Mysteries of Mankind, Secrets of the State, and Complexities of Conflict: A Dynamic, Multi-Level Pre-War Bargaining Model
type: CreativeWork
description: War is an undeniable phenomenon in international relations. But why do states fight each other? The quintessential question of the causes of war has drawn prolific scholarly attention ever since Thucydides' dissection of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE). Yet little consensus has been reached. What makes war causes so elusive? One reason, I contend, is that ideographic and nomothetic explanations of war have traditionally been considered in opposition. There is, however, nothing mutually exclusive about a dynamic process and specific combinations of causal variables. Explaining the onset of war requires answers to both why and how war emerges – conditions and process. In this thesis, I therefore take a systems approach and argue that war, as any social phenomenon, can be conceived of and analyzed as an outcome of an endogenous process of actions and reactions which shape and, in turn, are shaped by context. Whereas natural systems consist of detectable secrets, social systems also consist of undetectable mysteries. Specifically, I develop a dynamic, nonlinear pre-war bargaining model which allows us to simulate how two adversarial states of configurable economic and military size, regime type, and leadership bargain over a contentious issue and decide whether to use military force to resolve it. By integrating the international, domestic, and individual-level material secrets and immaterial mysteries into a coherent dynamic whole, the model embraces the inherent complexity of social systems and enables us to study how small variations in initial conditions, changes produced by the bargaining process, and exogenous factors affect the stability of peace. The model thus brings together the process-oriented ideographic approach and counterfactual analysis, on the one hand, and the variable-oriented nomothetic approach on the other. Another reason for the elusiveness of war causes, I argue, is the paradigmatic divides and lack of scientific pluralism in IR. Since etiol…
abstract: War is an undeniable phenomenon in international relations. But why do states fight each other? The quintessential question of the causes of war has drawn prolific scholarly attention ever since Thucydides' dissection of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE). Yet little consensus has been reached. What makes war causes so elusive? One reason, I contend, is that ideographic and nomothetic explanations of war have traditionally been considered in opposition. There is, however, nothing mutually exclusive about a dynamic process and specific combinations of causal variables. Explaining the onset of war requires answers to both why and how war emerges – conditions and process. In this thesis, I therefore take a systems approach and argue that war, as any social phenomenon, can be conceived of and analyzed as an outcome of an endogenous process of actions and reactions which shape and, in turn, are shaped by context. Whereas natural systems consist of detectable secrets, social systems also consist of undetectable mysteries. Specifically, I develop a dynamic, nonlinear pre-war bargaining model which allows us to simulate how two adversarial states of configurable economic and military size, regime type, and leadership bargain over a contentious issue and decide whether to use military force to resolve it. By integrating the international, domestic, and individual-level material secrets and immaterial mysteries into a coherent dynamic whole, the model embraces the inherent complexity of social systems and enables us to study how small variations in initial conditions, changes produced by the bargaining process, and exogenous factors affect the stability of peace. The model thus brings together the process-oriented ideographic approach and counterfactual analysis, on the one hand, and the variable-oriented nomothetic approach on the other. Another reason for the elusiveness of war causes, I argue, is the paradigmatic divides and lack of scientific pluralism in IR. Since etiol…
author: Eggum, Erik
language: eng
keywords: Bargaining, Bounded rationality, Causes of war, Dynamical systems, International Relations, Kalman filter, Levels of analysis
license: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/0217e48e-c96a-4915-9a1d-393210303317/download
license: https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
date published: 2022-07-05
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:23:54Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.99542