Book,
Causes of war
John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, UK, (2010)
Abstract
Our focus is on the causes of war, a subject that was once dominated by the study of interstate war and that has broadened in the last two decades to include civil war and terrorism as well as other forms of inter-group violence. Along with broadening has come fragmentation, since different communities of scholars utilizing different theoretical approaches have studied these different forms of warfare. This will be the first attempt we know of (other than some general international relations textbooks) to integrate all of these topics together in a single volume and deal with the question of causation. Our aim is to survey most of the leading theories of the causes of war, illustrate those theories with a wide range of historical examples, and give some sense of the strengths and limitations of each of these theories. We begin with a conceptual treatment of what war is (sustained, coordinated violence between political organizations) and how it has changed, with an emphasis both on elements of continuity and elements of change in the evolution of war. Since most of the theorizing about the causes of war has focused, until the last decade or so, on interstate war, and since the overlap between theories of interstate and intrastate war is relatively small, we begin with a lengthy survey of theories of interstate war. We adopt a modified 'levels of analysis' framework to organize the enormous and diverse literature on the causes of interstate war into chapters on systemic and interactional theories of war, state and societal level theories, and decision-making theories. In the next chapter we consider various approaches to the study of civil war. We include a discussion of how analyses of civil war have changed during the last three decades and of the extent to which theories of interstate war might also be applicable to civil wars. We then turn to terrorism, with an emphasis on its underlying political and strategic dimensions. We end with a discussion of the changing nature of warfare over time, and an assessment of how well leading approaches to the study of international relations can account for these changes.
