Session 22 - Exploring the root causes of War

War and Peace by Jack S. Levy attempts to understand war by perusing three important questions. These include the constant recurrence of war, the variations in war and peace and the origins of particular wars.

War, defined by scholars as “large scale organized violence between politically defined groups” has varied over time in terms of its causes, frequency, seriousness, location and outcome.  In recent times we have seen a shift in the nature of war as intra-states wars have overtaken the interstates wars in terms of frequency and seriousness. However the reading tells us that the number of deaths has actually been declining since the end of the Second World War.

In an attempt to understand the concept of war, three perspectives have been offered. The first is where war is treated as a non-zero zero constant which basically means that at any given time, some place or the other, people are engaged in a war. The other perspective seeks to understand war by treating it as a variable because of the fact that wars differ from each other in terms of frequency, length, severity, participants and social and political consequences. The last perspective isolates the different conflicts and looks at particular wars to better understand the reasons and causes of war.

In examining the three different perspectives, scholars resort to different methodologies and research methods. The realist perspective and the liberal perspective among others fail to account for some factors while overemphasizing others, for example, the neorealist believe that bipolar system being more stable than other systems.  This becomes a hindrance in getting to the root causes of war and its understanding. What is required, which levy points out, is a multi-method approach which gives all factors their due importance. This is easier said than done as scholars of a particular school of thought are attached to some basic assumptions of that school which are hard to deviate from.