Hidemi Suganami, On the Causes of War (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1996).
The author breaks down approaches to analyzing the causes of war into those that address three distinct questions. The kind of question that the theorists are attempting to address directly drives the approach taken, and the conclusions gleaned.
The three questions are:
“What are the conditions that must be present for wars to occur?”
“Under what types of circumstances have wars occurred more frequently?”
“How did this particular war come about?”
The first question addresses the necessary conditions for war to occur. A necessary condition, like oxygen for fire, can hardly be found to exist for the causes of international war. The second question—regarding the correlates of war—has a much richer set of studies to draw from. The final question deals most explicitly with understanding notions of causality. This is where Suganami fleshes out his own understanding of the causes of international crises.
The other two questions are relatively more straight forward.
“Nearly everyone knows that correlation is not causation” (Haas 1974, 59) (80).
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