Blackwell Reference Online

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Comment on this article The statistical study of international relations was born on the battlefields of World War I and II. The modern study of international relations, energized by a reaction against the horrors of World War I and a belief that classical methods of scholarship had failed, began in Chicago in the 1920s with the work of Quincy Wright, who founded the University of Chicago's Committee on International Relations. He led an interdisciplinary study of war that was to provide a first compendium of what was then known about the causes of war. Running for almost a decade, this project involved several dozen doctoral theses. This project was completed by about 1934 under the guise of the Committee on the Causes of War. During the next decade Wright completed a two-volume compilation of this knowledge, published during the middle of World War II. This was the first systematic study of war that was predicated on collation of empirical material, and it focused on the problematic nature of war in 1942: “growth of the opinion that war is a problem may be attributed to four types of change: (a) the shrinking of the world, (b) the acceleration of history, (c) the progress of military invention, and (d) the rise of democracy ( Wright 1942/1957 :4). Also reacting to the carnage of the so-called Great War, a Quaker physicist-turned-statistician began his own systematic study of the ... log in or subscribe to read full text