Azar Gat

Azar Gat (b 1959) is a researcher and author on military history. He was the Chair of the Department of Political Science at Tel Aviv University (1999-2003).

Professor Gat has a BA from Haifa University (1975-8), an MA from Tel Aviv University (1979-83), and his PhD from the University of Oxford (1984-6).

He has been an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in Germany (Freiburg), a Fulbright Fellow in the USA (Yale), a British Council Scholar in Britain (Oxford), and a Visiting Fellow at the Mershon Center, The Ohio State University.

He is also a Major (res.) in the Israeli army.

Professor Gat 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. An example is "The Human Motivational Complex: Evolutionary Theory And The Causes Of Hunter-Gatherer Fighting." This paper is cited in "Evolutionary Psychology, Memes and the Origin of War"

Publications:

The Origins of Military Thought from the Enlightenment to Clausewitz (Oxford UP, 1989),

The Development of Military Thought: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford UP, 1992),

Fascist and Liberal Visions of War: Fuller, Liddell Hart, Douhet, and Other Modernists (Oxford UP, 1998),

British Armour Theory and the Rise of the Panzer Arm: Revising the Revisionists (St Antony/Macmillan, 2000).

War in a Changing World (Michigan, 2001) (Editor with Zeev Maoz)

War in Human Civilization (Oxford UP, 2006)


 * Azar Gat's Book Voted Among Best of 2006 by TLS