Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace

by Christopher Blattman

big groups are deliberative and strategic. This means I’ll only talk about why individuals discriminate, brawl, lynch, or kill when that tells us something about larger group behavior.

one of the most common errors people make is to confuse the reasons a contest is intense and hostile with the reasons that a rivalry turns violent.

Enemies prefer to loathe one another in peace.[5]

The military was mistakenly focusing on a select sample, and so it got the causes of failure wrong. This is one of those mistakes that are obvious in retrospect, and yet we all make them again and again.

It’s simple arithmetic: because war is an even shot at a damaged $80 pie, the expected value of fighting is $40.

This shows us something important: peace arises not from brotherly love and cooperation, but from the ever-present threat of violence.

you garner concessions only if you can credibly threaten to burn the whole house down.

About the same time that these ideas were applied to the law and labor, a Harvard economist named Thomas Schelling began applying these strategic insights to wars. Over the next few decades, others refined the logic. My pie-splitting example comes from a Stanford political scientist named Jim Fearon, one of the first to systematically outline how our peaceful incentives break down.

realist” approach to conflict—a school of thought advanced by some of history’s most influential thinkers and politicians, from Niccolò Machiavelli to Henry Kissinger. They see nations as selfishly striving for their own interests, in an anarchic system where there’s no overarching authority to keep rivals from attacking one another. Peaceful deals depend on the two sides finding it in their mutual interest not to fight. This is exactly the kind of situation that noncooperative game theory—including our pie-splitting exercise—was designed to capture.

Each one of the five interrupts the peaceful pie splitting in a different way.

Unchecked interests,

Intangible incentives

Uncertainty

Commitment problems

misperceptions,

By this logic, war is never to be avoided; it should be exercised to one’s personal advantage. In other words, privatize the benefits of fighting and socialize the costs.

INTANGIBLE INCENTIVES

Three of them—righteous outrage, ideologies, and the quest for glory and status—have eroded grounds for compromise throughout history. The fourth—an innate human desire for aggression—hasn’t.

Fear, honor, interests

These participants reveled in the act of resistance itself. For some, even if their actions were futile, simply standing up against injustice gave them satisfaction and pride.

One person’s actions wouldn’t affect the outcome of the war. But for the aggrieved, simply doing something brought satisfaction and dignity.

We can find a desire for fairness, and a willingness to punish for it, in every human society for a simple reason: it helps us cooperate in large groups.

Maybe it comes from the pulpit, as educated priests preach a liberation theology. Or perhaps it arrives in little red books, from union workers, university students, and indigenous leaders who catalog the crimes of colonial settlers, their descendants, and foreign-owned plantations.

Or in little pamphlets titled "Common Sense"

when one of the other four reasons for war is powerful enough to provoke the first unjust attack, vengeance and righteousness can kick in and sustain that violence.

Here was a desire that war could fulfill: glory, esteem, admiration, and a degree of immortality.

It shows just how far humans can go in the pursuit of relative status, even when the cost is mortally high.

Some of the most celebrated philosophers and historians on war—Thucydides in classical Greece, Machiavelli in Renaissance Italy, Thomas Hobbes in early modern England, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau during the Enlightenment—all thought status, prestige, and honor drove peoples to fight.

the more common and more dangerous scenario is when unchecked rulers (rather than the populace) desire glory and status. This is a first example of how the reasons for war can cumulate and intertwine. War bias and intangible incentives can be a terrible mix.

E.g., Putin....

third intangible is a collection of things I’ll call ideology.

Their will for independence, their demand for agency, their conception of rights exceeds what their material bargaining power can win them. Yet the peaceful but unequal compromises on offer are simply unacceptable.

Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize–winning psychologist, labels this problem one of “noise.” There are so many details, and circumstances change so fast, that smart people with huge incentives to get probabilities right will still get them wrong all the time, even when they have a chance to learn and adjust.

Geoffrey Blainey looked across world wars fought since 1700 and saw exactly this. “Wars usually begin,” he concluded, “when fighting nations disagree on their relative strength.”[5]

COMMITMENT PROBLEMS

Tuchman had a simple explanation for World War I: flawed leadership. The guns of August fired because diplomacy failed in July, she argued. One of the world’s deadliest conflicts to date was inadvertent and accidental. The European generals and ministers expected the war to be short and cheap, over by Christmas. They misunderstood their adversaries and multiplied errors with miscommunication, vanity, and overconfidence.

Many have looked at the Cuban missile crisis and World War I and come to similar conclusions: a leader’s temperament and skill, plus a dash of luck, can save or ruin the peace.

When political economists talk about commitment issues, however, they mean something different—an arrangement that fails because one side can’t be counted on to honor it in the future.

A classic example of a commitment problem is the “preventive war.”

Spartan fears of the growth of Athenian power

The historian Thucydides spent much of his lifetime chronicling the war. The fundamental cause, he wrote, was a massive and unavoidable shift in power: “It was the rise of Athens,” he wrote, “and the fear that this inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable.” Arguably, this is the earliest documented commitment problem.[11]

REALITY RESISTS A SIMPLE NARRATIVE

what’s important to know is that there is no such thing as a purely reasoned decision. Emotions infuse our most clinical calculations, even the ones we think are purely rational. Roughly speaking, you can think of egocentrism, availability, confirmation, motivation, and affect as elemental features of our fast-thinking systems.

“The war—once ignited—had become a self-fueling conflict,” English wrote. “Revenge and politics reinforced one another as motivations for killing.”[24]

the group amplifies rather than eliminates our biases. (This is a good description of my social media

Personalized systems that elevate and insulate the leader, and centralized bureaucracies full of cronies and sycophants, could magnify a leadership’s bias.

the deadly interactions between misperceptions and passions.

“Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

“Peace is not the absence of conflict,” he explained to his listeners that day, “it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.”

If economic interdependence widens the bargaining range between rivals, however, this means the opposite is also true: people are more likely to wage wars when they are economically insulated from one another.

oil-rich countries tend to be more elite driven and autocratic, and thus probably more vulnerable to conflict.

Instead, I want to focus on a much more routine, everyday kind of social intertwining, one that comes from having intermingling and interlocking social groups and identities.

I don't know how valid this is. People havemutiple layers of their identity and which layer has primacy depends on time and the situation

This is possible because every

one of us has more than one identity. Most of us associate with an ethnicity, but we also think of ourselves in terms of a language, a class, a religion, a political party, a region, and a nationality. In some societies, these identities line up and reinforce one another rather than crosshatch. That’s a problem.