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Two important features distinguish wars from feuds. First, warfare is conducted on a level above that of the local community: warring groups are usually either relatively large-scale elements within a single nation (civil war) or whole nations (international war). The second difference lies in the relationship between the antagonistic parties. In a feud, the participating are part of the same relatively small-scale social system. In warfare, although the disputants may be covered by the same broad cultural umbrella, at a lower level they represent quite distinct political or social or economic organisations. This may be why they fight.

The causes of warfare are numerous. Values such as honour, freedom, or religious principles may be avowed reasons for fighting, but social and economic inequalities between the combatants- the lack of territory, unevenly distributed natural resources, unequal access to regional or world markets-are more likely to be the real causes. In the war between Iran and Iraq, young men on both sides went willingly to their deaths in the name of religion, even though this war was not so much about the ideological differences between the two branches of Islam as it was about the region's underground oil riches.

Some scholars claim that warfare is motivated by people's involuntary reactions to environmental, economic, or cultural forces. One ecological argument suggests that warfare prevents population growth that would lead to the overexploitation of resources (Vayda 1961). Yet there are many examples in human history in which populations have increased, but war has not erupted (Hallpike 1973). A deterministic view of this kind implies that people are the helpless pawns of irresistible forces.

Functionalists have argued that warfare strengthens the internal solidarity of groups that engage in it. But it does not follow that the entire society of which a warring group is a part is also strengthened. In fact, many societies punish members who risk plunging their particular groups into war. Among the Konso of Ethiopia, if a man steals a goat from a man of another town, the elders of the thief"s town, far from feeling obliged to support the thief (thereby, as the functionalists would argue, strengthening the solidarity of their town), would force him to pay compensation (Hallpike 1973).

People are not "passive machines pushed this way and that by ecological, biological, sociological or even cultural determinants" (Robarchek 1989) . At least some of the time, they make decisions among clear options and constraints in pursuit of a variety of goals. Another explanation for warfare, which we might call the pragmatic explanation, seems to fit this view and also the realities of human history. Hallpike rejects deterministic explanations of warfare. The desire for power, prestige, material wealth, and sex, and the envy of those who have them, are among the most powerful forces in human nature according to Hallpike. To attain such goals, and to keep others from attaining them is a sufficient reason for warfare. "The human race has evolved few more definitive means of proving one's superiority over an enemy than by battering him to death burning his habitation, ravaging his crops and raping his wife."

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