Our Brains at War The Neuroscience of Conflict and
Peacebuilding
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Contents
Preface ix
Introduction 1
1. On Being Mortal 11
2. The Amygdala Hijack 25
3. Us and Others 36
4. My Truth or Your Truth? 55
5. The Lure of Extremism 72
6. Follow the Leader 90
7. Accultured Norms 104
8. New Horizons, New Tribes 118
9. The Next Adaptation? 132
10. Peacebuilding More Successfully? 142
References 153
Index 185
Preface
It was an October evening in Belfast. The war had been dragging on for over
twenty years, with no end in sight. My office in the city center was still being
shaken by bombs on a regular basis: it was just around the corner from the
Europa Hotel, known as the most bombed hotel in the world, which had
suffered thirty-six bomb attacks during the so-called Troubles—the euphe-
mism for the conflict in Northern Ireland. I was making my way up to the
university area when my car suddenly died at the top of a street called Sandy
Row, where shootings and bombings were a frequent occurrence. It was a
staunchly loyalist area of Belfast and a traditional heartland for the paramil-
itary Ulster Defence Association. The Ulster Defence Association was using
violence to keep Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom, as opposed
to the violence of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which was being used to
try to force a politically united island of Ireland. Car maintenance not being
my forte, I duly went into a pub, looked helpless (apologies to my feminist
friends), and immediately was surrounded by a group of burly men, who
offered to help. When I explained I was on my way to the nearby Queen’s
University, they suggested I give them my keys and they would sort out the
car while I was away. I gave them the keys, and on my walk up to the uni-
versity I wondered where else in the world you would freely give the key of
your car to the patrons of a pub that was a known lair for paramilitaries—
and know it would be OK—and this despite my accent being from the South
of Ireland, which was the purported enemy of such men? A few hours later,
I returned. The men told me they had taken the car to the garage of a friend,
and he had fixed it, and it was grand now—“grand” being a shorthand term
in Northern Ireland for all being OK. I offered to buy a round of drinks, but
they refused and sent me on my way with their good wishes.
A few weeks later, the same car had a puncture and came to an abrupt
stop opposite the office of Sinn Féin, the political wing of the IRA, who were
the enemies of the loyalists. There were a group of men—“heavies,” as we
called bodyguards—outside the office, which was the lair of Gerry Adams,
the leader of Sinn Féin. I stepped out of the car, put my hands in the air in
supplication—and the whole group came over to the car, lifted it between
x Preface
them without the need for a lever, put on my spare tire, and sent me on my
way with their good wishes. Once again, there was a contrast between what
I know of how such men treated their out-group enemies—the British and
the loyalists—and the ordinary decency that is actually the hallmark of most
communities and people in Northern Ireland.
Living as I had in what were called “the Killing Fields” of Co. Tyrone—so
called because it had the highest rate of killings in Northern Ireland outside
of one Belfast zone—I had marveled over the years at how many of the people
(almost always men) involved in IRA activities in our area were the same
ones who helped the grannies get their groceries, coached the children in the
neighborhood football club, attended church services on a Sunday, and even
did the church collections. And I wondered how these men compartmen-
talized their actions, reserving all their goodness for their own communi-
ties and having no qualms about murdering their enemies on the other side.
How did they (and the many other paramilitaries and their communities that
I subsequently met from other countries) tell their histories to themselves so
that they were always the victims and the other side, always the aggressors,
often with complete disregard for many proven facts? How was it that their
deadly deeds, which injured and maimed not just men but also women and
children—wedding parties, football watchers, pub-loads of drinkers—were
always justified by them, but others’ similar deeds were never justified? What
was it that so energized social grievances, or political or religious ideolo-
gies, in such a fundamentalist way, leading to so many being prepared not
just to kill others but often to risk their own death while out on their killing
sprees or through prison hunger strikes? Why were so many people willing
to kill or be killed over a cartoon, a flag, a piece of clothing, a book, or a song?
Why were historical memories about enemies so long—often about events
that had happened hundreds or, in some cases, thousands of years ago? Were
toxic leaders at fault or psychopathic personalities who were prone to use
violence? Are conflicts always the product of unjust social and economic
systems or the product of groups who feel themselves to have a distinctive
ethnic, cultural, or religious identity that they perceive is disrespected and
threatened? And—perhaps the biggest question of all—are violence and war,
which appear to be so ubiquitous, “natural” to humankind and, if so, why?
An even more disturbing thought was that while we assume war and con-
flict are repugnant to most human beings, is this actually true? A gentle and
intelligent professor and prime minister from the Republic of Ireland once
said to me, “Of course everyone wants peace, don’t they Mari?” It made me
Preface xi
stop and wonder. As part of my doctoral studies I had interviewed many
paramilitaries from both sides of the war in Northern Ireland, and almost
all said that they had never felt more “alive” than while out on what they
called “a night of action” (i.e., their killing missions for what they saw as their
communities).
So many questions—few of which seemed to be answered in the political
or international relations textbooks that I initially studied, which are still the
normal tools used by many academics and policymakers trying to gain an
understanding of today’s wars. Living with my family in what was a war zone,
with helicopters continually overhead, armed soldiers frequently patrolling
our country roads, republican and loyalist murders happening with a few
miles of our home, my husband’s family business blown up, our local post
office—run by his aunt—robbed so many times it had to close, I felt com-
pelled to try to understand what was happening, and why, and to wonder
what could be done to change it.
My first foray into the field of “conflict resolution,” as it was then called,
came in the mid-1980s when I ventured into a newly developing profes-
sional field—that of mediation. So new was it that when I started to teach
it in the local university, about half the class who came thought it was about
meditation! Eventually, it resulted in the setting up, with some colleagues, of
an organization called the Mediation Network. This became the main pro-
viding agency for mediators for street conflicts in Northern Ireland, as well
as mediators who worked on many shuttle and face-to-face mediations be-
tween paramilitaries, political parties, communities, and governments in
Northern Ireland and subsequently on many international conflicts. Given
that such discussions were always fraught with difficulties, I also produced
a group skills book suggesting over a hundred ways of having productive
discussions about issues of justice, equity, symbols, emotions, history, com-
munity conflicts, etc., a generic version of which is in use in many conflicts
around the world today (Fitzduff and Williams, 2019).
My main intellectual interest was in trying to understand why some
people in Northern Ireland who had initially chosen to use violence to ad-
dress the conflict, some of whom had been jailed, eventually abandoned such
a strategy in favor of dialogue efforts, and this question became the focus for
my doctoral work. Somewhat to my surprise, I discovered that very few of
these people had been talked or reasoned out of their support for violence.
By far the majority who had changed were those whose minds and behaviors
had been transformed through experiences that had subsequently created
xii Preface
emotional and instinctual challenges for them. I was also very interested to
hear how lonely many of their lives were, given that they had moved out of
their belief or action “tribes,” and there were few alternative institutes or po-
litical parties to support them in their choices. Even more important, I was
struck by the problems these findings posed for current efforts to increase
intergroup understanding between warring communities, as almost all of
our existing change programs in Northern Ireland were focused on a belief
in the use of contact, argument, and reasoning between groups in the hope of
changing attitudes and, even more important, behavior.
I was soon to get a chance to test such strategies. Following my PhD re-
search, in 1990, I was appointed as the first chief executive of a body set up to
begin to fund both policy and practice conflict resolution efforts in Northern
Ireland. This was the Community Relations Council, which became the
main body for subsequent funding policy and community reconciliation
work in Northern Ireland.1 It was a recipient of extensive funds from both
the European Union and the British government. Although such work, and
through my subsequent international research, consultancy, and mediation
work as the Director of UNU/INCORE, a United Nations University Center,
I came again and again to appreciate how little part reason often plays in so-
cial conflicts—and how much is played by instincts and emotions.
My more recent work as the founding director, in Brandeis University, of a
graduate program for professionals involved in over seventy conflicts around
the world not only confirmed such a judgment, but also gave me a chance to
develop a learning program, in conjunction with the program participants,
that would augment existing international relations approaches to conflict.
This new program was based on learning from the existing fields of the social
sciences, particularly social psychology, as well as the emerging fields of the
biosocial sciences, which became an interdisciplinary field devoted to un-
derstanding how biological systems can affect social processes and behavior.
Such an approach takes heart and wisdom from the advent of the behavioral
sciences—in particular, the field of social neuroscience, which studies the
effects of psychological, neurological, emotional, cultural, and social factors,
as well as cognitive factors, and their effect on human decision-making in
various fields.
The advent of behavioral economics has revolutionized the field of eco-
nomics, involving efforts to incorporate more realistic notions of human
1 https://www.community-relations.org.uk/
Preface xiii
nature into economics and ways of looking at decisions other than those im-
plied by classical theories of economics. Governments too are now utilizing
these new behavioral approaches for public policy strategies; for example, the
UK government has set up a “Nudge” unit based on behavioral neuroscience
to help shape public policy, as has the Australian government. Social media
companies such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter are (rightly or wrongly—
see Chapter 9 of this volume) using neuromarketing as part of their business
strategies. The World Bank is increasingly turning to the behavioral sciences
to help tackle seemingly intractable social and economic challenges such as
the faster facilitation of development in many parts of the world. Many of
these companies are working on the assumption that drawing on insights
from behavioral sciences and, in particular, the social neurosciences can gen-
erate new kinds of interventions that can be successful and profitable for the
business communities and/or cost-effective for policymakers. The develop-
ment of such approaches has in recent decades been assisted by the advent of
new technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging and hor-
monal and genetic testing, which have either validated or enhanced our un-
derstanding about previously little understood social factors that shape our
relationships with each other, both individually and collectively in groups.
As yet the field of conflict resolution— now more often called
peacebuilding—has been little affected by such new strategies. We see al-
most nothing about such an interdisciplinary approach in our textbooks
for peacebuilders or for today’s soldiers whose military responsibilities are
in many cases being refocused on conflict prevention, as well as community
and institutional development in conflicted and post-conflict societies. We
need to understand that we as humans everywhere are affected by the many
predisposed body/brain legacy patterns that hamper our work and of which
we are often unaware. The problem is that if left unnoted and unattended,
such tendencies will hinder our capacities to live together and to resolve our
differences without the use of violence. This book sets out to address these
missing factors.
Caveats
A knowledge of the social and biosocial psychological sciences is important
to the effectiveness of the conflict resolution and peacebuilding field, but we
xiv Preface
need to be careful to recognize their limitations as tools for understanding
conflict and effecting more peaceful societies.
The number one limitation is the fact that most of the research outlined in
this book has been conducted by and on what are called WEIRD people (i.e.,
Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic; Henrich, Heine, and
Norenzayan, 2010). Thus far, WEIRD populations have been vastly overrep-
resented in social psychological research. By studying only such populations,
researchers often fail to take account of the diversity of the global population,
and thus applying the findings from WEIRD populations only can hinder
the relevance of the research. While this book has tried to take as wide an
approach to global research as is possible (see Chapter 7 of this volume), it
has, like my previous books on global conflict (Fitzduff and Stout, 2006),
been limited by the research capacity of many universities around the world,
whose meager finances have made it very difficult for them to free up their
academics to undertake the kind of research that is needed to supplement
this book.
The fact is that structural and societal contexts that are unfair and poten-
tially humiliating to certain groups are often the main facilitators of con-
flicted and violent behavior between groups (Stewart, 2008). Wars start
primarily not because of biosocial factors but because such factors come into
play through manipulation and violence within a situation where people of
particular identities feel unequal and excluded. Most of our recent wars have
come about because of issues of inequality or exclusion. Given that unfair-
ness is actually physically felt (Chapter 3 of this volume), it is logical to be-
lieve that if such contexts had been handled differently, then individual and
group differences might just be part of the normal grist of a society that is
well-informed regarding the need to manage diverse groups. Approaches
using only psychocultural/sociocultural understandings can only be effec-
tive in the long term if structural issues are addressed.
The third caveat is the fact that, as the book clearly outlines, not all human
brains are the same: for example, some people tend more easily to be suspi-
cious of others, and some are more open to new people and new experiences.
These differences clearly cross race and ethnic lines and cannot be used to
justify the legacy of scientific racism—that is, the use of scientific techniques
and hypotheses to support or justify presumptions of racial inferiority or su-
periority, which, although not often spoken about publicly now, are in some
quarters still with us.
Preface xv
None of the research in this book will give ballast to anyone interested in
eliciting such differences for reasons of discrimination. Alas, the contrary is
true—we are all of us, of whatever part of the world, or whatever part of our
group or nations indicted for the emotional and cognitive confusions that we
often bring to bear on the situations in which we live, work, and make war
and, sometimes, peace.
My fourth caveat is that we also need to know that there is nothing de-
terminist about what is revealed by our genetic or hormonal testing or our
magnetic resonance imaging scans. While our genes, brains, and hormones
can predispose us to certain ideas, they are not predestined: brains can be
relatively plastic, and our biopsychological and genetic tendencies can be
altered (somewhat) by our environments. Predisposition does not mean pre-
determination. There is no individual or group that cannot change their be-
havior toward another individual or group. While the research suggests that
predisposed characteristics can be relatively hard to change, it also notes that
such change, if carefully managed, is possible.
What such different strategies might be and how they may add to the ef-
fectiveness of peacebuilding—which I define as the capacity of a society
to solve its conflicts through political, legal, or dialogue processes, rather
than through violence—can hopefully be elucidated by the knowledge in
this book.
Introduction
The certainty with which we act now might seem ghastly not only to
future generations but to our future selves as well.
—Sapolsky (2017, p. 674)
The Future of Conflict
This book is being written at a time when the failures of the Western
interventions into Iraq and Afghanistan and the fragmentation of Syria into
thousands of militias of various hues, with ever-changing interventions by
at least seven other countries, have laid bare the limitations of traditional
war methodologies. While the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did stimulate
some debates about the limitations of traditional approaches to war (Debs
and Monteiro, 2014), such limitations have yet to be taken into account by
many policymakers, national leaders, and academics. As I write, the United
States, under the guidance of a relatively new president, is once again put-
ting its hopes into newer, better, and more expensive war equipment to pro-
tect itself without any clear indication of how this can contribute to a more
peaceful world or even to a safer US society. Such a strategy neglects to note
that nineteen amateur plane hijackers, with the threat of no more than box-
cutter knives, ended any idea of a “safe” society in the United States or else-
where on September 11, 2001.
The continuing development of smaller technologies also belies the whole-
sale purchase of billion-dollar armaments. For example, in October 2019, it
was revealed that just eighteen drones and seven cruise missiles—all cheap
and unsophisticated compared to modern military aircraft—disabled half of
Saudi Arabia’s crude oil production. They destroyed 5 percent of the world’s
oil supplies and raised the world price of oil by 20 percent.
An overriding belief in primarily using military force to solve conflicts was
challenged in an open letter by over 120 former US three-and four-star gen-
erals to the US House and Senate leadership in 2017. The letter called on them
Our Brains at War. Mari Fitzduff, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197512654.003.0001
2 Our Brains at War
not to expand the military budget at the expense of soft-power approaches,
and to “ensure that resources for the International Affairs Budget [which
funds diplomacy, developmental and peacebuilding efforts] keep pace with
the growing global threats and opportunities we face.”1 The signatories in-
cluded General David Petraeus, a former CIA director and a retired admiral,
and James Stavridis, the former NATO supreme allied commander (Cahn,
2016). This point had previously been implicitly made by former General
Petraeus in his guidelines for the army in Afghanistan, which emphasized
the practice of soft power, even by the military (ISAF Public Affairs Office,
2010). A decade previously former UK General Sir Rupert Smith also empha-
sized the importance and the priority of power other than military power
(R. Smith, 2005).2 Smith concludes that while confrontations and conflicts
exist all around the world, and states still have armed forces, which they use
as symbols of power . . . war as cognitively known to most noncombatants,
war as battle in a field between men and machinery, war as a massive de-
ciding event in a dispute in international affairs, industrial war—such war
no longer exists. We now are engaged, constantly and in many permutations,
in war amongst the people. We must adapt our approach and organize our
institutions to this overwhelming reality. (https://www.historynet.com/
interview-rupert-smith-cant-win-war-terror.htm; emphasis added)
Smith had been Deputy Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers
Europe from 1998 to 2001, and much of his experience came from the
conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and in Northern Ireland. Having worked
alongside all parties in Northern Ireland, including the military and the po-
lice, I was aware that the best of the British Army, as well as the police and the
British and Irish governments, were often at a loss about how best to contain
and eliminate a few hundred IRA and loyalist bombers and gunmen, despite
the presence of over forty thousand people in the security forces. These were
the “war among the people” wars that Smith referred to—and in these and
other intra-societal wars, which are most of the wars today, the best and most
expensive munition weapons are often useless.
Most of the wars I will be talking about in this book are what Kaldor (2012)
called the “new wars”—that is, those that are mainly fought within countries,
1 https:// w ww.usglc.org/ d ownloads/ 2 017/ 0 2/ F Y18_ International_ A ffairs_ B udget_ House_
Senate.pdf
2 https://www.historynet.com/interview-rupert-smith-cant-win-war-terror.htm
Introduction 3
or initially within countries, and often by non-state actors as opposed to
state military forces. Such wars are often supported by a wider community
of nations whose interests are engaged by them, which often act as proxy
stakeholders. These new wars are particularly difficult to understand using
traditional approaches to international political frameworks. Unfortunately,
most of the much-needed research on today’s conflicts is usually undertaken
by academics, many of whom fail to appreciate, understand, or even accept
the seemingly irrational logic of many of these new wars. Most political and
international relations scholars have previously assumed that nation-states
are the principal actor in international relations, and their prime focus of
study has been on inter-state relationships. Their work usually implies that
the decision makers are state rational actors who will always choose to pursue
the national interest.
The conception of the world offered by realists is easy to grasp. Rational,
calculating, and egoistic states are the most important actors in a non-
hierarchical international system. States’ survival strategies are based on
amassing power and forming alliances against any state that threatens to
upset the existing balance of power. Realists also believe that the security
dilemma can be limited by a balance of power. Power politics is the name of
the game and the game is zero-sum. That is, one state’s gain is another state’s
loss. (Al-Rodham, 2013)
However, although internal wars can become international state proxy
wars, most of the threats that states face come from their own non-state
actors and illegal paramilitaries who are often fighting for the power of
the state itself—or for the power of a transnational or transglobal identity.
Unfortunately, international relations researchers often fail to appreciate, or
indeed to have the vocabulary to deal with, the instinctual and emotional
factors involved in such conflicts despite the fact that they are probably the
most dominant factor in many of the identity wars of today.
Even in the Western world a major national/state decision, the Brexit ref-
erendum, was seen by many critics to be dominated “not by sober analysis
and evidence-based reason, but by hysteria, hatred, savage emotions, and the
sinister monster of exclusionary, ethnic nationalism” (Foster, 2016). In the
United States, the widespread disbelief and confusion around the 2016 elec-
tion of President Donald Trump as president was only possible because of a
misunderstanding by many analysts that political behavior, for the most part,
4 Our Brains at War
is rational. Unfortunately, they failed to realize that in many cases our polit-
ical and leadership choices are driven by value predispositions such as per-
ceived loss of identity and a context of threat and exclusion (Fitzduff, 2017).
In both the Brexit and Trump campaigns, leaders used their rhetoric not to
appeal rationally to followers’ interests but to appeal emotionally to their in-
stinctual and emotional predispositions, which in turn became the basis of
widespread decision-making (Grillo, 2017). In many other countries today
people are voluntarily electing right-wing political parties to govern them or
choosing autocrats as their leaders. Unfortunately, the perceptions of threats
today, particularly those incurred by increasing globalization, migration,
and inequalities, can be all too easily mobilized by political and military lead-
ership, and the “othering” of individuals or groups—that is, emphasizing a
person or group of people as intrinsically different from oneself—can follow
all too easily and significantly escalate a conflict.
Fortunately, the mismatch between wars as they are and wars as many
soldiers, politicians, and presidents would like them to be is increasingly un-
derstood by those at the sharpest and most authoritative level of the mili-
tary. It has led to an ever-growing number of military colleges opening their
doors to the profession and the skills of peacebuilding and an increase in
the number of professional and academic peacebuilders working in these
colleges. The author and many of her colleagues are frequent faculty members
for war colleges such as West Point, the US Army War College in Carlisle,
Marine Special Operations in Tampa, the Army and Navy Academy in San
Diego, the National Defense University, and the Inter-American Defense
College. Many peacebuilding graduate programs, such as those at George
Mason and Brandeis universities, welcome military forces. Sandhurst—the
prime officers’ college in the United Kingdom—has also been inviting pro-
fessional and academic peacebuilders to partner with its military faculty
to increase the skills of their officers in exploring alternatives to the use of
force for resolving conflicts in the field. Although still minor in relation to
war colleges, the professional field of conflict resolution/peacebuilding is
growing fast. When I established our international graduate professional
program at Brandeis in 2004, there were only ten such graduate programs in
the world addressing conflict resolution/peacebuilding strategies. At latest
count there are over 160 graduate programs around the world addressing
these issues.
Vital to these programs is an additional understanding of the realities of
our biosocial and neural legacies and the way they affect the development
and maintenance of war. Such an understanding may help us to work more
Introduction 5
realistically, more compassionately, and more effectively with conflicted
groups whose behavior is often dictated to, and limited by, human social and
physical processes whose consequences we are only just beginning to un-
derstand and appreciate. Being aware of how our minds and bodies work to
affect our social and group behavior to other groups is critically important.
Asghar (2016) has suggested,
The point of acknowledging the thorny aspects of human nature and our
similarities to the animal world isn’t to make us grow fatalistic. . . . I believe
it’s our highest duty as human beings. . . . I also believe that our ability to do
so is impaired by when we don’t look with absolute honesty at the uncon-
scious forces and peculiar motivations that draw our fellow citizens to idols
and icons. After all, condemning these fellow citizens as rubes and fools
really won’t bring about a better society.
In many ways, understanding these truths is both salutary and comforting,
as a more thorough understanding of them can help us to shape our envir-
onments to avoid ignorantly supporting contexts that elicit the worst
inclinations of our human predispositions.
The advent of technology that can actively track our brain and change our
emotions, our ideas, and our choices by slight physical brain manipulations
has been a humbling factor in our understanding of human nature (see
Chapter 1 of this volume). Social psychology studies have long suggested
many of the precise behaviors that are often elicited by particular contexts,
and the latest findings in the neuroscience field have frequently confirmed
their ideas. The advent of technology that can both read our brain and our
bodies and assess their responses to particular contexts, even before we are
conscious of them, is somewhat frightening. However, in the end I believe
it is perhaps better to understand both our complexity and our predicta-
bility as individuals and social beings so that we can better ensure that we
are not blindly led into situations by little-understood emotions and beliefs
that often nudge us into conflictual and violent behavior toward many of our
fellow citizens of this planet. My hope is that the contents of this book will
enable us to base our strategies for peacebuilding on a more thorough under-
standing of the study of psychological and bio-physical correlates of social
and political attitudes and behavior and more thoughtful approaches to our
work than hitherto.
In undertaking this work I have tried to take a non-judgmental approach
to the differences that seem to be evident between human beings and, for
6 Our Brains at War
example, their genes, neural architecture, and hormones. As the research
shows, people and groups are different in the way they think and process in-
formation, the kinds of emotions they bring to bear on decisions, the con-
trol they have over their emotions, the needs they have to belong to a group,
what they prioritize as values, the importance of ideology in their lives, the
way they identify enemies, the way they see facts, what they remember and
forget, their fear and suspicions of out-groups, their need for leaders, etc.
These differences are socially, biologically, and culturally influenced (see
Chapter 7 of this volume) and are neither good nor bad. They just are—and
they exist possibly because somewhere along the line such differences, and a
mix of such differences, have been important for individual and group sur-
vival. What is important, I believe, is that we understand these differences
and take them into account, and in my final chapter of this book I have made
some suggestions as to how such insights can be usefully applied to the work
of peacebuilding.
However, we also need to appreciate that much of the research about the
recent findings of neuroscience is very tentative: many of the mechanisms
used to measure such processes are still in their infancy, and some of their
results are still quite fragile. The biosciences have been touted for their ability
to look under the hood of our brains and perhaps to help us to see some
of the mechanisms and processes that can create and perpetuate conflict.
However, the reality is that many of the mechanisms used to measure such
thoughts and behavior, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging,
are still in their early stages and their results are often tentative. (In fairness,
I have often found that the tentative nature of their findings is acknowledged
by the researchers themselves.)
Perhaps it is best to approach these chapters with the usual caveat of
Wikipedia—namely, “these sites are under construction.” The social sci-
ences and biosciences, and the partnerships between them, are currently
very active disciplines, and I am aware that I may be giving the impression
that there is far more consensus about many issues than is actually the
case. I am also aware that by simplifying many explanations, particularly
in the neuroscience field, I run the risk of underestimating their actual
complexity and ignoring the relevance of such complexity to useful policy
and practice. The book is, however, replete with references for further
explorations by readers who can hopefully continue their interest into fu-
ture insights than can be shared with both the military and peacebuilding
fields.
