the sanction by a central specialized apparatus, the coercion instance. Another solution is the ‘sanction-service.’ In state societies this may appear parallel to the centralized apparatus; it is then often considered to be illegitimate, for example as a Mafia (Krauthausen 1997). In stateless societies there may be specialists for sanction services, organized as corporations, age grades, or secret societies. A third option is self-help, which may take a form similar to feuding (Spittler 1980). Self-help requires some kind of broader agreement that a norm has been transgressed. This can be a court decision which then legitimates the persons considered as victims of the norm infraction to take action or to hire specialists for this purpose (cf. Wurth 2001 on shari’a courts in Yemen). A fourth option, which again is a zero-option, is ignoring the conflict. If there are no strong central instances or sanction services available and if the dividing line between the actor conflict and normative conflict is blurred, this is a common solution.

Sanctions are not only physical sanctions (as corporeal harm or mutilation, restriction of movement, or material and economic fines) but also loss of status or attribution of negative reputation. The reputation sanction is very common in those contexts where a person can hardly escape contact with those who share the negative evaluation of the culprit. Since societies are never homogeneous, subgroups may not share specific norms (Pospisil 1958). The reputation sanction is then limited in its efficiency. The redundancy of overlapping reference groups, each with a sanction capacity, can cope with that (Elwert 1980).

The normative conflict is a two-tier process. The first element is the infraction, the second is the sanction process. That the infraction is an infraction is, how-ever, only definitely clear after the sanction process. The working of the sanction process may be expeditive (e.g., lynching) or procedural. The expeditive reaction is based upon a single decision or a turning point from when on a plurality of single decisions is valid enough for action. All human societies—not only the ‘modern’ ones—know, however, the advantages of procedural forms of sanctioning over the expeditive ones. Truth may be a matter of disagreement, and the loss or investment of time characteristic of procedures may allow information to be validated and emotions to cool down. Procedures may, however, also be used for the alternative purpose of steering the multiplicity of perceptions into just one established truth, and to stir up the emotions in such a way that sanctions become more probable or more violent.

7. The Attraction And Displacement Of Emotions

To live with emotions and act upon them requires some societal agreement. The popular notion that conflict is motivated by emotions does not hold against anthropological evidence—at least insofar as recurring conflicts are studied. People hardly react to emotions, but to assumed or perceived goals of action. The reaction in a conflict situation has higher strategic qualities if it is not based upon emotion but upon cool calculation. To ‘show’ emotions may, however, be very important in order to legitimate one’s action in a conflict situation, or in order to impress the adversary.

Actions in conflicts, however, can attract emotions. This is correlated with changes in the structure of relevance; it may help to concentrate resources to the conflict. Actor conflicts are strong attractors of emotion, even more so if violence is implied. In any procedural treatment of conflict, and especially in normative conflicts, emotions can be less intense. They may appear comparatively detached or displaced. A society which gives preference to normative conflicts and which privileges the procedural treatment allows for the displacement of emotions. The literary representation of conflict or sport competitions—a form of conflict with lesser implications to one’s personal life-goals—may then attract stronger emotions than those linked to lived conflict.

8. Conflict Motives

Motives to enter conflicts can be grouped into three broad categories: honor, power and material gain. Each of these three general motives has its own definition of who won in a conflict situation. What, for example, an outside observer may see as an economic loss, may appear to the insiders as winning prestige. In most cases, however, there are several motives over-lapping, and this can make it difficult to define who won in a given situation. To distinguish between these three categories of motives is, however, helpful in order to perceive different consequences of their priority for the respective organization of a conflict. If honor is the major goal—and even more, if honor may be even gained by a dead person declared to be a hero—then the propensity to risk increases. This may create patterns of recurrent warring, since new generations need new prestige (cf. Evans-Pritchard 1957 on Azande warfare). In the case that power, the control over persons, is the goal, then the end of the conflict has to be such that the winning side retains a coercion potential over the losing side. If material gain is the goal, then it may be reinvested, in a self-perpetuating process, to gain even more.

Systems of blood feud or vengeance are often dominated by a system of attribution of honor and shame. To kill a person may create honor. If this killing is not retaliated, this creates shame. Vengeance ‘washes away the shame’ and reestablishes honor (Schwandner 1999).

Behind a smokescreen of ideological motives, war- lords exhibit a very clear priority for motives of economic gain, whether the means are peaceful or violent. This entrepreneurial activity creates a market without the typical embedding for peaceful markets, a market of violence (Elwert 1999). Whether warlords subjectively give priority to noneconomic goals or not, they need weapons and soldiers (even if they call them volunteers) in order to reproduce their activity. The gains from robbery, blackmail, hostage-taking, customs and trade (especially in valuable items such as precious metals or stones, drugs, and weapons) have to cover expenses for the violence and generate a profit.

Group conflicts may originate in divergences of interest between the groups or they may be produced by the construction of such contradictions. In the latter case the purpose is a strategy which aims primarily upon the control of power within that group, an endostrategic mobilization. In such a process the outside conflict is heated up in order to homogenize the group, to push forward new norms or structures of leadership. Boundaries to ‘the others’ are created or become accentuated. Endostrategic mobilization is typically the instrument of would-be elites who want to gain power and therefore portray the actual elite as persons who do not sufficiently defend collective interests, or as agents of outside forces.

9. Conflict Regulation And Cohesion

It seems at first sight paradoxical to associate the social organization of conflict positively with social cohesion. Since anthropologists no longer believe that there is a natural harmony among human beings, however, we cannot escape the notion that the normalization and institutionalization of conflict in specific forms is an essential condition of social cohesion. Divergence of interest is omnipresent among human beings. If there is no channeled way to express it, then random conflict and—even more so— avoidance reduce chances for cooperation. Cooper-ation requires not that conflict is repressed but that it finds predictive ways of expression. Less destructive forms of conflict and especially forms which maintain both sides’ interests in form of compromise ease the readiness to enter conflicts. They do so because the lower risk threatens less the conditions of cooperation during or after the conflict. Thus, an institutionalization of conflict may increase conflict incidence if conflict becomes less violent within the respective entity.

A social group with a common reference is not necessarily a ‘conflict group,’ a group capable of acting collectively against one other. A conflict group requires an internal sanction capacity. Without it, collective action would be undermined by freeriders who want to enjoy the benefits of a victory but avoid the risk of the conflict itself. The creation of such a conflict capacity through an internal sanction system is an important indicator of a mobilization potential for civil strife and civil war.

We can observe that we-groups, organizations, or societies tend to reduce the violence of conflict within their respective boundaries. But this tendency does not create a general pattern. As cooperation creates resources, material or immaterial (such as honor), these resources may motivate further conflict. Thus, the violence of conflict within groups may be stronger than the violence between them. As long as these conflicts do not turn into a systematic destruction of a given subgroup, the entity’s cohesion may be maintained nevertheless.

The economist Albert Hirschman (1994) has observed something about modern societies which probably can be generalized to other societies as well: Group cohesion is strongly correlated with the access to accepted modes of conflict regulation. Shared cultural values, even if they are as emotionally binding as language or religion, do less to explain social cohesion than the presence of institutions which appear to give a fair chance to realize one’s interests with reduced destructive risk. From an anthropological point of view one has to add that procedures create a higher cohesion than other channeled ways of living a conflict. Hirschman has further shown that those procedures which favor more-or-less solutions (incremental conflict resolution in our terminology) have a better chance to create cohesion than those with either–or structure (alternative conflict resolution). The compromise maintains elements of interest of both sides. This eases the identification with the outcome of the conflict regulation. This perspective has been applied in an anthropological perspective to modern nations. It could be shown in one case that irrespective of cultural parameters such as language or religion, it is the deprivation of access to normatively regulated institutions of conflict resolution which further processes of fission and separatism (Elwert 1997). For African states it has been shown that the classical ignition spark for civil war is the arbitrary use of violence by state agents (Wirz 1982).

10. Institutions Of Conflict Regulation As Central Determinants For Processes Of Social Transformation

Ralf Dahrendorf (1954) has argued that the forms of conflict regulation are central for the difference be-tween paths of social transformation. The normative structure most often (but neither always nor exclusively) ensures a society’s reproduction and its same-ness over time (‘identity’). Social change requires breaks in the reproduction of sameness. It can, however, not proceed by ‘anything goes,’ since the end of reproduction would undermine further change. Stimuli for change, whether they are endogenous or exogenous, have to be treated as alternatives to something, and not as unrelated events. Alternatives are never abstract, they imply persons’ intentions. This gives the organization of social conflict the key role in social change to conceive and select alternatives.

Societies which give preference to the normative conflict increase the foreseeability of one’s own actions. As long as one follows the norms, the risk of conflict is reduced. But this produces overall a higher conflict-processing capacity. There is less relatively randomized conflict and thus more possibility to engage into ordered conflict. A higher conflict-processing capacity means more variation. If the society uses these institutions in order to select not only winners and losers, but also in order to select elements of social order, forms of consumption, and new products of human activity, then innovation can gain acceptance. It is the higher selectivity which reduces the fear of new elements of social order.

It cannot be stated, however, that such a society would be ‘more highly developed’ than others. Depending upon the type of social environment, different types of conflict regulation appear as optimal adaptations (Hallpike 1973). Avoidance-biased societies are among the most expansive types of social organizations in an environment characterized by raiding, especially slave raiding. Avoidance produces a high dispersion and thus hinders the population concentrations necessary to make slave raiding a profitable enterprise, e.g., in some regions of the Sahel and the Sudan. At the margins of aggressive imperialisms, feud-biased societies appear to be one of the most stable arrangements. These societies keep internally a high level of warring competence which act as deterrent or repellent to these imperialist forces—as can be shown in the case of the Caucasus or some regions of the Balkans. If societies interpenetrate each other by means of a reciprocal competition on their markets, a high innovation capacity gives an edge to this competition. Procedure-biased societies appear to be especially strong in this respect, e.g., some medieval oriental societies and some modern Western ones.

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