Advisory Board

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.