Cashman 2k Greg, Professor of Political Science at Salisbury State University “What Causes war?: An introduction to theories of international conflict” pg. 9
Two warnings need to be issued at this point. First, while we have been using a single variable explanation of war merely for the sake of simplicity, multivariate explanations of war are likely to be much more powerful. Since social and political behaviors are extremely complex, they are almost never explainable through a single factor. Decades of research have led most analysts to reject monocausal explanations of war.For instance, international relations theorist J. David Singer suggests that we ought to move away from the concept of “causality” since it has become associated with the search for a single cause of war; we should instead redirect our activities toward discovering “explanations”—a term that implies multiple causes of war, but also a certain element of randomness or chance in their occurrence.
