Description
Book SynopsisA unique assessment that challenges humanity''s quest to abolish warfare.The idea that war is going out of style has become the conventional wisdom in recent years. But in Only the Dead, award-winning author Bear Braumoeller demonstrates that it shouldn''t have. With a rare combination of historical expertise, statistical acumen, and accessible prose, Braumoeller shows that the evidence simply doesn''t support the decline-of-war thesis propounded by scholars like Steven Pinker. He argues that the key to understanding trends in warfare lies, not in the spread of humanitarian values, but rather in the formation of international orders--sets of expectations about behavior that allow countries to work in concert, as they did in the Concert of Europe and have done in the postwar Western liberal order. With a nod toward the American sociologist Charles Tilly, who argued that war made the state and the state made war, Braumoeller argues that the same is true of international orders: while the
Trade ReviewBraumoeller's analysis of the data is thoughtful and convincing...Today, with the conditions for a regional war in the Middle East riper than they have been for years, the liberal international order under strain, and the deterioration of U.S.-Chinese relations, Only the Dead makes for sobering reading. * Nikita Lalwani, Yale Law School and Sam Winter-Levy, Princeton University, Foreign Policy *
Overall, the arguments in this book are strong, and the discussion of data issues is subtle throughout. Its arguments seem fundamentally correct to me. * Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution University *
Table of ContentsPreface 1 Introduction 2 Empirical Reasons for Skepticism 3 Theoretical Reasons for Skepticism 4 A Conventional View of War 5 Measuring War 6 A Few Handy Tools 7 Trends in Warfare, 1815-present Notes Index
