Humans have probably always killed one another. Warfare is something narrower. It implies groups, planning, logistics, memory, leadership, and enough social organisation that violence stops being a personal act and becomes a collective institution. The interesting question is not when humans first killed. It is when ki…
Organised violence tends to appear where the substrate makes it the higher-return move, and to recede where it does not. That is one way to read the origins of war. Inverted, the same reading yields a second claim, less obvious and more useful. If war is what the ground rewards under some conditions, then peace is what…
At eight in the evening on 31 August 1939, a small team in Polish uniforms seized a radio transmitter at Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia and broadcast a few minutes of anti-German agitation. By the following morning the event had a name, an author, and a consequence: a Polish provocation, answered by the invasion that began …
Reading the Substrate argued that analysis of conflict tends to read a story first and the ground beneath it late, and that the ordering is often backwards in its emphasis: ideas set a conflict’s direction, conditions set its reach. That was a claim using looking backwards, about explaining wars that have already happe…
By the time a clash in the central Sahel reaches a wire service, it has already been given its name: a jihadist attack, or ethnic violence between Fulani herders and settled farmers, with the dead counted under one heading or the other. What rarely travels with the dispatch is the thing underneath it: a rainy season th…