Category Archives: War

Shame and War

19 Sunday Jan 2025

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In our supposedly enlightened era, many people would like to imagine that most wars are fought for essentially rational purposes: punishing terrorists, seizing resources, profiteering off of arms sales, and so on. In centuries past, of course, kings and princes would fight wars to avenge personal insult or for self-aggrandizement. But surely we don’t do that sort of thing today? Surely entire countries don’t burn with humiliated resentment and seek revenge?

If only. Countries are collections of people, after all. And emotions still play a significant role in decisions to go to war. In some cases, they may play the decisive role. And fantasy or sci-fi authors would do well to keep this point in mind. As I have noted before, we are apt to forget that people have many reasons to go to war.

I am nearly finished reading Bloody Revenge: Emotions, Nationalism, and War, by sociologist Thomas J. Scheff. (Despite the piffle that infests the field, there are occasionally good works of scholarship by sociologists to be found!) He argues convincingly that in recent decades, much of American academia has been improperly deemphasizing the role of emotion in war, and in society generally. (This is, he claims, part of the move by advancing “civilization” to suppress and delegitimize emotions as justifications for behavior. I wonder what Dr. Scheff would say about the late effervescence of “safetyism.”)

Somewhat less convincingly, Scheff argues that many if not most wars are motivated by suppressed shame, acted out in a dysfunctional international system that mimics a dysfunctional family system in many respects. He argues from the assumption that if national interest were the only issue in a conflict between countries, people are creative enough to work out compromises that are, at any rate, not as bad as the wholesale destructiveness of total war.

Why fight wars then? Scheff argues that the emotion of shame (and probably fear as well, though it is not his focus) leads to alienation between the conflicting sides when it is suppressed and unacknowledged—and also within a country, so that citizens subordinate their own selves to the false solidarity of nationalism, to the extent that they are willing to fight and die in the military (which Scheff calls engulfment). It is this alienation, and the rage erupting out of unacknowledged shame, that leads countries to desire vengeance and fight wars with each other, rather than working out their conflicts less destructively.

Scheff argues that France’s shame at losing Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 was one of the key preconditions of World War I, and motivated French policies that played a key role in triggering the conflict—in particular, its alliance with Russia against Germany, which encouraged Russia to foment trouble in the Balkans. Germany’s own belligerence was, therefore, (partly) motivated by a rational fear of France’s intrigues. He also draws parallels between the secret intrigues of France, Russia, and Britain—each of which kept preparations for war secret from their own peoples, and in some cases even from much of their own governments—to the “triangling” and intrigues to be found in dysfunctional families. Finally, Scheff endorses the standard position that World War II was in large part motivated by Germany’s humiliation in Versailles and consequent desire for revenge, though he adds several lurid details of the psychology of Adolf Hitler in particular.

Scheff nearly falls into the trap of reducing everything to a single variable. He does periodically note that clashes of interests, rational fears, and the like still play a role in decisions to make war; but his foundational assumption that people would naturally come up with solutions to conflict, if not for their emotional commitments, impels him to the conclusion that if only countries would acknowledge their shame and work through their issues, wars would all but disappear.

This conclusion, however, is based on Scheff’s unstated assumption that both parties always assume that war is not something desirable, in the absence of humiliation and rage, or some other “problem” or “conflict” to be resolved. But in some cases, war is simply something that a society does. For example, while the Mongol campaigns against China and the neighboring Muslim sultanates seem motivated partly by the desire to eliminate ongoing threats, the invasion of Kievan Rus was completely unprovoked. The Rus write that the Mongols were unknown to them before their sudden invasion.

In general, Scheff neglects a country’s strategic culture, the way it understands the world and the role of war in such a world. If one “civilized” country goes through a soul-searching process of airing grievances and working through its emotions, and another “warlike” country simply perceives the first country as weaklings who are ripe for conquest, acknowledging shame is more likely to encourage war than to prevent it.

Still, Scheff’s book is an important reminder that emotions in their rawest form, cloaked as they may be in the language of national interest or international justice, often play a role in war. Worldbuilders should keep this in mind, as shame and fear can be powerful tools in the worldbuilding toolbox.

Internal Discipline in Rebel Movements, Part IV

30 Sunday Jul 2023

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In previous posts, we discussed Jeremy Weinstein’s argument of how rebel groups’ initial access to resources tends to put into motion a series of cascading decisions over who to recruit, how to govern civilians, and how to employ violence against civilians—with the result that initially “rich” rebel groups usually end up using indiscriminate violence against civilians, and those resource-poor groups that survive long enough tend to become “activist” groups with close ties to the populace, and use violence selectively (though in some cases the level of violence may still be high if they face high levels of civilian collaboration with the government).

Now, in this final post of this sequence, we will ask a crucial question: do rebel groups ever change character from “rich” to “activist” or vice versa? And if so, when?

Weinstein argues that rebel groups can face four types of external shocks to their existing organizational logic:

  1. Battlefield losses can weaken beliefs by civilians and by the rebels themselves that victory is possible, or near; and it also creates the need to replace casualties.
  2. Battlefield success can lead observers to conclude that the rebels are about to win, and therefore that joining the rebels is a ticket to future power or largesse.
  3. The rebels may access new economic resources, or economic resources may suddenly halt, threatening to undermine the rebels’ existing organizational logic.
  4. The government may change its strategy, increasing the incentives for civilians to cooperate or encouraging rebels to defect.

“Rich” rebels, having previously foreclosed on building trust with civilians, typically respond to 1, 3, and 4 by intensifying violence and repression. (Such groups don’t view 2 as a problem.) They lack the organizational capacity to change course, most of the time. In particular, rebel groups that suddenly lose access to an external patron or that lose their tax resources are no longer able to pay their troops as they once did; but because their personnel are out for personal benefit rather than interested in the common good, a (formerly!) “rich” group would have a very difficult time switching the logic of its behavior to an “activist” model that relies on cultivating support from the populace.

Instead, such groups tend to unleash even more violence against civilians, engaging in more looting to gather resources, more indiscriminate violence to discourage collaboration (which is often self-defeating), and kidnapping and forced recruitment in order to replace battlefield losses. (The Lord’s Resistance Army is a notorious example, relying as it does on recruiting children who it kidnaps and forces to commit atrocities.)

In rare cases, a formerly “rich” group facing utter destruction can decide to try and reconfigure itself as an “activist” group out of desperation. This depends heavily on the presence of talented leadership, and faces many pitfalls such as defection of its current members, distrust by civilians, and continued government pressure.

“Activist” groups tend to react to 1 and 4 (i.e. strategic setbacks of various kinds) by reinforcing their commitment to their existing relationships with civilians. The temptation to resort to forced recruitment to solve short-term problems is certainly present, but typically outweighed by the groups’ long-term orientation. Adversity is not a new problem for such groups. The tricky bit is how they respond to success: an influx of new money or recruits (2 and 3).

Sudden control over new resources can come about in several ways. A rebel group can gain a new patron. It can extend its control over more civilians and suddenly have more tax revenue. It could capture natural resources such as diamond mines. However it happens, new money means new temptations to corruption. In the worst case, the group can find itself slipping into the logic of “rich” groups.

Weinstein finds that “activist” groups are best able to resist this threat if they put in place strong organizational structures to control the new money and make sure it is being spent on strategic objectives, rather than to enrich leaders or troops. If such structures are not present, the group is in great danger of undermining its organizational logic and becoming a “rich” group.

Similarly, a sudden influx of recruits who merely want to “back the stronger horse” threatens to weaken the group’s commitment to its principles and proper behavior towards civilians (in the language of our model, the group would have a higher proportion of “consumers” and fewer “investors”). Successful activist groups are those that respond by strengthening their screening efforts and indoctrination, in order to filter out troublemakers and impress upon the rest that the group operates according to firm rules.

In general, effective leadership seems to be crucial in how a rebel group handles changing conditions. Weinstein theory doesn’t encompass leadership per se, other than noting its importance in influencing outcomes.

****

I have seen very little fiction concerning rebel groups that discusses the challenges brought on by success. This seems like an oversight, given how frequent the problem of “betraying the revolution” is in real life, and more importantly the fantastic story conflicts that can be generated in this way. Now you have a conceptual model for thinking about such conflicts; huzzah!

*****

(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned fourth book in this series, working title War for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Internal Discipline in Rebel Movements, Part III

26 Wednesday Jul 2023

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In previous blog posts, we discussed Jeremy Weinstein’s work on the internal dynamics of rebel groups, and how they lead some groups to commit indiscriminate violence against civilians. In a nutshell, groups with limited initial resources are forced to establish close relationships with civilian communities in order to survive, which forces them to discipline their forces and share significant power with communal leaders.

By contrast, groups with significant wealth at their founding (for example, due to state sponsors or involvement in the drug trade) have no strategic imperative to depend on civilians, and furthermore tend to recruit personnel who are in it for the money. As a result, personnel tend to abuse civilians, the leadership doesn’t want to incur the costs of disciplining them, and the groups tend not to share power with the civilian populace.

We are now at the crux of it. The foregoing processes tend to encourage “rich” rebel groups to use massive violence against civilians, mostly because their previous mistreatment of civilians leaves them with no other options. Let’s see why.

Rebel groups want civilians in (or near) their territory to cooperate with them—to provide food, tax revenue, recruits, and information about government troops and collaborators. Civilians, on the other hand, may or may not want to cooperate. Some might be government supporters or officials. Even if civilians oppose the government, they may not want to risk government reprisals. And they might view the rebels as worse than the government, and not want to cooperate with them even if they could do so safely. Therefore, rebel groups (and governments, for that matter) will sometimes want to harm civilians who cooperate with the enemy or refuse to cooperate with them—not least in order to frighten other civilians into complying with their demands.

A rebel group that has close ties with civilian populations (usually because it began its existence as “poor”) will have a much easier time using violence in a selective, targeted fashion. Because the populace trusts them, civilians are more willing to give information to the rebels. And because the rebels have close ties to the populace, they will be able to vet information they receive to make sure that their informants are telling the truth, so that they don’t harm an innocent party by mistake. Punishments are usually more graduated (such as kidnapping civilians and confining them for a time), giving rebels the chance to discover a mistake before harm becomes irreparable (i.e. the wrong person is shot). Finally, when mistakes are made, the rebels usually make amends to the populace and punish the offending personnel, reinforcing the trust that the population has in them.

As a result, “poor” rebel groups will tend to use violence selectively against civilians, seizing or assassinating government officials and collaborators and rarely harming the wrong people. The overall level of violence against civilians will be fairly low (at least from the rebel side; often government forces are less discriminate, for the same reasons we are about to discuss with reference to “rich” groups).

In contrast, we discussed how “rich” groups will tend to abuse civilians because they don’t bother disciplining their troops, and they will tend to exclude civilians from power arrangements. As a result, civilians will tend not to trust such rebel groups, even if they nominally support them over the government (and they may not). Rebel groups will thus receive less information from civilian sympathizers, making it harder for them to selectively target government collaborators or functionaries, or to punish civilians who are refusing to cooperate with them.

Worse, when they do receive information from civilians about potential targets, “rich” rebel groups will have a hard time verifying its accuracy (if they even care to). As a result, malicious civilians will frequently exploit the rebel groups to take revenge against their neighborhood enemies. Even without such deliberate deceit, rebels will frequently target the wrong people, ending up harming innocents. This will cause civilian trust to erode still further and causing information flows to slow or stop. In the end, even if rebel groups wanted to target civilians selectively, they will find it impossible.

But such groups still have a strategic need to force compliance by civilians. Unable to use violence selectively, they will instead resort to collective punishment, massacring people at random or even whole communities in order to frighten other communities.

Obviously this is a suboptimal outcome for the rebels, even setting aside moral concerns. Once you murder people indiscriminately, it becomes almost impossible to go back as no civilians will trust you or want to help you. “Rich” rebel groups are thus set on a path to continued massacre and bloodshed that ends only when they establish unchallenged control over a given community or population. (And even then, the pervasive acts of individual exploitation will continue.) Their ability to gain popular support will be very much hobbled, and their effectiveness in challenging the government and ruling the populace will be significantly less than it might have been.

Still, it’s not impossible to overthrow the government and rule a country while murdering indiscriminately. (Charles Taylor comes to mind in Liberia.) Less dramatically, in Mozambique, RENAMO managed to bring the ruling government to the bargaining table after a very long and bloody civil war.

In the final post of this sequence, we will discuss how external shocks can challenge rebel groups’ ability to operate, and how their responses to such shocks might change their pattens of behavior from “activist” to “rich” or (rarely) vice versa.

*****

(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned fourth book in this series, working title War for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Internal Discipline in Rebel Movements, Part II

22 Saturday Jul 2023

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In a previous post, I discussed the theory of Jeremy Weinstein on why some rebel groups act in a relatively restrained manner towards civilians, while other groups engage in indiscriminate violence. He argued that much of the difference stemmed from the initial resources available to the group, and how that affected the incentives of people to join the rebels. Poor groups were forced by circumstance to become “activist” groups, that is, to appeal to a base of civilian support and to recruit personnel who were “investors,” i.e. willing to endure short-term sacrifices for the sake of the group’s long-term goals. In order to do that, activist groups were forced to maintain strong discipline to convince the civilian populace that it would protect them from abuses by its soldiers. Poor groups that failed to do so soon withered away from lack of recruits or food.

By contrast, groups that began with access to money and guns from external sponsors, or from control over valuable resources such as drugs or gems, lacked the strategic imperative to seek civilian support. Moreover, they had a strong incentive to expand their membership by offering high pay or other benefits, and therefore attracted “consumer” members, those seeking short-term benefits that flowed from their membership in the rebel group. Groups largely made up of consumers had a much harder time preventing abuse of civilians, since their members were prone to looting or to abducting civilian women or murdering people they disliked for personal reasons. And such groups also had fewer reasons to impose strong discipline: because they had independent resources, they suffered few (initial) disadvantages from tolerating abuses of civilians.

In this post, we will continue Weinstein’s argument and examine the consequences of the previous paragraphs for rebel groups’ governance of civilian areas.

As rebel groups gain control over territory, they have to decide how to handle the civilians living there. Civilians can provide useful resources to rebel groups: information about government activity, new recruits, food, and tax revenue. However, civilians are strategic actors: they can choose to support the rebels or the government, and if neither option seems attractive they will try to flee the area entirely or to resist both sides.

Rebel groups have options in how to build governance structures in response. These can be said to vary on two factors: inclusiveness (AKA participation) and the extent of power sharing. (This is true of regime governments as well, which is not surprising since a rebel group administering territory is basically a kind of government.) A participatory governance regime tries to address the preferences and needs of the populace, while a non-participatory regime treats civilians with indifference at best, as targets of predation at worst. But even participatory governments need not actually share power over decision making, a tempting option in wartime. However, the more that a rebel group shares real power with civilians, the more that civilians will trust the group (or the government in similar circumstances) to uphold its bargains in the future. And in response, rebel groups that build participatory structures of true power sharing are likely to elicit more cooperation from civilian populaces.

Why then doesn’t everybody build such structures? Weinstein argues that the difference hinges on three factors (though he subdivides the factors somewhat differently on pages 171 and 196 of his book without tying the differences to his findings—tsk tsk, Cambridge University Press editors!):

  1. The degree to which the rebel group needs support from the populace;
  2. The extent to which extracting resources from the populace is dependent on civilian productivity; and
  3. The time horizons of the group’s members (i.e. whether they are predominantly “investors” or “consumers”), and the resulting ability of the group to make credible commitments to the populace.

A group that has significant starting resources needs the support of the populace less if at all, and will tend as a result to build non-participatory structures that do not share power. This tendency is exacerbated by the short-term orientation of its members, who want to plunder the populace and seize loot. Even the need to get food from the populace will not moderate this tendency much, since civilians cannot simply stop growing food and will therefore usually have food available to seize.

One complicating wrinkle occurs when the group can extract valuable resources from the populace, but only if the people commit their work to generating such resources. For example, the Shining Path in the Upper Huallaga Valley gained most of their revenue from the drug trade, but they therefore depended on civilians to grow coca. Out of self-interest, then, the rebels built structures that were responsive to civilian interest in having a predictable market for coca leaves, charging fixed taxes and administering public markets. (We would describe the resulting governance structure as inclusive but not featuring true power sharing.) 

A rebel group in this situation could instead choose to enslave civilians en masse, and some try, but this tends to result in civilians fleeing the area or throwing their support to the government in response. Still, the short-term orientation of group members tends to cause the breakdown of the inclusive structures over time, as individual members steal opportunistically. As a result, even non-activist groups that try to take the interests of civilians into account for selfish purposes often fall back on control by force.

An activist rebel group, on the other hand, is dependent on the support of the civilian populace for its very survival. As a result, it will prize the cooperation of civilians, and will tend to create governance structures that both are participatory and share true power, so that civilians will trust them to uphold their bargains. Because activist groups are largely made up of members with longer time horizons (i.e. patient “investors”), the members will submit to such checks on their power for the sake of the group’s strategic goals.

In later posts, we will discuss rebel groups’ strategic use of violence against civilians, and their ability to sustain their membership over time.

******

(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned fourth book in this series, working title War for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Cities, Money, Power, and Political Bargains

20 Thursday Jul 2023

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, War

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For most of post-Roman, premodern history, Europe was hardly the most powerful region in the world. China and Japan were in many ways far more powerful than any European power and had more advanced technology. Africa too featured sprawling empires, such as that of Mali. Europe, by contrast, was something of a backwater, struggling with depressed trade, frequent war, limited education, and disease among other obstacles. And yet starting only a few hundred years ago, strong states emerged in Europe that were able to mobilize vast wealth and military strength sufficient to subdue most of the globe.

The question that scholars have grappled with is how this happened. The “state-formation” literature is generally more applicable to the discussion of state capacity (a topic to be covered in Book 3 of my series) rather than the economy per se; but it is still useful to us as we discuss worldbuilding models of the economy, because in one of the leading theories of state formation, economic development—and the growth of cities in particular—plays a central role.

In Charles Tilly’s Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992, he argued that European cities played a key role in the development of strong states because of their role in concentrating and deploying capital. While many states (such as Russia) were heavily coercion-intensive, states that featured a large amount of capital (such as the Netherlands) eventually found that they could mobilize more of that capital by sharing political rights with the merchant class. As a result, high-capital states that made political bargains with their populace were eventually able to build more powerful militaries than predominantly coercive states, and that particular model of state structure became common.

(It is worth pointing out that Tilly explicitly limited the scope of his theory to Europe due to the unusual concentration of urban cities and high populations found there, and did not apply the theory to other regions. For a while, there was a thriving literature arguing that Tilly’s argument failed in various other regions, or that it did not account for various factors even in the European experience. When the dust died down, I think the best evaluation is that Tilly’s basic thesis holds true even outside of Europe where its necessary conditions hold, such as in China. And where it does not hold, scholars trying to explain why have enriched the general theory by discussing the differing conditions that resulted in other outcomes, such as Jeffrey Herbst’s work on African state-building.)

Fundamentally, the driving force behind the development of strong states was the need to prepare for war. The first states were formed by men seeking to extend their control over others, and the states with the most power would extend their control as far out as it could go, stopping only when they reached the limit of their ability to project power—whether because of the limitations of available transportation technology, geographical barriers, or the opposition of other states. As a result, in each region, the most powerful state set the terms of coexistence—neighboring weaker states could either submit to vassalage or outright conquest, or else spend disproportionate resources on their defense. As Tilly puts it, “[M]ost rulers settled for a combination of conquest, protection against powerful rivals, and coexistence with cooperative neighbors.”

Within the constraints imposed by powerful rivals, states had to build structures to efficiently extract resources from their populations (or other populations forced to pay tribute or subject to plundering) and then translate those resources into military power. Tilly zeroes in on four variables to explain the variable success of a European state in doing so:

  • its concentration of capital,
  • its concentration of coercive power,
  • its need, and ability, to prepare for war, and
  • its position within the regional or international state system.

For Tilly, the key difference was between capital-intensive and coercion-intensive regions. In short, coercion-intensive states were able to mobilize larger armies, at least initially; but their advantage was nullified when warfare changed to require more and more money, to pay for professionalized troops, new weapons, and regularized logistics, and coercion-intensive states tended to have stunted economies as a result. Meanwhile, capital-intensive city-states had skilled professional armies, but small ones; they had not enough population to compete effectively with national states in the long run. The sweet spot was occupied by national states built around large, capital-intensive cities so that their political institutions tended to grant rights to the holders of capital. As a result, they could access large national populations and the money needed to fuel powerful armies.

Coercion

Tilly describes three kinds of European states during the period under discussion:

  • Tribute-taking empires tended to have relatively low accumulations of coercive power, but high concentration—that is, they might have had one or two armies that periodically swept through their vassal territories, demanding resources at swordpoint and punishing rebellions. Such empires were relatively fragile; if an adversary managed to accumulate significant coercive power, the empire’s ability to extract tribute might collapse entirely.
  • Systems of fragmented sovereignty typically included city-states as well as urban federations such as the Hanseatic League or the early Netherlands, which featured several loci of political power without a single clear sovereign. Such systems tended to have high accumulations of coercive power (usually because each of the constituent cities or other units was rich enough to afford its own army). This is almost true by definition; if a fragmented system were not able to accumulate a lot of coercive power, it would have been swallowed up by a competitor. However, such systems usually featured low coercive concentration, as the cities often cooperated poorly on defense and rarely subordinated their forces to a unified command.
  • Finally, national states were in the middle: featuring a high concentration of strong coercive power, but forced to bargain with their populations for their cooperation—typically by granting them political rights or participation of one kind or another.

Capital

Whether capital is concentrated or not depends heavily on the available technologies, and whether they tend to encourage distributed or centralized production.

In a subsistence economy, there is practically no capital at all as we are used to thinking of it. Even if there are a small handful of nobles living in castles, and merchants living in sturdy houses, most people have absolutely nothing to their names. Fernand Braudel (The Structures of Everyday Life, p. 282), writing of the centuries before the eighteenth century in Europe, notes that official inventories of possessions of the deceased almost invariably were restricted to “only a few old clothes, a stool, a table, a bench, the planks of a bed, sacks filled with straw.” That was all that most people had. Capital as we know it was the province of a very few people who engaged in large-scale trade or taxation. Labor-saving devices were few, even including such things as plows (many farmers were forced to use spades and dig by hand). The most readily available form of capital was living beings: livestock, slaves, professional hirelings, or peasants drafted for periodic corvée labor. (That is, the analytical distinction between capital and labor essentially breaks down.) As a result, to accumulate useful capital you had to command the labor of people, which is why rulers were often forced to rely on local landlords to muster their peasants.

In the “protoindustrialization” era of cottage industries, the available technology made production suddenly more efficient, but did not produce large economies of scale—at a time when the roads were just good enough for finished goods to be cost-effectively sent to markets, but not good enough for raw material and workers to routinely travel to centralized production. Capital flowed to labor, in smaller-scale workshops dispersed through cities and their surroundings or out in the countryside. This was the time of the putting-out system, of small workshops and manufacturies built around windmills and watermills, of largely local production. As a result, there was prodigious accumulation of capital compared to what had come before, but it was not excessively concentrated and was spread around relatively evenly. Still, cities served as nexuses for trade, and represented the most available “containers” for capital. City-based merchants and burghers became politically important, because they had the money that rulers needed to pay for their armies. (And sometimes, as in the case of the Hanseatic League, the burghers became rulers themselves.)

By contrast, industrialization featured massive centralized factories, encouraged by the coal boiler and the huge returns to scale that it created. Workers came to capital, concentrating themselves in the cities. The rewards of production became concentrated in relatively few hands and places, which consequently made it easier for governments to make bargains with such capitalists and appropriate some of that wealth in exchange for political privileges.

Effects on State Power

Tilly notes, “Two factors shape the process by which states acquire resources, and strongly affect the organization that results from the process: the character of the bottom-up hierarchy of capital [that emerges naturally from trade and exchange], and the place within that hierarchy of any location from which a state’s agents try to extract resources.” In other words, for a state to be capable of taxing individual incomes requires far more institutional capacity than a state that can only tax salt entering at a single port, for example. And conversely, a state that is dependent on a few sources of tax income must be more solicitous to the interests of the relatively few, relatively wealthy taxpayers.

As a result, states that emerged gradually during the early modern era developed in a clear pattern. The biggest cities with a lot of commercial activity and wealth often became their own city-states (such as in Italy and pre-Bismarck Germany). The regimes in these city-states were often thinly structured, able to easily collect customs duties and borrow money from bankers without large coercive bureaucracies. That, in turn, tended to discourage coercive government policies on the margin. Somewhat less powerful cities were typically incorporated into national states, but were able to negotiate political bargains with the developing state in exchange for their tax revenue (as in France).

By contrast, regions that were relatively poorer and had relatively few cities with weak commercial links with the hinterlands around them often were subject to straight coercion by the ruler, in states that covered a larger geographic area but a relatively dispersed and poor populace (such as Russia). Tilly writes, “In broadly similar ways, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Serbian, and Brandenburger states formed on the basis of strong alliances between warmaking princes and armed landlords, large concessions of governmental power to nobles and gentry, joint exploitation of the peasantry, and restricted scope for merchant capital. Repeatedly, leaders of conquering forces who lacked capital offered their followers booty and land, only to face the problem of containing the great warrior-landlords they thereby created.” The only feasible solution was to rely on extensive force, which became less and less effective as the coercive states fell behind their neighbors on economy.

******

This has gotten quite long and somewhat disorganized, but the key ideas are still useful in your worldbuilding. States need to survive in a dangerous world, and need money and power to do so. In poor settings, highly coercive states have an advantage; but as capital accumulates, richer societies that made political bargains with their populaces end up pulling ahead. (On average!)

*****

(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post will show up in the planned second and third books in this series, working titles Wealth for Worldbuilders and Tyranny for Worldbuilders respectively. No idea when they will be finished, but they should be fun!)

Internal Discipline in Rebel Movements, Part I

13 Thursday Jul 2023

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We fiction writers often feature resistance movements in our stories. American culture in particular lionizes rebels and guerrillas, thanks in part to our rose-colored cultural memory of the American Revolution on the one hand, and some people’s idealized picture of socialist revolution in the Che Guevara mode on the other.

In real life, most resistance movements fail before they even get started. Of the ones that get established enough to fight a serious war against the state, most of them lose—and before they lose, many of them victimize civilian populations more brutally than the states they try to overthrow.

Yet some resistance movements are protective of civilians, and maintain internal discipline to ensure that their foot soldiers do not steal or murder with impunity. Some of them end up getting corrupted by success and start predating civilians; but a few manage to stay moral all the way to victory.

What makes the difference? Why do some rebel groups routinely harm civilians and others don’t? And more to the point, how can we writers use these concepts in our stories?

Jeremy Weinstein, in his book Inside Rebellion, provides an unexpected answer that becomes utterly compelling as he lays out his evidence. Weinstein argues, on the basis of considerable fieldwork in Peru, Uganda, and Mozambique as well as analysis of the literatures on several other civil wars, that the key difference is the level of resources available to the rebel group at its inception.

If a group initially has very few resources (primarily money, food, and weapons), then it must quickly build links to a broader civilian community in order to survive. The need to maintain relationships with the populace then impels the group to develop strong internal discipline and governance, and to behave well with civilians (except for selective killings done for strategic reasons, for example executing collaborators).

If, on the other hand, a group has access to significant resources—money from a state sponsor, or from the drug trade, or from natural resources, for example—then it has much less need to maintain good relations with the civilian populace. That, by itself, doesn’t force a group to harm civilians; but the easy availability of resources tends to lead a group to pay its members well, which attracts a different (and less savory) caliber of recruit than would agree to join a poor, weak resistance group without resources.

This is not a simple argument of “rich group kills civilians, poor group does not.” Weinstein carefully lays out the cascading effects of that difference in initial conditions as they bear on five distinct problems faced by rebel groups (and by governments too, although that is outside of Weinstein’s scope):

  • Recruitment;
  • Maintaining discipline;
  • Managing civilians in areas the group controls;
  • Punishing people for cooperating with the enemy or otherwise shirking; and
  • Resilience (that is, maintaining your membership and its governance structures over time)

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Before I explain these, let me just take a moment to rhapsodize about good theories. (Because this is my blog, and I can do what I want!) The world is full of thorny questions, and equally full of bad answers to those questions—as H.L. Mencken put it, “[T]here is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.” It is a true joy to read a theory that suggests an answer that is utterly unexpected, and yet as you read the argument, it addresses so many features of the initial problem that the theory seems impossible to refute.

Obviously, later work can improve on even good theories. But some theories stand the test of time, and persist in their unaltered form despite the best efforts of later scholars. (Einstein’s theories are good examples. In a different domain, so is the work of Mancur Olson on collective-action problems.)

Not to suggest that Weinstein’s work is definitely in that latter category. But if it were, I wouldn’t be surprised.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program!

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Weinstein’s model builds from the starting assumption that there are two kinds of people who might join a rebel movement: “investors” and “consumers.” Investors are willing to incur significant short-term costs for the sake of the long-term goal of victory. Consumers, on the other hand, are interested in gaining benefits today from their association with the rebel group: a salary, a gun, prestige, the chance to loot plunder, the chance to harm neighbors they don’t like. Which type of recruit predominates in a rebel group has powerful effects on the development of the group.

If a rebel group is poor, it cannot offer immediate benefits to members. As a result, consumers would tend not to join the group, having little reason to. The group’s only option, therefore, is to attempt to appeal to investors—that is, develop links to a civilian population with which it shares ethnic, communal, or ideological ties to which it can appeal to gain support and foster loyalty. This means that the group will have to build institutions of self-governance, so that the civilian populace has reason to trust that the group will protect civilians from the government and from its own members.

It is important to emphasize that getting the support of a civilian base is a strategic imperative for poor rebels, regardless of their political program, ideology, or even personal standards of morality. Those poor groups that don’t manage it will simply wither away from lack of recruits or lack of food. This task will be easier with a rank-and-file made up of investors, who are relatively more willing to submit to discipline that serves the group goals, than it would be if most members were consumers and therefore willing to break the rules for personal gain.

Weinstein also finds that poor rebel groups spend a lot of effort filtering out low-quality recruits, despite the difficulties in finding manpower. Such groups have far too much at stake to risk antagonizing civilians with undisciplined behavior, like the National Resistance Army in Uganda and the Shining Path in Peru (except for the Shining Path in the Huallaga Valley, which became enmeshed in the cocaine trade and therefore followed the “rich group” trajectory).

If a rebel group has significant starting resources, on the other hand, it will be able to rapidly gain recruits by offering them steady pay. This tends to attract a much higher proportion of consumers. It also means that the strategic imperative to gain the support of civilians is largely absent: the group can support itself even if it is hated and feared by civilians, as long as the money or guns keep rolling in. As a result, the group will spend far less effort appealing to the populace, and will also spend less effort on filtering out low-quality recruits because it incurs little penalty from undisciplined behavior that harms civilians.

Moreover, even if the group wanted to stop its forces from harming civilians, it would have a hard time doing so: because most of its members are consumers, i.e. out for immediate gain, they will tend to resist orders not to predate on the civilian populace. So the group will tolerate bad behavior by its troops towards civilians in exchange for demanding obedience on the battlefield.

Now, you might wonder what happens if a group with significant resources nevertheless managed to resist the temptation to behave badly—and instead managed to only recruit investors, impose strong discipline, build links to the populace, etc. In theory, this is possible. In practice, however, the tremendous risks that rebels take when opposing the government would make it almost impossible for them not to take the quick and easy way of recruiting a bunch of thugs to boost their manpower, if they had the cash available. Remember, most rebellions fail miserably. Immediate survival often weighs more heavily on the minds of rebel leaders that the problems of tomorrow that they are unwittingly setting into motion.

*****

The foregoing is only the first half of Weinstein’s discussion, and this post is already quite long. In future posts I will summarize his discussion of how “rich” and “poor” rebel groups differ in how they govern civilians under their control, how they punish civilians for resisting their control or for apparent collaboration with the enemy, and how they maintain their own membership over time. But you can already see where the trend is going.

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned fourth book in this series, working title War for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Where Does War Come From, Anyway?

02 Tuesday May 2023

Posted by in Politics for Worldbuilders, War, Writing

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Worldbuilders and fiction writers often feature wars in their settings, often many wars. This is natural, given the importance of wars and their consequences in humanity’s recorded history. But note that I said “recorded” history. There are still a handful of societies (predominantly foraging societies without formalized leadership) in which war and feud does not take place. That does not mean that such societies are peaceful necessarily; often, homicide rates are quite high. (In one society without war, the Gebusi, homicide was traditionally thought to account for almost a third of adult deaths!) But while individuals might kill individuals, and groups might attack and kill offenders as a form of capital punishment, no one in these societies kills another solely because of his or her membership in a group.

Usually, your invented world will feature social organizations complex enough that the idea of war already exists for your inhabitants. But it’s still worth taking a few minutes to think about what makes war possible, and what it requires.

As used as we are to the idea of war, it can be hard to step back and consider that when you think about it, war is really weird. I’m supposed to kill that man in a uniform over there not because of anything he has done, or might do, but just because he’s wearing a uniform? And he’s going to try to kill me for the same (lack of) reason?

A great review of the anthropology literature on the subject is in Raymond Kelly’s Warless Societies and the Origin of War. Kelly distinguishes war from other forms of violence, such as brawls or assassinations, with the following characteristics:

  • War is collectively carried out.
  • Participants deliberately use deadly force.
  • The “deaths of other persons are envisioned in advance and this envisioning is encoded in the purposeful act of taking up lethal weapons.”
  • War involves advanced planning.
  • The killing in war is seen as justified, morally appropriate, and praiseworthy.
  • Finally, and in contrast to collective executions which target a specific individual, in war the targets are any member of a group, regardless of individual guilt or innocence.

Kelly points out that the default is for people to assign responsibility to individuals—if A murders B, B’s family will try to kill A, but not A’s brothers or sons or cousins. For a society to come up with the idea of feud (punishing an entire family for the crimes of one of its members) requires the concept of what Kelly calls social substitution, that killing A’s brother is somehow “just like” killing A. The same idea applies to war: war can only exist if the targeted people are socially substitutable, and killing one of them is as good as killing another.

There are two basic ways this can come about. Kelly the anthropologist focuses on the more common one, which is the development of durable group identities such that for A to murder B is an offense not only to B, but B’s group—and the offense came not merely from A, but from A’s group. In this view, war (and its smaller-scale cousin, feud) is carried out between groups. But that requires the concept of the group to be present.

He finds that in almost every case where war is not present in a society, the society is unsegmented, meaning that social organization features only the bare minimum of group identities. People who live together will cooperate, but there are no forms of organization that go beyond the immediate local group; and if you leave one group and join another, there is no sense of lingering affiliation with your previous neighbors. Extended families rarely function as a unit beyond the immediate nuclear or polygynous family. Vague senses of regional belonging can develop from periodic shared feasting and the like, but not in the sense of a shared nationality. Even being in the same language group doesn’t necessarily create the conditions of collective action as a group. Finally, and unsurprisingly, strong political leadership does not exist in these societies.

By contrast, once the concept of extended families takes root, once people feel loyalty to a group as such, once strong political leadership welds people into larger units of action, then war and feud are usually on the menu. The group as such has social reality and can suffer injury when its members are harmed. Moreover, your neighbors are viewed through the same lens (often with reason), so that if one member of a neighboring tribe kills your compatriot, the entire tribe is blamed.

(This is not always, or even usually, irrational. Indeed, collective punishment can sometimes be the only way to avoid a situation where outsiders commit violence against you with impunity.)

But war does sometimes exist even in unsegmented societies. How does it start, even in the absence of group identities? That gets us to the second driver of war: the perception that all members of another group pose threats to you as an individual. For example, the unsegmented Slave Indians who once lived near the Great Slave Lake in Canada, were so called because they were frequently attacked by the Cree Indians, who killed the males and took the women and children as slaves. Despite this, astonishingly, there is no record that the Slaves ever engaged in retaliatory raiding against the Cree or developed the concept of warfare as such. But other unsegmented societies facing persistent violence, such as the Andaman islanders, did develop a concept of war in response even in the absence of strong group identities of their own.

Sometimes, such a perception of threat can arise even without previous violence. If two communities live nearby, and suddenly there is a drought so that there isn’t enough food for both, and there’s nowhere else to move to, the communities are suddenly locked into a battle to the death (through no fault of either side). Kelly argues that this was part of what happened in the Andaman case—war developed as a concept when some groups were squeezed into too small a space, and were forced to compete for food.

(Incidentally, the concept of war-as-threat-perception was a big part of my PhD dissertation, for any of you with a few weeks to kill and a craving for boredom…)

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned fourth book in this series, working title War for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Building an Economy: Population Density

20 Monday Feb 2023

Posted by in Economics, Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, War, Writing

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After a great deal of procrastination, it’s time to revisit the Land/Labor/Capital triad, identified by the classical economists like Adam Smith and the like as the key factors of production.

(Side note: modern economists consider entrepreneurship to be a fourth factor of production. I’m still trying to figure out whether there is a nice way to characterize entrepreneurship in our model, as it would obviously lend itself to strong stories.)

Remember, we’re not trying to explain everything about an economy from the ground up. We’re trying to build a relatively simple, yet powerful and flexible framework that worldbuilders can use to quickly mock up the contours of their invented societies. Once the bones are in place, you are then in a position to dive into all the cool little details, confident that they will be consistent with the structuring logic.

So when we talk about land, we’re going to focus on three broad variables—each of which can have surprisingly powerful implications:

  • Population density
  • Ease of transport
  • Natural resources

Really, these are interrelated. For example, you can’t have a dense population without lots of food, and and an easy way to get the food to people. Still, it’s useful to consider them separately to keep everything straight in our heads. Let’s begin with population density.

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If you want to have a country or region with a high population density, that implies several things. We already noted the need for lots of food and efficient transportation of it. On the other hand, you don’t necessarily need to have urban cities, if people are living in densely placed villages and growing their own food with intensive agricultural methods. (It will mean that animal husbandry will likely use methods that require little land, rather than pasture-grazing.) And the material standard of living might still be low if most people are producing food, rather than more specialized goods. Still, the more people there are living close together, the more opportunities for specialization and exchange, and the more likely that the economy will develop more complexity.

Conversely, if the population is thinly spread, the people might still be relatively prosperous. They could have large herds of livestock that move from place to place, or practice a carefree foraging lifestyle where they only spend a few hours a day gathering food and use the rest of their time making luxuries, playing games, fighting with neighbors (!), or relaxing. Or they might be desperately poor, if the land is not very productive and they all have to work hard to feed themselves, since there are few opportunities for trade. With a thinly spread populace that cannot sustain specialization and exchange, chances are that the energy surplus of the society will be small, which limits the development of their society and culture. (And you can see how the productivity of the land interacts with population density.)

So whether you choose to have a dense population or not, you can play around with what that looks like for you and your story.

But what about the political effects of a dense population, or its opposite?

Note that the more thinly spread the population, the harder it is to control the territory. If you are being oppressed by a ruler, or landlord, or moneylender, or cruel family members or whatever, you always have the option to pull up stakes and run; and all else equal, it is more difficult for a ruler to stop you if the population is thin. This is because fortifying the border to keep people in would be too expensive, compared to the number of people being contained. By contrast, if the society has a dense population, it is relatively more efficient to fortify the border even at great expense, because of the large number of people you will be able to contain and control.

Jeffrey Herbst argues that this is one of the key differences between the experience of Western Europe and of precolonial Africa; Western Europe, being densely populated and urbanized, made it worthwhile for rulers to fortify their borders, the better to control the moments of their people (as well as to defend against invasion!). In Africa, however, the landscape was so vast compared to the populace that there was little practical way to control the territory as such. Instead, African rulers focused on strategies to control people directly—ties of loyalty or marriage for some, enslavement and physical domination for others.

Let’s see why. When seeking wealth or other resources, a ruler must ask a key question: is it easier to exploit one’s own people, or someone else? If your people are easily controlled and restrained, it will be relatively easier to tax them. If your people can move around easily, however, then they will not tolerate heavy taxation. On the other hand, if your army can also move around easily, it becomes more attractive to invade your neighbors and cart away plunder, in goods or people.

So as a broad pattern, we see regions of high population density focus on fortification of borders and relatively high reliance on taxation or other means to generate resources from their own people (which does not exclude invading and pillaging neighbors, of course!); and regions of low population density feature relatively higher mobility, societies that feature relatively less political coercion and taxation, and lots of raiding of neighbors for treasure and slaves.

Of course, rulers can also change the population density of their territory. A very common pattern, as James C. Scott tells us, was for city rulers to concentrate the surrounding populations by force within the city walls, and have them cultivate fields that were within easy reach of the city (and the city’s military). This allowed them to tax their peasantry’s output more easily than if farmers were living in distant villages.

So when you’re creating a new territory, think about the population density of the land, and then consider what consequences flow from that. The implications for your story might be surprising.

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Wealth [Commerce?] for Worldbuilders, along with some overlap with the planned third book, working title Tyranny for Worldbuilders. No idea when they will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Building a Worldbuilding Model for Military Effectiveness

17 Friday Feb 2023

Posted by in Politics for Worldbuilders, War, Writing

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Worldbuilders who plan for their stories to feature wars as a key plot conflict face a fundamental tension: the “bad guys” must be powerful enough to pose a serious threat, yet must still lose (usually!). How this happens is often fertile ground for stories.

A common fictional pattern is for the enemy to have overwhelming force, but be fundamentally stupid—tactically incompetent, strategically myopic, prone to getting distracted by personal feuds and such. I would tend to view such stories as being far too convenient and even a sign of lazy writing, but the current invasion of Ukraine shows that this can actually happen in real life.

Still, fiction has the burden of needing to make sense. How then should worldbuilders proceed? Essentially, if you want your enemies to have an exploitable military weakness, you should be able to justify it.

This post will not give you an entire theory for doing so (I plan to spend about half of Book 4 in my “Politics for Worldbuilders” series on that topic), but it will lay out a high-level framework. Essentially, you can view military effectiveness as a product of the state structures (or societal structures, in societies without strong states) built to support the military. Those structures, in turn, were created (in part) because the ruling regime (or ruling elites, or dominant societal ethos, or whatever) decided on specific political-military objectives and then decided to devote resources and create structures to achieve those objectives.

Hence:

  • Political-military objectives come first, and lead to
  • Strategic and organizational decisions for how to create a military that can achieve the objectives.
  • This leads to the creation of structures for generating and supporting the military, such as recruiting capacity, manufacturing base, logistics, scientific research, the development of doctrine, and the cultivation of a particular military mindset.
  • These then condition military success on the battlefield.

All of these can be discussed in great detail, and I plan to. Moreover, the arrow of causation isn’t in one direction. As Donald Rumsfeld famously said, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish you had at a later time.” So political decisions might be constrained by existing military weakness or institutional flaws.

But for a quick example, we can see how the political decision by the Russian regime to try and rush tactical success in Ukraine, as well as the long-standing policy of treating the infantry as a potential political threat that needs to be weakened and held in check, has led to drafted Russian soldiers being insufficiently trained. This means that they cannot execute complex tactics and are instead being thrown into the meat grinder in human wave attacks. So the seeming stupidity of Russian tactics is in fact rooted in a coherent (if equally stupid) set of political decisions.

For another example, the famed English longbowmen didn’t spring from the ground fully formed. English bowmen were required by law to spend their whole lives practicing; the English kings decided on this policy even though it made the peasantry more of a threat to the elites, while other states chose to disarm their peasants and rely on professional soldiers.

My aspiration is to give worldbuilders a clear structure that they can use to explain why their invented militaries look the way they do, think the way they do, and fight the way they do. In the interim, you can use the above model as a way to organize your thinking.

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post will end up in the planned fourth book in this series, working title War for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

New Release! Telling the Stories of Women Veterans

01 Friday Jul 2022

Posted by in Lagrange Books, Military

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My micropress, Lagrange Books, has just published a new book by Ron Farina, Out of the Shadows: Voices of American Women Soldiers. You can read the blog post there for the official announcement, but for the purposes of my personal blog, let me just say how very proud I am of Ron’s book.

Ron spent many, many hours talking to these incredible women about their experiences. He then wrote nine harrowing stories, and the two of us pored over each word, making sure that Ron had captured the essences of the veterans in the best way he could. Out of the Shadows is the product of the hard work of Ron, our brilliant cover designers at Deranged Doctor Design, skillful editors, our sponsor the Arenberg Foundation (and particularly the indefatigable Col. Roger Housen), and more.

For me, this project was especially meaningful because of my own family’s connection to the military. Both of my grandfathers served (in World War II and Korea respectively), and other family members served in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The tremendous sacrifices that we ask of our servicemen and women are easy to glibly acknowledge with a “Thank you for your service”; but it is harder to truly understand what they mean, and the obligations that they place on us in return. I hope that Ron’s writing helps to redress the balance, at least a little bit.