Steps to War Assignment and Instructions

The paper you will write in this class will entail a summary of The War Puzzle and an evaluation of how well Vasquez’ core argument about how disputes become war fits a particular war of your choosing.

I will address the basic formatting concerns first. The research design paper should be single-spaced and between 6,000 to 8,000 words. This word count includes title, front-matter, and bibliography. Margins should be one-inch on all sides. This will correspond with a paper that is approximately eight to ten single-spaced pages. Citation and references should be done following APSA style.

Here’s a table of contents to guide you.

1. Case Selection
   • Table: A Select List of Wars in the Gibler and Miller (Forthcoming) Confrontation Data
   • Table: Participant Summaries from a Select List of Wars in the Gibler and Miller (Forthcoming) Confrontation Data
2. Crafting Your Paper
   • Introduction
   • Reviewing the Steps to War Argument
   • Testing the Steps to War Argument With Your Case
   • Conclusion

Case Selection

What follows is a table of eligible wars for your to choose for your paper. These cases are first-come-first-served. I will not allow more than one student to cover one particular war, no matter how popular the selection might be. A few comments on this table follow.

First, feel free to ask me for some insight on some of these wars. I do not profess to be an expert on all these wars, but I can often tell you at least something about the wars on these tables. Some of these comments will range from the useful (e.g. the Kargil War is operationally a war even if the fatality threshold associated with war was only met because of a series of low-level incidents before the onset of major fighting in 1999) to the not as useful (e.g. my grandfather’s older brother and family namesake was wounded [and almost assuredly died] in the Second Spanish-Moroccan War). Even in the latter case, I could point you in the direction of some places to start, like understanding disputed territory or rivalry relationships.

Second, these data are forthcoming and are potentially subject to some slight revisions. We are constantly working on militarized events within cases like these. Feel free to raise questions or point out what you believe to be errors.

Third, World War I and World War II are conspicuously absent, mostly because these are atypical wars. This is one thing I will mention often through the course. These two wars may be the most conspicuous wars we’ll ever learn, and World War I itself is disproportionately responsible—or to blame—for the lion’s share of our theoretical arguments and perspectives, but these are far from a typical case of war. Thank goodness too! The world would be a worse place if most wars looked like these, rather than something more typical like the so-called Football War of the assorted Indo-Pakistan conflicts over Kashmir. That said, there are a few wars clearly related to, derivative of, or merged into these massive conflicts.

Start dates and end dates are for the confrontation, and not the war, per se. This is something I will emphasize a lot, and something that Vasquez emphasizes as well through the course of his book. War is a subset of a confrontation. Not all confrontations escalate to war (thank goodness, again), and understanding why confrontations escalate to war involve understanding how leaders handle (or mishandle) contentious issues. Don’t expect these dates to correspond with what you see on Wikipedia.

On a related note, recall these dates coincide with inter-state conflict processes. It may jar the student to see that the Afghanistan War lasted just three months. Recall: these are describing inter-state wars. The inter-state component of the Afghanistan War was brief. The extra-state component of it lasted forever.

I offer Wikipedia links to get you started. I tell students that Wikipedia is a fine place to start if you are absolutely in the dark about something. Wikipedia just happens to be an unacceptable place to stop learning about something, certainly for an assignment like this.

“Side A” and “Side B” are categorized by which side initiated the first militarized event (a threat, display, or use of force). This may not be obvious to students, certainly Americans, who are accustomed to thinking of clear “aggressors” and—dare I say—villains in major wars. For example, the United States was on Side A of World War II because the French and the British started what became World War II with a threat to Nazi Germany on behalf of Poland. Technically, the United Kingdom and France started the confrontation that became World War II, even if Americans don’t typically think of their World War II coalition in this way. This distinction matters a little to a lot, and certainly relaying a war to Vasquez entails understanding who started what.

States that duplicate in a given war are not an error. These are states that have a few “episodes” in the conflict that are separated by more than 180 days of militarized events. Where appropriate, you will want to consider how or why a state appears and reappears in a war.

Fatalities are approximate and informed by a great deal of archival work. Understand these too are approximate, but informed approximations. Fatalities are battlefield deaths for troops in conflict, isolating out instances of civilian massacres and other deaths of this nature. Again, this may not mesh with you see on Wikipedia.

Finally, I will add the caveat here that any paper you write without first clearing your topic with me gets an automatic zero. You must consult with me what case you will do before submission of your paper.

To close, here are some participant summaries of these wars, if they may help you choose which war you would like to research. Several of the same caveats apply here. Start dates and end dates communicate confrontation participation irregarding confrontation severity. Participants can drop out and reappear. Side A is the side that side that initiated the first militarized event in the confrontation. Battles indicate sustained military campaigns in heat of an ostensible war, though “clashes” may minimally indicate that we do not know who initiated a particular skirmish. Take care here in thinking about a case like Saudi Arabia in the Iraq War. Further, not all participants in the war are active belligerents. For example, the United States and Russia both participated in the Second Taiwan Straits Crisis, but never engaged in a use of force.

Crafting Your Paper

Introduction

The student should introduce the paper to follow in about three or four paragraphs. This is the part of any paper that is easy to neglect, but it is subtly one of the paper’s most important parts. This will be an important life lesson for students who do not have a lot of practical writing experience; the introduction is where the reader makes first impressions of the paper and the author. If I, as a reader, do not have a firm idea of what is going to be addressed in the paper after the first few sentences, the fate of the paper is in serious peril.

That said, the nature of this assignment is going to make the introduction rather straightforward and unexciting. Here is a broad template for what the introduction should resemble. Think of each entry in the itemized list to follow as coinciding with the theme of the paragraph in this section.

1. Give me a paragraph synopsis of what the “steps to war” argument is. Sell me at least a little bit on its importance (i.e. why should I care what “steps to war” is?).
2. Transition to the war you will evaluate. Describe the war but also make sure to bridge the previous paragraph to this. In other words, start by asking if this prominent theory of how disputes become war matches the particular case. Do not forget you should also give me some indication why the war is important. In other words, what is important about, say, the Seven Weeks War and why should the reader evaluate this war in the “steps to war” framework?
3. Outline the paper to follow. This will be a cookie-cutter “The paper proceeds in the following fashion. First, I summarize the ‘steps to war’ argument. Then, I outline how the confrontation escalated to war.” Make it work for what you’re doing, and obviously expand on this simple passage I wrote, but make sure the final paragraph of the section outlines the rest of the paper.

I will add one caveat here. Make sure your introduction previews your argument. It’s tempting to write a paper like this that tries to “surprise” the reader with some dramatic reveal at the end of the paper that finally mentions the author’s argument. Don’t do that. Make sure you write this section of the paper knowing what you intend to argue (i.e. how well Vasquez’ steps to war argument fits the case you will describe).

Reviewing the Steps to War Argument

The student will need to review the “steps to war” argument in this section of the paper, a treatment that will span from roughly six to eight paragraphs.

To be clear, the “review” in this context means summarizing Vasquez’ core argument. He contends that certain issues, when state leaders handle them a certain way, create conflict spirals that lead states to major wars they should strive to avoid. This “realist” roadmap to war can have important implications for the size, scope, and severity of the war itself. The student’s task in this section of the paper is to condense Vasquez’ core argument and findings from across his book into this six-to-eight paragraph summary.

Testing the Steps to War Argument With Your Case

This section will be the meat of your paper. Here, you’ll relate Vasquez’ general argument to the war you will examine and explain how well Vasquez’ “steps to war” model explains the war you chose. Your treatment here will need to be broad in scope but narrowed in detail. In other words, your treatment here will need to focus on the following attributes of the war.

• Was the motivating issue consistent with what Vasquez argues generally leads states to war? Why or why not? Be mindful that Vasquez’ primary interest might be what he terms ‘territoriality’ but his treatment is nebulous enough to include concerns of proximity, contiguity, and rivalry.
• How did the confrontation start? Please again internalize what the dates communicate. In other words, this is the start date that corresponds with the first threat, display, or use of force in what became a war. Your treatment here must sequence the events by which the confrontation escalated to war and I will read it carefully to see how thorough you are. This will require you digging through newspaper archives for Times of London and/or the New York Times in addition to other newspaper data sources that Clemson’s library has available. Start doing searches on Google Books and Google Scholar as well.
• What were the initial positions of the multiple state leaders and elites with a stake in the issue that ultimately led to war? Who was trying to influence the resolution of the dispute and toward what end? Identify the “hard-liners” and “soft-liners”/“accommodationists” that would interest Vasquez for his “steps to war” model. Your treatment here should identify the major players (e.g. foreign ministers, ministers of war, heads of state, other decision-making elites, even, when appropriate, the general public). It’s worth saying you cannot adequately do this part of your analysis without hitting the books. Google Books and Google Scholar will be your friend.
• How did the “hard-liners” push for war and ultimately get it? Do notice there’s a selection effect in this assignment. You’re covering wars, so invariably a set of decision-making elites that wanted war were able to secure policies that escalated the confrontation to war. You’ll need to tell me how the “hard-liners” in the decision-making circle were able to get what they wanted and how they were able to quell the policies proposed by those who wanted some kind of accommodation or peaceful conflict resolution. How did the “soft-liners” acquiesce? Were they simply outnumbered or did they come around and support the policies that ultimately led to war?
• How did the war unfold and was it consistent with Vasquez’ chapter on what accounts for the size, scope, and severity of war? Do note there is a wide variation in war and Vasquez’ treatment here is almost certainly thinking of “world wars” that may not describe your case. For example, the Battle of Navarino was a multilateral war that was effectively one major battle and other cases, like the Boxer Rebellion and Crimean War, were major conflicts that dragged in multiple actors from around the globe. Some of these cases were simple bilateral fights (e.g. Spanish-Moroccan War). Vasquez’ chapter on “world wars” need not describe your case, but it’s likely there will be certain features he describes of these wars that partially fit the case you describe. Take care to discuss that here.
• What was the epilogue of the war? Clearly the war ended, but how? What was the nature of the “peace” that followed and how might it conform to Vasquez’ chapter on the nature of peace and its relationship to war?

Conclusion

Take two or three paragraphs at the end of the paper to offer your conclusions. This will be somewhat banal, all things considered. You should have already said your argument and provided the reader the argument and the findings. Still, conclude with what do we know now about this war, Vasquez’ “steps to war” argument, and how well the argument fits the war.