Chris Blattman: War and Violence | Lex Fridman Podcast #273

What are your thoughts on the ongoing war in Ukraine? How do you analyze it within your framework about war?

How far would they go to hang onto power when push came to shove, is I think the thing that worries me the most, and is plainly what worries most people about the risk of nuclear war. Like, at what point does that unchecked leadership decide that this is worth it? Especially if they can emerge from the rubble still on top.

The following is a conversation with Chris Blattman, professor at the University of Chicago, studying the causes and consequences of violence and war. This he explores in his new book called Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace. The book comes out on April 19th, so you should pre-order it to support Chris and his work. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, and now, dear friends, here's Chris Blattman. In your new book, titled Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths for Peace, you write, quote, "Let me be clear what I mean when I say 'war.' I don't just mean countries duking it out. I mean any kind of prolonged, violent struggle between groups. That includes villages, clans, gangs, ethnic groups, religious sects, political factions, and nations. Wildly different as these may be, their origins have much in common. We'll see that the Northern Irish zealots, Colombian cartels, European tyrants, Liberian rebels, Greek oligarchs, Chicago gangs, Indian mobs, Rwandan genocidaires..." A new word I learned, thank you to you.

(laughs)

Those are people who administer genocide. "English soccer hooligans, and American invaders." So first, let me ask, what is war? In saying that war is a prolonged violent struggle between groups, what do the words "prolonged," "groups," and "violent" mean?

I sit at this sort of intersection of economics and political science, and I, I also dwell a little bit in psychology, but that's partly because I'm married to a psychologist, sometimes do research with her. All these things are really different. So if you're a political scientist, you spend a lot of time just classifying a really narrow kind of conflict, and studying that. And that's, that's an important way to make progress, uh, as a social scientist. But I'm not trying to make progress. I'm trying to sort of help everybody step back and say, "You know what? There's, like, some common things that we know from these disciplines that, uh, relate to a really wide range of phenomena." Basically, we, we can talk about them in a very similar way, and we can get really similar insights. So I wanted to actually bring them together, but I still had to, like, say, "Let's hold out individual violence," which, you know, has a lot in common, but, but individuals choose to engage in violence for more and sometimes different reasons. So let's just put that aside so that we can focus a bit. And let's really put aside short incidents of violence, because those might have the same kind of things explaining them, but actually, there's a lot of other things that can explain short violence. Short violence can be really, uh, demonstrative. Like, you can just... I can use it to communicate information. The thing that all of it has in common is that it doesn't generally make sense. It's not your best option, most of the time. And so I wanted to say, "Let's take this thing that should be puzzling." We, we, we kind of think it's normal. We kind of think this is what all humans do. Uh, but let's point out that it's not normal, and then figure out why, and let's talk about why. And so that's... So I was trying to throw out the, the short violence. I was trying to thr- throw out the individual violence. I was also trying to throw out all the competition that happens that's not violent. That's, that's the normal, normal competition. I was trying to say, "Let's talk about violent competition," 'cause that's kind of the puzzle.