From A Study of War to peace research: some criteria and strategies

ing out that the conduct of war is too impor-tant to be left to the militarists, it is Quincy Wright who reminds us that the analysis of war is too important to be left to the intuition-ists. After years and volumes of literary specu-lation on the causes of international war, it was he who undertook the first systematic search for those empirical regularities which might shed some light on the origins of war among nations (Wright, 1942). ’ He was not, however, completely alone. At about the same time that his monumental project was getting underway at the University of Chicago, two other scholars were undertaking comparably systematic and ambitious studies of the prob-lem. One was the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, whose work on war is reported in Volume III of his Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937) and the other was Lewis Richardson, the physicist whose output remained largely unread until the posthumous publication in 1960 of Arms and Insecurity and Statistics of Deadly Quarrels.3 3 In the conversion of war from a subject of speculation and propaganda to one of scien-tific analysis, all three of these pioneers, as well as others, have played key roles. The purpose of this paper, however, is not so much to appraise the work of the past as to suggest an orientation toward that of the future. While the need remains for a systematic appraisal and codification of existing research, and the framework proposed here could indeed be used for it, space permits only a superficial backward glance.4 The paper will concentrate, therefore, on a set of dimensions for describing, and criteria for evaluating, 1This is a condensed and reonented version of a paper originally prepared for the Quincy Wnght