Readers who, like me, are still catching up on great books published during the pandemic will find that Jason Lyall’s “Divided Armies” is as relevant as it was in 2020 and particularly compelling in light of the ongoing war in Ukraine. In this deeply researched book, Lyall, an associate professor of government at Dartmouth, brings new theory and evidence to bear on one of the oldest questions in the field of international relations: What makes some militaries significantly more effective than others even when they have nearly identical levels of numerical superiority over their enemies? An important factor, Lyall argues and demonstrates with rich qualitative and quantitative data, is how states treat (and mistreat) their citizens along ethnic, racial, class, and other identity-based lines. The book’s key empirical finding is that “successful armies are inclusive; unsuccessful ones largely die by their own hands, wracked by the poison of inequality that kills them, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, from the inside out.”
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