Introduction

This chapter examines what causes war, focusing on war, or armed conflict, between sovereign states. The main part of this chapter is divided into the following four sections: ‘War, sovereignty and sociability’, ‘Necessary causes of war?’, ‘Regular causal paths to war?’, and ‘Contributory causes of war’. The last of these sections comprises three subsections, dealing with ‘Chance occurrences’, ‘War-conducive mechanisms’ and ‘Key actions and inactions’, which are three key ingredients of war-causation, combining in a variety of ways to produce concrete instances of war.

It should be noted at the outset that war has not always been regarded as a problem requiring serious scholarly attention to its causes. Strange or outrageous though it may seem, some people have held a benign, or positive, view of war. But especially through the experience of World War I, a contrary view which sees war in a negative way has become more dominant. Our interest in the causes of war, and the conditions of peace, is a reflection of this broad shift in our attitude towards war (Suganami 1996: 189–90). Since this shift was also a key factor in the formation of International Relations (IR) as an academic discipline, it is unsurprising to find that inquiry into the causes of war has been a traditional concern of that subject (see Introduction).