The Future Practice and Study Of War

As dangerous as it is to predict in world politics and war, we can reduce the error rate by clear specification of our class of cases and precise delineation of the spatial-temporal domain from which we hope to draw our possible lessons from history. Further, we next need to lay out our predictions as to the context of future conflict with particular attention to military technol gy, geo-political shifts, economic developments, and changing political instit tions. On the basis of these considerations, we can expect linle change in the global frequency of both inter-state and intra-state wars as well as their sever ty, a modest return to extra-state war, and a continuing geographical trend in a southerly and easterly direction. Turning to the research future, we need to attend more carefully to epistemological and semantic clarity, multiple levels of social aggregation for both our predictor and outcome variables, and the role of contemporary policy analysis in our modeling and research design. We are clearly far from an adequate theoretical understanding of the etiology of war, and it thus belrooves us to combine our growing methodological sophistication with a continuing theoretical agnosticism.