Conceptualizing “War”

The purpose of this discussion is to focus on two problems that appear to have hindered the development of a solution to what Zinnes (1978, 1980) has termed the “puzzle” regarding the war proneness of nations. Specifically, it suggests that scholars who are interested in understanding and explaining international conflict should recognize: (1) While many analysts have focused on factors internal to nations—“national attributes”—as possibly sufficient conditions for war, the existence of such relationships is logically precluded by the way in which analysts have defined wars. (2) While scholars are trained to search for generalizable patterns that hold both through time and across space and often seem to believe that the isolation of such associations is the sine qua non of the systematic analysis of international conflict, simple logic and already existing theory suggest that patterns of that variety may not in fact exist. While neither of these contentions is original or complex, it is argued that a general failure to understand or recognize such rather basic, logical problems has impeded the development of a base of verifiable, replicable, and generalizable knowledge about the causes of international conflict.