SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Warfare as organised violence can be traced back to the New Stone Age. In the words of historian Azar Gat, ‘For once humans had evolved agriculture, they set in train a continuous chain of developments that have taken them further and further away from their evolutionary natural Way of life as hunter-gatherers' (Gat 2006: 145). We can argue that the beginning of agriculture around 10,000 BCE gave spurt to the production of surplus, demographic growth, the beginning of fortifications for the protection of agricultural wealth and the human population and the subsequent genesis of warfare. The last 12 millennia have included both regular warfare in the form of conventional conflicts between two or more polities and irregular warfare, including guerrilla war, terrorism, etc. that consists of violent confrontations in which at least one of the sides is a non-state group.