While contending the prevailing realists’ explanation of war happening because of power struggle, John Vasquez argues in his book, The War Puzzle Revisited, that a majority of wars are fought over territory, either to defend or occupy it. According to Vasquez, territorial disputes between two countries are ‘much more war-prone’ than others. These disputes underlie the causes of war in two senses: first, ‘…instead of leading immediately or inevitably to war, [territorial disputes] usually produce a sequence of events that results in war’; and second: ‘they are causes in the sense that if claims over contiguous territory are settled amicably at one point in the history of two states, it is highly unlikely that a dyadic war will break out between the two neighbours regardless of other issues that may arise in the future.
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