ABSTRACT
A variety of scholarly approaches and methods of investigation have been used by social scientists and historians to discover and analyze long-range patterns of international conflict. By ‘long-range’ I mean both long-term (diachronic) and worldwide (synchronic) comparative analysis. Origins, cycles, transformations, fusions, collapses, and fluctuations are some of the social patterns that are analyzed on a large array of long-range analysis, covering thousands of years and all regions of world politics, from local to global. In spite of the acknowledged complexity of these processes and systems, however, little attention has focused on critical conceptual, empirical, and theoretical distinctions that are crucial to establish, as between different scales of conflict in long-range analysis. Conflicts that occur on different scales (e.g. the French and Indian War versus the FrenchBritish War; the Six Day War versus the Arab-Israeli War; or the Korean War versus the Soviet-American Cold War) are generally assumed to obey different causal mechanisms, unless proven otherwise (scale invariance). From an applied policy perspective, the scale of conflict also matters, often critically so, for purposes of early warning, intervention, or resolution. The Vietnam War affected an entire generation; but the Soviet-American Cold War affected several generations. Scale matters in international conflict, just as it does in all complex phenomena.
