Happy New Year! I've just posted a new summary for Why We Fight: the Roots of War and the Paths to Peace by Christopher Blattman.

The key takeaways are below and, as usual, you can find the full summary on the website. Enjoy!

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• War is rare.
  • War is rare because war is ruinous. There is a “bargaining range” within which each party is better off than going to war, even if they expect to win that war, because of the costs that war imposes. Brief skirmishes are common, but cool heads usually prevail.
  • Be aware of selection bias when trying to understand wars. Wars often follow hostility and competition, but there’s hostility and competition all the time. The vast, vast majority of the time it does not lead to war.
• There are broadly five reasons for war:
  • Unchecked interests. Basically the principal/agent problem. The leaders who decide whether to go to war are not the same as the people who bear the costs of the war.
  • Intangible values. Some intangibles like prestige, honour and glory can only be achieved through war. War can therefore “increase the size of the pie” to the extent people value these intangibles.
  • Uncertainty. If opponents see their chances of success differently, they see different bargaining ranges. People have incentives to bluff and play hardball so that they get a bigger slice of any negotiated outcome. The presence of future rounds and multiple players can also increase these incentives.
  • Commitment problems. If one side can’t trust that the other will keep to a negotiated outcome, they may prefer to go to war. A preventive war is the classic example. Commitment problems are also rife in civil wars, and explain why such wars tend to be longer and less likely to result in a negotiated peace.
  • Misperceptions. Rationality sometimes fails. People can be overconfident about their chances of success. They may misconstrue the other sides’ actions and intentions. Group dynamics can sometimes make this worse and amplify individual biases.
• These five reasons compound. Each one narrows the bargaining range, but rarely eliminates it and causes a war by itself. But they can cumulate and, in combination, significantly narrow or even eliminate the bargaining range.
• The book suggests four paths to peace:
  • Interdependence. Interdependence makes parties internalise some of the costs war would impose on the other side. This widens the bargaining range.
  • Checks and balances. Distributing power between many groups can reduce all five reasons for war. Checks and balances doesn’t necessarily mean democracy – there are other ways in which power can be distributed.
  • Rules and enforcement. These can deter bad behaviour and help groups cooperate by enabling credible commitments.
  • Interventions. Examples include punishing, enforcing, facilitating, socialising and incentivising. They can work, but imperfectly, and it’s hard to measure how effective they are.
• But war is a wicked problem.
  • Wicked problems have no easy solutions, various causes, multiple actors, and each case is slightly different. Solutions are not one-size-fits-all; they need to be tailored to the circumstances.
  • Incrementalism is better than a grand vision. With small steps, we can get feedback and learn as we go. We should embrace experimentation and trial and error.
  • We also need to be patient and keep our expectations realistic. Change that happens over a couple of decades is already very fast. A century is more realistic.

Read the full detailed summary on ToSummarise.com.

Cheers