Singer: Correlates of War: I

Singer, JD. 1978. The Correlates of War. New York: Free Press.

The Correlates of War project has provided much literature and remains a foundational cut in the study of global conflict. Singer is obviously the god-father of this project, and, while it has found many detractors, it has undoubtedly moved the debate about state instability and war in new directions.

Volume one of the series represents Singer's own work, primarily. It begins by exploring some of the potential cause of war, such as arms build-up, and the logic behind such transactions. It explores issues widely, arguing for the normative study of conflict following a scientific method. It is also adequately, in my opinion, cautious about the veracity of what can be known in the field of conflict, as well as more broadly within the social sciences; the projects is intentionally titled the "correlates" and not the "causes".

When he moves into discussions of prediction, he argues for more thorough use of computer simulations in place of games, intuition and other methods where assumptions are not made as explicit as possible. Through computer simulations, scholars must make the variables, parameters and theories used in their models explicit. This is seen as being valuable.

The experiments in this book are directed at wars between nations. Some basic and standard statistical methods are used to explore bivariate and multivariate relationships between independent variables as they explain the output of war.

Much of the book reads pedantically.