ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2022
Turkana warriors' call to arms: how an egalitarian society mobilizes for cattle raids.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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6 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Evolutionary-Ecological Basis of Xenophilia.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- Landscape of fear: indirect effects of conflict can account for large-scale population declines in non-state societies.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Turkana warriors' call to arms: how an egalitarian society mobilizes for cattle raids.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Parochial cooperation in wild chimpanzees: a model to explain the evolution of parochial altruism.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Intergroup conflict: origins, dynamics and consequences across taxa.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Key individuals catalyse intergroup violence.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
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Abstract
Humans are able to overcome coordination and collective action problems to mobilize for large-scale intergroup conflict even without formal hierarchical political institutions. To better understand how people rally together for warfare, I examine how the politically decentralized Turkana pastoralists in Kenya assemble raiding parties. Based on accounts of 54 Turkana battles obtained from semi-structured interviews with Turkana warriors, I describe the precipitating factors, recruitment process, exhortations and leadership involved in marshalling a raiding party. Details of this ethnographic case shed light on how voluntary informal armies are mobilized, and illustrate how culturally evolved institutions harness our cooperative dispositions at multiple scales to produce large-scale warfare. This article is part of the theme issue 'Intergroup conflict across taxa'.
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