*Originally published in 2022 and preserved as part of our archive project. E-International Relations is free to read. We rely on reader support to make this possible.

Chris Blattman is the Ramalee E. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies at The University of Chicago’s Pearson Institute and Harris School of Public Policy, where he co-leads the Development Economics Center and directs the Obama Foundation Scholars program. His work on violence, crime, and poverty has been widely covered by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Forbes, Slate, Vox, and NPR. He is an economist and political scientist who studies violence, crime, and underdevelopment. His most recent book is Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace. It draws on decades of economics, political science, psychology, and real-world interventions to lay out the root causes and remedies for war, showing that violence is not the norm; that there are only five reasons why conflict wins over compromise; and how peacemakers turn the tides through tinkering, not transformation. 

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates in your field?

The thing that excites me about the study of conflict is that people are moving away from running the same theory-less regressions of “does climate cause conflict” or “does poverty cause conflict,” but now they’re trying to think deeply about what does cause conflict; why normal peaceful bargaining breaks down. They’re trying to design experiments and other kinds of studies that actually test our theories and tell us whether our theories are right. The best work in Economics on conflict is the work that is merging with Political Science and vice-versa.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

Ten or fifteen years ago I was asked to study a program in rural Liberia that was looking at land disputes between ethnic groups, religious groups, even just between households. 1 in 5 people had a pretty major land dispute, and something like a third of those were turning violent. Most of those were a punch on a nose or trampling crops, but sometimes the machetes came out and the village was a bloodbath. The program was just what we would call Alternative Dispute Resolution, which is a way of getting people to understand their biases when they’re trying to settle their disputes and share information through mediation with better negotiation tactics. This sort of seemed like a micro-conflict story, but as I worked on this I realized that everything that was going on—all the reasons they were fighting and that this intervention might work—were the same stories that I learned in class as a Political Science and Economics student on why we fight. On the international level we would learn about information asymmetries, commitment problems, psychological........

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