Why resort to war

What do we know about war? This much-anticipated reference book analyzes more than a thousand wars waged from to using authoritative, highly standardized, and systematic coding methods from the Correlates of War Project, which aims to reveal the underlying patterns and causes of war.

Resort to War lists and categorizes all violent conflicts with 1, or more battle deaths and provides an insightful narrative for each struggle. The volume distinguishes between traditional interstate war, the phenomenon of extra-state war as evidenced by the Al-Qaeda— USA conflagration, intra-state war, and the new category of nonstate ethnic wars. Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches.

Navigating away from this page will delete your results. Please save your results to "My Self-Assessments" in your profile before navigating away from this page. Books Add to list Added to list. Edited by: Meredith Reid Sarkees. Does armed conflict among states decrease as the international normative order moves from permissive to restrictive?

With this chapter, attention is turned to examining the incidence and seriousness of war. According to the results from a Poisson regression analysis, restrictive war-initiation norms are inversely related to the frequency of war in both the interstate system and the major-power subsystem.

Whatever controls are applied—levels of strategic rivalry, past amounts of war, or system size—normative restrictiveness shows a consistent dampening effect on the frequency of war, regardless of whether a contemporaneous or lagged model is specified.

On the other hand, the findings indicate that normative restrictiveness does not reduce the seriousness of those interstate or major-power wars that occur, nor does it affect the onset of wars fought between states and nonstate actors. Previous research on armed conflict among nation-states has identified two structural conditions in the international system that appear to be connected to the incidence of war: 1 the degree of preponderance enjoyed by the leading state and 2 the amount of volatility in the overall pyramid of international power.

Wars are less likely to occur when a single dominant state holds a decisive advantage over its nearest competitors, and stability exists in hierarchy of the other preeminent states. This chapter assesses how much restrictive war-initiation norms contribute to reducing warfare above and beyond the influence of these two conditions.

According to the results from a hierarchical regression analysis of system structure, international norms, and war during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, restrictive norms have a statistically significant negative impact on the frequency of war after the effects of preponderance and volatility have been taken into account. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the international normative order contained a set of restrictive war-initiation norms.

Whereas some commentators on world affairs assumed that these norms would endure, others questioned their resilience. Although it is impossible to predict exactly what will happen, we can forecast how current trends might develop and use those projections to create scenarios depicting plausible alternative futures.

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