Societal, Attitudinal and Structural Factors in International Relations.

The paper provides a conclusion to a series of articles about the approaches to the problems of war and peace. One paper distinguishes between those who do research in terms of governments and those who do research in terms of peoples. It is possible to make another distinction which overlaps to some degree the first two. This is a distinction between those who approach the problem in terms of macroscopic units, such as the nation, and those who essentially use the individual as their unit of analysis. Of the papers presented, one came close to the first type of emphasis. Operational research and regulatory research, would also fall in this category. Along with this difference in terms of the units of analysis used in the two approaches, there appears also to be a difference in the assumption about the nature of the phenomenon of war. Those who deal with the individual tend to conceive of war as a deviation that essentially occurs because of some failure in the mechanisms of maintaining peace. The extreme of this position is represented by the psychoanalytic approach suggesting that war is an aspect of irrational behavior, related to irrelevant, personal motivations, usually traceable to childhood experiences.