Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of interest in indigenous, traditional and customary approaches to peace-making in the context of civil wars. Supporters claim that indigenous approaches to...

Indigenous Peace-Making Versus the Liberal Peace

Most interstate wars are fought or begin between neighbors. This relationship between contiguity and war has long been known, but ignored within peace research. The major reason for this is that it has been seen as essentially a trivial relationship, reflecting the opportunity for war rather than the real underlying cause of war. Recent work on territory and the issues over which wars are fought has begun to question that interpretation. This article maintains that the clustering of war among neighbors may be theoretically significant. It presents a territorial explanation of the relationship and juxtaposes it with the proximity and interaction explanations. Each of the three explanations is appraised in terms of explicit criteria to see which is the most adequate. Ultimately, however, each explanation must specify a set of tests that would falsify it, and this article does so for the territorial explanation. The article concludes with some implications for peace in the post-Cold War era if the theoretical explanation is correct.

Why Do Neighbors Fight? Proximity, Interaction, or Territoriality:

In this essay we consider four criticisms of ecological anthropology: its overemphasis on energy, its inability to explain cultural phenomena, its preoccupation with static equilibria, and its lack of clarity about the appropriate units of analysis. Recognizing that some of these criticisms may not be justified, we nevertheless point to parallel concerns in ecology. Further, we ask whether new directions indicated by some ecologists might be appropriate paths for future work in ecological anthropology. A central theme is the desirability of focusing on environmental problems and how people respond to them. The kind of environmental problems we are especially concerned with here are those constituting hazards to the lives of the organisms experiencing them. In other words, we are particularly concerned with problems that carry the risk of morbidity or mortality, the risk of losing an "existential game" in which success consists simply in staying in the game (82, 85; cf 80, cited in 78). Our focus upon hazards and responses to them emerges partly from consideration of neo-Darwinian selection theory. As Colinvaux (22, p. 499) notes: "Selection . . . chooses from among individuals those which are best adapted to avoid the hazards of life at that time and place." Our focus reflects also the new concern of biologists such as Slobodkin (81, 82, 85) with the actual processes of responding to hazards or environmental perturbations rather than with formal alterations in hypothetical genetic systems. Related also is the emerging view among medical scientists that health is a "continuing property, potentially measurable by the individual's ability to rally from insults, whether chemical, physical, infectious, psychological, or social" (7, 8; cf 78). At least some and perhaps all of the insults referred to in the preceding quotation can be subsumed in our category of hazards; even social and psychological insults may evoke physiological "stress" and disease (60, 79) as well as psychological and behavioral adaptive strategies (99). A further influence on us has been the recent proliferation of research and thinking on problems of human response to "natural hazards" in geography (19,

New Directions in Ecology and Ecological Anthropology

Ecological approaches within maritime anthropology are reviewed, particularly those concerned with resource management in fisheries and characterized by certain assumptions of systems ecology. The systems ecology approach used in anthropology exhibits certain problems, including the assumption of equilibria, the tendency to restrict analyses to immediate and “natural” environmental relations, and the reification of analytical systems. Under the rubric of “people ecology,” data from research among commercial fishermen of Fogo Island, Newfoundland, are used to explore an alternative that emphasizes people rather than systems as starting points for study, and underscores the role of larger social and political processes in affecting local man — environment relations.

Systems ecology, people ecology, and the anthropology of fishing communities

Efforts to develop a foundation for scientiac knowledge that would unite the natural and social sciences date to the classical Greeks. Given recent advances in genetics and evolutionary theory, this goal may be closer than ever.1 The human genome project has generated much media attention as scientists reveal genetic causes of diseases and some aspects of human behavior. And although advances in evolutionary theory may have received less attention, they are no less signiacant. Edward O. Wilson, Roger Masters, and Albert Somit, among others, have led the way in using evolutionary theory and social science to produce a synthesis for understanding human behavior and social phenomena.2 This synthesis posits that human behavior is simultaneously and inextricably a result of evolutionary and environmental causes. The social sciences, including the study of international politics, may build upon this scholarship.3 In this article I argue that evolutionary theory can improve the realist theory of international politics. Traditional realist arguments rest principally on one of two discrete ultimate causes, or intellectual foundations. The arst is Reinhold Niebuhr’s argument that humans are evil. The second is grounded in the work

Andrew Peter Vayda

Papers

War in ecological perspective : persistence, change, and adaptive processes in three oceanian societies