Causes of War

Jack S. Levy and William R. Thompson, Causes of War. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

In this time of U.S. military debacles and proxy armed conflicts throughout the Middle East, Central Asia and the African continent, the moral and the scholarly imperative to understand the etiologies of warfare cannot be overstated. In Causes of War, political scientists Jack S. Levy and William R. Thompson attempt to shed light on this phenomenon by presenting a broad overview of "realist theories" on the causal factors of interstate and civil war. The realist models of war and peace draw heavily from the methodologies of cognitive psychology, structuralfunctionalist sociology and, to a minimal degree, on social-psychology. Although Levy and Thompson eschew an enormous body of empirical evidence that has been uncovered by psychohistorians, psychoanalyticsociologists and object attachment theorists on the fetal/childhood origins of sacrificial wars, Causes of War is a valuable work for all scholars.

In the opening paragraph of the first chapter, the authors' characterization of war as being a broadly destructive enterprise parallels the assessments made by psychohistorians. War, the authors succinctly state, "kills people, destroys resources, retards economic development, ruins environments, spreads disease...disrupts families and traumatizes people." Oddly, throughout the rest of their 281-page book on a wide range of realist theories of war, Levy and Thompson never clearly ask or adequately answer the key questions: Why do nation-states view war as having utility if it is so harmful? Why do we engage in massive killing sprees that effect economic collapse, loss of resources, dislocation of entire populations and collective traumatization? Unlike psychohistorians who view war as stemming from irrational and unconscious needs to restage childhood traumas, political scientists place greater emphasis on socio-structural and rationalistic models to understand the causal mechanisms of profoundly self-destructive group behavior.

In their assessment of realist theories of interstate and civil war, Levy and Thompson utilize a scale that they call "levels-of-analysis framework." According to the authors, realist theories can be categorized within a four-level framework: (1) individual-level, (2) nation-state level, (3) systems-level, and (4) dyadic-level.

Individual-level realist theories center on the macro groups' leaders as being causal triggers of war. Some realist theorists, for example, view Adolf Hitler as the primary causal factor for the outbreak of World War II and...