 Welcome everyone to this fireside chat. I have with me Chris Blackman. Chris, for those of you working on conflict, doesn't need much of an introduction. For the others, Chris is a professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. He was before at Yale, at Berkeley, and several other places. And he's been for a number of years now doing a series of pioneering research on conflict and political violence in many parts of the world. Chris, thank you very much for joining this UNU wider conference. It's really great to see you again. Yeah, thank you. So we have several young scholars in our audience that were really looking forward to hearing from you. And a lot of questions that I often hear is how does an economist end up working on such a topic as conflict and political violence? How did he end up working in this area of research? Can you tell us a bit about your trajectory up to this point? Sure. Well, I was for a long time been interested in international development. And I was, you know, like, there's this famous saying that once you start thinking about economic growth, it's hard to think about anything else. And I was sort of in that I was thinking about that. And I was working on a fact, I was working on a survey of factories and firms in Kenya, because I was very interested in industrialization. And and then one day to two con men started talking to me at lunch. And while one of them engagement conversation, the other one stole my my laptop. And so I was in an internet cafe for the rest of my trip whenever I needed to send emails. And back in 2004, I think each email took like 10 minutes to load. And so I would chat to the people next to me. And I started chatting to a woman who was working in a humanitarian crisis, who's a psychologist and a PhD student and working in Northern Uganda for many years during the war. And I admit I followed her there because I was mostly interested in her rather than the war. But then I realized that once you start thinking about conflict, it's hard to think about anything else. So we've now been married 15 years, we have two kids. We wrote many of our papers together. And that and that collaboration where we decided to were basically I jumped onto her qualitative study of child soldiering and turned it into also like a mixed methods study by doing the quantitative end. And that sort of launched me on a career of studying conflict. So it was it was sort of love and happenstance. That's a good story. And the best part is my for all the students out there, my dissertation committee told me it was a terrible idea and I shouldn't go. So I defy them as well, unfortunately. But but so yeah, so you never know, you never know, don't listen to your advisors as maybe the punchline of the story. Thank you for that because I think I may have some PhD students in the audience. So yeah, but that tends to be the advice often in this area. So I have a few more questions for Chris, but I see the audience has increased now. And anyone that would like to ask Chris a question, please, you're very welcome to do so. We have a Q&A button. So we don't have a raise hand button like you might be used to. But if you just drop a note there or on the chat, I'll be able to see you and Eva will kindly unmute you and you can ask the question if that's okay with Chris. Okay, until I see someone raising one thing to ask. So let me just carry on. I mentioned to several people that I was going to be talking to you, Chris. And the first thing I was asked is have I been able to see a dance copy of the new book for the record? I haven't yet looking forward to it. But I was hoping, could you tell us a bit about the new book and what is it about? It's entitled Why We Fight. Can you give us an advanced summary of what we can expect? Right. And for the record, I don't have an advanced copy of the book either. It's just gotten submitted for, I just turned in the copy edited version and these things move along slowly and I'll come out in April. So I guess the idea is I was inspired to write this because I talk to people and I read in the newspaper how there's this sense that it's easy to look around and feel like violence is everywhere. And so a lot of people think that war is common place or that it's humanity's natural state. And Patricia, you'd know, as a lot of political scientists know, that's not really true because when it comes down to it, most adversaries don't fight. And we could be talking about ethnic groups. We could be talking about countries. We could be talking about political factions. We could be talking about Chicago or Latin America or Africa. It doesn't really matter. Most enemies compromise and they do that for a really simple reason, which is just war is incredibly destructive. And so people are better off finding some other way, some way to avoid it. And maybe the problem is nobody writes books about these million little compromises. We all read books, we all buy books about wars that happen. And I get that I buy a lot of books about wars that happen, but it ends up distorting our thinking. Partly it makes us think war is everywhere, but it's not. And but actually really most importantly, it makes us get the causes of war wrong because we're only looking at the time something broke down. It's sort of like a doctor that would only look at sick patients and never realize that most people are healthy and never really observe people in the healthy state that's broken. So the book's designed to fix that. And so even so I start off with a book that's called Why We Fight. I actually talk about why we don't fight. But then of course we do sometimes. And so part one of the book is actually about why that breaks down in some cases. And I make an argument that you can put all these explanations like there's a reason for every war and war for every reason. There's basically five types of reasons, five logics. Some of them draw on political science and economics. Some of them draw on on game theory and strategy. Some of them draw on psychology. And then the second part of the book walks us through the paths to peace. So basically how societies resolve these sort of five sources of breakdown. And how they basically every intervention in an institution we have, political institution, peacekeeping, police, whatever it will be, when they work, it's because they actually reverse these sorts of five problems. They make settlements more durable and they sort of get they get enemies back to their natural state, which is to just load one another in peace. And so why do you think are the main motivations that would lead someone to actually fight? I mean, I give these examples sometimes I ask this question actually to my students, which is, you know, we all ordinary people sitting in the room having a seminar. What would it take for you to pick up arms at fight against someone that you might know? And I guess this is the question we all struggle with. Well, I mean, I'd say the five logics that I think cover almost all explanations for conflict. So one is just that whoever's deciding to go to whether or not to fight doesn't bear a lot of the costs or may even have private incentives. So economists and political scientists would call that an agency problem. But we could just think of that as unchecked leaders. So it's maybe in my personal interest to take my group to war. The second thing that and that's maybe the most common in human history, even though it's surprised, it's maybe the least focused on I think in a lot of our academic literature. Then there's then then I think, you know, economists and political scientists have really dwelled on a couple of other sources of war. One is basically uncertainty and private information and different information sets so that basically, I think I'm stronger than I am or I misjudge how strong you are or I'm not sure. And so we have to fight to work that out and working that out, basically trying to figure out how learning by fighting can actually take longer than you might think. And so the third is another sort of game theoretic and strategic, which is that we basically have dynamic incentives that basically I have a window of opportunity to really cement the balance of power in my favor. And if I don't take it, then I'm probably going to be, I think you're going to be more powerful in the future and you're going to take that away from me. And so it's this sort of changing power dynamics over time, which which economists and political scientists call commitment problems. And so those are sort of our three more economic political science game theoretic reasons. But then I also talk about the psychological reasons. One is when groups or their leaders have intrinsic incentives to go to war, either they value violence itself or they value something only violence can deliver. So there's maybe an unwillingness to compromise on certain ideological issues, which could be liberty, which could be religion, it could be something as noble as human rights. And it could be something as base as exterminating the heretic or exterminating the ethnicity or the religion, whoever that you happen to disagree with. And so that's another logic that breaks down these bargains. And the last I would say is what political scientists have called misperceptions, which have to do with all the ways where they misjudge ourselves persistently or misjudge others. So it's like persistently erroneous beliefs, which we're amazingly capable of. So it could be over confidence or could be a misconstrual of your motives and your actions. And so, you know, the book is sort of talking about all the different things that people say. This war happened for this reason, this war happened for that reason, whether it's the first World War or an African civil war or gun violence in Chicago, how we can understand them all through these sort of five lenses. That's really, I mean, that's pretty, that's really insightful. You also have, I noticed you know, the blurb about the book, a very provocative sentence, which is, well, peace is actually easy. It's fighting that is difficult. Why do you think peace is easy? Well, I think a lot of people think, I mean, I guess is the, because we've underestimated how many enemies find it. Like think about, I live in a city in Chicago, which is cleaved by race and class, right? And yet there is no civil war in Chicago, right? There is gun violence and gang violence, that's totally separate, that's a few hundred individuals and totally different. But generally, like there's this incredible divide. And you could say the same thing about the United States, right? There's an incredible polarization and yet there's no conflict. So clearly, we're able to find settlements all the time. And we just don't see it. So, but once you hear that, like you start reading history books, and you'll notice that for every king that takes his country to war, there's like a privy council that's whispering in another king's ear saying, this is too expensive. Or there's some treasurer saying, we can't afford this. And that's what happened. So 99 times out of 100, they don't do it. So that's why it's easier, I think. But if we don't notice that, then we I think we chronically overestimate how difficult it is to achieve. But I guess the difficulty will be once in our conflict is so ingrained for so long. I presume those are the situations where peace, like in everyone else here with Afghanistan comes to mind, right? That's when things become really tricky, right? Yeah. And I think these long ongoing conflicts, one, they fall into warfare and then they sort of have these circular dynamics that can make it harder and harder to resolve. So, you know, those psychological hatreds and those sort of misproject, misperceptions about your enemy and your misjudging of yourself can get worse, right? You may also have these intrinsic incentives to keep fighting nearly out of vengeance and out of a desire for revenge. And there and that the other one of the other buckets I talked about, one of these strategic buckets, commitment problems can get worse in civil wars because at the end of, especially in the civil war where you have to put down your weapons and submit yourself to a government, essentially. And that's profoundly risky because there's an opportunity for a more powerful faction to use that window of opportunity to sort of wipe you out completely. And so once a war is started, it has these dynamics that can actually make it difficult. And that's that I don't want to diminish that, but I do want to point out that most enemies never get there. And so most of the time, but not all of the time, most of the time pieces easier than anything. I fully agree. We have a few requests for questions. I think Collette, Collette Salemi was asking to share with you. Could you click the blue button on the right hand side of Collette? Let's see if we can. Oh, here we go. Hi there. Hi, I didn't realize that video was going to come on. Anyway, so here's a black man. This is really exciting, especially because I feel like you're offering a paradigm shift away from the common economic framework around conflict is very focused on resources. And and I was wondering if you could comment at all on sort of the the persistence of the neo Malthusian framework with respect to resource scarcity leads to violence, how that actually could probably fit in quite well or how we could actually probably better understand those dynamics through the five lenses that you've laid out. Mm hmm. So I mean, it's a great question. It's that's true. The I guess what I would say is that, you know, if we're if we're splitting a pie, the pie could be a policy issue and could be control of territory. It doesn't as long as war is going to cost something as long as war is going to be destructive. It doesn't matter if the pie is very small or extremely large. It's always going to make sense to try to carve up that pie peacefully rather than fight over it. And so resource stocks shouldn't resources and shocks to resources shouldn't really matter. And indeed, I think a lot of the literature says they don't I think partly this comes from a miss, I would say a misinterpretation of regression coefficients where people have regressed conflict on resources or conflicts on shocks to resources, whether it's droughts or prices. And then they they they see a relationship because there is a relationship there, but they forget then that when you regress conflict on these things for every one year where conflict breaks out, you have maybe nine years or 20 years when conflict continues or gets more intense. And so the your regression the thing that you're estimating is totally estimated by the relationship between ongoing and intensifying conflict and resource how big or small it is and what these shocks are. And so and so when you actually separate those things out, you find that there actually isn't much of a relationship between war breaking out and whether you're poor or rich or there's resources or not. There's a tiny bit because it matters a little bit. It's but it's a little bit like it's one of the many idiosyncratic forces that can be destabilizing a big resource shock makes, you know, everybody has to rebar again. Everybody has to find a new settlement. And that's tricky. And so sometimes that breaks down. And just like, you know, a very elderly person who's extremely sick with some chronic disease can die of a cold, right? But if we say like why why did this person die? On the one hand, yes, they died of cold. But but actually it's fundamentally that was there was mother that was a very fragile state that because the fundamentals of the health were poor. And so we just need to we need to still pay attention to the cold, right? Especially in this environment, we have to we have to pay attention. We have to have come up with vaccines and wear masks and and such things. But we have to fundamentally focus on people's health. And that's kind of what the book is is pushing people to do. And there's a question from Yanika Makat. Yanika, do you want to join us? Yep, she does. Hi. Hello. Hi. Hi. Yeah, so I think the least categorizations were really good. I've actually used that in my African politics class, because it kind of like explains the debate in political science between greed versus grievance explanations quite nicely, because then you don't have to debate about the motivations, right? Because these are really good categorizations. But I think I wonder, in terms of like, when we want to test the political implications, and like, are the ways in which we could operationalize these categories, because some of them are quite similar in terms of like, can be empirically non-differentiable of each other, I think. That's a good point. So I'll say a few things. One is, I mean, the first thing I should mention, this isn't my theory of conflict. Like, this is, the book is really me trying to document, maybe bring sort of a unifying framework to what everybody has talked about, and just bring some, and for a, if you were in this literature, and you were steeped in the psychology, you might not know the game theory. And if you know the game theory, you often don't know the psychology. So I'm trying to bring that. So think of this as like a typology of theories rather than a theory. And I think that's what, it's very hard to, so the question is, how do you do diagnosis then? And operationalizing and heuristic thing is, it's so tricky that, you know, when I write about the First World War, or the Peloponnesian War, or a Civil War in Africa, or gun violence in Chicago, the literature can't even agree on what the causes are, right? In fact, they all, and they debate these things endlessly, especially things like the First World War, where this is probably more written. So this is what makes it so challenging, I think, is the fact that it's actually really difficult to diagnose. It's like trying to diagnose a patient who's sick with five or six different ailments, all of which are sort of manifesting in a similar way, and could be any number of different things, and you just have to try to figure it out. And so the last chapter of the book actually is, I call it, the piecemeal engineer, which is sort of after Karl Popper's piecemeal engineer, except now I spell piecemeal piece, like, worn piece. And I talk about how, because this is so difficult, as with any complex or wicked social problem, what we have to do is we have to tinker, and we have to work on the margins, and we have to explore with care, and we have to recognize that a lot of the time we're going to get it wrong, and we're going to make mistakes. And only through that tinkering and experimentation are we ever going to sort this out. Thank you. And I didn't realize that 20 minutes were actually so quick. We almost it's just one final question. I know people are listening to you, as myself, thinking, well, it's a great idea to produce a book like this. I'm sure it will reach why the audiences will reach policymakers, and so forth. And others might be thinking with repudiation about it. What are your views about the importance of a book like this, for us as researchers in trying to reach broader audiences? So do you mean what is the effect of the book on research, or what's the effect on how we speak to? How we speak to the broader public, which I assume is what the book will try to do, right? No, very much. Even from a postdoc, I started my blog, I've been active on social media. This is the point for me. I joined academia, partly because I love the science and the investigation, but mostly I wanted to make social change, and I thought the best way I could do that is to change the conversation. And so that's kind of what I see. I think we as academics underestimate how powerful a tool that is, which is to just sort of change the way many, many people talk about a problem in a room together, and you give them a vocabulary and you give them ideas, and if I could make people think more like piecemeal engineers, which is in some ways the purpose of the book, then I'll probably have done, even if only a few people do so, then that'll be more good than anything else I did with any of my research. Great. We're pretty much out of time, and it's been really great to talk with you, and we haven't even reached other issues around. I mean, if everyone is interested, Chris is also doing an awesome project on gangs, which would be great to hear another opportunity. And I thank you very much, Chris, for your patience and answering the questions and joining us and everyone that joined in. And I hope to see you in Helsinki at some point. Yeah, thank you. Well, thank you so much. It was a pleasure. Thank you.