Description
Process tracing is well suited to addressing the causes of wars and their outcomes. Wars are relatively rare, always multicausal, and typically characterized by the presence of idiosyncratic context-dependent factors about which it is hard to generalize (see Tannenwald 2015). What, though, can process tracing teach us? This paper follows Suganami (1996) and Mahoney (2015) by focusing on the different kinds of questions we can ask about the causes of wars. It argues that whereas the focus is often on answering synoptic questions about what ‘explains’ wars and their outcomes, process tracing’s real added value lies in its ability to answer narrower questions about whether particular factors of interest did or did not contribute causally in particular contexts. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, answering these narrower questions also turns out to be the key pathway through which process tracing can contribute to the construction of broader theories about the causes of wars and their outcomes. Crucially, however, these theories are not ‘general’ in the way that is sometimes suggested (see e.g. Beach and Pedersen 2013). Rather, these theories describe causal propensities (see Humphreys and Suganami 2024): ideal-typical patterns the unfolding of which is inherently context-dependent.
