| Kommentar |
Ever since Waltz's classic work on possible causes of armed conflict in the human psyche, the structure of government, and the international system, scholars have struggled to provide a comprehensive paradigm for armed conflict. Today, two general lines of thinking dominate the academic literature: "top-down" explanations usually focus on political agency and the decision-making of armed actors. This approach is used to model conflict as bargaining processes between rational actors. In most cases, the motivation for armed conflict is also borrowed from Realist theories and revolves around power and/or material gain. This perspective still reigns supreme in the IR literature and has been applied empirically to a wide variety of conflict cases from low-level insurgencies to the Cold War.
A number of both classic and contemporary contributions reject this reasoning in favor of a "bottom-up" perspective. From this angle, conflict is best understood as resulting from the shared ambition of individuals to use violence against a common enemy. Disaggregated empirical studies of civil war and simulation models typically rely on this perspective. This seminar will introduce theoretical contributions from both camps and relate them to the major conflicts of the 20th century. |
| Literatur |
Clausewitz: “On War”, 1873
Waltz: “Man, the State, and War”, Columbia University Press, 1959
Pinker: “The Better Angels of our Nature”, Penguin Books, 2011
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