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Rationalist Explanations For War James Fearon Summary

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Recommended: War is sometimes justified

James Fearon in “Rationalist Explanations for War,” begins with the basic assumption that wars are costly and states should have a rational desire to avoid wars and seek peaceful agreements before the war breaks out (Fearon, 379). Fearon critiques many elements of international relations including neorealism and rational choice theories while supporting his thesis. However, Fearon does not provide a durable conceptual explanation of anarchy, and the discussion on why other theories fail to describe why states go to war over a possible agreement is deficient.
Fearon claims that “it is not enough to say that under anarchy nothing stops states from using force, or that anarchy forces states to rely on self-help, which engenders mutual suspicion …show more content…

There are those who would argue that the United Nations is the equivalent of an international authority. If this is true, does the United Nations have the power to enforce her will or other international agreements? No. The United Nations only maintains its current level of power as long as the states that make up the United Nations continue to give it the power operate. In fact, the United Nations gains most of its enforcement power from the world’s top economies/powerhouses (most of the top economies are permanent members of the United Nations Security Council) (“United Nations Security Council”). For it is not the United Nations who enforces policy, it is the individual states who collectively enforce …show more content…

With the rationalist perspective, Fearon argues that states should always prefer to reach an agreement prior to war breaking out because war is always inefficient. By the phrase war is always inefficient he means that “before fighting, both sides know that war will entail some costs, and even if they expect offsetting benefits they still have an incentive to avoid the costs” (Fearon, 383). Upon further thought, it makes one wonder if the problem is not that rationalist theories fail to account for why states go to war, but rather that they are unable to accurately do

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