• DOI:10.4337/9781849808323.00009
• Corpus ID: 154254634

The Reasons for Wars: An updated survey

@inproceedings{Jackson2011TheRF,
  title={The Reasons for Wars: An updated survey},
  author={Matthew O. Jackson and Massimo Morelli},
  year={2011}
}

• M. Jackson, M. Morelli
• Published 28 February 2011
• Economics

We thank CEPR for allowing us to organize a workshop on conflict in Switzerland in the months before the deadline for this chapter. We also thank Stergios Skaperdas for comments on an earlier draft. Why do interstate wars occur and recur, especially in cases when the decisions involved are made by careful and rational actors? There are many answers to this question. Given the importance of the question, and the wide range of answers, it is essential to have a perspective on the various sources of conflict. In this chapter we provide a critical overview of the theory of interstate war, focusing on rationalist explanations of costly conflict. In particular, we provide not just a taxonomy of causes of conflict, but also some insight into the necessity of and interrelation between different factors that lead to war. In order for our discussion to be as unambiguous as possible, we begin by clarifying what we mean when we dichotomize between rational causes of war and irrational causes of war. When we refer to a rational action by an agent we require that maximize the expected payoff to that agent out of the available actions and relative to the agent's beliefs about the potential consequences of the actions. In the incarnations that we discuss below, a rationalist explanation for war or conflict is requires the rationality of the relevant actors. This does not necessarily require that the beliefs be accurate, nor that the payoffs of the individual agent correspond to what is best for the state or country that he or she might represent. 1 1 In order for this not to become a tautology, one has to be careful. An "irrational" act can always be rationalized simply by saying that it gave the agent taking it a high payoff for some intrinsic reason. Thus in order to have bite, the payoffs to agents for various actions have to have some natural specification. Although the distinction is thus partly semantic, or reliant on some idea of what natural payoffs should be, we still find it to be a useful dichotomy. This is a broader definition of a rationalist explanation than is usually understood in International Relations, where it is common to associate a rationalist approach to realist and neo-realist theories of conflict with unitary actors that are exclusively interested in material costs and benefits. Our broader definition should make it clear that …