A unique assessment that challenges humanity's quest to abolish warfare. The idea that war is going out of style has become the conventional wisdom in recent years. But in Only the Dead, award-winning author Bear Braumoeller demonstrates that it shouldn't have. With a rare combination of historical expertise, statistical acumen, and accessible prose, Braumoeller shows that the evidence simply doesn't support the decline-of-war thesis propounded by scholars like Steven Pinker. He argues that the key to understanding trends in warfare lies, not in the spread of humanitarian values, but rather in the formation of international orders-sets of expectations about behavior that allow countries to work in concert, as they did in the Concert of Europe and have done in the postwar Western liberal order. With a nod toward the American sociologist Charles Tilly, who argued that "war made the state and the state made war," Braumoeller argues that the same is true of international orders: while they reduce conflict within their borders, they can also clash violently with one another, as the Western and communist orders did throughout the Cold War. Both highly readable and rigorous, Only the Dead offers a realistic assessment of humanity's quest to abolish warfare. While pessimists have been too quick to discount the successes of our attempts to reduce international conflict, optimists are prone to put too much faith in human nature. Reality lies somewhere in between: While the aspirations of humankind to govern its behavior with reason and justice have had shocking success in moderating the harsh dictates of realpolitik, the institutions that we have created to prevent war are unlikely to achieve anything like total success-as evidenced by the multitude of conflicts in recent decades. As the old adage advises us, only the dead have seen the end of war.

Do great leaders make history? Or are they compelled to act by historical circumstance? This debate has remained unresolved since Thomas Carlyle and Karl Marx framed it in the mid-nineteenth century, yet implicit answers inform our policies and our views of history. In this book, Professor Bear F. Braumoeller argues persuasively that both perspectives are correct: leaders shape the main material and ideological forces of history that subsequently constrain and compel them. His studies of the Congress of Vienna, the interwar period, and the end of the Cold War illustrate this dynamic, and the data he marshals provide systematic evidence that leaders both shape and are constrained by the structure of the international system.

Do great leaders make history? Or are they compelled to act by historical circumstance? This debate has remained unresolved since Thomas Carlyle and Karl Marx framed it in the mid-nineteenth century, yet implicit answers inform our policies and our views of history. In this book, Professor Bear F. Braumoeller argues persuasively that both perspectives are correct: leaders shape the main material and ideological forces of history that subsequently constrain and compel them. His studies of the Congress of Vienna, the interwar period, and the end of the Cold War illustrate this dynamic, and the data he marshals provide systematic evidence that leaders both shape and are constrained by the structure of the international system.

Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature is, quite simply, one of the most influential social science books of the past decade. In it, Pinker argued that violence in all its forms-but especially war-has been steadily declining throughout the modern era, and that the world is more peaceful now than ever before. The book found a very receptive audience, and it is indeed a powerful work. But is it true? In Only the Dead, Bear Braumoeller assesses the claim that armed conflict is in decline and finds it wanting. In the course of his assessment, he also develops a powerful explanation for trends in warfare over time. His central finding is that, although there has been a drop in the rate of international conflict following the end of the Cold War, that drop followed nearly two centuries of steady increases in the rate of conflict. Moreover, the rate of civil war onset has increased following the end of the Cold War, and extrastate wars (wars between states and non-state entities) have shown a recent resurgence. With regard to war intensity and severity, he has found no significant change since the end of the Napoleonic Wars-which represents a sharp rejoinder to Pinker's thesis. Just as importantly, he contends that the flaws in Pinker's argument flow from a fundamental weakness in this theory, which is really a monocausal story about a decline in the willingness to wage war. In contrast, Braumoeller's findings are in accord with systemic theories of international politics that emphasize Great Power conflict. He therefore traces how Great Power interactions produce world orders, which in combination with Great Power activity alter the calculations made by states as they contemplate the choice between a negotiated settlement and war. To buttress his argument, he looks at key episodes from each major historical era, all the while emphasizing how the Great Power system induces armed conflict. Because the decline-in-war thesis has captured the attention of politicians, journalists, and citizens as well as academics, Only the Dead is likely to be quite controversial. But Braumoeller, known for being one of the most numerate political scientists in the discipline, has both a powerful theory and data that doubters cannot dismiss. It therefore has the potential to stand as a landmark work in the fields of international politics and the history of war.