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Principal The War Puzzle Revisited
The War Puzzle RevisitedJohn A. Vasquez
John A. Vasquez's The War Puzzle provided one of the most important scientific analyses of the causes of war of the last two decades. The War Puzzle Revisited updates and extends his groundbreaking work, reviewing recent research on the onset and expansion of war and the conditions of peace. Vasquez describes systematically those factors associated with wars to see if there is a pattern that suggests why war occurs, and how it might be avoided, delineating the typical path by which relatively equal states have become embroiled in wars in the modern global system. The book uses the large number of empirical findings generated in the last twenty-five years as the basis of its theorizing, and integrates these research findings so as to advance the scientific knowledge of war and peace.
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This page intentionally left blank T h e War P u z z l e R e visit e d John A. Vasquez's The War Puzzle provided one of the most i mportant s cientific analyses of the causes of war of the last two decades. The War Puzzle Revisited updates and extends his groundbreaking work, reviewing recent research on the onset and expansion of war and the conditions of peace. Vasquez describes systematically those factors associated with wars to see if there is a pattern that suggests why war occurs, and how it might be avoided, delineating the typical path by which relatively equal states have become embroiled in wars in the modern global system. The book uses the large number of empirical findings generated in the last twenty-five years as the basis of its theorizing, and integrates these research findings so as to advance the scientific knowledge of war and peace. John A. Vasquez is Thomas B. Mackie Scholar in International Relations at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. C a m br i d ge St u di e s i n I n t e r nat iona l R e l at ions: 110 T h e Wa r Pu z z l e R e v isi t e d Editors Christian Reus-Smit Nicholas J. Wheeler Editorial Board James Der Derian, Martha Finnemore, Lene Hansen, Robert Keohane, Rachel Kerr, Colin McInnes, Jan Aart Scholte, Peter Vale, Kees Van Der Pijl, Jutta Weldes, Jennifer Welsh, William Wohlforth Cambridge Studies in International Relations is a joint initiative of Cambridge University Press and the British International Studies Association (BISA). The series will include a wide range of material, from undergraduate textbooks and surveys to research-based monographs and collaborative volumes. The aim of the series is to publish the best new scholarship in International Studies from Europe, North America and the rest of the world. C a m br i d ge St u di e s i n I n t e r nat iona l R e l at ions 109 Rodney Bruce Hall Central banking as global governance Constructing financial credibility 108 Milja Kurki Causation in international relations Reclaiming causal analysis 107 Richard M. Price Moral limit and possibility in world politics 106 Emma Haddad The refugee in international society Between sovereigns 105 Ken Booth Theory of world security 104 Benjamin Miller States, nations and the great powers The sources of regional war and peace 103 Beate Jahn (ed.) Classical theory in international relations 102 Andrew Linklater and Hidemi Suganami The English School of international relations A contemporary reassessment 101 Colin Wight Agents, structures and international relations Politics as ontology 100 Michael C. Williams The realist tradition and the limits of international relations 99 Ivan Arreguín-Toft How the weak win wars A theory of asymmetric conflict 98 Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall Power in global governance 97 Yale H. Ferguson and Richard W. Mansbach Remapping global politics History's revenge and future shock 96 Christian Reus-Smit The politics of international law Series list continued after index T h e War P u z z l e R e visit e d J o h n A . Vas q u e z Thomas B. Mackie Scholar in International Relations University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521881791 © John A. Vasquez 2009 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2009 ISBN-13 978-0-511-59565-3 eBook (EBL) ISBN-13 978-0-521-88179-1 Hardback ISBN-13 978-0-521-70823-4 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. To Elyse peace of my heart C o nt e nts List of Figures xii List of Tables xiii Preface xv Preface to the Original Text xix Pa rt I Preliminaries 1 Introduction 3 1 Conceptualizing War 14 Definition 14 Definition of war 21 The concept of war 30 Theoretical assumptions about war 42 2 Types of War 52 Is there a need for a typology of war? 53 A typology of war 61 Conceptualizing rivalry 78 The domain of the analysis 87 3 Power Politics and War 90 Foreign policy and war 94 Power-based explanations of war 98 The role of capability in the onset of war 117 Retrospective Commentary on Part I 128 Pa rt I I The Onset and Expansion of Wars of Rivalry 133 4 Territorial Contiguity as a Source of Conflict Leading to War 135 Sources of conflict leading to war 137 ix x c on t e n t s Interstate war and neighbors: an overlooked relationship 146 A territorial explanation of interstate war 153 Territory, politics, and violence 160 Conclusion 165 5 The Realist Road to War 167 Explaining war as a series of steps 169 The rise of security issues 172 Responding to security issues: alliances 173 Differences between the nineteenth and the twentieth century: alliances and arms races 185 Responding to security issues: arms races 193 Crisis escalation 200 Conclusion 213 6 The Domestic Prerequisites of Wars of Rivalry 216 Classifying domestic political actors 218 Determining the initial balance between hard-liners and accommodationists 225 Domestic reactions to the steps to war 229 War initiation 236 Domestic constraints on war 240 Conclusion 244 7 Explaining World War: Its Scope, Severity, and Duration 245 What are world wars? 247 Factors promoting the expansion of war 250 The necessary conditions of world war 269 Duration 280 Conclusion 283 8 Peace 285 The nature of peace 286 Characteristics of peaceful periods 291 The relationship of peace to war 304 9 Conclusion: Solving the Puzzle of War 315 The onset of war 316 The expansion of war 324 c on t e n t s xi Peace research and cumulation of scientific knowledge 327 Retrospective Commentary on Part II 333 Pa rt I II Findings on the Steps to War, 1994–2008 10 Research Findings on Territory, War, Peace 341 Territory and War 343 Territory and Peace 362 Conclusion 371 11 Research Findings on Power Politics and War 377 Alliances and War 377 Rivalry and War 383 Arms Races and War 390 Combining the Steps 393 Conclusion 400 Appendix I: A Propositional Summary 405 Appendix II: Major Findings on the Steps to War 423 References 430 Index 463 339 F i g ur e s Figure 2.1 Classifying individual war efforts 72 Figure 2.2 Typology of war 75 Figure 2.3 The role of issue variables and dimensions of cooperation and conflict 85 Figure 6.1 Classification of domestic political environment 227 xii T ab l e s Table 2.1 Types of proposals for disposing of stakes 83 Table 3.1 Houweling and Siccama's findings on the power transition 107 Table 4.1 Frequency of wars involving a particular issue 143 Table 4.2a Interstate wars 1816–1980 148 Table 4.2b Major wars 1648–1814 148 Table 4.2c Rivalries 1816–1986 148 Table 5.1 Ranking of major states by alliance and severity and amount of war 184 Table 7.1 Wayman's power polarization data 272 Table 7.2 Wayman's alliance polarization data 276 xiii P r e fac e Over the years I have been asked by colleagues and students if I was going to do a second edition of The War Puzzle or an update. I was hesitant to do so, because at a certain point the text of a book takes on a life of its own. This was particularly the case with this book, because its larger purpose was to construct an explanation of why war occurs on the basis of an inductive review of existing findings. Once that inductive explanation was constructed, the more important task was to test that explanation deductively rather than tinker with it by looking at new findings. In the last fifteen years, I have spent most of my time conducting such deductively oriented empirical tests, including several co-authored studies, particularly with the late Paul D. Senese. It was always my intention, once that research reached a critical mass, to revisit the war puzzle to see what the new findings would tell us about the explanation set forth in the original book. The book before you is the fulfillment of that long-term goal. It is not so much a second edition as it is a book that keeps the original text intact, but supplements it with two new chapters whose purpose is not to augment the original explanation of war but appraise its scientific adequacy in light of the quantitative research conducted since 1993 that is relevant to the steps to war. The main reason for doing this book is scientific. It is to see how the propositions in The War Puzzle have been tested and how the two explanations embodied in the book – the territorial explanation of war (Chapter 4) and the steps-to-war explanation (Chapter 5) have fared. Chapter 10 reviews the research on territory and Chapter 11 reviews the research on power politics. This research has been very encouraging both in terms of failing to falsify the original theory and in breaking new ground. At the same time, as one would expect, not everything has worked out. The natural domain of the theory is the classic 1816–1945 era. It fits the Cold War xv xvi Pr e face only partially, but the post-Cold War period seems to be returning to the patterns found in the classic era, making the theory still relevant for the immediate past and the future. From the reader's perspective, the major difference between The War Puzzle and this book is that the former provided an explanation of why war occurs and this book complements the former by presenting a substantial amount of evidence that gives us an idea of where that explanation is correct and where it is not. Nonetheless, I have added to the text some brief "retrospective" commentaries after Part I and Part II. These look back on each chapter, indicating what I think now, after fifteen years have passed. Several people have been kind enough to read the new portions of this book. Marie Henehan provided several critical readings and impor tant advice. Sara McLaughlin Mitchell provided a close reading of Chapter 10 and Doug Gibler did the same for both Chapters 10 and 11 on short notice. My thanks also to Brandon Valeriano for suggestions on these two chapters and his work on types of war. More importantly, I thank each of them and all of the other authors cited in these chapters for the research they have conducted on interstate war and conflict. I am particularly appreciative for the research and insights of Michael Colaresi, Karen Rasler, and William Thompson on the steps to war. My thanks especially to Jack Levy, who encouraged me (more than once) to undertake this project. I am also grateful to the several anonymous referees who provided reports to Cambridge University Press, with valuable suggestions. I have not always taken everyone's advice, so I remain responsible for any errors and flaws. My new colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, especially Paul Diehl and Colin Flint, have provided an intellectually stimulating environment in which to think and write about peace and war. As always, it has been a great pleasure working with John Haslam and Cambridge University Press. My thanks also go to various doctoral students who have worked on the steps to war in other studies: ChoongNam Kang, Chris Leskiw, Andy Owsiak, Karen Petersen, Toby Rider, and Susan Sample. In preparing the manuscript, I am grateful to the Thomas B. Mackie research fund at the University of Illinois for support, to Delinda Swanson for preparing the references and the index, and to Audrey Cotterell for copy-editing. The War Puzzle was completed when my daughter was eight. I dedicated the book to her because I was working on it for most of her life Pr e face xvii and because she provided me with a sense of peace conducive to working on this sort of subject. She is now twenty-three, having just finished her Master's. I re-dedicate this work to her. Raising children always has more uncertainty about it than parents want; she has provided us with more joy than we anticipated and more satisfaction than we deserve. August 11, 2008 Block Island, Rhode Island P r e fac e t o t h e Ori g ina l T e x t This book treats war as a social phenomenon that recurs in human experience. Instead of focusing on any particular war, I am interested in systematically describing those factors which are common to wars and to the peace that follows to see if there is a pattern that suggests why war recurs and how it might be avoided or mitigated. The end result will be an explanation of the onset and expansion of war and the conditions of a stable peace. This involves explaining why and how wars occur, why some wars expand, why some historical periods and interstate relationships are more peaceful than others, why some peaces last longer than others, and how they work to avoid war. The task set forth in this book would be almost impossible for a single individual to tackle were it not for an international community of peace researchers who have been dedicated to investigating manageable portions of the problem in a rigorous way. Their efforts have made mine possible. They have contributed a new body of evidence and insight on war and peace distinct from those provided by history, traditional discourse, and political philosophy. In this book, I seek to integrate and explain their findings in a way that will move the culmination of scientific knowledge on war and peace forward. My greatest debt is to those peace researchers who have painstakingly worked to document generalizations about war and peace. My debt to them is acknowledged in the text every time I discuss their work and cite their studies. This is particularly the case when I am critical of an explanation or give an alternate interpretation to a finding. Just because I have disagreed with something does not mean I have not found it valuable. I have benefited not only from the body of knowledge generated by peace researchers, but in many instances from the willingness of individual scholars to read and comment on parts of the manuscript or papers presented from it. Since this book has taken a long time to write and since I have not kept a record of every instance, I know I will forget to mention xix xx pr e face t o t h e or igi na l t e x t some who have provided a contribution. With apologies in advance, let me acknowledge the following who were generous with their help, time, and insights, and provided important feedback to me: Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, Paul Diehl, Brian Ferguson, Gary Goertz, Charles Gochman, Patrick James, James Turner Johnson, Charles Kegley, Jr., Sheldon Levy, Richard Lore, Manus Midlarsky, T. Clifton Morgan, Karen Rasler, James Lee Ray, Gregory Raymond, A. Bikash Roy, Alan Sabrosky, Randolph Siverson, William R. Thompson, Peter Wallensteen, and Frank Wayman. In addition to these people, five individuals have played a special role in the evolution of this work. At the very beginning, Harold Guetzkow and J. David Singer provided models of inspiration and discipline. Harold Guetzkow's description of how to construct theory in his "Long Range Research in International Relations" provided a guiding light in uncharted academic ground. This, along with his personal encouragement and early advice on how to spend one's time, were of immense help. David Singer has probably been the key critical influence on this work. Without him, there would have been no Correlates of War project, and without that project this book would not have been possible. David Singer has been generous in giving me his time and has been supportive of my endeavors. He read early versions of the key chapters (chapters 4 through 7) and provided valuable criticisms. Steve Smith, managing editor of the Cambridge series, is one of three people who read the entire manuscript. He provided suggestions that improved the overall structure of the book and its theoretical argument. I am grateful for his long-term commitment to the project and his faith in it. Jack Levy, my new colleague at Rutgers, also read the entire manuscript – and parts of it more than once. His comments have always been stimulating, provocative, and educational. The manuscript has benefited from his readings. Marie Henehan, my partner and colleague, has read the manuscript more times than anyone with the exception of myself. Her substantive and editorial criticisms have saved me from more than several errors. More importantly, without her presence I do not think I would have been able to complete this study. I deeply appreciate her steadfast support. Even though at times I became discouraged about the project, she never did. All of the above persons greatly improved the book, but they are in no way responsible for the omissions, errors, and misinterpretations that remain. Nor, since they do not all agree with each other, should they be seen as necessarily agreeing with the interpretations I present here. Nevertheless, I hope each will find this work as making a contribution to our common endeavor. pr e face t o t h e or igi na l t e x t xxi A book of this length requires a great deal of time and space. Block Island, a small community of people, gulls and beaches, provided the space where my ideas and thoughts could come together and eventually be expressed in the written word. Several agencies provided time. Rutgers University, in the form of the Faculty Academic Study Program and research support from the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, permitted me to get started. A Fulbright research grant to spend a year in Beograd, Yugoslavia allowed me to maintain the momentum I had gathered on my sabbatical. My stay provided enough time and distance from the US to gain perspective and commit key parts of the manuscript to paper. My thanks to my sponsor, Radoslav Stojanovic, and to Sima Avramovic for making my stay productive and informative. Without the sabbatical and subsequent Fulbright, this book could not have been written. Several groups funded a course reduction in my teaching load from time to time which permitted me to work on the book. I thank the President's Coordinating Council (of Rutgers University) and the New Jersey Division of Higher Education for this invaluable support. My special thanks to Manus Midlarsky, Director of the Center for Conflict Resolution and Peace Studies, who not only provided funds for my work but has also provided an intellectual stimulus for serious work on conflict and peace at Rutgers. While I have felt the need to have a reduction in my teaching load in order to complete this study, I have also benefited greatly from teaching the ideas and research in this book to my undergraduate and graduate students. They have provided a constant sounding board, convincing me, as it has others, that good scholarship and good teaching feed off each other. Finally, let me express my appreciation to Michael Holdsworth who waited patiently for this manuscript and to Sheila McEnery and the staff of Cambridge University Press for the care they take in preparing manuscripts for publication. I started research on this book the year before my daughter, Elyse, was born. She is now eight. Those have been important years. She has provided a peace for me and has helped me find my home. To her I dedicate this work of mid-life. Block Island, Rhode Island I Preliminaries Ӈ Introduction Much has been written on the causes of war; little has been learned about the subject. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the theoretical assumptions used to study the phenomenon are flawed and often erroneous. The second is that individual scholars have tried to do too much too soon. Typically, a single scholar working alone has tried to review a number of wars, reflect on their commonalities, and reach a conclusion. The end result has been some insightful suggestions, but little real evidence or documented generalizations. In the last twenty-five years, this has begun to change. Building on the pioneering efforts of Lewis Richardson and Quincy Wright, a community of peace researchers has emerged, with scholars testing very specific hypotheses and trying to document in a rigorous fashion the patterns of behavior associated with war. What distinguishes this book on war from previous ones is that it will employ the large number of empirical findings generated in the last twenty-five years as the basis of its theorizing. Although this research has added important pieces of evidence that have moved the field beyond the imprecise and often contradictory explanations of the past, no clear theoretical explanation seems to be emerging from this process, although there is research that suggests such explanations. Because of inconsistencies and anomalies in the findings as well as differences in measurement and research design, the meaning and significance of these findings are hardly self-evident. Rather, they exist as a set of clues or pieces of a puzzle that need to be put together. A scientific explanation will not just emerge from the research process, but must be constructed carefully from the evidence. While the empirical work on delineating various factors associated with war and specifying models of the war process can continue by testing various hunches, it has failed to date to provide a coherent explanation of war. One of the reasons for this may be that the dominant realist perspective that should be providing such an explanation has simply not been up to the task. It has not been able to explain inconsistencies in a satisfactory manner, and 3 4 Pr e l i m i na r i e s an entirely new theoretical approach may be needed, one that will put both existing findings and unresolved questions into a perspective that makes sense of both (see Vasquez, 1983a; Banks, 1985; Mansbach and Vasquez, 1981). What needs to be done is to stand back from the findings and see what they are trying to tell us. Rather than treat the scientific process in a conservative deductive manner as suggested by philosophers of science as varied as Hempel (1966), Popper (1959), and Lakatos (1970), we might be better served by being more radically inductive, for at least the moment, and treating existing evidence as a good detective would treat clues. We would then try to piece the clues together as we would a puzzle, hoping that as we did so we would come across a clue that would suggest new hypotheses. These new hypotheses would then tell us where to find the missing pieces of the puzzle and in doing so would provide a way of deductively testing the theoretical explanation we had constructed so far . Since a number of research efforts using existing data on alliances, polarization, capability, arms races, bargaining, decision makers' perception, status, and crisis escalation (among others) have been completed or are approaching completion, this is an ideal time to implement this strategy and try to synthesize a theoretical explanation that can guide the next stage in data collection and hypothesis testing. The scientific research on war and peace in the last twenty-five years has demonstrated that induction can bear important fruit. That research now constitutes a sufficiently critical mass of evidence to provide a real turning point in the long human effort to discover the causes of war. If the turning point comes, it will support J. David Singer's inductive notion that in attempting to understand war, emphasis must be placed on systematic data collection and description so as to produce a body of empirical generalizations. Once the patterns or correlates associated with war are known, then it will be possible to explain them. What is significant about the scientific study of war from the perspective of the philosophy of inquiry is that progress and cumulation have not come from deriving a hypothesis, testing it, and reformulating it in light of the evidence. If one takes that positivist approach, then the findings seem much more inconsistent, ambiguous, and farther away from cumulation than they in fact are. If, however, one treats the findings as an aid to discover inductively what patterns precede war, then there is greater reason for optimism. The debate on induction versus deduction has often been confused because there has been a failure to distinguish the logic of discovery from the logic of confirmation (Nagel, 1961; Scheffler , 1967), as well as a I n t roduc t ion 5 tendency to ignore that in practice inductive and deductive procedures do not oppose each other but go hand in hand. Many of the logical arguments against induction hold only on the question of how to validly test theories (the logic of confirmation). This book is concerned primarily with the logic of discovery. I review existing findings not to see if they confirm a particular explanation, but to see if in the absence of any confirmed explanation a new explanation consistent with the evidence can be discovered.1 This new explanation must then be tested before it can be accepted. Methodologically, this book does not follow the typical positivist approach that specifies a proposition, operationalizes its concepts, collects data and constructs a research design that adequately tests the proposition. Instead, what this book does is employ a synoptic review of all relevant evidence to see what has and what can be learned about the onset of war – what in some disciplines is called a meta-analysis (see Hunter, et al., 1982). Such efforts always raise two questions: First, is it possible to compare studies that have different statistical analyses or measures, or are designed at different levels of analysis? Second, is there not a danger that such an effort will treat findings as more definitive than they are? Both of these are important questions, but in practice they turn out not to pose insurmountable obstacles. In terms of comparing studies, this is more of a statistical dilemma than a philosophy of science problem. On the statistical level, a Pearson's r of 0.15 and a Yule's Q of a 0.15 are not equivalent and tell us different things about a relationship. Philosophically, however, they are comparable in that they both tell us that the proposition has produced a "weak" association (see Vasquez, 1983a: 179–80). Statistical findings can be compared to make philosophical assessments about the empirical adequacy of various explanations. If this could not be done, then what would be the point of doing research in the first place? More importantly, in terms of the logic of discovery, differences in research design and measurement, even flaws and measurement errors turn out to be very useful because they provide clues about what might really be going on across a series of studies, particularly those that get different results using basically the same data set.2 This brings us to the second question, the danger of treating findings as more definitive than they are. This, of course, can be a problem with simplistic analyses that categorically assert what "science" has found, Of course, explanations are not discovered as if they had a pre-existing status, but are constructed by human minds. 2 For an example of this, see Mueller (1971) who compares different surveys using different phrasing of questions with good effect. 1 6 Pr e l i m i na r i e s but it is not a problem if one is careful in assessing the evidence and explicit about one's judgments. In this analysis, I have taken pains to present the reader with all the various pieces of evidence I have examined to reach the conclusions I have drawn. Often I repeat in the text or footnotes the actual findings. If a study has been criticized or followed by studies that have inconsistent findings, I give these equal attention. In this process, I have tried to act like a judge rather than a prosecuting attorney or defense counsel. It is important to take this perspective if one wants to get at the truth or at least learn something from research. Unfortunately, some analysts wish to pursue skepticism's agenda and seek to use scientific studies to show that nothing can be known. Ironically, it is often the anti-quantitative and anti-scientific who take this tack. They then become "super positivists" using positivist criteria to show that a research design is flawed, a measure invalid, or a finding trivial. Having satisfied themselves that scientific research cannot produce knowledge, they then proceed to ignore it and study international politics in a considerably less rigorous and even speculative manner. I hope this book will show readers who have been seduced by this attitude what they have been missing. I have approached the literature neither in a naive nor overly skeptical way, but as a detective looking for clues. In the end, of course, I have had to make judgments about measurement validity, research designs, and how much weight to place on a particular finding. Evaluation of empirical research requires that such judgments be made. To think otherwise is to misunderstand the nature of scientific inquiry. Nevertheless, this does not mean that judgments need be arbitrary. Whenever an important question is at stake, I trace for the reader the thinking process I went through in making a particular interpretation. Although it would be tiresome to do this for each judgment, I have done it enough so that the reader can make a judgment about how much confidence to place on my evaluation of a particular body of research. These questions are important because, in this book, I try to uncover the dynamics of war and peace in the modern global system by examining the patterns of behavior delineated by existing research. These patterns, rather than a set of axioms, will be the foundation of my explanation. Instead of assuming that people either as individuals or as collectivities act in certain ways (as rational actors or utility maximizers, for example), I will try to base my explanation on what we empirically know about how people actually behave in certain situations. In other words, I will tend to explain how one action leads to another by saying that in those kinds of I n t roduc t ion 7 circumstances, what we know about people tells us that they will act in that way for these reasons or because of these factors, rather than explaining the action by a model based on an untested axiom. What this means is that my propositions will often be linked not by mathematical or logical deduction, but by historical contingency. War is a very complex subject, in part because war does not result from a single set of causes. There are many paths to war, and in this analysis I try to delineate the modal (typical) path by which relatively equal states have become embroiled in wars with one another in the modern state system. I had initially hoped that a single explanation of war over all of history could be constructed. Instead I have come to the conclusion that there are different types of war and that each type can be preceded by different causal sequences. To explain war requires identifying the various paths that lead to war. What makes this even more complicated is that these paths may vary over long periods of history. In this book, I believe I have identified one path, for one type of war, in one historical era, the modern global system (1495 to the present) . In trying to identify the causal sequences that precede wars, I distinguish between underlying and proximate causes. Underlying causes are fundamental causes that set off a train of events (the proximate causes) that end in war . Of all the various issues over which wars can arise, I have found territorial disputes between neighbors to be the main source of conflict that can give rise to a sequence of actions that ends in war. Since all neighbors usually must, at some point in their history, contend with this issue, and because this issue is an issue over which most neighbors are apt to fight if they are involved in a war with one another, I see territorial disputes as an underlying cause of war. Whether or not it will give rise to war, however, will depend on how the issue is treated (the proximate causes). Since how states treat each other varies according to a number of characteristics, the proximate causes of war are much more varied than the underlying causes. Thus, while territorial disputes can be the origin for all types of wars, each of the different types of wars has its own proximate causes . In this analysis, I have tried to identify these proximate causes by looking at the foreign policy practices that lead to war. Among equals, I have found that, within the modern global system, war is likely if the practices of power politics are used to try to resolve territorial disputes . Power politics behavior, rather than preventing war, actually increases the probability that it will break out. This is because the main practices of power politics – alliances, military buildups, and the use of realpolitik 8 Pr e l i m i na r i e s tactics – increase insecurity and hostility motivating each side to take harder lines. Coercion fails to produce compliance or compromise because the nature of the issue at stake is such that giving in (especially to an equal) is unthinkable . Under such conditions, the use of power politics produces a set of interactions and domestic political environments that make war increasingly likely. Between equals, war is brought about by each side taking a series of steps that increase hostility and make the issue at hand more intractable. This involves the disputants in a series of crises, one of which escalates to war. Evidence on which steps increase the probability of war and which characteristics of crises make them prone to escalation has been provided by empirical research . The use of the foreign policy practices of power politics to handle certain territorial disputes will increase the probability of war, but whether power politics will be used depends, in part, on the nature of the global political system in operation. The global institutional context, in particular whether it provides norms and " rules of the game" for resolving issues, has a major impact on whether states will resort to power politics . Preventing war and creating peace involves learning how to build structures that provide mechanisms for resolving issues through diplomacy rather than armed force. To summarize: In the modern state system one of the main sets of factors that bring about war among equals is the rise of territorial disputes, particularly between neighbors, that in the absence or failure of a global institutional network to resolve the issue politically makes actors resort to the unilateral solutions provided by power politics. Through elaborating this skeletal outline, I will explain why and how wars occur, why some wars expand, and why some historical periods and interstate relationships are more peaceful than others. In trying to construct these explanations from the various pieces of research, I have found it useful to think in terms of causes and consequences. Many scholars, including the leading peace researcher in the field, J. David Singer, eschew causal language. Many share Hume's reservation that the notion of "cause" inheres within the human brain and not in nature.3 In addition, there are a host of problems in making causal inferences. Despite these concerns, it is very difficult to construct an Like Hume, I agree that a cause is not something that is observed empirically but is imposed by the human mind. Unlike Hume, however, I do not see this as very unusual or problematic, since we now know from linguistics and cognitive psychology that this is true of many concepts and aspects of human language. If we reject the concept of cause because of Hume's empiricist objections, we would have to reject most scientific concepts, the grammar 3 I n t roduc t ion 9 explanation of why wars occur or expand (especially if one is proceeding inductively) without thinking in causal terms at critical points in the analysis (see Dessler, 1991). Thus, I have found it important to distinguish whether some factor is really a correlate or a "cause." I have tried to see if a factor is really something that brings about war or is a consequence of war. I have thought it important in interpreting a study to see if its explanations and findings identify sufficient or necessary conditions of war. I have found it useful in determining the relative potency of variables to speak in terms of underlying and proximate causes. Without prejudicing the deeper philosophical issues, I have retained causal language and thinking at critical points in the analysis. When I have done this, I have tried to make it clear exactly what I mean by the language and to what empirical referents I am alluding. Having said that, let me note some areas where I have found causal language misleading and have found the need to correct some of its mechanistic connotations. I have found it misleading to think of war as being brought about because a certain set of conditions or variables are in place . Such Newtonian conceptions and research based on them have not been very fruitful. Rather than seeing war as caused in this mechanical sense, I have seen war as an outcome, i.e. as something that flows out of a set of actions. Rather than seeing war as being produced by a set of conditions, I have found it more enlightening to speak of the probability of war increasing as certain actions are taken. To correct these misleading connotations, I have done the following. To emphasize that war comes out of a set of actions, I have spoken in terms of causal sequences and paths to war. To emphasize the probabilistic nature of war, I have spoken in terms of factors that promote or increase the probability of the onset and expansion of war, rather than of sufficient conditions – although I will use the latter phrase from time to time to distinguish these factors from necessary conditions . My concern that war and peace have been conceptualized in an overly mechanistic manner in the scientific and traditional realist literature reflects a deeper concern that various criticisms that have been made of positivism need to be taken more seriously by those pursuing scientific inquiry. This book was written during much of the debate over positivism (see Ashley, 1987; Shapiro, 1981; Kratochwil, 1989; Lapid, 1989; Hollis and Smith, 1991; Der Derian and Shapiro, 1989), and the analysis herein nderlying language, and a host of other aspects of cognition that seem to be associated with u the structure of the brain rather than the empirical environment. 10 Pr e l i m i na r i e s has not been unaffected by that debate. In this book, the importance of history, cultural variation and the role of beliefs and social constructions of reality are emphasized over the role of single factors, like power, or rationalistic explanations. My views are considerably less positivist than even traditional scholars like Gilpin and Morgenthau who see themselves as uncovering timeless laws of politics. More fundamentally, the debate over positivism has affected how I conceive of international relations theory and has provided an opening for reflection, which I have found more congenial to serious theory construction than the strict positivism of the recent past. These various philosophical issues are pursued in Part I of the book in which I explore the conceptual questions that need to be resolved before constructing an explanation of war and peace. In Chapter 1, I address the question of how the phenomenon of war should be conceptualized in order to understand and explain it. Here, I outline the theoretical assumptions about war that I have found useful to make and which are employed in the subsequent analysis. I learned early on that not all wars were alike and that different explanations would be required for different types of war. In Chapter 2, I present and justify a typology of war and argue that each type has its own causes. I then limit myself to explaining wars of rivalry, wars that are fought between relative equals. The concept of rivalry is defined and its dynamics outlined. In Chapter 3, I assess realist contributions to our understanding of war and its failure to provide an adequate understanding of the dynamics of peace and war. I argue that power politics theory, rather than providing an explanation of war and peace, actually reflects an image of the world that decision makers sometimes hold and a set of foreign policy practices that once implemented increase the probability of war. I discuss how the institution of war evolves and the role learning plays in the onset of war by creating and institutionalizing a culture of war at the global level. In a more general sense, this chapter is concerned with how and why violence is used by some collectivities in some periods, and not by all collectivities in all periods. Part II is the heart of the book. It is devoted to constructing a scientific explanation of the onset and expansion of war and the nature of peace. In each of these chapters, the main scientific findings are put together as pieces of a puzzle to come up with an explanation of war and peace. I begin, in Chapter 4, by examining one of the main underlying causes of interstate wars – territorial disputes. I argue that territorial contiguity is the source of conflict that most frequently leads to wars, and I provide evidence to show that this is the case . The reason why human collectivities will fight I n t roduc t ion 11 over territorial issues more readily than other issues is not known, but I speculate that it may have something to do with an inherited tendency toward territoriality. A focus on territoriality can explain a number of patterns that other perspectives have not explained. Nevertheless, territoriality should not be conceived of as a drive or instinct that makes war inevitable. Territoriality makes humans very sensitive to threats to their territory, but how they deal with these issues is the main factor determining whether they will go to war . Chapter 5 specifies some of the proximate causes of war by outlining how war comes about between relative equals when they treat highly salient issues in a power politics fashion. In this chapter, I provide a detailed analysis of the empirical literature to outline the typical steps to war that rivals follow. Delineating the steps to war provides a way of explaining why some rivalries end in war while others do not. In Chapter 5, the focus is on why interactions between rivals encourage them to take certain steps that lead to war. However, domestic political factors are also important in explaining the steps to war, and these are delineated in Chapter 6, which focuses on the linkage between global and domestic factors . Chapters 5 and 6 identify the main causal sequence that leads relative equals to war. Chapter 7 identifies the causal sequence that leads some wars to expand. In that chapter, I examine the research findings on the scope, severity, and duration of war in order to explain how some wars expand to become world wars. These three chapters specify proximate causes, but it is important to remember that structural factors have a major impact on whether the interactions that produce the steps to war are likely to be taken. Why rivals initiate the steps to war in the first place cannot be fully understood without reference to the global institutional context. This is done in Chapter 8, which examines peace structures and the role of peace in the onset of war. A full explanation of war must explain how and why a peace breaks down, encouraging states to resort to the practices of power politics. This chapter delineates the main factors associated with interstate relationships and historical periods that are comparatively peaceful. This demonstrates that world politics need not always be a struggle for power, that war is not inevitable, and that peace is possible . The analysis presented in Part II explains war by: (1) looking at how certain issues become prone to violence if they are handled in a certain way; (2) identifying the ways in which issues are treated that are most likely to result in war between equals; and (3) examining how the global institutional structure permits or discourages political actors from handling issues in a way that will result in war. In Chapter 9, I integrate the 12 Pr e l i m i na r i e s various analyses of each of the previous chapters to construct an overall theoretical explanation of the onset and expansion of wars of rivalry. In this chapter, I also discuss the implications of the analysis for the cumulation of scientific knowledge on war and on peace. The Appendix, which the reader should not ignore, provides a more detailed specification of the theoretical argument in a propositional format. These propositions, which are keyed to each chapter, provide the best summary of the book. They also constitute a research agenda for the future. Before turning to the body of the work, let me make some final points about the way in which this book is written and about the terminology I employ. Although it is common to review literature and summarize various approaches in theoretical works, I have avoided that in this book. I am not so interested in writing a book about what various scholars have said about war as I am about writing a book that tells us something about war. For this reason, I draw upon the literature and use it to synthesize empirical findings, rather than spend a great deal of time summarizing it. Likewise, while on occasion I will criticize other explanations, as in Chapter 3, my purpose in this book is not so much to demonstrate that one "theory" is better than another, as it is to create a new explanation. Whether it is attractive is up to the reader to decide. Whether it is true will be a matter for future research to decide. The general reader, therefore, should be cautioned that the aspects of the analysis that are based on research can be accepted with more confidence than those aspects that break new ground, even though the latter may sometimes prove more interesting. Technically, from a scientific point of view, the explanations provided herein must be tested systematically before any of them can be accepted. Throughout this book, I have tried to write in a style that will make it accessible to the non-specialist. Nevertheless, I do periodically use technical terms employed in the research that I have found most useful, because progress in part depends on the use of a common language. However, since much of this research has been guided by the realist paradigm, scholars often use concepts that I find to be fundamentally flawed. These include such basic concepts as power, the balance of power, hegemony, influence, deterrence, and labels such as major power, minor power, or employing shorthands, like "France," to personify societies. My main concern with each of these is whether the things these words refer to have actually existed in the way the concept or label implies they do. What, for example, are the theoretical preconceptions involved in referring to a state or some other political actor as a "power"? Have states really been I n t roduc t ion 13 deterred, or do we just assume that? What does it mean to say that France took a particular action? In this context to what does the term "France" really refer, and can we avoid the theoretical dangers inherent in using such an anthropomorphizing label? Generally, I have avoided using theoretical terms I view as hopelessly flawed. The one area in which this proved awkward was with the terms major power, minor power, and great power. Since I do not think that countries can be treated as billiard balls that are simply a bundle of capabilities, and because I believe the realist paradigm to be an inadequate guide to scientific inquiry (see Vasquez, 1983a), I have abandoned the conceptually distorted habit of referring to countries as "powers." The capability of countries may not always be their most important characteristic; indeed the fact that countries are "states" is probably more important. For these reasons, I refer to them as "states" rather than "powers." I also avoid the term "great" because it is normatively biased in favor of the elites who ran those states. Unfortunately, most conceptual problems are not so easily solved. Let me begin the analysis by turning to a concept that has received surprisingly little scrutiny – the idea of war. Its meaning and scientific definition are a proper subject for the first chapter. 1 Conceptualizing War In defining a word, one may be doing a lot more than one suspects. Definition It seems only fitting that a scholarly work should begin with a definition of the subject at hand. Yet defining the subject of an inquiry is no light task. Although lilliputian scholars often get so bogged down in definition that they never get to the inquiry itself, poor definitions not only lead to confusion but often end up telling you more about the person who stipulated the definition than about the subject. Because the subject of definition and meaning is more complicated than appears, it needs to be analyzed before even attempting a definition of war. For this reason, I begin this chapter with a discussion of the nature of definition – how definitions are employed in and affect inquiry, the relationship between definitions and conceptualizations, and how adequate definitions and concepts can be distinguished from "flawed" ones. With this philosophical framework in mind, I argue that at the beginning of a scientific inquiry, it is best to begin with a simple working definition and to delineate the more interesting insights of complicated definitions and concepts of war as a set of theoretical assumptions separate from the definition itself. In the second section, I select a working definition for the inquiry and elucidate some of its latent assumptions. Next, I identify the operational definition used by empirical researchers as the working definition of war in quantitative world politics discourse and analyze its latent assumptions.1 In the third section I turn to a review and assessment of various conceptions of war by analyzing some of the more important theoretical definitions that can be found in the history of international relations 1 An operational definition is one that identifies the empirical referent of a concept by stipulating what observations (or operations in the laboratory) will count as an instance (or indicator) of a concept . 14 C once p t ua l i z i ng Wa r 15 thinking and in other disciplines' study of war. From these I draw out a set of insights that form an inchoate conceptualization of war. In the final section, I derive from this conceptualization the main theoretical assumptions about war I have found most useful in my own attempt to understand war and which will serve as a foundation and a perspective for this analysis. Surprisingly, not much attention has been focused on how war should be defined or even on the broader question of its conceptualization. Most scholars seem content to work with modified everyday or ordinary definitions, since "we all know what a war is," a sure sign that we may not know anything theoretically significant about war.2 Nevertheless, ordinary definitions provide, with slight modifications and stipulations, three useful functions. First, they can delimit the empirical domain of an inquiry by providing the "defining criteria" (Frohock , 1974: 56–60) that determine what phenomena will be included or excluded. Second, they try to provide at least some consistency of usage so that the word refers to the same thing. Of course, since everyday language is robust and living, most words have more than one meaning, and this can lead to ambiguity and a lack of conceptual rigor if an analyst fails to stipulate in what sense a concept is being used. Third, ordinary definitions help us get started; they allow us to talk to each other about the subject, to investigate and research it, to see it . It is the latter function that makes words and concepts so important and, hence, scholarly decisions about how a word should be defined are much more complicated than was first understood. As a number of analytical philosophers have pointed out, if we do not have a word for something, it is difficult for us to even see the phenomenon and thus be aware of its importance and its connection to other phenomena. Indeed, without a word, we have trouble understanding whether the thing at hand is a single phenomenon or several (Hanson , 1965: ch. 1). One of the major contributions an intellectual or a scientist can make is the invention of a new word that permits us to see things we never saw before. Darwin's notion of evolution and natural selection, Freud's conception of the unconscious and of repression, Marx's idea of exploitation were all words that these seminal thinkers invented to communicate and see what no one else had really seen before. Once these words were uttered and applied we began to One can distinguish ordinary definitions which reflect the standard dictionary definition from more technical or stipulative definitions associated with the advance sciences; see Shapiro (1981: 61). 2 16 Pr e l i m i na r i e s understand what before we only darkly perceived. Once having done so, our world (the phenomena we recognize) changed. In this way, concepts have a dramatic impact on the world we perceive. The hope of science is that it can formulate concepts that illuminate what is causally significant and obfuscate the unimportant, rather than the other way around. The history of science is the history of rejected conceptions that distorted relationships more than they clarified them. Nevertheless, even when concepts appear to work scientifically, one can assume that there are aspects of a concept that are more illuminating than others. Since science and knowledge advance, in part, by conceptual changes, the greatest task of definition is to produce a conceptualization that will result in a major breakthrough. However, because everyday definitions are derived from cultural experience rather than scientific analysis, it is highly unlikely that they will be up to this task. This makes for a predicament, because, in order to formulate a really useful scientific concept, something must be known about the subject, but in order to know something significant about the subject there must be an adequate conceptualization of it. The practices of scientific inquiry deal with this predicament by changing concepts as inquiry unfolds. The most adequate scientific concepts are the products of a fully developed theory and research program, which usually are not the concepts with which the inquiry began. The history of science demonstrates that, while conceptualization should be taken seriously, any particular concept or definition should not be taken too seriously too early. Since the most important aspect of concept formation is to develop a conceptualization that will illuminate what is theoretically and causally significant, and since that will only be known if the concept produces hypotheses that pass scientific tests, the most important criterion for accepting an initial definition of war is that it permit research to begin. For the point of any empirical study of war, as Fukui and Turton (1979: 3, quoted in Ferguson, 1984: 4) point out, is to focus on "inspecting the phenomena and not defining the word ." Once we have adopted a working definition it should lead research in a direction that will produce suggestive findings. If such findings are not produced, this may be an indication that the definition is flawed, since it is not f ulfilling the purpose for which it was chosen. When a research program is producing null findings, then there is a good chance that the fault lies in poor conceptualization. Very poor concepts can produce failure and frustration. This discussion assumes that there are no real definitions, definitions like those Plato sought for Justice, definitions that are absolute and C once p t ua l i z i ng Wa r 17 reflect metaphysical verities. Instead, we remain in Plato's cave and can only develop stipulative definitions, working definitions that arbitrarily delimit what we are trying to study. Since science is primarily a process, it does not expect that any one stipulative definition will become a real definition that fully captures for all time the truth of a subject. Nevertheless, it should be clear that while "modern" science does not expect its definitions to reflect metaphysical verities, it strives to make its most useful concepts reflect "causal verities." Scientists can never know if their concepts are doing this, and some question whether there are any "causal verities" in nature other than those we impose through our conceptualization. Despite this caveat, science and knowledge seem to progress by assuming that concepts that produce significant findings are capturing something about phenomena (if not nature) and not simply reflecting mental processes. The only ultimate test that science has had that it is, in fact, understanding the world is that its practices, which in a certain period of history won control over a large area of inquiry, have succeeded in providing answers that have permitted people to control and manipulate their physical worlds. Clearly, part of the promise of the scientific study of war has been the prospect of this kind of manipulation and control . How does one get a conceptualization that will produce fruitful research that will be policy relevant? There is no easy answer to this question, but it is clear that even inductively oriented researchers do not test every possible claim. Rather, they mentally sift through ideas to see which make sense and to reformulate and make more rigorous those concepts that seem promising. Since all definitions focus on only some factors, one way of determining whether a concept is likely to produce interesting research is to uncover the latent theoretical assumptions it makes and examine the extent to which these assumptions seem plausible. The problem with this portrayal, as critics of "positivist" interpretations of science maintain, is that it makes the process of selecting definitions appear much less complicated and fraught with pitfalls than it is. The portrayal ignores the fact that definitions and language play a variety of roles within a culture and not just the pursuit of scientific truth. In particular, it must be recognized that definitions do not simply provide a way of discussing phenomena, but help produce phenomena (see Shapiro , 1981: 5, 20–21). It is important to understand how the constituting function of language affects social inquiry and how intellectual discourse affects language. 18 Pr e l i m i na r i e s Definitions that provide a constituting function are usually associated with an institution and its practices and for this reason can be called institutional definitions. Such definitions create a social institution (a set of practices) by delimiting what practices constitute the institution and what do not. In this way, they help make a certain activity come into existence and attempt to control it once in existence. Rules of games (chess, baseball) or definitions of ethical behavior and customs (like promising) are institutional definitions in that, by defining what it means to play chess or to make a promise, they provide a kind of constitutional structure for the activity.3 This defining structure also serves to keep the institution "pure" by keeping its practices distinct from those of other activities or institutions. The "constituting" function of language is often performed by intellectual analyses, which can be scholarly, religious, political, magical, legal, and/or scientific depending on the dominant intellectual modes of a culture . The presence of influential institutional definitions of a phenomenon under inquiry may not only hamper "objective" analysis, but "frame" and push inquiry in directions of which the investigator is not fully aware. For example, Grotius defined war as a legal condition between juridical equals that is declared and which regulates the way those contending by armed force may behave (see Wright, 1965: 9–10). The declaration of war is important because it sets aside normal international law and announces that a special set of laws on warfare will now govern relations. Grotius did not simply define war as it appeared historically in his day, but defined the institution of war; he defined war as an institutional fact within the existing system (and global culture) of early-seventeenth-century international law. His definition demonstrates that definitions do not just uncover phenomena but create them. However, it should also be clear that Grotius does not start de novo; he inherits an ongoing activity and tries to shape and push this raw material to fit an ideal. The ideal type, if sufficiently influential (as was Grotius's analysis), can take on a life of its own. The ideal type of the activity, while rarely achieved in practice, acts as a demiurge constantly trying to shape the events of history to conform to a definitional recipe. Since this is the case, there is always the danger or the prospect (depending on one's point of view) that a new definition or concept of war can change the practice of war; that it can shape the institution 3 What I have described as institutional definitions are usually discussed as institutional facts as opposed to brute facts; see Frohock (1974: 26–27) and Searle (1969). C once p t ua l i z i ng Wa r 19 of war the way in which both the just war tradition and Machiavelli, in different ways, attempted to do. The fact that this can occur is most obvious with legalistic definitions like Grotius's, because the institution of international law that he employed has become outdated. It has been replaced by less obvious and more informal institutions that nevertheless satisfy the definitional function, as can be seen by the fact that war is easily distinguished from riots, revolution, and ubiquitous violence . From the perspective of the constituting function of language, what is considered war is a product of history – a product of the beliefs, formal and informal laws, and customs of a particular period. This emphasizes the notion that war is a social invention, a fact created by an institution that takes certain actions and makes them a thing. The definition of war reflects the process by which the verbs to fight and to kill become nouns, the process by which the actions become an institutional fact. In the process, that action is changed and controlled. The raw action is controlled by the dominant ideas and thoughts about the action (themselves a product of learning from engagement). These ideas try to add to and delete characteristics from the raw action, giving the action, in this case war, a goal and purpose, a strategy and a set of rituals (like declaration, surrender, treatment of prisoners, diplomatic negotiating etiquettes). However, these institutional ideas must constantly confront the raw action itself and any ideas of individual participants that may not reflect the ideals . For the phenomenon of war, the main source of deviation from ideals is likely to come from attempts to win a war. "Innovations" of this sort are often seen as immoral and illegal. They involve things like unrestricted submarine warfare and civilian bombing. If they are successful, then they become selected out and the institution accommodates itself to them. At times, some forms of warfare are so different from prevailing customs that the term war is not applied to them. These forms of fighting are beyond the conceptual pale of the definition of war. When this occurs, we have a good illustration of the fact that definitions not only reflect "reality," but help create it and give it a degree of legitimacy. This is most evident today in the concept of terrorism, which is seen as something separate from war, although the case for its separation is primarily political and appears motivated by questions of legitimacy and conformity to recent historical practices, rather than a scientific delimitation of the empirical domain. From this analysis it should be clear that the definitions of most terms do not emerge from a scientific pursuit of the truth. The history of a definition is a history of a culture's or discourse's view of the world it has created given the raw material at hand. Because we make our own world 20 Pr e l i m i na r i e s and how we have made it affects our behavior, it is always difficult to have a concept capture the world as it is. Concepts do not just reflect or capture reality, but help make reality. In the process, they distort or illuminate different aspects of the world they are shaping. In this way, a definition's history can provide the traces of those aspects of the raw action that any given age or culture saw as most important, but cultural importance is not necessarily the key to scientific understanding. How a phenomenon should be conceptualized can become a matter of contention between science and other discourses. Why a particular concept or definition may come to dominate an age or inquiry poses a jurisdictional problem for scientific inquiry. Principles of contemporary scientific concept formation (see Hempel, 1952) try to evaluate the utility of definition and conceptualization solely on their basis for explaining empirical phenomena. Concepts and definitions, however, have purposes and consequences other than their ability to explain. Concepts may have a religious, metaphysical, ethical, or cultural utility. Statements may be believed not because they are "scientifically true," but because they help one get along in the world; live the proper way; capture the metaphysical essence of why we are here; or satisfy a group's or a "society's" political and economic interests . One of the problems of discussing politics is that not everyone's primary purpose may be the search for "scientific truth," which is another way of saying that what is meant by the Truth is a question of debate and contention. Science wants to argue that whether we really know something is true must depend, at least in part, on the criteria people use to believe things. If some people believe things because it is in their personal or political interests or because they desire it, this does not make them "true" (nor necessarily false). However, even while those who are opposed to scientific thinking might agree with this view, this framing of the question ignores the more fundamental question, which is why should scientific (empirical) truth be the only or primary basis for accepting statements or beliefs? Once this question is asked, it becomes clearer that science itself must be seen as an institutional discourse that competes with other institutions and their discourses for the control of language and belief in certain domains . This is the major insight suggested by Foucault's (1972; 1980: 112–14, 131–33) analysis of modern science. "Post-modern" critics, like Foucault (1980) and Shapiro (1981), have gone a long way in refuting naive positivist explanations of science as "objective ." However, just because scientific discourse can be seen as competing with other discourses for C once p t ua l i z i ng Wa r 21 control of beliefs does not mean that there are not good reasons (both epistemological and practical) for choosing scientific criteria of truth over others in questions of empirical observation (i.e. concept formation) and explanation. Whether a scientific concept should be permitted to exercise a constituting function, thereby affecting the practice of war as an institution, is a question that must be held in abeyance for now. Suffice it to say that until the empirical study of war and peace is able to provide an adequate scientific concept, the question is moot. In the meantime, the realization that different concepts of war may affect the practice of war suggests that an analysis of different conceptions of war may provide insights about the nature of war and how it changes. Although this discussion of the nature of definition has not answered all questions posed by the act of defining, it has made it clear that there are non-theoretical assumptions and consequences involved in accepting definitions which can make the task of defining an important social phenomenon, like war, subject to a number of pitfalls. In particular, the use of previously accepted definitions that appear highly theoretical may carry with it the unconscious acceptance of historical institutional legacies that may lead a research program in directions that would not be warranted from a purely scientific perspective. This problem can be avoided by not incorporating too many untested assumptions in a definition at an early stage of inquiry because it could produce a too narrow or distorted empirical domain for fruitful research. Rather, many useful assumptions can be taken as auxiliary hypotheticals to form a broader conceptualization of the phenomenon that both guides research and theory construction and is changed by it. In this way, the initial working definition remains fairly stable in its identification of the empirical domain and does not have to carry the weight of the entire theoretical enterprise. I will begin by selecting a working definition of war that can accommodate a number of conceptualizations and at the same time satisfy two of the main functions of ordinary definitions – demarcation of the empirical domain and consistency of use . Definition of War Probably the best way to move from an everyday definition of war to a working scholarly definition is to try to think of what phenomena it would be most useful to study to learn about war and what phenomena would make the effort too diffuse and divert it from its main focus. One 22 Pr e l i m i na r i e s immediately thinks of the two world wars, extended and major fights that shaped history, and a host of other more limited interstate wars, like the Franco-Prussian War. Certainly, any study should include these kinds of wars, and it is what Webster's Dictionary means by war when it defines it as "a state of usually open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations." What about armed clashes between "primitive" tribes or border conflicts? Are these wars? They are organized and fought under the authority of a leader, characteristics associated with state warfare, but for some investigators these clashes are too small (in terms of the number of casualties) or too short in duration to study. Others might not want to study such clashes because they might see them as a fundamentally different human phenomenon that would tell us little about (interstate) war. What about acts of violence like revolutions and civil wars, which take place within the same society rather than between societies? Is the distinction between what is within a society or a state and what is without the critical distinction that should be made to determine the proper domain of what is war? If so, then some of the longest and bloodiest violent political acts of history will be excluded. What is the theoretical justification for doing this and what are the implications for research? What of interpersonal violence? Is war fundamentally different from these acts or just a special case of human violence? What about organized acts of human violence like dueling and vendetta, are these wars? And what of violence itself? Is human violence similar to animal aggression? Are the wars fought by ants for territory and the food associated with it that different from human wars? Does war have to result in death or can it still be war if no one is killed? How important are attitudes in war? Was the Cold War a war because of the extreme hostility? Are two states with a protracted border conflict that have only periodic clashes with few fatalities, at war with each other? Such questions can be irritating, especially when they are raised by the sophist. Answering such questions, however, is much simpler than such an extended list would imply. Two things must be kept in mind. First and most important, what is or is not a war or special class of war can be determined by whether one thinks this phenomenon is caused by the same set of factors. I once met a historian who argued, perhaps facetiously, that there were as many causes of war as there were wars. For him, war simply did not exist as a general social phenomenon. Gang fights, wars among ants, and World War II can be treated as wars if we believe that they are all caused by the same factors. Since we usually do not, or at least think it not C once p t ua l i z i ng Wa r 23 very useful to begin an inquiry with that assumption, they are not usually included as part of the class of events that we choose to call war. This is not the case, however, with civil wars, border clashes or "primitive wars" which may, in fact, have the same causes as interstate wars. Conversely, revolutions are seen as a distinct phenomenon because theories of revolution, especially those that emphasize relative deprivation (Gurr, 1970), are seen as inapplicable to interstate war . This underlines the point that what is or is not part of a phenomenon in science is determined by whether a separate theory is needed to account for it. Second, even though we may not treat something as war, this does not mean that studying it may not give us valuable insights about the causes of war. Studying interpersonal violence, animal aggression, or even labor strikes may tell us something about the respective psychological, biological, and political dynamics associated with war. Studying phenomena that seem related to war may elucidate different aspects of war. For example, studying animal aggression may help us understand territoriality and other ecological factors associated with war. Studying family violence may add insights about the role hostility and frustration play in the onset of war. Studying gang wars and labor strikes may tell us something about war as an instrument of force. Studying interpersonal violence may elucidate psychological factors and the role of motivation and emotion in war. Studying "primitive" warfare helps us understand factors associated with war that precede modern complex societies and that may be basic to the human condition regardless of history and culture . Eventually, science may be able to explain what makes certain acts of violence fundamentally different from each other, as well as understand how they are related and connected, if they are. It cannot be known in advance which perspective is correct. The scientific utility of these different perspectives can only be assessed in light of their ability to generate a fruitful research program that culminates in an accurate and explanatorily powerful theory. In this sense, the disciplinary division that has given rise to different approaches to war in political science, sociology, psychol ogy, social psychology, anthropology, animal behavior, history, and geography is a useful way for social science to spread its research bets. Given this diversity and interest from various disciplines, it is difficult to find a common working definition and nearly impossible to reach a consensus on a theoretical definition. Nevertheless, a review of the more conventional definitions shows that, while no one definition can accommodate all disciplines, there are some that can accommodate more than one. These, as would be expected, are the more straightforward and less 24 Pr e l i m i na r i e s theoretical definitions. The one that will be used for the purpose of this inquiry is that offered by Hedley Bull (1977: 184): " War is organized violence carried on by political units against each other ." The only immediate reservation that I have about this definition is the use of the term violence, which remains undefined. Even a narrow definition of violence as direct bodily harm through physical action (rather than broader definitions such as destruction of property, psychological domination, or harm brought about by structural conditions (see Galtung and Hoivik , 1971) seems too broad for what Hedley Bull has in mind. It would seem that war must involve organized violence that aims to kill members of another group, not simply to do them harm, otherwise war becomes too much like force. This reservation, however, is not so complicated that I am prompted to add to the semantics of war by giving my personal peculiar definition. The overall advantages of Bull's definition can be readily seen by examining one of its competitors. For example, Malinowski's (1968: 247, also cited in Levy, 1983: 50) widely used anthropological definition of war as "an armed contest between two independent political units, by means of organized military force, in the pursuit of a tribal or national policy," suffers from defects not present in Bull's definition. Malinowski's emphasis on independent political units suggests that anti-colonial wars of liberation would not be seen as wars, neither apparently would massacres of indigenous groups like the Turkish massacres of the Armenians . Likewise, objections can be raised to confining the goals of war to tribal or national policy, or even to the notion that war is pursued for policy reasons rather than some other (including unconscious) reason. I present these objections as illustrative of the kinds of problems confronted by working definitions. Since not much can be gained by systematically examining various working definitions and indicating why I prefer Bull's to some other, I will not dwell on my reasons for selecting his. I find Bull's definition useful for three reasons. It does not confine war to interstate war, so it is sufficiently broad to accommodate the work in political science, history, anthropology, sociology, and aspects of social psychology and geography. Second, it lacks terms that are contentious or would impose too great a theoretical perspective. Third, the main theoretical term it does include, "organized," I find particularly useful. Since it is analytically impossible for a definition not to impose any perspective on a subject matter, it is important to make Bull's assumptions explicit. The most obvious assumption made by his definition is that war involves collective violence; it is not simply conflict. Bull's focus C once p t ua l i z i ng Wa r 25 on violence is important, because it makes it clear that war and conflict are not synonymous. Conflict is a very broad and somewhat ambiguous term. One could easily argue, as E. H. Carr (1939 [1964 ed.: 42–44]) does, that conflict is pervasive and inevitable, since it cannot be assumed that there will ever be a permanent harmony of interests among political actors . Despite the reality of such conflict of interests, it is clear from the historical record that not all conflict ends in war . Indeed, war remains a relatively infrequent event in the history of most nation-states; Small and Singer (1982: 78) report that there were only 118 international wars from 1816 to 1980 . Since this is the case, there must be something that distinguishes the vast majority of conflicts that do not end in war from the very few that do, which suggest that the causes of conflict are not the same as the causes of war. Another important assumption made by the definition is that war is organized violence. This has three implications. First, it means that war is an ordered activity with rules and customs. This encourages an examination of how conceptions of war affect the practices of war. Second, it means that war is not random violence, but focused and directed. It reflects, no matter how irrational its overall impact or the chaos of immediate battle, some rational purpose for which it was initiated. Third, it is organized in the sense that it is collective and social, not individual. This is not interpersonal violence between individuals who have a personal dispute. Indeed, one of the theoretically interesting things about war is that it is fought by people who usually do not know each other and have no personal dispute or animus toward one another other than that which has been defined by those controlling the war. The next critical assumption made by Hedley Bull's definition is that war is fought by political units. Again this emphasizes the collective aspect of war, but it is not violence between just any collective actors, but primarily between political organizations. Economic organizations do not fight wars, they compete in other ways. Even robbers and their victims do not typically engage in war, but in something else, and the point is not usually to kill. There is something about politics, what it does and the functions it serves, that seems to make it more prone to violence than other activities. Exactly what that is, is left unspecified by this definition.4 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Whatever it is, also seems to affect religious organizations, which like political organizations are prone to war under certain conditions. For a review of the anthropological literature that sees economic exchange as a substitute for war, see Ferguson (1984: 17–18). 4 26 Pr e l i m i na r i e s Finally, unlike other major definitions, this definition does not indicate what is the aim or purpose of the violence except that it is directed toward the political units and only to the members of those units as a means to an end. Unlike Malinowski, Bull does not define war as aiming at a tribal or national policy. He does not tell us that war is a specific instrument to attain a particular goal that cannot be otherwise attained. Whether war, in fact, does that becomes a matter of empirical investigation and not definition. While it is useful to delineate the assumptions of the working definition of this inquiry, it is even more important to be aware of the working definition of war that has guided research within the field of international relations. For most of the research discussed in this book, the working definitions of war have been the operational definitions of those who have collected scientific data on war. The Correlates of War project has provided the most thorough and influential quantitative data set on war, and its operational definition is: " An international war is a military conflict waged between (or among) national entities, at least one of which is a state, which results in at least 1000 battle deaths of military personnel" (Bremer et al., 1975: 23 [1992 ed.: 387]; see also Singer and Small, 1972: 37, 39). The use of an operational definition to guide a research program without ever explicitly developing a conceptual definition has led some to raise questions about procedure, since from a philosophy of science perspective one first has a theory and then collects the data. This did not happen with the Correlates of War project, and the fact that it did not reflects, in part, the difference between scientific ideals and practice, as well as the early stage of the scientific study of war . Singer and Small (1972) did not employ a specific concept of war because they wanted to create a data set that could be employed by the entire field to test hypotheses from a variety of theoretical perspectives. In addition, although they did not have an explicit conceptual definition, their operational definition and their actual collection of data were informed by the conceptual definitions of their two main predecessors – Quincy Wright and Lewis F. Richardson. The problem Singer and Small faced with the work of Wright and Richardson was that these scholars' respective definitions stemmed from very different theoretical perspectives and were at times contradictory and had, as a result, produced different sets of phenomena for investigation. Like Singer and Small, Quincy Wright (1965: 636) was concerned with determining the empirical domain of the concept and eventually settled on two defining criteria: "all hostilities involving members of the family C once p t ua l i z i ng Wa r 27 of nations, whether international, civil, colonial, or imperial, which were recognized as states of war in the legal sense or involved 50,000 troops" (Wright, 1965: 636, also quoted in Small and Singer, 1982: 37).5 Since Wright was conducting his study during the realist–idealist debate of the inter-war period, it should not be surprising that he should combine the idealist legal emphasis with the realist emphasis on power and impact (see Vasquez, 1983a: 134–36). Richardson (1960b), being outside the field, took a different perspective. He began by throwing out the very concept of war and replacing it with the much broader notion of "deadly quarrel." Influenced by psychology and having little respect for the scholarly study of politics (which he regarded, with reason, as unscientific), Richardson saw all killing, whether it be an individual act of crime or a war, as stemming from aggression. Therefore, for him the only thing that distinguished wars from other deadly quarrels was their magnitude, and Richardson (1960b: 6) ordered his data on the basis of the number of deaths grouped by various cut off points of the logarithm to the base ten. Singer and Small decided to collect data on wars from 1816 on by combining lists of wars and deadly quarrels of Wright and of Richardson, since for them every instance of military combat is a potential datum (see Small and Singer, 1982: 37; their data were first published in Singer and Small, 1972). However, since Richardson included incidents that did not involve military combat and Wright included incidents of military combat that Singer and Small found problematic, they went through the combined list and eliminated the cases they regarded as "non-wars. " For them, an incident is a non-war either because of "the inadequate political status of their participants," or because there are fewer than 1,000 battle deaths (Small and Singer, 1982: 38, 54). Although these criteria appear innocuous enough, closer inspection reveals how difficult it is to free research from dominant perspectives, both those of the present and of the past. The first criterion, on political status, leads Singer and Small to focus primarily on the use of violence by nation-states, either against other states or against entities that the system of nation-states did not recognize as nation-states. This criterion leads them to distinguish between interstate wars and extra-systemic (imperial and colonial) wars. For interstate wars, their data set is the most definitive Wright (1965: 636) then makes this definition less reliable operationally by indicating that he will include some other incidents which meet neither criterion, if they "led to important legal results such as the creation or extinction of states, territorial transfers, or changes in government" (also quoted in Singer and Small , 1982: 38). 5 28 Pr e l i m i na r i e s to date. For the extra-systemic wars, the data are the most accurate to date, but woefully incomplete for non-national entities, which are usually the victims in this historical period. The discrepancy in the quality of these two data sets may be seen as part of the historical legacy of Western imperialism and racism that simply did not regard non-Western groups as civilized or as human beings equal to whites. It is not unfair to assume that such attitudes played some role in accounting for the fact that Western nations did not bother to record in any systematic way the fatalities sustained by non-national groupings in imperial wars of conquest or pacification. This historical legacy forced Small and Singer (1982: 56) to make certain "practical" data-collection decisions which resulted in the discrepancy in the two data sets. First, Singer and Small decided to count the battle deaths only of recognized nation-states to determine what is or is not a war for their data set. This establishes a double standard in that, for an interstate war, the minimum fatality threshold for inclusion is a combined total of 1,000 battle deaths from all the sides that fought in the war; whereas for extra-systemic wars (since non-national participants' deaths are not counted) the nation-state must sustain that level by itself in order for the incident to be recorded as a war. This eliminates from consideration an entire range of unequal contests, even if they amounted to massacres. Second, Singer and Small require that 1,000 battle deaths must be sustained by nation-states participating in an extra-systemic war each year in order for the war to be considered as ongoing; whereas for interstate wars once the 1,000 battle death threshold is crossed it is a war and the length of the war is determined by other factors. The reason for this research decision is that many "pacification" efforts drag on, and Singer and Small do not want these years to count as wars because it would inflate the frequency of war in the system in any given year or decade (see their discussion in Small and Singer, 1982: 56–57). Nevertheless, these decisions have the effect of making some people's deaths and wars not count, which is just the way the West viewed these conflicts in comparison to their own "real" wars. This "coincidence" has led some (like Duvall, 1976) to charge that Singer and Small's operational definition is ideologically biased. In one sense, this is true, but, in another, this accusation is misleading since the reason the definition is biased has much more to do with previous history and governmental records than it does with Singer and Small . They are faced with the fact that others, less objective than they, have managed to shape C once p t ua l i z i ng Wa r 29 and control the past so that part of the record is not easily reconstructed. The only alternative would have been to make crude estimates, and they were unwilling to do this because it would have greatly reduced the scientific reliability of their data. What are the theoretical implications of this historical bias that has been handed down to researchers from the past? The clearest is that the data set on interstate wars is more complete and more valid than the data set on extra-systemic wars. This means that we can have more confidence about inferences based on the interstate data than on the extra-systemic. Since this is the case, analysis of the two data sets should be kept separate, which usually has been done. It must also be recognized that generalizations about interstate war may not apply to extra-systemic wars or to all war. The causes of interstate war may be fundamentally different from the causes of extra-systemic war; certainly the motivations (or reasons given) for these wars are different. Nor must researchers assume that the absence of interstate war means that there is no ongoing war and the system is at peace, a common mistake in data (as well as historical) analysis. If the absence of interstate war is taken as an indicator of peace when, in fact, there is ongoing extra-systemic war, then a correlation between a set of independent variables and "war/peace" may really be a correlation between independent variables and different types of war. Finally, it must also be noted that the elimination of military confrontations with fewer than 1,000 battle deaths, which means, in effect, the elimination of many border clashes, may be eliminating from observation an important set of wars and underestimating the effect of territorial considerations. This discussion should make it clear that even the most scientific, systematic, honest and fair-minded attempts to define war with a minimum of theoretical "distortion" not only produce a number of theoretical implications, but are easily subjected to prevailing ideological assumptions about what is really war and what is peace.6 Nonetheless, the solution to such problems is not less science, but more science. Better data, painstakingly reconstructed if necessary, and rated for their reliability, could be collected for extra-systemic wars. Data on wars with fewer than 1,000 battle deaths have been collected by Kende (1978) and by Gantzel This is because data collection is a paradigm-directed activity (see Vasquez, 1983a: ch. 5). In international relations inquiry the dominant realist paradigm carried with it much of the conservative anti-democratic ideological baggage of the aristocratic Euro-centric diplomatic elite of the post-Napoleonic era, and this is reflected, periodically, in some of the assumptions that guided the data collection . 6 30 Pr e l i m i na r i e s (1981) . In addition, one should not conclude in the face of problems that nothing can be learned from Correlates of War data or any data because they will always be biased and their results suspect (a conclusion Duvall [1976] comes close to making). Instead, one must be aware of the domain to which the data and the findings are applicable, a point which reminds us that we must be detectives if we are to solve the war puzzle and not expect an incontrovertible answer to emerge miraculously from the logical rigor and objectivity of research designs . The Concept of War Because even working and operational definitions make theoretical assumptions that may distort the world, I have avoided beginning this inquiry with an explicit theoretical definition. This keeps the empirical domain and research as open as possible. Nevertheless, since the ultimate point is to discover what is the best way of viewing the world so that we can understand the causes of war, a review of theoretical definitions provides an understanding of the various concepts of war that have existed and some insights about what may be the most useful theoretical assumptions to make in trying to explain war. Such a review also tells us something about what the various periods of history saw as the most important elements in war (or at least the wars of their time). Quincy Wright's review of classical Western conceptions of war remains one of the most useful and will serve as a basis for beginning this review. According to Wright, one of the earliest important definitions of war comes from Cicero, who defined war as "contending by force " (quoted in Wright, 1965: 10). This suggests that war involves contention over something and that while war differs from other contentions in that it employs a special means, namely force, we should not lose sight of the fact that war is a form of contention. In politics, contention consists of disputes over objects of value (i.e. stakes). "Contention" is the general term applied to the various means that political actors use to resolve a dispute. From this perspective, war may be considered a violent way of getting objects of value. As Wright (1965: 10) notes, Grotius takes exception to Cicero's defi nition by maintaining that war is not simply a contest, but a condition, by which he means "a legal condition." Although this may have been true in Grotius's time (and as was shown earlier, the impact of his work helped make it true), it is not necessarily true for all time. Put another way, it is p ossible to think of Grotius's exception as stating that war under C once p t ua l i z i ng Wa r 31 conditions of accepted international law can become a kind of legal contest that regulates how and for what purposes armed forces may be employed . Certainly, this is Wright's (1965: 8) view, who formally defines war as "the legal condition which equally permits two or more hostile groups to carry on a conflict by armed force" (italics in the original). Wright sees war as a condition or period of time in which special rules come into place which permit and regulate violence between governments. The purpose of this violence is to settle disputes. Wright also has behavioral concerns that make him wonder about the other characteristics of "the condition which prevails while groups are contending by arms" (Wright, 1938 cited in Wright, 1965: 8 n. 1). Law and custom, according to Wright (1965: 698), recognize that "when war exists, particular types of behavior or attitudes are appropriate." From this perspective, any given culture (including a global culture) consists of a number of different conditions (situations), each with its own appropriate behavior pattern. War can be seen as simply one of those conditions with custom informing neophytes how to behave when faced with such a situation, and law institutionalizing and sometimes shaping existing custom. What this appropriate behavior pattern is, what brings it about, and how regular it is throughout history and different cultures provides a latent social science conception of war within Wright's more explicit legal focus . Today this legal focus appears less relevant, and many see this Grotian idea of international law as unrealistic. Much of this thinking is part of the legacy of the two world wars. Yet despite that dual trauma, Hedley Bull (1977: 184–89) reminds contemporary analysts that war has an order to it. It has a purpose; it is fought on a certain basis and often according to norms and rules. A world order involves an understanding of when and for what reasons war may be initiated and of who can initiate it (in the modern system only sovereign states). International society does not permit states to go to war for just any reason; it identifies either through law or intellectual argumentation the casus belli and legitimate reasons for war (Bull, 1977: 188). The presence of war does not mean that there is no order in the world, that all is a Hobbesian anarchy; rather, the strength of order in a global society is reflected in how it makes war. A true anarchy is not characterized by war, as Bull (1977: 185) notes, but by a "more ubiquitous violence." This, according to Bull, has been the historical alternative to war . To understand how war differs from ubiquitous violence, we might return to Cicero's notion that war involves a contest. If, in the early seventeenth century, war had become, in part, a legal contest, then one wonders 32 Pr e l i m i na r i e s what kind of a contest it was before and what kind it has become since. Such a question makes it clearer that the word contest is a metaphor that implies that the "deep structure" of a contest (the elements that make a contest a contest) may also be the "deep structure" of war. In order to have a contest, in any period of time, according to the way we use the word, it is necessary for the parties to be aware of the formal and informal rules of the contest. There must be a prize, the parties must be aware that they are contending, that there are winners and losers, and that contenders have some sense of what it means to win and lose – although each may underestimate or not anticipate the most important consequences of their actions. A contest is an "institutional fact" whose meaning is only fully apprehended to the extent one understands how the practice of contests is created, sustained, and implemented. Because a contest is a human institution, it will vary with time and place, although the deep structure that is reflected in the word will provide a way of illuminating the similarities of different contests. This analysis suggests that legal contests are only one kind of contest, which is another way of saying that how and why parties fight is determined by the tradition, customs, and thought of the time, which set up the rules of the contest so that the contending parties have a shared understanding of what they are doing.7 This view comes close to an anthropological conception of war which sees war as an institution that is invented by humans and persists because it satisfies certain functions. Margaret Mead (1940: 402) argues that w