The central, organizing spirit of the highly peaceful Batek society, at least in the mid-1970s, was a moral commitment to sharing any and all foods with everyone else who happened to be in camp. This “moral unity,” as Karen and Kirk Endicott so evocatively put it, required children to be constantly scampering about carrying meals […]

Next week, the Lorentz Center at Leiden University in the Netherlands is hosting a five day workshop, “Aggression and Peacemaking in an Evolutionary Context,” which could be of interest to students of peaceful societies. The aim of the five-day meeting, October 18 – 22, is to bring together scholars in fields such as primatology, evolutionary […]

The people of a relatively peaceful Zapotec community in Mexico have internalized controls against expressions of aggression, but in a nearby, more violent, community the residents lack similar internal controls. In an article published originally in 1994 and just added to the Archive of this website, Douglas Fry argues that external controls on the expression […]