Azar Gat

THE DEMOCRATIC PEACE THEORY REFRAMED The Impact of Modernity

This article argues that the democratic peace theorists have overlooked the defining development that underlies that peace of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the industrial-technological revolution. Not only did that revolution make democracy on a country scale possible; it also made all the countries that experienced the revolution—democratic and nondemocratic—far less belligerent in comparison with preindustrial times. The democratic peace did not exist among premodern democratic and republican city-states, not because they were not democratic or liberal enough but because they were premodern. Other factors that have emanated from the modern transformation and may generate greater aversion to war apply mostly to liberal democratic countries while being only variably connected to their regime. Such factors include the staggering rise in the standard of living; the decrease in hardship, pain, and death; the dominance of metropolitan life and the service economy; the spread of the consumer and entertainment society; sexual promiscuity; womens franchise; and the shrinking ratio of young males in the population.

So Why Do People Fight? Evolutionary Theory and the Causes of War:

The causes of war remain a strangely obscure subject in the discipline of International Relations. Although the subject is of cardinal significance, theories of International Relations address it only obliquely, and most scholars in the field recognize the lacuna only when their attention is drawn to it. While people have a good idea of the aims that may motivate states to go to war, an attempt at a strict definition of them is widely regarded as futile. This article seeks to show how the various causes of violence and war all come together and are explained within an integrated human motivational complex, shaped by evolution and natural selection. These interconnected causes of fighting — some of them confusedly singled out by various schools in IR theory, most notably within realism — include competition over resources and reproduction, the ensuing quest for dominance, the security dilemma and other prisoner’s dilemmas that emanate from the competition, kinship, identity, and ideas.

Proving communal warfare among hunter‐gatherers: The quasi‐rousseauan error

Was human fighting always there, as old as our species? Or is it a late cultural invention, emerging after the transition to agriculture and the rise of the state, which began, respectively, only around ten thousand and five thousand years ago? Viewed against the life span of our species, Homo sapiens, stretching back 150,000–200,000 years, let alone the roughly two million years of our genus Homo, this is the tip of the iceberg. We now have a temporal frame and plenty of empirical evidence for the “state of nature” that Thomas Hobbes and Jean‐Jacque Rousseau discussed in the abstract and described in diametrically opposed terms. All human populations during the Pleistocene, until about 12,000 years ago, were hunter‐gatherers, or foragers, of the simple, mobile sort that lacked accumulated resources. Studying such human populations that survived until recently or still survive in remote corners of the world, anthropology should have been uniquely positioned to answer the question of aboriginal human fighting or lack thereof. Yet access to, and the interpretation of, that information has been intrinsically problematic. The main problem has been the “contact paradox.” Prestate societies have no written records of their own. Therefore, documenting them requires contact with literate state societies that necessarily affects the former and potentially changes their behavior, including fighting.

Is war declining – and why?

The article reviews and assesses the recent literature that claims a sharp decrease in fighting and violent mortality rate since prehistory and during recent times. It also inquires into the causes of this decrease. The article supports the view, firmly established over the past 15 years and unrecognized by only one of the books reviewed, that the first massive decline in violent mortality occurred with the emergence of the state-Leviathan. Hobbes was right, and Rousseau was wrong, about the great violence of the human state of nature. The rise of the state-Leviathan greatly reduced in-group violent mortality by establishing internal peace. Less recognized, it also decreased out-group war fatalities. Although state wars appear large in absolute terms, large states actually meant lower mobilization rates and reduced exposure of the civilian population to war. A second major step in the decline in the frequency and fatality of war has occurred over the last two centuries, including in recent decades. However, the exact periodization of, and the reasons for, the decline are a matter of dispute among the authors reviewed. Further, the two World Wars constitute a sharp divergence from the trend, which must be accounted for. The article surveys possible factors behind the decrease, such as industrialization and rocketing economic growth, commercial interdependence, the liberal-democratic peace, social attitude change, nuclear deterrence, and UN peacekeeping forces. It argues that contrary to the claim of some of the authors reviewed, war has not become more lethal and destructive over the past two centuries, and thus this factor cannot be the cause of wars decline. Rather, it is peace that has become more profitable. At the same time, the specter of war continues to haunt the parts of the world less affected by many of the above developments, and the threat of unconventional terror is real and troubling.

Why War? Motivations for Fighting in the Human State of Nature

The chapter addresses the causes of fighting among hunter-gatherers, whose way of life represents 99.5% of the history of the genus Homo and about 90% of that of Homo sapiens sapiens. Based on anthropological observations on the behavior of extant and recently extinct hunter-gatherer societies, compared with animal behavior, the chapter begins with somatic and reproductive causes. It proceeds to demonstrate that other motives, such as dominance, revenge, the security dilemma, and “pugnacity,” originally arose from the somatic and reproductive competition. Rather than being separate, all motives come together in an integrated motivational complex, shaped by the logic of evolution and natural selection.

Ideology, national policy, technology and strategic doctrine between the world wars

Going beyond the still prevalent image of the interwar period as the scene of a struggle between progress and reaction in strategic doctrine, this article analyzes the factors that shaped the formulation of strategy and doctrine in each of the great powers. It shows how underlying technological trends and sweeping visions of warfare on land, in the air, and at sea had to be squared with practical questions and intricate problems of application and detail, as well as with differing national aims, priorities, and constraints.

Female participation in war: Bio‐cultural interactions

Throughout history fighting has been associated with men. Cross‐cultural studies of male/female differences have found serious violence as the most distinctive sex difference there is. Is that a matter of education and social conventions, or are men naturally far more adapted to fighting than women are? This question is at the centre of public debate nowadays regarding the right and ability of women to enlist in combat roles in the armed services. The article attempts to elucidate the nature of the bio‐cultural interactions involved, whose complexity, and even existence, are all too often ignored in the debate.

Clausewitz's Political and Ethical World View

This article challenges the accepted view that Clausewitz did not deal with the ethical status of war. It attempts to show that his views on this matter are well documented in his works; that they were part and parcel of a comprehensive outlook regarding the nature of both international relations and the state; and that this outlook reflected the emerging world view in the Germany of national awakening.

Nations: Introduction: is nationalism recent and superficial?

This book is the result of my deep dissatisfaction with the study of nations and nationalism as it is currently framed. Undergoing a spirited revival since the 1980s, the literature on the subject is marked by a great fault line which runs through the field. On one side of that line stand those who regard the nation as a creation of modernity. In their view, the nation emerged in Europe during the nineteenth century with the French and Industrial revolutions, or possibly sometime before, during the early modern period. For modernists, nations are a product of processes of social integration and political mobilization, which have welded together large populations hitherto scattered among parochial and loosely connected small rural communities spanning extensive territories. According to this perspective, it was only in the modern period, with the advent of print technology, wide-scale capitalist economies and, later, industrialization, urbanization, mass education, and mass political participation that such social integration and mobilization became possible, with active solicitation by the state. On the other side of the fault line stand those who defend, adapt, and develop the more traditionalist view of the nation (labeled “primordial” or “perennial”). They believe that nationhood, as a reality and a sentiment, is older, existed before modernity (even if not universally), perhaps as far back as antiquity, and not only in Europe but throughout the world. This debate is further accentuated as it reverberates across the wider circles which have been drawn to the subject as it gained popularity. In the social sciences, history, philosophy, literature, and cultural studies, scholars working on related subject matters cite fashionable theories of nationalism, all too often radicalizing them even beyond their original form. Furthermore, cohorts of undergraduate and graduate students of an impressionable age, who are particularly receptive to sweeping pronouncements and criticism of accepted assumptions, are regularly exposed to exciting theories of nationalism as part of their disciplinary socialization and professional initiation. In this process the rift between the modernist and traditionalist schools is constantly reproduced. False dichotomies and captivating hyperboles have become the norm in the study of nationalism, to the degree that they are barely recognized as such.

Liddell Hart’s Theory of Armoured Warfare

Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart’s fame rests largely on his perceived role as a leading, if not the leading, theorist of modern armoured warfare. During the interwar period he supposedly envisaged, developed, and directly influenced the way armoured forces would be employed during the Second World War, first by the Germans in their brilliant ‘Blitzkrieg’ campaigns and, subsequently, by all other major armies. Yet in recent years historians have come to doubt and reject this picture, arguing that Liddell Hart (1895–1970) largely fabricated the accepted image of his role in, and influence upon, the development of the doctrine of armoured warfare. The consequences for his reputation have been devastating. Highly egocentric and vain, Liddell Hart carries much of the blame for this change of opinion. His almost compulsive manipulations of evidence for the purpose of self-aggrandizement could not in the long run withstand critical scrutiny and only cast doubt on everything he wrote about himself. Nonetheless, a further examination of the evidence reveals that the main charges levelled against him are misplaced and based on almost incredible historiographical slips on the part of his chief critic, John Mearsheimer. Indeed, once the distortions created by himself and by others are removed, the picture that emerges is not very far from the accepted one and is, on the whole, impressive as far as Liddell Hart is concerned.