IACSP Homeland Security Bookshelf

By Dr. Joshua Sinai

This column capsule reviews 10 books on homeland security-related subjects, including terrorism- and counterterrorism.

In Introduction to the Causes of War:

Patterns of Interstate Conflict From World War I to Iraq [Second Edition]Greg Cashman and Leonard C. Robinson, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), 466 pages, $120 [Hardcover], $49.00 [Paperback], ISBN: 978-1-5381-2779-7.

This is an excellent and comprehensive overview of the causes of war that characterize interstate conflict, which the authors define as “sustained armed combat between two or more sovereign states that results in a minimum of 1,000 battle deaths” (p. 1). These issues are examined at the individual level, the sub-state level, the nation-state level, the dyadic level (peer interaction, such as the distribution of power between states), the international system, and at a multilevel of analysis (i.e., “a process that occurs over time”) (pp. 4-37). These analytic approaches are applied to the volume’s six major interstate wars. In the conclusion, the authors observe that “Many of the wars featured in our case studies appear to be inadvertent in the sense that they were not consciously sought by the initiators – at least not as part of a long-term strategic plan” (p. 402). For analysts of terrorism, another finding is that despite Israel’s military victories in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and the wars in Lebanon in 1982 and 2006, they did not “prevent the uprising b...