Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 3, June–July 2009, pp. 183–191
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The Causes of War
David Sobek. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008. £14.99/$24.95. 229 pp.
Wars, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places
Paul Collier. London: The Bodley Head, 2009. £20.00/$26.99. 255 pp.
Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
Malcom Potts and Thomas Hayden. New York: BenBella Books, 2008. $24.95/£18.99. 457 pp.
Sir Michael Howard spoke of the causes of war, nearly 30 years ago: ‘How much ink has been spilled about it, how many library shelves have been filled with works on the subject, since the days of Thucydides! How many scholars from how many specialties have applied their expertise to this intractable problem!’1 What more, then, is there to be said? Can recent scholarship offer anything new and useful to policymakers and analysts?
In any overcrowded intellectual field, it is always salutary and refreshing to find books that organise, and attempt to make sense of, the whole theoretical debate. This is what David Sobek, a professor at Louisiana State University, successfully does in The Causes of War. Sobek’s most important insight is to argue that it is vain to look for any ‘magic bullet’, or ‘grand unified theory’, of war. What is useful and relevant instead, according to him, is to find the ‘recipes for war’ (p. 6). ‘Wars result from a number of factors interacting to increase or decrease the risk of violence. By focusing on single causes, researchers have been trying to place round pegs in square holes, although occasionally they do find the round hole, in which case they argue that all holes are round’ (p. 196).
Traditional explanations of wars fall broadly into three categories, related to domestic factors and the nature of states, the interaction of states, and the nature of the international system. Sobek describes the latest studies and theories dispassionately. His work complements elegantly that of one of his predecessors, Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey, who wrote, in 1973, a classic on the subject, since updated and expanded.
Historians, economists and political scientists disagree on many core issues related to the third level, the relationship between war and the nature of the international system. Whether unipolarity, bipolarity or multipolarity is the most stable and peaceful system is still, by and large, unsettled. But some important and reasonably consensual insights can be drawn from the past four decades of academic studies on the two other levels: domestic factors and the interaction of states. Among them are the following:
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Major powers are more war prone than minor powers: they have more opportunities to fight because of the global nature of their interests and commitments, more power to do so because they usually develop strong militaries, and more willingness to overthrow or maintain the balance of power. It is no coincidence that the United Kingdom, France and the United States have been, for a long time, the three countries most often engaged in military conflict.
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Mature democracies rarely, if ever, fight each other. The democratic peace...
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Bruno Tertrais is a Senior Research Fellow at the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research and a Contributing Editor to Survival. He is the author of War Without End (New York: The New Press, 2005).
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