Reddit mentions of Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

>Personally, I don't think you can solve violence with violence

I don't think history supports that view. It sounds nice, but peace usually follows one side winning, not people deciding to put down their weapons and be nice. I was reading Fukuyama's Political Order and Political Decay, and he made the point that the peace of modern Europe rests on centuries of war.

Denmark is commonly offered as the high-water mark of secular, peaceful society, but they started as the Vikings, raping and pillaging. Europe didn't set aside their differences, rather specific parties won, and through all the war and carnage the population learned that maybe war wasn't so great after all.

I'm not arguing that we can solve the Syrian situation. I'm just saying that, if the area was left to its own devices, one party would probably win eventually, and for all we know in 300 years the region might be as peaceful as Denmark. But along the way there would be a lot of war and death.

Sure thing! I should point out that's the first book of a two-part series, although both books are well-regarded.

This is a great list to start, but I would also suggest Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Political Decay, which I think are as if not more accessible than Guns, Germs, and Steel.

If you want to read a long-ass book that tries to answer that question, check out Political Order and Political Decay by Francis Fukuyama.

In brief, he puts much of the blame on the US's incomplete separation of powers and a tendency towards nepotism (which has been prevalent through most of US history, with the exception of the early 1900s to the 1970s, according to him)

So the US has an often ineffectual executive branch, further saddled with an activist legislature that likes to meddle in its affairs. Yet, the legislature is hobbled by a patchwork of largely independent elected or appointed judges that vastly complicate the enforcement and interpretation of laws.

According to him, it is less of a question of how much the government does and more a question of how it does it. He tends to favor centralized parliamentary systems (reduce conflict between executive and legislative branches) with powerful, efficient, independent bureaucracies (leave day to day operations to a professional class and minimize political appointees). Yet such a system would be hugely unpopular to wide swaths of the American public, who traditionally prefer a degree of decentralization and elected officials as opposed to appointed bureaucrats.