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This volume brings together some of Professor Azar Gat's most
significant articles on the evolution of strategic doctrines and
the transformation of war during the 20th and early 21st centuries.
It sheds new light on the rise of the German Panzer arm and the
doctrine of Blitzkrieg between the two world wars; explores the
factors behind the formation of strategic policy and military
doctrine in the world war era and during the cold war; and explains
why counterinsurgency has become such a problem. The book concludes
with the spread of peace in the developed world, challenged as it
is by the rise of the authoritarian-capitalist great powers - China
and Russia - and by the chilling prospect of unconventional
terrorism. This last essay summarizes the author's latest research
and has not previously been published in article form. This
collection will be of much interest to students of strategic
studies, military history, and international relations.
Combining insights from evolutionary psychology with a broad sweep
through history, down to the ideological civil war ripping the
United States apart, the book explores the deeper roots of people's
inability to accept claims about reality which come from the
opposite ideological camp, no matter how valid they might be. After
theorists around 1960 proclaimed the 'death of ideology',
ideological divides and clashes have reemerged with renewed
intensity throughout the world. In the United States they have
become particularly venomous. Each side in America's escalating
ideological civil war charges the other with concocting 'fake news'
and 'alternative facts'. The other side is widely viewed as
malicious, irrational or downright stupid, and, often, as barely
legitimate. People are deaf to claims about reality that come from
the opposite camp, no matter how valid they might be. The zeal of
the opposing sides is often scarcely less than that which
characterized the religious ideologies of old. Indeed, historical
religious ideologies have largely been replaced by 'secular
religions' or 'religion substitutes'. Ideology consists of
normative prescriptions regarding how society should be shaped,
together with an interpretive roadmap indicating how this normative
vision can be implemented in reality. Ideological Fixation is the
result of tensions and conflicts between these two elements. The
book focuses on ideologies' factual claims about the world,
typically subordinate to, and often distorted by, their normative
commitment. In exploring this phenomenon, the book combines
insights from evolutionary psychology regarding the nature of some
of our deepest proclivities with a broad sweep through history and
around the world. It proceeds from the Stone Age to the rise of
civilization, the great religions and modernity, to a critique of
fundamental factual premises that underlie some of the major
debates dominating today's liberal democracies, not least the
United States.
This volume brings together some of Professor Azar Gat's most
significant articles on the evolution of strategic doctrines and
the transformation of war during the 20th and early 21st centuries.
It sheds new light on the rise of the German Panzer arm and the
doctrine of Blitzkrieg between the two world wars; explores the
factors behind the formation of strategic policy and military
doctrine in the world war era and during the cold war; and explains
why counterinsurgency has become such a problem. The book concludes
with the spread of peace in the developed world, challenged as it
is by the rise of the authoritarian-capitalist great powers - China
and Russia - and by the chilling prospect of unconventional
terrorism. This last essay summarizes the author's latest research
and has not previously been published in article form. This
collection will be of much interest to students of strategic
studies, military history, and international relations.
This collection brings together scholars from a wide range of
disciplines to offer perspectives on national identity formation in
various European contexts between 1600 and 1815. Contributors
challenge the dichotomy between modernists and traditionalists in
nationalism studies through an emphasis on continuity rather than
ruptures in the shaping of European nations in the period, while
also offering an overview of current debates in the field and case
studies on a number of topics, including literature,
historiography, and cartography.
What are the origins of nationalism and why is it capable of
arousing such intense emotions? In this major study, Azar Gat
counters the prevailing fashionable theories according to which
nations and nationalism are modern and contrived or 'invented'. He
sweeps across history and around the globe to reveal that ethnicity
has always been highly political and that nations and national
states have existed since the beginning of statehood millennia ago.
He traces the deep roots of ethnicity and nationalism in human
nature, showing how culture fits into human evolution from as early
as our aboriginal condition and, in conjunction with kinship,
defines ethnicity and ethnic allegiances. From the rise of states
and empires to the present day, this book sheds new light on the
explosive nature of ethnicity and nationalism, as well as on their
more liberating and altruistic roles in forging identity and
solidarity.
Azar Gat sets out to resolve one of the age-old questions of human
existence: why people fight and can they stop. Spanning warfare
from prehistory to the 21st century, the book shows that, neither
an irresistible drive nor a cultural invention, deadly violence and
warfare have figured prominently in our behavioural toolkit since
the dawn of our species. People have always alternated between
cooperation, peaceful competition, and violence to attain
evolution-shaped human desires. A marked shift in the balance
between these options has occurred since the onset of the
industrial age. Rather than modern war becoming more costly (it
hasn't), it is peace that has become more rewarding. Scrutinizing
existing theories concerning the decline of war - such as the
'democratic peace' and 'capitalist peace' - Gat shows that they in
fact partake of a broader Modernization Peace that has been growing
since 1815. By now, war has disappeared within the world's most
developed areas. Finally, Gat explains why the Modernization Peace
has been disrupted in the past, as during the two World Wars, and
how challenges to it may still arise. They include claimants to
alternative modernity - such as China and Russia - anti-modernists,
and failed modernizers that may spawn terrorism, potentially
unconventional. While the world has become more peaceful than ever
before, there is still much to worry about in terms of security and
no place for complacency.
Why do people go to war? Is it rooted in human nature or is it a
late cultural invention? How does war relate to the other
fundamental developments in the history of human civilization? And
what of war today--is it a declining phenomenon or simply changing
its shape?
In this sweeping study of war and civilization, Azar Gat sets out
to find definitive answers to these questions in an attempt to
unravel the riddle of war throughout human history, from the early
hunter-gatherers right through to the unconventional terrorism of
the twenty-first century. In the process, the book generates an
astonishing wealth of original and fascinating insights on all
major aspects of humankind's remarkable journey through the ages,
engaging a wide range of disciplines, from anthropology and
evolutionary psychology to sociology and political science. Written
with remarkable verve and clarity and wholly free from jargon, it
will be of interest to anyone who has ever pondered the puzzle of
war.
What are the origins of nationalism and why is it capable of
arousing such intense emotions? In this major study, Azar Gat
counters the prevailing fashionable theories according to which
nations and nationalism are modern and contrived or 'invented'. He
sweeps across history and around the globe to reveal that ethnicity
has always been highly political and that nations and national
states have existed since the beginning of statehood millennia ago.
He traces the deep roots of ethnicity and nationalism in human
nature, showing how culture fits into human evolution from as early
as our aboriginal condition and, in conjunction with kinship,
defines ethnicity and ethnic allegiances. From the rise of states
and empires to the present day, this book sheds new light on the
explosive nature of ethnicity and nationalism, as well as on their
more liberating and altruistic roles in forging identity and
solidarity.
In this scholarly and original study of military thought during the
nineteenth century Azar Gat continues and expands the themes he
explored in his previous book, The Origins of Military Thought from
the Enlightenment to Clausewitz (Oxford Historical Monographs,
1989). The present volume spans the period from the aftermath of
the Napoleonic era to the outbreak of the First World War.
Encompassing Prussia/Germany, France, Great Britain, the United
States of America and the Marxist theory later to gain sway in
Russia, The Development of Military Thought focuses on the wider
conceptions of war, strategy, and military theory which dominated
the West in this period. Dr. Gat's penetrating analysis uncovers
the intellectual assumptions and picture of the past which underlay
military policy and practice.
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