Chicken or egg?
Brother Wilf,
You know my thoughts on CvC, IMHO he focuses exclusively upon only one variable of a multivariate equation, and so I question your CvC inspired assertion that we can reduce the causative reasons for war to just a political variable. In my experience and studies Security and Economics variables are inseparably interrelated with Politics/Governance variables.
Whooptie...let's look further than just my opinion or yours and see if a holistic approach to war is quantifiable/politics can be disaggregated from the data set that describes war.
Political Instability Task Force
Political Instability Task Force (formerly known as State Failure Task Force) was a U.S. government-sponsored research project to build a database on major domestic political conflicts leading to state failures.The project was begun as an unclassified study that was commissioned to a group of academics (particularly active was the Center for Global Policy at George Mason University) by the Central Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Intelligence in response to a request from senior U.S. policy makers in 1994. A similar project (Project Camelot) generated much controversy in the 1960s.SteveThe task force repeated this analysis for global and regional data sets and produced fairly consistent findings. The three statistically significant variables most often associated with political upheavals were:
* regime type,
* international trade and
* infant mortality.
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