ABSTRACT
If war is multicausal, one of the most important tasks facing scholars is to identify the paths to war that exist and pinpoint the wars that arise from each path. The concept of paths to war is meant to capture the particular steps that two states take in dealing with an issue that are causally significant in bringing about war. Thus, power transition theory, in it most classic form, will see the second most powerful state catching up and leapfrogging the power of the most powerful state in the system as a key path to war. To operationalize each of the paths to war, it is necessary to examine whether territorial issues give rise to the war, whether the parties were rivals before the war broke out, whether one or more had outside allies to support them, and whether they were engaged in an arms race.
