They argue that cultural and ideational explanations for the decline in interstate war underestimate the extent to which those factors are endogenous to material and institutional variables. Jack Levy and William Thompson question some of the theoretical arguments advanced to explain the historical pattern of declining violence. Their analysis also neglects the systemic causes of conflict and its insights for increasingly intense security competition between China and the United States. Bradley Thayer argues that the decline of war thesis is flawed because the positive forces identified by these authors do not rule outside of the West or even fully inside of it.

And, although our species evolved with motives that can erupt in violence, it also evolved motives that can inhibit violence, including self-control, empathy, a sense of fairness, and open-ended cognitive mechanisms that can devise technologies for reducing violence. Homo sapiens evolved with violent tendencies, but they are triggered by particular circumstances rather than a hydraulic urge that must periodically be discharged. In fact, it is compatible with a hardheaded view of human violent inclinations, firmly rooted in evolutionary biology.

Steven Pinker observes that a decline in war does not require a romantic theory of human nature. The debate on the waning of war has recently moved into higher gear.

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