What the Words of War Can Tell Us About the Risk of War.

McClelland (1975) argued that reform movements have the unintended result of cre-ating an action orientation that makes war possible. The use of one’s own accumu-lated power to save the others is often the link between an imperial motivation pat-tern (i.e., the gap created between a high need for power and a low need for affiliation) and later wars. Conflict-related documents, real and fictional, were ana-lyzed with the help of the new Motive Dictionary, a computer-readable thesaurus de-vised to detect the power and affiliation motives in texts supposed to contain them. Results confirm McClelland’s theory. An increasing gap between affiliation and power words consistently precedes the outbreak of wars including World War I and the war in Iraq (2003 –). This study draws on the possibility of predicting war from the analysis of the words contained in documents describing the moments before war breaks out. If we can predict previous wars from the analysis of documents of the past, then per-haps we can also detect ahead signals of forthcoming wars through the analysis of documents of the present. The indicator is a content-based approach to wars that considers the state of motivation of top political decision makers (McClelland, 1975). This indicator complements other indicators, formal (Suedfeld & Tetlock, 1977), event-based (Schrodt & Gerner, 2000), normative (Bremer, 1992; Maoz & Russett, 1993), or institutional (Gleditch & Ward, 1997). The proposed motiva-tional indicator rests on the idea of “putting the words first. ” This idea is applied here first on fictional texts, then on historical documents. There is something to be said after all for stories. Stories are useful pilot data free of the constraints of the