Books like Why We Fight — picked by fans

I learned a great deal from this book’s insightful and wide-ranging coverage of the motives of terrorists; economic, political, and social causes and effects of terrorism; and government and private-sector counterterrorism efforts.

I especially like the book’s accessible coverage of leading research results in the field including risk factors for terrorism and conundrums associated with policy efforts to stymie terrorism. I loved how the book offered a fruitful blend of theoretical models, data trends, empirical results, and policy perspectives.

The authors are economists, so the book is strongly economic in approach, yet multidisciplinary perspectives are richly woven into the chapters, giving rise to a true “political economy” of terrorism.

I especially like how this book powerfully demonstrates that economists should care deeply about violent conflicts because of the severe harms that violence inflicts on economies (and ultimately people) in both the short- and long-run.

The book also persuasively shows that peace advocates should seriously consider economics in their work because conflict prevention must get the economic policies right to avoid the outbreak (or renewal) of violence.

I felt that the book succeeded wonderfully as a primer by explaining important economic concepts in layperson terms, applying economic concepts to violence and peace issues across a wide range of countries (including in several mini case studies), and highlighting economics policies that promote long-term growth and development, macroeconomic stability, and stable peace.

I especially like how this book widens the scope of analysis of humanitarian responses to include both human-made disasters (e.g., war, genocide, terrorism) and natural disasters (e.g., earthquakes, cyclones).

I learned much from the author’s multidisciplinary perspectives on the economics of humanitarianism based on his decades-long policy experiences in humanitarian aid and development.

I found several chapters in the book to be unique or rarely found elsewhere including “The Humanitarian Market” (covering data and perspectives on the supply and demand of humanitarian aid), “Survival Economics” (covering the deep needs of individuals and families living through disasters), and “The Transformative Power of Humanitarian Crises” (on how disasters can be springboards for institutional reform and long-term development).

I appreciated how this book took on the challenge of applying advanced mathematical modeling and simulation techniques to gain new insights into the social evolution of norms and institutions in societies, which is a critical topic in many fields, including conflict and peace economics.

I learned much from the book’s coverage of selected conflict and peace topics such as riots, revolutions, the 2010 Arab Spring movement, and the social evolution of cooperation. I especially like how the mathematical models in the book are described intuitively using wonderfully imaginative diagrams.

In this way, both the mathematically and non-mathematically inclined can come away with a richer understanding of human behavior in dynamically changing social systems.

If this book doesn’t compel you to become a feminist, then you probably don’t have a heart. Or if you have, then it is likely as cold as the rapists’ described in it. 

What do you feel when you read yet another account of mass rape, the trafficking, torture, and abuse of girls and women, and the gang rape of innocents? You should feel anger, if not despair. You might also well wonder what is wrong with men to make them behave this way.

Of course, you can choose not to read such accounts. But really, that is the coward’s way out. This is why this book is on my list–to challenge you to read it from start to finish and then, at the conclusion, decide you are not a feminist. 

A memoir that blends science and history with myth and memoir, Susan Griffin’s writing is like sinking into deep water to find buried treasure. Every time I pick this book up (again and again), I find relevance, for my own family and the world around me, particularly related to the earthquake that truth-telling has for individuals, families, and nations. It reminds me that interconnectedness is not just an image or an idea; the web of our lives is created and held together by the secrets we keep, and the truths that inevitably surface after years of denial.

Here’s a radical idea: let’s think deeply about murder. Let’s imagine that understanding why we fight and kill each other is as lofty an intellectual challenge as any other great, sweeping mystery of human nature or human origins.

Roger C. Gould never came out and said that a higher vision of murder was his purpose, but his book Collision of Wills achieves nothing less. It set a new bar for theorizing on human violence, and is a great, complex, and surprising tour de force about petty street violence.

If you're interested in lawlessness, Collision of Wills is indispensable, right up there with Donald Black's Behavior of Law. On a personal level, I'm grateful to this Harvard sociologist simply because he took the topic of petty street violence so seriously. Gould related rampant argument violence to the problem of unstable status in the criminal underworld.

His ideas are game-changing. He died… show more.

On May 8, 1970, just days after the killing of four college students at Kent State University, construction workers in New York City violently attacked a group that had gathered to protest the Vietnam War.

Kuhn offers a riveting account of the events (dubbed the “Hardhat Riot” by some and “Workers’ Woodstock” by others), but he also situates them into a broader story of how the war and other developments of the 1960s exacerbated divisions within the Democratic Party between white, heavily unionized blue-collar workers in the urban North and an emerging class of college-educated professionals. 

Nixon successfully courted many of the blue-collar workers on the way to his landslide victory in 1972. Kuhn is no apologist for the workers, but he also avoids facile stereotypes about the white working class, some of which persist to this day.  

What if we could detect psychopaths? Like many of Sawyer’s novels (and there are a bunch I could’ve selected for this list), there is a question and then a lightning strike of answers. Not a single bolt, but many, branching off, colliding, bleaching the night. There is plenty of scientific realism here–a personal must for Sawyer–resulting in a far-reaching yet intimate story.

The title is not ‘Night of the Psychopaths’ because the book’s many forks take us deeper into the nature of the human mind and the quantum arena we all play in, whether we know it or not. Oh, and it is still fun, adventuresome, and easier to read than I may have made it sound with all that deep, introspective stuff.

I’m keenly drawn to this novel because it navigates the specter between myth and violence, the grandeur of folkloric myth, and the raw side of violence, which are so descriptive of the Mexican past and present. Melchor blurs the lines between a world of quasi-fantastical superstition and hyper-realism, delving at times into the territory of mystery and crime fiction, all of it contained by the paradigm of the Mexican drug war, accurately rendering the reach and expanse of drug consumption and distribution as much as the ravages they bring about.

Centered around the figure of a murdered witch and alleged healer in the depths of the state of Veracruz, this narrative unmasks the mythical traditions of a locality to uncover the violence that lies at the depths of Mexican communities affected by the war on drugs. Melchor masterfully demystifies and rids exoticism from the Mexican imaginary to denounce the marginalization… show more.