For more than 32 years, David Dessler served as a professor of government studies at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. The author of regularly cited articles in peer-reviewed academic publications, David Dessler brought to his work a singular insight derived from his wide-ranging background in both political science and international relations. In 1991 International Studies Quarterly published his article Beyond Correlations: Toward a Causal Theory of War, which remains among his most referenced works.
The article notes that the traditional study of war has been historically limited by the personal worldviews and biases of its scholars. By comparison, the more recent academic study of war of the 1990s began to make extensive use of correlational research studies to trace the web of physical conditions, events, and human activities associated with a variety of international conflicts and aggressions. The purpose of this type of research focuses on producing a theory untainted by personal biases and anchored in scientifically reproducible evidence.
