Yesterday’s blog explained that the seemingly ‘senseless,’ ‘random’ nature of most shooting rampages is not senseless at all. Instead, the shooter is motivated by the logic of ‘social substitutability.’ In other words, random mass shootings are a variety of suicide terrorism. The aim

We now  know the identity of the killer in the Sandy Hook School Massacre but are still in the dark about why he did it. Police said that they had found “very good evidence” which would answer questions about the motives of the gunman, but they haven’t yet released this ev

This morning a horrible tragedy shook Newtown, a small town in Connecticut just 70 miles from where I live. An as yet unidentified gunman (there are conflicting reports of his identity) went on shooting rampage at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, killing nearly thirty people, most of

In the Economist’s World in 2013 issue there is an article, The Cycle of History (thanks to John McGonagle for bringing it to my attention). The author, Max Rodenbeck, discusses the recent events of the Arab Spring from the point of view of Ibn Khaldun’s theory. Ibn Khaldun, as many o

The publication of the Feature Article in Nature about my research on American political violence elicited a wave of comments on the Web. The expression ‘feeding frenzy’ comes to mind. I’ve had a lot of fun reading those comments that I came across (and thanks to various people who se

Joe Anoatubby raises a number of good points, with many of which I find myself in complete agreement. However, one thing I cannot emphasize too much is that generic violence is not a good conceptual category. We need to look at different sides of it separately, for reasons that actual

Today’s issue of Nature has a Feature Article by Laura Spinney on cliodynamics. Laura interviewed me when we both attended the Frankfurt Forum on Cultural Evolution (about which I wrote in an earlier blog). I think she did a great job capturing the excitement of our new fledgling disc

Those of you who’ve read my books know that in addition to my research on the evolution of large-scale human societies and the rise of centralized states and empires, I am also interested in the reverse process by which an empire loses cohesion and gradually crumbles into a ‘failed st