The logic of conflict : making war and peace in the Middle East

The author's argument ties this literature to a field that is often called the logic of inquiry. He criticizes an influential and deliberately analytical approach to the study of international conflict and show what can be gained by bringing more integrative or synthetic approaches to bear on problems in the field. The study started as an effort to work out some problems in international relations theory and it has remained that through eight years of writing and research. Still, the book is more than incidentally about the Middle East, and evidence from the region informs the argument made here. This evidence is of two kinds: traditional historical material from both primary and secondary sources, and data on events that have occurred during the course of both conflictual and cooperative exchanges between the actors there. The treatment focuses on the relationship between Egypt and Israel between 1967 and 1979, a period that saw their relations pass from the most intense antagonism to a reasonable degree of comity if not friendship. The Stalin era has been less accessible to researchers than either the preceding decade or the postwar era. The basic problem is that during the Stalin years censorship restricted the collection and dissemination of information (and introduced bias and distortion into the statistics that were published), while in the post-Stalin years access to archives and libraries remained tightly controlled. Thus it is not surprising that one of the main manifestations of glasnost has been the effort to open up records of the 1930s. In this volume Western and Soviet specialists detail the untapped potential of sources on this period of Soviet social history and also the hidden traps that abound. The full range of sources is covered, from memoirs to official documents, from city directories to computerized data bases "Wastful vengeance" describes aptly what occurs on the battlefield when nations fight, and its prevention motivates much writing about war. The author’s argument ties this literature to a field that is often called the logic of inquiry.