Blattman, Chris
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Blattman defines "war," for the purposes of his analytical framework, narrowly as prolonged, costly violent struggle between groups (deliberately excluding short, low-cost "demonstrative" violence like gang shows of force or border skirmishes, and excluding purely individual violence), arguing this definition lets him find common patterns across phenomena as different as Chicago gang conflict, Colombian cartel wars, ethnic riots, and interstate war. His central thesis is that war is nearly always a failure of bargaining rather than a rational strategy: because prolonged violent conflict is catastrophically costly to essentially all parties, a peaceful bargain that avoids those costs is almost always available in principle, so actual wars require some specific breakdown that eliminates that bargain — and, empirically, the vast majority of potential conflicts (rival nations, hostile ethnic groups, feuding gangs) never escalate to war, meaning restraint is the historical norm and war is the puzzle to be explained.
He organizes causes of war into five "buckets": three "strategic" mechanisms he considers relatively tractable to formal (game-theoretic) modeling — unaccountable/unchecked leaders who don't personally bear war's costs, uncertainty about relative strength or resolve (leading to costly "bluffing" dynamics), and commitment problems (where a rising or declining power cannot credibly promise to constrain its future behavior, making preemptive action seem rational) — and two "human" mechanisms that resist simple modeling: intangible incentives/values (ideological, nationalist, or principled commitments people are willing to bear immense costs for, which he treats as neither irrational nor reducible to a single formula) and misperceptions (systematic errors in judging one's own or an opponent's strength or intentions). He argues these interact, particularly that unchecked leaders are simultaneously most exposed to acting on unaccountable private incentives, most prone to distorted information (since autocrats structurally struggle to get honest intelligence, a dynamic he sees reflected in phenomena like state propaganda and censorship), and most able to manufacture the population's "intangible" values through propaganda — citing Winston Churchill's rhetoric as a (in his view) noble version of the same value-manufacturing mechanism Adolf Hitler used toward a "sinister" end.
Applying this framework to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Blattman argues Ukrainian refusal to accept a deal reflecting Russia's relative power (paralleling, in his view, the American colonists' refusal of British demands) reflects the "intangible incentives" bucket; that Russia's demands stemmed from a ruling elite whose grip on power (not the interests of average Russians) was, in his account, threatened by a democratic, Western-aligned Ukraine, illustrating the unaccountable-leadership bucket; and that substantial uncertainty about relative resolve and military strength (which he compares to bluffing in poker) made a costly war more likely than either side's private calculations anticipated — with Russia, in his account, badly misjudging the probability distribution of outcomes rather than necessarily "miscalculating" outright. Fridman, in an extended personal aside, expresses admiration for Ukrainian (and, historically, Russian) resistance to tyranny in the spirit of Churchill's "we shall fight on the beaches" speech, while Blattman cautions against over-celebrating cases where standing firm "worked" (Britain in WWII) without equally weighing cases where it either didn't happen (most potential conflicts are quietly avoided) or went badly (citing the 2003 Iraq invasion as a case where humanitarian justifications for standing up to a tyrant, Saddam Hussein, are generally now seen as a mistake). Both express significant concern that Russia's ruling elite, facing an existential threat to its own hold on power, could escalate toward nuclear use, a scenario Blattman says has moved from "unimaginable" toward a small but newly non-zero probability that he finds independently alarming regardless of its absolute magnitude.
Blattman extends the same five-factor framework to non-state conflict, drawing on his fieldwork studying Colombian gangs and cartels around Medellín: rival "office"-style umbrella criminal organizations (sometimes called la oficina), whose imprisoned leaders are deliberately housed together by authorities, function like an informal UN Security Council — mediating disputes, providing commitment guarantees, and imposing sanctions to prevent street-gang violence from escalating, with a real 2021 episode where rising Medellín homicide rates were brought back down within about a week once leaders were brought together and a trusted mediator intervened. He also recounts fieldwork in northern Uganda studying Joseph Kony's rebel movement, arguing mass child abduction functioned as a rational (if horrifying) solution to a recruitment problem for an unpopular insurgency lacking voluntary support, and that Uganda's government tolerated the insurgency for years partly because it destabilized a rival regional power base — illustrating, in his account, how unchecked leaders can have a private incentive to allow violence that serves no one else's interest. On Israel-Palestine, he frames the current situation as an "uneasy" but genuine peace by his definition (sporadic low-level violence without sustained war), attributing the difficulty of a lasting resolution to what he describes as two sets of deeply-held, mutually incompatible principled commitments (Israeli commitment to both liberal democracy and a Jewish state; Palestinian resistance to compromising on repeated historical dispossession) rather than simple miscalculation.
On broader trends, Blattman is more skeptical than Steven Pinker's thesis that intergroup violence has been declining, distinguishing this from the much less contested decline in interpersonal/homicide violence, and suggests rarer wars may partly reflect wars becoming more destructive (raising the cost threshold) rather than genuinely declining underlying conflict propensity. He credits growing economic, social, and ideological interdependence (trade, intermarriage, cultural exchange, shared values) as a durable, if incomplete, structural check against major-power war, including US-China relations, and expresses more concern about trends toward centralized, personalized power (citing Xi Jinping's consolidation) than about cultural or systemic rivalry per se. He closes by describing his own path into the field — an accidental 2004 meeting in a Nairobi internet café with his future wife and research partner, psychologist Jeannie Annan, which led to an ambitious, initially discouraged panel study tracking formerly abducted Ugandan child soldiers — and offers career advice centered on finding a "vocation" through sustained trial and error (recounting his own initial, miserable career as an accountant) and on the value of a Tyler Cowen-style "walk out early" mentality toward relationships, jobs, and interests that clearly aren't working.
Excerpts
On why nearly all war reflects a bargaining failure rather than a rational strategy:
“There [is] usually a way to get what you wanted or be better off without having to fight over it... fighting is just politics by other means, and it's just inefficient, costly, brutal, devastating means... everybody loses in this war.”
On why he identifies unaccountable power as the "meta-cause" of conflict:
“If I had to say, big picture, what do I think is the fundamental cause of most violence in the world? I think it's unaccountable power... it's the source of underdevelopment, it's the source of pain and suffering, it's the source of warfare — it's basically the root source of most of our problems.”
On his assessment of why Russia's ruling elite, rather than ordinary Russians, drove the demands preceding the invasion:
“Was democracy in Ukraine a threat to an average Russian? No... it was a threat to the political apparatus of political control and economic control that Putin and cronies... this elite in Russia, um, it was a threat to them.”