Hartmut Lang: Introduction
Domains of variables related to war
. Economics
. Social organisation
. Political organisation
. External relations (of a culture to other cultures)
. Norms and values
. Socialisation (of children)
AN Ul AWN =
The project group has six members, one member for each of these domains. Obviously
the six domains contribute in rather different ways to the explanation of war. In addi-
tion research in the six domains is not equally advanced. Thus the members of the re-
search group had to face rather different tasks. This situation will be reflected in the
following series of papers. Each paper will adress the problems specific to the respec-
tive domain.
It might be appropriate to point to the fact that this research is a type of secondary
analysis. And this means that hypothesis construction and variables selection are con-
strained by the availability of data. Thus there have been some hypotheses and varia-
bles, that had a high degree of plausibility, but since there were too few data in the eth-
nographic reports they had to be dropped.
There are obviously interactions between variables of different domains with re-
spect to the dependent variables. The domain partition has definite advantages for hy-
pothesis development and refinement, since most of the domains are established dis-
ciplines of anthropology, but in the final analysis of the data, the boundaries of the dis-
ciplines are irrelevant. The explanation of war and peace certainly needs a multivariate
approach that is not limited to one domain. Of course there has been cross domain talk
during the hypothesis development phase. But because the existing relevant codes are
rather unequally distributed among the six domains, the full fledged multivariate anal-
ysis has to wait until now the data base has been assembled.