Marie Armoudian: Hello and welcome to the Scholars Circle. I am Marie Armoudian.

Today we began with when and how war began, and then how wars and violent conflicts might be resolved. When did war begin? Some have argued it had evolved from early human behavior within foraging ban(?) societies but our next guests say thats not true. Most forager bans did not wage war. With us is Douglas Fry. He is a professor and the administrator of the Peace Mediation Conflict Research program at Abo Akademi University. Hes also a research scientist at the University of Arizona and the author of Beyond War: The Human Potential for Peace, War, Peace, and Human Nature: The Convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views, and The Human Potential for Peace. Robert Kelly also joins us. He is Director and Professor of the Frison Institute at the University of Wyoming. Hes the author of The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum, Archaeology, and Archaeology: Down to Earth. Welcome to you both, Bob Kelly, Doug Fry. Thank you for being with us here in the Scholars Circle. Maybe with this discussion about war versus cooperation, violence versus non-violence, and where it began in humanity, we should start with a definition. Doug Fry, you started with a pretty clear definition to distinguish between interpersonal violence and war. Why dont you start us there? Robert Kelly: Violent competition always has an extraordinarily high cost to it, and that cost only goes up throughout human evolution. It goes up because one person invents a spear so another person invents a shield, and another person invents bows and arrows so the other person invents palisades. Someone invents gunpowder then cannons so we invent bigger, bigger walls and it goes on and on. Really until we reached nuclear weapons and there it kind of stops because its Mutually Assured Destruction. Nobody thats the first time that the worlds reached that point, and that cost is partly in terms of human life but its also in terms of other resources, and we see it happening in the world today; People not opting to use their military because its such an enormous cost. What did we spend in Iraq? $1 trillion? And people have reached a point where war is extraordinarily expensive and its a huge cost, besides the obvious: cost in human lives. Thats the point in which people start saying there has to be some other way to work things out. Thats the point in which cooperation is going to be the cheaper option to competition. Armoudian: Doug Fry, before we have you respond to all this one thing that you were talking about in terms of how these groups related to each other that often times they have relative in the other groups and brothers and sisters, or maybe it was a distant cousin, made me stop to think about anonymity and how important that was in violent conflict between groups such as war and it made me think of the Christmas troops. When during World War I after the, I believe it was the Germans and British in these trenches got to know each other they couldnt kill each other anymore. How do you think this Douglas Fry: Very interesting example, I made a couple of thoughts Id like to piggyback a bit on something that Bob was talking about and come back to this whole idea of the fear, basically, and part of the fear coming from lack of resources or fear that the resources are limited and so forth not having enough or just living in fear of being attacked by some other group which is a major one. As Ive been studying peace studies more recently and just thinking about these phenomena, I think its a fair generalization or

true generalization that people everywhere would like to live a secure life and by that I mean free from fear of attack, certainly a big one, and just all of the other things considered necessary and helpful for life: a roof over your head, adequate food, and clean water and so on and so forth. And on the global studies or international spirit of this theres a term called human security by contrast the existing way the United States has operated in the last 50-60 years has been military security to the extent of basically ignoring other factors that are really important: a clean environment, protecting us from radiation from nuclear plants and from nuclear weapons. The fact that there could be a nuclear weapon is just mad in multiple meanings of the term mad! But what people really want is not that they want military might, they actually want to feel secure. So this brings me, in my mind, back around to this idea of cooperation. The military model is not working so we need to shift. I really think, and I think huntergatherers show us this as well, over to a different conceptualization of what is security that would involve human security and a cooperative strategy to achieve that. So I think this is where we are on the globe. Toss out some big ideas in this interview in that way as well! Armoudian: Bob Kelly, last word? Kelly: I think what Ive learned from hunter-gatherers is that there really is no one, single human nature. You cant say that its human nature to be violent and you cant say its human nature to be peaceful either. We have the capacity for both and what hunter-gatherers teach us is which of those capacities comes out has a lot to do with the conditions that we live under and how we choose to organize our societies is entirely up to us not human nature. Armoudian: Bob Kelly, Doug Fry thank you very much for being with us here on the Scholars Circle. Fry & Kelly: Thank you!