Why Do We Wage Wars?

Despite our claims of modernity, wars have not stopped being a recurring feature of our times. Here are some of the most popular (but not exhaustive) answers to the age-old question on why wars are waged:

Biological: Humans and animals display similar aggressive behaviour projecting dominance when faced with competition for possession, intrusion by strangers, or frustration with an activity, suggesting that the reasons we wage wars are written into our DNA.

Psychological: Wars are the result of a group’s drive for power or glory. Similarly, an injury to national pride or ego must be answered with retribution or revenge.

Economic: According to many liberal scholars, people and nations go to war because they believe it will enrich them, with either resources or money. The liberal school proposes interdependency as a means to prevent that.

Realpolitik: Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz framed war as “a continuation of policy by other means” - by which he meant that war served as one of the instruments rational leaders use to achieve national interest.

Ingroup/Outgroup: Several wars have been fought because people viewed some other social group(s) as detrimental to the survival or way of life of the social group they identified as being a member of. This can be applied to religion, nationalism, etc.

Political scientists divide causes of war into three levels of analysis - individual (dependent on personalities of leaders), nation-state (societal features affect how the state decides to face problems), and international system (war is a symptom of the anarchic world system).

For peace: Many justify wars as a means to attain peace. Sometimes the aim is not only to end violence or a fraught situation but to bring about structural lasting positive transformation which may be only possible by replying to violence with violence.

Wars are, of course, often too complex to be defined by such structured causes and heavily depend on contextual factors. However, the above causes have been seen in numerous conflicts throughout history, and thus are useful in understanding war.

Bottom Line. The above list covers the main theories that humans have come up with to explain wars. Such analyses are important, for this simple reason: if we can ascertain the cause(s) of wars, could we prevent future ones?