Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict by Stephen Van Evera

tephen Van Evera’s book revises half of a Žfteen-year-old dissertation that must be among the most cited in history. This volume is a major entry in academic security studies, and for some time it will stand beside only a few other modern works on causes of war that aspiring international relations theorists are expected to digest. Given that political science syllabi seldom assign works more than a generation old, it is even possible that for a while this book may edge ahead of the more general modern classics on the subject such as E.H. Carr’s masterful polemic, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, and Kenneth Waltz’s Man, the State, and War.1