![]() ![]() It can refer, first of all, to the question of what makes war possible, to the permissive or logically necessary conditions for war. 4ĭespite this consensus on what we are trying to explain, the question of what causes war can mean several different things ( Suganami 1996). Until recently they devoted a disproportionate amount of attention to great power wars, including “hegemonic wars.” 3This great power and Eurocentric bias in the study of war is decreasing, however, in response to the end of the Cold War, the shift in warfare away from the great powers, and the rise of “low-intensity wars” and “identity wars” ( Holsti 1996). Peace, which is analytically distinct from justice, is usually defined as the absence of war.Īnalysts traditionally distinguish international wars from civil wars, and interstate wars from imperial, colonial, and other international wars that involve non-state actors. To differentiate war from lesser levels of violence, they generally follow the Correlates of War Project's operational requirement of a minimum (and an annual minimum) of 1000 battle-related fatalities ( Singer & Small 1972). International relations theorists generally define war as large-scale organized violence between political units ( Levy 1983, pp. THEORETICAL PRELIMINARIES The Dependent Variable Some of the following builds on Levy (1997b). For more complete reviews and citations see Levy (1989b), Kugler (1993), Vasquez (1993). ![]() ![]() ![]() My citation of the literature is also selective. I give limited attention to applications of game theoretic models ( Powell 1990, Bueno de Mesquita & Lalman 1992, Morrow 1994, Fearon 1995) and say relatively little about cultural, constructivist, postmodern, and feminist approaches to the study of war and peace ( Huntington 1996, Katzenstein 1996, Elshtain 1987). The chapter's space limitations prevent discussion of several important new developments in the study of war and peace. This chapter begins with a theoretical overview, continues with a selective review and critique of some of the leading theories of the causes of war, and ends with a discussion of some general trends in the field. Because of the extensive coverage of my earlier review ( Levy 1989b), I focus here primarily on significant developments in the last decade. This enormous diversity of theoretical, methodological, and epistemological perspectives on the study of war complicates the task of providing a concise assessment of the field. 2There is no consensus as to what the causes of war are, what methodologies are most useful for discovering and validating those causes, what general theories of world politics and human behavior a theory of war might be subsumed within, what criteria are appropriate for evaluating competing theories, or even whether it is possible to generalize about anything as complex and contextually dependent as war. However, we have few lawlike propositions, limited predictive capacities, and enormous divisions within the field. We are more explicitly theoretical in our general orientation, more rigorous in theory construction, more attentive to the match between theory and research design, more sophisticated in the use of statistical methods, and more methodologically self-conscious in the use of qualitative methods. That view was somewhat overstated at the time, because the field of international relations had made significant progress since its emergence by the end of World War II as an autonomous field of study, and it is certainly incorrect today. Nearly 20 years ago two leading international relations scholars argued, from different perspectives, that our systematic knowledge of international conflict had progressed very little since Thucydides wrote his History of the Peloponnesian War ( Gilpin 1981, p. My aim in this review is to assess the state of the art in our understanding of the causes of war. Each of these perspectives rests on some critical assumptions and theoretical propositions about the causes of war. Some foresee an “end of history” ( Fukuyama 1992) and gradual obsolescence of war, or at least of great power war ( Mueller 1989), whereas others see an explosion of low-intensity warfare and “clash of civilizations” ( Huntington 1996). The nuclear revolution, the end of the Cold War, the rise of ethnonational conflicts, and the spread of global capitalism and democracy have led to considerable speculation about a turning point in the history of warfare. ![]()
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