Psychological Theory of War

Most traditional theories of international relations have tended to reify states as actors in their own right, a habit encouraged by the practice of writing, say, "Germany adopted" such and such a policy. But in practice, states are institutions whose policies are set by human policymakers, and it has been suggested that a fruitful interpretation of international relations and particularly of war might better be rooted in examination of the psychological characteristics and behavior of leaders and policymakers.

The simplest psychological theory of war is that it is instinctive. The central difficulty of this theory is that it does not explain peace (Sullivan, n.d., p. 26). Humans must indeed be instinctively capable of war, as of other kinds of violent aggression, but a usable theory must tell us why war is made under certain conditions, and not under others. Clearly, if a model of war is to be based on the psychology of leaders, it must find a more robust premise than the simple observation that they can make war, it must explain why they sometimes do make war.

One class of theories, psychological or psychoanalytic in character, has sought to identify the causes of war in personality disorders of warmakers. These theories have no doubt gained some credibility from the circumstances of this century's chief war, the Second World War. Leaders such as Hitler and Stalin have lent themselves to psychological interpretations of policy behavior (Vogler, 1989, p. 143).

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arson, 1985, p. 32). By this argument, it was in this case precisely the scrambling of American policymakers to find a belief capable of explaining Soviet behavior that led them into the Cold War interpretation of Soviet intentions. Certainly cognitive factors must be considered as one factor in explaining the behavior and attitudes of policymakers. In both the movement toward the First World War and the war in Vietnam, there is much grounds for supposing that leaders and policymakers became trapped by the momentum of their own perceptions. It is less clear that cognitive and other psychological theories, by themselves, are capable of explaining the forces that lead nations into wars. References Larson, D. W. (1985). Origins of Containment: A Psychological Explanation. Princeton: Princeton University. Sullivan, M. P. (no date). International Relations: Theories and Evidence. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall Vogler, J. (1989). Perspectives on the foreign policy system: Psychological approaches. In M. Clark and B. White, eds., Understanding Foreign Policy: The Foreign Policy Systems Approach. Brookfield, VT: Gower. pp. 135-61. Particularly since the end of the Cold War, it has been widely observed th

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