Abstract

War between the groups of people has been a recurrent and universal phenomenon throughout the recorded history. However our knowledge about war has been mainly derived from the study of wars occurred only in the Western world. For more generalizable theories on the causes of war, we need to study the wars of other international systems. A historic East Asian international system was chosen as a subject of investigation. The specific characteristics in the relations between the states in this international system reflected the ideas of Confucian philosophy and so named as the Confucian international order. ;To study wars in this system, we need a data base for the wars and one of the major purposes of this study was the generation of war data for the Confucian international order. With the data for 131 wars which contain the information of duration, extent and magnitude, the descriptive analysis on the individual characteristics of the wars are presented. We find similarities as well as differences of the wars between the Confucian and the Western international systems. Because the Confucian international order was usually a hegemonic system guided by a pacific Confucian philosophy, we thought that the system would be very peaceful. However, our analysis shows that the wars were very widespread and normal in that international system. The debates on the relationships between the structure and stability or peacefulness of the system was tested with the collected data. Among the three types of international systems, the Unipolarity looked most peaceful. However, if we look into the data more in detail, we will find that the warlikeness of the system is more closely related to the attributes of the supreme state. From the data analysis we do not find any specific cyclical patterns or trends of war in this international system