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 examines causes of political participation in pre-industrial societies, particularly the level of resources and organization of resources. Hirschman’s concepts of exit, voice, and loyalty are also discussed. A distinction is made between range of community decision-making and the degree of adult involvement. Results from a multiple regression analysis favor the more structural variables (i.e. organization of resources) in the prediction of political participation.

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.

This study tests various theories on conflict. Multiple regression analyses are presented and support is given for the psychocultural perspective.

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 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 study investigates the presence of feuding, arguing that a solely evolutionary or functional approach misses important inter-societal factors. Results indicate that while fraternal interest groups are associated with feuding, the presence of war and level of political integration also increase the likelihood of feuding.

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 several predictors of female status in public decision making. The author hypothesizes that paternal nurturance will be positively associated with female status. Although results suggest that a male dominated social structure is the strongest predictor, paternal nurturance also significantly contributes to variance in female status.

The present study attempts to replicate the Ember, Ember, and Russett (1992) worldwide finding that fighting rarely occurs between democracies in a sample of eastern African societies. Following the earlier study, the authors considered internal warfare to be an analog of international warfare and measures of political participation analogous to democracy. The researchers also explore if there is an association between political participation and committing atrocities. Contrary to past findings, internal warfare was not predicted by the same set of variables as the 1992 study, but there is an inverse relationship between committing atrocities and political participation. However, when additional variables were added, internal warfare was significantly predicted by less political participation.