 Good morning, and welcome. My name is Joe Hewitt. I'm the Vice President for Policy Learning and Strategy here at USIP. Thank you for joining us this morning for a conversation with Chris Blatman, the author of the recent book, Why We Fight, The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace. As you'll hear in just a few minutes, the book draws from decades of research in economics, political science, and psychology to better understand the root causes for violent conflict, as well as the pathways to peace. And here's one of the big things that the book imparts to the reader about violent conflict. It's not the norm. It's not the norm. Hostile rivals far more often figure out ways to compromise. In the exceptional cases when rivalries turn violent, the cause can be traced to five factors that undermine the potential for rivals to de-escalate and compromise. It's through the logic of those five destabilizing factors that we learn a lot about how to steer potentially violent conflicts toward peace. You're about to hear a lot more about this, and I'm betting you'll find the next hour to be really engaging. Chris Blatman is the Ramali E. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies at the University of Chicago in the Harris School of Public Policy and the Pearson Institute. He also co-leads the University's Development Economic Center, as well as the Obama Foundation Scholars Program. He's an economist and a political scientist, and his global work on violence, crime, and poverty has been widely covered by several major media outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and many more. Why We Fight has already been recommended as a best book by the Financial Times, the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Amazon. And I might add, USIP had the privilege of providing support to his dissertation research as a USIP peace scholar not too many years ago. To leave the conversation with Chris, I'm really delighted to introduce Raj Kumar. Raj is the founding president and editor-in-chief of DEVX, the media platform for the development community. DEVX was created in 2000 by Raj and his collaborators to connect and inform development professionals all over the world. Today, DEVX serves a global audience of more than a million workers and development professionals. He is also, if I might add, a truly gifted moderator with a knack for drawing out key insights, whether he's speaking with senior government officials, acclaimed thought leaders, or any other global leader. Raj, thanks so much for taking time from your busy schedule to join us today. I'm going to hand things over to you now. Thank you. Thank you, Joe. And thanks to all of you who are joining us virtually from all over the world for what I'm sure is going to be a really interesting conversation. I'm here with Chris Blatman, who, if you're like me, you may know him from Twitter. You may know him from his podcasts and from his media appearances. But it's our first time meeting in person. And I'm so excited to get a chance to have this discussion with you, Chris. Great to be with you. Congrats on this book, Why We Fight. It's a pretty bold and provocative title. And it's ambitious. I mean, you're setting out to essentially describe why in the full history of human civilization groups of people, gangs, or countries, societies of different forms engage in prolonged violent struggle. That is an ambitious goal. What made you want to set out to try to build an algorithm or a framework for understanding that question? Right. Well, thanks for being here. It was born of frustration that nobody else was writing this book. This is a book that, I mean, a little bit is my own ideas and my own research and a lot of my own stories. But it's, I mean, there's 50 hundred more years of brilliant scholars, all these disciplines, all the lessons of practical peace builders, and I couldn't believe how many of these insights that I'd learned and acquired and all the great thinkers that I'd encountered in the big ideas that rotated my brain 90 degrees every time I read about them that hadn't gotten out there, that the village leaders or gang leaders or world leaders, all these people I met, don't know. And so that seemed kind of a problem. And year after year, nobody else wrote this book. And so finally, I said, I'm going to write this book because it's too important. I mean, it's ambitious because you are boiling down a lot of thought. And the book is filled with interesting stories and insights but that you boil down to these logics. It's kind of a framework for understanding why people fight. And not just any conflict, but specifically these prolonged violence struggles between groups. What are the implications for understanding that? I mean, why does this matter to be able to have a framework versus to, I guess, the thinking that existed before this book came out and people had their own ideas for why violence like this exists? So I mean, it feels like there's a war for every reason and reason for every war. And this is true. But it's kind of overwhelming. And it almost seems to kind of make it feel hopeless. And then all these people argue, and it seems like everyone's a cross-purposist. And how do we solve that problem? And I think what these social sciences have given us is actually a framework for actually simplifying this and recognizing that there's only so many reasons. And so a lot of these millions and millions of reasons to draw valid are sort of a few logics in disguise. And so I'm not trying to say my book is wrong. All the other books are right. My book is right. All the other books are wrong. I'm trying to say here's a lens through which you could just sort of make order of the chaos and make a lot more sense. And therefore, sort of like a tool that a doctor gets for diagnosing and understanding disease better, makes us then maybe better at designing and testing treatments. And that's sort of the hope and the goal. You may not be saying all the other books are wrong. But in a sense, you're critiquing the way peace-building conflict resolution is thought of and approached today. Is that right? I mean, we're here at the US Institute of Peace. There is a huge global infrastructure of governments and agencies and NGOs and others that are working on peace-building. And it seems like your logic, your framework, suggests some people are getting this wrong. What do you think people are getting wrong today? I think there's a couple of things. I think like the five logics that come from psychology and political science and economics. The one thing that drives all of the five logics that makes everything worse, that I think we don't focus enough on, is concentrated power. I think that and as a country in the United States, as a government, as development agencies, our entire diplomatic system, our entire aid system, I think is designed more often than not to make power more concentrated rather than more checked and balanced. And I think that's bad for policy. I think that's bad for development outcomes. I think that's bad for ordinary people. And I think it's really bad for political stability. And so if there's like one meta message that comes out at the end of the book, it's that if we had to focus more on one thing, we'd actually be actually trying to check in balance power more in the world. Maybe let's try to tease that out using the example of Ukraine since it's so much in the news today. You've got this concept of war bias. And you talk about how when there is concentrated power, thinking kind of through game theory that leaders of countries might be able to really get away with war with few consequences to themselves. And their people might face most of those negative consequences. And if they win or if the war is beneficial, it might be very beneficial to those very leaders who are concentrated in power. Is that the case here as you assess the situation Ukraine is this kind of Putin's war due to the concentration of power that he has in Russia? Yes, but for several reasons, all five of the reasons. So, you know, but like stepping back for a minute, like every, if people remembered one thing, like every answer to why we fight is a reason that we as a society or our leaders ignored the costs because war is ruinous. We can see that. And it's that ruinousness of war that leads most societies to actually just find some other bitter but peaceful way to sort of find a deal or a settlement or a stalemate. But those costs are not equally shared, right? And that's kind of your point about concentration of power. Exactly. And so one of the ways that we find ourselves fighting is when the people who decide whether or not we fight don't bear a lot of those costs or might even have some private interest that they can pursue that benefits them but not their group. And the ultimate example of that is a personalized dictator, right? And Putin is to a large extent a personalized dictator. And I don't know, we don't know the counterfactual of history but I think if Russia was run by a Politburo instead of a personalized dictator or if it was run by a plutocracy rather than a Politburo, something more and more checked, like it's not like I love crony capitalism, right? But crony capitalism in Russia might have saved us from this invasion because more and more people would have been considering some of the costs of this conflict. And I think the fact that he doesn't, I think it was maybe one of the things that really, there was even some hope at the beginning of this that maybe the Russian billionaires would be able to exert influence and that was part of the sanctions regime put in place. This idea that that's a kind of check, as you're saying. Yeah, and it can be. And I think it was, and that might, and that's to some degree true. I'm not, I don't pretend to be a Russia expert but my understanding is that they weren't, that really wasn't really where the power resided and Putin had made himself such a powerful personalized autocrat by really fragmenting all that opposition and all those billionaires and capitalists and sort of binding them to him. And he was very, very skillful at that. And I think that in some sense was one of the most volatile things with this whole situation. Let's say with some of the other logics because I think you also talk about this idea of injustice. And maybe that relates to concentration of power, right? That you have these leaders who are so separate from their people that it's easier for them to inflict indignities on them. And then that creates a sense of injustice and populations say, well, it almost doesn't matter the cost of war anymore. I'm going against the sense of injustice. Does that play out in some way in the Ukraine conflict? Or explain maybe that and some of the other logics, how they all fit together here. Right, so we might, so the first one is we might ignore some of the costs of war, but the second one, which I think of as sort of ideologies or intangibles, including justice, glory, nationalistic ideals, ethno-nationalism, all these sorts of things, these ethereal things that we or our leaders may value, we were willing to pay the cost of war to get them, to exterminate the heretic, to accomplish our ideological vision of a greater empire. And every story we hear about Putin's pursuit of personal glory and a place in history, every story we hear about his vision of a greater Russia or rectifying these humiliations of the last three decades, those are stories of Russia or maybe more particularly Putin and his cabal pursuing an ideological agenda that makes them willing to pay the cost of war. So they're not ignoring them, but they're willing to pay them for this ethereal other thing that they value, and it helps that they don't bear most of the costs of that war personally because now they can pursue their ideological ideals. These two things often interact in this pretty terrible way. What are some of the other things that interact that you think cause these conflicts to go on and be so prolonged? Right, so the other three I call misperceptions, uncertainty, and commitment problems, and they're really core ideas that I think come from psychology and strategy, game theory essentially, but not complicated game theory. Game theory that any poker player or person who negotiates for a used car already understands but just forgets to apply to. And you describe it all with these pie charts in the book that are fairly easy to understand that show you kind of the gap between what you could get or might lose. Yeah, I mean it's kind of a tragedy that there are these sorts of really deep strategic insights that we all kind of understand on some level and we just need to be shown that we need to kind of learn to recognize it in the wild. So let's take uncertainty, for example, okay. Five months ago before this ignited, nobody knew exactly how strong the military in Russia was going to be. Nobody knew exactly how lucky and resourceful the Ukrainians and their military was going to be, and nobody knew how unified the West would be on sanctions. And all of the things that came to pass were within the realm of possibility, but I don't think anybody predicted that Russia would get a bad draw on all three of those things, least of all Vladimir Putin. And that fundamental uncertainty itself can sort of lead war to be a gamble in many cases, right? And we look back and we say, oh, that was a mistake, he miscalculated. Well, that's also true, we'll get to those misperceptions in a second, but let's not forget just how fundamentally uncertain these things are. And so that's just a fact that's hard to resolve and can lead to war, but it's worse than that. And this is where the strategy comes in. It's because, and this is where the poker playing comes in. Like, I don't know what cards you hold. And now you're saying, oh, I'm really resolved. You don't invade, it's like, we're gonna be with sanctions and our military will resist. And I'm like, hmm, maybe you're bluffing. Do I believe you or not? Yeah, because I know you have an incentive to fake it as well. And so just as in poker, your optimal strategy is never to fold all the time. And your optimal strategy is never to call all the time, right, it's a gamble. And so those invasions, those skirmishes and all sorts of things that are a product of uncertainty. And we shouldn't ignore that, right? Then there's the misperceptions and all these stories you hear about Putin being insulated, isolated, and overconfident, underestimating the cost. That's another way we ignore the costs of war, right? We just systematically underestimate that cost-benefit calculus. That is also true, I think, in this situation. But some of that's just due to the general uncertainty. And the mistake we often make is we attribute a lot of the stuff to mistakes. And we forget sort of that really basic, almost universal problem and conflict at every level of uncertainty. What about misperceptions and the commitment problem? Tell it, take us through that quickly and I want to bring us to some other concepts. So I mean misperceptions, I think, comes really, I don't need to dwell on it because so many people recognize it instantly. It's this idea that Putin's insulated, isolated, either institutionally he's getting bad information because of this is what dictatorships and really a lot of intelligence agencies do is they filter bad information up to the top, unfortunately. But psychologically, the idea that he like, many leaders is overconfident. And we know leaders can be, we wouldn't have a mutual fund industry if we didn't have people overconfident their ability to beat the market wrongly year after year, right? So we know that and it works in politics too. The last, the fifth one, the fifth reason we can overlook the cost is this sort of, it's like one of the more difficult, subtle but important, I think, understandings of all of politics and all of human development. Because it's everywhere and it's called a commitment problem. One of the worst names in political science. There's an old Iraqi adage that says, if you think your opponent's going to eat you for dinner, you better eat them for lunch. That captures a really core insight of the commitment problem. And if I think that you're gonna have an advantage over me in future that you can exploit, and I'll be at, and I'm at a temporary advantage now, I would rather not fight. I'd rather you commit not to use your advantage in the future, right? We write a constitution, we write a treaty, we find an enforcer. We do this all the time. We solve commitment problems all the time. But sometimes, especially with big powers or especially in the international scene where we have a degree of anarchy, they can't commit. And so I better eat you for lunch. And that explains, people use these commitment problem logics to explain many of the greatest wars in history from the Peloponnesian War in ancient Greece to World War I, to the US invasion of Iraq. Really fundamental. It's not, I'd say, the most important thing to understand the Ukraine conflict, but it is important to understand, I think, in the sense that, arguably Russia was at its peak leverage vis-a-vis Ukraine and Europe five, six months ago, and it was going to be downhill from there, in terms of- The sense was they might join NATO. They might, therefore, be impossible to invade or more difficult to invade. Even with the NATO bit, which I think we talk about too much, not irrelevant. I just mean in the sense of Ukraine was headed in a more ideologically democratic direction in a way that its politicians and its people were going to refuse to tolerate interference and segregation the same way that, say, Belarus has accepted that. That was moving in a bad direction, I mean a good direction, from my perspective, bad direction for Putin's. They were also getting better at defending themselves. They just acquired Turkish drones. They're going to get a lot more Turkish drones. We've all seen how important these are. Neptune missiles, they were developing them, and we've seen how effective these have been, at least somewhat in sinking warships, and then maybe they would get long range weaponry from NATO or, but even without the NATO thing, they were, Russia was losing leverage. Their advantage was starting to slowly shrink. So there was a closing window of opportunity. I don't think it was totally closing. I don't think that's the main reason, but I think it helps us, it contributes amidst these other four factors. I think it helps us understand some of the timing and some of the motivations. So let's get into then what do you do about it, right? And that seems to be a motivating theme of your book. Yeah. As I said, there's a big peace-building industry. There are experts and professionals around the world working on these issues. What do you think are the insights out of those five logics that should change the way they work? Yeah. So every path of peace we have that works is operating through one of these five logics. And you're right that you said earlier, we do a lot of stuff that doesn't work. But actually, I'm kind of impressed. I look at a lot of the things that we do, and I emerge a lot more confident. Everything from mediation, peacekeeping, sanctions, on and on and on. The tools that we have for international wars, civil wars, gang wars, village wars are, they're not great. We can do a lot better. They actually often do pretty well, or they help a little bit, and when they do, they help because they're rolling back the five factors. And so it's like a lens to look through these things. So what does a mediator do? So what role is Turkey or Turkey and Israel trying to play? Well, mediators are trying to reduce uncertainty by encouraging conversations through both sides. So instead of learning through fighting, which is what happens, you can also learn through mediation and conversation. And trying to sort of get rid of that bluffing thing by trying to be credible and a lock-eater between both sides, okay? That's a big, they're also, commitment problems are like finding that commitment deal is tricky. You need like some, it's not always hard to find. Mediators are really good at finding those things. And then mediators are also trying to get our mis, get like riddice of our misperceptions. You talk to them and what they do day to day. And I mean this for like a lawyer who does mediation between business disputes or somebody like Jonathan Powell who writes books about being an international mediator in his own country or abroad. And a lot of it is about trying to erode misperceptions that these leaders hold on to. And so, and they're effective. And we've evidence that they're effective because they're doing this. And so that's just one example. Let's think about what this means. And I want to soon go to people who are following along and might want to add their own questions. So please go ahead and start doing that. But what does it mean in the current context, right? You're saying something which is a little bit counter-intuitive which is that actually the most common state of affairs is peace. And that a lot of what we're doing to try to avoid conflict is working or there's some seeds of success in that. On the other hand, if you look at what we write about every day at DevX, you look at the broader mainstream media, what you hear about is conflict. And it's often driven because of things like climate. There's a sense that people are on the move, that they're scarce water resources that yields of crops are going down and this is affecting peace and stability in countries. Now we have a food crisis that's budding and that many experts tell us could be worse than what happened during the Arab Spring, 2008, 2011 or so. How do you see that context that we're in now and is your lens on this a bit different maybe than the way it's normally perceived to places like USIP? So I wanted to take these shocks, these terrible things that are happening like the climate and food crisis seriously at the same time I want to put them in perspective. Let me get to that in a second. Let me start by about two weeks into the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I'm scrolling through my phone. It takes me about 17 scrolls to get past the Ukraine news. And there's this little story about India. Yesterday India launched a cruise missile accidentally at Pakistan in peace and soup. And as it has for decades. Now if a war had broken out at that moment in Pakistan we would all know what the articles would look like and how this war was inevitable and long brewing, what were the causes of this war but actually peace breaks out every day to some degree over Kashmir and some of these other issues. Or at least it stays very contained, the violence is contained in low scale. So that's the norm and it's also the norm in Russia in the sense that Russia has lots of neighbors that it's tried to subjugate successfully actually without violence, sorry, with lots of repression but without a war. So I'm not trying to say there's no repression and no threats. I'm trying to say there wasn't prolonged fighting between the two sides. And indeed in Ukraine they tried for 20 years. Every other trick in the book, propaganda, dark money, poisonings, on and on and on without like, invasion was the last resort. Okay, so we need to keep this in perspective. So like a doctor, let's focus on the terminal but let's not forget that most people are healthy. And is it valid to think of violent struggle as that distinct from those other means of persuasion, assassinations, repression? Is that a useful construct to separate those at just given the costs of violent struggle being so much worse? Or in a sense is it really all one continuum? Well there's a continuum of course of violent. I mean I do think there's a big, I think everyone would agree there's a categorical difference between this pitched battle that has killed more soldiers and more people and more civilians, even less on the Russian side than their long war in Afghanistan and what they were doing before. Which was this quiet kind of evil meddling. Which frankly all great powers do. And so yeah, I think there's a qualitative and quantitative difference between the nefarious things we do that are not as violent like drone strikes and cyber attacks and propaganda and disinformation. I don't want, I'm not trying to say these things are good anymore. I'm just trying to say like I'd rather people use that than war and of course there's other tools I'd rather than use than these nefarious ones. But to get back to the point about like food and climate, these are important but like what I think, listen when you look at all the water scarcity incidents and you actually count how many become violent, it's very very few, right? Cause war's always ruinous. And so you always strive to avoid it and so just because there's something to be conflicted over, just cause the pie shrinks fighting still destroys the share of the pie so we try to avoid it, right? And the scarcer water is maybe the less you even want to fight over it because it's really detrimental. And so actually there isn't really much association between water scarcity and war. And there's not that much scarcity between sudden shocks to commodity prices and the outbreak of conflict. So you see people in the streets, they're protesting but that doesn't lead to a violent revolution which leads to prolonged civil war in most cases. I mean sometimes it does. Like look at the Arab Spring. Rising food prices can be a contributing factor to unrest. I'm not saying these things don't create unrest. Unrest is important but then most political change happens without that turning more violent and turning into a violent revolution, right? History, democratization, political change throughout history is mostly revolutions without violent revolt. It's political elites capitulating or just granting a little bit of ground to the masses when they get more power. And it's the masses capitulating a little bit to the elites when the elites get a little bit more powerful. But then of course we do have Syria and we do have Libya, there have been some violent. So it's not to say that there's no risk. It's just to at least remember that most places that will have unrest won't actually, this won't turn into violence. The incentives are not for violence. We should be laser focused on trying to identify the circumstances that are gonna actually lead that politics to turn into bloodshed, right? Bargaining by other means. You feel like we can do that? Do we today have the ability, you and your colleagues who look at these things or people in US government agencies in the State Department or USAID, do they have the ability today to kind of bring your five logics, bring this algorithm to individual contexts and say that's a place where a small spark, maybe food prices could actually lead to prolonged violent conflict? Absolutely not. I would sell a lot more books if I pretended we had that answer. I think we're rotten at prediction. I actually tried my hand, a lot of big data machine learning in countries with really rich data come up almost empty to some degree because I think what we're really good at, we can use these tools to identify the smaller set of places that are at high risk, that are fragile in the sense that each of these five factors have accumulated. That's what fragility is. Fragility means each of these five factors of this sort of shrunk that the costs that our leaders are paying attention to to such a tiny sliver that just any perturbation can set things off. And then we just don't know where, because that gravitational pull is so strong in so many places, we know most of these places shocked are probably not gonna go into, turn into bloodshed, but going back to what we were saying, what accentuates commitment problems, uncertainty, misperceptions, ideological incentives and like these unchecked interests is centralized power, because dictators can't make credible commitments. We're not sure what's going on in their mind. We're vulnerable to this misperception. We're vulnerable to their ideologies and then they don't pay attention to most of the costs. So if I had to like pick one thing to focus on, I would say look at the places where power is more concentrated and where did that, where did that like some of the worst stuff break out like Syria and Libya is not to me so surprising. There's a big theme and we're about to get into some of the questions here but there's a big theme in the global development sector about localization, country ownership and at least part of that is saying, hey we should work more through governments and of course there are countries like Rwanda that are considered donor darlings, very successful states in terms of the way they coordinate development activities and have some good development results but there's a lot of centralized power there. Do you think we're getting that wrong as a global development community that we should be perhaps not investing so much directly through governments? I mean frankly we're not doing that much of it but there's a theme of a discussion point that we should do more and maybe do more through civil society and local groups. Are we falling into a trap of some kind that may lead to future violent conflict? So a localization, the answer to localization it depends. Are we contributing to the problem of concentration of power and few checks and balances in that society with this development assistance or diplomatic approach or are we on the margin trying to make it a little bit better and that's the best and as an outsider there's not much you can do but you have a choice. I can drop a truckloads of money in the finance ministry who really probably is just listening to the president or we can drop it out of helicopters through community driven development programs, metaphorically so to speak, right? Give directly or these kinds of things. Could be there give directly but could even be like a very common approach is just a sort of community development grant like grants to villages, grants to mayors, like that's a choice we make and one of those concentrates power and decision making and one of them doesn't. We can choose to empower and try to do things, the United States is pretty good at private sector development, right? Even though I mean a development apparatus isn't that good compared to other bilaterals but we're pretty good at that. That's a kind of check and balance building up a middle class and industrial class, crony capitalist, right? I would love for Paul Kagame to be constrained by more crony capitalist. That would help a little bit even if it's not enough. And then rejecting this idea of coddling the melissanauis and the Paul Kagame's, I mean super convenient to sort of deal with one of these people, especially if they're at their benevolent stage, not at the stage where clinging on to power, trying to pass power onto their crony or their son or their daughter, they just take the country down the drain, which is just sort of the second act in almost every single one of these cases and somehow we forget that. So we may see like great development gains that actually improve people's lives for a decade or two decades or three but we're doing that at the cost potentially of some long-term violent struggle because we're empowering this centralization. I mean you look at the data on the great growth successes of the last century and a lot of them happen under these personalized dictatorships and a lot of the great growth failures happen under these personalized dictatorships and then you really look at the data and you realize it's the same dictatorship. They take them up and they take them down and there's very few and then we're like, oh, what about Lee Kuan Yee? Well, yes, we can cherry pick one or two instances where they actually checked and balanced themselves and their institutions and didn't fall down that trap but that almost never happens. The slow, steady progress in development and good policy is happening by these checked and balanced regimes. So we've got a number of questions that have come in and I wanted to start getting to some of these from the audience and we can sort of tease out some of the insights from your book. You know, you talk a lot about being incremental. So the way the book ends is you talk about this idea of piecemeal engineers, this idea that you're gonna build piece but you're gonna do it in a small state, small way, step by step and not try to come in with a big vision and you break that down into these basically 10 commandments of piecebuilding. What do you think about this idea of being incremental and what should policymakers expect from piecebuilding and in what time frame given your approach? You know, I imagine right now there are people on the Hill saying we've gotta end the war in Ukraine today but your approach seems smaller scale, more piecemeal, slower. How do these things fit together? Yeah, well let me say, I mean like how you end a book like this is like a big problem. Most books fail at the end and they fail in a couple ways I think or one so good friend and a long time mentor, early mentor of mine, Bill Easterly whose books end on sort of a there's nothing you can do you might as well just give up. I didn't wanna write that book because Bill and I disagree there in a good natured way. One of my other early mentors is Jeff Sacks and someone I also admire and I love their book is Steven Pinker and these are books that sort of end with grand optimism and grand plans and I disagree with them as well and so I didn't wanna end the book with like everything's gonna get better and here's your 10 step plan to piece. So how do I do it? And I took a page from someone I always, someone who's sort of deeply influential in my thinking and I think an idea that's deeply influential through all the great development thinking and piece building thinking that's out there which starts with Carl Popper and the idea of piecemeal engineering and that's where I get the title. I try to make it cute but I think it's like a dad joke instead of spelling it piecemeal with P-I-E-C-E I tell it piece with P-E-A-C-E and I try to show how every great success in policy, development, immigration, cities, every facet of human society has actually been made by people who are engaged in sort of not trying to make grand steps but trying to make incremental steps and are doing so in a way that they're trying to tell whether or not what they're doing makes a difference and it occurred to me that all of the thinkers from all these facets of life that had influenced me were saying the same thing but we had to apply it to piece building and so through the last chapter of the book kind of charts out how that can work. Yeah, Carl Popper who was of course a famous philosopher of science and was applying that idea to everything in public policy and you're saying it's also applicable to people here. And to science, and to how we make progress in science. And it's part of it's like incremental changes trying things and seeing they don't work and then trying the next thing, right? Iterating as you go. We've got another question that's come in that talks about the context and it's about social media. And saying that social media platforms have been creating this idea of competing truths. And does this weaken the opportunity to have checks and balances without violence? Maybe it's part of your uncertainty logic but this idea that you may have different parties and you talk about a mediator kind of getting people on the same page different parties that are very much on different pages. They don't even agree on the basic facts and that social media maybe has changed that dynamic. What's your take on it? So, I don't really see like a first order. I'm not sure this is gonna ramp up or ramp down conflict in any way because I don't really see how it's changing any of these big five kinds of reasons. On the margin though, I actually am a little bit optimistic in the sense that it's been an incredibly democratizing thing in the set of voices. Expert voices but also angry voices of non-experts have been sort of given a platform to exchange a lot of different information and ideas. And I think I know a lot more about what's as an expert on conflict but someone who doesn't know anything really about Russia and Ukraine. I think I'm more knowledgeable and I'm checked and when I make mistakes I'm corrected more quickly because of this platform we've created. This one would have happened 10 years ago. I would have dwelled and stood in my ignorance a little bit longer than I have. And so I sort of see this actually as a positive force for sort of checking and balancing a lot of bad expert ideas. And it's not a fundamental shift of the landscape. It's important maybe but it doesn't completely change and throw out the way that you've studied conflict as it's existed over many years. The way I see technology now is we have this incentive not to fight, right? But one side can be stronger than the other. A lot of struggles in a lot of countries is between a government controlled by a small elite cabal who've subjugated the masses. And I think social media for a while was something that actually strengthened the mobilizational power of the broader masses. And then without coming to violence brought them more freedom and brought more accountability to the elite. So it was like a bargaining tool that was affecting how much of the pie either side got. And now we're starting to see it potentially shift in the other direction where the governments have figured this out and are using it to sort of control and disinform and disorganize the masses. So I don't think it's causing more or less conflict. I think it's more that it's shifting the bargaining power of either side in these struggles in ways that are shifting and hard to predict. But I don't think it's causing more or less violence. So we talk a little about mediation and we've got a question related to that, which is sort of like who should the mediator be? Is there a difference whether it's a nation state? You use Turkey as an example. Or the UN or some other independent, non-nation state bodies and neutral organization. Have you seen anything there that's kind of thematic that works? So my day job isn't talking to mediators at this high level in figuring out the Ukraine-Russia conflict. My day job is working in civil wars, is working in inter-ethnic conflicts between villages, is working in gang conflicts. And so the mediation I see is at that level. But what gave me insight into the high level mediation was like running experiments, running tests of what the mediators do and why did they work. And that's how I discovered at this more village, gang, civil war level that the role that mediators were playing in reducing uncertainty, reducing misperceptions, reducing commitment problems, and then finding quantitative evidence that they work at this scale. I think we can extrapolate a lot from that. I think the mediators who spend a lot of time thinking about the shape of the table, and there's a lot of nonsense, I think. I think the mediators who spend more time thinking about finding settlements and thinking about these problems, and a lot of them do, right? They don't write it the same way I wrote this in the book. I sort of translated it into kind of like social science to some degree, but I think there's some who really get it. And I think the ones who are a little bit less focused on shapes of the table, a little bit more focused on actually how do we create more reasonable bargainers and help people reach settlements is maybe like the first basic principle. I don't know if that answers their question. There's another interesting question that came in, because you talk about the cost of war being so high, and that that's why for the most part, people choose peace. What about when nuclear weapons are involved? Are you convinced by the idea of a nuclear peace? And let's say, use a counterfactual, let's say Ukraine had nuclear weapons. Would that have changed this dynamic? Because the cost of war is so much higher for Russia, in that case they would have never invaded. How do you see nuclear weapons? Well, nobody should ever be convinced of anything, because the number one thing, if anybody's certain about the cause of war, they're certain about their peace, they know they're wrong, because there's just too much a chance here, and there's no certainty. A nuclear, being mutually nuclear armed and this threat of mutual assured destruction is the ultimate deterrence strategy. It is because war is so costly that India and Pakistan didn't go to war over this cruise missile, and we didn't, you know, in the United States, have a direct conflict with the USSR for so many years, right? So it works almost all of the time, I think, is maybe, but that's not maybe good enough, because that tiny little chance, and I think it is tiny, is just so disastrous that just having these weapons around in that capacity for mutual destruction is maybe one of the most dangerous things on the planet. Right, so the costs are so high that it might reduce the incidents, but if and when there is a nuclear war, it's that bad that it takes away all of the maybe peace benefit, peace dividend you had in those prior years. Yeah, I mean, because I think it's, like I said, war doesn't happen most of the time, but I didn't write a book called Why We Don't Fight, because it can happen because of these circumstances. We're seeing circumstances. Now we can imagine how this could come about, even if it's very, very tiny, and I think we need to do more of that. So one of the topics you hear around the US Institute of Peace for the last several years is the idea of a global fragility act, which was passed by Congress. And I guess it implicates US government policy on these very issues, and it talks about things like getting local, and it talks about really having more of a whole of government strategy from the US. I guess I wonder, are there some takeaways from your book, from your research, on the way the US government approaches these issues of mitigating or stopping conflict? Is the US government getting it right, getting it wrong? What are some takeaways for you? That's a key question we've gotten here. So the way it's framed and written, it could either be good or bad. It says let's localize, but as we've already said, you could localize and make things worse. It says set a strategy, which is great, but if their strategy is let's continue to coddle the Kagames and the Melissan Awees of the world, which is, to some extent, our basic, diplomatic approach much of the time, then rather than looking back to our own founders like James Madison and taking some inspiration from what made this country successful, I think we can end up with the wrong strategy. I think we could get distracted by things that are important in general, like reducing climate change, but are maybe second or third order when it comes to, I think, conflict prevention. So there's a lot of risks there. So it's kind of like a big, it depends. I think if, but on the other hand, if it was a strategy, and it's good to think, and if they focus, everyone loves to sort of focus on coordinating better, which is such a bureaucratic thing to do, of course, if we should do it somewhat. But on the other hand, if that strategy that eventually emerges, I think, looked through this lens, not my lens, the lens that comes from decades of like the most brilliant minds that I've just tried to distill, then I think, then I feel more optimistic, right? And that's kind of the reason I put this together because I at least want people to reject it. Read the book, reject it, but think about, maybe we should be trying to reduce uncertainties between rivals. We should be trying to find ways to reduce misperceptions. We should be finding, we should be building international institutions and then not rejecting them but joining them that actually try to create commitment and that try to hold unchecked leaders and people pursuing ideological objectives accountable. That to me would be real progress. It sounds like if we boil it down, the main critique you have of U.S. government policy in this area is that we are helping power become more centralized in many cases. Often but not always, we're ignorant of that as like one of the fundamental criteria that we should be considering every time an opportunity crosses a desk. We are not recognizing that I think, and I think this is the message of almost every great thinker in development or public policy of the last 50 years. When people have gone and actually said what worked and what went, why did some countries get ahead and why did some countries break? It basically comes down to concentrated unaccountable power is like the root cause of, and this is Jane Jacobs explaining why some American cities succeed and fail. This is James Scott explaining why some states have been oppressive and successful. This is just goes on and on. It's not even about conflict. And I think if we just brought that criterion to everything we do, amongst the other criterion that we have to evaluate, like is this a quality project? Or is this like gonna be cost-effective? Lots of criteria that come naturally. Is this going to concentrate power in society or not? Is like the fundamental thing that I think is just gonna lead to good or bad outcomes in the medium and long run for these places. And we just don't ask that question very much. Yeah, it's just not on our, you know, the job of I think an academic like me, the job of DEV-X, the job of USIP, I think is to try to change the conversation, to try to basically have these things come to front of mind for people. And if that's the one thing I would have come to front of mind as a result of like, what's the path to peace? That would be it for me. You kind of as an aside earlier mentioned that the US government's bilateral aid is not as effective as some other countries. And you mentioned Jane Jacobs right now. And I guess the example you talk about with her in the book is that she was critical of the kind of grand visionaries around city planning, you know, and who would come in and say, let's completely plan this entire city. And she said, well, why don't we just listen to the people and let people design their own city? Is that the critique of the US bilateral aid program? Why do you think it's not as effective? Is it because we have a grand vision? And we kind of lead with that as opposed to listening on the ground? So I think it happens on many levels, but let me put it in like a little simple, concrete way that like the average person, I think, who's like an ambassador or sitting at the desk of somewhere in USAID or some NGO or whatever, they're confronted, they're like, we have to do this thing, this project, we've got an objective we want to obtain over the next five years and we've got some donor that's gonna give us money or you're the donor that has to decide. Here's how most of these things happen. Years one, you write out exactly what you're gonna do from the outset and then you implement that grand plan to do it one way and then around year three or four you realize it's not working and then you kind of rejigger it a little bit in year four and in year five you do something that's not as bad. That's basically every five year plan at the high level or lowest level that you've ever seen. And I'm saying what would be a concrete way to be more of a piecemeal engineer? It would be to say, let's actually just do what we're already doing but institutionalize it and do all that messing around in year one. Why don't we institutionally just say, actually we don't really know what the, this is a complex problem, we don't exactly know how to solve it. We're gonna try five or six or 10 different things in the first year and then even just through careful observation, not even don't run a study, right? I'm not, that would be the academic thing to say, right? I'm just saying just experiment the same way that a shopkeeper's constantly trying to like run little experiments, put this over here, put this over here, put that in front, put that in back, do those, do that and then in years two through five try to pick the one thing that you think is really more effective and learn from them and do that better. That would be like a basic marginal incremental thing that if we just all thought that way and approached every project that way and some organizations are really good at this. There are examples that out there, they're doing this already and they're the best organizations out there. I think everything would get a lot better. We had a couple of questions in that really directly address the point you're making right now. So maybe we can just dig a little deeper into it. One of them is talking about how do we actually get the authority and the tools to experiment? And another on the other side of the same coin is how can we build tolerance to risk when we're talking about the US government? So in a lot of ways this project mentality, this idea that you define the problem and then define the solution and then spend five years working that through, it's a government procurement problem, right? Do you see solutions to that problem here? And I think that's what these questions are getting to. Yeah, so I've seen examples. In the book I talk about the crime lab in Chicago, I talk about the UN Peace Building Fund in Liberia and in general I talk about some great examples of people who have figured this out and built like a local authority and that little corner of the organization and they've made it happen and been really successful and that can be contagious. I also talk, in some ways you guys have the wrong member of my family in the room. My wife built this internal unit at the International Rescue Committee and went from one person to 70 and they're just constantly running these experiments. And I think the part of the answer is you get lucky with your leadership and the embracing, it's not always gonna happen. But I think part of it is like you're gonna show success is at the end of the day, you're always engaged in an experiment. Most people are running a single experiment that's the five year long failed experiment. And so I think you'll be like a paragon of just sort of success on average because you'll consistently be the person in your organization that's delivering something more successful over that five year horizon even if you have to suffer some of the failures. And so I think that's not an easy thing to ask of people but I think it's the good long-term strategy for her. You mentioned your wife and you do a lot of interesting personal stories in the book including How You Two Met, which is something maybe worth reading the book to find out more about. We got another question about how can industrialized and democratic states support the people who are in semi-democratic and authoritarian societies and are trying to bargain against their local political elite? As you say, we think about development agencies and NGOs so often you're interfacing with the local political elite maybe making the problem worse of concentration of power. So how do you actually get around that? So first I wanna say that's the best question that we should all, I think that's as wealthy and powerful individuals which many of us are, really any American is vis-a-vis the rest of the world as wealthy and powerful state, like how do we strengthen people against the elites? Is should just be the question all their minds? I don't have the perfect answer. I don't even have a great answer because it's actually not my specialty but I just wanna start by saying we should just get up every morning asking that question. And but we can, I think it's surprising we can all do it in our jobs, in the aid sector, in the diplomacy sector, in this world, even as a voter, I think we can all do a little bit on the margin. And so what's an example? Where do I give my money? I give one of the places we donate every month is to give directly, right? Give directly is just sort of sending cash to people who are using that to support small enterprise development. And that's something that on the margin is trying to, is empowering individuals and maybe that little business they start or whatever is gonna, is just gonna actually just shift the economic bargaining power in that society towards other people, right? But as an aid, just as, you know, if I were in the World Bank, I would think a little bit more every day about how to build industrial capacity and shift some more industrial capacity towards Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, which actually a lot of people do get up in the morning and think of it. So they might not realize that by changing the ability to exercise voice, organizations like the Carter Center and trying to improve how political parties function, election monitoring, cash transfers, industrial development. There are all of these little things we do and can do that are part of our toolkit that I think we could emphasize more. And that would be a better bet than some of the stuff that centralizes power. You've mentioned in your book that kind of gets to this and I wanted to probe it a little bit with you. And that's, you talk about how there's this effective altruism movement. There are these things we know work, give directly would fit on that list. Think of give well and there are nine or 10 recommended charities. And you say, definitely give money there, but save some money for the wicked problems that are harder to solve. And I guess I wonder why. What is your rationale there for the many effective altruists and new billionaire philanthropists and others who are enamored by the idea that why wouldn't we just invest in the things that we work, that we know work, especially when you're telling us, hey, these peace problems, they're really hard to solve. We're not sure what to do. We have to experiment. We have to try and then fail and then try again. Why not just put all of our resources into vitamin A pills? Yeah. So we live in a world where there's a few simple problems that still exist with a few simple solutions that are just under resourced and the effective altruism movement and the sort of randomized trial movement that I've been a part of has helped identify and fund and I've worked on some of these things. Some of my work on cognitive behavioral therapy and violence is, I think, a little bit in this category. And so, of course, I do this every day and I give it to those things. So let's do it. But the consequences of not dealing with political instability and the consequences of not dealing with unequal power in societies and strengthening the bargaining, checking and balancing elite and personalized rule, those consequences are so dire that if we ignore them or get them wrong, like everything else could just fall apart. For there's no development, there's no advance, there's no health without basic security and stability. It's the cornerstone. So we have to figure out that complex problem and so we have to, and we have to be piecemeal to careers to get there and then hopefully, by spending a little bit more time on that, we'll find a few simple things that work in that space. That's great. Most of the time, we won't but let's not ignore it because the, whatever, the economists in me would say the negative externalities are so dire but we all understand it is just saying like things would go completely south if we don't actually get better at this. Right, whatever good development work was done in Ukraine, you can see how quickly it's been set back by a short violent conflict even at this end soon and hopefully it does. We got another question about China and their role. I mean, there are many fragile states, as the questioner mentions, where China is actively involved. They have a strong development strategy. They're partnering with government. Does this change the dynamic in some way? Does it make, does that context perhaps elevate the possibility of civil war in some of these fragile places? Chinese, oh, Chinese say involvement in other countries. You know, another area where I don't want to pretend I have expertise, I think that every time we think about could we do X or is this country doing X? I think we have to distinguish between are they strengthening the bargaining power of one side versus the other or are they doing things to make the bargains fall apart and turn into violence. And I put a lot of Chinese actions more or so than the United States in terms of strengthening the level of elite control over societies. The kinds of technologies they've produced and exported for monitoring and controlling conversations as the United States has as well. So that's I think changing and so the sense in which it's indirectly making peace less likely is I think it's concentrating power. China itself though is a good example of an autocracy that is very checked and balanced in many ways, more certainly more so than Russia. And even if President Xi Jinping seems to want to move that in the other direction and more personalized rule on the margin, maybe a lot. I think it's actually a good example of why not all autocracies are doomed to go to war. I think there are highly institutionalized checked and balanced systems that are not democratic and we have to pay attention to that and draw some hope from that. Oh and it seems to me we're already in this creeping Cold War with China, which if it's anything like the last Cold War with the Soviet Union from a development perspective will mean both powers are looking to partner with governments and maybe centralize more power. And perhaps could lead to more of the very problem that you're describing in your book. Yeah, what would be fearsome, what happened in the last Cold War and I hope doesn't happen in this one would be proxy wars. Which is the ultimate example that what's that, we talked about the five reasons for conflict, the first one was these unchecked interests, the fact that we go to war when our leaders don't bear the costs. The ultimate example of being able to decide to go to war without bearing the costs is basically funding a rebel movement or a oppressive regime in another country to fund you'll fight a war. Because we don't bear any of the costs, I mean we have to cost of giving them weapons, that's a minuscule in our budget. And it's that unaccountability for the damage that that decision causes that leads to these proxy wars. And so that would worry me going ahead if this really did enter a Cold War. We're just in the last few minutes and we had a kind of final thoughts question from our audience as well about what do you hope policy makers and peace builders will take away after reading your book? What are some of the implications you want them to go and kind of do differently in their day to day work after they read this? So, I mean one is just to always start with this premise of that we have to pay attention to the costs of war. So if I were thinking about what's going to happen in the next months and years with Ukraine Russia and I wanted to think about that, I would be laser focused because even once war is broken out, the fact that war is so ruinously costly for both sides is a gravitational pull towards peace. It's also a tool, right? The more that Ukraine's allies or for that matter Russia's allies can make that war costly in a resolute clear way, in some sense paradox by funding and guaranteeing, paradoxically through this logic of deterrence which isn't perfect, can actually maybe shorten this war by changing the incentives for this war of attrition to say we're Ukraine down, not without risk. But again, only by focusing on the cost of war by thinking about sanctions as we have, I think this is why we've been so reliant on sanctions, we're trying to make this decision more costly. And so it doesn't always work but just that basic frame of mind for thinking about how we do, like and you can do that at a local level, like when you're worried about these villages going to conflict, farmer-herder conflicts or ethnic or religious conflicts or gang warfare, what can you as a police chief or a development worker or a mayor or whatever, you just wanna focus on how do we make the people who are deciding more conscious and accountable for the costs of their decisions. And that's just this basic starting point for every intervention, for every analysis that I think if we use is just gonna lead us to much better outcomes. Yeah, that idea of accountability is so key in everything that we do in development and humanitarian work and it's so great that you brought that and underlined it here in this book. Congratulations on the book. Thank you. It's fantastic, it's engaging, it's interesting, it brings new insights but it, but filled with stories that helped to illuminate them and I'm sure people are gonna enjoy. And I love the fact that in the book you describe yourself as an international do-gooder and meddler and maybe that's a little bit of what we need more of, you know, of people with the right intentions and with the right frameworks meddling in a good way. Right, and of being conscious that it's not really clear how legitimate we are as meddlers and just constantly sort of being on guard, I think, for our own... Well, that word is so helpful in that way, right? It really does require some self-reflection to call yourself that, so I appreciated reading it, I appreciate the book very much. I wanna thank you, it's been a real treat to get to talk to you. Chris Blatman, thanks to the U.S. Institute of Peace, thanks to Joe Hewitt and thanks to all of you who've been a part of this conversation today. Thank you.