War is a stupid idea.
Fighting is a bad way to resolve disagreements. If two countries want the same land, it is almost always less costly to each side to split it than to fight. The same is true if they are arguing over a shared natural resource, like oil. Fighting costs lives and money, with an incredibly uncertain payoff when the dust settles.
And yet wars persist, both within nations and, as appallingly demonstrated by Russia’s devastation of Ukraine, between them. Why? Why do governments and private armed groups still resort to violence when it’s so often mutually destructive?
That’s the question Chris Blattman’s new book, Why We Fight, seeks to answer. Blattman is an economist and political scientist at the University of Chicago, and he has studied the roots of violence in many different contexts. In academic work, Blattman and his coauthors have examined the roots of child soldiering in Uganda, the potential of cognitive behavioral therapy to prevent violence in post-war Liberia, and the policy choices of drug gangs who govern neighborhoods in Medellín, Colombia.
