ABSTRACT
Territorial disputes definitely increase the likelihood of war between states, as the previous studies have shown. Having territorial disagreements does not make war inevitable, however. It all depends on how they are handled. The following article, which was Vasquez’s Presidential Address to the International Studies Association, shows that as states resort to power politics to settle their territorial disputes the probability of war increases. The leading scholars of the early post-World War II era who studied war and violence—Harold Guetzkow, Robert North, and J. David Singer—all shared this motivation. In our time there has been a shift from studying the causes of war to the correlates to war and now to the probability of war. This analysis presents some new findings that show how statistical knowledge about probabilities can help us address and answer this ancient question of why war occurs.
