Bear F. Braumoeller's "Only the Dead"

Bear F. Braumoeller is a professor in the Department of Political Science at The Ohio State University who studies Great Power politics, international conflict, complex systems, and statistical methodology. He earned his Bachelor's degree at the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan. He has previously been a faculty member at Harvard University and the University of Illinois and has been a Fellow at the Norwegian Nobel Institute. His first book, The Great Powers and the International System, won the Best Book Award from the International Studies Association as well as the J. David Singer Award.

Braumoeller applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Only the Dead: The Persistence of War in the Modern Age, and reported the following:

Only the Dead is a systematic examination of the decline-of-war thesis that's been forwarded by authors like Steven Pinker. The top half of page 99 isn't that relevant to the overall content, but the bottom half summarizes the chapter, and given that the chapter is central to the book, the summary actually does a pretty good job of conveying the book's essence. It reads:

I have to admit that when I started this project a big part of me hoped that I would be able to show conclusively that conflict is in decline. I devoted my life to the study of conflict in the hopes that understanding conflict would improve the prospects for peace. I’m well aware that objectivity is essential to scientific inquiry, of course, but I also think we should be clear about our biases. My bias in this case is that I want to believe that the world has become more peaceful over time and will continue to do so.

Unfortunately, nothing in the data gives me much reason to sustain that hope. The rate at which countries use force against one another has increased more than it has decreased over the last two hundred years. The decrease following the end of the Cold War, while real, is the exception rather than the rule.

There are other important tests in the book—tests of whether the deadliness of war has changed, for example, and of whether the potency of the causes of war has declined. There are also two chapters at the end arguing that patterns of international order are responsible for changes in rates of conflict initiation. But this is not a bad summary of the overall story of the book, and even though it's incomplete, I have to conclude that it passes the Page 99 test.

Visit Bear F. Braumoeller's website.

--Marshal Zeringue