Abstract:

When did war start? Is it as old as our species (Hobbes), or a late cultural invention that emerged only with agriculture, complex societies and the state (Rousseau)? Travelling through the millennia, is war decreasing in today’s world, and if so what are the nature and causes of this decline? What are the countervailing forces that may undermine the trend as we advance into the 21st century?

About the Speaker:

Azar Gat, Ph.D. earned his doctorate from the University of Oxford. He has been an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in Germany (three times: Freiburg, Munich, Constance), a Fulbright Fellow in the USA (Yale), a British Council Scholar in Britain (Oxford), a Visiting Fellow at the Mershon Center, The Ohio State University, the Goldman Visiting Israeli Professor at Georgetown, and the Koret distinguished Israeli Fellow at the Hoover Institute, Stanford.

He was twice Chair of the Department of Political Science at Tel Aviv University (1999-2003, 2009-2013), is the founder and head of the Executive Master’s Program in Diplomacy and Security, and is the incumbent of the Ezer Weitzman Chair for National Security. He is a Major (res.) in the Israeli army.

He authored War in Human Civilization, Victorious and Vulnerable: Why Democracy Won in the 20th Century and How it is Still Imperiled, A History of Military Thought: From the Enlightenment to the Cold War, British Armour Theory and the Rise of the Panzer Arm: Revising the Revisionists, The Development of Military Thought: The Nineteenth Century, Fascist and Liberal Visions of War: Fuller, Liddell Hart, Douhet, and Other Modernists, and The Origins of Military Thought: From the Enlightenment to Clausewitz.

Organised by IDSS, Military Studies Programme.

The Past and Future of War by Professor Azar Gat