Why Wars Happen

We prefer to forget the fact, but war has played a major role in human history. This is true not only of periods of killing but also of the years of so-called 'peace' – years in which the military have prepared for war, while the rest of society has paid the costs, ranging from caring for the wounded and bereaved to dealing with the often crippling financial costs, from previous conflicts.

For those of us not in the military there is terrible temptation to forget or ignore what we dislike. In the universities war is generally ignored as a subject. Yet this is unhelpful, because we need to understand why people fight and how we can best cope with war-like tendencies. In Why Wars Happen (Reaktion Books) I have tried to look at this question both as a general issue and in terms of the history of the last half millennium, including civil wars as well as international conflicts within and between cultural areas.