We want doctors to pay a lot of attention to sick people, but then we don’t want them to forget that most people are healthy.įor example, two weeks into Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, India accidentally lobbed a cruise missile at Pakistan and nothing came of it, and we shouldn’t be surprised at that. It is kind of amazing how much attention we pay to violence. Can you explain that organizing framework and why you think that’s important? Chris Blattman You start from a standpoint that is kind of surprising for a book about war, which is that war usually is a bad idea, it usually isn’t in anybody’s best interests, and most conflicts are resolved peaceably. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Weeds on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Note that our conversation occurred on April 7, so we didn’t cover the past couple weeks of developments in Ukraine. A transcript, edited for length and clarity, follows. Why We Fight is an effort to summarize what he and other social scientists have learned about violent conflict, both between and within states: where it comes from if it can be prevented and how to stop it once it’s begun.īlattman and I spoke for this week’s episode of the Vox podcast The Weeds. 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. Blattman is an economist and political scientist at the University of Chicago, and he has studied the roots of violence in many different contexts. That’s the question Chris Blattman’s new book, Why We Fight, seeks to answer. Why? Why do governments and private armed groups still resort to violence when it’s so often mutually destructive? Fighting costs lives and money, with an incredibly uncertain payoff when the dust settles.Īnd yet wars persist, both within nations and, as appallingly demonstrated by Russia’s devastation of Ukraine, between them. The same is true if they are arguing over a shared natural resource, like oil. If two countries want the same land, it is almost always less costly to each side to split it than to fight. Fighting is a bad way to resolve disagreements.
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