Throughout the span of human civilization, the unpredictable nature of cultural collisions has inevitably spawned conflict between neighbors and warfare between nations. While these brutal behaviors may be attributed vestigial links to innate animalistic instinct, the intellectual capacity which separates and elevates humanity has compelled thinkers of every generation to study and reflect on the nature of widespread conflict. Emerging from the meticulous documentation of official matters provided by monks in the early church, the role of the historian has been refined throughout the centuries, but their fundamental objective has remained essentially the same: to record the continuity of events as time progresses, from the mundane minutiae of municipal politics to the mobilization of military forces for armed conflict. As noted historian and Cold War strategist John Lewis Gaddis states in his comprehensive treatise on the profession, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, historians "pride ourselves on not trying to predict the future, as our colleagues in economics, sociology and political science attempt to do" but instead "advance bravely into the future with our eyes fixed firmly on the past."
¶ … human civilization, the unpredictable nature of cultural collisions has inevitably spawned conflict between neighbors and warfare between nations. While these brutal behaviors may be attributed vestigial links to innate animalistic instinct, the intellectual capacity which separates and elevates humanity has compelled thinkers of every generation to study and reflect on the nature of widespread conflict. Emerging from the meticulous documentation of official matters provided by monks in the early church, the role of the historian has been refined throughout the centuries, but their fundamental objective has remained essentially the same: to record the continuity of events as time progresses, from the mundane minutiae of municipal politics to the mobilization of military forces for armed conflict. As noted historian and Cold War strategist John Lewis Gaddis states in his comprehensive treatise on the profession, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, historians "pride ourselves on not trying to predict the future, as our colleagues in economics, sociology and political science attempt to do" but instead "advance bravely into the future with our eyes fixed firmly on the past."1 This distinction between historians and political scientists warrants further examination considering another of Gaddis' observations, which holds that "our modes of representation determine whatever it is we're representing,"2 a phenomenon from which Gaddis
1. John L. Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Oxford Press, 2002), p. 2
2. Ibid, p. 29
extrapolates his broader conclusion by identifying "the historian's version of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: the act of observation alters what's being observed."
The underlying assertion explored by Gaddis throughout The Landscape of History holds that historians and political scientists conduct their study of the past using distinctly divergent methodologies. As Gaddis explains in the fourth chapter of his book, "historians don't think in terms of dependent and independent variables & #8230; (but) rather assume the interdependency to trace their interconnections throughout time,"3 and this gulf between the identification of variables and their state of dependence practiced by political scientists, and the wider recognition of variables within a system applied by historians, forms the foundation of Gaddis' theoretical framework. In the historian's estimation, the seemingly routine outbreak of hostilities between nation-states which has defined human history for millennia is more than simply the byproduct of randomly occurring externalities, and instead represents a confluence of several institutional, political, and social phenomena.
While historians like Gaddis have always been concerned primarily with observing, recording and archiving an accurate account of significant events, including armed conflicts between international actors, political scientists engage in the tenuous process of constructing theoretical frameworks through which to explain why such conflicts occur on such a consistent basis. As renowned American political scientist Joseph S. Nye explains in Understanding Global Conflict and Cooperation: An Introduction to Theory and History, the perpetually fluid balance of power between states is best maintained through a system of international politics4.
3. Ibid, p. 53
4. Joseph S. Nye and David Welch, Understanding Global Conflict and Cooperation: An Introduction to Theory and History, 9th ed. (New York: Longman, 2012), p. 15
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