WVSA Vice-President and PI for Germany Chris Welzel gives a key-note lecture at the ECPR Graduate Conference in Tartu
WVSA Vice-President and PI for Germany Professor Christian Welzel has been invited to give a key-note lecture at the ECPR Graduate Conferencу at the University of Tartu on July, 10-13, 2016.

This lecture demonstrates that inter-state peace is underpinned by an increasingly solid mass basis: representative survey data from around the world evidence a massive decline in people's willingness to sacrifice their lives in war. To explain this finding, we test and confirm Evolutionary Emancipation Theory (EET). When improving existential conditions in a society turn most people's lives from a source of threats to suffer into a source of opportunities to thrive, people adopt ‘emancipative values': to allow themselves and others to take advantage of life's wider opportunities, people increasingly support and tolerate universal freedoms. This emancipatory trend is most significant where the fixation of traditional survival norms on high fertility erected the strongest resistance against emancipation: reproductive freedoms. As a direct consequence of the emancipatory trend, people's willingness to sacrifice their own and other people's lives in war has dramatically declined. Hence, the emancipatory trend is a pacifist force that makes it increasingly difficult for government - especially in democracies - to find public support for waging wars. Video is available here.
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