Why War? by John Doe - Pelican Books | History & Political Science Analysis | Perfect for Students, Researchers & History Enthusiasts

Perhaps if we could only figure out why human societies engage in war, we could prevent it. If you pick up this book expecting to arrive at that hopeful conclusion, you are (probably not surprisingly) destined for disappointment. As Richard Overy concludes, “warfare is too diverse and historically widespread to be cured by any single prevailing remedy or remedies.”In roughly 300 pages, Overy (a historian) surveys a wide field of scholarship attempting to answer the question, Why war? The book is split into two parts: the first containing chapters that examine the biological, psychological, anthropological, and ecological motivations for war; the second with chapters that examine war as a battle over resources, belief, power, and security.The first part is the less cohesive of the two. In the realm of biology and psychology, the distinction between individual propensity toward violence and collective violence that could be termed warfare is muddled. The chapter on anthropology could seemingly stand on its own. Here, Overy looks at the latest research and concludes that, contrary to Margaret Mead’s insistence that war is merely a modern invention, there is good evidence that humans engaged in something like warfare or collective violence for at least the past 10,000 to 20,000 years (with the archeological record too thin to support any conclusions farther back in history). Part one ends with a chapter on ecology, examining such concepts as “land carrying capacity” and climate shocks.The second part focuses on more recent history, up to the present, classifying the motivations for war into four broad categories. Toward the end, Overy ruminates on the prospect of nuclear war (still very much a possibility) and raises the specter of cyberwar and warfare in space.Overall, this is an insightful read, written in an engaging style. It is not a hopeful one, however. In the end, I couldn’t help but share Overy’s verdict: “There are scant grounds for thinking that a warless world is about to emerge from the current or future international order.”