R. J. Rummel's Understanding Conflict and War: An Overlooked Classic?

Abstract

R.J. Rummel's five volume work Understanding Conflict and War is an ambitious, comprehensive theoretical approach to international as well as domestic conflict. It provides a substantial theoretical as well as epistemological basis for the democratic peace proposition, which has received a lot of attention in recent years. Yet most writers in the field seem unaware of the roots of that proposition in this 5 volume work. The democratic peace proposition is only one of the 33 interrelated propositions regarding the causes of international conflict developed in Understanding Conflict and War. Many others, regarding the argument that international politics are less violent than domestic politics, or the impact of power transitions, or of recurring crises, or of geographic contiguity, or of regime type of states in general, and not just on their relationships with each other, play a prominent role in important contemporary research efforts. The theoretical approach developed by Rummel may have important potential to integrate and/or subsume all of these “islands of theory.” It may also provide an alternative to rational choice, or formal methods of developing a theory of international conflict.