[Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization. Oxford University Press. Oxford (New York), 2006. 822 p.]

July 2, 2020

review / Salvador Sánchez Tapia

Among the numerous authors who have written on the war phenomenon in recent decades, the name of Azar Gat shines with its own light. From his Chair at Tel-Aviv University, this author has devoted an important part of his academic degree program to theorize from different angles on the war, a phenomenon that, on the other hand, he knows directly from his condition as a reservist in the Tsahal (Israel Defense Forces).

War in Human Civilization is a monumental work in which the author sample his great erudition, together with his capacity to treat and study the war phenomenon combining the employment of fields of knowledge as diverse as history, Economics, biology, archeology or anthropology, putting them at the service of the goal of his work, which is none other than to elucidate what has moved and moves human groups towards war.

Throughout the almost seven hundred pages of this extensive work, Gat makes a study of the historical evolution of the phenomenon of war in which he combines a chronological approach that we could call "conventional", with another synchronic approach in which he puts in parallel similar stages of evolution of war in different civilizations to compare cultures that, at a given historical moment, were in different Degrees of development and show how in all of them war went through a similar process of evolution.

In his initial approach, Gat promises an analysis that transcends any particular culture to consider the evolution of war in a general way, from its beginning to the present day. The promise, however, is broken when he reaches the medieval period because, from that moment on, he adopts a clearly Eurocentric vision that he justifies with the argument that the Western model of war has been exported to other continents and adopted by other cultures, which, without being totally false, leaves the reader with a somewhat incomplete vision of the phenomenon.

Azar Gat dives into the origin of the human species to try to elucidate if the phenomenon of war makes it different from the rest of the species, and to try to determine if conflict is an innate phenomenon in the species or if, on the contrary, it is a learned behavior.

On the first question, the work concludes that nothing makes us different from other species because, despite Rousseaunian visions based on the "good savage" that were so in vogue in the 1960s, the reality sample is that intra-species violence, which was considered unique to humans, is in fact something shared with other species. Regarding the second question, Gat adopts an eclectic position according to which aggressiveness would be both innate and optional; a basic survival option that is exercised, however, in an optional manner, and which is developed through social learning.

Throughout the historical journey of the work, the idea, formulated in the first chapters, that the ultimate causes of war are evolutionary in nature and have to do with the struggle for the survival of the species, appears as a leitmotiv.

According to this approach, conflict would have its origin in the competition for resources and better reproductive opportunities. Although the human development towards increasingly complex societies has ended up obscuring it, this logic would still guide human behavior today, fundamentally through the bequest of proximate mechanisms implied by human desires.

An important chapter in the book is the author's dissection of the theory, first advanced during the Enlightenment, of the Democratic Peace. Gat does not refute the theory, but puts it in a new light. If, in its original definition, it advocates that liberal and democratic regimes are averse to war and that, therefore, the expansion of liberalism will advance peace among nations, Gat argues that it is the growth of wealth that really serves that expansion, and that welfare and the interrelationship favored by trade are the real engines of democratic peace.

Two are, then, the two main conclusions of the work: that conflict is the rule in a nature in which organisms compete with each other for survival and reproduction in an environment of scarce resources, and that, recently, the development of liberalism in the Western world has generated in this environment a feeling of repugnance towards war that translates into an almost absolute rejection of it in favor of other strategies based on cooperation.

Azar Gat recognizes that an important part of the human race is still far from liberal and democratic models, much more from the attainment of the Degree welfare and wealth that, in his view, goes hand in hand with the rejection of war. Although he does not say it openly, it can be inferred from his speech that this is, nevertheless, the direction towards which humanity is heading and that, the day it reaches the necessary conditions for this, war will finally be eradicated from the Earth.

Against this idea, one could argue the ever-present possibility of regression of the liberal system due to the demographic pressure to which it is subjected, or because of some global event that provokes it; or that other systems, equally rich but not liberal, replace the world of democracies in world domination.

The work is a reference letter must for any scholar or reader interested in the nature and evolution of the war phenomenon. Written with great erudition, and with a profusion of data that, at times, makes it a bit rough, War in Human Civilization is, without a doubt, an important contribution to the knowledge of war that is essential reading.