Conflicts, Arms Races and War: A Synthetic Approach

This chapter elaborates basic elements for an integrated formal approach to conflicts, arms races, and war in an attempt to remedy the inadequacies we see in similar theoretical efforts. Starting from a rational actor perspective in international politics, the paper presents three interconnected models of arms races or resource allocation processes, diplomatic conflict and war initiation by nations that are based upon either general optimising principles through time or differential game theoretic considerations. All these principles are defined as adjustments between actual and target values of key variables of resources devoted to defence, diplomatic conflictual efforts, and evaluations of each side’s deterrent capabilities by the other. In addition, time constraints play a crucial role in the representation of the war initiation submodel. An analysis of these three interconnected formulations shows that our conception can account for several types of war initiation. On the one hand, we can emphasise a situation that we label the paradox of the weak where the nation with the least effective deterrent has an incentive to attack first. On the other hand, our model can also represent more classical types of confrontations where either deterrence works or where the strong attacks the weak.