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The proof for "War Is in the Error Term," a piece that appeared in the Summer 1999 issue of International Organization, contains a subtle error. Once the correction is made, there are broader implications for testing theories of war using quantitative studies. Large-n tests to verify the incomplete information explanation for war will be more difficult to perform than originally anticipated.

At least since Thucydides, students of international relations have sought rational explanations for the advent of war. Rationalist explanations assume purposive action; states are said to make reasoned decisions about the use of force. Although rationalist explanations have proven persuasive, durable, and offer the basis for cumulative theorizing, they also imply substantial limits on what we can know about war. I show that the most general rationalist explanation for war also dictates that the onset of war is theoretically indeterminate. We cannot predict in individual cases whether states will go to war, because war is typically the consequence of variables that are unobservable ex ante, both to us as researchers and to the participants. Thinking probabilistically continues to offer the opportunity to assess international conflict empirically. However, the realization that uncertainty is necessary theoretically to motivate war is much different from recognizing that the empirical world contains a stochastic element. Accepting uncertainty as a necessary condition of war implies that all other variables—however detailed the explanation—serve to eliminate gradations of irrelevant alternatives. We can progressively refine our ability to distinguish states that may use force from those that are likely to remain at peace, but anticipating wars from a pool of states that appear willing to fight will remain problematic. For example, we may achieve considerable success in anticipating crises, but our ability to predict which crises will become wars will probably prove little better than the naive predictions of random chance. The need for uncertainty to account for war means that the same conditions thought to account for war must also exist among states not destined to fight. Otherwise, states themselves will differentiate between opponents in a way that either removes the motives for war or restores uncertainty. It has long been accepted that social processes possess an element of uncertainty, but the centrality of uncertainty to rationalist explanations for war means that the advent of war is itself stochastic. War is literally in the "error term."

Kern des Aufsatzes ist die Theorie der Kriegsursachen. Der Verfasser übt Kritik an rationalistischen Erklärungsansätzen, die von zielgerichteten Staatenverhalten ausgehen, die einen vorhandenen Konflikt zum Kriegsausbruch bzw. militärischen Gewalteinsatz führen. Die Grenzen dieses Ansatzes werden diskutiert. Ein Artikel von James Fearon (1995) wird zur Beweisführung des Autors herangezogen, daß für außenstehende Staaten und Beobachter die Faktoren, die bei rationalistischen Erklärungen zum tatsächlichen Kriegsausbruch führen, Krieg als reines Zufallsereignis ("random event") erscheinen lassen. Implikationen für die angewandte und theoretische Kriegsursachen-Forschung werden genannt. (SWP-Ebg)

After some time since the onset of the Covid19 pandemic, we believe it is now possible to reflect on how the global response to the worldwide spread of the virus has been organized, and at the same time reflect on the emergency approach that has characterized the responses on the health front but also the public communication of the same pandemic. The hypothesis around which we work is that the term of emergency itself is not appropriate except to designate a sit-uation that is strictly related to a reductionist approach to understanding and explaining phenomena. An event becomes an emergency only if we reason in terms of a linear explanation, avoiding paying attention to the real complexity of the phenomena, with a comprehensive look at systemic interrelationships. In this perspective, Horton correctly proposed the term syndemic to characterize the set of events related to Covid19 (Horton, 2020). Because the unexpected, which is experienced and managed as an emergency, arises from an obvious interpretative error if the problem is not addressed with a systemic logic. And it can perhaps also be hypothe-sized that as such - that is, as unexpected and emerging - any phenomenon legitimizes proce-dural and communicative errors, thus exonerating in some way whoever is responsible for facing them.