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.

War in ecological perspective

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

The results of this cross-cultural study suggest that war may be caused mostly by a fear of nature and a partially resultant fear of others. A history of unpredictable natural disasters strongly predicts more war, as does socialization for mistrust (but less strongly). It seems that people, particularly in nonstate societies, may try to protect themselves against future disasters by going to war to take resources from enemies.

Resource Unpredictability, Mistrust, and War A Cross-Cultural Study

This article critically assesses recent interpretations of premodern defensive architecture and militaristic themes in the archaeological record, using the Andes as a case study. While archaeologists have proposed intriguing alternative hypotheses that call into question the existence of war in the past, much evidence for conflict has been incautiously dismissed. This stance has seriously skewed our understanding of the development of premodern societies. It is suggested here that because archaeologists underutilize ethnographic and historical evidence, the architecture of premodern defenses is poorly understood and many arguments used to dismiss military interpretations are incorrect. These misperceptions are addressed with empirical observations based upon known analogies from ethnography and history. The problematic dichotomy of ritual battle and real war is discussed, and the article concludes with a reassessment of the evidence for warfare in a few controversial Andean contexts in terms of more relia...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/425660

Interpreting Conflict in the Ancient Andes

The nature of global change in the Pacific Basin is poorly known compared to other parts of the world. "Climate, Environment, and Society in the Pacific during the Last Millennium" describes the climate changes that occurred in the Pacific during the last millennium and discusses how these changes controlled the broad evolution of human societies, typically filtered by the effects of changing sea level and storminess on food availability and interaction. Covering the entire period since AD 750 in the Pacific, this book describes the influences of climate change on environments and societies during the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, focusing on the 100-year transition between these a period of rapid change known as the AD 1300 Event.This book discusses the societal effects of climate and sea-level change, as well as the evidence for externally-driven societal change. It synthesizes how climate change has driven environmental change and societal change in the Pacific Basin. It contains a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the evidence for climate, environmental, and societal change, supported by a full list of references.

Climate, Environment and Society in the Pacific during the Last Millennium

From a behavioral ecology perspective, all forms of warfare are instances of collective aggression perpetrated predominantly by coalitions of young men. Such coalitions are manifestations of cross-cultural sex differences in aggressive behavior and may be conceptualized as a form of intrasexual competition, occasionally to obtain mates, but more often to acquire resources for the attraction and retention of mates. All societies have young males, yet wars are discrete events that can take place even after long periods of peace. Therefore, an additional factor is needed to explain the episodic nature of the phenomenon. We have proposed (Mesquida and Wiener, 1996) that the most reliable factor in explaining episodes of coalitional aggression is the relative abundance of young males. In this article, we present additional evidence to that effect. The ratio of the number of men ages 15 to 29 years of age versus men 30 and older in a population appears to be associated with the occurrence and severity of conflicts as measured by the number of war casualties. A series of analyses of demographic and war casualty data indicates that the relative prevalence of young men consistently accounts for more than one third of the variance in severity of conflicts.

War in ecological perspective

Citations

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

Resource Unpredictability, Mistrust, and War A Cross-Cultural Study

Interpreting Conflict in the Ancient Andes

Climate, Environment and Society in the Pacific during the Last Millennium

Male Age Composition and Severity of Conflicts

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Resource Unpredictability, Mistrust, and War A Cross-Cultural Study

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