War and peace

“Wars and other conflicts are among the main sources of human misery.” Thus begins the Advanced Information announcement of the 2005 Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, awarded for Game Theory Analysis of Conflict and Cooperation. So, it is appropriate to devote this lecture to one of the most pressing and profound issues that confront humanity: that of war and peace.

I would like to suggest that we should perhaps change direction in our efforts to bring about world peace. Up to now, all the effort has been put into resolving specific conflicts: India–Pakistan, North–South Ireland, various African wars, Balkan wars, Russia–Chechnya, Israel–Arab, etc., etc. I'd like to suggest that we should shift emphasis and study war in general.

Let me make a comparison. There are two approaches to cancer. One is clinical. You have, say, breast cancer. What should you do? Surgery? Radiation? Chemotherapy? Which chemotherapy? How much radiation? Do you cut out the lymph nodes? The answers are based on clinical tests, simply on what works best. You treat each case on its own, using your best information. And your aim is to cure the disease, or to ameliorate it, in the specific patient before you.

And, there is another approach. You don't do surgery, you don't do radiation, you don't do chemotherapy, you don't look at statistics, you don't look at the patient at all. You just try to understand what happens in a cancerous cell. Does it have anything to do with the DNA? What happens? What is the process like? Don't try to cure it. Just try to understand it. You work with mice, not people. You try to make them sick, not cure them.

War has been with us ever since the dawn of civilization. Nothing has been …

*E-mail: raumann{at}math.huji.ac.il