Why War?

Overy, better known for narrative military history, pivots here to a different register entirely: a survey of the competing theoretical frameworks, biological, ecological, anthropological, psychological, that scholars have used to explain why humans go to war at all. The book is split roughly in half, first treating war as an outgrowth of evolutionary pressure and resource competition, then turning to cognition and culture as the more proximate drivers. Overy's conclusion is deliberately anticlimactic: no single theory accounts for war, and he's skeptical of thinkers on all sides who claim otherwise with more confidence than the evidence supports. Readers expecting the vivid battlefield narrative of his earlier books will find something more austere and argumentative instead.