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  • Published: 7 April 2022
  • ISBN: 9780241989265
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 400
Categories:

Why We Fight

The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace





Based on two decades of research, the five causes of wars and four ways to stop them

It's easy to overlook that most of the time, war doesn't happen. Around the world there are millions of hostile rivalries, yet only a tiny fraction erupt into violence. With a counterintuitive approach, Blattman reminds us that most rivals loathe one another in peace. That's because war is too costly to fight. Enemies almost always find it better to split the pie than spoil it or struggle over thin slices. So, in those rare instances when fighting ensues, what kept rivals from compromise?

Why We Fight draws on decades of economics, political science, psychology, and real-world interventions - drawing on examples from vainglorious European monarchs to African dictators and British football hooligans - to lay out the root causes and remedies for war, showing that violence is not the norm; that there are only five reasons why conflict wins over compromise; and how peacemakers turn the tides through tinkering, not transformation. Realistic and optimistic, this is book that lends new meaning to the old adage, \"Give peace a chance.\"

  • Published: 7 April 2022
  • ISBN: 9780241989265
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 400
Categories:

About the author

Christopher Blattman

Christopher Blattman is the Ramalee E. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies at the University of Chicago in the Harris School of Public Policy and The Pearson Institute. 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. He's now done so for 21 years. Through his academic work he has witnessed (and helped to stem) violence around the world. Blattman writes regularly for The New York Times, Vox, Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs, among others. For 13 years he has run one of the most popular blogs on international affairs and global development, and is one of the 25 most followed economists on Twitter. This is his first trade book.