MWI Speaker Series: Dr. Bear Braumoeller – “Why War Won’t Go Away”

Dr. Bear F. Braumoeller is a professor in the Department of Political Science at The Ohio State University. His present work focuses on the decline-of-war thesis, as well as the relationship between international order and international conflict. Dr. Braumoeller’s most recent book is Only the Dead: The Persistence of War in the Modern Age.

In this MWI Speaker Series event, he will discuss how, despite the recent conventional wisdom that war is going out of style, the evidence simply doesn’t support this decline-of-war thesis. He will explain why the key to understanding trends in warfare lies not in the spread of humanitarian values, but rather in the formation of international orders—and further, that while these orders reduce conflict within their borders, they can also clash violently with one another, as the Western and communist orders did throughout the Cold War.