This chapter focuses on explaining the powerful logic of perilous promises and hidden information, as well as the dangers of low opportunity costs and attractive rents. We start out by explaining how in many circumstances peaceful bargaining succeeds in preventing hostilities – as the “peace dividend” creates a range of win–win bargaining solutions. Sadly, though, asymmetric information, commitment problems and political bias can lead to bargaining failure and the outbreak of war. Further, when the stakes of contest are high and opportunity costs low, the scope for peaceful bargaining shrinks. In particular, we show that being out of work and out of options makes somebody easy prey for rebel headhunters. This is exemplified by the dreadful consequences of bad harvests. Next, we examine the role of ethnic cleavages and how they tend to be exploited by divisive ethnic politics. Finally, the chapter discusses the curse of natural resources. Countries blessed with valuable soils tend to suffer from conflict, often leaving them poorer than countries lacking natural resources.

This chapter shows that violence today sows the seeds of future fighting through a series of vicious cycles. First, it is stressed that persistent poverty creates vicious cycles of deprivation and disputes. Namely, poverty provides the breeding ground for violence, as the lack of income and perspectives makes it relatively more appealing to join armed rebellion. This, in turn, further impoverishes the country. Secondly, wars tear apart the social fabric of society, which in turn hinders postconflict reconstruction. Put differently, hate and distrust in the aftermath of fighting often trigger revenge wars further down the road. The third vicious cycle studied concerns education, with low human capital fueling fighting and subsequent wars destroying schools. Last but not least, this chapter discusses the impact of war trauma on future crime propensity. These various vicious cycles are illustrated with the help of a series of historical examples, spanning Peru, Angola and Uganda to Sri Lanka, Tajikistan and Switzerland. This discussion highlights the crucial importance of fostering peace right now, which leads to a powerful peace multiplier.

Britain is not a good place to be poor. That has become even more true over the last fourteen years. Our justification for that statement is that, in Britain, the health of the poorest people, always lower than that of the average person, declined since 2010. Regional inequalities in health also increased with the ‘Red Wall’ north falling further behind. There has also been stagnation in the UK’s average life expectancy – and we have dropped down the international rankings. Please let the implications sink in: the health of the poorest people and places got worse; life expectancy went down; living with illness went up; and thousands of families lost loved ones before their time. It is an unprecedented calamity.

The nature of power, both social and psychological, and the implications of power imbalances in modern societies.

This chapter examines Harriet Martineau’s approach to gender politics through her understanding of ‘manliness’ as explored in a selection of her Illustrations of Political Economy (1832−4). It was a concept essential to her configuration of male leadership fit for the testing times of the early 1830s, and highly topical. Published when the pressures experienced by men of all classes were being highlighted in periodicals and novels, the tales address the differences between ‘personality’ and ‘character’ in crises faced by fathers and husbands, magistrates and petty criminals, trades union activists, landowners, and slave-owners, at home and in the colonies, as they debate the injustices of their living and working conditions. This chapter argues that Martineau’s interventions in contemporary debates about masculinity shift the focus to a new kind of conscientious working man whose values are tested in cross-class dialogues in public places. It explores the ways in which the Illustrations show how men collaborate and compete within their communities, and the ambiguous gender messages arising from patterns of reward and punishment that seem to devalue otherwise positive characteristics.

Depression is a leading cause of disability in high- and middle-income countries and is of increasing relative burden in low-income countries. The Global Burden of Disease study illustrates how depression is increasing as a proportion of all the disabilities resulting from illness. This is because we know how to prevent other major causes of disability such as cardiovascular disease and infection and so their incidence is on the decline. Meanwhile, there is evidence that rates of depression are rising slightly. In order to have an impact on this major public health burden, we will need to devise preventative strategies to reduce the incidence. As depression is a continuum, much of the disability is experienced by the larger numbers of those with mild and moderate levels of depression who might not seek treatment for themselves. Therefore, effective preventative strategies applied to the whole population will have more widespread benefits than interventions simply targeted towards those at high risk. In order to develop preventative interventions, we need to know what causes depression.

Epidemiology tends to be primarily concerned with causes outside the individual or with genetic causes.

How big a problem is toxic stress in our own culture and around the world? Any way we measure it, toxic stress is a problem for about one in five of us. Most of us don’t know if we’re at risk for stress-related illnesses. And measurement is not easy, as Ted Daley’s experience shows us, pointing to one reason we overlook toxic stress. Teresa Langford’s story weaves throughout this book to show how toxic stress has erupted at key points in her life, suggesting lessons for the rest of us.

People often speak of random acts of violence. Traumatic events may be unpredictable, but they are not random. A political psychology of trauma requires an understanding of the patterned nature of traumatic experiences, which is the main objective of this chapter. Traumatic experiences are associated with factors such as gender, age, minority ethnic or religious group and poverty. Different demographic groups tend to have different types and ranges of traumatic experiences. There are groups of people who may be far more vulnerable than others when they encounter a traumatic experience. On the other hand, when people encounter a traumatic experience from a position of relative strength, the outcome is likely to be very different to having the same experience at a moment of vulnerability. The role of these social risks and their consequence for people’s subsequent resources is centrally relevant to how people adjust to trauma. People’s responses to the events they experience are covered in later chapters, though obviously these two factors, the experience and the response, are connected. The main goal of the chapter is to uncover how social economic and political resources play a role in shaping people’s exposure and vulnerability to traumatic events.

This chapter considers compassionate experience, using as examples the Pietist diaconate movement in Germany in the nineteenth century, the Catholic Worker, and the L’Arche movement. The chapter shows that such compassionate practice is usually motivated by a recognition of precarity and need, a “seeing” of suffering or “hearing” of the cry of the other. Those who engage in compassionate experiences identify with the poor and suffering, often to the point of joining them or sharing in their plight. Their actions are marked by compassion, which is more than a feeling of pity, but involves deep commitment to understanding and ameliorating the plight of others or enabling them to improve it themselves. Such generous acts of hospitality often go far beyond the bounds of what seems reasonable or even humanly possible. Compassionate experience is focused less on the religious self but instead is devoted to the other, whether religious or not.