No root cause---particulars of each case must be accounted for

This article’s contribution is two-pronged: it argues that IR theory regarding the causes of conflict and war is deeply flawed, locked for decades in ultimately futile debates over narrow, misconstrued concepts; this conceptual confusion is untangled and the debate is transcended once a broader, comprehensive, and evolutionarily informed perspective is adopted. Thus attempts to find the root cause of war in the nature of either the individual, the state, or the international system are fundamentally misplaced. In all these ‘levels’ there are necessary but not sufficient causes for war, and the whole cannot be broken into pieces.13 People’s needs and desires — which may be pursued violently — as well as the resulting quest for power and the state of mutual apprehension which fuel the security dilemma are all molded in human nature (some of them existing only as options, potentials, and skills in a behavioral ‘tool kit’); they are so molded because of strong evolutionary pressures that have shaped humans in their struggle for survival over geological times, when all the above literally constituted matters of life and death. The violent option of human competition has been largely curbed within states, yet is occasionally taken up on a large scale between states because of the anarchic nature of the inter-state system. However, returning to step one, international anarchy in and of itself would not be an explanation for war were it not for the potential for violence in a fundamental state of competition over scarce resources that is imbedded in reality and, consequently, in human nature. The necessary and sufficient causes of war — that obviously have to be filled with the particulars of the case in any specific war — are thus as follows: politically organized actors that operate in an environment where no superior authority effectively monopolizes power resort to violence when they assess it to be their most cost-effective option for winning and/or defending evolution-shaped objects of desire, and/or their power in the system that can help them win and/or defend those desired goods.