Azar Gat
Born1959 (age 64–65)
Haifa, Israel
Education
Occupation(s)Interdisciplinary researcher of war, nationalism and ideology
OrganizationTel Aviv University
Awards

Azar Gat (born 1959) is an Israeli researcher of war, nationalism and ideology, and a professor at the School of Political Science, Government, and International Relations at Tel Aviv University. His research combines expertise in the fields of history, evolution, anthropology, and social sciences. He is the author of ten books that deal with the history of military thought, the fundamental questions of war and its causes, the struggles between democratic and non-democratic states, nationalism, and the phenomenon of ideological fixation. His books have been translated into many languages.

Gat has served as a visiting professor and researcher at the universities of Oxford, Yale, Stanford, Georgetown, Ohio State, Freiburg, Munich and Konstanz. He is a three-time winner of both the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship and research grants from Israel Science Foundation (ISF). He has also won a Rothschild Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a British Council Fellowship. Gat was a recipient of the EMET Prize for the year 2019, considered Israel’s premier scholarly award.

Biography

Born in Israel, Gat holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Haifa (1978), a master’s degree from Tel Aviv University (1983), and a doctorate from the University of Oxford (1986). He served as a major in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

Since 1987, Gat has been on the faculty of the Department of Political Science at Tel Aviv University (now the School of Political Science, Government and International Affairs), where he is currently a full professor and the incumbent of the Ezer Weizman Chair in National Security. He has twice served as head of the department. Gat also founded and heads the Executive MA Program in Security and Diplomacy[1] and the International MA Program in Security and Diplomacy (which is taught in English).[2]

Research

The History of Military Thought

Gat's first book, The Origins of Military Thought from the Enlightenment to Clausewitz (1989), merged two fields that were until then completely separate: strategic thought and the history of ideas. The book showed that the military thought of the 18th century grew out of the ideas of the Enlightenment and sought to create a general theory of war based on universal rules and principles. Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s criticism of it has now been explained as an expression of the sweeping reaction of Romanticism against the ideas of the Enlightenment from the turn of the 19th century.

In The Development of Military Thought: The Nineteenth Century (1992), Gat continued presenting the main schools of military thought of the 19th century. His book Fascist and Liberal Visions of War: Fuller, Liddell Hart, Douhet, and Other Modernists (1998) revealed the close relationship that existed in the first decades of the 20th century between the leading theorists of mechanized warfare (both land and air) and futurist and fascist currents which conjured visions of an elitist and mechanized future world. The book also presented the thought of Basil Liddell Hart in liberal, post-World War I Britain as a pioneering expression of ideas that would become the basis of how liberal democratic societies relate to war and its conduct. In both this book and in his 2000 book British Armor Theory and the Rise of the Panzer Arm: Revising the Revisionists, Gat refuted the accusations leveled against Liddell Hart regarding the alleged falsification of his influence on the formation of German armor doctrine prior to World War II.

His books from 1989, 1992 and 1998 were collected into a single volume, A History of Military Thought: From the Enlightenment to the Cold War (2001).

What is War? Basic Questions

Gat’s 2006 book War in Human Civilization is an interdisciplinary work that critically examines knowledge and insights from the fields of anthropology, evolutionary theory, political science, history, sociology, economics, and international relations in order to provide answers to age-old questions, some of which have been considered unsolvable. Since when have humans fought each other? Was the state of human nature before agriculture and the state warlike (as Hobbes claimed) or peaceful (as Rousseau claimed)? What are the reasons for war? How did the appearance of states, the process of modernization, and liberal democracy affect war? The book was chosen by the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) as one of the books of the year for 2006, and has been translated into Japanese, Korean and Chinese.[3]

The Struggles of Democracies against Their Non-Democratic Rivals (Past and Future)

Gat’s 2010 book Victorious and Vulnerable: Why Democracy Won in the 20th Century and How it is still Imperiled? examines the reasons for the democracy’s ascendence in the world during the last two centuries, and the relevance of this process to the question of the future development of China and Russia in the 21st century. In addition, the book analyzes the dangers of unconventional terrorism. Victorious and Vulnerable won the book of the year award of the Israeli Political Science Association for 2010.[4] The return of the authoritarian-capitalist great powers to the international arena was at the center of two articles published by Gat in the journal Foreign Affairs in 2007 and 2009, at a time when most researchers believed that the final victory of democracy had already been achieved.

The Phenomenon of Nationalism

Gat’s 2013 book Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism (with Alexander Yakobson), refutes the claim that nationalism is a purely artificial, if not completely manipulative, modern phenomenon. The book shows that the close relationship between ethnicity and the state has existed since the appearance of states at the beginning of history. Modernity led to the tightening of national ties and their empowerment through the concepts of popular sovereignty and civil equality. However, the book argues that there is no basis for the claim that national ties - which in the past as in the present have always given rise to powerful manifestations of collective identity, sacrifice and devotion - are new or superficial. The book has been translated into Spanish, Turkish and Korean.

The Causes of War

Gat’s 2017 book The Causes of War and the Spread of Peace: But Will War Rebound? lays out the system of human motivations that lead to war, a subject that has hitherto been completely neglected in the literature of international relations. The book shows how the process of modernization in the last two centuries has resulted in a continuous decrease in the incidence of war since 1815 because it has changed the relative attractiveness between the three fundamental strategies of human social behavior: cooperation, peaceful competition, and violent conflict. The book also explains the major exception to this trend: the two world wars. Gat refutes the popular belief that war has become more expensive and more costly in the modern industrial age and shows instead that it is peace that has become more profitable.

Ideological Fixation

In his recent book Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars (2022), Gat again combines knowledge from a variety of disciplines. The book attempts to resolve the paradox according to which everyone recognizes the phenomenon of ideological fixation and the bias in the factual interpretation of reality it involves, and yet, so often, fall victim to it.

Publications

Books

  • The Origins of Military Thought: From the Enlightenment to Clausewitz. Oxford University Press. 1989. ISBN 978-0198229483.
  • The Development of Military Thought: The Nineteenth Century. Oxford University Press. 1992. ISBN 978-0198202462.
  • Fascist and Liberal Visions of War: Fuller, Liddell Hart, Douhet, and Other Modernists. Oxford University Press. 1998. ISBN 978-0198207153.
  • British Armour Theory and the Rise of the Panzer Arm: Revising the Revisionists. Palgrave Macmillan. 2000. ISBN 978-0312229528.
  • Zeev Maoz, ed. (2001). War in a Changing World. University of Michigan Press. ISBN 9780472111855.
  • A History of Military Thought: From the Enlightenment to the Cold War. Oxford University Press. 2001. ISBN 9780199247622.
  • War in Human Civilization. Oxford University Press. 2006. ISBN 978-0199236633.
  • Victorious and Vulnerable: Why Democracy Won in the 20th Century and How it is Still Imperiled. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2010. ISBN 978-1442201149.
  • Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism. Cambridge University Press. 2012. ISBN 978-1107400023.
  • The Causes of War and the Spread of Peace: But Will War Rebound?. Oxford University Press. 2017. ISBN 9780198795025.
  • War and Strategy in the Modern World: From Blitzkrieg to Unconventional Terrorism. Routledge. 2018. ISBN 9781138632561.
  • Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars. Oxford University Press. 2022. ISBN 9780197646700.

Journal articles

References

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