This article suggests a general theory of conflict and violence that may help explain the conditions under which internal conflict co-occur or are differentiated.

This article suggests a general theory of conflict and violence that may help explain the conditions under which internal conflict co-occur or are differentiated.

This article suggests a general theory of conflict and violence that may help explain the conditions under which internal conflict co-occur or are differentiated.

This article investigates whether external warfare, intercommunity trade, and female exogamy lead to more amicable intercommunity relationships. Intercommunity amicability is considered a historical facilitator of the large-scale integration of human groups. The absence of internal warfare is used as a measure for intercommunity amicability.

This paper explores societal-level mechanisms associated with women’s participation in and exclusion from political life. Analysis suggests there are two statistically independent types of female political participation: involvement in decision-making and the existence of positions controlled by or reserved for women. Multiple regression analysis identifies several social-structural, psychocultural, and behavioral correlates for both types of female political participation and explanatory theory is discussed.

Several theories on the development of matrilocal residence are tested. The main argument put forth predicts that matrilocal residence will develop in response to a need to break up fraternal interest groups that encourage internal war and instead encourage a pattern of external war that is more beneficial in populated regions with additional group migration.

In this study, the author empirically tests a formulation of Ellen Dissanayake's evolutionary theory of art, which argues that art evolved to promote group cohesion. The hypotheses derived from this theory and tested in this study specifically focus on ritual art and its relationships to various proxies for group cohesion such as community conflict and internal warfare. Results show that the presence of ritual art is significantly higher where certain measures of group cohesion are also higher (including lower internal warfare, lower conflict between communities of the same society, and lower frequency of violent conflict between groups within local communities).

This study examines how social structure, political organization, and intersocietal relations may affect the incidence of internal warfare (between culturally similar political communities). Results show that in uncentralized political systems, fraternal interest groups and unauthorized raiding parties may increase the incidence of internal war.

This article examines structural and dispositional explanations for complexity of political institutions. Analysis suggests that both socioeconomic organization and socialization variables are useful in understanding the concentration, specialization, and centralization of political power, but socioeconomic organization variables have stronger associations.

In order to explore the evolution of mutually beneficial transactions in large societies, this experimental study gathered data on the way people in societies of different subsistence types played games simulating interactions with anonymous others. The degree of fairness displayed by different players was correlated with measures of large-scale institutions, such as a market or world religion, that were present in a player’s society. Results suggest that “modern prosociality is not solely the product of an innate psychology, but also reflects norms and institutions that have emerged over the course of human history” (1480).