Is war a disease?

[dedo]

There is literature that claims that all violence is a contagious disease, transmitted from person to person.  This point of view gives primary weight to nurture, or learned behavior as opposed to genetic predisposition.  Unfortunately, this discussion has not begun in the international relations literature, that I have seen, where there is an important caveat.  In this literature, there is data that suggests that human conflict is related to a cumulative process, called power law data discovered by Lewis Richardson in 1949.  A power law is a relationship between frequency and intensity such that wars are either small and frequent, or rare and huge.  Forest fires and earthquakes also work this way.  Thus, the longer a period of relative peace, the worse will be the next war.

This discovery gets little attention in the IR literature where the "cause of war" is unknown.  This is important because cumulative processes usually end with sudden failure if not defused or treated, like a person with coronary disease who never sees a cardiologist.  

Systems that accumulate tension to failure emit symptoms when the accumulation reaches toxic levels like angina in a patient with coronary disease or near misses in a high hazard system that has accumulated safety hazards warning of impending sudden failure.

The evidence seems to be overwhelming that the international system is now emitting these kinds of symptoms including the setting of the Doomsday Clock, conflicts in Ukraine & Gaza, rising authoritarianism, and political strife.

Thus, if the world fails to respond to current symptoms, sudden failure or world war should not be far off.

[swansont]

3 hours ago, dedo said:

There is literature that claims that all violence is a contagious disease, transmitted from person to person.

Such as?

[dimreepr]

4 hours ago, dedo said:

There is literature that claims that all violence is a contagious disease, transmitted from person to person.  This point of view gives primary weight to nurture, or learned behavior as opposed to genetic predisposition.  Unfortunately, this discussion has not begun in the international relations literature, that I have seen, where there is an important caveat.  In this literature, there is data that suggests that human conflict is related to a cumulative process, called power law data discovered by Lewis Richardson in 1949.  A power law is a relationship between frequency and intensity such that wars are either small and frequent, or rare and huge.  Forest fires and earthquakes also work this way.  Thus, the longer a period of relative peace, the worse will be the next war.

This discovery gets little attention in the IR literature where the "cause of war" is unknown.  This is important because cumulative processes usually end with sudden failure if not defused or treated, like a person with coronary disease who never sees a cardiologist.  

Systems that accumulate tension to failure emit symptoms when the accumulation reaches toxic levels like angina in a patient with coronary disease or near misses in a high hazard system that has accumulated safety hazards warning of impending sudden failure.

The evidence seems to be overwhelming that the international system is now emitting these kinds of symptoms including the setting of the Doomsday Clock, conflicts in Ukraine & Gaza, rising authoritarianism, and political strife.

Thus, if the world fails to respond to current symptoms, sudden failure or world war should not be far off.

How does one catch war?

If your premis is true, then a pub fight would naturally lead to civil war, at least (if it started on an island 🏝), otherwise world war is inevitable...

So, no it's not a disease, any other question's??? 

BTW that's a lot of words to explain why you don't understand your own topic question... 😉 

[Phi for All]

How is looking at war as a disease helpful in understanding how to combat it? Is this eventually going to end with some kind of "immunization"? 

We can avoid analogy. We're led to war these days for profit, backed by an impoverished citizenry who've been made fearful by their leaders. Figure out how to stop our leaders from profiting from war and war becomes too costly for everyone.

[dedo]

12 hours ago, swansont said:

Such as?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207245/

3 hours ago, Phi for All said:

How is looking at war as a disease helpful in understanding how to combat it? Is this eventually going to end with some kind of "immunization"? 

We can avoid analogy. We're led to war these days for profit, backed by an impoverished citizenry who've been made fearful by their leaders. Figure out how to stop our leaders from profiting from war and war becomes too costly for everyone.

It is important in knowing how to combat it because it provides a framework to guide efforts.  Without the framework, interventions often are a hodgepodge of efforts with a much lower chance of being effective.  Cumulative diseases behave in certain ways.  There is an input process that should be interrupted if possible, and there usually is a treatment or "antidote".  There are also elusive "super antidotes" (my term) where just one intervention can have a dramatic effect.  

A super antidote for obesity is semaglutide, for coronary disease a stent, and more than one high hazard industry has discovered that rarely, one intervention can dramatically lower risk.  On the other hand, cumulative diseases and processes almost always end in sudden failure if not defused.

If the response is uncoordinated, then it is like someone with coronary disease having broccoli with his fried chicken.  It is not going to work, which is the world's current state of affairs.  An example from the international relations field of an uncoordinated intervention is the belief that trade and travel prevents war.  In his book, "The Psychology of War", LeShan notes that trade and travel were at an all time high in 1914, and people wrote articles claiming war was a thing of the past, just before the onset of the greatest war in history up to that time.

Thus, if the model is valid, then it either gets a coordinated intervention ideally from a multi-disciplinary task force, with international input, or the world should explode sometime before 2050.  

11 hours ago, dimreepr said:

How does one catch war?

If your premis is true, then a pub fight would naturally lead to civil war, at least (if it started on an island 🏝), otherwise world war is inevitable...

So, no it's not a disease, any other question's??? 

BTW that's a lot of words to explain why you don't understand your own topic question... 😉 

You don't understand the model.  A cumulative process has an input process that builds up over the course of years.  So a "bar fight" is not a relevant example except that participation in a bar fight could be part of the input process.  In a non-linear system, the input and output are often far apart.

If you don't understand models of conflict google "The Cause of War" and there are usually chapters that can be downloaded for free to review current theories.  Jack Levy has an easy to understand one.

If you don't understand a cumulative disease, google coronary disease & read about that.  If you have never studied a cumulative social system, study the "Swiss Cheese Model" for organizational accidents.

[dimreepr]

12 hours ago, dedo said:

You don't understand the model.  A cumulative process has an input process that builds up over the course of years.  So a "bar fight" is not a relevant example except that participation in a bar fight could be part of the input process.  In a non-linear system, the input and output are often far apart.

If you don't understand models of conflict google "The Cause of War" and there are usually chapters that can be downloaded for free to review current theories.  Jack Levy has an easy to understand one.

If you don't understand a cumulative disease, google coronary disease & read about that.  If you have never studied a cumulative social system, study the "Swiss Cheese Model" for organizational accidents.

It's a really ill defined question, to base a model on...

When does a bar fight become a war?

Can a pacifist accumulate agression with exposure? And is that an illness?

What is it your asking?

 

[dedo]

5 hours ago, dimreepr said:

5 hours ago, dimreepr said:

It's a really ill defined question, to base a model on...

When does a bar fight become a war?

Can a pacifist accumulate agression with exposure? And is that an illness?

What is it your asking?

 

 

A bar fight becomes a war when it becomes one small influence, combined with many others, that turns someone who might have otherwise been normal into a killer.  Of course the person would have to rise to a political position where he could act on his predisposition.

Yes, a pacifist or even a priest can accumulate aggression.  A nun has been convicted of assisting genocide in African genocides.  No one is immune.