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Rationalist Explanations Of War

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This week’s readings by Fearon, Schultz, Oneal & Russet, and Lebow mainly focus on war and peace theory from an international relations perspective. Why does war occur, or what can prevent war from happening? Can states bargain to reduce the costs and risks of war? Fearon claims that rationalist explanations for war do not really bring effective clarifications for why war occurs. The five traditional rationalist explanations include ‘anarchy’, ‘expected benefits greater than expected costs’, ‘rational preventive war’, ‘rational miscalculation due to lack of information’, and ‘rational miscalculation or disagreement about relative power’ (Fearon, 1995). Fearon’s central puzzle is that wars are risky and costly, however they occur anyways. The above assumptions fail to explain the puzzle. …show more content…

In order to exclude the costs and risks of war, states should be able to bargain. The author gives few assumptions required for bargaining, such as states highly knowing that one state would win in war can prevent war. For example, during the Cold War, if USSR knew that USA would win the war for sure, both states could bargain, even without going to war in the first place. In addition, states mostly fail to cooperate and choose to go to war under certain causal mechanisms that include misinterpretation of private information, and states’ incapability of keeping the deal. States revealing their private information to each other can bring peace, but mostly they all refuse not to share, due to mistrust. If USA and USSR trusted each other and were able to bargain, the Cold War would probably not occur. Also, this relates to

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