Abstract: Chapter 2 reflects on a key assumption about the “traditional Chinese family,” the “child-training” paradigm that emphasizes parenting and overlooks children. The chapter draws from interview and observational data with mothers and children to contrast an important local cultural model of parenting, that is, preventing children’s fights, with the reality of prevalent fighting and conflict among children. Weaving together qualitative, quantitative and machine learning analyses of texts, the chapter uncovers the experiences of “dis-obedient children” which departs from the parental ideal of training obedience. After debunking the myths of “Chinese parenting,” I explain the inefficacy of parental punishment through the lens of children’s sociomoral cognition, against the popular assumption and paradigm of reinforcement learning. These findings remind anthropologists to pay more attention to the ethical experience and reflections of young children, “the punished,” and urge adults to see the world through children's eyes.

Human history is often narrated as a story of fighting. The earliest written records including engravings in clay tokens, limestone tablets, ancient monuments, and antique documents contain extensive descriptions of human belligerence. For example, one of the early etchings found in the ruins of ancient Near East settlements and attributed to Ashurnasirpal II, king of Assyria from 884 to 859 bce, is completely centred on the experience of fighting and killing. The inscription depicts Ashurnasirpal’s first military campaign that involved quashing an armed rebellion in the city of Suru in 883 bce. This record provides a detailed depiction of close-range human-on-human violence:

In this chapter I explore the economic motivations for interpersonal violence. The spotlight is on the leading rationalist and instrumentalist approaches that attempt to explain willingness to fight through the prism of individual self-interest. The chapter analyses different strands of the economics-centred paradigm: (a) approaches that have been developed in the study of civil wars and other violent conflicts; and (b) criminological theories of homicide and other violent crimes. The chapter identifies strengths and weaknesses of the agency-centred strategic and instrumentalist approaches to close-range violence as well as the more structural approaches that focus on the collective motivations and social inequalities that foster violent responses. I argue that social inequalities and economic self-interest can tilt conflict towards violent episodes, but material reasons alone cannot adequately explain human motivation to fight or the social dynamics of close-range violence. The chapter concludes with a brief critical analysis of two empirical cases that show the limits of economic models of violence.

Social pugnacity is a complex and contextual phenomenon. As argued in the previous chapters its dynamics is shaped by variety of factors including coercive-organisational capacity, the extent of ideological penetration, and the intensity of micro-interactional bonds. Although people can fight for economic, political, ideological, and other reasons social pugnacity can never be reduced to individual motivations only. Instead, a combat experience has its own social dynamics that is shaped by the changing social environment. This relates not only to Clausewitz’s (2008 [1832]) well-known fog of war that always generates uncertainties and unpredictable behaviour, but even more importantly violent conflicts impact profoundly and are in turn impacted by the changing group dynamics. Wars, revolutions, insurgencies, and other forms of organised violence are dependent as much on the strength and endurance of the macro-organisational structures as the micro-group ties. The link between these two is often established through shared ideological narratives. However, it is not completely clear how this process operates in practice. Do form, size, or shape of the armed organisation influence one’s willingness to fight? Are fighters involved in clandestine political movements or criminal syndicates motivated by the same principles as those fighting in formal military organisations? What specific role do organisational structures, economic incentives, coercive pressure, and ideology play in individual and collective decisions to fight?

Close-range killings in war are usually associated with two contrasting images. The more prevalent view depicts excessive violence as common, widespread, and easy to do. Popular films and TV programmes are saturated with the images of war where killing is the norm and an almost routine, everyday practice. For example, the recently featured and extremely popular Game of Thrones is full of such imagery where individuals show no moral qualms when getting involved in mass killings, torture, rape, and violent abuse. Moreover, such acts are encouraged and celebrated with the memorable lines such as ‘Stick ’em with the pointy end’ or ‘There is only one god and his name is Death’. In direct contrast, the other common portrayal of war focuses on the traumatic experiences of soldiers who are unwilling to fight and when forced to take part in violent events where they kill other human beings, they express regret, remorse, and guilt. A plethora of critical war films and novels from All Quiet on the Western Front to The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, and The Hurt Locker emphasise the sheer brutality of war and its deep traumatic impact on ordinary soldiers. In these narratives the act of killing is an extremely difficult experience which leaves lasting psychological damage on those who take part in it. As one protagonist in the film Saving Private Ryan states: ‘I just know that every man I kill the further away from home I feel’ (Hagelin 2008: 112). In this chapter my aim is to offer a sociological analysis of these phenomena with a focus on the role emotions play in the individual and social responses to killing in war. The chapter draws on the interviews conducted among the ex-combatants who fought in the wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (1991–5).1 The first part of the chapter critically reviews the existing research on killing in war and articulates an alternative approach to understanding the emotional dynamics of killing in the context of social pugnacity. The second part explores different aspects of violent collective action on the battlefields through in-depth analysis of the interviews with the ex-combatants. The final part brings the theoretical arguments and the results of the empirical research together.

The overwhelming majority of popular science fiction TV shows, films, and novels depicting the world of the future do so in very similar, mostly post-apocalyptic, ways: with the collapse of governance structures human beings automatically turn to violence. The central assumption that underpins these depictions of the future is that the disintegration of law and order would inevitably lead to vicious and bloody struggle for survival. In many respects these fictional narratives draw upon and reproduce the ideas that have dominated political and military thought for centuries. From Machiavelli and Hobbes to the contemporary neo-realists and cognitive evolutionary psychologists, violence and war are perceived to be the natural state of individuals, societies, and states. In this chapter I challenge these Hobbesian visions of violent futures and argue that the dynamics of social pugnacity is context dependent and highly variable. By focusing on the organisational, ideological, and micro-interactional processes that make fighting possible I envisage different possibilities and trajectories of close-range violence in the future.

The principal aim of this chapter is to explore the social context of fighting for other people. The traditional instrumentalist accounts emphasise that individuals are self-preservers who are unlikely to fight for others unless they are forced or induced to do so by genetic, material, or symbolic benefits. Hence for many cognitive evolutionary psychologists sacrificing oneself for others is possible only if such acts will increase one’s inclusive fitness, that is, the direct or indirect ability of an individual organism to pass on its genes to the next generation. For rational choice theorists collective action is always rooted in self-interest and one will fight for others on the assumption that others will do the same, thus enhancing the possibility that shared action will bring about greater benefit for all. Nevertheless, recent studies have questioned these well-established views by indicating that biology and instrumental rationality largely play a marginal role in the context of close-range violence. More important are emotions and moral ties as they impact substantially on one’s decision to fight for others. Many individuals develop strong networks of micro-solidarity which motivate different forms of collective action in the context of violent encounters. In this chapter I analyse when, how, and why individuals fight for others. The focus is on the dynamics of social pugnacity. I argue that one’s willingness to fight is a contextual phenomenon shaped by specific ideological and organisational logic. Nevertheless, despite its temporal and spatial variability, micro-group solidarity is a universal practice that underpins nearly all durable violent conflicts. In other words, fighting for others is a foundation of social pugnacity. The first part of the chapter traces the evolutionary trajectory of human sociability and looks at the structural transformation of micro-bonding in different historical contexts. The second part briefly explores the social and physical dynamics of micro-solidarity in the context of close-range fighting. The final, and longest, part analyses the workings of micro-level solidarities in the fighting practices of the three very different armed forces – American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, Indian soldiers in the First World War, and members of the Wehrmacht in the Second World War.

To understand the motivation for fighting it is necessary to provide some analysis of the physiological and biological make-up of human beings as a species. This chapter will utilise up-to-date research on interpersonal violence across different disciplines including anthropology, biology, cognitive evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, physiology, anatomy, and palaeontology. The focus is on the biological underpinnings of violent action and especially how human violence differs from the aggressive behaviour of other species. This chapter scrutinises and critiques the dominant essentialist interpretations which attempt to explain human behaviour in terms of biological or psychological givens. I argue that the recent experimental studies across different disciplines indicate that interpersonal violence is complex and shaped by changing structural contexts. Unlike most carnivorous mammals, human beings lack bodily entailments for aggressive behaviour and hence their increased capacity for violence has distinctly non-biological origins. To compensate for their individual physical incompetence in belligerence, human beings had to devise effective social and organisational mechanisms for violent action. Hence biology plays some role in the human capacity for aggressive behaviour, but it largely does not determine or even shape much of human violent action. Psychology is also relevant in this context but neither biology nor psychology can adequately explain the enormous contextual and historical variation that characterises human relationships with close-range violence. Instead, violent action entails the interlocking presence of organisational capacity, ideological penetration, and micro-interactional social tuning.

Coercion has always played an important part in making ordinary individuals into fighters. The ancient texts including Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War and Sun Tzu’s Art of War point to the role of force in compelling ordinary soldiers to fight. For Thucydides, coercion is the cornerstone of soldering: ‘We must remember that one man is much the same as another, and that he is best who is trained in the severest school’ and ‘The strength of an army lies in strict discipline and undeviating obedience to its officers’ (Thucydides 2019 [400 bce]: Book 2, 80, 92). Sun Tzu is even more precise on the role of force in making soldiers fight: ‘If soldiers are punished before they have grown attached to you, they will not prove submissive; and, unless submissive, they will be practically useless. If, when the soldiers have become attached to you, punishments are not enforced, they will still be useless’ (Sun Tzu 2017 [500 bce]: 30). Hence once individuals are fully integrated into the military organisation they still need to be coerced into fighting: ‘Throw your soldiers into positions whence there is no escape, and they will prefer death to flight. If they will face death, there is nothing they may not achieve … If there is no place of refuge, they will stand firm … if there is no help for it, they will fight hard’ (Sun Tzu 2017 [500 bce]: 37).

The study begins with the formation mechanisms of a social group that were created almost ex nihilo by the war. Men became disabled by suffering an irremediable loss over the course of three conflicts of varying intensity between 1904 and 1921. We must first assess the scope of the loss, which is difficult to do, for in Russia, and then in the USSR, the tallies always provided approximate totals that were never definitive. This incredibly massive number was in fact a compilation of individual cases. In order to adopt the best way of approaching this experience, we have to detail the physical and moral ordeals that the soldiers endured from the time they were wounded until they ended up as disabled veterans: this process of transition weighed heavily on their ability to cope successfully. The army lost fighting forces, the men lost a part of themselves along with certain physical or mental capacities, and society lost its future workforce. The rhetoric of defeat, decline, and deficit heavily influenced the conception of the strikingly sudden, widespread phenomenon that exposed the moral fragility of the Russian nation. During the war, attitudes toward repairing bodies were polarised, torn between moralising suspicion (of self-inflicted wounds or simulation) and scientific uncertainties, military verifications and independent assessments of experts.