Blainey: The Causes of War

Blainey, Geoffrey. 1973. The Causes of War. New York: Free Press.

This book is a wide ranging exploration of the causes of war and peace. The author refers to its structure as an "intellectual detective story" (vii), and proceeds to explore and adjudicate a large chunk of extant literature, keeping some insights, and tossing others away.

The book begins with a claim that, "for every thousand pages published on the causes of wars there is less than one page directly on the causes of peace" (3). Many of the theories explored in the first two chapters are arcane, and are not explorations of the causal dynamics of international conflict, but rather the identification of a certain possibly correlated variable (ie., there is a certain amount of energy that a society has, and it can be for international conflict or domestic, or that this energy can be used in building the economy, or that there is a process of jingoism, war and then weariness, which eventually leads to more war (87), etc).


Theories of war explore, in part, perceptions about the likelihood of victory, finding that many who perceive wars to be winnable and short are likely to engage. Though, when this happens from two sides, it becomes problematic, as both sides cannot win.

"A prediction of a war about to be fought is thus a crystallization of many moods and arguments, each of which has some influence on the decision to make war" (54).

Potential alliances also inform the decision to go to war.

There was previously a relationship between wars and the deaths/succession of monarchs.

Few wars are started in December and January.

The discussion of balance of power is interesting. Is it the balancing of power that makes for more peace, or is it the hegemon that makes for a peaceful environment? This is a crucial question in the study of international conflict. "The idea that an even distribution of power promotes peace has gained strength partly because it has never been accompanied by tangible evidence. Like a ghost it has not been captured and examined for pallor and pulsebeat" (112).

On the interaction of diplomats: "In peace time the relations between two diplomats are like relations between two merchants. While the merchants trade in copper or transistors, the diplomats' transactions involve a variety of other issues which they have in common. A foreign minister or diplomat is a merchant who bargains on behalf of his country. He is both buyer and seller, though he buys and sells privileges and obligations rather than commodities. The treaties he signs are simply more courteous versions of commercial contracts"
(115).

"Wars usually end when the fighting nations agree on their relative strength, and wars usually begin when fighting nations disagree on their relative strength" (122).

“One may suggest that nations, in assessing their relative strength, were influenced by seven main factors: military strength and the ability to apply that strength efficiently in the chosen zone of war; predictions of how outside nations would behave in the event of war; perceptions of internal unity and of the unity or discord of the enemy; memory or forgetfulness of the realities and sufferings of war; perceptions of prosperity and of ability to sustain, economically, the kind of war envisaged; national and ideology; and the personality and mental qualities of the leaders who weigh the evidence and decide for peace or war” (123).

Skipped book 3.

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.