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Azar Gat (Hebrew language: עזר גת; born 1959) is an Israeli researcher of war, nationalism and ideology, and a professor at the School of Political Science, Government, and International Relations at Tel Aviv University. His research combines expertise in the fields of history, evolution, anthropology, and . He is the author of twelve books that deal with the history of military thought, the fundamental questions of war and its causes, the struggles between Democracy and non-democratic states, nationalism, and the phenomenon of ideological fixation. His books have been translated into many languages.
Gat has served as a visiting professor and researcher at the universities of Oxford, Yale University, Stanford, Georgetown, Ohio State, Freiburg, Munich and Konstanz. He is a three-time winner of both the Humboldt Prize and research grants from Israel Science Foundation (ISF). He has also won a Rothschild Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a British Council Fellowship. Gat was a recipient of the EMET Prize for the year 2019, considered Israel's premier scholarly award.
Since 1987, Gat has been on the faculty of the Department of Political Science at Tel Aviv University (now the School of Political Science, Government and International Affairs), where he is currently a Full Professor and the incumbent of the Ezer Weizman Chair in National Security. He has twice served as head of the department. Gat also founded and heads the Executive MA Program in Security and Diplomacy and the International MA Program in Security and Diplomacy. He is academic advisor to the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS).
Gat's first book, The Origins of Military Thought from the Enlightenment to Clausewitz (1989), merged two fields that were until then completely separate: Military theory and the history of ideas. The book showed that the military thought of the 18th century grew out of the ideas of the Enlightenment and sought to create a general theory of war based on universal rules and principles. Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz's criticism of it has now been explained as an expression of the sweeping reaction of Romanticism against the ideas of the Enlightenment from the turn of the 19th century.
In The Development of Military Thought: The Nineteenth Century (1992), Gat continued presenting the main schools of military thought of the 19th century. His book Fascist and Liberal Visions of War: Fuller, Liddell Hart, Douhet, and Other Modernists (1998) revealed the close relationship that existed in the first decades of the 20th century between the leading theorists of mechanized warfare (both land and air) and Futurism and Fascism currents which conjured visions of an elitist and mechanized future world. The book also presented the thought of Basil Liddell Hart in Liberalism, post-World War I Britain as a pioneering expression of ideas that would become the basis of how liberal democratic societies relate to war and its conduct. In both this book and in his 2000 book British Armor Theory and the Rise of the Panzer Arm: Revising the Revisionists, Gat refuted the accusations leveled against Liddell Hart regarding the alleged falsification of his influence on the formation of Germany Armoured warfare prior to World War II.
His books from 1989, 1992 and 1998 were collected into a single volume, A History of Military Thought: From the Enlightenment to the Cold War (2001).
What is War? Basic Questions
Gat's 2006 book War in Human Civilization is an interdisciplinary work that critically examines knowledge and insights from the fields of anthropology, evolutionary theory, political science, history, sociology, economics, and international relations in order to provide answers to age-old questions, some of which have been considered unsolvable. Since when have humans fought each other? Was the state of human nature before agriculture and the state warlike (as Thomas Hobbes claimed) or peaceful (as Rousseau claimed)? What are the reasons for war? How did the appearance of states, the process of modernization, and liberal democracy affect war? The book was chosen by the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) as one of the books of the year for 2006, and has been translated into Japanese, Korean and Chinese.
The Struggles of Democracies against Their Non-Democratic Rivals (Past and Future)
Gat's 2010 book Victorious and Vulnerable: Why Democracy Won in the 20th Century and How it is still Imperiled? examines the reasons for the democracy's ascendence in the world during the last two centuries, and the relevance of this process to the question of the future development of China and Russia in the 21st century. In addition, the book analyzes the dangers of unconventional terrorism. Victorious and Vulnerable won the book of the year award of the Israeli Political Science Association for 2010. The return of the authoritarian-capitalist to the international arena was at the center of two articles published by Gat in the journal Foreign Affairs in 2007 and 2009, at a time when most researchers believed that the final victory of democracy had already been achieved.
The Phenomenon of Nationalism
Gat's 2013 book Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism (with Alexander Yakobson), refutes the claim that nationalism is a purely artificial, if not completely manipulative, modern phenomenon. The book shows that the close relationship between ethnicity and the state has existed since the appearance of states at the beginning of history. Modernity led to the tightening of national ties and their empowerment through the concepts of popular sovereignty and civil equality. However, the book argues that there is no basis for the claim that national ties - which in the past as in the present have always given rise to powerful manifestations of collective identity, sacrifice and devotion - are new or superficial. The book has been translated into Spanish, Turkish and Korean.
The Causes of War
Gat's 2017 book The Causes of War and the Spread of Peace: But Will War Rebound? lays out the system of human that lead to war, a subject that has hitherto been completely neglected in the literature of international relations. The book shows how the process of modernization in the last two centuries has resulted in a continuous decrease in the incidence of war since 1815 because it has changed the relative attractiveness between the three fundamental strategies of human social behavior: cooperation, peaceful competition, and violent conflict. The book also explains the major exception to this trend: the two . Gat refutes the popular belief that war has become more expensive and more costly in the modern industrial age and shows instead that it is peace that has become more profitable.
Ideological Fixation
In his book Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars (2022), Gat again combines knowledge from a variety of disciplines. The book attempts to resolve the paradox according to which everyone recognizes the phenomenon of Ideology fixation and the bias in the interpretation of reality it involves, and yet, so often, fall victim to it.
The Clausewitz Myth, or the Emperor's New Clothes
Returning to the subject of his first book, Gat argues in his 2024 book that Clausewitz's reputation has been largely inflated because of the notorious difficulties of understanding his major book, On War (1832). Clausewitz changed his mind on the most crucial aspects of his analysis of war half-way through the writing of that book and died before he was able to complete it. Gat writes that many of Clausewitz's interpreters, struggling to make sense of the On War that we have, have not admitted - to themselves no less than to their readers - that they did not quite figure it out. Hence, "the emperor's new clothes." The Clausewitz Myth seeks to clarify Clausewitz's train of thought and remove the veils of mystification and idolization that have surrounded his work.
Military Theory and the Conduct of War: What is Strategy All About?
Warfare has been radically transformed throughout history, mostly under the influence of technological change. But is there anything enduring that can be determined about it? In his book that addresses this question, Gat discusses the relationship between politics and war, the meanings of ‘victory’, the distinction between offense and defense, and the significance of concepts like the ‘principles of war’ and military doctrine. He analyses the successive military innovations of modernity, including the advent of Nuclear weapon and the ongoing Cyber revolution and robotics revolutions of our own times. He also explains why guerrilla warfare and terrorism have grown increasingly important, and where they are heading. With China and Russia posing a growing challenge to the global order, as Gat argues, he asks if war is in our nature - or if it is, in fact, declining.
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