Levy: The Causes of War and the Conditions of Peace

Levy, J., 1998. The Causes of War and the Conditions of Peace. Annual Reviews in Political Science, 1(1), 139-165.

“I organize this review and assessment of the literature on the causes of war around a levels-of-analysis framework and focus primarily on balance of power theories, power transition theories, the relationship between economic interdependence and war, diversionary theories of conflict, domestic coalitional theories, and the nature of decision-making under risk and uncertainty” (139).

Dependent Variable: War: Large-scale violence between political units. “To differentiate war from lesser levels of violence, they generally follow the Correlates of War Project’s operational requirement of a minimum…of 1000 battle-related fatalities” (141).

System level explanations for war: Realism. The main division in realism is the debate between hegemonic theories and balance of power theories. Hegemonic theories downplay the role of anarchy and focus on power transition and allows for hierarchy. Liberalism: trade interdependence and peace.

Societal Level Theories: Democratic peace and its off-shoots, some Marxist examples, regime type and its comparison to propensity for war.

Individual Level Theories: “Individual-level theories assume (a) that external and internal structures and social forces are not translated directly into foreign policy choices; (b) that key decision-makers vary in their definitions of state interests, assessments of threats to those interests, and/or beliefs as to the optimum strategies to achieve those interests; and (c) that differences in the content of actors’ belief systems in the psychological processes through which they acquire information and make judgments and decisions and in their personalities and emotional states are important intervening variables in explaining observed variation in state behaviors with respect to issues of war and peace” (157).

In terms of general trends, there has been a move away from great power types of conflict, and a move towards small-scale conflicts. There is also an increase in research focused on “…rivalries, bargaining, territorial contiguity, trade…” (159).