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7. Conclusion
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7 CONCLUSION life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. —shakespeare, macbeth The analysis in the previous chapters ats into a research mosaic that has been developing over the past sixty years. The quantitative study of the origins and escalation of violent conbict between nations now has a history spanning nearly three-quarters of a century. Published behavioral works on the origins of war trace immediately back to a series of papers published in the 1930s by Lewis Richardson in the British science journal Nature and to Quincy Wright’s A Study of War (1942). Both Richardson and Wright armly believed that in order to eliminate the pox of war we would need to understand it better, both from a theoretical perspective and, as has largely been the case here, from an empirical one. Their work laid the foundation for several generations of scholars whose best efforts went to building and testing explanations of the onset of war, many of whose work we summarize here. Some have had greater success than others. Progress in social science, as in any science, comes from taking steps forward and backward—steps of building new ideas, reaning old ones, and pausing for retrospection and rebection. Among Richardson’s (1960a, 1960b) most important conclusions based on his data was that chance, and not systematically identiaable causal relations, regulates the distribution of war with respect to both its beginning and its ending. The notion that chance, or the stochastic component of the war-generating process, plays a powerful force in determining war’s onset thus has a long history. Historically, this has typ200 ically been an unsatisfying explanation. Consistent with John Donne’s weary claim about all men that “Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,” Richardson’s conclusion remains for many an unhappy one, as he began the process of discovering the limits to our knowledge about the onset of war. While Richardson was able to provide powerful descriptions of the wars that occurred in the past, he largely failed in coming to grips with the fundamental question that motivates many of those who study the deadly quarrels between nation -states, namely, what are the systematic causes of war? The next generation of social scientists working on this puzzle greatly broadened the search for theoretical explanations of war. While doing so, they developed increasingly sophisticated statistical tests of their propositions. Current social scientists working in the empirical tradition owe a huge debt to J. David Singer, whose greatest contribution may have been to democratize the statistical study of war through the development and distribution of detailed data on many of the possible correlates of war (Singer and Small 1972, 1982, 1993). As we take our place at the contemporary end of this research program, we recognize that the questions we have posed and the answers we have provided differ more in manner of degree than in kind from those that precede this work. If there were one single story to take from this book, it would be that there is no single story of war. In many ways, we are as uncertain about the causes and likely timing of any individual war today as we were in 1942 when Wright initially published his study of war. As our degree of certainty about the inherent limits to knowledge on the origins of war sharpens, we can see the proverbial glass as either half-full or halfempty —we can choose to be optimistic or pessimistic about the current and future state of knowledge and the nature of the unknowable. As we move to discuss our general andings and the uncertainty associated with our attempts to evaluate the myriad arguments and empirical conjectures about the causes of war, it would be wise to keep in mind the following Socratic dialog that opens Richardson’s Arms and Insecurity (1960b, overleaf): Politicus: What are you trying to prove? Researcher: In social affairs it is immoral to try to prove. Fidor: Yes. One should have faith that God will provide. He that cometh to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him. Researcher: I meant that in social affairs where proof is seldom rigid, and where prejudice so easily misleads, it is best not to Conclusion 201...