Dan Banik and Chis Blattman discuss why there are so many misleading ideas about war, how we should distinguish between individual acts of violence and those that are performed by groups and the major reasons for war.
While there are millions of hostile rivalries around the world, only a fraction of these erupt into violence. It is easy to overlook the underlying strategic forces of war and to see war mainly as a series of errors and accidents. It is also easy to forget that war shouldn’t happen—and most of the time it doesn’t.
Chris Blattman is a Professor at the University of Chicago in the Harris School of Public Policy. He is an economist and political scientist who studies violence, crime, and underdevelopment. His most recent book is Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace, which shows that violence is actually not the norm; and that there are only five reasons why conflict wins over compromise. Twitter: @cblatts
Host:
Professor Dan Banik, University of Oslo, Twitter: @danbanik @GlobalDevPod
https://in-pursuit-of-development.simplecast.com/
Dan Banik: Chris, it's just lovely to see you and welcome to the show.
Christ Blattman: Thank you.
Dan Banik: There's so much focus these days on the Ukraine War and in the media. There is considerable attention on wars that are sensational, sensational acts of violence. But wars are really the exception, they're not the rule. We often tend to avoid or to somewhat ignore all those instances where we actually avoided a war, that violence did not take place, all the times we didn't fight. One of the key takeaways, and I have many takeaways from your excellent book, is that while we're trying to forecast and predict whether war will take place the most reliable prediction will always be peace. Before we discuss the roots of war, Chris, why do you think there's so many misleading ideas about war? Is it because we are obsessed with failures? Is it because we love these gory spectacles? Is it because we don't really want to talk about all the times when we avoided wars from happening, when we were able to compromise? Why are we obsessed with this kind of failure, and we ignore the successes?
Chris Blattman: I do think we're drawn to the spectacle in some ways, as we should be. We want doctors to also pay attention to the critically ill patients. The funny thing is we also want doctors to remember that most people are healthy and that the critically ill patient in front of them is not representative. Doctors do know that, and that means they're not demoralized, that they're better at diagnosis and treatment than if they just thought everybody was critically ill. When it comes to violence, and I won't even just say violence, I will say any kind of conflict, just take like everyday disputes that you and I could have in Norway or the United States, 95, maybe 98% of disputes that bring in lawyers never go to court. People realize just how costly and nasty it's going to be. But of course, we pay attention to the big court battles and the sensational trials. The mistake is not to pay attention to the violent conflagrations, it's to forget that they're the exception.
Dan Banik: This reminds me of some of the work I was doing many years ago looking at court cases in India on the right to food. I was looking at the literature and it turns out that the court system is often clogged, it's overwhelmed, a bit like the United States, I would say. It turns out the wisdom that lawyers impart is that if you have a weak case then you go to court, if you have a strong case you settle. You want immediate satisfaction. I was thinking also about India in relation to something else I really found interesting in the book, and that relates to why we sometimes avoid perhaps talking about the successes that has to do with the role of interdependence and this intertwining, sort of interest in preventing violence. You actually talk about this very well-known case of the Babri Masjid, the mosque in Ayodhya, which was demolished by a Hindu mob in 1992. What is particularly interesting is that there was a lot of focus on the violence that erupted in the immediate aftermath, but in many cases it did not spread. In areas where you think it could have spread, it turns out it did not spread because Hindus and Muslims had economic interests, there were deep social ties.
Chris Blattman: Those social ties and that independence is really protective in a lot of cases, just like I think international trade and social interactions are protective in a way, because they make fighting even more costly than it otherwise would have been. I do like to stress that we don't need that. That most Indian cities don't have sustained riots, it's really just a handful of places that have some recurrent issues with or without social ties, and with or without economic interdependence in these cities. It just doesn't really make sense to riot and doesn't make sense to strike, and it doesn't make sense to revolt, and it doesn't make sense to invade most of the time. There's a whole bunch of other nasty stuff you can do instead of invading. The peace that I'm thinking of is, some people call it negative peace, the absence of pitched battles. If you look at the 20 years that preceded Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin tried everything he could short of invasion to co-opt politics there. There was dark money, there was propaganda, there were assassinations or attempted assassinations and poisonings, there were support for separatists. All of these things were tactics that were preferable to war because they weren't so costly. War was a last resort. Likewise, Putin and has successfully cowed most of his other neighbors without having to invade them. He's completely subjugated Belarus and Kazakhstan that accepted the “peacekeepers” the last year or two, and a certain amount of political interference without rebellion. We do pay attention to these moments of non-conflict. They still seem pretty unpleasant, all this interference and meddling. The United States and the West has its own fair share of meddling too, little bit less violent, I think, but not much. It helps to remember that that's the alternative to war and that's the sad thing. That's the sad state we need to get back to is nefarious meddling instead of war.
Dan Banik: When reading this book, I love the title “Why We Fight”, I was reminded of my British boarding school experience. I was often a witness to the occasional fistfight. Tempers would flare up because we've always hungry, not because we didn't get food, it was just bad food. Because we were denied access to something, we felt insulted the cottage parents weren't nice. But what is interesting about that, and I was just thinking about it, is these felt like short lived acts. Some of my peers ended up gaining some sort of a formidable reputation of being the tough guys you can't mess with, but those were individual short-term acts. Here of course in the book you're talking about group-based violence, groups that leads to wars that are extremely different. Can you help me and my listeners better understand and distinguish between these individual acts of violence from those that are performed by groups?
Chris Blattman: There's lots of parallels but they're quite distinct. In the book I quite comfortably jump from gangs and villages up to political factions and civil conflicts and countries. I focus on the commonalities because as different as they are, I think causes of conflict between groups at any level have a lot in common. We learn a lot from looking at that. But I do put individuals aside to a degree because I think you're right. A book on individual violence, of which there have been many, would focus on our hot reactive emotional states, fight or flight mechanisms. There are so many books on this, there's some that go back and look at our apelike origins and what we learned from that, Richard Wrangham is a great example. There are sociologists like Randall Collins who talk about our micro sociological interactions and how violence happens. The fact is that it just doesn't make that much sense. Think about the war in Ukraine. It drags on for months, there are vast military bureaucracies that are waging this conflict each side and even the initial decisions to wage it, which seems like a really relatively small cabal of Putin and the FSB probably conceived of this initial invasion. And were they influenced by emotions and these sorts of momentary hot reactive states? Maybe a little bit, but of all of the behavioral biases and of all the way we're irrational, I think we are irrational, and we get to make mistakes as groups differently. I try to move away from that. Emotion in that sense plays a relatively minor role in in the book, which is I think what makes it different from most books about why we fight.
Dan Banik: Another reason why I liked your book is the sheer interdisciplinarity of the research that you cite. It's political scientists, psychologists, economists, sociologists. I think that really makes it very different. But just staying on my boarding school experience, another activity I detested at boarding school was the annual boxing competition. The first year I think I boxed, I was like 7 or 8 years old. My mum had told me to be nice to everyone, smile as much as possible, even if people were mean. I'm in the ring 3x3 minutes, 3 rounds 9 minutes, boxing with this tall guy with a huge reach and he was beating the hell out of me. What shocked a lot of people, and I remember this very vividly, was I had this idea in my head, my mom said be nice to anyone even though they are hitting you, so I was like smiling every time I was being punched and there was blood coming out of my nose. It was just very weird, and I wasn't really offering any sort of, you know, I was just defending myself. I wasn’t really punching back. It turned out I got the best loser prize that year. The point here is that every year at school, Chris, and I keep telling my kids, I was the happiest kid on the planet when I was done with the first fight, and I was always hoping I would lose that fight. I never really wanted to win because to lose was my victory, because then the boxing season was over, I could just go about it. As I grew older, I realized that losing the first fight wasn't good enough. I had to actually put up a good fight, because you had to maintain some semblance of dignity, some respect. I had to convince people that they couldn't push me around, that they could also risk being beaten up. That wanted me to put on a good show, even though secretly I wanted to lose. My question to you is, is such a scenario at all possible at a group level, at a country level, where you want to secretly lose, but you still want to put up a good show?
Chris Blattman: Absolutely and I can tell you the story about a gang leader I know in Chicago, and I can tell you a story about the US invasion of Afghanistan, where we essentially used the same logic.
Dan Banik: Is it Nap in Chicago?
Chris Blattman: No, this is a different person, it is not in the book, although we could talk about Nap who's in the book. The first thing I want to say is that we say most of the time we don't fight the reason is the war is so costly. There’s usually better alternatives, nefarious meddling, or even just getting hit in the face and then conceding. In some sense, you're like, that's just better than having the pain go on. If you could just tap out, you would have, because you're not going to win, you're going to get bloodied, tapped out and then be done with it. Now, you said there's two reasons why you might not want to do that. Two of them sort of get into the logics that I think why we ignore the cost. The answer to why we fight is our societies, our leaders, ignore the costs of war, and you've hit on two of them. One, you said something like dignity, or there's some ethereal thing that you think you might get glory potentially by fighting, and only by fighting. That's a potential answer. We hear lots of stories of the kings of Europe or Vladimir Putin or your younger self fighting for glory or fighting for some intangible that makes the violence worthwhile. I don't think that's the exact story you were telling, though. You were actually telling a story of reputation.
Dan Banik: That's correct.
Chris Blattman: Reputation comes from uncertainty. If everyone knew how strong you were and resolved, you would never have to fight to establish these things. You only have to fight in order to signal these things credibly to everyone else around, you because you may face 100 other fights in the future. This gang leader I met through a program I'm running on violence reduction was talking about how he became a killer. He said: well, you know, originally when I started out selling drugs, someone robbed me. I knew that if I let that happen, I was going to get killed or I just have to get out of the business, so I realized that I had to establish a reputation, so I tracked him down and killed them, and I had to do that a few more times. And then I had a reputation as a killer, and nobody robbed me anymore. But he was regretful about it because it had changed him. He wasn't happy with the person he had become in that choice, but nonetheless, he made it through this very calculating reason. It wasn’t a hot, reactive passion for the most part, and he wasn't seeking glory. I think you could make the same argument about the US in Afghanistan. There were lots of mistakes, and maybe they weren't pursuing glory, but revenge. There was an intangible there. But the US was seen as weak in the sense of not willing to put American soldiers on the line. Not willing to be the world's real policeman. Not willing to go beyond bombing someone like Saddam Hussein or in Kosovo, so they could be attacked on their own soil without really facing any consequences. The invasion of Afghanistan was an opportunity to demonstrate that no, that was a red line that could not be crossed. And then even when you're losing as they were, they were getting bloodied in the face eventually, not initially, but from about 2006 onwards they stayed in the ring to demonstrate that resolve, that this is how painful we will make it for a society that condones or endorses or somehow supports an attack on American soil. That the message was to every future possible pariah state or terror group. That's not the only reason I think they stayed but I think that's the one of the most important. That's a good example of dynamics that are true at the individual level that I think are true at all these other levels too.
Dan Banik: But don't you think that red line has sort of changed somewhat in the Ukraine war, that with NATO member states not wanting to be involved, the US also not wanting to be directly involved, do you think there's been some sort of a lesson learned from Afghanistan in relation to what's happening at the moment? One is more cautious maybe?
Chris Blattman: The lesson we learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, to me, is the same lesson that nothing has changed. The lesson was that a great power, a nuclear armed veto-wielding member of the UN Security Council, can invade another country without the support of the United Nations illegally if they deem it's in their national interests. The US established that in Iraq and you can argue that's justified or not but that's what they did. In the rest of the world, some of them condemned them, some of them supported them but they didn't fight back. Russia did the same with the seizure of Crimea. It may be that the lesson that Russia drew was that it was not going to face significant resistance. That's the gamble that I think this initial invasion was. It was a gamble that the West would not put a lot on the line, and it was a gamble that Ukrainians would not put up significant resistance. It wasn't a crazy gamble. I think it could have come to pass. Once again, it goes back to this uncertainty. Fundamentally the reputation of the West and the willingness of Ukrainians to not surrender but to fight was fundamentally uncertain. The problem with uncertainty is that it’s really hard. And then the West and Ukrainians were strongly signaling no, no, no, no, we are going to do the sanctions, it will be unified, we are going to be plucky and resist and that's exactly what came to pass. But I think it's also difficult to believe those signals. It's sort of like it's like playing poker: were they bluffing or not?
Dan Banik: Exactly. We can discuss this later in the conversation. We can return to this, the five major reasons for war that you've identified, and of course you've already discussed a bit of this uncertainty aspect which is particularly interesting in relation to the ongoing war, because you could say that the Russians did not really know or could not know, perhaps they should have known, how strong Ukraine was, the resolve of the Ukrainian people. Maybe because they didn't have timely or accurate information, they were not able to assess the risks. We can return to some of these later, Chris, before we talk about the roots of war, there's one issue I wanted to ask you and that has to do with visible and invisible forms of violence. I've been studying Malawi for many years, and just after like 16 years, I realized that Malawi is on paper, on the surface, one of the most peaceful societies. There's no conflict. But the more I get to know the country, the more I visited, the more I speak with people there is this feeling that there is beneath that surface a seething rage against elites, it could be against Asian minorities, it could be against some other person in the community. Now this does not necessarily, this rage, spill over into a visible form of conflict, but beneath the surface people are pretty angry at each other. One way in which this pans out is by this widespread resort to witchcraft or healers. You tend to take out that anger through a consultation with a healer or a witch doctor and you can spread evil. The conflict doesn't result in the kind of fist fights that I was telling you about at school, but there is the need to spread hate or jealousy or evil through more invisible forms. That is a type of violence, wouldn't you agree?
Chris Blattman: In the book I say enemies prefer to loathe in peace, this is this negative piece that you're describing: technically we're not fighting but it's hateful and then it may come out. That's the equivalent of these nefarious tactics. It's the meddling in the elections or the propaganda or the witchcraft. There are all these things we do when we're hateful and polarized towards our adversaries that are costly and miserable and unpleasant. But it's not the same as violence. It's not the same as these pitched battles. Call it what you will, we could call it violence, we could call it nefarious tactics. I want to put prolonged fighting in its own category because it's different. I think we see that sometimes people dismiss that, but compare what's happening, it's June when we're recording this, like the pitched battles, the tens of thousands of people dying, destruction in cities, the complete economic collapse, that is in a different category than all of the nasty stuff that was happening over the last 20 years. It's just orders of magnitude more terrible, and a civil war in Malawi would be orders of magnitude more terrible than all of the nefarious, polarized things that hateful enemies do towards one another in “peacetime”.
Dan Banik: Of all the wicked problems in the world war is perhaps the most wicked of them all?
Chris Blattman: Yes, and the other thing about a lot of these peace’s, like when you have a country dominated by elites, especially a dictatorship, not sure this is a description of Malawi, but a lot of societies have peace under the constant threat of repression. That's a kind of violence. Whenever any group, whether their majority or minority group, dominates another group and that dominated group doesn't revolt violently, a lot of people call that violence.
Dan Banik: Are you thinking about the Cold War where we didn't really have a war, but it was a threat of violence, a threat of nuclear weapons, right?
Chris Blattman: Yes, that kind of brinksmanship and living under the shadow of annihilation is miserable. But being dominated by a minority elite through the constant threat and maybe use of repression is also miserable and violent. I don't want to call that not violence, but I do want to distinguish that from this from all out warfare. The sad truth is that for most of human history, most societies have had a small elite dominating the masses through the threat and occasional or maybe regular use of violent repression. That's not warfare and most of these societies don't have violent revolutions. The masses are cowed. Peace doesn't have to be just and it doesn't have to be happy, it's often quite miserable. That's this idea of negative peace. A part of the book is about how we get past that, because the closer we get towards a more, what people call positive peace, interdependent and protective, really far from that brinksmanship, far from that everyday violent repression, the further we are from actually also a civil war or an international war breaking out, or an ethnic conflagration. That's hard, but the easy part is just stopping the pitched battles by comparison. That's the easy part.
Dan Banik: Let's dive into the book, the five major categories or reasons for war. You've mentioned intangible motives and uncertainty. Let's begin with unchecked interests, which in many ways is the key argument that it is the unaccountable unchecked leader that is the problem. That a leader who has something to gain, something to profit from a war, so when the leaders’ private incentives are not aligned with those of society, then we have a problem. Here you discuss this in the book to the role of politics and the agency problem that we often face in many societies. We elect leaders, we as principals, the citizens. We elect leaders to be our agents and we hope that they will act in our interests, but often we end up in societies where the agent does not act in our interests. I'm thinking about what's going on at the moment in the United States which appears to be a very good example of this. You have the House Select Committee to investigate the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol. It’s discussing the role that President Trump played in mobilizing a riot, an act of violence. It seems that Trump here is one of those examples that you could potentially use to talk about unchecked interests.
Chris Blattman: I think that all leaders are unchecked to some degree. American leaders are checked and maybe the whole problem... this is the one country on the planet where I think leaders are too checked. It's impossible to get anything done. It's even impossible to stage a real revolution, and that's the whole point. You can manage a riot. It was a terrible event, but it was a single day of insurrection. Nothing like that has been repeated, it would have been very difficult to sustain, and American institutions were constructed to make this kind of sustained insurrection almost impossible. But every president does have the ability to create. It has enough insulation from accountability that they can create some short mayhem. People point to Clinton trying to distract the world from his marital affairs by bombing Kosovo. That may or that may or may not be true, but it's possible that it's true. He could. You can imagine prime ministers and presidents who use executive authority to try to rally, it's called the rally-around-the-flag-effect. It turns out that the rally-around-the-flag-effect doesn't seem to be very reliable. People don't really rally very long; it actually doesn't provide much of a political boost. Biden certainly hasn't received much of a boost. Any boost he had was very temporary and has disappeared in terms of his Ukraine support already. That's quite typical. But all you need is leaders to think that they get a boost. They just have to believe in the rally effect for that. I do think most democratically elected leaders are accountable enough that sustained violence is really rare.
Dan Banik: Yes, but it seems that one could perhaps say that this particular case with the insurrection has elements of the intangible interest that you were mentioning earlier, appealing to some, I don't know, revenge or dominance by some other groups and elements of an unchecked leader. The other example you use which I found fascinating is George Washington. You have this portrayal of Washington in very noble terms usually, but you show how there were very concrete self-interests in terms of property that were at stake, and which were then addressed by going to fight with the British colonial masters, the revolution. Despite all of these other noble claims, there were some very mundane economic incentives at play, which is not very unusual from a Liberian warlord, who may also have similar interest in very different contexts.
Chris Blattman: Throughout the book I wanted to show that it wasn't just like Liberian warlords and evil dictators from the other side of the planet that caused wars. I wanted people to see this in their own societies. I think that the main explanation for the American Revolution was an idealism, a decision to refute. It was an intangible incentive, this other thing we talked about earlier, that basically the compromise with Britain was repugnant. Arguably that's the cause of the war today in Ukraine. The Ukrainians find the idea of compromise with a superpower repugnant. Even though they're the weaker party. There are a lot of parallels, and I think that's why you see so much American support. But, the unchecked leaders are very important because Washington at the time, and I point to more of the French-Indian War which he helped ignite, which later becomes the Seven Years War, we can't ignore the fact that our founding fathers were elites, that they had a private stake in independence from Britain and Washington in particular. Not only did he become one of the richest men in American history, certainly maybe our richest president, he was just known, he was just a total… he loved land, and he loved wealth, and he loved fancy clothes, and he loved his carriages. He was totally obsessed with wealth and status his entire life and that helped carry the colonies into this terrible war against the French because he was off losing control of his troops as they scalp a bunch of French ambassadors in order to protect his spurious land claims. Honor him for his nobility, but also remember that there is this darker side, as there is with many leaders.
Dan Banik: In terms of just going back to this intangible interest that raised the risk of war, which is also another category for war, I was thinking about this whole revenge thing. You also touch upon it in the book, like Hollywood movies and one of my favorite movies, The Shawshank Redemption, it just makes us feel good. When I was a child I loved the Count of Monte Cristo, we liked these things. The importance of historical injustices, all of these non-material motives, higher ideals, all of these are important. I'm just wondering, could you elaborate on how important you think it is sometimes to maintain our dignity, keeping our heads high, how that leads to war?
Chris Blattman: To put it in context, every reason why we fight is a reason we ignore the costs. We talked about one being leaders just aren't accountable for them, but then there's might be times when we're just… dignity, vengeance, whatever, we're just willing to pay the price. We know what the price is, there's a cost of war, we're not ignoring it, but we're saying I will pay that for this ethereal thing that I get, which is glory or revenge. I think that this is a bit important for how leaders choose to go to war. I think the American founding fathers and the revolutionaries did believe in liberty, I think that Putin was thinking of glory for himself and for the Russian nation. I think these things matter somewhat for a leader’s calculus; it makes them willing to pay some costs of war. I think we exaggerate it. I think what is very important, is not in terms of why we fight, in terms of why our leaders ignite wars, it's almost, I could write a different book about how we fight. How we fight is by convincing our populations too-
Dan Banik: That it is legitimate.
Chris Blattman: Well, that it's legitimate, but you mentioned agency problems. You have to get soldiers to show up every day, meaning you have to solve the participation constraint, and then you have to get them to work hard. You have to solve the incentive compatibility constraint. And you have to get everybody in the society to do the same things, to get them to contribute to the war and support you. You could do that by paying them, or you could do that by convincing them that they get intrinsic rewards. This is what organizations love to do. They love to give us intrinsic incentives to let follow the leader. Because extrinsic incentives are very expensive.
Dan Banik: That's why I think the Campesino example in El Salvador is such a great one. You're not getting a tangible benefit. But you're doing this in solidarity with your comrades.
Chris Blattman: Correct. We have to be aware. I'm a sincere supporter of Ukraine's resistance and American support for it, but I also recognize that we're all being manipulated in a very skillful way. The information war is really being won by the Ukrainian Government and some of its elite supporters in that they've successfully mobilized an immense amount of support by creating these intangible antennas. They're solving these problems in a very skillful way. Their use of social media is masterful. I'm also aware. I'm supportive, in spite of knowing that we're being manipulated. I don't know that everyone else is just so aware, and that's just common. That's just how it is. Every conflict is like that.
Dan Banik: That reminds me of one of my mentors in political science many years ago told me that to be wary of all kinds of reports criticizing North Korea all the time. Remember that much of the way in which we understand North Korea is based on South Korean propaganda. We have to be careful.
Chris Blattman: I want to know, you've mentioned India and some of the riots, Paul Brass, this famous scholar-
Dan Banik: Yeah, he just died recently.
Chris Blattman: Well, I didn't know that, how tragic. I believe he coined the term the Institutionalized Riot Machine. That we need the Fox News’s of the world and the MSNBCs of the world, which are radical stations here in the US. Every country has their more extreme media sources. They're constantly stocking anger. They're trying to create that rage between both sides and that sense of injustice, because then when you want to ask for something, follow me over the trenches to like, then they follow you. This is what political elites do. That's why I'm suspicious. I think sometimes political elites believe their own rhetoric, and they're pursuing these intangibles. They convince themselves with their own propaganda, or we put people in office who believe the propaganda. But mostly I think these things are how we build bargaining power vis-a-vis our adversary and get people to fight when really it's against the group’s interests.
Dan Banik: It also appears, Chris, that we may derive a lot of pleasure and satisfaction by punishing others. Handing out some sort of a beating, punishment for past crimes or being treated unfairly. We can't underestimate that sense of satisfaction that we derive as humans.
Chris Blattman: That's true and in fact, it's a bargaining tactic. In the cost of warring there's a whole range of bargains that we should accept rather than be fighting, but some of them are quite disadvantageous to us. That could be just better to our adversary. If I'm a skillful leader, then what I want to do is to stoke the rage machine. I want to convince my population that a whole range of these so-called acceptable bargains are actually unacceptable for ideological reasons. That will narrow the bargaining range in my favor, meaning it will push the range of remaining bargains to things that are unfavorable to the other side. The other side says: well, I'd better do the same thing with my population and we're going to now move this, and we're going to move the bargaining range down to a sliver that works in favor of whoever is the more skillful propagandists of their own people. That happens all the time, and the problem is when both sides are so successful, maybe they lose control, and that sliver disappears. We will see where we are in the next couple of months, but that's where we may end up in this in this conflict with Ukraine and Russia. Both sides have so successfully convinced their people that compromise, it is unacceptable that this terrible thing goes on.
Dan Banik: It's fascinating to see reports now emerging increasingly. What if Ukraine wins? What are the possible future scenarios? Because all this time we were thinking it was inevitable that the Russians are more powerful and would win.
Chris Blattman: I mean that's within the realm of possibility. I think there's a certain amount of delusion and propaganda going on there, but we'll see. I will just say that this is a very common thing that happens in conflicts is that it’s in the interests of each side to convince its sides of this elusive victory.
Dan Banik: You mean the problem of overconfidence, in many ways?
Chris Blattman: It can be. It can actually be a strategic tactic, again by elites. It could be a mistake. Very often in civil wars, international wars, the moment before a negotiation is the most violent moment because both decide to just throw it all in there to see if they can improve their bargaining position, but then usually there's no change, it's just a big gamble and it's super wasteful and destructive in in horrible terms. Maybe that's irrational. We've talked about unchecked leaders, we've talked about these intangibles, we've talked about uncertainty leading towards, but then this other one is, you can just be mistaken. You can be overconfident. You can underestimate the costs. You can overestimate your chances of victory. This is very common. It's not emotion, I think, that clouds our judgment in these situations. Of course emotion matters, but I think there's some systematic mistakes that are either psychological or institutionalized that a lot of military bureaucracies and political elites make.
Dan Banik: I think this really relates to that misperceptions category that you talk about. It assumes that others think like us, that it is this confirmation bias, maybe, we are stubborn. We may even refuse to see somebody, our opponent’s point of view. We are thinking fast, we are reacting, we are selfish, we're demonizing our enemies. All of this contributes. I think one particularly fascinating example in the book is the case of the IRA, the Northern Ireland conflict that you write about in Belfast that I think you visited, and you studied this. There was absolutely no room for compromise. It was us and it was them and there was no acceptance that the other party had any valid reason.
Chris Blattman: What I try to do is, there's a lot of behavioral psychology and science and economics about the mistakes we make systematically, but a lot of the stuff we studied, like why we buy gym memberships we don't use, it doesn’t really make a lot of sense in understanding warfare. They're not very high stakes decisions. They're not repeated decisions, often. They're not made in groups and they're not strategic, they're not decisions that we're making in interaction with others, which is really key. What's the set of behavioral science and psychology that helps us understand how groups strategically make mistakes? One, as you mentioned, is overconfidence. I think when we underestimate the costs overestimate probabilities of victory, and I talk a lot about that. The other is this systematic misperception of the other group. What their interests are, how they will interpret our actions and how we just get the strict… we basically just look down the game tree and we just see the wrong game tree. We do so in the same way over and over. It's true for northern Uganda, it's true for this war right now that's going on. I wanted people to focus on that. There's less research on that. We don't do a lot of good research on strategic behavioral biases. I think behavioral game theory needs more work.
Dan Banik: A final set of issues related to these five logics of war is the commitment problem, which of course relates to an agreement, a deal and arrangement fails, when one party can’t trust the other party, whether this other party will honor this agreement in the future. Chris, help us understand a concept that you use in, the book the concept of “preventive war”, that that one country or a group, we are powerful today, we feel we are powerful, but we also know that we may not be powerful for very long, that maybe our rivals, our enemies, will soon become more powerful, so it's best to attack our enemies now so that we actually combat their rise. We prevent them from becoming powerful. And one concrete example you discussed throughout is Saddam Hussein, the Iraq war, the US action to it. Help us understand this concept of “preventive war” and how that leads to this commitment problem.
Chris Blattman: Commitment problems are a really deep and important idea that are maybe the least, the public's least aware of them, and even most political scientists and economists, I think about them completely or maybe even wrongly. They help us understand why wars break out and they understand, help us understand why they're hard to stop once they do break out. Let me use the current example with Russia and Ukraine where you could make an argument that in late 2021 Russia was at its peak leverage versus vis-a-vis the West and Ukraine. The economy was stagnating. Ukraine had nowhere to go but up in terms of its economy because it had been so terrible. They've been acquiring more and more defensive weaponry, not necessarily from NATO, building it themselves and acquiring Turkish drones and things of this nature. More importantly, Ukraine was growing closer to the West, in terms of its inclination to join the EU, it's putting NATO in the constitution, a NATO membership in the constitution, and more and more sympathetic towards with less support for Russia. There's this inexorable trend, what Russia was trying to do is to say stop: stop moving towards democracy, stop moving towards the West, stop acquiring weapons, because this is profoundly threatening to us. If you do, stop, we won't invade. It's just not clear that a Ukrainian leader could agree to stop. How do you do that? How do you agree not to arm yourself? If they did agree, he would probably be turfed out. Zelensky was extremely unpopular before this war. These are commitment problems. Then seeing where this war could end there are commitment problems, because everyone is worried that if we pause, negotiate a solution, or even have a frozen conflict and stop fighting that Russia is just going to remobilize and attack again. People don't believe that Russia can commit to not regroup and attack. Russia looks at the Ukraine and said: we had an agreement, we had these Minsk accords that you said you weren't going to do all these things that you then did, because your Parliament wouldn't ratify them, and your people wouldn't support the Minsk Accords. We can't deal with Ukrainian politicians because they can't credibly commit to a deal, so we're at war and we're at continued war because of the lack of reliability of either side. This is a really common feature of war. It's interesting, there are two commitment problems here. The commitment problem on the Russian side is nobody trusts Putin's private interests and intangible incentives. Ant the Russians don't trust the Ukraine's political process and their ability to make a deal because of their too constraint in some ways and there isn't popular support for concession. These commitment problems are so fundamental, and they do help us understand everything from World War 2 to the Iraq war. That to me it's maybe the most important chapter in the book because it's so poorly understood, and yet it's so fundamental to every peace process.
Dan Banik: The other aspect about that chapter that I really liked is how in many societies, increasingly, we see the fears of an encroaching and growing minority, what they will do. We have clashes in India, we were discussing the Hindu Muslim things. There's always this fear that the minority is getting more and more powerful, so one has to react. The worst-case scenario is the Rwandan genocide where you had millions of Tutsis being butchered by the Hutus. Again, that I think, is like the worst form of that commitment problem.
Chris Blattman: Genocide and mass killings are a tactic. They're a last resort and of course they're driven by hatreds, but often they almost always happen in the context of a civil war. They're often a final solution in the sense of saying: you, this opposition group can't commit not to use your power against us in future, and because you can't commit our optimal strategy, not our hate or loath-filled strategy that helps, our optimal strategy is to try to exterminate you before that threat becomes real. It's this cold strategic logic that scholars of genocide constantly having to point out against this sort of journalistic view that it's all about hatreds and ancient ethnic blah blah blah.
Dan Banik: We talked a lot about war, let's talk a bit more about peace. Towards the end of the book, you come up with your 10 peaceful commandments. These relate to being able to distinguish between what are easy from difficult problems, how we shouldn't ignore everyday politics in policymaking, making sure that our actions actually have an impact, we ought to embrace failure, we have to be patient, we shouldn't formulate nonsensical, unrealistic goals. Most importantly we have to prioritize accountability, and we've talked about this in relation to unchecked leaders. One of the 10 peaceful commandments I liked particularly relates to a friend of ours, Jim Scott. Jim has been my mentor and you referred to seeing like a status book, and one of the commandments you formulate is to avoid worshipping grand plans. I wondered if you could elaborate on that principle or any of the other 10 commandments as to why these grand plans, and you refer to this one quote that Jim has: “the despot is not the man, it is the plan”. What is it about these plans, these grand visions that we should avoid in terms of this pursuit of peace?
Chris Blattman: A lot of books like mine die in the last chapter. They die for a couple reasons. One is, well, maybe they're just boring and they just re summarize what the whole book said. I didn't want to do that. They also die because they sort of are like, well OK, now that we understand why war happens, here's the ten-step plan to peace and everything will get better. I didn't want to write that chapter mostly because it's not true because there isn't a 10-step plan for peace everywhere. I sat down and I reflected, and I said it's a little bit like being a doctor. I can't write a book about why people get sick. I couldn't write a book like says why we get sick, and then like in the last chapter, say here's the ten-step plan, everybody should get Tylenol and radiotherapy. It would be bizarre; it would be totally false. You would end the book called “why we're sick” that says: well, we need to have really good doctors who get trained in diagnosis and who are not giving everyone radiotherapy and Tylenol but actually have a good theory of why we're sick and that are able to through trial and error figure out why each individual is sick, and then what treatment will help them, with some basic principles and generalizations. It's complex and every person is going to be different. That is the last chapter I had to write, which is not as satisfying. It’s not the natural instinct of a lot of peacemakers and bureaucrats, so I had to channel Jim Scott and all these thinkers who, not in conflict, but in other realms of policy, have said that development is complex, cities are complex, medicine is complex, scientific advance is complex. In these complex problems, we've only ever made progress by being like these doctors, these engaging in trial and error, careful diagnosis, knowing what we don't know and what Karl Popper called “piecemeal engineering”. I said we have to be piecemeal engineers. My little dad joke is I spell piece “pece”. It's not like this inspiring message, I don't really expect to go to Washington and see a bunch of people wearing piecemeal engineered T-shirts, that's what I think people have to do. People have to realize they're a little bit like doctors and that there is not a 10-step plan to peace all over the world, they're going to have figured out every time.
Dan Banik: I think really the most important message, and I think you do a very good job in the last chapter too, it isn't boring, I think the most important message is that we are all actually, or we should aim, we should strive for polycentric peace. There's this polycentric governance aspect that the more constrained societies are they more peaceful they are. You said the United States, and I know you're Canadian, the United States, you said the leaders are very constrained, maybe too much. I suppose one advantage is that you could have some sort of peace, but that could result in ineffective governance. That could really result in polarization. But at least there is peace. Is that how you see it? Is it the polycentric peace concept that really is the key here?
Chris Blattman: I think so. There aren't many places I would say have taken it too far, but the US might be the only one. I think polycentric just means checks and balances, it means that power or leaders are constrained by an independent bureaucracy by treaties they've signed, by international agreements, by other branches of government, by lowers states. If mayors and state governors aren't a pain in the butt to you as a president, then something's wrong because it means you're not checked enough. We talked about the five reasons for war, the concentrated power makes all of them worse. The leaders unchecked, were subject to their intangible incentives, were subject to their misperceptions, it's uncertain what's going on in the minds of these despots, and then by definition, dictators can't make credible commitments. It's like the worst, which is why checks and balances is one of the core solutions, which is a complex problem that every society has to figure out on their own. Then I call it the polycentric peace, I don't know, because I wanted to combat this idea of a democratic peace. I don't believe in the democratic peace. I don’t think it's about elections. I think it's about checking, and balancing power and some societies have gotten there, and good for them. More societies need it to happen. I don't think we'd be in this conflict today if Putin were more checked. Not just not as a democrat, even if we had a plutocracy in Russia, we probably wouldn't have found ourselves in this mess. I do try to focus people on that laser focus on, on decentralizing, not centralizing power.
Dan Banik: Chris, I've really enjoyed reading your book, fantastic book “Why We Fight” and it was such a pleasure to chat with you today. Thanks so much for coming on my show.
Chris Blattman: No, thank you.