Azar Gat (Hebrew: אז"ר גת; born 1959) is an Israeli researcher of war, nationalism and ideology, and a professor at the School of Political Science, Government, and International Relations at Tel Aviv University.

He is the author of twelve books that deal with the history of military thought, the fundamental questions of war and its causes, the struggles between democratic and non-democratic states, nationalism, and the phenomenon of ideological fixation.

Gat has served as a visiting professor and researcher at the universities of Oxford, Yale, Stanford, Georgetown, Ohio State, Freiburg, Munich and Konstanz.

The book showed that the military thought of the 18th century grew out of the ideas of the Enlightenment and sought to create a general theory of war based on universal rules and principles.

Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz's criticism of it has now been explained as an expression of the sweeping reaction of Romanticism against the ideas of the Enlightenment from the turn of the 19th century.

[4] The return of the authoritarian-capitalist great powers to the international arena was at the center of two articles published by Gat in the journal Foreign Affairs in 2007 and 2009, at a time when most researchers believed that the final victory of democracy had already been achieved.

However, the book argues that there is no basis for the claim that national ties - which in the past as in the present have always given rise to powerful manifestations of collective identity, sacrifice and devotion - are new or superficial.

The book shows how the process of modernization in the last two centuries has resulted in a continuous decrease in the incidence of war since 1815 because it has changed the relative attractiveness between the three fundamental strategies of human social behavior: cooperation, peaceful competition, and violent conflict.

The book attempts to resolve the paradox according to which everyone recognizes the phenomenon of ideological fixation and the bias in the factual interpretation of reality it involves, and yet, so often, fall victim to it.

He analyses the successive military innovations of modernity, including the advent of nuclear weapons and the ongoing cyber and robotics revolutions of our own times.

With China and Russia posing a growing challenge to the global order, as Gat argues, he asks if war is in our nature - or if it is, in fact, declining.