The First Political Order: How Sex Shapes Governance and National Security Worldwide

Reliance on the patrilineal/fraternal security provision mechanism means that one’s society is rooted in a fundamentally authoritarian and violent sexual order, and this fact has important consequences for the larger political order, as well as for the stability and resilience of the group or nation-state. We examine those linkages in this chapter. In chapters 5 and 6, we look more specifically at the structural goads catalyzing societal instability created by the Syndrome’s predisposition for marriage market obstruction and examine other types of macrolevel consequences, including implications for human, economic, and environmental security. Political scientist Scott Weiner has rightly noted that “the linkage between familial and state-level patriarchy is widely asserted but not well specified…These accounts assert that familial patriarchy is ‘reproduced’ [at the state level] without explaining the mechanisms by which that reproduction occurs.”¹ We take up the challenge to specify those links and mechanisms in this part II of the book.

The ancient security provision mechanism of the Patrilineal/Fraternal Syndrome, as specified in part I, does accrue tangible benefits to at least some group members, otherwise, it would not exist or persist or be as ubiquitous as it is across time and cultures. Physical security for individuals in the face of out-group threats is provided by the male kin alliance (although for women, physical security against out-groups does not preclude grave physical insecurity from violence perpetrated by in-group males). Through strong deterrent signaling and the quasi-legal codes that spring up around that signaling, the risk of intergroup violence can be diminished, at least for a time, by male kin alliances. These quasi-legal codes, often referred to as codes of honor, are often harsh toward individuals in an effort to satisfy debts of honor between groups. As Weiner explains: “Collective liability thereby moderates infractions against other clans, enabling kin groups to coexist peaceably despite being autonomous and responsible to themselves alone.”²

Despite its persistence and prevalence, reliance on the extended male kin group for security “comes with a profound price.”³ We detailed in part I the profound price that women pay. But women are not the only ones who pay. Given the authoritarian and violent nature of its foundational sexual order, we argue the Patrilineal/Fraternal Syndrome breeds a fragile societal peace based on a combination of dominance (sticks) and side-payments (carrots), or as the political scientist Edward Schatz puts it, “clan balancing” and “clan clientelism.”⁴ Should the effectiveness of either tactic wane, the political order begins to crumble as well, unleashing the violent pursuit of dominance as power is contested within the society—very much like how when women attempt to leave abusive relationships, they find their lives, and the lives of their children, most in peril.⁵

Our overall argument is that reliance on the Patrilineal/Fraternal Syndrome and its subordination of women does not produce healthy, functional nation-states. For example, development expert Clare Castillejo notes the presence of a “mutually-reinforcing relationship between gender inequality and the weak governance, under-development and conflicts that characterise [fragile] states.”⁶ Because the Syndrome is so prevalent across culture, time, and space, some suggest it must be adaptive. Not so, we assert. As Patricia Gowaty notes,

One cannot assume that because a character is common, it is adaptive and has evolved by natural selection. This point is important to any arguments that assume that all gender differences are adaptive. There are many who argue that because sexual division of labor (and power) is so widespread, it must be adaptive, and, further, it must be genetically based. However, there is no evidence that either statement is correct…I find little in the biology of gender differences that requires us to maintain the unequal status of men and women in society. Whatever it is that does account for those phenomena, it is “not in our genes.”⁷

Malcolm Potts and Thomas Hayden extend Gowaty’s point, suggesting the subordination of women produces unnaturally dysfunctional outcomes: “The proverbial man from Mars—or woman from Venus—would surely find it odd that the members of one sex should behave in this way, hazarding their own lives and inflicting so much pain on others.”8 The polity, in a real sense, may come to resemble the typical Syndrome-based households found within it, in which can be found the almost daily use of dominance, control, extortion, and injustice on a day-to-day basis. When that order is threatened, the polity may be consumed by a paroxysm of violence not unlike a domestic murder-suicide. Let us examine the more specific linkages to state governance, security, and stability in the following sections.

In its working papers, the Princeton Project on National Security suggests ten key functions of the state that gauge its capacity to ensure state security: a legitimate monopoly on the means of violence, administrative control, sound management of public finances, investment in human capital, the creation of citizenship right and duties, the provision of infrastructure, the regulation of the market, management of state assets, effective management of international relations, and maintenance of the rule of law.¹¹ Development and foreign policy strategist Clare Lockhart suggests that “a state is fragile…where one or more of these functions have really eroded or are not being performed properly.”¹² Pertinent to our discussion of Syndrome-based polities, international relations scholar Barry Buzan further points out that national security “presupposes a strong state (where government and society enjoy a high degree of consensual integration),” which means that “the concept of national security is difficult to apply to weak states (low integration between government and society and high levels of coercion) because feuding parts will make their own security claims against each other.”¹³

Stable states, then, are states that have moved beyond insecurity by achieving capacity in the provision of state functions, as listed earlier, and that are not significantly regressing on these measures. A stable state, accordingly, is relatively secure, so that when we speak of state stability, inferences about state security can be made as well.

We must remember, as historian Ira Lapidus observes, that “we are dealing with a system involving two types of political and cultural entities [on] the same territory, competing for power and legitimacy.”14 The extent to which male-bonded kin networks or clans degrade state stability is dependent, then, on the degree to which these networks have “captured” state institutions and capabilities. Even in the presence of a functional state government, such capture becomes easier under certain conditions, such as endemic economic shortages and other types of exigency.

Capture mechanisms are plentiful, and include clan-based voting, kin-based patronage, the stripping of state assets (such as oil) by clans in power, and what Kathleen Collins calls “crowding out” participation of nonclan members in formal institutions, such as political parties, the media, or unions by clan mobilization. “By pervading formal institutions…clans use the [state’s] assets to fortify their group, effectively bankrupting state coffers, decentralizing state power, and creating competing wealth/power centers where they govern through an informal regime of clan bargaining,” she explains.¹⁵

Collins concludes that “clan politics is not democratic. Even if civil and political liberties exist, clan politics creates informal political and economic rules that are not pluralist, equally and fully participatory and representative, or transparently contested. Clan politics therefore undermine formal civil and political liberties.”¹⁶

The tension between the goals of the clans and the state lead many to conclude, as Collins does, that “tribes and states have created and maintained each other in a single system, though one of inherent instability, [and that] tribes have proved an unstable basis on which to build the future of [a] country.”¹⁷ In what specific ways, then, might greater reliance on patrilineality and fraternity as a security provision mechanism affect state security and stability? We assert six specific causal pathways in this chapter:

This is to be expected. Psychologists argue that the key to training an individual to become violent both within the family and in peer groups is to demonstrate the functionality of violence. Violence and coercion must “work” for these to be perpetuated. The reactions of parents, siblings, and peers teach individuals to select actions that work and to ignore those that do not. Male children who imitate the violence they observe against women in the home are likely to perpetuate it as long as it gets them what they want. “Events [of male violence against women] operate to glue the male group as a unified entity; it establishes fraternal bonding and helps boys to make the transition to their vision of a powerful manhood—in unity against women, one against the world. The patriarchal bonding functions a little like bonding in organized-crime circles, generating a sense of family and establishing mutual aid connections that will last a lifetime.”¹⁹

Where violence against women is allowed to persist, individuals (especially men) are committing continual, possibly daily, acts of aggression and violence against women, which may not only be applauded by male peers, but for which they are afforded virtually complete impunity. As we have argued in previous work,²⁰ extrapolating from Patterson’s model, the relative rate of reinforcement is a significant predictor for the relative rate of aggressive behavior, and the rate of reinforcement for violence against women is extremely high, resulting in overlearned violent acts that become automatic.²¹ This strongly suggests that violence at different levels is connected. States that allow violence against women to persist are allowing men—that half of society that holds both physical and political power—to engage in frequent, even daily, antisocial acts. Theodore Kemper draws the connection for us:

At the micro level, the powerful control their interpersonal environments through verbal and physical violence, preemptive decisions, reducing others to dependency, and forming coalitions…At the macro level, the powerful not only enforce socialization codes and define reality through culture, they also beat, arrest, and imprison opponents; they enforce deference routines by painful sanctions; they compel conformity by inducing fear of punishment; they overcome opponents in direct confrontations and…through decrees and by direct exclusion.²²

The witnessing of violence against women in one’s household as a child is particularly significant. Priya Nanda and colleagues found that “rigidly masculine” factors, such as “witness of childhood discrimination and violence against women, lower education, and economic stress” tripled the odds of men committing violence.23 A 2003 study published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence found that boys who experienced domestic violence in their childhood home were four times more likely to become perpetrators later on.²⁴ Pamela Shifman of the NoVo Foundation comments, “Violence tends to be first experienced in the home [and] is often the root justifier of all violence.”²⁵

We underestimate the larger social and political consequences of homes imbued with violence against women. Rose McDermott notes, “Why should we be surprised that children come to believe that might equals right because that is the relationship they see between their mothers and fathers? Children do not outgrow such developmental disturbances. Instead, they carry such a paradigm of inequality and violence into their larger personal, professional, and social lives and seek to re-create hierarchies of dominance that are natural, but also learned.”²⁶ This socialization can be found worldwide, in countries rich and poor; for example, an eleven-year-old Australian boy told his mother, “I’ll slit your throat and put a bullet to your brain”—because he had witnessed his father say the same to her.²⁷

Political scientist Dara Kay Cohen explains how this takes place, using the example of rape used by rebel and state soldiers during civil war: an individual must be trained to overcome an

innate hesitation to commit violence, and especially violence that is physically close, such as rape. Once this hesitation is overcome, whether through training that simulates battle or simply through force or pressure to commit violence, violent behavior then tends to lead to more violence. This occurs through one of several processes: desensitization, moral disengagement, or other forms of “dissonance reduction” that allows individuals to justify committing violence they once found repugnant.²⁸

Even sexism without violence in the home can create a hierarchical order based on sex, justifying such similar hierarchy in social relations outside the home. As one anonymous New York Times commenter eloquently put it,

What men overlearn with regard to their interpersonal relationships with women will become the toolkit they carry into positions of power in the larger society. For example, Potts and Hayden note, “Once individuals are identified as belonging to an out-group, there seems to be no limit to the human capacity for cruelty.”³¹ The first out-group for men is always women, and scholars have noted that one of the first signs of dehumanization of a group is its feminization. That is why to be called a “woman” is an insult for men across nearly all cultures, and why individuals with highly gender unequal beliefs are so much more hostile to minorities and foreigners—these groups are perceived, socially, as “women.”³²

Sulome Anderson interviewed captured ISIS fighters in 2016, and their comments when she asked about the treatment of women demonstrate how feminization and dehumanization are of a piece. One fighter said, “Women exist to be married and have children…Women survive; they do not live.” Another, asked how he would feel if his own mother were raped, as he had raped other women, said, “Even if it were my mother, that is Islamic sharia law and I would not mind because it would be for the jihad. We treat women the way we are required to by Islamic law, not human law. This is how they are supposed to live. They are second-class humans.”³³ No wonder men are so afraid to be perceived as feminized.

Ultimately, then, the foreign policy of human groups, including modern states, may be more dangerous because of the human male evolutionary legacy to form male-bonded kin groups as a security provision mechanism. Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson analyze the primate roots of behavior that results when “males hold sway by combining into powerful, unpredictable status-drive and manipulative coalitions, operating in persistent rivalry with other such coalitions”:

Unfortunately, there appears something special about foreign policy in the hands of males. Among humans and chimpanzees at least, male coalitionary groups often go beyond defense [typical of monkey matriarchies] to include unprovoked aggression, which suggests that our own intercommunity conflicts might be less terrible if they were conducted on behalf of women’s rather than men’s interests. Primate communities organized around male interests naturally tend to follow male strategies and, thanks to sexual selection, tend to seek power with an almost unbounded enthusiasm.³⁴

A fascinating study by evolutionary psychologist Aaron Sell and colleagues suggests some linkages from male dominance to the use of force as a preferred method of dispute resolution. This research team finds that the physical strength of the survey respondent was a significant predictor of support for the use of force not only in interpersonal conflict, but also in international conflicts.35 This finding was much more robust for men than for women: strong men were far more prone to anger and to consider themselves entitled to better treatment, and they also were more likely to prevail in conflicts of interest—and thus become leaders. Such men are more likely to experience overconfidence on the eve of aggression, lowering the psychic barriers to aggressive action.³⁶

Because we feel the socialization for force as a preferred method of conflict resolution comes from daily experience of the effective subordination of women by men in Syndrome societies, it is worth considering once more the conclusions reached by Bjarnegard and Melander, who found in cross-national analysis that individuals with highly gender unequal beliefs were also far more hostile toward other nations as well as toward minorities within their own society. In additional findings, they note that male survey respondents in Thailand with more highly gender unequal beliefs were also significantly more likely to actually participate in political violence (sociologist Ana Velitchkova notes similar results from Africa).³⁷ They propose that “patriarchal values lead to othering, and that masculine toughness drives violent aggression, so that honor ideology predisposes men to participate in political violence.”³⁸ Middle East studies scholar Sebastian Maisel notes this dynamic at play in contemporary Saudi Arabia, where “tribal discussion forums frequently report about clashes between young tribal members over issues of honor, pride, status, or genealogies.”³⁹ These observations suggest that Syndrome-encoding societies would be predisposed toward increased levels of conflict within their nation and in relations to other nations.

More specifically, societal expectations of benefits from violence at every level of analysis will almost certainly be higher if men, who dominate political power in every human society, have received both tangible benefit and obvious impunity from committing aggressive acts toward women. Benefit and impunity abound, for as Peggy Reeves Sanday notes, “In an all-male social group, the disparagement of women is, invariably, an important ingredient of the mystical bond, and sexual aggression the means by which the bond is renewed.”⁴⁰ Indeed, numerous researchers have noted the association between sexism and warfare. Marvin Harris, for example, comments that martial societies “have correspondingly more pronounced forms of male sexism…In keeping with this intense pattern of warfare, relations between…men and women are markedly hierarchical and androcentric.”⁴¹

Force not only is legitimized in this way but also can become valorized as the preferred conflict resolution mechanism of the society. After all, “the ability to exclude fellow humans from our emotional in-group may well be the trait underlying much of what we call evil…and such ‘evil’ acts have made evolutionary sense for males for many millions of years.”42 In the sexual order of the Patrilineal/Fraternal Syndrome we have explicated, men first learn to practice such emotional exclusion on women.⁴³

Numerous recent aggregate statistical findings underscore these conclusions.⁴⁴ Political scientists Monty Marshall and Donna Ramsey find a relationship between women’s disempowerment and state willingness to use force.⁴⁵ International relations scholar Mary Caprioli finds that greater domestic gender equality is correlated with less emphasis by the state on using military force to resolve international disputes.⁴⁶ Caprioli and Mark Boyer find that severity of violence used in an international conflict decreases with greater levels of domestic gender equality.⁴⁷ Political scientists Patrick Regan and Aida Paskeviciute find that the degree of women’s access to political power in a society is predictive of the likelihood of that state engaging in interstate disputes and war.⁴⁸ Caprioli and Peter Trumbore find that states with lower levels of gender equality are more likely to be the aggressors and to initiate the use of force in interstate disputes, which has been confirmed in research by David Sobek, Rodwan Abouharb, and Christopher Ingram.⁴⁹ Caprioli and Trumbore, as well as Melander, find that states with lower levels of domestic gender equality are more likely to be involved in intrastate conflict.⁵⁰ Security studies scholars Cameron Harris and Daniel Milton find that states with higher levels of gender inequality also have significantly higher levels of domestic terrorism.⁵¹ Political violence scholar Victor Asal and colleagues find that states with greater commitment to gender equality show greater predisposition to peaceful strategies of contention, and found the same to be true with ethno-political subnational movements.⁵² Caprioli and colleagues find that states with higher levels of violence against women are also less peaceful internationally, less compliant with international norms, and less likely to have good relations with neighboring states and that violence against women is a better predictor of these outcomes than level of democracy, level of wealth, or presence of Islamic civilization.⁵³ Melander finds men

who endorse honour ideology tend to view relations with others as a zero-sum conflict rather than a positive sum competition. Consequently, states where honour ideology is strong can be expected to produce and be influenced by more offensive realists, and fewer defensive realists, and therefore power transitions that involve such states will indeed be particularly threatening…Those who endorse honour ideology are thus particularly likely to take perceived affronts to their nation personally, and to react with demands for a strong response.⁵⁴

Specific components of the Patrilineal/Fraternal Syndrome may aggravate the predisposition toward the use of force. For example, the typically high fertility rates of Syndrome societies, resulting from the repression of female family planning interests, predispose those societies to conflict: as Anthony Lopez, Rose McDermott and Michael Petersen note, “one of the strongest predictors in explaining the severity of modern wars is the frequency of young males in the relevant populations. As the frequency of young males increases, so does the severity of the war.”⁵⁶ Furthermore, they note the intersection of male population and marriage market obstruction,⁵⁷ a topic that will be explored more thoroughly in chapter 5, by noting that men who are disadvantaged in the marriage market may actively seek heroic success in battle to improve their status.

The most illustrative example of how components of the Syndrome aggravate conflict, however, is that of polygyny.⁵⁸ Polygyny produces especially unstable societies, because it means that certain men in the clan will have several mates, whereas others may have none, undermining the solidarity necessary among the men of the group. Interestingly, evolutionary biologist Richard D. Alexander has posited that the first evidence of transition away from a clan-based foundation of society is the prohibition of polygyny: “It is almost as if no nation can become both quite large and quite unified except under socially imposed monogamy…. Socially imposed monogamy inhibits the rise of the kind of disproportionately large and powerful lineages of close relatives.”⁵⁹ Anthropologists also have found significant correlation between polygyny and the amount of warfare in which societies engage.⁶⁰ Satoshi Kanazawa suggests that “polygyny may be the first law of intergroup conflict (civil wars),”⁶¹ and James Boone even suggests that polygynous societies are more likely to engage in expansionist warfare to distract low-status males who may be left without mates.⁶²

Anthropologist Jillian Keenan, in her work on Burundi, has found that polygyny’s linkage to high fertility has fueled bloody land conflicts in that country. Polygynous men may have twenty or more sons who must all be satisfied with a tiny share of a plot of land, causing brother to turn against half-brother, brothers against cousins, sons against fathers, and even wives against husbands. Keenan notes, “within polygamous families, sons born by different mothers fight for finite land. In Muramvya, people speak in low voices about a woman who slit her husband’s throat to accelerate a land inheritance for her son.” Keenan interviews a nurse working at a family planning clinic: “[Christine] Nimbona says that of the roughly 30 patients she sees each week, ‘almost all’ cite fears about land resources and potential inheritance conflicts as their reasons for seeking family planning. ‘I know that by what I am doing, I am fighting the escalation of violence in my country,’ Nimbona says.”63 Not surprisingly, Burundi has the worst ranking on the Global Hunger Index as a result of too little land and too many sons.

Polygyny, however, is but an extreme example. Speaking more broadly, we would expect that states where the structural control of women by men is allowed to persist will exhibit not only higher levels of violence against women but also higher levels of authoritarianism, greater use of force in conflict resolution with resulting higher levels of violence within society, and lower levels of state peacefulness at home and abroad. This is a proposition that has unaccountably received little attention in the field of security studies. Azar Gat notes, “Students of war scarcely think of sexuality as a motive for fighting. The underlying links that connect the various elements of the human motivational system have largely been lost sight of.”⁶⁴ Wrangham and Peterson elaborate why it is crucial to include a gender lens in explaining violence conflict:

Humans are cursed with males given to vicious, lethal aggression. Thinking only of war, putting aside for the moment rape and battering and murder, the curse stems from our species’ own special party-gang traits: coalitionary bonds among males, male dominion over an expandable territory, and variable party size. The combination of these traits means that killing a neighboring male is usually worthwhile, and can often be done safely.⁶⁵

What evolution has produced in men, generally speaking, is a tendency “to seek power with an almost unbounded enthusiasm” and to engage in “unprovoked aggression.”⁶⁶ Potts and Hayden observe that “male Homo sapiens…have an inherited predisposition to team up with kin—or perceived kin—and try to kill their neighbors.”⁶⁷ Note, then, that nationalist identity can substitute for biological kin ties, as “shared cultural traits functio[n] as cues for kinship.”⁶⁸

It is Stephen Rosen who postulates a concrete explanatory linkage between the logic of clan aggression and the logic of state aggression. He notes that particular societal arrangements and cultural beliefs will bring more aggressive men to positions of highest authority:

Rosen is explicit in his predictions for such states: “A population of states run by groups of men who are prone to react to perceived challenges by punishing the challenger should see more conflict. Such systems will be prone to war.”⁷⁰ Dominic Johnson and Bradley Thayer concur:

The pleasure of competition and victory has been widely recognized as a feature of human nature from classical times to the present day, and success in competitive interactions and the domination of others are known to increase testosterone and dopamine responses in men—the so-called victory effect. Such dominance behavior is, we suggest, exaggerated among leaders because they are generally ambitious and competitive, and usually male. Moreover, the very acquisition and exercise of power itself is known to inflate dominance behavior further.⁷¹

When we step back, we cannot help but notice the dysfunctionality of a state system influenced by evolutionary male behavior. Violence is the constant backdrop of a society of states reliant on the Patrilineal/Fraternal security provision mechanism. Potts and Hayden put it best:

Warfare, terrorism, and their attendant horrors are based on just this sort of inherited predisposition for team aggression which, whatever its origins, has become a horribly costly and counterproductive behavior in the modern world…The original survival advantage enjoyed by individual males with a predisposition for team aggression has long since been replaced by a major, verging on suicidal, disadvantage for our species as a whole…To a very large extent…the natural tendencies of men are not consistent with the survival and well-being of their sexual partners, their children, and future generations to come.⁷³

This suggests it may be difficult to construct a more egalitarian—or more secure—society in which households are profoundly inegalitarian between the sexes. Gloria Steinem asserts, “Political philosophers always have told us that the family is a microcosm of the state. Unfortunately, they did not take the logical next step: only democratic families can produce and sustain a real democracy.”76 This is true even of nation-states where the nominal political system includes procedural democracy. For example, one official in democratic South Africa, accused of domestic violence, stated baldly, “Democracy stops at my front door.”⁷⁷ Democracy may even facilitate a regression back toward the Syndrome: for example, a recent peaceful democratic transition from autocracy in Gambia has seen a resurgence of female genital cutting and child marriage, as Gambian voters decided democracy means that they now have the freedom return to their patrilineal/fraternal traditions.⁷⁸

Scholars have noted that “the tribe is based upon the legitimation of inequality by ideology.”⁷⁹ Perhaps that legitimation finds its foundational expression in the subordination of women in marriage at the household level; if so, meaningful democratization cannot take place without change at that foundation. As political scientist Steven Fish states,

Several leading writers have argued that the repressiveness and unquestioned dominance of the father in the family and of the male in relations between men and women replicate themselves in broader society, creating a culture of domination, intolerance, and dependency in social and political life…. Individuals who are more accustomed to rigidly hierarchical relations in their personal lives may be less prone to resist such patterns of authority in politics. The generalization applies to the wielders of authority as much as to the objects.⁸⁰

Gerda Lerner agrees with this view, commenting that “children reared and socialized within such authority will grow into the kind of citizens needed in an absolutist kingship. The king’s power was secured by men as absolutely dependent on and subservient to him as their families were dependent on and subservient to them. The archaic state was shaped and developed in the form of patriarchy.”⁸¹ Political scientist Ariel Ahram concurs:

The parallel between the Syndrome’s sexual order and the form of governance in the wider polity has been well understood across the millennia, especially by monarchs. Sociologist Julia Adams, for example, quotes James VI of Scotland who wrote,

As Sir Robert Filmer put it, “The first kings were fathers of families.”84

The leader of the group will need to be dominant, indeed, to deter the aspirations to dominance of his male kin. As we have seen, Barbara Smuts (and others) argues that the establishment of a hierarchy among men of the group was increasingly selected as a way to dampen male-male competition within the kin group.⁸⁵ Male dominance hierarchies, however, can create extreme inequality among male allies. Smuts suggests that “the degree to which men dominate women and control their sexuality is inextricably intertwined with the degree to which some men dominate others.”⁸⁶ Not surprisingly, then, this hierarchical strategy is problematic: psychologists Nicholas Pound, Martin Daly, and Margo Wilson observe that “evidence indicates that relative deprivation (as indexed by income inequality) is typically a more powerful predictor of variation in male violence than other socioeconomic measures such as percent below the poverty line or average income.”⁸⁷

The reliance on hierarchies among male kin within the patriline is, thus, a highly paradoxical strategy: in attempting to dampen male-male competition, such a hierarchical structure may instead wind up aggravating it, both within and betwixt groups. Francis Fukuyama notes that, “in tribal societies, justice between individuals is a bit like contemporary international relations, based on the self-help of rival groups in a world where there is no higher third-party enforcer of rules.”⁸⁸ Although peaceful coexistence and pursuit of well-being is nominally the goal, the means by which clans pursue these goals results in a system of “disequilibrium in equilibrium.”⁸⁹ As David Jacobson explains, “Balanced opposition is a way to organize society. But it also means that violence, or the threat of violence, is an organizing principle of society—at a basic personal and communal level. Any potential attacker knows he may trigger a formidable collective response…The role of violence explains why, in good part, the prowess of males is so valued.”⁹⁰

To benefit from this tropism of states’ systems of governance paralleling household systems of governance, the authoritarian state may purposefully attempt to formally base its governance on patrilineal lines. China and Korea⁹¹ may be the primary examples here. Monica Das Gupta observes that

In China and Korea, the state made a concerted effort to propagate Confucian values to reinforce the ruler’s authority and build a strong authoritarian state. This involved pressuring and incentivizing people to form themselves into patrilineages, and to adopt elaborate rituals of ancestor worship tying the lineage members together…. These authoritarian kinship relationships were mirrored through the political hierarchy, culminating in obeisance to the king. Presented as a civilizing force, this enabled the state to control local societies through lineage organization.⁹²

But, as Das Gupta notes, state cooptation of lineages depends on the creation of a supra-lineage, with the state leader as the “father of fathers.” In cases in which that is not possible or successful, the tension inherent in the system of male-bonded kin groups will come to the fore once again. How do patriline leaders cope with these constant centripetal forces that threaten to tear the extended kin alliance apart? Only with great difficulty; the “state” seems ready to fly apart at the slightest pressure. Leadership succession is often a catalyst: consider S. J. Tambiah’s account of historical Burma: “The curious fact is that succession to the throne was always contentious, and the winner who was rarely if ever the eldest son of the chief wife, usually murdered all his half-brothers and their immediate relatives…. The son who most often succeeded was the son who could take and maintain the kingship by force.”93

Implicit in Tambiah’s assertion is that polygyny exacerbates all these authoritarian tendencies. As Robert Wright puts it, “Extreme polygyny often goes hand in hand with extreme political hierarchy, and reaches its zenith under the most despotic regimes.”⁹⁴ Laura Betzig, in an intriguing empirical study of 186 societies, found “the correlation between polygyny and despotism to be statistically significant.”⁹⁵

Sex ratio alteration is also a structural point of instability, one that we explore in chapter 5. Highly masculinized sex ratios may predispose the nation-state in the direction of authoritarianism. As Steven Fish describes:

Extremely high sex ratios themselves make for a social time bomb and may dim the prospects for popular rule. They may create conditions under which young men are more likely to join militant groups and engage in threatening, anomic behavior that provokes official repression. Late marriages for males, who in some Muslim countries must by custom be economically capable of supporting wives who do not work, may contribute to male aggression and frustration, but sheer numbers exacerbate the problem.⁹⁶

In sum, although leaders may attempt to pacify other group members by claiming their rule is legitimate or by divine design, their rule is in reality based first and foremost on the threat of violence, just as is the rule of men over women in the society—and our theoretical framework suggests this is because the former is based on the template of the latter. Authoritarianism backed by the threat of violent coercion is thus mirrored at both levels of analysis—the household and the state.

Indeed, even in an autocracy, it is the male-bonded kin networks within the broader society that ultimately determine the limits of the autocrat’s power. We have previously mentioned how nominally democratic governments can be undermined by clan politics, so much so that the term “democracy” seems a sham when the autocracy of clan politics, in fact, has captured the institutions designed to implement democracy. The same can happen in an autocracy as well, in which the “all-powerful” autocrat is not actually very powerful at all. Rather, it is the male-bonded kin networks that run the show. Collins’s analysis of post-Soviet states allows us to see the mechanisms involved:

Because the balancing act between clans is such a delicate one, a chronic predisposition to instability is inevitable. To forestall the outbreak of violence, patrilineal leaders may attempt to use rents to appease would-be aspirants for power as a near-term strategy, or, as Schatz puts it “as a whole, society experiences a proliferation of non-productive activities, such as rent seeking.”⁹⁹ Speaking of the weak post-Qaddafi Libyan government’s attempts to co-opt leaders of the rebel militias that are the real force in that society, journalists Scott Shane and Jo Becker record in the New York Times the plea of one observer: “ ‘Don’t give them salaries for nothing,’ Mr. Sagezli recalls begging. ‘Giving a commander money means giving strength to the militias, more loyalty for the commander, more armaments and more corruption. They never listened.’ Instead, he said, ‘the politicians started bribing them to buy loyalty.’ ”¹⁰⁰ Governance-by-rents is a hallmark of the Patrilineal/Fraternal Syndrome, and it is to that topic that we now turn.

Rents are valuables obtained through some form of raiding or extortion or direct exploitation (such as digging minerals from the earth), rather than through one’s production of them. Indeed, one merely expropriates rents from those who or that which has produced them. The accumulation of wealth and power through obtaining and utilizing rents creates what Jack Goody terms “the predatory economy.”101 That is, dominant economic actors will be in the business of “taking” from others who actually produce value. The parasitical form that this strategy of accumulation takes must not be overlooked, as once more the originary template for the strategy may be found in the character of male–female relations within the society, that is, the first political order of relations between the sexes. As economist Elissa Braunstein states, “there are two ways to make a living—producing things or appropriating what others have produced…. Social norms like the sexual division of labor are not simply solutions to the problem of coordinating family production, but rather a way to organize family labor in terms that benefit men.”¹⁰²

This is reflected even in colloquial language. One “takes” a wife in many cultures, and sires children “upon her.” That “givers” are always coded as inferior to “takers” has deep roots in the subordinative first political order.¹⁰³ Goody notes that “the agnatic group has strongly endogamous tendencies…to give a wife to another lineage is dishonourable, and the wife-takers are superior to the wife-givers.”¹⁰⁴ Children then belong to the patriline, and not to the mother who physically produced them—she may be the “giver,” but her husband and his patriline are the “takers.” All her labor, productive as well as reproductive, belongs to her husband and, by extension, his lineage group.

The first rents, then, are extracted from women by men through “implicit intra-household rent agreements.”105 (“Agreement” may not be the right word choice, given what we know of the nature of marriage in Syndrome-encoding societies.) Thus, the fruits of both a woman’s productive and reproductive labors are typically expropriated by the patriline in such cultures, whether these fruits are in the form of children or food or domestic service or farm labor. This understanding of the expropriative nature of the male–female relation still finds echoes in laws today; so, for example, marital rape is in many countries considered an oxymoron and is not illegal, for a man has “taken” his wife, and in a sense, “owns” her as property. In other countries, a woman’s earnings from participation in the labor force or her dower assets are under control of her husband; in many countries, it is not illegal for a man to physically harm a woman who withholds expected services, such as sexual services or food preparation services. The first rents were arguably expropriated from womankind, then.

The usefulness of a strategy of expropriation and raiding does not remain confined to male–female relations. It cascades outward and becomes a type of broader societal economy. Sociologist Maria Mies argues that the development of at-a-distance weaponry, such as spears, arrows, and atlatls, in the historical evolutionary environment allowed men to more safely expropriate goods and slave labor from other groups, simultaneously providing political power to those who excelled at this task.¹⁰⁶

Rents are easier to expropriate in cases in which that which is valuable is alienable from the producer thereof. Anthropologist Joseph Manson and colleagues note, “The predominance of males in human intergroup aggression leads to the expectation that human societies will be characterized by male philopatry and female transfer [as found in cultures with] patrilocal or virilocal postmarital residence…we suggest that the object of intergroup aggression should be predictable by resource alienability—i.e., the extent to which resources can be profitably seized.”¹⁰⁷ Or, to put it more colloquially, an Arab proverb states, “Raids are our agriculture.”¹⁰⁸ The fundamental activity of high-status actors in this type of economy may thus become “raiding,” a form of rent extortion.

The raiding and extortion of rents for the purpose of ruling is a trademark of patrilineal/fraternal networks. Speaking of the tribes of Inner Asia, Thomas Barfield notes that historically the tribes not only raided government assets but also extorted protection money from the government, with the payments amounting to one-third of the annual government payroll.¹⁰⁹ But the cumulative effect was anything but stabilizing: “More destructive was the [tribal] tradition of raising revenue by raiding or extortion…For this reason, tribal peoples were perceived as threats not just to the stability of weak dynasties but to the very fabric of government as well.”¹¹⁰

These rents play an important role in the group’s logic of male hierarchy. Despite the inequality between the hierarchy’s members, the dispersal of rents and their associated sinecures serve to dampen grievance within the patrilineal network. For example, individuals are typically provided opportunities simply because of their place in the patrilineal clan’s hierarchy; “family, relatives, and extended clan fill the power ministries.”¹¹¹ The placement of such male kin (and, in some cases, female kin) in powerful positions in the formal state government generally solidifies the power of the patrilineal network. Patrilineal interests, and the need for some measure of patrilineal clan balancing to keep the peace, drive political appointments and policy decisions, rendering the political process irrational and incapable of pursuing national interests should they diverge from clan interests.¹¹²

Historian J. E. Peterson gives a classic example in the Gulf States of the 1970s:

More classic resource-based rents are also in play: patrilineal clans offer significant and concrete economic benefits to their members. For example, with regard to the Saudi royal family, one anonymous observer interviewed by journalist David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times has noted “the family has maintained its unity in part by spreading its top government roles and vast oil wealth among different branches of the sprawling clan. Most important was the division of the three main security services, which constitute the hard power on the ground.”¹¹⁴ Although the prevailing ideology of patrilineality is one of kinship morality, in patrilineal clans, that ideology is tangibly married to “shared interest, advantage, and service.”¹¹⁵ As historian Joseph Kostiner puts it, it is both “blood ties and booty”—or, now, subsidies—that keep clans both an affective and a rational investment.¹¹⁶ As Collins explains,

[Clans] persist over time because they are identity networks with cultural capital, rooted in both real kinship and the idea of kinship that incorporates one’s trusted friends…Clan elites can trust the members of their networks, and nonelites can rely on clan patrons to assist them in times of need…they are also rational networks that foster individual survival in an environment characterized by failing, inadequate, or repressive formal institutions.¹¹⁷

This dynamic does not just afflict weak economies, for as Schatz notes, “Even in some advanced industrial contexts, the performance of formal, state-introduced institutions suffers in those areas where kinship networks remain vibrant.”118 Inevitably, then, patrilineal networks “emerged as distinctly political, by becoming ensnared with questions of distribution and exchange.”¹¹⁹ This type of political economy, however, is far from functional, just as the exploitation of women upon which it is patterned is dysfunctional.

This parallel has even been explored in scholarly research. In a fascinating study, international relations scholars You-Ming Liou and Paul Musgrave find that women are more subordinated in economies focused largely on oil rents, and they opine that a “gendered resource curse” is at work in addition to the more conventionally noted “resource curse,” which has been used to explain the paradoxical durability of these otherwise dysfunctional regimes that are propped up by oil or mineral rents.¹²⁰ Liou and Musgrave assert that these regimes are long-lived not only because they provide rents to tamp down levels of discontent but also because they explicitly subordinate women—which pleases the winning male coalitions in the society. These winning male coalitions are none other than the patrilineal/fraternal male-bonded extended kin groups we have been discussing, whose very existence and strength relies on the oppression of women in the interest of the patriline.¹²¹

The predatory economy at the government level is bolstered by the government’s unfailing support of it at the household level, and this is intertwined with the authoritarianism seen at both levels of analysis. Lerner expresses it eloquently:

[The] dependence of male family heads on the king or state bureaucracy was compensated for by their dominance over their families [emphasis added]. Male family heads allocated the resources of society to their families the way the state allocated the resources of society to them. The control of male family heads over their female kin and minor sons was as important to the existence of the state as was the control of the king over his soldiers.¹²²

That governance-through-rents is not a solid foundation for good governance is well accepted in economic development circles. Collins notes that, “energy resources appear to be particularly susceptible to clan-based corruption, as the ‘resource curse’ may foster instability between clans and hinder democratization over the longer term.”¹²³

Furthermore, although rents may make “sense” to men in societies where the fraternal network is the security provision mechanism, it may not make any sense at all from the standpoint of economic rationality and efficiency. Elissa Braunstein elaborates:

Braunstein goes on to note that hierarchies provide a strong source of vested interest in the status quo, with those at higher levels “buying off” those at lower levels. In the case of households, elite males allow nonelite males to control women. But, she notes, such rent-seeking induces men to expend resources to maintain their dominance over the source of rents (women), regardless of the societal cost—and this both lowers economic growth as well as lessens human capabilities overall. Depressingly, Braunstein comments, “If gender equity means the loss of individual or collective rents, it will be resisted regardless of how seemingly socially efficient the attendant economic prescriptions appear.”¹²⁵ No wonder the World Bank finds that countries that subordinate women also experience subpar economic performance,¹²⁶ and no wonder that recognition of this fact has not led to any overhaul of that subordination.

Our theoretical framework suggests that male-on-female predation leading to the development of a “predatory economy” also primes a society for corruption. Indeed, in an intriguing finding that parallels this assertion, political scientist Christopher Butler and colleagues found that “the level of financial corruption in a political system is robustly associated with the extensiveness of sexual violence committed by policemen and soldiers.” If corruption is defined as “being willing to use your position or power to your own advantage” in a way that is “dishonest,” “lacking in integrity,” “illegal or immoral,” then the first corruption may well be found in the first political order of women’s subordination at the household level.¹²⁷

It is important to understand “corruption” for what it really is in the economics of Syndrome-encoding countries—corruption is the means of governance. Mark Weiner suggests, “What we tend loosely to call corruption is often the distribution of favors along clan lines.”¹²⁸ Indeed, garnering assets for one’s clan while “simultaneously doling out to rival clans just enough to prevent open conflict”¹²⁹ is the typical modus operandi of clan-based states. Collins notes about post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan how

Thus, although an informal pact between clans based on clan balancing through corruption is often initially struck to enable some peace and regime durability, these pacts often serve to undermine stability. As Collins suggests, “democracy in a clan-based society has not proven stable; it has quickly deteriorated under the pressure of clan interests. Nor is clan-based autocracy a stable political system over the longer term…[clans] undermine genuine economic reform that would threaten their vested interests.”¹³¹ Under exigency, these pacts will break down, leading to violent conflict to reconfigure rights to rents. Indeed, Collins asserts that “in anticipation of regime or even state collapse, [clans] may in fact be precipitating that collapse…. The informal decentralization of power and assets, potentially including access to arms, among clan elites and along group identity lines, raises the likelihood of clan elites instigating intergroup conflict to defend their interests.”¹³²

The linkage between corruption and state instability is widely acknowledged. For example, Samuel Mondays Atuobi of the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre notes:

The existence of widespread corruption…has a deeply corrosive effect on trust in government and contributes to crime and political disorder…. At the extreme, unbridled corruption can lead to state fragility and destructive conflict, and plunge a state into an unremitting cycle of institutional anarchy and violence. Inasmuch as corruption destroys the legitimacy of government in the eyes of those who can do something about the situation, it contributes to instability. [Corruption has] often been cited among the reasons for military takeovers.¹³³

Furthermore, as we have seen, in patrilineal clan-based societies, government positions are used in a corrupt fashion to obtain additional assets for the clan and its members, and not to build up the broader society or the institutions of the state, generally speaking. The resources of the government are often viewed as potential booty, which clans feel should be preemptively stripped lest they fall to the control of other clans. In Kenya, a country dominated by clan politics, the colloquial term for this asset-stripping by the clan in power is “eating.” As a new clan comes to power, members crow, “It’s our turn to eat!”134 Likewise, Tambiah says that historically, “kinship groups were…clusters of relatives associated with such privileged officials…. In Burma, an official became a myo-sa, the ‘eater of the town,’ and this entitled him to extract tribute from his domain.”¹³⁵ In Kazakhstan, Schatz notes, the term is qanyn tartady, or “bring in their blood.” In stripping state assets, clans “create a wealth and power base largely independent of the state.”¹³⁶ Fukuyama concludes, “public service is often regarded as an opportunity to steal on behalf of the family.”¹³⁷

Clan-based corruption is a horse of a different color than run-of-the-mill corruption. As we have noted, “blood and booty” hold clans together: “booty,” or asset-stripping, is always the foundation of the economic system created in which patrilineal clans (blood) are powerful, and thus corruption is not an aberration, but rather a built-in feature of the governance system.

Douglass North and his colleagues describe this system as one in which “the political system [is used] to create economic rents; the rents order social relations, control violence, and establish social cooperation.”¹³⁸ Rather than corruption being seen as an impediment to governance, corruption is often seen as the very means of governance and the primary leverage with which to control violence. Typically, economic reform will be a nonstarter in these states because it is largely through rent creation and allocation that “elites create credible incentives to cooperate rather than fight among themselves…rents then secure political order.”¹³⁹ Social anthropologist Ernest Gellner elaborates,

The chief has to guard against defections among the tribal segments by giving subsidies that can rival those promised by other similar chieftaincies, ever ready to seduce some of his following by offering better terms. All this takes money; so he himself is in the market for the reception of subsidies and arms from outside powers, which in turn are eager to use his strategic position either to ensure their own communications or to undermine the communications and claims of their rivals…. Treachery is endemic…. Nothing, certainly not death, ever terminates the game; leadership in a segmentary society has a dragon’s-teeth quality.¹⁴⁰

Modern examples of these Games of Clan Thrones abound. For example, Chinese personal and familial relationships have aided lineage groups in accessing business opportunities,141 and in response to numerous scandals, President Xi Jinping launched a major anticorruption campaign upon taking office, although it is unclear whether even the power of a one-party state can offset that of powerful patrilines.¹⁴² In Saudi Arabia, “The Saudi polity tributarises other clan groups, no longer nomadic, and ties them…to the redistribution of Saudi wealth; for plunder is substituted by subsidy and the privilege of citizenship, such as the legal sponsorship of foreign business is akin in many ways to the exaction of protection money. Thus tribalism becomes ascendant.”¹⁴³ In both China and Saudi Arabia, the need to “cull the number of pigs at the trough” has resulted in dramatic anticorruption campaigns without really attacking the government-by-corruption system itself.¹⁴⁴ In Central Asia, meanwhile, “presidential appointments and policy decisions are defined or sharply constrained by clan interests and their competition for resources. Clan elites actively engage in nepotism and patronage of their kin and clan network.”¹⁴⁵

Kin-based systems will always provide impunity for corruption, as kin networks are the warp and woof of the economy. Collins notes, “Far from being irrational relics of a bygone age, the informal ties and networks of clan life reduce the high transaction costs of making deals in an environment where impersonal institutions are weak or absent and stable expectations are hard to form.” An example is Yemen, a very weak state (so weak that a civil war is now raging). Nadwa al-Dawsari states:

The strong presence of tribes in Yemen is due to the corruption and weakness of the state institutions there. The tribes in Yemen provide social order outside the formal system. Tribes and tribal law act, in the words of political scientist Daniel Corstange, as “second-best substitutes for an absent or weak state.” People approve of the tribes because they provide basic rule of law in the form of conflict resolution and regulation.¹⁴⁶

Clans, in fact, serve as an alternative to formal market institutions and official bureaucracies. Collins explains, “The particularistic ties and repeated interactions that characterize clans build trust and a sense of reciprocity, enabling the people involved to make contracts that extend over time.”¹⁴⁸ This lowering of transaction costs has a steep price, however. As Fukuyama notes, nepotism makes institutions “intolerant, inbred, slow to adapt, and oblivious to new ideas,”¹⁴⁹ or as a recent Arab Human Development Report notes, “Clannism implants submission, parasitic dependence and compliance in return for protection and benefits,” and it thereby becomes “the enemy of personal independence, intellectual daring, and the flowering of a unique and authentic human entity.”¹⁵⁰ Sociologist Ivan Ermakoff concurs, stating patrilineal/fraternal networks undermine state capacity “by begetting arbitrary power and instability, by undercutting incentives for productive innovations, and by fostering the down-ward fragmentation of spheres of influence.”¹⁵¹ Because no separation exists between what is private and what is public, official state property can easily come to be seen as private property. Furthermore, when you cannot fire employees who are incompetent or venal because they are kinsmen, the liability of this system becomes clear.

Additionally, this culture of relational corruption undermines any sense of common ties through citizenship. Members of the patrilineal/fraternal network may not see themselves first and foremost as the citizens of their nation-state, but rather as members of their clans or tribes. As such, the notion of common sacrifice for the good of the country is attenuated because kin-based patronage networks are the dominant resource allocation mechanisms in society. Note what Weiner says about Indian jatis:

Thus, patrilineal clan members generally have an instrumental view of formal government: In cases in which the formal government supports the clan’s interests—which may be ensured by placing one’s own members in governmental positions—the clan can strengthen the central government. In cases in which the formal government opposes clan interests, however, the clan may well seek to undermine the formal government. Seen in this light, many authoritarian regimes are actually not authoritarian at all: the “supreme leader” may lack the real power to govern society and be highly dependent on clan acquiescence, as we see in several post–Cold War Central Asian nations.¹⁵³

In her masterful work on corruption, Thieves of State, Sarah Chayes notes that corruption undermines the state in two ways. First, the disgust engendered by a corrupt government breeds rebellion:

Kleptocratic governance—acute and systemic public corruption—was fodder for an expanding insurgency…. Corruption was not solely a humanitarian affair, an issue touching on principles or values alone. It was a matter of national security…. Acute government corruption may in fact lie at the root of some of the world’s most dangerous and disruptive security challenges—among them the spread of violent extremism…. For decades…extremism had been the only outlet for people to express their legitimate grievances…. Militant extremism [seemed] the only alternative to corruption.¹⁵⁴

And yet, as Chayes points out, corruption may not so much undermine the government as to be the purpose of government. Her epiphany occurred during her time serving alongside the U.S. military in Afghanistan:

Chayes reflects on why this realization was so difficult for those from nonpatrilineal societies to achieve and decides on two primary reasons: (1) “the notion that an entire government might be transformed into what amounts to a criminal organization, that it might have entirely repurposed the mechanisms of state to serve its ends, is almost too conceptually challenging to contemplate,” and (2) “the overwhelming evidence that the market liberalization, privatization, and structural adjustment programs the West imposed on developing countries in the 1990s have often exacerbated corruption, not reduced it [is] hard to process.”¹⁵⁶ Societies that have moved away from the Patrilineal/Fraternal Syndrome will find the logic of corruption mystifying in a way that societies still encoding the Syndrome will not.

Chayes notes that kinship is at the heart of this system of corruption that passes itself off as government. Her informants consistently point to the “big families,” and the “extended ruling families,” whose goal is “the extraction of resources for personal gain, and the softening of the state [that] resulted.”¹⁵⁷ The state becomes a “feeding trough,” and banks become the piggy banks for these families, issuing loans no one believes will be repaid. She describes the system as “a welfare program to secure obedience,” which is in line with our theoretical framework.¹⁵⁸ In an interesting echo of how men create the legal systems that oppress women, the “big families” do the very same. Chayes notes, “The legal system was created by the people who were going to benefit.”¹⁵⁹ We raise the possibility that the corruption Chayes notes was learned first in the home, where the extraction of resources (and labor) for personal gain was the practice of one sex in regard to the other. Although a fragile stability can be achieved in the short term, governance by means of corruption is ultimately a recipe for instability and rebellion.¹⁶⁰

Note that this “welfare system” of corruption and nepotism can, in addition to breeding instability and rebellion, seriously constrain innovation, initiative, and reform: deviants will be radically ostracized, perhaps even killed. Furthermore, the patrilineal/fraternal system is no breeding ground for meritocracy. Indeed, basic competence cannot be assumed of those appointed to office, because they have been appointed because of their lineage position. Indeed, political scientist Bassam Tibi notes that this was one reason why in the historical Middle East those who were outside lineages were brought in to run things: “Men can now be trusted, on the whole, to perform their tasks in bureaucratic organizations without constantly yielding to the temptation to bend the rules so as to favor their own kin…Traditional society did not have this advantage; for reliable bureaucratic performance it had to rely on slaves, eunuchs, priests, or aliens.”161 It was these outsiders, with no strong clan ties, whose allegiance to the leader of the country could be somewhat trusted to perform on pain of dismissal. Fukuyama comments, “There appears to be something of an inverse relationship between the bonds of trust and reciprocity inside and outside the family; when one is very strong, the other tends to be weak…. What made the Protestant Reformation so important for Weber was not so much that it encouraged honesty, reciprocity, and thrift among individual entrepreneurs, but that these virtues were for the first time widely practiced outside the family.”¹⁶²

More specifically, it is hard to threaten “pain of dismissal” in a kin-based network system. In this type of societal structure, although individuals are easily replaceable by others in the same lineage, the position may be tied to a certain level of status within the lineage—and woe be it unto anyone who seeks change in those parameters. In the short term, acceding to this system may be stabilizing, but in the long term, it augurs for civilizational stasis and decline. Furthermore, it has dire ramifications for individuals who deviate—even in positive ways—from lineage norms. Jacobson expresses it, “Tribal societies do not afford the relatively easy “exit” from family ties that modern functioning states do from kin dependencies, so to dishonor oneself is to live a life of humiliation and shame. Furthermore, it will be difficult for the dishonored to find partners for any social or economic endeavors.”¹⁶³

Clannism traps individuals, and by extension, the entire society, into a straitjacket of corruption, nepotism, and economic underperformance, which in turn stoke grievance and rebellion.

Again, we assert the template for this hierarchy is the inequitable nature of the original social contract between men and women—what typically is called marriage. Family and personal status law in Syndrome-encoding countries openly demonstrate that all people are not equal before the law, for men and women surely are not. For example, wives may be killed if accused of adultery, but men may not be punished for adultery at all. Husbands may easily divorce their wives, but wives may only with great difficulty divorce their husbands. Husbands have full property and inheritance rights, but wives enjoy very few such rights. Husbands may be excused if they beat their wife, but not if they beat another male. And so on.¹⁶⁵ The pattern is quite clear: impunity for the man and harsh punishment for the woman, simply based on sex difference.

We suggest that the profoundly inequitable nature of family law undermines from the start the very concept of rule of law within the society. As economic historian Douglass North and his colleagues put it, “The law cannot enforce individual rights if…every relationship between two individuals depends uniquely on their identity within the [group],”¹⁶⁶ or as Weiner expresses it, “communities governed by the rule of the clan possess a markedly diminished conception of individual freedom. This is because under their legal principles people are valued less as individuals per se than as members of their extended families. The rights and obligations of individuals are fundamentally influenced by their place within the kin groups to which they inescapably belong.”¹⁶⁷ This is established at the start, for a male’s place in the patrilineal/fraternal group is far, far different from that of a woman’s place. A husband who kills an unfaithful wife will walk free, for he killed for honor; a wife who kills an unfaithful husband will be executed as a murderess.

Thus, because the first political order is grounded in women’s subordination—a founding template of injustice, if you will—a kin-based system may openly sanction impunity for the guilty as well as punishment for the innocent, which undermines the concept of justice being based in accountability for individual actions before the law. In Iraq, there is a saying, “Support your brother even though he is guilty,”¹⁶⁸ which suggests that tribal law is first and foremost about stability and not about justice.

Weiner highlights a critical distinction between shame and guilt, which illustrates the core problem discussed here: “In shame cultures it is not a person’s behavior that creates shame. It is instead the fact that the person’s community has witnessed or learned of the behavior. Guilt, on the other hand, is solitary. It stems not from a disapproving community but from a bad conscience.”169 Patrilineal/fraternal syndrome societies are decidedly shame-based, for conscience has already been seared through the foundational order of the coercive subordination of women. In such a context, the rule of law cannot be easily developed, even if the country is nominally a democracy. States in such societies “may have elections, but they do not have extensive systems of rights of rule of law for most citizens.”¹⁷⁰

Interestingly, the linkage we posit between elements of the Syndrome and impunity has long been noted. Laura Betzig, in her classic 1982 article on the subject, notes that

[Social] rank classically correlates with size and strength of the kin group, and with differences in wealth, [which] consistently determine the asymmetrical application of [legal] sanctions…. Conflicts of interest are asymmetrically resolved to the point that one individual may, for example, be killed for coughing in the presence of another, while the other may murder with impunity. Simultaneously, perquisites for third party authorities acting to resolve disputes become substantial, frequently equal to the payment of a brideprice or a bride; and degrees of polygyny increase.¹⁷¹

Tribal societies can display, cumulatively, an unusual degree of personal and social violence…. Why would tribes, as a whole, exhibit such violence? We observed earlier that balanced opposition is a way to organize security and served to organize many societies for millennia. This also means that the threat of violence is an organizing principle of society [emphasis added]—at both a personal and social level. Such a threat is the very antithesis of the civil, republican form of the modern state, where the state monopolizes violence and social relations are to be conducted on the basis of self-restraint and civility…. The blood feud is the ultimate tool of accountability.”¹⁷⁷

Such violence is usually local, but it can broaden quickly to encompass whole peoples, such as the world witnessed in the Rwandan genocide, or can even mutate into global militancies, which, in Jacobson’s words, “turn tribal-patriarchal concepts—such as honor, gender, and grievance—into ideological rather than kinship-based concerns.”¹⁷⁸ After all, one of the useful characteristics of these lineage systems is that virtually all adult males can be mobilized at a moment’s notice.¹⁷⁹ As Weiner notes, “clan societies have the potential to destabilize regions vital to our strategic interests…. In addition to being sources of regional instability, clan societies also provide safe-havens for a wide variety of militant groups [which] either belong to a particular clan or who can claim its loyalty.”¹⁸⁰

Thus, although clans are capable of using their influence in a strategic fashion to create temporary peace and stability in place of continual violence,181 certain behavioral predispositions of clans predictably and chronically undermine the stability and security of their societies. We may remember how Richard Tapper expresses it: “blood descent lead[s] to bloody dissent.”¹⁸² The “republics of cousins” (a phrase coined by French anthropologist Germaine Tillion) are always an unstable arrangement. National security researcher Patricio Asfura-Heim notes, “tribes are always in constant competition. They challenge each other, form alliances, and break apart to improve their access to resources. A balance of power among lineages keep the peace by guaranteeing that unjustified attacks will result in retribution and equivalent loss. [The leader] must be prepared to avenge every injury.”¹⁸³ The tales told by former ambassador and anthropologist Akbar Ahmed in The Thistle and the Drone about clans’ willingness to perish—and have everyone else perish, too—in pursuit of honorable revenge makes for horrifying reading.¹⁸⁴ The logic of honor can easily outweigh the logic of survival.¹⁸⁵

It cannot be otherwise, according to Ernest Gellner, because of the vital role of fear in keeping the peace. If there’s too much peace, according to Gellner, there’s not enough fear:

So as to work at all, the system also must not work too well…. The driving force behind the cohesion of the groups is fear, fear of aggression by others in an anarchic environment. If the balancing system really worked perfectly, producing a kind of perpetual peaceful balance of power at all levels, the society would cease to be anarchic, and fear would cease to be a powerful spring of action…. The persistence of a segmentary society requires, paradoxically, that its mechanisms should be sufficiently inefficient to keep fear in being as the sanction of the system.¹⁸⁶

This means, however, that when the clan balancing act becomes unbalanced, violence is easily unleashed. Collins notes: “Once the balance of clan or patronage power is disrupted and the state breaks down, clan lines become clearly visible, and clan warfare extremely personalistic and vengeful; reestablishing trust and cooperation across clan boundaries becomes very difficult. The kinship element of clan conflicts makes them particularly intractable.”¹⁸⁷

“Intractable” is a word often applied to societies that depend on extended male kin networks for security provision. Schatz similarly notes “strongly drawn blood relationships can make conflict more intractable once it has begun. Descent ideologies are easily mobilized by political actors with narrow goals and agendas, as blood ties are widely understood as immutable.”¹⁸⁸ Furthermore, despite the idea that clans unite to face external threat, the rivalries continue even as the fight is enjoined. As Schatz notes about Kazakhstan, even during the most widespread anticolonial rebellion against Russian colonization, the Kazakh leader Kasymov “was unable to keep at bay interclan rivalries.”¹⁸⁹ Indeed, the power of the state in relation to the clans is measurable by how well it is able to suppress such feuding, although such suppression also may be quite costly to the society in many ways.¹⁹⁰

Indeed, the very conception of martial masculine honor breeds subgroups within a patrilineal society that seek greater power by becoming the most “honorable of all”—that is, being the most manly, defined as being the most belligerent, the most ruthless, the most brutal, the most violent,191 and, we would add, the most oppressive of women. This is but one reason why those who have been made “others” or “out-groups” within a society will receive especially harsh treatment—because the society will “feminize” those others by treating them as women are treated. Minority ethnic or religious groups may thus be seen as legitimate targets of violence and violent expropriation because they occupy the same subordinate status in the society as women.¹⁹² This subordinate status often will be enacted in gendered terms, such as wholesale raiding and rape of the minority group’s women, as we have seen with the Yazidi minority in Syria under ISIS. As Ahram perceptively notes,

By selectively reinforcing, creating, and severing ties of kinship, these violent practices can affect bonds of loyalty and obedience far more substantially than the simple distribution of resource rents…for the power to control or manipulate sexual and ethnic identity is a key component of all state power…. the modes of hyper-masculine statehood that have emerged in the Arab world provided a blueprint for instrumentalising sexual violence as a tool of state-building.¹⁹³

William Divale and Marvin Harris note this logic of hypermasculinity would make no sense without the overriding concerns inherent in patrilineality: “Frequent warfare is significantly correlated with patrilocal residence, patrilineal inheritance, polygyny, marriage by capture, brideprice, postmarital sex restrictions on women, property rights in women, male secret societies, male age grades, and men’s houses.”¹⁹⁴ When the Syndrome is encoded as the primary security provision mechanism in society, the logic of hypermasculinity is, unfortunately, all too persuasive.

States often vacillate in the face of alternative no-win options. The male-bonded kin groups are so martial and so prickly that the first temptation is to simply allow them their autonomy and rule the country indirectly through these groups. This has been repeatedly tried historically by both states and colonial powers.¹⁹⁵ However, that temptation is always rewarded with increased conflict and violence, as intertribal conflict then escalates as tribes vie with one another for greater dominance. The alternative temptation for states is to forcibly subjugate the tribes to the power of the state, which, as many states such as Iraq and Pakistan have discovered, results in rivers of blood, vengeance, and misery.¹⁹⁶ We suggest a third, hopefully more effective, and certainly more revolutionary, alternative, which is to break the power of the clans by building equality between men and women (discussed in part III).

Structural goads also are embedded in the Syndrome, which tend toward bloodshed. We touch on these here, including polygyny and altered sex ratios favoring men, and note that chapter 5 contains a more in-depth discussion. Elite polygyny is often the cause of bloody succession fights.¹⁹⁷ As we have seen, in societies with elite polygyny, “the son who most often succeeded was the son who could take and maintain the kingship by force.”¹⁹⁸ Sex ratio alteration acts in a similar fashion—for example, among the Yanomamo of the Amazon, “The shortage of women causes sexual frustration and jealousy. Having several wives is the insignia of power and influence, which only increases the level of sexual frustration and the motivation for going to war [among those without wives].”¹⁹⁹

The literature scholar Jonathan Gottschall notes that Mediterranean society at the time of Homer was similarly riven by violence caused by practices such as polygyny and enacted son preference:

Homeric society suffered from acute shortages of available young women relative to young men. The institution of slave-concubinage meant that women were not equitably distributed across the circum-Aegean world; they were concentrated in certain communities and, within those communities, in the households of powerful men…. This shortage of women, whether it was brought about solely through polygyny or also through differential mortality, created strong incentives for men to compete, as individuals and in groups, not only for direct access to women, but also for the limited funds of social and material resources needed to attract and retain them…. While the desirability of peace is obvious, Homeric men—like their fathers and grandfathers before them—feel that they are doomed to perpetual conflict.²⁰⁰

Ben Raffield and Mark Collard say much the same about the operational sex ratio in eight-century Viking society, which led to a wave of shipborne raiding activity by young men in search of plunder across more than one continent.²⁰¹

Note, with reference to these cases, that polygyny can coexist side by side with female infanticide, which on its face makes little sense. Divale and Harris attempt an explanation:

Polygyny stands in mysterious contradiction to the high frequency of the practice of female infanticide…. Since women are exploited by men, one would expect girls to outnumber boys just as slaves outnumber masters…. [However] a premium survival advantage is conferred upon the group that rears the largest number of fierce and aggressive warriors…. Sex, rather than other forms of reinforcement such as food or shelter, is used to condition warlike behavior because sexual deprivation does not lead to the impairment of physical fitness, whereas deprivation of food and shelter would cripple fighting capacity. Furthermore, if women are to be the reward for military bravery, women must be reared to be passive and to submit to the decisions concerning the allocation of their sexual, productive, and reproductive services. Polygyny is the objectification of much of this system of rewards. At the same time, polygyny intensifies the shortage of females created by the postpartum manipulation of the sex ratio, producing positive feedback with respect to male aggressivity and fierceness, and encouraging combat for the sake of wife capture.²⁰²

Furthermore, these effects will be especially pronounced when asset-stripping or natural disaster has imperiled environmental security, for such insecurity and exigency only deepen the Syndrome. In times of exigency during which the state cannot offer relief, the natural recourse will be toward the male-based extended kin network. Such fraternal networks will resurge even if they had faded in previous time periods. Schatz describes how this occurred in Soviet Central Asia: “By creating a political economy based on endemic shortages, the Soviet state generally promoted tight-knit access networks.”203 In other words, although the Soviets’ explicit aim was to destroy the clans, the economic exigencies they caused by their policies only served to make kin groups even more salient.

The 2004 Arab Human Development Report described this linkage as well, suggesting that the inadequate security offered by authoritarian government explains the persistence of the Patrilineal/Fraternal Syndrome. We argue the same can be said of democratic governments that prove unable to safeguard their societies. According to the United Nations Development Program:

In the absence of a viable civil society that could protect citizens’ interests, exposed individual turned their backs on the institutions of civil society and sought the rude shelter of the tribal and clan system, with its feudal and organic bonds. Tribal and clan systems continue to command the devoted allegiance of individuals in such groups through just and unjust causes alike because they are a last recourse for identity, solidarity, security, and self-defense. They represent the sole viable definition of an “us.”²⁰⁴

The resurgence of the salience and usefulness of these networks simultaneously cause the components of the Syndrome—that is, the mechanisms of women’s disempowerment at the household level—to resurge as well. For example, food shortages and drought have exacerbated rates of child marriage in Ethiopia;²⁰⁵ this same phenomenon is seen in the refugee camps surrounding Syria.²⁰⁶ As Sanday asserts, there is “a causal relationship between scarce resources and the oppression of women.”²⁰⁷ She offers the example of the Plains Indians as a case in point:

On the basis of the case studies in her research, Sanday concludes that

men react to stress caused by food shortage or by the circumstances of migration by banding together, excluding women from male-oriented power ceremonies and by turning aggression against women…. Generally, male dominance evolves as resources diminish and as group survival depends increasingly on the aggressive acts of men. Male oppression of women, however, is neither an automatic nor an immediate response to stress. Other solutions to stress are possible.²⁰⁹

It is critical to consider what the Patrilineal/Fraternal Syndrome accomplishes, and for whom, to understand why exigency always increases the salience of the Syndrome. The Syndrome provides security for men and ensures that rents will flow from women to men, while also ensuring that rents will flow from the young to the old. A context of generalized insecurity will thus catalyze a tightening of the Syndrome to keep those rents flowing. In speaking about postconflict societies, political scientist Sheila Meintjes and colleagues note,

In the aftermath [of war], men use violence against women and women’s fear of violence to reinforce their hold on women; they compel women to comply because they need to re-establish or preserve control over wealth and resources and, above all, over women’s productive and reproductive labor…. For the older generation, which depends on the young for survival in old age, it is imperative to re-establish the customary flow of wealth from young to old that obtained before the war. In the context of re-establishing livelihood, the older generation finds it particularly important to control young women. Their sexist view of women as commodities persists. Indeed, their view of sexuality is the first tradition they want to reconstruct, and they may use violence to do so.²¹⁰

War is but one type of exigency that produces such results. Another example can be found in modern-day India, where the environmental disaster of drought has catalyzed higher levels of child marriage, polygyny, dowry deaths, and prostitution. In addition, girls are being pulled from school to help find and haul water.211 Although polygyny is illegal for almost all Hindus in India, marginalized women agree to become “water wives” to survive. Men demand higher dowries because of lower farm income. Because women are more malnourished than usual, they may suffer violence because they cannot bear children as a result of disruption in their menstrual cycles. As men migrate to gain additional resources, the women and girl children left behind are prey to traffickers. Lawyer and activist Varsha Deshpande explains that, “Women are the most vulnerable during drought because it is their duty to fetch water and provide food for the family. She is the first to wake up, she walks the farthest to fetch water, she eats last—and probably the least—and she sleeps last.”²¹² Although this exigency hits everyone in the society, because of the subordinative first political order, women’s subordination and insecurity are disproportionately deepened.

Indeed, Sanday suggests violent male dominance

evolves in societies faced with depleting food resources, migration, or other factors contributing to a dependence on male destructive capacities as opposed to female fertility…. When people perceive an imbalance between the food supply and population needs, or when populations are in competition for diminishing resources, the male role is accorded greater prestige. Females are perceived as objects to be controlled as men struggle to retain or to gain control of their environment. Behaviors and attitudes prevail that separate the sexes and force men into a posture of proving their manhood [including] sexual violence.²¹³

Following Sanday’s thinking, we argue in chapter 6 that a co-constitutive relationship exists between the Syndrome and environmental stress and exigency. Environmental stress or exigency deepens the Syndrome, to be sure, but the Syndrome also makes environmental stresses and exigencies far more likely than they otherwise would be. Before undertaking that discussion, we round out this discussion of governance and political stability by examining the special role of the Syndrome’s structural predisposition to marriage market obstruction in the emergence of state-level insecurity and instability.