War
The ubiquity and importance of war have made analyses of its causes a central concern of scholars for over two millennia. Many of the fundamental questions about the causes of war were raised by Thucydides in the fifth century B.C., but the vast amount of work on the topic since that time has produced ongoing debates instead of generally accepted answers. Studies of war can be divided into three broad categories (reviews of the literature using similar frameworks are provided by Waltz 1959; Bueno de Mesquita 1980; and Levy 1989). The first type takes the system as whole as the unit of analysis and focuses on how characteristics of the interstate system affect the frequency of war. States are the unit of analysis in the second type, which explores the relationships among the political, economic, and cultural features of particular states and the propensity of states to initiate wars. The third type analyzes war as an outcome of choices resulting from small group decision making.
Some debates focus on characteristics of the interstate system that are thought to increase or decrease the chance of war. Are wars more likely during a period of economic prosperity or one of economic contraction? Which is more likely to maintain peace, a balance of power in the international system or a situation in which one state is hegemonic? Has the increasing power of transnational organizations such as the United Nations changed the likelihood of war in the contemporary world?
Social scientists also disagree about the effects of political and economic factors within a state on the possibility of war.
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