New insights into the psychology of individuals and large groups in a world of changing conflicts

Abstract

The character of armed conflict has changed dramatically. The use of overwhelming force no longer brings victory and success. Under what conditions do supposedly weaker conflict actors ‘outpower’ stronger actors? This article argues that, throughout human history, those most willing to engage in and sustain extreme conflict have not been rational actors but ‘devoted actors’ driven by faith in defending or advancing their non-negotiable ‘sacred values’, whether religious or secular. Bringing into dialogue insights from large group psychology, neuroscience, and epigenetics with political science, this article demonstrates how two factors can help explain apparently non-rational elements of human functioning during armed conflict: first, the biological substrate helps elucidate why and how rational actor models seem to underestimate the influence of ‘right and wrong’ in people’s behaviour; second, the complex psychology of large groups often drives people to engage in action that may not be in their own individual interests.

Introduction: The use of overwhelming force no longer brings victory and success

The ending of the Second World War with the detonation of nuclear bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki changed the character of war. Until then mankind knew that however damaging any conflict, humanity would survive, and the world would return to normal. Now a nuclear war would likely render the whole world uninhabitable. Of course, wars did not stop, but the two nuclear super-powers – the United States and the USSR – engaged in proxy wars rather than direct, and potentially catastrophic, conflict. However, wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere proved very difficult for these two great powers to win. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the development of the European Union, the progress of globalization and the growth of ‘international law’, many people wished to believe that the world was becoming a safer place (Pinker, 2012), but the attacks by Al Qaeda on the USA on 11 September 2001 dented such confidence, and another question arose when on 30 August 2021 the United States and its allies withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban took over again. The United States had demonstrated its extraordinary capacity to deliver a massive military assault on almost anyone who attacked its vital interests, but the defeat in Afghanistan showed that, with sufficient passion, geographical advantage and motivation, a relatively modestly armed military outfit could resist and repel the US forces and inflict a defeat of geo-political consequence. Overwhelming military force, even when backed by the biggest economy in the world, could no longer guarantee victory.

On 24 February 2022, the world witnessed another historically significant conflict: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While, at the time of writing, the outcome remains uncertain, already it is clear that despite Russia’s military superiority, Ukrainians have demonstrated remarkable resistance. Rather than decidedly outpowering Ukraine, as many had expected (Rachman, 2022), Russia failed to take any major cities, and was forced to withdraw from some of the areas it had initially seized.

It seems to be another example of an armed conflict in which supposedly weaker actors have been remarkably resilient and effective, and victory has eluded the powerful. This raises an important question: how and under what conditions do supposedly weaker conflict actors ‘outpower’ stronger actors? The dominant paradigm adopted by many military, political and economic experts assumes that combatants rationally weigh up the most materially cost-effective way to achieve goals which they have judged as achievable (Atran et al., 2007). However, partisans in situations of historic conflict are sometimes more resistant to compromise and peacemaking when offered material benefits but more open to symbolically significant offers (Ginges et al., 2007), and revolutionaries often sacrifice everything for their cause, are frequently committed more strongly to their comrades than even to their families, and have regularly prevailed against overwhelming odds (Whitehouse et al., 2017). I would argue that those most willing to sustain extreme conflict have not been rational actors but ‘devoted actors’ driven by faith in defending or advancing their non-negotiable ‘sacred values’, whether religious or secular (Atran, 2016). Bringing together insights from anthropology, psychology, neuropsychology, genetics and biological science has been given the term ‘cultural neuroscience’ (Han et al., 2013). In this article I bring these ideas into dialogue with conflict studies, and political science more broadly, to demonstrate how two interacting factors can help explain what appear to be non-rational elements of human functioning. The first factor is the biological substrate, which helps elucidate why and how rational actor models may underestimate the influence of ‘right and wrong’ in people’s behaviour. The second factor is that of psychology, especially the emerging and complex psychology of large groups, driving people to engage in action that may not be in their own individual interests.

While the character of armed conflict is constantly changing, the biological structure of the human body and the significance of human relationships remain constant. To substantiate my argument, I summarize significant biological and psychological findings, present evidence from my experience as one of the negotiators of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that ended the violent conflict in Ireland, and end with some reflections on the relevance of bio-psycho-social insights for the study of change in armed conflict as well as making some concluding remarks on avenues for future research and policy implications (Alderdice 2017a, 2017b).

Theory: The biological substrate and the psychology of large groups

In this section I first provide an overview of how appreciating the biological substrate of brain function helps us understand why rational actor models need to be complemented with considerations of how a sense of what is ‘right and wrong’ can be a powerful driver in conflict dynamics. I then discuss how the psychology of large groups is relevant to understand the actions of supposedly weaker conflict actors.

The biological substrate: Rational actor versus right and wrong

Recent developments in large group psychology, neuroscience and epigenetics all add to political science debates on changes in armed conflict. Under conditions of existential threat, where there is profound uncertainty and anxiety, the brain adopts a different form of functioning, in which commitment to the cause, and decision making on the basis of firm principles, takes over from weighing up the costs and benefits to the individual of a course of action.

New forms of biological investigation make it possible to explore these processes in the brain. We can now assay the levels of brain neurotransmitters, observe and measure the electrical activity in different parts of the brain in response to various stimuli, visualize the functioning of the brain in real time using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and sequence genomes and see how they function. These capacities are beginning to enable us to understand more about how our thoughts, feelings and behaviour emerge from, are influenced by, and in some cases are limited by our genetic predispositions and our physical brain and body functioning. These discoveries have furthered understanding of the body/mind split, showing how much we are in thrall to our biological substrate (Fitzduff, 2021).

Genes do not determine political beliefs, but when people are presented with a situation, a dilemma, or the behaviour of another person or community, whether, for example, they focus on the independent individual or the social milieu and context, is not only culturally but also biologically mediated. People’s thinking about things and their reactions to others are less voluntary and self-constructed than we might wish to believe, even if experience and environments affect the content of ideas.

At the same time, while genes may be a ‘given’ that is not altered by experiences, studies of epigenetics show that experiences can affect how those genes are expressed. This can be both positive and negative. If one has positive experiences, the gene expression may be modified to make it more possible to accept change. If one has had negative experiences, even if the problem were to be resolved tomorrow, the negative impact could continue for a lifetime and may in some cases even be able to be transmitted to the next generation (Moore, 2015). It is also important to realize that violence can be experienced and perceived as an armed conflict even if categories of international law or formally established political science definitions do not capture it as such, for example with gangs in post-conflict societies. These experiences and perceptions influence people’s behaviour, which can lead to escalating violence or affect future generations in other ways. Acquiring a nuanced understanding of armed conflict and its dynamics thus requires taking them seriously by critically questioning conventional definitions and categories—at least in our analyses.

Research using fMRI scanning shows that when people emerge from communities under existential threat, not only is the way that they think and react different, but it is mediated through different parts of the brain that operate with what one might characterize as different grammars and syntax of thinking in response to differing circumstances. Having studied the thinking of people engaged in violent inter-group conflict on the one hand, and brain function on the other, Hamid et al. (2019) show how fMRI investigations can enable us to observe psychological function and brain function operating in conjunction with each other in real time; this has made it possible to observe a range of related phenomena. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, inferior frontal gyrus and parietal cortex have been implicated in calculating costs and consequences – rational actor function – while increased activity in the left temporoparietal junction and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex has been associated with semantic rule retrieval – that is to say, operating under rules of right and wrong, rather than cost-benefit analysis. In other words, whether someone is addressing a problem using cost/benefit analysis or the rules of right and wrong is not just a matter of psychological choice; we can see that different parts of the brain are operating.

While soldiers of a state often see their professional role as a job for which, like other jobs, they are contracted and remunerated, those who volunteer to engage in violent intergroup conflicts are more likely to be motivated by commitments to abstract ideals such as God or nation, so-called ‘sacred’ values that are largely insensitive to material trade-offs. These individuals and groups react as ‘devoted actors’ rather than ‘rational actors’. The fMRI studies referenced show that, as they indicate their willingness to fight and die for sacred and non-sacred values, and as they react to peers’ ratings for the same values, we can see diminished activity in those regions of the brain that have been implicated by other studies in calculating costs and consequences. In other words, they are making decisions using parts of the brain where decision making is not based on the calculation of costs and consequences.

Why large groups sometimes matter more than individuals: The psychology of the ‘large group’

That individuals may use decision-making processes that are based on rules of ‘right and wrong’ rather than weighing up the costs and benefits may seem contrary to the well-being of that individual, but sometimes the outcome of events at the level of the large group – matters of armed conflict – are more successfully prosecuted by committed leaders and followers willing to sacrifice and die, than by those who prefer to assess whether it is best to live to fight another day. In one of the examples of this phenomenon, Johnson (2020) shows how the first President of the United States, George Washington, should not have won independence from Britain if he had weighed up all the apparently reasonable realities of the respective military resources and strengths of his supporters and opponents. However, Washington refused to let military reversals dent his determination or be influenced by what would have appeared to be his poor prospects, and not only won out, but altered world history as a result. Enlightenment expectations focus not only on rationality, but on the welfare and autonomy of the individual; however, the survival and evolution of the group may well, on the contrary, require individual sacrifice.

The study of psychology started out by addressing the disturbances of individual thought, feeling and behaviour, resulting in theoretical development in normal individual psychology, though less in the complex relationship between our physical substrate and our psychological functioning. However, human beings do not operate only by themselves, but in relation with others. The pressures of dealing with large numbers of disturbed individuals suffering from the impact of the Second World War and being looked after in large hospitals encouraged psychiatrists to experiment with treating their patients in groups rather than as individuals. This revealed that when a group of individuals begins to develop a relationship not only with other individuals on a one-to-one basis, but as a group, a new entity is formed – the group – that functions in ways that are not seen when studying individuals on their own or in couples. Families and therapeutic groups of eight to ten people became a regular mode of addressing psychological problems, opening new understandings of how to apply systems theory to working with people. In rudimentary terms, when several people develop a sufficient relationship with each other, as a group, a new ‘organism’ comes into being with properties and ways of functioning that did not exist with the individuals on their own (Volkan, 2013a).

Fusion, complex adaptive systems, large groups

These insights have been built upon in three ways. First, in situations of threat, individuals can become ‘fused’ together to form powerful attachments that enable them to make sacrifices for each other and their larger community. These bonds go beyond what they feel even for their families of origin and may be very long-lasting, as in the case of veterans who have been through war experiences together. Throughout history this phenomenon of ‘fusion’ that grows out of experiences of existential threat has been used to create powerful group bonds by the requirement for young men to go through initiation rites which may often be painful and damaging. They do not make much sense at the level of individual function, but in the way they produce powerful group bonds, their evolutionary value becomes clearer (Whitehouse, 2021).

Secondly, the study of ‘complex adaptive systems’ has opened new possibilities for understanding how large groups of people function differently from collections of individuals, and this may have particular significance in dealing with conflict (De Coning, 2016). An example is the way in which states deal with terrorism. When a terrorist act is understood as a breach of the criminal law, the state implements its normal process of security: policing and administering justice. However, this rarely succeeds in ending the terrorist campaign, not least when the terrorist is prepared to make personal sacrifices, as noted above. When they make these sacrifices on behalf of the large group, one is not dealing simply with an individual problem but with a disturbance of the group of which they are a part, albeit a group that is a minority of the larger community. It may be necessary to address the problems at the level of the group and the larger community. This goes beyond what the criminal justice system can generally do on its own, since it is posited on the notion of a guilty individual to whom the law and its sanctions can be applied. Thinking of the problem as a large group problem raises many political, legal and moral questions, but progress in our understanding of phenomena often raises such questions, especially when that progress involves a shift from the old paradigm on which these social boundaries were created.

Thirdly, psychology has moved from the disturbed individual to the ‘normal’ individual, to addressing small groups and families, and more recently to large groups (Volkan, 2013a). This includes addressing the functioning of ‘groups’ of hundreds of thousands or millions of people, who will never meet or know each other, but nevertheless operate as groups, as exemplified by supporters of major soccer teams. They may be dispersed throughout the world but share the elation when watching a live match. If they do meet, they feel a sense of kinship. Just as the rules of structure at a ‘lower’ level – that of fundamental ‘particles’, and then atoms and molecules, and finally cells and multicellular organisms – have similar features, but also differ in their properties from those with greater structure, so the psychology of individuals, families, small groups and large groups is both similar and different. As these large groups have been studied not only from the perspective of anthropology and sociology but that of the emerging science of ‘large group psychology’, new ways of understanding and engaging with them have emerged (Alderdice, 2017a, Alderdice 2017b). This is evidenced by the Irish Peace Process, which moved away from rational actor models and a focus on law and political structures in one or two communities and was modelled instead on the analysis and addressing of interlocking disturbed historic relationships between Protestant unionists and Catholic nationalists within Northern Ireland, between the people of Ireland, North and South, and between the peoples of Britain and Ireland. Addressing three sets of relationships involved three matching strands of negotiations and the outcome was three interlocking sets of institutions (Alderdice, 2020). The need to see things in terms of complex sets of relationships became clear, not only in the success of bringing the violence to an end through the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, but also later when the neglect of them contributed to subsequent problems not only within Northern Ireland, but between the United Kingdom and Ireland after the departure of the UK from the EU, often described as ‘Brexit’. These British/Irish problems arose from the requirements of another ‘external’ set of relationships – that of the European Union – and resulted in persistent and challenging difficulties in addressing the requirements of the EU customs border (Alderdice, 2018). This is an example of how developing a theory based on the complexity of relationships rather than on the linearity of traditional political thinking can produce a positive outcome in a previously intractable conflict.

Evidence

Recent research has focused on understanding what makes for the willingness to fight and make costly sacrifices. These sacrifices range from giving up material benefits, such as a paid job, through to abandoning family and undertaking a suicide attack. These studies of frontline combatants in Iraq included ISIS, Kurdish PKK and Peshmerga, Iraqi army, and Arab Sunni militia (Atran, 2020). They also included ex-members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a militant terrorist organization in Sri Lanka. While this latter group somewhat complied due to perceived external pressure, this was not the case with the Islamists. Psychological measures undertaken in field surveys indicated that willingness to fight and die is greatest for those who fight for ‘sacred values’ and perceive ‘spiritual strength’, whether of their own side or of their enemies, and this is more important than material strength (numbers of combatants or military resources). The same results were found with both religious ISIS fighters and secular PKK fighters. Both were deeply committed to their beliefs, and their willingness to fight and die was able to be validated in terms of measures such as the numbers of casualties and how long they were prepared to stay at the front line (Gómez et al., 2021). ‘Sacred values’ in this sense does not refer solely or even particularly to religious values, but to values that transcend individual socioeconomic values and metrics.

This phenomenon of ‘sacred values’ was also seen in young Sunni Arab men, even when they no longer accepted ISIS rule but had absorbed such values as commitment to strict Sharia law and a Sunni Arab homeland. They were more willing to fight and die than those young men who believed in a more liberal, democratic Iraq (Gómez et al., 2017).

If physical force does not trump psychological commitment, what more can we understand about this ‘psychological’ element? One key site for exploring psychological operation and behaviour is through analysing brain function.

Hamid et al. (2019) undertook both psychological studies as well as brain and behaviour studies of supporters of a Pakistani associate of Al-Qaeda, and of Moroccan immigrants to Spain who supported armed jihad and strict Sharia law. They first identified the sacred values of the research participants, and then explored their willingness to make sacrifices for these sacred values. The participants showed significantly greater willingness to sacrifice for sacred values (e.g. intolerance of images of the Prophet Mohammed) than non-sacred values (e.g. opposition to women refusing the veil). With neuroimaging during processing of sacred values there was inhibition of activity in brain areas associated with deliberative reasoning but increased activity in areas associated with subjective values and rule-bound judgments (Pretus et al., 2018). Social exclusion among the radical immigrant group was also associated with sacralization and readiness to sacrifice for previously non-sacred values. Similar observations were found in Iran. When the country was treated as a ‘pariah state’ and excluded, more individuals supported the country’s nuclear energy program, which became seen as a sacred mission linked to national sovereignty and religion (Dehghani et al., 2010).

Further research shows that a perception of spiritual strength is more strongly associated with willingness to fight and sacrifice, than physical strength. This spiritual strength is mediated through group bonds where trust between group members is maximized (Tossell et al., 2022).

These findings confirm that cultural mores, core values, and non-material issues are essential to an informed understanding of the psychology of groups in violent conflict. They suggest that the current focus on material factors, interpreted through a lens of rationality, and the hope of defeating enemies through imposing economic or political costs, is misguided.

Implications for conflict dynamics

. The importance of the psychological aspects of war and intractable conflict has long been appreciated by military and political strategists. For example, Anwar Sadat, the former President of Egypt, addressing the Knesset on 20 November 1977 described psychological issues as constituting 70% of the problem between Israel and the Arabs (Volkan, 2013b). At Camp David he went further and told Weizman that 90% of the problem was psychological. In a similar way, psychology is key to understand the situation in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden had been seized of a total commitment to repel the infidels from Islamic lands and, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he went to the region to help the resistance there (Robinson, 2001). By 1988 he had drawn his network of jihadists together as Al Qaeda and, in 1989, the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan defeated. By then the Soviet system was crumbling from within, yet the humiliation of their defeat at the hands of the Afghan mujahadeen arguably further contributed to the USSR’s unravelling (Reuveny and Prakash, 1999).

Certainly, Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda took encouragement from it as they turned their attention to ridding Muslim lands of the other global power, the United States. The United States’ withdrawal on August 30, 2021 was not just from Afghanistan. US President Joe Biden or any likely successor will likely have little appetite for further significant military engagement in the Middle East. Osama bin Laden may be gone but the effect of his strategy endures; he has demonstrated not only the limits of military power in its traditional form, but also how a political outcome can be brought about in the face of overwhelming military odds. This represents a significant change in military expectations.

On August 16, 2021, US President Joe Biden identified what he believed to be the key factor in this outcome: ‘We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong — incredibly well equipped — a force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies. We gave them every tool they could need. We paid their salaries, provided for the maintenance of their air force . . .. What we could not provide them was the will to fight’ (Biden, 2021).

A previous US President, Barak Obama, was of the same view as his Director of National Intelligence at the time: ‘We underestimated the Viet Cong. . . we underestimated ISIL and overestimated the fighting capability of the Iraqi army. . . It boils down to predicting the will to fight, which is an imponderable’ (Payne, 2014).

Rather than dismissing the ‘will to fight’ as ‘an imponderable’, the discussion above of the biological substrate shows that the ‘will to fight’ and the preparedness to sacrifice, are important psychological matters that are different from the psychological drivers and processes that apply in relatively peaceful stable societal contexts, and must also be explored at various levels – that of the individual, the small group and the large group. They can also be observed as operating at the biological level in brain function.

The outcome in Afghanistan confirms this conclusion. The Taliban continued to fight, even after repeated setbacks and defeats, because they were devoted to their cause and to each other. They were willing to sacrifice because of their commitment to the sacred and non-negotiable cause of an Islamic Emirate. They wanted to see their territory freed from the control of infidels – whether the Russians or the Americans. They wanted to implement strict Sharia law, as interpreted by a form of Islamist religion and aspects of traditional Pashtun tribal culture (Hossain, 2021; Swedlund et al., 2021). The power of these religious/political commitments does not come from rational argument and logical thought but from the power of feelings and the impact of the symbolic.

To those who understood the power of such sacred values, the eventual defeat of the American adventure was not only predictable but predicted. That is why the early advice from such observers was that if the United States felt the need to respond, it should not believe that democracy was the cure for Islamist terrorism. Instead, it should engage in a short, sharp, punitive strike, but promise more attacks if the reason for the attack was not addressed (Ottaway and Carothers, 2004). In such an analysis democracy building was a wish-fantasy that would never be successful in the long term.

Discussion: Transgenerational trauma and epigenetics

Having demonstrated the relevance of our biological substrate and of large group psychology for the ability of supposedly weaker conflict actors to prevail, I now discuss the implications that some emerging findings from epigenetics have for how to think about the long-term harm caused by conflict.

The failure of treatments with individuals, especially young people in situations where there had historically been violent political conflict, and the emergence of family approaches to treatment began to show how psychological damage not only results from direct personal experience. Young people who have not themselves experienced trauma seem to suffer from adverse effects from the trauma that their parents or grandparents experienced. This is not simply a community- or society-mediated impact. One can explain the next generation’s problems in places like Northern Ireland by demonstrating how the trauma of the violence is sustained in the minds of young people in the community through telling stories of humiliation or injury and through commemorating such events with which they can identify. Of course, this also is a reminder that violence is often only a symptom of deeper conflict: the grievances or contested issues of conflict may endure, even if violence pauses, as is reflected in the concept of a ‘frozen conflict’ that Dursun-Özkanca uses elsewhere in this Special Issue (2023) to refer to the situation in Cyprus. Likewise, Idler and Tkacova (see in this Special Issue, 2023) caution that mapping fluid conflict shapes only captures observed conflict events, whereby less tangible conflict-related phenomena such as fear and perceived insecurity can radiate far beyond the localities affected by physical violence. Insights from psychology can help elucidate the implications of this for the long-term harm caused by conflict.

However, the transgenerational transmission of trauma also appears in other situations. In young people in Australia, for example, where there was personal disturbance but no clear connection with communal trauma, family therapy revealed that the parents and more often grandparents suffered trauma on the other side of the world in the Holocaust. It had an impact even though it was not talked about. When it was discussed, the connection with the present-day problems became clear (Healey, 2016).

Such findings reveal the importance of shifting territorialities in studying conflict, as highlighted by Davis, Idler and Tkacova (2023), and Nogales and Oldiges elsewhere in this Special Issue (2023), albeit in different ways. Having a clear understanding of the territories affected by conflict events not only provides insights into the harm caused while conflict is ongoing, but also the harm that endures in these localities in the aftermath of armed conflict. Likewise, tracing people back to the places where they resided when armed conflict was ongoing can help explain certain behaviours even once these people are distant from these places.

Initial studies assumed a psychological transmission of trauma. Work on epigenetics has revealed another potential mechanism (Caspi et al., 2003). It had long been assumed that when people received their genetic material from their parents it was largely unaltered during their lifetime unless there were mutations or other physical interferences. However, it now seems to be the case that experiences can impact the expression of genetic coding and the same genetic coding may bring different outcomes in different circumstances. It may even be the case that some of these changes in the expression of the genetic coding may be transmissible. If this were to be conclusively demonstrated, it would explain how political problems of past generations, especially those that involved major violence and trauma, are not easily resolved by addressing the problems of the past and ensuring that they did not continue in the present. This suggests that the massive trauma inflicted on children in places such as the Middle East, Africa and parts of Asia will continue to be a problem into the future, even if the intractable violence of their regions was resolved (Heijmans et al., 2008).

Conclusion

Implications for the future

This article has outlined how a series of major traditional assumptions about the way human beings relate with each other in peace and conflict may have been mistaken.

The idea that physical force, exerted by the most powerful and technically sophisticated military machines in the world, can in the long run ensure victory over more primitive and less developed communities is not borne out by the evidence.

The way in which the will to fight and to prevail may often be less a function of economic and political power than of passionate commitment to a cause has implications for the study of changing conflict dynamics as well as for geo-political and military strategy and politics.

There are differences in the forms of thinking that operate in human beings who have emerged from different cultures, as well as differences between those who are functioning out of peaceful, stable and relatively predictable contexts and those who are functioning under existential threat to them as individuals and communities, and this is not only a matter of psychological mechanisms but of the operation of different parts of the brain. These observations militate against the long-established notion that we can separate the physical and the psychological. They also undermine any idea that we operate solely as rational actors, especially in times of conflict, and so a rationalistic basis for the understanding of society does not address some of the key challenges that are faced by local, national and regional communities, or by humanity as a whole, especially in times of great threat and anxiety.

The fact that our biological substrate is more directly implicated in how we think and behave, not just as individuals but as communities, requires a reimagining of our model of humanity, while the new findings about fusion of groups, the operation of complex adaptive systems and the differences between the operation of psychology at the level of the large group or culture, all feed into the need to construct a new way of understanding the way we function. The old splits between physical and mental, individual and group, past and present, helped us advance in the past four or five hundred years, but they may now have passed their most useful period as a single narrative approach.

The challenge of reframing our models and concepts for a world where we have the capacity both to engage across the globe, but also bring all life on it to an end, and where, for the first time in history, our decisions and actions may determine that outcome for temporary good or permanent catastrophe, requires new conceptual models which cross the boundaries of our various academic and professional silos. None of us, and none of our disciplines, will find the answers on our own.

Policy implications in the short term

If it is the case that we have major challenges that will require intellectual creativity, then more research will be necessary, but it will not be enough. The need to take an approach that goes beyond linearity and recognizes complexity challenges the ways in which universities, researchers and funders operate. The answers to these ‘wicked’ questions, especially in the field of conflict studies, requires multidisciplinary engagement. No one model or approach will bring the paradigmatic progress that is required, but most funders and universities still prefer their siloed structures. Such an approach may have benefits, but it also has major intellectual disadvantages when it comes to developing new ideas.

In the recruitment and training of the military there needs to be a greater recognition and focus on the sense of inspirational commitment and ‘spiritual strength’ of one’s own fighters and those of one’s allies (and enemies). This will not likely be achieved by the usual battery of psychological tests or examination achievement. It will also require more than bureaucratic structures to sustain the spirit of devotion to the cause.

Policing and justice systems have been constructed to address individuals who break the law. As we have already demonstrated in the Irish context, there are two problems here. The first arises when the challenge is not with an individual but with a large group that neither obeys nor accepts the law as applying to them. Identifying individuals who can be convicted may make the situation worse rather than better. At another level, the Russia–Ukraine war challenges the ideas of an ‘international community’ and ‘international law’. There is no single, coherent, international community. The United Nations, which might be supposed to be the highest embodiment of ‘the international community’, is profoundly split from the top down in its attitude to the Russia–Ukraine war – the worst humanitarian and security crisis since the organization was founded in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. International law as represented by, for example, the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ does not exist when there is no effective policing function for breaches. The highest global body, and the one that should implement these policing functions, is the UN Security Council, but two of the five permanent members are regarded by the others as being guilty of crimes against humanity and the President of one of them, Mr Vladimir Putin, is the subject of an international arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court.

Bringing in more complexity and creativity, as also called for by Rugo in this Special Issue (2023); valuing emotional engagement as well as the intellect; crossing the usual comfortable academic disciplinary boundaries; understanding that cultural differences are real and need to be accepted rather than overcome; and appreciating that there is not, and is not likely to be, a global agreement on Enlightenment values and liberal democracy – these are some of the challenges we face on the next stage of our human journey.