1 toward a Better Understanding of Theories of International Conflict

i pass with relief from the tossing sea of cause and theory to the arm ground of result and fact. —winston churchill, 1898 Social science, like any science, achieves progress through the accumulation of systematic knowledge. To improve our collective understanding of international politics we need to regularly assess both the empirical regularities observed in the world around us and the theories that profess to explain these facts as we have come to know them. Political science in general and the study of international politics in particular suffer from having numerous competing theories, assertions, and conjectures describing the same phenomena. Although new explanations and descriptions of interstate war appear almost as frequently as the events themselves, new ideas rarely supersede those previously developed. Instead , they simply accumulate with little regard paid to the explanatory power of new accounts versus those previously advanced. This has resulted in the multitude of models, untested hypotheses, conjectures, and normatively grounded assertions that constitute the discipline. The study of international conbict exempliaes these problems. Over the last forty years, the development of models and conjectures purporting to explain the incidence and escalation of international conbict has proceeded at a rapid pace. In their 1990 survey, for instance, Dougherty and Pfaltzgraff identiaed over thirty examples of what they characterize as theories of international relations. If we counted variations on familiar themes and arguments developed since, the number would be much higher. Having an array of theoretical approaches and empirical conjectures is not a problem if scholars have a well-founded sense of which explanations or descriptions account for the greatest The Behavioral Origins of War proportion of events or facts or, more colloquially, which theories or hypotheses work best. While political scientists have been very successful in developing numerous interesting stories about the nature of international conbict, we have been much less successful at conducting the type of rigorous analysis that would allow us to (1) evaluate the relative explanatory power of these various descriptions and (2) reach some sense of consensus about which stories are the most useful or valuable in understanding international political processes. The abandonment of " failed " theories or presumed empirical regularities is rare in political science—and particularly so in the study of international politics. Apologists for the current state of affairs might claim that, compared to other disciplines, cumulative progress in political science may be particularly difacult to achieve for …