INTRODUCTION
As pleased as we are to contribute to this project, it may nevertheless be useful to begin with a few caveats. Perhaps the most critical of these is the historical fact that, of the many strategies for conflict resolution over the centuries, war may come close to being the one most frequently used.
Normally, we think of conflict resolution as a set of strategies by which disputes between and within nations can be resolved short of war. An interesting historical aside is that when we created the first scientifically oriented peace research institute, those of us at Michigan rapidly endorsed the Kenneth Boulding proposal that we call it the Center for Research on Conflict Resolution. What he had in mind was, first of all, an understanding that conflict - not military or necessarily the violent type - is inherent in all human relationships and was unlikely to disappear from the human condition in the relevant future. Boulding liked to say that our mission was to “make the world safe for conflict,” by which he meant reduce the likelihood that social conflict would regularly erupt into armed combat and war. Thus, our mission was to come to grips with social conflict at the international and other levels of aggregation and discover the tactics and strategies by which the protagonists and potential interveners might find or create ways of ameliorating the severity of these conflicts. Another of our founding fathers was Anatol Rapoport, who early on drew an interesting set of distinctions in his Fights, Games and Debates (1960). In his view, a fight was a conflict in which the protagonists would seek to destroy one another, in a game the idea was to outwit and dominate one another, and in a debate the idea was to persuade one another. Little has happened in the half century since to change our view that war continues to be a widely practiced mode of conflict resolution. Surely, we see an increasing reliance on an interesting range of less violent strategies, but we can hardly urge that these strategies have been particularly effective.This leads us, then, to the somewhat unconventional suspicion that the conflict resolution field has not been especially successful and that may well be because of a failure in our research strategy. As a good many of the contributors to this volume seem to understand, grasping the etiology of conflict at the various levels of social aggregation, from interpersonal to international, must be seen as a prerequisite for greater success in the conflict resolution endeavor. Hence, we offer this chapter as a contribution to the current discussion and will present what we consider to be some of the more relevant findings in the peace science effort to explain interstate armed conflict. To that end, we hope that our chapter will play a useful and catalytic role in engaging the peace science and conflict resolution communities to engage one another in an ambitious integration of empirical findings and theoretical speculations. We will organize our report by differentiating in terms of the level of social aggregation at which we find major contextual correlates of war, then describing some of the behavioral correlates of war, and concluding with some conflict resolution implications emerging from the peace science enterprise.