Duelling and the abolition of war

Abstract

Political scientists have long compared war to duelling in the hope that war could be abolished like duelling, that is, at the hands of a normative campaign. However, there has been limited investigation of duelling's past. What can the history of duelling teach us about the future of war? This paper advances two arguments. First, by refining the conventional wisdom, it argues that duelling's demise was caused less by normative campaigning than by the timing of industrialization. Second, it argues that although duelling is not an analogous institution to modern war, its ancestor, feuding, is. Writings on feuds contribute a complementary literature to the limited data on war, which is helpful for thought experiments and hypothesis testing. Further, feuding's fall was caused more by the growth of state capacity than by normative campaigning. In sum, neither the history of duelling nor that of feuding confirms the view that ideational factors played the principal role in suppressing these practices; therefore, we should reconsider how the abolition of war might occur.