Population and Warfare (original) (raw)

ECOLOCIST PETER Turchin and anthropologist Andrey Korotayev (2006) propose that population size and incidence of internal warfare or sociopolitical instability exhibit a deterministic relationship in prestate societies. Important to their thesis is that both population size and incidence of instability are, and must be treated as, dynamic variables: population growth eventually causes an increase in instability, with a lag, whereas increased instability, also with a lag, eventually leads to decreases in population size.