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Reference

Lebow, R. N. (2026). Why Nations Still Fight. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009701068

Youtube channel link

https://www.youtube.com/@weekendresearcher

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayukhpsm/

Welcome to Revise and Resubmit, and this is your “Weekend Book Review” 📚✨

Some books don’t just explain the world. They quietly rearrange it, like furniture moved in the dark, so that when you wake up you keep bumping into new corners of your own certainty. Tonight, I’m sitting with a question that feels both old and embarrassingly current: if war is so ruinously expensive, so publicly condemned, and so frequently unsuccessful for the people who start it, why do nations still reach for it anyway? 🕯️🌍

The book on my desk is Why Nations Still Fight by Richard Ned Lebow, published on 08 January 2026 by Cambridge University Press. Lebow is not a pundit passing through the scene. He is Professor Emeritus of International Political Theory at King’s College London’s War Studies department, an Honorary Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and the James O. Freedman Presidential Professor Emeritus at Dartmouth. He’s also a Fellow of the British Academy. And I love this detail: alongside all that gravitas, he writes short stories, murder mysteries, and counterfactual historical fiction. That range matters, because this book is about the stories nations tell themselves before they light the match 🔥🧠

This work follows his earlier Why Nations Fight (2010), but it carries the weight of a long view. Lebow draws on an original dataset of interventions and wars from 1945 to today, and he walks us through eighty-eight cases of interstate conflict with short, sharp case studies. His argument is unsettling in its simplicity: wars often begin not with clear-eyed strategy, but with miscalculation, lazy or performative risk assessment, and the kind of cultural and political arrogance that makes leaders think reality will politely cooperate.

And then he pushes harder. He says a lot of our familiar realist and rationalist theories simply don’t fit what we keep seeing. Nations do not always fight for security in a neat, rational calculus. They fight for something messier, something human. Lebow leans on thumos, the hunger for status, prestige, and sometimes revenge. The pursuit of being seen. The refusal to be slighted. The need to prove you still matter ⚔️👀

He also doesn’t let great powers off the hook. In his account, states like the United States and Russia stumble into interventions that they expect to control, only to discover that force is a poor substitute for foresight, and that winning militarily can still mean losing politically. Again and again.

In this episode, I’ll walk you through what Lebow is really claiming, what it challenges in the way we study war, and what his “irrationalist” turn might open up for how we forecast the future of conflict 📈🧩

Before we begin, my sincere thanks to Richard Ned Lebow and Cambridge University Press for bringing this book into the conversation 🙏📘

If you enjoy “Weekend Book Review,” please subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, and subscribe to my YouTube channel, Weekend Researcher 🎧▶️ You can also find the show on Amazon Prime Music and Apple Podcast.

So here’s the question I want to start with, and I want you to hold it close as we go: if nations keep losing, keep regretting, and keep insisting they’re rational, what exactly are they still fighting for? 🤔🌑