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Origins of Violence: Approaches to the Study of Conflict

NCJ Number
120871
Author(s)
A Rapoport
Date Published
1989
Length
620 pages
Annotation
This book is based on a lifetime study of the causes and consequences of the human obsession with warfare and suggests that the same rules of empirical engagement and experimentation should be used to study conflict as they would be used to study any other science.
Abstract
The writings of significant thinkers in history such as Tolstoy, Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr., are used to illustrate the reaction and the investigation of four causes of violence: psychological, ideological, strategic, and systematic. The psychological approach includes evolutionary, behavioral, and attitudinal perspectives. The ideological approach studies the addiction to power and reviews methods used by totalitarian Nazi and Communist regimes as well as by conventional military institutions. The strategic approach includes the intellectualization of war while the systemic approach establishes causal connections and discusses the arms race and war in general as a system and institution. A schema is suggested to mitigate conflict and disagreement in which a "games" theory replaces the winner-take-all theory of action through the use of logic, argumentation, and suggestion. Name index, subject index, tables, bibliography.

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