Session 22 - War or Peace?

War or Peace? The ultimate question in the study of International Relations. Why are wars fought? What can be done to avoid them? The search for peace. A lot of study has been done on this subject, so much so that the discipline of International Relations deals mostly with this subject. With all the thought and time given to this subject, the scholars have been able to come up with quite a few theories which deal with the aforementioned questions. Every theory deals in its own way and tries to explain in its own terms the events that have unfolded throughout history.

In his piece Levy has laid emphasis on the two major theories that have dominated the field of International Relations. Realism and Liberalism. The crux of Realism is that the one who has power uses it to dominate the weak and everyone works in his/her self-interest. When applying this theory to International Relations we take the states as the actors. Liberalism is another theory that has states as actors but what it adds is that the military might is not the only type of power that the states possess. Liberalism states that the economic power has become the main force that drives the International Relations and the states that have strong economies have more power and are able to influence the economically unstable states.

Whatever the theory maybe used to describe the wars that have been happening through the times, the main problem has always been the prediction of the wars in the future. No theory has been able to predict the upcoming wars. It is the complexity of this phenomenon that is the major hindrance in the prediction of the wars. The amount of factors that contribute to this phenomenon is so much that keeping in mind all those factors and devising a theory becomes almost impossible. Furthermore, the factors upon which war depends are themselves not fully understood, which makes any kind of prediction even more difficult. After all the years of theorizing, “Will there be war?” and “Will peace prevail?” still remain the questions that are pretty unlikely to be solved.