Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict.(Review) (book review)

Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict. By Stephen Van Evera. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. 270p. $35.00.

Stephen Van Evera explicitly sets out to accomplish two tasks. The first is to present a set of five hypotheses on the causes of war grounded in "misperceptive fine-grained structural realism" (p. 11). He lists (1) false optimism about the outcome of a future war, (2) perceived first-mover advantages, (3) opening and closing windows of opportunity and vulnerability, (4) cumulativity of resources, and (5) beliefs about the offense-defense balance. ...

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