Irregular Warfare Podcast - From Street Fights to World Wars: What Gang Violence Can Teach Us about Conflict

Episode Date: November 4, 2022

Subscribe to the IWI monthly newsletter by going to www.irregularwarfare.org! Is peace the natural order of things for the human race and war an aberration? Our guests on this episode, Dr. Chris Blattman and Mr. Teny Gross, argue that it is. They describe five theoretical mechanisms that cause breakdowns in societies and discuss why different groups end up resorting to violence. They then compare and contrast the characteristics of violence at the interpersonal, communal, and international levels. Finally, they end by discussing how third-party mediation at the local and transnational echelons can effectively employ peace-building mechanisms to bring an end to violence at all levels. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Because there's only so many ways agreements break down. And that's kind of like my little personal mission in life, to de-stovepipe this a little bit and get us talking and realize that actually, you know, you can go to the streets of Chicago or northern Uganda or wherever, and you might actually learn something about your great power war. I never had grandparents because of war. I grew up angry about the Holocaust, but I also understand that to minimize conflicts, I got to develop that muscle in my brain of

understanding the opponent, so it's perceived upon what do we have as shared interest. the opponent or perceived upon? What do we have as shared interests? Welcome to episode 65 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. I'm your host, Laura Jones, and my co-host today is Ben Jebb. Today's episode explores why violence occurs from the local to the geopolitical level, and how conflict can revert back to peace. Our guests today begin by asserting that peace, and not war, is humanity's natural state. They then identify the five theoretical mechanisms that cause breakdowns in societies, and discuss why different groups end up resorting to violence. Our guests then compare and contrast the characteristics of violence at the interpersonal, communal, and international levels.

Finally, they end by discussing how third-party mediation at the local and transnational echelons can effectively employ peace-building efforts to bring an end to violence at the local and international levels. Dr. Chris Blattman is an economist and political scientist who uses fieldwork and statistics to study poverty, political engagement, and the causes and consequences of violence in developing countries. He's a professor in the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. His new book, Why We Fight, The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace, serves as the anchor for today's conversation.

Mr. Tenny Gross is a veteran of the Israeli Defense Force and spent years working on mediation efforts between Palestinians and Israelis before moving to the U.S. Tenney's work in America began in Boston, where he worked on local peace-building projects before moving to the Midwest, where he now serves as the executive director for the Institute for Nonviolence in Chicago. He earned his bachelor's degree from Tufts and holds a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard University. from Tufts and holds a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard University. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare

professionals. Here's our conversation with Professor Chris Blattman and Mr. Tenny Gross. Professor Chris Blattman, Mr. Tenny Gross. Professor Chris Blattman, Mr. Tenny Gross, welcome to the Irregular Warfare podcast and thanks for being with us today. Great to be here. Thanks for having us. Chris, in your book, Why We Fight, you propose that peace is actually the norm and violence, especially sustained violence, is really an outlier. How does peace frame violence in the book?

You know, we can look at the U.S. and its rivals. Most of the time, we just strive to loathe one another in peace and avoid open conflict because it's just so costly. That's Russia has not invaded most of its neighbors. Two weeks into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, India launched a cruise missile at Pakistan, and that's remained peaceful. of Ukraine, India launched a cruise missile at Pakistan, and that's remained peaceful. It's even true, you know, I work in civil wars. Most fundamentalist groups, Islamist groups, oppressed groups, you name it, they don't rise up or rebel. And I work on gangs and organized crime, and actually a lot of gangs don't fight, maybe the majority. And so we forget that. You know, it's obvious why we pay attention to the wars that happen.

It consumes us, as it should. But we can't forget that most of the time we don't fight, mostly because I think we get the causes of war wrong, because we start to trace back from those minority of times when things went wrong. And we see lots of things. We can trace back all these antecedents, things that happened before, and think, oh, that's what caused the war. But if we're actually tracing back from all the times we didn't fight, we actually find a lot of those

same things. So we have to focus on what made these other situations different. And that's really was my starting point. Chris, can you introduce us to your ideas on how violence actually does occur? Thucydides said people go to war for fear, honor, and interest. So how do your five causes of violence expand on that? And how do you lay out when war becomes a rational action for an actor? So this book actually isn't really my ideas. This book is my attempt to take all of social science, basically since Thucydides, and say, okay, what do we know? And so I guess if people are looking for everything boiled down into a volume, so they can get the grad school classes or just get it all in one place. That was the purpose. And so we kind of had it right. You know, hopefully we would have failed as a species if we hadn't learned something in 2,500

years. I think the idea that we don't fight because it's just so ruinous and costly is a nice lens to look at conflict because what it means is every time we do fight, it's a reason that we ignored those costs or were willing to pay them. And I guess you can think of fear, honor, and interest as confusing shorthand because everyone means different things by those terms. So I actually, in the book, sort of lay out that actually there's a million reasons for war, war for every reason, reason for every war, but there's certain logics. And one is when our leaders in particular aren't taking into account those costs of war, usually because they're unics. And one is when our leaders in particular aren't taking into

account those costs of war, usually because they're unaccountable. So we could call that interest if you want, but interest isn't important. Everybody's interested in pursuing their own goals. It's when leaders aren't forced to internalize all the costs. So that's one. There's something you could think of as ideology or intangible. Sometimes when you're pursuing something that is worth paying the price of conflict, which could be a noble ideological goal like liberty, it could be an ignoble goal like dominance or glory. So maybe that's honor, right? We could stick honor there. The third reason we go to war is basically when we make mistakes, particularly when we're biased,

we misperceive the situation, we underestimate those costs, we overestimate our chances. The fourth reason we go to war, which I think is often missed, is uncertainty. It's the idea that we actually don't know the cost of war. We don't know the strengths of our enemy. We don't know our chances of victory. And so war is a gamble. And also there's a real difficulty in resolving that because we're always worried that our enemy is bluffing. So we can't really trust them to tell us how strong we are. And then the last is also this idea that we can't trust our enemy, that they're unreliable because we think they have some reason to defect from this deal in future, maybe because they'll be much more powerful. And this is what historians used to understand World War I. They used it to understand the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It's this famous Thucydides trap, the rise of Athens that spurred Sparta

to invade. So Thucydides was onto something there. So perhaps that's fear, but it's here something very specific, fear that the deal will unravel in future because of this power imbalance. And so I guess what I try to show in the book is that we actually benefit from being a little bit more precise and laying out maybe the logical strategic ways to go to war, but also with ideology and these mistakes, the illogical and passions and the other motives that drive us to war and nail that down a little bit more finely. Kenny, how have you seen these models laid out by Professor Blattman play out from your experiences in both the IDF and from your time looking at gang violence in Chicago? And what are the common threads from violence in war and street violence?

You often think about that. You think about it constantly in Chicago, for example. And again, I started most of my time I've spent on the East Coast during the crack epidemic and after to the point of honor, for example, right? Chris Hedges wrote a book more than a decade ago. War is a force that gives us meaning, right? So when you shut off from opportunities in regular society, in a regular city, for young people, so there's dynamic also of age that fall into this.

And I think with Chris trying to think about how do we restrain it? How does it get restrained most of the time, which I agree with him. There's also age, right? So young people without purpose with failure. Young ladies love the guys when they carry the guns, the music, the excitement. There is an adrenaline rush there. What are the forces that contain them?

Well, all the brothers and sisters or leaders in those crews that have gone and suffered, that have seen the cost of war. Just like young soldiers, you know, in a way they join an army with a certain purpose. At some point, all this training, people want to use it. We don't have dramas on Netflix about peace, right? What would you watch? An hour and a half of peace? Conflict is at the heart of every novel, every story. There's so many police dramas. I'm watching now the new Simon on Baltimore.

We own this city, right? It's interesting. But most of the time, we have that bias, and Chris talks about that, where we don't really think a lot about the peacemaking, how to avoid conflict. Well, I live off doing that. And we had some cities where we succeeded in reducing violence quite drastically. And there's lessons there and it's worth it. You never feel completely satisfied as when you win a war. Peace is always fragile. It can erupt any moment. When you're a peacemaker, you don't have the total satisfaction

of stability. And I think that's another reason for biases, right? We sometimes want to have a decisive sort of victory, whereas with peace, it's an ongoing maintenance work. But obviously, it's worth it when you're dealing at least with your society. You know, Tenny and I started working together for the last few years because I got drawn into thinking about Chicago. And, you know, there's and I started working together for the last few years because I got drawn into thinking about Chicago. And, you know, there's a few things in there. One is, you know, this is a city with an awful lot of violence.

Everybody knows that. Most people don't want to shoot most young men. Actually, even most gang members, it's important to note, don't shoot. You know, if there's hundreds of thousands of young black men in the five high violence neighborhoods, There's only a few thousand people you might call gang or mob or clique or crew members. And actually only a tiny fraction of those are actually shooting. And they're miserable, too. They don't want to shoot, right? No one likes to be looking over their shoulder every day.

So most of the time we don't fight. It's happening a lot here. It doesn't happen in all cities, right? There's a story of vengeance in the sense that a lot of these shootings in an American city or Latin American city, really anywhere, honor killings. And in a way they're basically saying, you know, you shot at me, you shot at my brother, you killed my brother, maybe you killed my uncle. This could be going on 10 years. And though that's not irrational, right? That's pursuing this ideological intangible objective, which you might call honor. But there's another kind of

honor, which I think a better term is reputation, which says that, look, and it's very strategic, right? So far, we've caricatured these young men as just, you know, emotional mindless people pursuing vengeance. But that's not true. You know, I met a drug dealer, a head of a crew from Tenney's neighborhood that was running through this program that we've been working on. And he told me how he became a killer. These are his words. He became a killer because initially been working on. And he told me how he became a killer. These are his words. He became a killer because initially he was robbed. And he realized he either had to get out of the business and get killed, or he had to go after them and prove that they were wrong to think he was weak and had low resolve.

And if his resolve had been written on his forehead, he wouldn't have had to kill and kill and kill to build this reputation. You only need this reputation when your true strength and resolve is unknown. That's sort of saying, like, I need to cultivate this reputation so that I'm not attacked. And that's true at every level, right? That's what the United States has to engage in. That's what an insurgency group has to engage in. You try to construct reputation so that you don't have to fight your enemies. Israel had a calculus. We're in a real hostile neighborhood. You don't have to fight your enemies. Israel had a calculus.

We're in a real hostile neighborhood. And while our opponents can lose many battles, we cannot afford to lose even one. And that makes for a pretty tough dog in a neighborhood. You know, fill that in with a recent history of never again after the Holocaust. And that makes a group of people that had a reputation of being pretty scholarly and quiet actually turn pretty aggressive. Because the calculus is we cannot lose even one battle. We will be preemptive and we will get you wherever you are around the world. The downside to violence, of course, you can have that calculus.

Eventually, there's a slippery slope. How often and how easily do you use violence? And that we see with gangs as well. Yeah, there's a weird combination of emotion and bias, of vengeance and ideology, and then this uncertainty-reputation nexus. These three, it's kind of amazing how this pervades at so many different levels. Yeah, that's super interesting,

just looking at how these theories apply at the state level, the local level. So for the five causes of war that you talk about, Chris, are there ones that are more applicable to state-on-state war and others that are more applicable to non-state or regular warfare? Or is it just more dependent on the actors and kind of their individual motivations when it comes to violence? Yeah, you can sort of see they apply differently, but they always apply in some fashion because they're just logical ways that this peaceful deal breaks down. So let's take the fifth one, which I called unreliability. But in the book, I use the political science and economics term, which is a commitment problem. It's a horrible term. science and economics term, which is a commitment problem. It's a horrible term. The state-on-state example is that Russia's rising and Germany's worried that it's going to be crushed and there's no credible deal that Russia can make. And that's a major story of World War I, not the assassination

of an archduke, right? Those things help, but it's about this Thucydides trap. So again, this fear of a rising rival gives you an incentive to lock in your advantage now. So it's a classic commitment problem that contributes to a lot of warfare. It's strategic, and it's cold, and it's calculated. That can happen in irregular warfare. You know, most genocides and most mass killings, you could take Rwanda as an example. We think of them as exercises of passion and hatred. No, that was a cold, calculated, strategic move by one group deciding that it was losing the civil war. It had to lock in its advantage now by attempting to exterminate

the other side. So it's a similar logic. The other logic that pervades irregular warfare, take Colombia and the FARC as a classic example, but you could point to a lot of insurgent groups. Insurgents have to put down their weapons at some point, and they usually have to join a political process. And they're usually weaker than the government. And when that's the case, they have to believe that when I put down my one weapon, you know, my one thing that I really have gives me bargaining power, you're not going to marginalize me or worse, you're not going to kill me. And that's a commitment problem. And a lot of insurgents don't trust. And I work in Colombia for many years. Every time the insurgents entered into talks over the last 40, 50 years, someone would try to kill them.

Maybe not the government, but maybe a splinter group or a spoiler. And then indeed, since they've put down their weapons in the last couple of years, hundreds, if not a couple thousand leftist leaders have been murdered. So there was a real commitment problem. So that's different than what drives great power wars. commitment problem. So that's different than what drives great power wars, but the logic helps us understand why wars start and why they can be persistent. So Chris, you've mentioned the idea of the Thucydides trap a couple times. Can you delve deeper into that and analyze for us whether that actually holds true,

as in rising powers after a certain point, go down this inevitable path of violence with rivals? Or do individual actors actually have more agency and are able to reassess their position and interests using these five avenues and oftentimes avoid armed conflict? You know, I just made this classic mistake we started off with, which is, oh, I just pointed to the worst that happened, which makes us think that the rise of Athens, you know, is what inspired fear in Sparta. The rise of Russia is what forced Germany to do this. And, you know, Xi Jinping's been walking around for the last 10 or 15 years talking to foreign journalists and domestically about the Thucydides trap, which, you know, is worrisome. But actually, most of the time,

we handle the rise of other powers just fine. You know, China just became the world's greatest economic and military power after the United States without a war. And I think even those are some real possibilities, war still feels somewhat unlikely. So we handle these rises all the time. Nations see dramatic demographic changes and one group rising over another without going to war. So we solve commitment problems in lots of ways. War is just so costly that even if we have this incentive to lock in our advantage, we often don't because it's too costly. Or we find ways to make commitments. Some third party guarantees that peace. That might be a peacekeeping force. Or what nations do we come up with constitutions that lock in certain rules and let groups know that minority rights will be protected? So it's not an inevitability, right? There is no Thucydides trap. It's sort of like a Thucydides risk, which we mostly avoid. I'd like to go back and address the idea of spoilers and splinter groups. How do they disrupt options from the local to the geopolitical level?

We breezed past what I think is the first and maybe one of the most important drivers of war, which is this lack of accountability of, I said, our leaders. When our leaders aren't accountable for war, they're more likely to wage it and that happens all the time you know vladimir putin is a personalized dictator that is a big part of the story doesn't bear most of the costs so he can be quick to use violence splinter and spoiler groups are sort of a special case of this right it's not the top top leader but it's somebody in the middle or middle high who says you know what this leader this ultimate leader is trying to take my group towards peace. And it's not in my interest, either for some ideological reason or because I'm just making a lot of money from this current state of warfare.

And so I'm going to try to break this peace down for me. Not in the interest of my group, but it's in the interest of me. And that's what we call a splinter group or spoilers. I'm kind of curious of Tenny, like, does that happen on the streets? I pay so much attention to some of these other three factors on the streets. I don't know. Are there spoilers and splinter groups when you try to make a game piece? Absolutely huge. So we are in back of the yards. We have made an unprecedented two and a half years long, sort of a non-aggression agreement, we call it. You stay on your side of the avenue, you stay on the other one. This is a conflict that lasted a few decades,

was the highest priority for the police. They were the first one to use AKs in the city. They've shot the son of a deputy chief. They shot an ATF agent. I mean, it is a serious conflict. And we managed through a lot of hard work and relationship, reduced a lot of the sting. The leaders that now have great relationship with us, the young people underneath them, they're feeling restless. They're feeling, well, now is our time for conflict. So they tease each other over social media. They humiliate, they drive into each other's territories territories and the elders are trying to keep it going and calm. And that is definitely, we see that. This weekend, we had a

homicide in Austin in a territory that we have had now a good non-aggression agreement. And very quickly, it looks to us now that it's actually an internal conflict and not between the two groups that we have an agreement. And they're spoilers, right? I think often also, I'm very interested when our government is not curious and its mindset. That's what really resonates with me with Chris's book. We were just hosting a commander from Belfast. And the feeling there is often the police force is Protestant, white males, and they're not paying attention to the Catholic population. They're not policing fairly. But if the population will be restless enough and feel like we're not being heard and our

pain, which we are communicating, is not being heard, then they will use violence to get attention. So often it's also the failure of good actors and governments to act and follow until there is a conflict. When there is a serious conflict, a lot of us mobilize. And I think it does apply also in other conflicts that I've seen, whether it's Belfast, whether it's Israel. I was actually doing some work for the State Department in Macedonia, North Macedonia, similar thing. Are we paying attention to different minorities and different actors

and young people? Otherwise, we're abandoning them to partisan, manipulative, nationalist groups. I think that's a fascinating look into how internal conflict can happen at all ends of the spectrum. how does that also translate to state-on-state violence? It's clear to see those internal cleavages pushing certain populations, underrepresented populations, into internal violence. What about external projections of force? How then do we apply that to that? If the system doesn't provide justice, people want justice, right? We talked about vengeance as a motive. Why are people seeking vengeance through targeted assassinations? Well, the state does not solve crimes. What percentage of homicides that result in a conviction? 5% in Chicago? Some ridiculous number. I don't know. Tenny's nodding. So, and there's lots of reasons for that. It's complex, right? The police struggle to do their job, the people don't cooperate with them. So as a result, there's street justice. Well, now let's scale up to the world, right? We do not have a

system of equal justice. When one state versus the other has a grievance, we do have these institutions, we have the UN Security Council, we have great power politics, we have regional associations, but states often can't actually get a fair shot at anything that resembles like a rules-based order. And that's going to lead to a lot of long-running grievances between states. Now, they still don't want to fight because it's too costly, so a lot of them avoid it. But to the extent that they pursue extra legal means on occasion, it may be partly because the legal means internationally have failed them. Now, it'll be a long time before anything like that in the world,

maybe never. But we can also understand that states pursue extra legal actions when the legal means don't exist. Tenny, you talked about how violence can break out at the national level or city level due to a crisis of legitimacy or a lack of legitimacy from the local government. Chris, were you saying that at the international level, basically a lack of any governing authority, this idea that realists often talk about is, you know, a cause for longstanding grievances and violences, and there's just really no mechanism to hash out differences other than violence? No, there's lots of other options, right? But of course, the U.S. tries to use the international

order and its own other tools all the time with all these other adversaries, North Korea, Iran, like the list goes on, right? Venezuela. But it doesn't help that these systems don't exist. But maybe the deeper point is you say, here we are talking about street violence in Chicago, or I was working in insurgencies in Africa, or on organized crime and conflict in Latin America. And it is like an international relations class. A lot of this stuff that we've learned under Stern and Great Power War, we can know, it's not exactly the same. We like to stovepipe all these things. Maybe our services are the same way.

Like maybe everybody thinks, well, you do a regular warfare. So what can I learn from that that's relevant for China, Ukraine, right? And of course, that's true. These are different, right? Just like being a scholar of civil war is different than being a scholar of great power conflict. But occasionally we have to step back and say, actually, what do we learn that's maybe a bit general? Right. Just like being a scholar of civil war is different than being a scholar of great power conflict. But occasionally we have to step back and say, actually, what do we learn that's maybe a bit general?

What do these things have in common? Because there's only so many ways agreements break down. And that's kind of like my little personal mission in life to de-stovepipe this a little bit and get us talking and realize that actually, you know, you can go to the streets of Chicago or northern Uganda or wherever, and you might actually learn something about your great power award. When you have superior power, it actually sometimes atrophies your brinksmanship, right? The idea of dealing with a weaker opponent in a merciful and thoughtful way. And that is the risk of being superior. It's a risk the United States faces. And I think so often, you know, I run a nonviolence institute. People immediately go to the extreme. Well, the Holocaust. Are you an Israeli? Are you a pacifist? I say, I don't need to be a pacifist. I just need to really work hard so I will never need to rely on force. I come from the realist school, right? I studied realism.

I lost grandparents. I never had grandparents because of war. I grew up angry about the Holocaust. But I also understand that to minimize conflict, I got to develop that muscle in my brain of understanding the opponent or perceived opponent. What do we have as shared interests? And that's something I think that would behoove military leaders

to do the same, or police. And that is an undeveloped view of how you should have a stick, but you should use carrots a lot, and you should know how to use them. And reading military commanders in Afghanistan and other places that were smart, they really took to learn the local terrain. I spent some time in Northern Ireland writing the book. A friend of mine is a historian at IRA. I talked to some guys, and there was this approach of some incident would happen, a police station gets a Molotov cocktail, and they'd round up all the Catholic boys they could and beat them up. And maybe someone gets killed.

And they ended up being the provisional IRA's best recruiter. And then you come to the U.S. and you look at the FBI, takes a completely opposite approach. Five guys decide they're going to try to kidnap a governor and the FBI doesn't round up every Proud Boy for 300 miles, right? They're very precise. And then they use the legal system to go after them. And I'm guessing, you know, people in the military see this as well.

You know, you hear stories in Afghanistan, there were very different approaches. You know, you could take that FBI-like approach, or you could take that much more round-up-every-suspicious-looking character for 40 blocks. And those had very different effects and effectiveness. And one, I think, built legitimacy and helped quell violence, and I think one spurred it. Unfortunately, we make the same mistake here. and help quell violence, and I think one spurred it. Unfortunately, we make the same mistake here. So Chris, in your book, you talk about these five mechanisms that cause war to include accountability, there's an ideological dimension, personal biases, we've talked about uncertainty

and commitment problems, but are there mechanisms outside of the five you mentioned that do cause violence? And if so, are there any real-world five you mentioned that do cause violence? And if so, are there any real world case studies we can look at? So I will say I was surprised how much of our reasons for war are just one of these five logics in disguise. And I searched a lot to be able to write a sixth chapter, either odds and ends or here's another category. Obviously, there's some

candidates. There's surprisingly little. I think the one situation that makes things very complex, this is true at cities, this is true in civil wars, I think this is also true internationally, is this basic logic that it makes sense to not to fight holds up really easily when you have two parties. And once you have 40 armed groups, and that could be 40 gangs, that could be 40 armed groups in the Eastern Congo, that could be 40 insurgent factions in some country, that could be 40 countries on a contentious continent. It's actually really hard to find some stable bargain that everybody agrees to. They can switch factions, they can move around. And actually, it turns out, you know, there's the game theorists back this up,

like there's a peaceful equilibrium almost always when there's two players that's really hard to break down. And that's really hard to maintain with lots and lots of players. So from practical experience from the theory, there is this problem of multiplicity. And that's actually why so many mediators and this is true at the international level. it's true when someone goes to the Congo, it's true when peace mediators go into cities with warring gangs, they actually try to form groups into two factions, right? And to help those factions cohere and not have splinter groups and not have spoilers in some faction defecting. They try to get people down to these two groups, to these bilateral negotiations where it's actually a lot easier to maintain peace. So I guess if I had to add a sixth chapter, it might have been that, but as my editor was telling me, the book was already too long.

When you're working through partners or a proxy on the ground, whether that's a state sponsoring a local militia or non-state armed group, or a police department working with a local nonprofit, or perhaps partnering with one gang to lower violence with another gang on the street. Do these causes get exacerbated and amplified? I mean, we already touched on increased numbers of actors, increased complexities when trying to strike a bargain. But when there's some kind of alignment and interest, how does that play in? I think nonprofits like ours

who do outreach, victim services, et cetera, we operate in the gray zone again because there's a crisis of legitimacy. So we're hoping to build a ramp that restores the legitimacy of our government. Eventually, we will be unnecessary. And that's what we want to get back to. We need the government to do better and we need actors to have more opportunities, but we work on them, right? We're working on creating,

and Chris has been instrumental in creating programs that help bring them back into our world, into our society. You know, young people in our neighborhoods very often act in very rational ways in the environment they're in, right, they're surviving. And moving them to what I would call our middle class, working class world takes more than just say no. So yes, it does complicate it, right? We're sometimes sandwiched in between. The young people in crews have to be suspicious of us.

Are we too close to the government? What is really our intention? The government and the police sometimes saying, well, are they really out of the game themselves, right? Or do they have their own interests? So there's constantly you got to work on trust. Being in that middle, in that gray zone is a really difficult role. It's stressful. Often you almost don't get trusted by anyone because their job is not to trust each

other. And here you are inserted yourself in it. So you got to keep working and got your own reputation to protect. One other way to look at this through my lens is to say like there's two kinds of ways that outsiders intervene. One is you just try to strengthen the hand of one party so that they get a better deal when they eventually stop fighting which to some extent is the majority of say the u.s approach to israel the other role that you can play is to actually roll back these five reasons that you're fighting and try to get the parties to peace and And the U.S. also plays a role in the Middle East. It's doing both, right? It's trying to strengthen one hand while trying to end the fighting. And organizations on the street in Chicago, a lot of them are especially doing that.

They're mediating. They're doing the kinds of things that diplomats do at the international level. They're trying to provide incentives for young men to put down the guns and maybe adopt a more normal life, right? We call those demobilization and DDR programs in the international sphere. And I could go through a dozen examples of the ways in which these organizations on the streets of Chicago are doing things that in many ways mimic and can learn from what's happening in a civil war or international conflicts and vice versa. I will say I'm new to working on the streets of the United States, and I'm learning things here that I will take to these other places. I think that points to really complex relationships that exist on the ground,

whether it's at the local street level or the geopolitical level, that actors who may be in tension with each other find a way usually to coexist. But how then does a third party intervention, say the United States invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq, or, you know, a Russian annexation, what does this third party intervention do to that equilibrium that had been there? And does that kind of change the calculus or does it just reset a cycle? So, you know, it's interesting. I mean, I'm guessing most Americans and maybe most of the military in this country think about Afghanistan and Iraq a lot. They went on a long time. But just like we don't pay attention to the wars that don't happen, I think we don't pay a lot of attention to the interventions that succeeded. So I spent many, many years

working in Liberia. Americans don't talk a lot about Liberia. That's because the American intervention there was a wild success. It was over in a couple hundred days, and then the UN Peacekeeping Force took over, and Liberia's a relative success. The same is true of the UK intervention in neighboring Sierra Leone. The same is true of several French interventions and neighboring Cote d'Ivoire on the other side of the country, and so on and so on. So there are examples, numerous, of successful military intervention. And quite honestly, we can look back and try to rationalize what it was. And I think we can learn something from that. But it's a tremendously uncertain process. So I do worry that Americans and the rest of the world draw the wrong lesson from Iraq and Afghanistan, which is to say we should be very cautious.

We should try to understand why this might work, but not to say it never worked. But people should be asking those questions. We should be paying attention to the interventions that worked and thinking deeply about that. Again, to follow with Chris's advice that we don't prescribe too much, right? With Chris's advice that we don't prescribe too much, right? I'm thinking we brought in 2017, nine groups together in the most violent neighborhood in Chicago. And initially they came to meetings armed.

They did not trust each other. Outreach workers who were wise and older really eventually encouraged them to exchange cell phone numbers and really not sort of become the go-between, right? And that's a temptation to be the go-between. You feel important, right? But actually, when they saw there's enough interest on all those groups to keep it going, they really encouraged them. They were just facilitators.

We talk about successful interventions. What you were a part of in Boston in the 90s and in Providence after that was, I don't think we can call that a third-party intervention because the communities were really engaged, right? But those are some of the great American success stories of violence reduction. And we don't pay enough attention to that when we think about irregular warfare. What did you guys pull off? They call it the Boston miracle for a reason.

warfare. What did you guys pull off? They call it the Boston miracle for a reason. And what Dean Esserman, chief in New England and Providence said, we really changed the culture also of policing, right? All actors. You cannot just think, oh, the problem is just young people shooting each other. They're the problem. Well, they're reacting to an environment. That's often what we miss with simple replications of models, which just think very simply, get them a job, mediate them, or lock up the really violent one. But what are all the actors when you assess a city? Usually, when I came to Chicago, I said, actually, I think it will be the elites that are the problem. And it turns out to be correct. There was just zero coordination among

civilian groups, law enforcement, the government, just no coordination. So we built a civilian architecture here now in Chicago. It's too early to declare anything, but it's a robust civilian architecture. Obviously, we had major setbacks with COVID and social unrest. We're starting to trend back down. unrest, we're starting to trend back down. So there is a role for civilians and in a civilian society to really step in and take part of those roles. I think that applies also in other conflict. So it's absolutely within a realistic calculus to put the conflicts down while we're working

to repair more root causes. You've got to do both. Gentlemen, so I'm kind of interested between this interplay in technology and the cost-benefit analysis of utilizing violence. So more specifically, do you think the advent of new technologies, whether it's at the state level, it's AI automation or hypersonics, or maybe at the gang or personal level, just the use of commercial off-the-shelf drones or peer-to-peer encrypted apps, do those somehow distort the human element when it comes to calculating the cost-benefit analysis of using violence? You know, the thing you see, I think, in Chicago, and Tenny can correct me, is this internet banging. So gangbanging,

the way one of my friends who used to be gang leaders, now one of these peacemakers, talks about it, is he used to go to the neighborhood of the neighboring crew and shoot up buildings. He was signaling reputation, right? That's what he was doing. He was doing it in a non-lethal way, but he was showing he wasn't being messed with. But he was a kid, and so he was also being stupid. So it's a little mix of misperceptions and reputation building. And a lot of that has moved online. And it's hard to say, I think, if that's good or bad. I mean, it's good that the young guys don't feel like they have to go shoot up buildings. I guess that's progress. But it does lead to some escalation that then can go offline and can result in someone feeling they have to do something real. The one analogy I'll

make with cyber warfare and these attacks, there's this stuff going back and forth all the time. It's low cost, so it's easier to do, right? That's what's happening with the internet gangbang. So it's easier to do, so it's more happening. And that's a problem. What I think makes cyber warfare different is, listen, when the Facebook insult comes, you know who's drilling on you here, right? So you know who you're going to target. Maybe the added problem we face in an international sphere is not just that there's this internet banging going on from our adversaries, but then we don't know if it's Russia or if it's the Iranian National Guard pretending to be Russia or if it's the Chinese pretending the Iranian National Guard pretending to be Russia, or if it's the Chinese pretending to be the Iranian National Guard pretending to be, you know, and so you risk actually hitting back at the wrong person.

So I think it's much worse at the international level, as bad as it is here on the streets. So Forrest Stewart, a colleague of both of us, wrote a book called Ballad of the Bullet, and it's gangs, drill music, and the power of online infamy. And I'm of two minds, right? Technology is kind of neutral, right? It can bring a lot of blessing and it can bring a lot of negativity. And people adapt to it. If you're a bad player, you will adapt sometimes and use it. And you can, right? So you can diss someone two streets down without having to drive and take the risk. Well, that's a good thing, right? A cell phone eliminated the need for a pager and to protect a pay phone in a drug dealing operation where you had a lot of violence because you had

to protect actually a source of communication to connect with your clients. It also is a little bit this sort of internet gangbanging. It's also a way to be aggressive and pretend you're someone really dangerous, but not having to do anything dangerous. And that's kind of good. You know, I'm a Liverpool fan. I can't stand Manchester United, you know, but I go to the pub where Liverpool fans are together

and we get a tribal energy and that's about it. It ends, right? We are tribal to some extent, even those educated and rational people among us, we like to feel identities. in our journalism, we're very biased towards the conflict. So people constantly bring examples how conflict happened because of virtual gangbanging, right? Drill music. But we collect very selective information, right? On one level, maybe it allows us, again, opportunities to intervene when no one actually was really harmed. We've talked a lot about how we get to violence, right? About how peace breaks down and how violence occurs. So then the follow-up to that would be how do we get to peace? How do we move from violence back into a peaceful equilibrium? from gangs working a peace process with local government or an insurgency working a peace process with a national government or states working a peace process on the international stage. You know, Tenny just talked about mediation, just as one example. So what are mediators doing when it comes to these five problems that solve war? The one thing they're doing is they're reducing uncertainty, like exchanging phone numbers, right? What did we do after the Cuban Missile Crisis? We put this hotline. The parallels

are just so perfect sometimes. So we try to create channels of communication. You try to find trusted intermediary. I don't trust the other side to stick to this deal. I don't trust their motives. There's a commitment problem. And I'm worried that they're bluffing, right? And so mediators are people who have built reputations and will try to provide credible information and provide some commitment. And that's true at every level. And often because gang leaders and world leaders are not always their best rational selves in those moments, and there are these deep misperceptions. They spend a lot of time trying to basically get everybody to act like the rational bargainers that will come to a deal and on and on and on. So they're solving the five problems.

And we could walk through just a hundred things that societies have done over time or international institutions that we've tried to build that accomplish that. And they exist. That's kind of what I spent the whole last half of the book talking about. But for me, the key is that you can always look at them and the successful ones are rolling back these five unsuccessful ones. And there's a lot of those are not diagnosing the situation correctly. They're either rolling back the wrong one of the five because they didn't have a good

sense of the situation. Or very often they're doing something that has nothing to do with these, like poverty alleviation. That's what you hear on the streets of Chicago. We just need to give everybody a job, develop the South and West side. And that's what you hear in Africa or the Middle East, right? There's all these poor people. And I spent a lot of my career fighting poverty and developing, I think, some really successful interventions that I'm proud of. And that's because poverty is important to fight. There's intrinsic reasons that we should care about poverty.

But poverty is not going to solve violence. Because if you're poor, you're rich, fighting is still costly. And poverty is not causing you to be more unchecked or more ideological or more uncertain or have commitment problems. It generally doesn't happen. And it's a distraction because it's like I said at the beginning, there's hundreds of thousands of poor black and Latino and white men on the streets of Chicago. And only about two or three thousand of them are shooting guns. So solving the poverty of the entire South Side of Chicago, which is an important thing to do, is not addressing this very concentrated problem of the 2,000 or 3,000 guys,

or it is in the most indirect and expensive manner possible. I think the building of the peace is where a lot of the thinking is often not invested. So one thing is we don't listen often to the people we deal with. We don't really listen. And they have internalized, even if they're not super articulating it sometimes, really the cost. They've lost so many friends jumping between bedrooms to try and they don't have a place to live. There's been a real cost to this lifestyle and they're exhausted, they're drained. So one of it is really working with human nature, right? You're tired, conflict is exhausting and it's costly to the warrior. And very often our system is, we look at your past, the criminal

record, and we tell you, this is who you are. We're really in these stages of entering conflict when you're very young and it looks exciting. There's when you're in it, we got to try and keep you alive. So why are you trying to avoid them from getting in it? But let's say you got in it. Now my job is to try and keep you alive. And when you have suffered enough casualties or you see it's not for you, you don't have that strength or your mother is evicting you and you want help to really listen to you. You want that ready to go out. And we often miss those opportunities. How do you help someone reduce their risk? So I start my conversations here in Chicago with young men in Austin, West Gafford,

back of the yard. In the last 60 years, we had 40,000 homicides in Chicago. 40,000. 80-85% is African-American. I tell them, you have a better chance if you drop out of high school, which many of them did, getting killed than I did being in Lebanon as an Israeli soldier. So giving them really, articulating very clearly the cost of war, right? Because what we're fighting against is the idea this is just the way it is, right? The sort of inertia in the Middle East too, this is just the way it is. Or in Belfast, it was very hard to move people from conflict.

No one is happy about the conflict. The mothers in Belfast were not happy. I always talk about the mothers here in Austin and West Gaffer, whether we're visiting in prison or we're on the street. The mothers don't like it. We remind them that humanity is of mothers on both sides. And that articulation, we often don't. We spend a lot of time on that. Yeah, and that's good news about any kind of peace builder. I don't care who you are. Like, a lot of people feel like they're working against the grain, but it's not true. They're the exhausted warriors, these exhausted mothers, people who are so cognizant of just how costly the fighting is. And that's why we don't fight. Most of the time we don't fight because it's too costly. And so you're working with the grain. You just have to harness it and find a way to get those costs internalized by the leaders, by the societies. And so that's like, I think the takeaway is maybe peace isn't as hard as we all think. A quick follow-up to that would be, how do you assess peace processes and how do you know it's working? And are those same assessment mechanisms available for all levels?

You know, it's one thing to say, okay, you know, we have the Good Friday Agreement and we've not seen violence reoccur really in Northern Ireland, right? So, we could say it's working. You could say the Dayton Accords are working, but we still have, you know, UN peacekeeping presence on the ground. So, what are we saying? It's just a decrease in violence? Or, you know, what's your time horizon really for success? So, one thought is that most of the time we don't need peace processes because most conflicts are really short. So we don't pay attention to them, right? So Israelis and Palestinians will fight, but it's often a flare up for two weeks and then it quiets down because both sides don't want it. Most cities, the gangs don't have a sustained gang war. Most ethnic conflicts or whatever you want to call Northern Ireland don't

sort of last for 30 years. Most civil wars like Colombia don't last for 50 years. So actually, we only need peace processes in this tiny fraction of conflicts that keep going on. Most people don't remember this. The median conflict for the last 200 years was only three months, right? These things are mostly over. You need peace process for that select group of conflicts where things are just really, really, really bad. It's sort of like, what do you do with terminally ill patients? It's hard. It's just going to be really, really hard and they're going to need a lot. And you're probably going to fail a lot of the time. And that's kind of hopeless. At the same

time, it's hopeful because it sort of reminds us that these really are the exceptional cases. And then it's just, you know, the tennies and the others of the world to do this. I think at the end of the day, it's just hard work where you get it wrong and wrong and wrong until one day it starts to get a little bit right. I agree. It's again, the realism and you got to have a little bit of a vision that is beyond the mundane. I spent three days alone with Hamas explaining to them why they should diversify their information sources beyond the mosque on Friday. I was scared and they were scared, but I wanted to hear directly from them. And I wanted to tell them why Israelis are not

just the crusaders and that we're just going to go away, that they should recalculate the risk. So here on one level, peacemakers in Chicago and any other American city and many other places, we're maintenance workers, and that's okay. We're like in the trauma room. We patch people up. And you do enough of that until you can actually eventually speak of prevention. Suddenly you hit the tipping point. And when there is violence, when it does erupt, rather than say, well, that's what always

happened. Violence will always dominate. Peace is useless. No, it's a setback. Just like in life. My diet is a great example, right? I exercise every day. And I'm not always winning.

I have better years and worse years, right? But I keep at it. I don't just sit in front of TV and eat steaks all day. I keep at it. Am I going to come out of this life alive? No, I'm not. Does that mean we don't exercise? Of course not. The same goes with peacemaking. We discussed broad implications for peace and the work necessary to move from conflict to peace across levels of analysis. So what are further implications for academics, policymakers, and practitioners? I think what I would like both academicians, especially people in power, policy,

police, mayors, is community work. It needs to be a real serious investment. A big point in Chris's book, a commitment to change it is very fearful and misdirected. The financial business community in Chicago is miserably failing. At capitalism, Chicago could have three times the size of its GDP if we had peace. I can stand at a tower, the Chase Tower downtown, and look west and south and look at the cost of violence and lack of businesses, lack of thriving, early deaths, all those expenses. It's really poor capitalism, right? People are locked up.

I'm going to compete with another country financially, but I'm paying for someone to be in a hotel called Cook County Jail for $50,000 to $100,000 expense. So the two of us are competing with someone from another country. How is that good capitalism? The lack of imagination and daring and courage is often what causes those failures.

So I'm sometimes worried that Chris's book, which is ambitious, I'm a child of the enlightenment. I love ambitious books. It's very dangerous these days because you can poke holes at different parts of the argument. It's very dangerous these days because you can poke holes at different parts of the argument. It is so sweeping. You can say, well, he wrote about Belfast. He's not an expert of Belfast. He wrote about Israel. He wrote about this. But actually, the courage to go for

some real big observation, I really admire that. I want to encourage academicians to go back to that and writers. And I want policymakers to be more ambitious as well. For those of us who are immigrants to this country, the one thing we often felt, and I come from very bureaucratic places, that in America, good ideas can really, really win. You know, your last question is a little bit like the dilemma I had at the end of the book. is a little bit like the dilemma I had at the end of the book. Like a lot of books just fail in the last chapter because they say, okay, I've now told you what the problem is. Here's your 10-step path to peace. And that's a tempting chapter to write, but I realized it wasn't true.

You know, there's no like little pointer. In each specific situation, like Tim and I could say, okay, in cities like Chicago, we've learned to do A, B, and C. But the problem is, it goes back to what you said before, where our attention is focused on the worst cases, right? All those episodes of violence that didn't happen or resolved after two weeks or three months, we're just embroiled in these disputes that just cannot seem to end. And they're like the worst tail end of the problem. And the sad fact is, is every single one of those is different. And at every moment, our diagnosis is wrong.

And the thing we're doing is wrong. And then you roll out because you're exhausted after two years and the next 10 or the next general or the next whoever comes in, often convinced they know what they okay, I have the diagnosis and I have the answer. And then in often convinced they know what they okay I have the diagnosis and I have the answer and then they fail and they fail and they fail and they get a little closer and then they rotate out so maybe the one thing is is I think if we all approach this one maybe a little bit more cognizant that we're going into the hardest cases that to be optimistic that most of the time it's not like this so So go in optimistic, but this is the hardest case. And I do not have the answer. And I have an idea. And the only thing I know is that idea is wrong. And I have a plan of attack. And the only thing I know is that that

plan of attack is wrong. And so I need to design step two, three, four, five, and six to react to the fact that step one is wrong, rather than just put all my hopes on step one being right. And that's actually a mentality and a plan of attack that you set up expectations differently, you act differently. And I think you could do this in Chicago. And that's why Tenney succeeds. I think that's true in insurgencies, that's true with this ridiculous and tragic thing happening in Eastern Europe right now, if we were all just 50% less confident and realized that we sort of have to tinker our way to the solution, we would all probably get there a bit faster. I think it was Dwight D.

Eisenhower who said, the plan is nothing, planning is everything. So it sounds like you're saying, you know, a local understanding of the issue at hand, knowing the context, and then combine that with a strong dose of humility might get you closer in an iterative process than just trying to apply a solution that you're confident in is right. Yeah, and Karl Popper talked to us. He argued that the philosopher of science said that the only way we've ever made human progress in science or in social policy, right? He was a philosopher of science, and he was Austrian, and then the Nazis happened, and World War II happened,

and fascism and communism and totalitarianism happened. So he quickly started to think about how do we solve human problems? And he said, the only way we've ever solved any problem is this piecemeal approach. He called it piecemeal engineering. And he said, every social actor in society, every military actor, every government actor has to be a piecemeal engineer. And so that's why I made my like cheeky dad joke at the end of the book. Like the last chapter is called piecemeal engineering, but it's spelled P-E-A-C-E. And it's trying to draw those insights. That's the 10 commandments that Tenney talked about. So I agree. And I'm not surprised that someone like Eisenhower goes through a long war

and then a long presidency. These guys often figure it out. The problem is a lot of us figure this out when we're maybe 70 and not when we're 30. Professor Chris Blattman, Tenney Gross, thank you so much for being with us on the Irregular Warfare podcast today. This conversation was very enlightening, and I know Ben and I learned a lot. Thank you. No, I'm a big fan of the podcast, and I was real privileged to be here and to sort of, you know, trade these thoughts, especially with you, Tenny. Thank you. Always enjoy it. Thank you again for joining us for episode 65 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks.

Next episode, Adam and I discuss irregular warfare in the context of European security cooperation efforts with Lieutenant General Mark Hertling. Following that, we'll explore the question of U.S. credibility in the wake of America's withdrawal from Afghanistan. Be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. The podcast is a product of the Irregular Warfare Initiative. We are a team of all-volunteer practitioners and researchers dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. You can follow and engage with us on Facebook,

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