Christopher Blattman: Peace as the Technology of Institutions
War dominates the collective imagination because it is violent and spectacular, leaving more lasting marks than decades of quiet cooperation. Christopher Blattman challenges this fascination, defining peace not as an idyll, but as an institutional competence. It is a society's ability to resolve conflicts through procedures rather than violence. In a world of clashing interests, peace becomes a precisely engineered technology of coexistence.
Piecemeal Engineering vs. Utopian Projects
The foundation of effective peacebuilding is Karl Popper’s piecemeal engineering. Unlike utopian engineering, which seeks a total reconstruction of society according to an ideal blueprint (often resulting in violence), the piecemeal approach focuses on combating specific ills. Its tools are small-scale experiments and the humble method of trial and error.
Blattman, following Lant Pritchett, uses the metaphor of the Lewis and Clark expedition: in unknown territory, a rigid plan is useless. Success depends on the capacity to adapt and navigate through uncertainty. The piecemeal engineer is an operational skeptic who treats every action as a hypothesis to be verified, rejecting the hubris of total planning in favor of institutional flexibility.
Five Logics of War: Mechanisms of Bargaining Breakdown
Why do parties choose destructive combat? Blattman identifies five logics that push actors into a narrow canyon where room for maneuver vanishes. The first is the unchecked interests of leaders who privatize the gains of war while shifting its costs onto society. The second consists of intangible incentives—honor, status, or ideology—which make compromise appear as a disgrace.
The third logic is uncertainty and information asymmetry, leading to "tragic learning" by testing an opponent's resolve through force. The fourth is the commitment problem under conditions of international anarchy—parties do not trust that future promises will be kept once the balance of power shifts. The system is closed by misperception: psychological biases and overconfidence that ultimately block the path to agreement.
Checks and Balances: Geoeconomics and Business
To neutralize the logic of war, Blattman proposes four paths: interdependence, rules, interventions, and checks and balances. The latter relies on polycentrism—the dispersion of power among independent centers, which forces decision-makers to internalize the costs of conflict. The Madisonian principle of "ambition must be made to counteract ambition" serves here as a design for an aggression-braking system.
This theory finds application today in geoeconomics. Global business treats peace as a public good with a structure similar to financial stability. Faced with trade fragmentation and sanctions wars, companies are adapting Blattman’s theory by building resilience and redundancy into supply chains. Peace becomes an economic imperative, requiring hard institutional engineering rather than just moral appeals.
Peace as a Process: Continuous Institutional Correction
Peace is not an ultimate goal, but a process of continuous correction and the strengthening of institutional safeguards. The five logics of war are the gears of a breaking machine that we must constantly repair through piecemeal engineering. Can we transform the chaos of interests and emotions into a harmony of institutional solutions? Success depends on our ability to expand the field of maneuver where natural instincts push us toward confrontation.
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