Societal Approaches To the Study of War

Haas, Michael

doi:10.1177/002234336500200402

Cited by 41 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…For example, Rummel (1968) and Haas (1965), looking at national correlates of the foreign conflict behavior of nations, find few significant correlations between the two. Some interna-tional relations theorists argue that nations which differ in terms of internal or external conflict are not necessarily very different in terms of their internal characteristics.…”

Section: Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Cross-Cultural Theory of Political Conflict and Violence

Ross¹

1986

Political Psychology

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.It is difficult to conceive of a human community where there is no conflict among the members or between persons in the community and outsiders. At the same time, the degree to which conflict is overt varies widely. This paper examines structural and psychocultural hypotheses to account for this variation, and then tests them using multiple regression with data from a worldwide sample of 90 preindustrial societies typically studied by anthropologists. While the statistical results provide some support for both explanations for internal and external conflict, more interestingly, the two are integrated to form a general theory of conflict behavior. Our argument is that pyschocultural dispositions determine a society's overall conflict level, while its structural features shape whether the targets of aggression lie within the same society, in other societies, or both. The common psychocultural roots of both internal and external conflict are harsh socialization patterns, low warmth and affection directed at children, and high protest masculinity. The structural roots of internal and external conflict differ. Internal violence is associated with weak cross-cutting ties, strong localized male groups (in uncentralized societies), and polygyny; while external conflict and warfare are found in societies which are high on socioeconomic complexity, where polygyny is absent, and in uncentralized societies with martial endogamy and weak cross-cutting ties. The theoretical aspects of this theory are elaborated on, drawing on anthropological and psychoanalytic theory.

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Section: Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Through the establishment of trade and other links severe conflict is inhibited in much the same way that functionalists suggest integration can be achieved at the international level (e.g., Haas, 1965;Lindberg and Schiengold, 1970). But what produces cross-cutting ties?…”

Section: Cross-cutting Tiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Cross-Cultural Theory of Political Conflict and Violence

Ross¹

1986

Political Psychology

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“…Yet no investigation identified much of an association until Wilkenfeld (1973) controlled for regime type, and found, for part of the post-World War II period, several clear associations. However, looking at regime type alone and examining the full L8I6-19fi5 period, Small and Singer (1974) found that autocratic and democratic regimes were equally likely to both initiate wars and to become embroiled in them, but Haas (1965) found, at least for the twentieth century, that democratic regimes were less war prone than authoritarian ones. He also concludes in the same study that wealthy urbanized nations, especially during periods of social strain, are particularly susceptible to war involvement.…”

Section: National Attributes and Relationshipsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Accounting for International War: The State of the Discipline

Singer

1981

Journal of Peace Research

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In studies of war it is important to observe that the processes leading to so frequent an event as conflict are not necessarily those that lead to so infrequent an event as war. Also, many models fail to recognize that a phenomenon irregularly distributed in time and space, such as war, cannot be explained on the basis of relatively invariant phenomena. Much research on periodicity in the occurrence of war has yielded little result, suggesting that the direction should now be to focus on such variables as diffusion and contagion. Structural variables, such as bipolarity, show contradictory results with some clear inter-century differences. Bipolarity, some results suggest, might have different effects on different social entities. A considerable number of studies analysing dyadic variables show a clear connection between equal capabilities among contending nations and escalation of conflict into war. Finally, research into national attributes often points to strength and geographical location as important variables. In general, the article concludes, there is room for modest optimism, as research into the question of war is no longer moving in non-cumulative circles. Systematic research is producing results and there is even a discernible tendency of convergence, in spite of a great diversity in theoretical orientations.In the early 1930s, when Quincy Wright in America and Lewis Richardson in England began their respective investigations into the causes of war, they were not only unaware of one another's work; they were, of necessity, equally unaware of the radical change that their studies would produce in the field of war and peace research. With perhaps the exception of Jean de Blochwhose Future of War (1899) sought all too successfully to predict what warfare would look like on the basis of a systematic examination of previous warsand Pitirim Sorokin (1937)-whose focus was on the relationship between long cycles in cultural patterns and fluctuations in war and revolution over several thousand years -Wright (1942) and Richardson (1941 and 1960a, b) mark the first traceable efforts to bring scientific method to bear on international conflict. While physical phenomena had been studied in an essentially scientific fashion for several centuries, and biological phenomena for nearly a century, social phenomena had remained largely the domain of theological speculation, moral imperative, and conventional folklore. But even as economics and sociology began to emerge as systematic sciences, followed in due course by the study of national political systems, international politics remained one of the most backward of disciplines. This state of affairs was, and often still is, explained in terms of the intractability of the material; not only does much of the behavior occur in secret, but the material, structural, and cultural conditions associated with the international system are allegedly too spread out in time and in space to permit direct observation. But that explanation is incomplete. Political elites, it can be as...

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“…Instead we confine ourselves to the simple question: does internal conflict correlate with external conflict at all? This restriction is necessary for two reasons: first, the extensive literature on this subject (Rummel, 1963;Haas, 1965;Tanter, 1966;Wilkenfeld, 1968Wilkenfeld, , 1969Wilkenfeld, , 1972Flanigan and Fogelman, 1970;Burrowes and Spector, 1973;Collins, 1973;Hazelwood, 1973Hazelwood, , 1975Liao, 1976; summaries by McGowan and Shapiro, 1973;Zimmerman, 1975Zimmerman, , 1976Zinnes, 1975) is full of contradictions and does not yet allow an answer to the question of whether a significant cross-sectional correlation exists. Second, the causal explanation of such a correlation can only be tested adequately either when reliable time-series of internal and external conflict data are available, or when sufficient data on different known determinants of external and internal conflicts are ready for use.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

External and Internal Conflict Behavior Among Nations, 1966-1967

Eberwein

Hübner-Dick²,

Jagodzinski

et al. 1979

Journal of Conflict Resolution

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In this article we attempt to replicate the hypothesis tested by Rummel and others that external and internal conflict are unrelated. We do this using data for 125 nations for the years 1966-1967. As did Rummel, we use exploratory factor analysis and regression analysis; in addition, we also employ confirmatory factor analysis. Results from confirmatory factor analysis contradict Rummel and reveal moderately strong correlations between internal and external conflict factors. Regression analysis and partial correlations, however, show that zero-order cross-country correlations between internal and external conflict are reduced to insignificance when a control variable, population size, is introduced in the analysis.

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Societal Approaches To the Study of War

Cited by 41 publications

References 3 publications

A Cross-Cultural Theory of Political Conflict and Violence

A Cross-Cultural Theory of Political Conflict and Violence

Accounting for International War: The State of the Discipline

External and Internal Conflict Behavior Among Nations, 1966-1967

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