Causes of War

Course Description

INR4060 asks the oldest question in international relations and the one the field has spent the most effort on: why do states go to war?

Florida's statewide description is one line, and every word of it is doing work: "the primary theoretical and empirical research explaining militarized interstate conflict." UCF uses it verbatim.

⚠ Two things follow from that sentence. Theoretical and empirical research means this is a course about scholarship — competing explanations and the evidence for and against them — not a military history course. And militarized interstate conflict is a term of art: it names war between states, which deliberately excludes civil wars, insurgencies and terrorism. The phrase is borrowed from a specific research programme that built a dataset of exactly those events, and much of the quantitative literature in this field rests on it.

UWF's version is broader and more historical. It examines "the causes and evolution of war… war's origins and evolution; theories about the causes and nature of war; arguments for a contemporary world of 'new wars'; and theories about the future of war," analysing World War I, the Cold War and the Iraq War, and covering "war and the state; structural and psychological explanations; terrorism and irregular war; and the moral/ethical dimensions of war."

⚠⚠ So UWF adds three things the statewide reading excludes: irregular and non-state war, the ethics of war, and an argument about where war is going. Neither is wrong — one is the narrow research literature, the other is the broad subject — but they prepare you differently, and the distinction is set out below.

⚠ A note on what this course is emphatically not. It is not about how wars are fought. Strategy, campaigns and weapons belong to other numbers. This course is about onset — the conditions under which states that would both prefer to avoid a war end up fighting one anyway.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Apply the levels of analysis framework — individual, state and system — and explain what each level can and cannot account for.
• Explain realist accounts: anarchy, the security dilemma, balance of power and power transition.
• ⚠ Explain the bargaining model of war — that war is costly, so a negotiated settlement should exist, and the puzzle is why states fail to reach it.
• Explain the three standard answers to that puzzle: private information with incentives to misrepresent, commitment problems, and issue indivisibility.
• ⚠ Evaluate the democratic peace — the finding, the competing explanations, and the objections.
• Evaluate economic interdependence and trade as causes of peace or of conflict.
• Evaluate alliances — whether they deter aggression or entangle members in others' wars.
• Explain deterrence and the conditions under which it succeeds or fails.
• Explain domestic-political explanations, including diversionary war and audience costs.
• Explain psychological explanations — misperception, prospect theory and leader belief.
• ⚠ Evaluate the empirical evidence critically: what the datasets measure, what they leave out, and why a correlation in this field is hard to interpret.
• Apply competing explanations to historical cases and assess which the evidence supports.
• ⚠ Distinguish interstate war from civil war, insurgency and terrorism, and explain why the causal literatures are largely separate.

Optional Outcomes

• ⚠ Analyse irregular war and terrorism as causes and forms of conflict. Explicit at UWF.
• ⚠ Apply just war theory and the ethics of force. Explicit at UWF.
• Evaluate the "new wars" thesis and the decline-of-war debate.
• Analyse nuclear weapons and their effect on the probability of war.
• Analyse civil war onset and its distinct literature.
• Analyse war termination — ⚠ the core of the companion course INR4061.
• Work directly with conflict datasets.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Defining war and measuring it; what a dataset counts.
• Levels of analysis.
• Anarchy, the security dilemma and realist explanations.
• Power transition and hegemonic war.
• The bargaining model — information, commitment, indivisibility.
• The democratic peace and its critics.
• Interdependence, trade and capitalist peace arguments.
• Alliances — deterrence and entrapment.
• Deterrence theory, credibility and reputation.
• Domestic politics — diversionary war, audience costs, regime type.
• Psychology and misperception.
• Offense-defense balance and military technology.
• Cases — the First World War is nearly universal; UWF adds the Cold War and Iraq.
• Evaluating quantitative evidence in this literature.

Optional Topics

• Terrorism and irregular warfare.
• Just war theory and the ethics of force.
• The "new wars" thesis and the decline-of-war debate.
• Nuclear weapons and the stability-instability paradox.
• Civil war onset.
• War termination and settlement.
• Cyber and emerging domains.
• Quantitative methods and dataset work.

Resources & Tools

• The Causes of War and the Spread of Peace (Azar Gat) or Causes of War (Levy and Thompson) — ⚠ Levy and Thompson is the standard survey and the most likely assignment; it is organised by level of analysis, which makes it easy to use alongside the course.
• Man, the State, and War (Kenneth Waltz) — ⚠ the book that created the levels-of-analysis framework; short and still assigned.
• James Fearon, "Rationalist Explanations for War" (International Organization, 1995) — ⚠⚠ the single most important article in this literature. If your syllabus includes one journal article, it is this one, and it is worth reading twice.
• The Better Angels of Our Nature (Pinker) and New and Old Wars (Kaldor) — the two sides of the decline-of-war debate, both contested and both worth reading as arguments.
• ⚠ The Correlates of War project and the Uppsala Conflict Data Program — both publish their data and codebooks free. Reading a codebook is the fastest way to understand what "militarized interstate dispute" actually counts, and it will change how you read every statistic in the field.
• International Security, Journal of Conflict Resolution and International Organization — the field's journals.
• International Crisis Group — free, high-quality reporting on current conflicts, useful for applying theory to live cases.

Career Pathways

• Intelligence analysis — ⚠ the CIA, DIA, NSA, State Department's INR bureau and the service intelligence components. This course's content maps unusually directly onto political and military analysis work.
• Defense policy and analysis — the Department of Defense, the combatant commands, and the federally funded research centres.
• Foreign Service and diplomacy.
• Think tanks and research institutes — policy analysis and country risk.
• Political risk consulting — ⚠ advising firms and insurers on conflict exposure; a real and well-paid private-sector application.
• Military service, particularly for officers — ⚠ this material is directly relevant to professional military education and is taught in it.
• International organisations and humanitarian work — conflict analysis and early warning.
• Journalism and graduate study — ⚠ this is a strong foundation for an MA or PhD in international relations or security studies.
• ⚠⚠ Florida context, and it is genuinely strong for this subject. US Central Command and US Special Operations Command are both headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, and US Southern Command is in Doral. Three combatant commands in one state supports a substantial ecosystem of defence contractors, analysts and contract linguists. Florida also has one of the largest veteran populations in the country, which means classes in this subject frequently include people who have been in the wars being analysed — which changes the seminar, usually for the better.

Special Information

⚠⚠ The two carriers differ in scope — narrow research literature, or the broad subject

UCF — the statewide reading	UWF — broader
"The primary theoretical and empirical research explaining militarized interstate conflict" — the statewide description verbatim.	Causes and evolution of war; "new wars"; the future of war; terrorism and irregular war; the moral and ethical dimensions.
Expect the scholarly literature on interstate war, quantitative evidence, and hypothesis testing.	Expect that plus non-state conflict, ethics, and a structured argument about where war is heading.
⚠ Better preparation for graduate study in the quantitative conflict literature.	⚠ Better preparation for policy and professional work, where irregular conflict and the ethics of force are live daily questions.

⚠ Neither is misfiling — UWF's is a superset that fully contains the statewide subject. A syllabus test: look for terrorism, insurgency and just war theory. If they appear as their own units, you are in the broad version.

⚠⚠ At UWF this is one of THREE war courses, and they are genuinely distinct

Students routinely assume these overlap and choose badly. They do not overlap much.

Course	What it actually is
INR4060 Causes of War this course	Broad and historical. Origins and evolution of war, competing theories, irregular war, ethics, the future of war. Cases: WWI, Cold War, Iraq.
INR4061 International Conflict	⚠ Narrow and rationalist. The bargaining model applied rigorously to interstate war onset and termination — diversionary war, trade, alliances, arms races, balance of power, and why costly settlements fail.
INR4224 War and Peace in East Asia	⚠ The same theory applied to a region. Uncertainty and commitment problems worked through East Asian history from the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 onward.

⚠⚠ Taken together these form a coherent sequence rather than three overlapping electives — the broad survey, the formal theory, and the applied regional case. If you are building a security concentration, that is a sensible order to take them in.

⚠ Prerequisites differ, and the statewide version differs from both

Source	Prerequisite
Florida statewide	POS 2041 or INR 2002 or consent of instructor
UCF	⚠ ENC 1102 or POS 2041 or consent of instructor
UWF	none published

⚠ UCF substitutes freshman composition for the introductory IR course, which effectively opens the course to students outside the major — useful if you are a history, economics or military-science student who wants it. Take your own institution's gate, not the state's.

⚠⚠ That said, take INR2002 first if you can. This course assumes you know what realism and liberalism are and what the levels of analysis mean. It is survivable without that background and it is much harder.

⚠ UCF offers it "occasionally" — plan around that

UCF lists this course's term offering as Occasional rather than a fixed semester pattern. ⚠ That is weaker than "Fall only": it means you cannot assume it will run in any given year. If it is required for a concentration, take it when it appears rather than when it fits.

Offering Notes

Institution	Its title	Credits	Contact hours	Notes
University of Central Florida (SUS)	Causes of War	3	not published (0 lab hours)	⚠ Prerequisite ENC 1102 or POS 2041 or C.I.; offered "Occasional"; School of Politics, Security, and International Affairs
University of West Florida (SUS)	Causes of War	3	not published	no prerequisite published; may not be repeated for credit; Department of Government, College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities

Both carriers award three credits and use the identical title — ⚠ no title divergence, which in this catalogue is worth noting positively. UCF publishes zero weekly laboratory hours, so the 45 contact hours recorded here is Florida's convention for a three-credit unsuffixed course and is well supported.

⚠ Departmental placement is worth noting. UCF houses it in a School of Politics, Security, and International Affairs — a security-forward department with a very large international relations catalogue including intelligence, cyberwarfare and space policy. UWF places it in its Department of Government. Both are political science homes; UCF's surrounding course list is the more specialised.

Position in the curriculum and transfer

An upper-division course in a political science or international relations degree, normally taken after the introductory IR course. It pairs with INR4061, INR4124 (statecraft and deterrence) and the regional politics courses.

Florida's statewide record classifies it as transferable to an institution offering the same course, with no Gordon Rule designation and no general-education category, and marks it for dual enrolment with elective high-school credit — ⚠ every active undergraduate INR number carries that marking, so it is boilerplate.

⚠ INR is 74% single-carrier across 306 live identifiers, so two carriers is reasonable coverage. Send a syllabus on transfer and be specific about scope — a department deciding whether you have covered irregular war will want to know.

AI Integration

Conflict research was quantitative long before this wave of tools, and computational methods are now central to it. Machine-learning models are used for conflict early warning and forecasting, event data is extracted from news text automatically, and satellite imagery analysis supports conflict monitoring. ⚠ Students heading toward intelligence or research work will meet all of it.

⚠⚠ That connects to the course's own content in a way worth making explicit. Forecasting models in this field are trained on historical conflict data — and the course spends real time on what those datasets do and do not count. A model trained on militarized interstate disputes inherits every definitional choice in that codebook, including the exclusion of civil war and the thresholds for what counts as an incident. A student who has read the codebook can say what a forecast is actually predicting; one who has not will read the number as a fact about the world.

Where generative tools help in the coursework: summarising a dense journal article; explaining a formal argument such as the bargaining model in different terms until it lands; building and checking a literature list; generating the strongest objection to a position you are arguing; and drafting and revising your own writing.

⚠⚠⚠ Three cautions, the first specific to this subject and serious.

• Historical and numerical claims about wars are frequently wrong and confidently stated. ⚠ Casualty figures, dates, force ratios and treaty terms are exactly the kind of specific, checkable detail these models confabulate. In a field where an argument often turns on whether a case fits a pattern, a wrong fact is a wrong conclusion. Check against the dataset or a cited source.
• Fabricated citations. ⚠⚠ Plausible authors, plausible journals, plausible years, no such article. Every citation gets located in the actual database before it enters a reference list.
• ⚠⚠ Contested debates get flattened into consensus. The democratic peace, the decline-of-war thesis and the effect of nuclear weapons are all live disputes among serious scholars. A generated summary will hand you a settled-sounding answer. The disagreement is the content of the course, and being able to state both sides fairly is what the assessment is actually testing.

⚠ One professional note for anyone heading toward intelligence or defence work: classification and handling rules apply from day one, and they are not negotiable. Nothing sensitive goes into a consumer chat interface, ever. Agencies have approved tools and explicit policies; learn them before you need them, because a clearance is far easier to keep than to recover.