Why We Fight

Title: Why We Fight – The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace
Author: Christopher Blattman
Publisher: Penguin, 2023 (First published 2022)
ISBN: 9780241989258
Pages: 388

Very common and ordinary thoughts can be sometimes very profound. A book title such as this one touches the basic fabric of community-living, but not many people would have nursed a thought on why quarrel is engendered in a society – like between individuals in a human group, between human groups in a larger conglomeration such as a nation, or between nations in the larger comity of international organizations such as the UN. This book presents a framework to understand the common forces that drive fights that are prolonged and violent between groups. Interpersonal violence is not included as also acrimonious competition between groups which is regarded as normal. Prolonged violence is a rarity and not normal. What is stressed in the book is that competition or quarrel or even a skirmish is common, sustained fights that exhaust resources are not so. The factors which lead a group to take the plunge by delivering the first planned blow that sets off conflict are carefully analysed. Another set of suggestions are given at the end that help to reduce conflict. Christopher Blattman is a professor of Global Conflict studies at the University of Chicago. As a young man, he met his future wife in a Kenyan internet café, where she set him on a path to working on conflict and international development. Through his academic work he has witnessed violence around the world and tried his hand in stemming them.

The book presents some hard facts which are not fairly obvious but would be found convincing if you apply your mind over it. The first principle is that instead of fighting it out on the streets, enemies prefer to loathe one another in peace. The established wisdom often suggest that issues like poverty, scarcity, natural resources, climate change, ethnic fragmentation, polarization and injustice lead to violence. Blattman thinks that though these may be terrible for a particular group, they don’t ignite fighting in a big way. Another counter-intuitive yet logical inference is that peace arises not from brotherly love and cooperation, but from the ever-present threat of violence (p.27). This is discovered in the context of urban gang wars, but a little consideration will show that it holds good for the relations between nations as well. The more destructive our weapons, the easier it is to find peace. When the prospects of war are more ruinous, the bargaining range widens and expands the dividend from peace. By corollary, it shows the arguments of non-violent gurus like Gandhi as just wishful thinking which are nothing but the pampered thoughts of one who had only to deal with a civilized antagonist. If you think that would be praising Britain too much, it may be changed as Gandhi chose to look the other way when his antagonist abandoned civilized ways on other people, but not him.

The book sounds like describing a hypothetical world where pure logic suggests what should take place rather than going behind what is taking place in the real world. The author introduces game theory models to describe real phenomena but which are too idealistic to serve much purpose. This requires rivals striving selfishly for their own interests in an anarchic system where there is no overruling authority to keep rivals from attacking each other. To be selfish is logical, and theory explains much of practice when self-interest in the physical sense is more prominent. Blattman’s theories hopelessly falter when they are applied to terrorism – Muslim suicide bombers blow themselves up for no selfish objective to be achieved in this world. What they aim for is greater things after death. No logic can describe this madness and that may be why the author carefully stays away from even mentioning terrorism in this book that studies reasons for fighting! Oversimplification or reductionism to an imagined principle is another drawback of the book. Street violence between Hindus and Muslims in India is simplified as politically orchestrated for purely political goals. He does not seem to be aware of the deep cleavages between the two communities and instead settle self-satisfyingly with a hypothesis that would do nothing more than please American academics. This book also examines ways to reduce conflict. Unconstrained and over-centralized rule is a basic cause of conflict everywhere. Proper checks and balances are the solutions. The more constrained societies are, the more peaceful they will be. Blattman presents the US constitution and its restrained presidency as the perfect examples for the world to emulate. It is also claimed that narrow dictatorships and military juntas are the most likely to launch wars. Note the qualifier ‘narrow dictatorship’! It’s a subtle ploy to acquit the Chinese regime where a highly distributed Communist party apparatus is said to be exercising enough checks and balances on the executive.

Blattman then makes a careful study of the origins of the tendency to violence in human societies. Humanity’s righteous vengeance is biologically and culturally evolved. This is a powerful social norm that is found in every human society. An instinct for fairness is a must for cooperation in large groups. Strange it may seem, there are powerful motivators to fight and die for others in the society. The author claims that status is what most people care about more than their lives. Nazi air force pilots fought and laid down their lives willingly for an elaborate system of war medals and status recognition. Intangible incentives like these are present in every society. Even though this was the ideal point to hint at, the author prefers to remain silent of Islamist suicide squads and their motivation to do so. Overconfidence is a crucial factor that pushes groups to violence. We are biased to search for evidence to confirm what we already believe. Electing overconfident leaders will narrow bargaining ranges and make peace more fragile. Groupthink, organizational forms and leadership styles are still prone to collective errors. Groups work especially well for problems that have a clear right or wrong answer. In a subjective matter or in uncertain environments, groups don’t take better decisions. Like-minded group members often get more extreme in their views through deliberation.

This book introduces several ideas to reduce conflict and violence between groups in human societies. Economic intertwining is a way to peace such that an attacker feels the financial pinch when a victim who is economically linked to him is assaulted. Social interactions and integrated civic life also help. Here, the author brings forward an Indian example to prove his point which is neither true nor logical. Hindu organizations carried out a Rath Yatra (chariot procession) from Somnath in Gujarat to Ayodhya in UP as part of the Ram temple movement. A string of violence was reported along the route. The author claims that Somnath – from where the procession began – was calm. The reason for this is hypothesized to be that the Hindu and Muslim communities are economically more intermingled there. This is a totally unsubstantiated conjecture. Both the communities are economically very closely linked everywhere in India. Communal tensions occur at some places in spite of that. Here the author is clearly regurgitating the fallacious finding of some local activist. Blattman also looks at the mechanism by which enlightenment ideals spread around the world. Sometime between 1689 and 1776, rights that had been viewed as the rights of a particular people were transferred into universal and natural human rights. The explosion of literary forms like the novel and paintings gave people a window into the minds of other people, cutting across distance and social boundaries. These extended the bounds of sympathy to include the interests of the Other and made fighting less acceptable than before.

The author has a lot of experience working in the world’s most notorious conflict zones and with gang leaders who are waiting for half a chance to be at their enemy’s throats. With this exposure behind him, Blattman proposes some factors that are essential to make and keep peace between contending parties. Peace is said to be the product of socialization. Power should be devolved into more hands. The number of stakeholders should be more to restrain a few intransigents. There is a hunch among scholars that women are more likely to keep peace as rulers. However, a survey of early modern Europe doesn’t buttress this idea where queens were found 40 per cent more likely to make wars than kings. Foreign aid agencies should distribute their resources in decentralized ways through the community, rather than channelling it through the government which would concentrate power in fewer hands. Foreign NGOs always have a poor opinion of third world regimes and would waste no chance to bypass their authority and grow taller in stature than the government in its citizens’ minds. Divisions on wealth and ethnicity are by nature not prone to violence. There are many poor and ethnically divided societies which are not going to dissolve into violence.

The book gives some plain talk on what matters in a standoff between rivals whose fighting capabilities are more or less balanced. Blattman asserts that weak nations do not set the policy agenda; bargaining power comes from the ability to threaten harm. Nations should project their strength in a measure exceeding their actual resources in order to demonstrate a credible deterrent. Even though not clearly spelt out as such, Gandhian nonviolence has no place in the changing balance of power between nations and is not even considered as an alternative system worthy of examination. The author has analysed specific scenarios using game theory models and associated pie charts that look rather too simplified. Religious terrorism is not handled in the book which is a serious disadvantage and this deficiency sticks out prominently in a narrative which is otherwise comprehensive in its analyses of the reasons of conflict. Another disadvantage is the sole anchoring of the narrative on sociology without any link to evolutionary biology that lies underneath. How a trait to fight strategically developed in biological evolution and whether they exist in other animal species would have provided informative context to the discussion.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star