Professor Azar Gat
Azar Gat, Ph.D.
is a researcher and author on military history.
He is known for taking an extremely wide view of warfare incorporating
viewpoints from ethology, evolution, evolutionary psychology,
anthropology, archaeology, history, historical sociology, and political
science.
Azar has been an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in Germany (Freiburg), a
Fulbright Fellow in the USA (Yale), a British Council Scholar in Britain
(Oxford), a Visiting Fellow at the Mershon Center, The Ohio State
University, the Goldman Visiting Israeli Professor at Georgetown,
and
the Koret distinguished Israeli Fellow at the Hoover Institute,
Stanford.
He was Chair of the Department of Political Science at Tel Aviv
University (1999–2003), is the founder and head of the Executive
Master’s Program in Diplomacy and Security, and is the incumbent of the
Ezer Weitzman Chair for National Security. He is a Major (res.) in the
Israeli army and on the Advisory Board of
War in History.
He authored
War in Human Civilization,
Victorious and Vulnerable: Why Democracy Won in the 20th Century and
How
it is Still Imperiled,
A History of Military Thought: From the Enlightenment to the Cold
War,
British Armour Theory and the Rise of the Panzer Arm: Revising the
Revisionists,
The Development of Military Thought: The Nineteenth Century,
Fascist and Liberal Visions of War: Fuller, Liddell Hart, Douhet, and
Other Modernists, and
The Origins of Military Thought: From the Enlightenment to
Clausewitz,
coauthored
Human Morality and Sociality: Evolutionary and Comparative
Perspectives, and coedited
War in a Changing World.
His papers include
The Human Motivational Complex: Evolutionary Theory And The Causes Of
Hunter-Gatherer Fighting,
Why War? Motivations for Fighting in the Human State of
Nature, and
Why City-States Existed?
Riddles and Clues of Urbanization and Fortifications.
Azar earned his BA from Haifa University (1975–8),
his
MA
from Tel
Aviv University (1979–83), and his Ph.D. from the University of Oxford
(1984–6).
Read
The return of Authoritarian Capitalists.