Books like War and human progress by John Ulric Nef

Jared Diamond explains how geography, biology, and human ingenuity shaped the world’s unequal societies in his Pulitzer‑winning study of civilization and social evolution.

Overestimates of violence beg the question: is modern society the most peaceful era? Steven Pinker argues that, through centuries of decline, violence has steadily fallen, revealing humanity’s better angels.

John Keegan offers a visceral, on‑the‑frontline view of combat, comparing three iconic battles—Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme—to reveal the physical, emotional, and motivational realities soldiers face.

Historian Fergusson provides a revolutionary reinterpretation of the modern era that resolves its central paradox: why unprecedented progress coincided with unprecedented violence, and why the seeming triumph of the West bore the seeds of its undoing. From the conflicts that presaged the First World War to the aftershocks of the Cold War, the twentieth century was by far the bloodiest in all of human history. How can we explain the astonishing scale and intensity of its violence when, thanks to the advances of science and economics, most people were better off than ever before? Wherever one looked, the world in 1900 offered the happy prospect of ever-greater interconnection. Why, then, did global progress descend into internecine war and genocide? Drawing on a pioneering combination of history, economics, and evolutionary theory, Ferguson examines what he calls the age of hatred and sets out to explain what went wrong with modernity. --From publisher description.

This latest work (portions of which have appeared in the New Yorker and elsewhere) completes an unplanned trilogy that took shape around current events. Like the trilogy's previous two titles (Blood and Belonging and The Warrior's Honor), this book critiques the West's selective use of military power to protect human rights and the failure of Western governments to "back principle with decisive military force"--But here Ignatieff pushes this critique a step further, attempting to explain the paradox of the West's moral activism around human rights and its unwillingness to use force or put its own soldiers at risk: war, he suggests, has ceased to be real to those with technological mastery. Whereas Kosovo "looked and sounded like a war" to those on the ground, it was a virtual event for citizens of NATO countries--it was "a spectacle: it aroused emotions in the intense but shallow way that sports do." In other words, the basic equality of moral risk (kill or be killed) in traditional war was replaced by something akin to "a turkey shoot." In a series of profiles of major players in the Kosovo crisis (including American negotiator Richard Holbrook and war crimes prosecutor Louise Arbour and Aleksa Djilas, a Yugoslav opposed to the bombing), as well as in other writings--including a fine, concluding essay--the author presents a strong argument on the need to avoid wars that let the West off easily and don't have clear-cut results.

Los ensayos recogidos en *Guerra y civilización* de Toynbee nos dan la opinión del autor sobre el militarismo. Toynbee vivió dos guerras mundiales y fue miembro de la comisión de paz después de cada una. Por eso está alerta a los peligros del pensamiento marcial. Creía que la paz nunca era más frágil que cuando se asegura como resultado de una guerra exitosa. Solo ese punto de vista hace que la guerra y la civilización sean oportunas y relevantes.