Conflict and Defense: A General Theory

366 Pages·1962·28.994 MB·English

by  Kenneth E. Boulding

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CONFLICT AND DEFENSE
A General Theory
Kenneth E. Boulding
Professor of Economics
Institute of Behavioral Sciences
University of Colorado
UNIVERSITY
PRESS OF
AMERICA
Lanham New York ® London
Copyright © 1962,1988 by
Kenneth E. Bouiding
University Press of America, ® Inc.
4720 Boston Way
Lanham, MD 20706
3 Henrietta Street
London WC2E 8LU England
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
British Cataloging in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bouiding, Kenneth Ewart, 1910-
Conflict and Defense.
Includes index.
1. Peace. 2. Social conflict. 3. International
relations. I. Title.
JX1963.B6954 1988 327.1'6 88-27677
ISBN 0-8191-7112-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
All University Press of America books are produced on acid-free paper.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
CONTENTS
PREFACE TO THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
OF AMERICA EDITION vii
PREFACE XV
1. STATIC MODELS OF CONFLICT 1
2. THE DYNAMICS OF CONFLICT: RICHARDSON PROCESS
MODELS 19
3. THE CONTRIBUTION OF GAME THEORY 41
4. THE THEORY OF VIABILITY 58
5. THE INDIVIDUAL AS A PARTY TO CONFLICT 80
6. THE GROUP AS A PARTY TO CONFLICT: THE ECOLOGICAL
MODEL 105
7. THE GROUP AS A PARTY TO CONFLICT: THE EPIDEMIO­
LOGICAL MODEL 123
8. THE ORGANIZATION AS A. PARTY TO CONFLICT 145
9. CONFLICT BETWEEN THE INDIVIDUAL, THE GROUP, AND
THE ORGANIZATION 166
10. ECONOMIC CONFLICT 189
11. INDUSTRIAL CONFLICT 208
12. INTERNATIONAL CONFLICT: THE BASIC MODEL 227
13. INTERNATIONAL CONFLICT: MODIFICATIONS AND APPLI­
CATIONS OF THE BASIC THEORY 248
14. IDEOLOGICAL AND ETHICAL CONFLICT 277
15. CONFLICT RESOLUTION AND CONTROL 305
16. EPILOGUE: the PRESENT CRISIS OF CONFLICT and
DEFENSE 329
INDEX 345
V

PREFACE
To the University Press of America Edition
The babies who were born when Conflict and Defense was written
are now about 28 and presumably actively participating in the
world around them. What does this book have to say to this
generation, or more importantly perhaps, what does it not say that
might be said if it were written now? Conflict and Defense was a
very early product of what has come to be known as the peace
research movement, embodied in journals, books, institutes
around the world, programs in universities, and professional
societies, especially the International Peace Research Association,
which attracts over 300 people from all around the world at its
biennial meetings. Conflict and Defense has reached the status of a
“Citation Classic” and has been cited in over 360 publications.1
Somebody must have read the book! I have used it myself recently
as a textbook in a course on The Theory of Conflict. Much, of
course, has happened in these 28 years, and if I were writing it
today it would certainly not be quite the same book. I am
particularly grateful, however, to the University Press of America
for reprinting it in its original form, so that It can perhaps have
some impact on the next generation.
'Conflict and Defense: A General Theory, featured as the “Citation Classic,”
Current Contents (Social & Behavioral Sciences), 18, 43 (Oct. 27, 1986): 20; and
Current Contents (Arts & Humanities), 8, 43 (Oct. 27, 1986): 20.
PREFACE TO THE UPA EDITION viii
A whole book could be written—and one day perhaps will
be—on the history of conflict thought in the last generation. The
patterns of thought have not changed very much. This has been a
period of what might be called “normal science” rather than a
period of revolutionary change. The static models of conflict
(Chapter 1) have not changed very much. There has been a little
more “economics imperialism,” the attempt on the part of
economics to take over the other social sciences. There have been
some contributions from psychology on decision-making
pathologies. What still remains to be done here is a much more
careful study of who are the parties to conflict, particularly in the
case of groups and organizations. Even in the case of the
individual, studies of multiple personalities suggest that a single
person, and especially a powerful person, is a “group.” Bismarck
is supposed to have said “I am a committee.” The single unified
person of “economic man” oversimplifies the complexity of actual
human behavior.
There has been some development of Richardson process
analysis (Chapter 2), introducing a few more variables, without, I
think, changing the fundamental model. I have even made some
contribution to this myself in “The Parameters of Politics.”2 In
this article I extend the Richardson process to three parties and
show that if an equilibrium is to be reached, that is, a balance of
power, the reaction coefficient, that is, how much each party will
raise armament expenditures in response to a perceived one percent
increase in the other party’s, cannot be more than about 0.7,
whereas in a two-party system this is 1.0 or less. I have not seen
anything on the n-party case as n gets larger. Oddly enough, the
economist’s concept of perfect equilibrium may be relevant here.
Game theory (Chapter 3) has continued to stimulate a good deal
2Kenneth E. Boulding, “The Parameters of Politics,” University of Illinois
Bulletin (Urbana), 63, 139 (July 15, 1966): 1-21. Reprinted in Kenneth E. Boulding,
Collected Papers (Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press), Vol. V, pp.
195-215.
IX PREFACE TO THE UPA EDITION
of work in the last generation, mainly in terms of the two-party
game.3 The subject is still very lively today, as witness the
remarkable work of Robert Axelrod4, which suggests that if the
parties are given a tit-for-tat strategy, that is, no more than one eye
for an eye or one tooth for a tooth, this is likely to be most
successful. This theory has been criticized since by Jack Hirshleifer
and Juan Carlos Martinez Coll,5 but it still continues to arouse a
great deal of interest.
From the point of view of its practical applications to conflict,
however, game theory has a fundamental weakness: it assumes that
the parties to conflict are known and given. In fact, both the origins
and the effects of organized conflict are remarkably obscure. What
might be called “unconscious conflict,” that is, the real dynamics of
the distribution of welfare around the human population, often
bears very little relation to conscious conflict. Thus, a union wins a
strike, but who loses? Either the people who might have been
employed if wages had not risen or the customers who have to pay
higher prices. The employer against whom the conflict was
ostensibly waged may even benefit. Military defeat often results in
both an economic and a cultural expansion of the defeated party at
the expense of the victor. Empire often impoverishes the imperial
power. Game theory is merely a very abstract theory of conscious
conflict. It has very little to say about unconscious conflict, which
may be much more important.
Chapters 4 to 9 really represent the beginning of an evolutionary
theory of conflict, seeing conflict as merely one element in the vast
process of evolutionary and ecological interaction which moves us
’See especially Anatol Rapoport and Albert Chammah, The Prisoner’s Dilemma,
A Study in Conflict and Cooperation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1965), for a fairly popular exposition.
■“Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
’Jack Hirshleifer and J.C.M. Coll, “What Strategies Can Support the
Evolutionary Emergence of Cooperation?” Working Paper No. 58. (Los Angeles:
University of California Center for International and Strategic Affairs, February
1987).
PREFACE TO THE UPA EDITION X
as a total system through time. A good deal of my work (and
publications) since writing Conflict and Defense has been devoted
to the study of this larger system.6 The role of conflict in this larger
process is a matter of great conflict itself between the
“dialecticians,” who see conflict as the most important part of the
process, and “evolutionists” like myself, who see conflict as
occasionally significant, but on the whole a minor part of the
process of overall interaction of species in the immense complexity
of mutational and selective processes.
Since writing Conflict and Defense my main interest in the
international field has been in the development of a theory which
might be called the “evolution of peace,” as reflected in my book
Stable Peace1. It is interesting to note that the biologists are
beginning to see that evolution is not a continuous process, but is
marked by some quite sharp discontinuities. This is what is called
“punctuational evolution.”8 The evolutionary process seems to
consist of periods of relative stability, with rather small and
gradual changes, which are divided by short periods of very rapid
and dramatic change, leading into a new periods of stability. These
transition periods may be induced by some catastrophe which
opens up all sorts of new niches for new mutations that would not
have survived before. A transition may also happen through simply
passing over some kind of systems boundary in which positive
feedback processes—the more A, the more B; the more B, the more
A—become more prominent rather than the negative-feedback
processes which lead towards equilibrium (if A gets too big, it will
get smaller; if it gets too small, it will get bigger). Punctuated
‘See Kenneth E. Boulding, A Primer on Social Dynamics: History as Dialectics
and Development (New York: Free Press, 1970), Ecodynamics: A New Theory of
Societal Evolution (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1978), Evolutionary
Economics (Sage, 1981).
’Kenneth E. Boulding, Stable Peace (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978).
"See Steven Peterson and Albert Somit, eds., “Punctuated Equilibria Theory,”
special issue of The Journal of Biological and Social Structures (forthcoming).
XI PREFACE TO THE UPA EDITION
evolution leads to the perception of stages. Thus, the age of big
reptiles and dinosaurs was succeeded by the age of big mammals, as
dinosaurs became extinct, perhaps because of some catastrophe
about which there is still a good deal of disagreement.
It is very tempting to divide human history Into stages—the
paleolithic, the mesolithic (which seems to have been something of
a catastrophe), the neolithic, leading into agriculture, which
releases resources for increased human learning—pottery, weaving,
metallurgy—which leads into weaponry, which leads into
civilization. Now we seem to be in a transition period of very rapid
change,' between civilization and something that can be called
“post-civilization.” This transition is very far from being complete
and indeed it may not be accomplished, but it is certainly within the
realm of the possible. And there is at least some probability that it
will lead to a world without war and without poverty.
One must always be careful about “stages” because there is
continuous change as well as discontinuous change and it is not
always easy to say where one stage ends and the next stage begins.
Nevertheless, it seems not unreasonable to postulate four stages in
the development of international systems, which may also be found
in other conflicts. Each of these stages, it should be emphasized,
may be found in different places at the same time, and it is quite
possible to retrogress, that is, to go from what normally would be a
later stage to an earlier one. The four stages are: (1) stable war, in
which war goes on all the time, perhaps with some ups and downs
of intensity. Southeast Asia seems to have been in this condition for
over 50 years. Stable war, however, is very expensive and
destructive. It is not surprising that it tends to pass over into the
second stage, (2) unstable war, where war is interrupted by periods
of peace, although war is still regarded as the norm and peace as
just a time of wound licking and preparing for the next year. The
Middle East has a good deal of this kind of quality. We see the
beginnings of it even in the early civilizations, with the development
of royal marriages, diplomacy, trade, and so on.