Listen: The Essential Podcast, Episode 108: Examining the Nature of Conflict: A Conversation with Richard Overy

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Nathan Hunt

This is the Essential Podcast from S&P Global. My name is Nathan Hunt. Geopolitics is driving markets. Perhaps that's always been true, but geopolitics has had a particularly obvious and direct effect on markets, certainly since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the war in Gaza, the Houthi attacks on shipping and renewed tensions in the Taiwan Strait, to name just a few examples. Geopolitics itself are not truly concerning. A trade war between the U.S. and China may be inconvenient, but it is of particular concern because trade wars historically have served as a prelude for shooting wars.

War is the big concern. It is not, in my opinion, with apologies to Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz. Simply politics by another means, war is a state change in the global order. Geopolitical tensions and conflicts in the world make war an appropriate topic for a podcast like this one, although we are usually more concerned with economics and market events.

And with that, it is my great pleasure to be joined on today's podcast by the Historian Richard Overy. Professor Overy has written extensively on the Second World War and the period leading up to it, but his latest book takes a far broader view taking on the question of war itself. The book is called Why War? Professor Overy takes up this question from a variety of perspectives, from evolutionary biology to psychology, to anthropology and ecology. Professor Overy, I'd like to welcome you to the podcast today.

Richard Overy

Thank you very much.

Nathan Hunt

One of the things you say in your introduction to the book is very interesting to me. You call the book, or the writing of the book, an impertinence. And first of all, I love the word impertinence, but I was wondering why is it an impertinence for a historian and a specialist, particularly the topic of the Second World War, to write about war in general.

Richard Overy

Well, at one level, of course, it's not because historians write about war all the time. I call it an impertinence because I very soon discovered when I started to explore the way various disciplines explain war or tried to explain more over the course of the last 50, 60, 70 years. But I've been looking at biology, at psychology, at ecology, political science, but actually not a great deal of history. And I realize that these are all disciplines I know very little about, particularly biology. So I was on a learning curve. I enjoyed it a great deal, and I've learned a great deal, but that's what I really meant by this being something of an impertinence.

Nathan Hunt

I'm wondering if we can back up for a second and ask the question, what is war? And how do you distinguish it from mere violence? Or is that a meaningful distinction to make?

Richard Overy

Well, I think many historians do make that distinction. They're very keen to see war as something which is pretty modern, something states do. But I've adopted a much wider definition, one which is commonly used, I think, by archeologists or even anthropologists, which is to see collective violence as a critical factor. When human beings decide to undertake an active collective violence against neighbors, against a neighboring tribe or another state, we are looking at a form of warfare. And it usually is lethal, which is why I regard it as warfare.

Now there's obviously a huge difference between a tribal conflict or a band of hunter-gatherers, massively bringing another band of hunter-gatherers. But the more I've looked at the past 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 years, the more you see a kind of continuum there. That's what people did 20,000 years ago because that's the world they lived in. 20,000 years later, we threaten each other with nuclear bombs. That's where we live in. But the common factor is that we are all thinking about the nature of collective violence, why it happens, how can we control it, what are its purposes.

Nathan Hunt

One of the interesting points I thought you made in the section where you were looking at anthropological explanations for why war is you engage with Margaret Mead, who famously suggested that war is an invention. Certainly, we can sort of see where she might have been coming from writing in the 1930s, following the First World War, sort of highly mechanized interstate war. You say specifically that Margaret Mead was wrong. Can you expand on that? Why wrong? Could it be that she was wrong due to different definitions of war? Or is she just blanket wrong on the idea of war?

Richard Overy

Well, no, I think the problem really was that she saw war as an invention as if it was anything else that we might have invented, which we could then uninvent or get rid of. And she refused to accept that most of the tribal communities that she worked with were capable of violence or had been more like, which turned out not to be true.

But I think the real problem is that war is something it's completely different from the other things that she was talking about. War is traumatic, destructive, lethal. It results in the killing of our own species in very large numbers. So in a sense, you've got to have a different kind of intellectual approach to it rather than saying it's invention, maybe we can uninvent it. Quite clearly, it's a phenomenon rooted somehow in the human condition. We need to understand why. We need to understand how it has developed that way. We need perhaps to understand at some level how we might limit it.

Nathan Hunt

As a historian, you're obviously aware of the power and the impact of narratives, the stories we tell ourselves about our own history. Are you at all concerned about the impact of, say -- or the difference between describing war as an aberration versus an inevitability, sort of a human inevitability? Is that to you a meaningful distinction?

Richard Overy

Well, it's an interesting question. I mean, I think many people would much rather have said it was an aberration and that at some point, we'll get rid of it. But of course, everything you look at for the last 20,000, 30,000 years is clearly not an aberration. Clearly, it has function. And we can distinguish the various functions it performs and why people make war. We can understand why it is that people choose to make war.

So in that sense, it's like it's a pessimistic view of the human past. It's not something which happens by chance. In fact, in many of the modern periods, in other words, the last 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 years, war can be an almost permanent state for many communities. So rather than aberration, it's something which we can see built into their culture, which they sustain culturally over a long period of time.

Nathan Hunt

One of the things that has interested me for years is that there are, in some ways, 2 ways of looking at human experience. There's obviously -- there's -- we can follow Thomas Hobbs, which to use the classic short form, life is nasty, brutish and short in the state of nature or we can follow sort of Locke and Rousseau and their somewhat more idealistic viewpoints on human nature. Do you feel, having done this incredible amount of research, do you feel yourself in one of these camps or the other?

Richard Overy

Well, I hate to be in a camp. I'm quite clearly in Hobbs' camp. It's not that life is nasty, brutish and short. And the point he made simply was that for human communities, the elusive thing is security. Unless you've got some big God-like figure up there with a big club is going to hit you over the head if you all start fighting each other, you will go on fighting each other because at the end of the day, nobody can be really secure, whether you're a bunch of hunter-gatherers trying to protect your hunting territory or indeed, whether Vladimir Putin today, who's worried about the advance of NATO in the European Union towards the Russian frontier.

And that's really what Hobbs was driving at. In the absence of any international force that can make us all stop fighting, fighting is going to break out. I should just add, of course, that of course human beings are capable of cooperating, and they do cooperate all the time, of course. It's not a question of life is always nasty, brutish and short. Life can be quite nice. But nevertheless, we're living in a world in which war is a phenomenon that will not go away.

Nathan Hunt

The question, why war, which obviously informed the title of the book and certainly the topic of the book comes from a question that Einstein posed to Sigmund Freud. It's clear from the book that Freud's explanation, which was to posit the existence of a death drive was not particularly persuasive to you.

But as you looked across all of these different fields from biology, evolutionary biology through anthropology, psychology and also ecology, there had been different answers to this question over time. Which of these answers, as you were doing the deep work of this book, appealed to you?

Richard Overy

Well, I suppose really it's the way in which modern evolutionary science has gone, whether it's evolutionary biology or evolutionary psychology. I mean, both of them have a much more sophisticated explanation for the origin of collective violence. In the case of biology, where it was once thought it must be in our genes, we must have instincts and so on, nobody really accepts that now. What the argument is that violence was a key to biological survival for small human groups. Very vulnerable to all kinds of things, natural shocks of one kind or another, predators and so on, but also other humans.

One of the ways in which you could preserve your gene pool, if you like, was when necessary fighting. Either the argument is you went out and you fought and you seize women from another tribe and you bought them back, kill all the men or the men of a tribe would gather together and always act to defend collectively and altruistically the tribal group.

Now psychology is clearly involved in that and evolution psychologists argue that over time, human beings developed a different set of psychological instruments, if you like. But one of them was that when necessary, you would resort to collective violence. And in general, that would be the men, not of course the women. And that became reinforced over time as well. So that for the early human communities, the fact of fighting was about your own survival, but something that, in a sense, you came to accept psychologically, something which would have to be done in order to make sure that survival could be guaranteed.

Nathan Hunt

Through the book, you give many examples from the archaeological record, which seems to point to the fact that collective violence was a -- has at least been a recurring theme throughout human history. Some of these examples are, honestly, somewhat upsetting. Bones broken apart to extract the marrow, scalping, beheading, et cetera. When you look at all of those, is your natural conclusion that there is a human inclination towards violence or a human capacity for violence?

Richard Overy

Well, I think there's a capacity for violence, but it's quite hard to separate these out because, as I was talking earlier, over evolutionary time, this is something that many human communities almost certainly began to take for granted, that there were going to be moments when you would have to fight somebody else to defend yourself or to your advantages for your particular tribe.

And this would bit by bit become a kind of inclination, in and modern cultures, i., last 5,000, 6,000, 7,000 years, once human beings settle down and began to create tribal communities and federations and states and so on, it's almost that nobody really questioned that's what you did, that moments of crisis or moments when you needed to protect or enhance the interest of your group, you would engage in violence to do so.

Nathan Hunt

Is there a distinction in your mind between wars of offense or wars of defense? Or is that not necessarily meaningful as they play out over time?

Richard Overy

Well, no, it is obviously a very important distinction. And anthropologists have shown that tribal communities, for example, will tend to react rather differently towards aggression and wars of defense. Wars of defense, everybody is rallied, even the women often, in defense of the community. For war of aggression, it will be a cohort, perhaps most males, but a cohort of males who are used to the idea that at times, they will have to be aggressive.

And the pattern of that kind of always are different. You go out, you find your enemy tribe or whatever it is and you generally massacre them and come back with the trophies. In defense, you're fighting for your life. And if you're not very good at it, you won't keep it.

Nathan Hunt

The second part of the book focuses on what we might consider sort of reasons for war. And you include there sections on resources, belief, power and security. It seems to me that there are sort of 2 categories there. There is resources and security and then there's belief and power. Do you believe that you can make those distinctions between something that is in some way a necessity of survival, and on the other side, sort of more of a choice?

Richard Overy

Yes. No, there is a difference. I mean, the obvious thing, of course, is they're not all mutually exclusive. There are many wars, of course, in which 2 or 3 of those might operate at the same time. The search for resources, to support a belief system and so on and so on. But belief in power, yes, it's about conscious understanding that you're going to wage war because you have a particular purpose behind it, usually a purpose which meets the needs of your particular culture and the political interest of your leadership.

When it comes to resources, yes, it could be the whole tribe fighting in order to get more resources so that they can survive or expand their interest. When it comes to security, as I said at the beginning, my views on Hobbs. Security is common, in fact, almost in all wars because there's always a sense in which you're fighting a war in order to maintain your security or extend your security or protect your security in one way or another, even if the war itself is up in the language of belief or the pursuit of power. And that, I think, gives security of a different character from the other 3.

Nathan Hunt

Returning to your area of specialty, you've written extensively on the Second World War. There have been debates over time about the role of security and resources in Hitler's decision to initiate war. To what extent do you find those arguments persuasive or unpersuasive?

Richard Overy

No, I think they're very persuasive. I mean, interesting thing about both Japanese imperialism and German imperialism is that they were driven by -- well, they were driven, of course, by desire to be like the other great powers. They felt that they've been shortchanged and they wanted to sit up there at the top table. But the only way you could sit at the top table was by making sure you had adequate resources to be able to sustain that role.

And for the Japanese, that means seizing resources in China and Southeast Asia. For Germany, in the end, that meant seizing resources in Central and Eastern Europe and in the end in the Soviet Union. And although the war could be also addressed up in ideology or belief systems or whatever, a driving factor there was to seize resources because resources will be the foundation on which you could then make your claim to great power status.

Nathan Hunt

To what extent do you think similar motivations are active today, on the one hand, in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and on the other hand, sort of the conflict between the United States and China?

Richard Overy

Well, they're 2 other different conflicts. And case of Ukraine and Russia, as I said before, I think the driving force of Putin was his security and his growing sense of insecurity as Russia has declined as a power and as a military power as the West pushes further and further into Eastern Europe. You can see why the Russian leadership is worried about what that means and is looking around for allies who will support them in the -- basically in their rejection of the West.

There's a frontier here, you're not coming any further. Between United States and China has been regarded by political scientists as a classic example of what they call power transition theory where you get a relatively declining power and you get a rising power, one Hagerman goes down, one Hagerman comes up. And at some point, there's bound to be a war between them. In fact, almost all the historical examples one can find, it doesn't happen at all. So Hagerman actually, on the whole, tend to get on war, right?

Britain, the United States is perhaps the best example of that, where one gave up global leadership and gave it -- passed it on to the next. So I don't think that's necessarily a source for war. The problem is China. China is so awkward about's its frontiers, a bit like Russia, and it's anxious to make sure that its frontiers meet its requirements, that its frontiers match its view of where its frontiers ought to be, i.e., Taiwan. And that's much more likely to drive potential conflict than rivalry between China and the United States, which is, I think, a context much exaggerated.

Nathan Hunt

Richard, I'd like to end with an observation, if I could. And I hope you will take this as a compliment. It's certainly intended in that way. Reading your book, I was struck by the fact that it's called Why War? And what you did is not so much answer the question of why war as you asked the question better than it has ever been asked before. It was a full encapsulation of the question of why war. Was that something you were consciously thinking as you were writing it?

Richard Overy

Yes, it was, I think. I mean, I'm sure people would like me to have an answer straight away, like Einstein hoped that Freud would have an answer straight away. And so I'm not actually setting out to say this is why it all occurred, therefore, we can get rid of it. But I do think that we have more -- we have better and better explanations for why war happens and better and better explanations of why war has been a part of the human past as far back as we can go.

And I would like to think within 100 years' time, we're not fighting each other, but I don't think that's going to be the case. I think that the real problem with this is that we can explain war in all kinds of ways, sophisticated ways and so on. But in the end, understanding why war happens isn't necessarily going to stop it from carrying on.

Nathan Hunt

Well, the book once again is, Why War?, written by Professor Richard Overy. I encourage everyone to read it. It is fascinating and engaging and deep. Richard, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today.

Richard Overy

Thank you.

Nathan Hunt

The Essential Podcast is produced by Patrick Moroney. At S&P Global, we accelerate progress in the world by providing intelligence that is essential for companies, governments and individuals to make decisions with conviction. From the majestic heights of 55 Water Street in Manhattan, I am Nathan Hunt. Thank you for listening.

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