ABSTRACT
War between states has always been central to the study of International Relations and widely accepted as an inevitable feature of state-to-state interactions. This is understandable given that, historically, this form of conflict has been so prominent and so costly in lives. Understanding the causes of war – and consequently also the bases for peace – must be the fundamental concern of the study of military security and, many would say, of International Relations as a whole. The precise causes of war are, of course, myriad, but they can be distilled down to some general explanatory factors about the nature of the political world. Carl von Clausewitz’s On War remains the most revered book on military strategy ever written and a standard text on contemporary reading lists for Security Studies students and military officer trainees, despite being written in the 1830s and never finished by the author.
