War in Human Civilization (review)

Azar Gat's newest book joins the recent scholarship attempting to explain the "riddle" of war. After writing books on military thought and the development of military strategy, Gat turns his eye toward the origins and fundamental nature of war itself. At the risk of boiling down a sophisticated argument too much, he agrees with Lawrence Keeley and others that war has been a fundamental aspect of human behavior almost since the appearance of humans. Gat contends that war has been a function of humanity's adaptive, evolutionary growth over time. In effect, humans have fought wars because winning wars has produced real, tangible gains (most notably access to food and sex for reproduction) for the victors that were worth the costs associated with it. The best summary of this thesis can be found in chapter five.

Gat begins his argument in pre-historic times and seems more comfortable when discussing the Greeks and Romans than when discussing the wars of the twentieth century. His chronology avoids the trap that some historians (including, I admit, myself) sometimes fall into of devoting disproportionate time to the more modern periods because of the much richer source bases. Thus halfway into the book, he has only just begun to discuss the development of sedentary civilization. This refreshing willingness to eschew the modern is a welcome facet of the book's structure.

When Gat moves on to the development of states, he argues that state formation did not increase war's frequency or its lethality. By contrast, states helped to reduce the raids and constant inter-tribal warfare that had inflicted tremendous damage on small farming societies. Groups like the Mongols and the Huns were able to do so much damage and wreak such havoc as they did because they did not have settled farming areas of their own to protect. States provided protection from such marauders and therefore reduced the overall level of war-related violence, even if the wars states prosecuted with their new resources could be bloodier and lengthier than tribal raids.

War in the age of states thus became less common and less normative. In the modern, post-Enlightenment era war came to be regarded as an aberrance in liberal societies, "something utterly repugnant and futile, indeed, incomprehensible to the point of absurdity" (662). While one can take issue with that assumption, the linking of liberal thought and the subject of war forms one of the strongest parts of the book. Along these lines, Gat also adds a caution about accepting the widely-held belief that liberal societies do not go to war against one another.

Gat draws on a wide variety of disciplines to shape his arguments. This interdisciplinary approach is at once a strength and a weakness of the book. His breadth of coverage is impressive, using fields as far flung as archaeology, international relations, and ethology. Historians, whom he does not seem to hold in terribly high regard as a group, feature as only one of many influences. He places a great deal (perhaps too much) reliance on animal behaviorists, extending their arguments into the human realm. He even makes an evolutionary comparison between the human need to fight wars and a tree's need to develop a trunk, a comparison that I for one do not find terribly enlightening. This far-flung approach, although used by other books of similar scope and magnitude, is problematic, as it robs humans of some of the central agency that historians take for granted. Gat does not argue for biological determinism, but his central thesis implies more of a biological element for explanations of war than most historians would be willing to accept.

Large sections of the book do not deal with war much at all. Gat digresses into lengthy discussions of the development of market economies, state-based political systems, communications technologies, and liberal thought. These tangents are not always directly connected back to the main subject of war, although they are always well grounded and well researched...