The University of Arizona Press
June 3, 2025
Warfare and the Dynamics of Political Control draws on a wealth of interdisciplinary perspectives to explore how conflict shapes the establishment and maintenance of political institutions, from small-scale societies to expansive empires. Edited by Brian R. Billman, the book brings together case studies from diverse regions and time periods and illuminates the multifaceted nature of political violence. The volume includes discussions of human sacrifice, slave-taking, ideological signaling, and military strategy and tactics. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.
Politics by Other Means: Toward an Understanding of the Role of Violence in the Origins of Political Control
By Brian R. Billman
This book is about how leaders and groups use warfare and other forms of political violence, such as torture, slavery, and human sacrifice, to create centralized institutions of political control in which the few dominate the many. It is also about how groups during periods of endemic warfare resist domination by ambitious leaders. The case studies are drawn from historic, ethnohistoric, and archaeological sources and involve societies of varying scales, from small, autonomous farming communities to empires. The temporal range is equally broad, from the Late Shang Dynasty in China (ca. 1250–1050 BCE) to the first contact between the Māori of New Zealand and Europeans in the 1700s.
In our modern era, warfare has been one of the primary means by which political organizations have gained political control over land and people. From Henry VIII to Vladimir Putin, states (be they nation-states, kingdoms, or empires) have achieved political domination through the use of warfare and other judicial and extrajudicial forms of violence. With the emergence of global capitalism, warfare has been to the formation of states like water is to the ocean. Without warfare, there wouldn’t be modern nation-states. Political violence by states is not the only means to political control in the modern era; however, it has been fundamental to seizing control of land and people and maintaining political, ideological, and economic domination.
Modern history raises key questions. What was the relationship of warfare, and other forms of coalitional violence, to the emergence of systems of political control in human history and prehistory before the rise of global capitalism? Are there commonalities between the politics of modern warfare and the politics of conflict in noncapitalist political formations? Clearly, capitalism and nation-states are profoundly different from antecedent political economic formations. Likewise, modern warfare is significantly different from earlier forms of coalitional violence in scale, lethality, and in kind. Nonetheless, one wonders if the past, and the myriad noncapitalist political formations, can help us understand our modern world. To use the words of a renowned scholar of the politics of modern wars, Barbara Tuchman: Is the past a distant mirror (Tuckman 1978)?
The case studies presented here reveal the complex and often contradictory relationships between warfare and the development of institutions of political control. In several of the cases presented here, endemic raiding led to the formation of communities that successfully resisted attempts by ambitious leaders to gain control over the community, whereas, in two case studies, conflict led to two of the largest empires prior to the modern era: the Inka and the Han Empires. This is not surprising; we all know that history is inherently complex. What is surprising is that there are similarities among these case studies even though they involve profoundly different historical and cultural contexts. No uniform or unified theory of conflict and political formation emerges from these case studies. Rather, they reveal parallels in historical sequences, political strategies, and reoccurring relationships. If not exactly a distant mirror, they do provide a means of placing the warfare, political violence, and nation building of our time within the broader context of human experience over the longue durée of history and prehistory. They reveal what is unique to our times and what is recurrent and, therefore, perhaps, fundamental to human violence and politics.
DEFINING QUESTIONS
All the lead authors in this volume were participants in a SAA-Amerind Advanced Seminar in September 2023. They brought to the table a great diversity of theoretical perspectives and research experiences. Remarkably, in our discussions at Amerind there emerged a general framework for discussing the politics of conflict. Not mutual agreement but rather a framework for disagreement, discussion, and exploration. In this chapter, I present this framework, lay out the thematic foundations for the case studies, and discuss some new ways of thinking about warfare and political control that emerged from our discussions and the case studies.
I suggest that we need to move beyond leader-centric models of social and political change to models that encompass group power and collective action. Key to the success of the seminar was the formation of a set of defining questions for establishing the parameters of our discussion of our case studies. These questions developed from the papers we presented at a session at the Annual Meetings of the Society for American Archaeology in April 2023. Prior to the Amerind seminar, these questions, as well as revised drafts of the SAA papers, were circulated to all the seminar participants. The questions were not rules of engagement but rather a beginning point for open discussions:
• How did leaders use warfare, raiding, and other forms of political violence to gain control over or influence others?
• What specific strategies did leaders use and what were the outcomes of those strategies?
• How did groups resist the development of political control by ambitious leaders during periods of intense warfare and raiding?
• Why did conflict inhibit the creation of institutions of political control in some cases while promoting it in others?
In the seminar, we agreed on a broad definition of warfare for the purposes of our discussions: “We adhere to a more inclusive definition of warfare as organized aggression and violence between socially distinct or autonomous groups of people” (Kissel and Kim 2019:2). While agreeing with Kissel and Kim (2019), we broadened the scope of our discussions to include other forms of political violence, such as human sacrifice as a means of ideological signaling and slave taking as a form of political terror and economic capital-building.
Brian R. Billman is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Billman’s research interests include the prehistory of Andean South America and southwestern North America, community-based archaeology and heritage preservation, community organizing, prehistoric political economies, origins of states and empires, causes and consequences of warfare, household archaeology, and settlement pattern and landscape studies.
