#519 Douglas Fry: The Origins and Causes of War, and Peace Social Systems and How to Maintain Them
RECORDED ON JUNE 18th 2021.
Dr. Douglas P. Fry is Professor and Chair in the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He has written extensively on aggression, conflict, and conflict resolution in his own books and in journals such as Science and American Anthropologist. His work frequently engages the debate surrounding the origins of war, arguing against claims that war or lethal aggression is rooted in human evolution. He’s the author or editor of books like The Human Potential for Peace; Beyond War; War, Peace, and Human Nature; and Nurturing Our Humanity.
This is our second interview on the anthropology of war. You can find the first one here: https://youtu.be/uz9xPBQ_CO0
In this episode, we expand on the topics I covered in our first interview, and talk about: how old is war; what drives war – factors like population density, sedentarism, and social complexity; how we can be sure that a death in the archaeological record was caused by war; peace social systems, and how they are maintained, both in traditional small-scale societies and industrialized societies; and how we can promote peace and international cooperation, and in dealing with threats like global pandemics and climate change. Finally, we talk about Dr. Fry’s upcoming book on peace systems.
Time Links:
Intro
How old is war?
The factors that drive war
How to identify war casualties in the archaeological record
Peace social systems
How are peace systems maintained?
Promoting peace and international cooperation
Dr. Fry’s upcoming book
Follow Dr. Fry’s work!
Follow Dr. Fry’s work:
Faculty page: https://bit.ly/3iIUstV
ResearchGate profile: http://bit.ly/2kjdlYD
Amazon page: https://amzn.to/2krFU5W
Papers:
Social complexity, inequality and war before farming: congruence of comparative forager and archaeological data: https://bit.ly/3wPOsDy
New insights on interpersonal violence in the Late Pleistocene base on the Nile valley cemetery of Jebel Sahaba: https://go.nature.com/3q6kXuM
Societies within peace systems avoid war and build positive intergroup relationships: https://go.nature.com/3cR2Svf