What We're Fighting For: Motivation, Evolution, and the Data Sets of War

Abstract

Barbarous Philosophers: Reflections on the Nature of War from Heraclitus to Heisenberg. By Christopher Coker. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 278 pp., $30.18 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-231-70198-3). Why Nations Fight: Past and Future Motives for War. By Richard N. Lebow. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 295 pp., $27.85 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-17045-1). The Arc of War: Origins, Escalation and Transformation. By Jack S. Levy, William R. Thompson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 280 pp., $24.30 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-226-47629-2). Making War in Cote d'Ivoire. By Mike McGovern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 240 pp., $24.10 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51460-4). Everyone loves war, even those who take a moral stance against it, and even more so those who attend the street parties that have sometimes passed for protest. This is a tongue-in-cheek epigram I use to startle my students, but it has an element of truth. Pacifists define themselves by war. So do states, within international orders, through the principles of non-intervention and defense. Human rights discourse provides a moral case against it and a casus belli when necessary. War, peace, and freedom form an intimate triangle, both rhetorically and in practice. It would be interesting to rigorously explore the proposition that no one presently on Earth has been entirely free from war's effects, but one suspects the case could be made. Small wonder, then, our fascination with it. There may be very little generic left to say about war. Thucydides has spoken to the ages (Thucydides 1829:52–54), leaving the contemporary observer to speak for his own (or to couch eternal verities in the most faddish preoccupations of the moment, as Coker arguably does [Coker 2009]). Clausewitz got around this problem by distinguishing between the eternal nature of war and its ephemeral character (Coker 2010:11). One has only to glance over a list of recent publications on the subject, too numerous to list, to see our fascination borne out in the academic literature on war, peace, ethics, strategy, and defense. One downside of this avalanche is that it makes the task of keeping abreast of it all increasingly difficult, leading to many restated old arguments. Reinvented wheels seem to outnumber the chariots at Megiddo. Heraclitus, the first historian, captured in an epigram, “war is the father of everything,” and in his dedication to the polis (Coker 2010:18, 47), the evolutionary dynamic of war. Coker's work is …