page_title: War
section_title: Malthusian
hierarchical_section_title: War / Theories of motivation / Demographic / Malthusian
caption_attribution_description: Aerial view, right side profile, of a US Marine helicopter as it flies over a MOGADISHU residential area on a patrol mission to look for signs of hostilities. This mission is in direct support of Operation Restore Hope.
context_page_description: War is an intense armed conflict between states, governments, societies, or paramilitary groups such as mercenaries, insurgents and militias. It is generally characterized by extreme violence, aggression, destruction, and mortality, using regular or irregular military forces. Warfare refers to the common activities and characteristics of types of war, or of wars in general. Total war is warfare that is not restricted to purely legitimate military targets, and can result in massive civilian or other non-combatant suffering and casualties.
  The scholarly study of war is sometimes called polemology, from the Greek polemos, meaning "war", and -logy, meaning "the study of".
  While some scholars see war as a universal and ancestral aspect of human nature, others argue it is a result of specific socio-cultural, economic or ecological circumstances.
context_section_description: Malthusian theories see expanding population and scarce resources as a source of violent conflict.
  Pope Urban II in 1095, on the eve of the First Crusade, advocating Crusade as a solution to European overpopulation, said:
  For this land which you now inhabit, shut in on all sides by the sea and the mountain peaks, is too narrow for your large population; it scarcely furnishes food enough for its cultivators. Hence it is that you murder and devour one another, that you wage wars, and that many among you perish in civil strife. Let hatred, therefore, depart from among you; let your quarrels end. Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre; wrest that land from a wicked race, and subject it to yourselves.
  This is one of the earliest expressions of what has come to be called the Malthusian theory of war, in which wars are caused by expanding populations and limited resources. Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) wrote that populations always increase until they are limited by war, disease, or famine.
  The violent herder–farmer conflicts in Nigeria, Mali, Sudan and other countries in the Sahel region have been exacerbated by land degradation and population growth.
caption: U.S. Marine helicopter on patrol in Somalia as part of the Unified Task Force, 1992
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