Peace and Non
iolence: Anthropological Aspects
Peace and Nonviolence: Anthropological
Aspects
1. Definitions
The phrase ‘peace studies’ refers generically to studies
of the dynamics of ‘peace,’ and specifically to the
natural history of ‘peaceable’ or ‘nonviolent’ peoples.
The two main foci, which overlap significantly, are
(a) the analysis of particular conflict-resolution tech-
niques, and (b) the holistic study of peaceable peoples.
1.1 Problems of Definition
The terms ‘peace’ and ‘nonviolence’ are relative, not
absolute, referring to adaptations which are often
transitory rather than to essential natures which per-
sist indefinitely. Although researchers use the words
‘nonviolence’ and ‘peace’ as rough synonyms, the
former creates methodological problems. How to
observe and analyse the absence of violence? It might
be useful to reserve this term for ideals such as
Gandhi’s ahimsa or related techniques such as the
nonviolent protest of the 1970s ‘Peace Movement’ of
Europe and America, from which peace studies arose
and borrowed the term.
Likewise, in most Indo-European languages ‘peace’
is a null category. When you have no violence, you
have peace. Linguistically, violence is the norm.
Peaceable peoples are ‘nonviolent’ (Ashley Montagu)
or ‘low-conflict’ (Marc Ross). It is difficult for students
of peace to avoid drifting into the null construction of
peace which pervades the cultures within which they
live their lives.
By contrast, Semai, a peaceable Malaysian people,
use the term slamad to refer to a condition of security
and serenity which they nurture with the same zeal
that Indo-Europeans pursue wealth and happiness. In
Semai construals, slamad is normal, ‘non-slamad’ the
null category. Recent peace studies stress the dis-
tinction between ‘negative peace’ (refraining from
violence out of fear) and ‘positive peace’ (maintaining
slamad out of love of peace). In this construction, both
forms of peace are activities rather than absences of
activity, involving conscious and unconscious ‘peace-
making’ rather than voids. Defeat involves an agent’s
act of surrender as well as another agent’s act of
conquest. ‘Peacemaking’ is thus the category of be-
haviors and social patterns on which peace studies
focus.
2. Why Not Study Peace?
2.1 The Ubiquity of Peace
Any survey of the literature will uncover hundreds of
articles on violence for every one on peace. Yet the
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most violent people spend most of their time in
humdrum peaceful activities: Eating, sleeping, talking,
daydreaming, scratching, and otherwise doing no
harm. Most people in the most violent societies, even
in wartime, spend their days in peaceful pursuits
(Nordstrom 1997). The life of a soldier in wartime
involves more hours of boredom than moments of
terror.
No wonder. Violence hurts, and individuals dislike
getting hurt. The possibility of counter-violence makes
violence self-limiting in a way that peace is not. People
prefer hurting those who, for whatever reason, cannot
retaliate. Domestic violence is probably the com-
monest form of violence cross-culturally, simply be-
cause perpetrators are relatively safe from retaliation
(Gelles and Straus 1988). Even then, when local values
justify violence, the way human perpetrators obfuscate
their actions by appealing to peace ideology reveals
their uneasiness with violence: they are ‘maintaining
law-and-order,’ ‘keeping the peace,’ ‘disciplining stu-
dents,’ or ‘teaching them a lesson.’
In evolutionary terms, that makes sense. Other
things being equal, organisms that avoid serious
fighting with peers are more likely to survive long
enough to produce fertile offspring than those that
usually win fights but risk counter-violence; i.e.,
peaceful organisms are fitter. Moreover, violence
disrupts cooperative activities that enhance the fitness
of social organisms like humans. Such disruption is a
common theme in nonWestern peoples’ reconciliation
ceremonies: if we fight, who will help to harvest the
crops? Fear of disruptive violence rationalizes human
rulers’ stamping out or severely limiting freelance
violence, and monopolizing violence for themselves
and their state. As a result, throughout human history
peace prevails, in most places, most of the time. Peace
is normal and normative. Violence is abnormal and
disruptive.
2.2 Reasons Not to Study Peace
So why does peace get so little attention, even from
social scientists? One reason is the definition of peace
as an absence, discussed above. There seem to be
several others. One probable reason is evolutionary:
Violence threatens fitness. Successful organisms attend
to threats. Violence is a problem; peace is unprob-
lematic. So peace remains in the background, and
violence is dramatic. Unsurprisingly, the most popular
account of paleoanthropic violence is by a dramatist,
not a paleoanthropologist, primatologist or pre-
historian (Ardrey 1961). The very prevalence of peace
makes violence salient: The exception, ‘man bites dog,’
makes news. Normal conditions do not.
Answers to the question of how to live in peace have
potential political consequences, which might affect
the lives not only of this generation but of generations
to come. In the 1990s, over 2 million children died in
wars, 6 million were seriously injured or permanently

disabled, a million orphaned, and 12 million made
homeless. Children are the main victims of enslave-
ment and domestic violence.
Awareness that research may be consequential can
make it teleological, arriving at conclusions which
reflect researchers’ political predilections. Hobbes, an
early student of violence and peace, deliberately
excluded empirical considerations from his work,
relying instead on an a priori method which he felt
derived from Euclidian geometry, and concluding that
the political despotism of his time was a counter-
violence needed to control the freelance violence which
would otherwise ruin human life. Similarly, peace
studies evolved from New Left political activism in the
1970s. A large number of peace theorists are pacificists
or members of quietist religious groups like Quakers
or Mennonites. Many are explicitly political, arguing
that, since they feel peace requires respect for human
rights and social justice, anthropology should espouse
such causes. Pedagogy is a central concern.
The resulting atmosphere may alienate students
who hold traditional social science notions of ‘ob-
jectivity.’ Moreover, this sort of partisanship generates
equally political responses by students of violence and
others for whom, as Max Weber warned might
happen, social science is the handmaiden of the
Establishment and the social controls that maintain it
in power. Social justice, say the reformers, will produce
(positive) peace. No, say the establishmentarians,
sometimes marching under the banner of objective
social science, you need the hangman and the Bomb
(negative peace).
Such politicization makes researching these topics
difficult: For example, anthropologists have been
reluctant to undertake (and funding agencies to
finance) studies on domestic abuse among indigenous
peoples, at least partly because the hegemonic liberal
ideology frames indigenous peoples as simple and
peaceful, and representing them otherwise might
exacerbate the difficulties they already face in finding
allies among more powerful peoples. In rebuttal,
opponents seem to be reviving the nineteenth-century
hegemonic representation of indigenous peoples as
savage and violent, an equally political representation
(e.g., Keeley 1996).
It may be impossible and even undesirable to
eliminate political concerns from research that is so
‘sensitive.’ It would be helpful to make them explicit,
as students of peace traditionally do. But scholars may
be unaware of the teleological concerns that bias their
results. Even researchers, after all, swim in their own
culture like fish, mostly unaware of how the medium
that supports them also affects how they perceive the
world.
A cognate difficulty is that discussions of peace-
ability often degenerate into speculations about ‘hu-
man nature,’ a Platonic essentialist concept which
serves more to terminate research than to stimulate it
(but cf. Boehm 2000). If people are ‘naturally’ violent,
Peace and Non
iolence: Anthropological Aspects
violence needs no explanation; if ‘naturally’ peaceable,
peace requires no further examination. Recent studies
such as Keeley’s (1996) suggest that violence has been
part of human societies since early in prehistory. There
may be no society in which violence has never
occurred. By the same token, there is no society in
which peace never occurs, in which the general rule is
a Hobbesian war of each against all; and no period in
prehistory or history at which no one lived in peace.
One of the most interesting studies of war describes
how, in the midst of all-pervasive violence, people
continue doggedly to construct peace (Nordstrom
1997). The half-empty glass is half-full (Boehm 2000),
and the decision on the question of human nature is
more likely to reflect the political sensibilities of the
researcher than the empirical data.
3. Styles in the Study of Peace
The two main foci of peace studies reflect the di-
chotomy between positive and negative notions of
peace. Although the sketch given in the previous
section of ‘establishmentarians’ versus ‘reformers’ is a
heuristic oversimplification of impulses which overlap
and may coexist within the same person, nevertheless
it is not completely inaccurate to see the establish-
mentarian impulse in the first focus and the reformist
in the second.
3.1 Conflict Resolution Studies
The first subfield is, at least implicitly, instrumental or
‘applied’ anthropology, reflecting governmental inter-
ests in international diplomacy and administrative
measures to reduce freelance violence, e.g., in the
school system. It comprises ‘conflict-resolution’ or
‘mediation’ studies of the sort emphasized by the
journal Peace and Conflict Studies—www.gmu.edu\
academic\pcs. In the United States, George Mason
University is a center for such studies. Since World
War II, conflict resolution studies in anthropology
have grown in tandem with their growth in psy-
chology, sociology, and political science. This upsurge
seems to be connected with the rise of UN ‘peace-
keeping’ efforts and interventions by the USA and
Western Europe in overseas conflicts. More recently,
the perceived rise of violence in the USA has led to
funding of ‘violence prevention programs,’ for
example, by the Justice Department. Most such
programs stress peaceful conflict resolution, some-
times purportedly modeled on ‘primitive customs.’
Most conflict resolution theory is a subset of game
theory models, in which participants try to maximize
benefits to themselves, and minimize their losses. The
ideal solution is ‘win–win,’ in which for each par-
ticipant the sum of the benefits outweighs the sum of
the losses. Ideally, participants arrive at a ‘rational’
11141
Peace and Non
iolence: Anthropological Aspects
resolution through reasonable (ideally numerate) dis-
cussion, perhaps with the help of mediators from
outside, trusted by both parties, experienced in me-
diation, and dedicated to resolving conflicts peace-
fully. The ‘anthropological’ character of conflict
resolution studies comes mostly from the attempt, in
the face of skepticism from other disciplines, to deploy
the concept of culture, and from the occasional choice
of ‘tribal’ peoples as subjects. In general, however, the
concerns and analytical techniques (e.g., cost–benefit
analysis) are indistinguishable from those of the other
social sciences.
Of course, as ‘conflict theorists’ have insisted since
Georg Simmel, conflict is ubiquitous and need not
produce violence. Conversely, conflict resolution is
neither necessary nor sufficient to produce peace (Fry
and Bjorkqvist 1997). Many nonWestern peoples
traditionally held interminable meetings explicitly to
resolve conflict. During these meetings, everyone got
to speak at length until participants were physically
and emotionally exhausted, and no one had any
unvoiced opinions. The conflict might remain, but
angry emotions dissipated and the conferees could
reconcile or agree to differ.
Another practical limitation is that most conflict
resolution techniques require that participants be
equals or equally subject to coercion by a power
greater than they are. But, as cost–benefit analysts of
domestic violence point out, violence is most likely to
occur when unpleasant consequences for the per-
petrator are negligible, i.e., when the parties are
unequal (Gelles and Straus 1988). Thucydides records
a conflict resolution conference between Athenians
and Melians. Since the more numerous and better-
armed Athenians could (and later did) overwhelm the
Melians, the Melian conference ‘failed.’
The corollary is that egalitarian societies tend to be
peaceable, and peaceable ones tend to be egalitarian
(Fry 1999); between nations, ‘mutual deterrence’
depends on perceived equality. Perhaps social justice
in the form of felt equality is also important. Thus,
although conflict resolution theorists tend to dismiss
other tactics for preventing violence as unreliable (Fry
and Bjorkqvist 1997), conflict resolution techniques
are most likely to succeed when least likely to be
necessary.
3.2 Peace Studies
Peace studies are more ethnographic, less technical
and more value-laden, finding expression in, for
example, Human Peace and Human Rights, journal of
the Commission on the Study of Peace and Human
Rights of the International Union of Anthropological
and Ethnological Sciences—rar!syr.edu. Syracuse
University is a center for such studies as well as for
conflict resolution studies in the USA. This research
rests on the empirical observation that conflicts among
11142
some aggregations of people are less likely to erupt
into violence than among others. One reason for such
peace is a value system that promotes negative peace
by abhorring violence (e.g., as stupid, scary, or self-
destructive) and promotes positive peace or slamad, a
value system somewhat like that of the 1970s ‘Peace
Movement’ which inspired peace studies.
But that movement itself grew from the Vietnam
War. Peace tends to be valued particularly by people
who know violence firsthand. Peaceable values may
maintain peace, in the short run, but they gain strength
from the threat of violence (DeBenedetti 1978, Dentan
in Silverberg and Gray 1992, in Sponsel and Gregor
1994, Nordstrom 1997). And one reason for war is
that outsiders threaten slamad. In short, attributing
peace only to peaceful values is as simplistic as
attributing violence to ‘innate aggression.’ The stipu-
lated variables are insufficient to produce the observed
results.
The ethnology of peaceable peoples reveals how
complicated is ‘peace.’ Documentation exists on a
fairly large number of relatively peaceable societies,
including traditional ethnic groups (e.g., Dentan in
Silverberg and Gray 1992, Fry 1999, Howell and
Willis 1989), cenobitic pacifists like the Amish or
Hutterites, and other voluntary associations such as
the Friends, the Rainbow Family, or Alcoholics
Anonymous (AA) (1994). Most have formal and
informal conflict-resolution techniques, the latter de-
rived from those characteristic of the species as a
whole (Boehm 2000, de Waal 1989). Most lack the in-
group economic or political hierarchies which impede
consensual conflict-resolution, although many are
enclaves in hierarchical societies against whom they
must maintain identity barriers.
Peaceable values are conducive to peace. Many
peaceable peoples like peace better and violence less
than more violent peoples do. But many, for example,
the Amish and Mbuti, beat children severely. Others,
such as the Semai, fantasize warfare against their
oppressors, or boast, like the AA, that members can
stand up to the challenges of warfare when their
country calls. Generally, in-group peace seems more
valued than peace with outsiders. And, as the ubiquity
of peace may indicate, most people prefer peace to
violence except under exceptional circumstances.
‘Negative peace’ based on fear of consequences
seems more salient than ‘positive peace’ based on
idealist values. Many peaceable peoples, particularly
cenobitic pacifists, are patriarchal and physically
punish disobedience by children. Oppressive regimes
can also diminish freelance violence by retaliatory
violence such as incarceration, mutilation, or capital
punishment.
Avoiding others is yet another way of peacemaking.
Cross-culturally, inevitable structural conflicts, such
as that between a man and his in-laws over who
benefits from his wife’s services, may result in formal-
ized respect\avoidance relationships in which one or

the other party expresses extreme deference to, or even
avoids social contact with, the other. Avoiding a
person with whom one is angry is an effective passive-
aggressive communication of the anger and dramatizes
the threat of withdrawing cooperation. Many peace-
able societies of Southeast Asia arose in the context of
a poltical economy based on slavery and coerced
trade, in which the best way to avoid enslavement was
to flee. Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland,
like ‘blacks’ and ‘whites’ in the USA, tried less
successfully to minimize violence by minimizing
mutual contact.
Another way of dealing with inherent conflict is to
transform physical violence into ‘harmless’ symbolic
violence. To some extent, sports in the Western world
do provide the ‘moral equivalent of war’ that William
James imagined. The ‘joking relationships’ that occur
in many societies allow people to express anxiety and
frustration about possible conflicts, especially involv-
ing sex, by hostile words and deeds which local
ideology defines as ‘not serious.’ This technique is
unreliable: fans battle each other and ‘locker room
humor’ can erupt into violence.
3.3 The Future of Peace Studies
What is needed is meticulous field studies of peoples
who seem better at peacemaking than others. Such
studies require avoiding essentialist notions of peace-
ability as a psychosocial deficiency, the inability to be
violent under any circumstances. Rethinking defi-
nitions of peace and violence seems appropriate (e.g.,
Dentan 2000). If peaceability is an adaptation rather
than an essence or changeless value, then changing
circumstances should affect peaceability, so that such
studies must take account of history in order to
discover what variables are important. Perhaps the
most promising future studies are those which make
detailed comparisons between (a) peacemaking among
specific human groups and among specific other
primates (e.g., Cords and Killen 1998), or (b) ‘con-
trolled comparisons’ between particular peaceable
peoples and otherwise similar but more violent
peoples, e.g. the studies of peaceable and violent
Zapotec towns by O’Nell and Fry (see Fry 1999); the
Robarcheks’ planned book-length expansion of their
chapter on peaceable and violent tropical rainforest
swiddeners, the Semai and Waorani (Robarchek and
Robarchek 1992); the comparison of peaceable and
violent Chicago neighborhoods by Sampson et al.
(1997).
3.4 The Use of Peace Studies
Improving conflict resolution techniques is of obvious
importance. Are any lessons from peaceable societies
of possible use to other peoples? The great student of
Peace and Non
iolence: Anthropological Aspects
primate conflict resolution, Frans de Waal dismisses
peaceable human groups as a ‘few gentle, nonmartial
human societies that have managed to survive in
remote corners of the world’ (1989, p. 4). But many
cruel martial human societies have also perished,
because their cruelty and violence was as unsustainable
as is peaceability as de Waal implies. The British poet
Shelley’s poem Ozymandias says it best: There is an
immense broken statue in the poem, on whose base are
the words: ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings.
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’ All
around the statue, as far as the eye can see, the desert
lies unbroken. Scientists must not let the drama of
violent conquest obscure the fact that organisms and
societies often survive better by eschewing, preventing,
or avoiding violent conflict than by engaging in it. As
a long-term adaptation, neither peaceability nor vi-
olence is necessarily or essentially ‘good’ for survival;
in the short term, either may work, depending on the
circumstances. That is why peaceable people like the
Semai may stop being peaceable, and violent people
like the Waorani may turn to peace. Both fight and
flight are active adaptations, which couple with caring
for children and forming alliances (‘tend and befriend’)
as human responses to environmental stress. The
dynamics of these adaptations need the same careful
study as any other ecological adaptation.
See also: Domestic Violence: Sociological Perspec-
tives; Peace; Peace Movements; Peacemaking in His-
tory; Violence, History of; Violence in Anthropology;
Violence: Public; War: Causes and Patterns; War,
Sociology of
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iolence: Anthropological Aspects
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All rights reserved.
Peace Movements
‘Peace Movements’ may be used in two ways. On the
one hand, a peace movement is a specific coalition of
peace organizations that, together with elements of the
public, seek to remove a threat of war or to create
institutions and cultures that obviate recourse to
violence. On the other, it is the organizational infra-
structure to do so. Usage is usually clarified by context.
Peace organization constituencies are people with
shared commitment to common values and traditions,
like religious pacifism, or to a program such as world
federalism. Such groups form coalitions in order to
enlist public support in response to salient issues. If the
issue is war or a specific war threat, peace coalitions
take the form of antiwar movements. In nearly 200
years of organized peace effort, specific peace move-
ments have affected national policies, international
institutions, and popular attitudes. Taken as a whole,
they can be viewed as a single, evolving, and increas-
ingly transnational social movement that has inter-
acted with formal analyses of war, peace, and social
movements. The conceptualization of peace move-
ments has resulted from the dialectical interaction of
the movement’s self-reflection on its experience and
subsequent scholarly analysis.
1. Growth and Self-definition, 1815–1939
In western civilization peace has been understood
mainly as the absence of war (Chatfield and Ilukhina
1994). Given war’s existence, there were two main
ethical alternatives: a dominant ‘just war’ tradition
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International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
that legitimated organized violence under specific
conditions, and a minority tradition of individual
Christian nonresistance that rejected violence alto-
gether. There was no sustained tradition of organized
popular effort to check interstate warfare.
That was the situation when small peace societies
were formed in the United States and the United
Kingdom (1815) by a few local nonconformist Prot-
estants who denounced warfare. In the next 100 years
civic associations for societal change became common
in western societies, providing the context in which
peace organizations grew and defined themselves.
1.1 Early Internationalism
Peace constituencies broadened within an educated
elite. British and American leaders solicited support
on the Continent, where peace advocates tended to be
secular intellectuals and where Richard Cobden’s
program of peace through free trade became very
influential (Cooper 1991). During the 1840s leaders on
both sides of the Atlantic promoted international
arbitration. A few went further, a congress of nations,
an international court, and even a united Europe.
Then, in mid-century, peace advocates were shaken by
wars in the Crimea, Germany, Italy, and America.
Gradually the movement was rebuilt in the latter
third of the century. American and European leaders
promoted treaties of arbitration, forming a program-
oriented peace movement propelled by a bias for
internationalism—the conviction that warfare is ir-
redeemable and that statesmen could render it obsolete
by breaking down barriers, building up international
law, and seeking practical mutual interests beyond
conflicts. The American Peace Society (1928) and the
Ligue internationale et permanante de la paix (Paris
1863) popularized this approach. The Ligue inter-
nationale de la paix et de la liberteT (Geneva, 1867),
however, pressed the view that peace could be secured
only by political justice among self-determining, dem-
ocratic peoples. Concurrently, the First and Second
(socialist) Internationals held that peace was con-
tingent upon economic justice—the overthrow of
capitalism. In practice, though, as socialists entered
the political mainstream they supported programs of
arbitration, arms limitation, and anticolonialism—
peace as liberal internationalism, which was christened
‘pacifism’ (Cooper 1991, p. 237, n. 1).
1.2 An Internationalist Peace Establishment
The movement for liberal internationalism obtained
strong leverage from the First Hague Conference in
1899, when the great powers endorsed pacific alterna-
tives to war. By then approximately 100 national and
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