Toward a Scientific Understanding of International Conflict: A Personal View

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Abstract
A scientific understanding of international conflict is best gained by explicit theorizing, whether verbal or mathematic, grounded in axiomatic logic, from which hypotheses with empirical referents may be extracted, followed by rigorous empirical analysis (whether quantitative or not) in which assumptions and procedures are explicitly stated. Such research should be careful to note whether the hypotheses stipulate necessary, sufficient, necessary and sufficient, or probabilistic relations among variables. Where, as will generally be the case, individual researchers lack all the skills required by the above research agenda, collaboration should be emphasized. Knowledge will best be gained when those with the ‘traditionalist’ skills for evaluating patterns within individual events, those with the ‘behavioralist’ training in the analysis of general patterns, and those with the skills of the axiomatic theorist communicate and cooperate with each other to move the discipline forward.

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