Conceptualizing and Measuring War

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Conceptualizing and Measuring War

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Some Issues Along the Way

• Are there multiple causal paths to war (e.g. more
  than one cause)?
• Example Bremer (1993)
• Are there domain specific laws, or no universal
  explanations of warfare?

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Example of domain specific law

• Case Domain IV DV
• 1 A X war
• 2 A X war
• 3 A X war
• 4 A not X not war
• 5 B X not war
• 6 B X not war
• 7 B X not war
• 8 B not X war

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Example of domain specific law

• In domain A, X is a necessary and sufficient
  condition for war.
• In domain B, X is neither necessary nor
  sufficient for war.
• If we analyzed cases 1-8, we would conclude that
  X is unrelated to war, even though it is strongly
  related to war in a particularly domain.

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Some Issues Along the Way

• Because wars are so rare, the number of plausible
  explanatory factors far exceeds the number of
  wars, and if it is not true that only a very few
  of these factors play a significant role in war,
  then the task of sorting out the causes of war
  will be very difficult.

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Major War Data Collection Efforts

• Quincy Wright, A Study of War (1942, 1965)
• Lewis Fry Richardson, Statistics of Deadly
  Quarrels (1960)
• Melvin Small and J. David Singer, Resort to Arms
  (1982) Correlates of War (COW) Project

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COW project

• Data collected from 1816-2001
• The purpose of the COW project is to identify
  the variables that are most frequently associated
  with the onset of war..to discover the trends
  and fluctuations in the frequency, magnitude,
  severity, and intensity of war. (Singer and
  Small, 19724)

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COW Criteria for Interstate War

• 1) Fatalities minimum 1000 military personnel
  casualties among all participating system members
• 2) On each side, there must be at least one
  participant that is a member of the international
  system
• -Minimum 500,000 population
• -Diplomatic recognition by France and UK
  through WWI
• -After 1920, UN or League of Nations member or
  received diplomats from any two major powers

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COW Criteria for Interstate War

• 3) To be a war participant, a state must suffer
  100 fatalities or have a minimum of 1000 armed
  personnel engaged in active combat

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MID Data Set

• The COW Project also developed the Militarized
  Interstate Dispute (MID) data set.
• This data codes over 2,300 threats, displays, and
  uses of military force from 1816-2001.
• This data is often employed in dyadic form, where
  each case records a MID between two states in a
  given year.
• We can study escalation from dispute to war with
  the MID data.

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Major Powers

• Austria-Hungary (1816-1918)
• Prussia/Germany (1816-1918, 1925-1945,
  1991-present)
• Russia/USSR (1816-1917, 1922-present)
• Italy (1860-1943)
• Japan (1895-1945, 1991-present)

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Major Powers

• France (1816-1940, 1945-present)
• Great Britain (1816-present)
• United States (1898-present)
• China (1949-present)