Although scientists have warned of possible social perils resulting from climate change, the impacts of long-term climate change on social unrest and population collapse have not been quantitatively investigated. In this study, high-resolution paleo-climatic data have been used to explore at a macroscale the effects of climate change on the outbreak of war and population decline in the preindustrial era. We show that long-term fluctuations of war frequency and population changes followed the cycles of temperature change. Further analyses show that cooling impeded agricultural production, which brought about a series of serious social problems, including price inflation, then successively war outbreak, famine, and population decline successively. The findings suggest that worldwide and synchronistic war-peace, population, and price cycles in recent centuries have been driven mainly by long-term climate change. The findings also imply that social mechanisms that might mitigate the impact of climate change were not significantly effective during the study period. Climate change may thus have played a more important role and imposed a wider ranging effect on human civilization than has so far been suggested. Findings of this research may lend an additional dimension to the classic concepts of Malthusianism and Darwinism.agricultural production ͉ population collapse ͉ price ͉ war-peace cycles ͉ preindustrial era
This paper describes a particular use of pattern recognition techniques to identify pre-conflict situations. The goal is to find particular circumstances (which appear as patterns) in the descriptions of individual countries' situations before the outbreak of violent conflicts. If we find such patterns, we can then scan for them in current news reports. If we find a pattern in the current description of a country, we can then say "When we have seen this pattern before, 'x' percent of the time a conflict has erupted within 12 months." To accomplish this, the paper describes methods for getting alerts that a conflict is about to erupt, the information needed to get those alerts, how to organize that information, and a procedure for searching for patterns in that information.
Violent conflicts were more prevalent in historical Europe during colder periods, caused by food scarcity. Up to now, however, cold periods have not been attributed to planetary-scale atmospheric circulation, and thus no relationship between circulation and violence in Europe has been established. In this study, we took an innovative step in exploring the association between the NAO and violent conflicts in Europe in 1400−1995. Our results show that the NAO was positively correlated with violent conflicts, particularly in southern Europe and the Mediterranean-the region in which an NAO-induced desiccation effect is experienced. Results hold up even with different measures of violent conflict. Nevertheless, the NAO-conflict correlation has weakened since the Industrial Revolution. Our result is the first demonstration that the NAO affected social stability in preindustrial societies. This knowledge is crucial in examining violent conflicts in northwestern Africa, a region affected by the NAO, as well as being highly agricultural. KEY WORDS: Climate change • NAO • Violent conflicts • Europe Resale or republication not permitted without written consent of the publisher 1 Eckhardt's (1991) statement is based on the absolute number of battles/wars and war-related deaths, but the probability of an individual being killed in violence may be higher in other cultures and other periods (see Pinker 2011)
This book is the first systematic examination of the impact of reconciliation on restoring and maintaining peace following civil and international conflicts. Through eleven comparative case studies of civil war and eight of international conflict, it constructs a surprising explanation for when and why reconciliation restores social order.The civil war cases reveal that successful reconciliation is associated with a process of national forgiveness, not merely negotiated settlement. All successful cases followed a four-step pattern of public truth telling, justice short of revenge, redefinition of the identities of former belligerents, and a call for a new relationship. The book argues that success is not solely the result of rational choice decision making. It proposes a hypothesis, grounded in evolutionary psychology, that to restore social order we use emotional/cognitive techniques that have evolved to ensure human survival. On the international level, however, successful reconciliation was not a part of a forgiveness process. Reconciliation was successful in bringing about sustained peace when it was associated with a signaling process—an exchange of costly, novel, voluntary, and irrevocable concessions in a negotiated bargain. This result is consistent with realist notions of the limits of international society and illustrates the context in which a rational choice model is appropriate. The book's approach, integrating emotion with reasoning and linking political science to scientific research in other disciplines, particularly biology and neuroscience, has broad implications for social science theory.
Integrated global models are computer simulations that have been developed over the past two decades to provide a unique tool for understanding global-scale problems and their solutions. This article describes a major global modeling effort conducted in the Soviet Union that until recently has been virtually unknown in the West. The sections of this article cover the orientation and thrusts of the SIM/GDP project and brief descriptions of key submodels.
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