Session 22: Conflict and War in IR

Conflict in IR is the term used usually for armed conflict. Conflict itself is ever present in IR, the situation against which the bargaining takes place.  On individual level theories of conflict have been centered on rationality. Some theories have termed the conflict and wars in IR as resulting from rational decisions of national leaders, whereas others have termed conflict as irrational. Neither of these theories has been proved to be absolutely right yet.

At domestic level the theorists talk about the characteristics of the states or the societies that make them more prone to violence or war. According to liberal theory authoritarian regimes are more prone to violence than democracies as democracies almost never fight with each other. But this doesn’t seem to be the general rule as some theorists have tried to prove it wrong in their writings

Quincy Wright, in his mammoth work A Study of War, concludes that there does not seem to be much difference in the war activity of different kinds of political systems, Singer and Small’s the Correlates of War (COW) project has yielded similar results. Investigating wars occurring between 1861 and 1965, they discovered no difference between democracies and non-democracies in terms of either their war participation or war initiation. Russett and Monsen also found that the type of political system a state possesses has little effect on its war proneness; size seems to be a much more important predictor. Large polyarchies (representative democracies) have been involved in more wars than either small polyarchies or non polyarchies of any size.

Hence a conflict may arise between states or between different groups within a state on different issues such as religion, ethnicities, economy etc which may lead to violence or wars. But the questions such as whether the decisions of violence or war are rational ones or what kind of states are more violent than others have no definite answers atleast at present.