Conflict: Trajectories and Challenges

abstract: How has the field of conflict studies evolved over the past three decades? This essay suggests an answer by posing three questions: Why do we study conflict? What do we understand as conflict? And how do we study conflict? The article proceeds with critical remarks, illustrated with articles that have appeared in World Politics during the past five years. It concludes by highlighting three key challenges for the future evolution of the field: the theoretically driven broadening of our understanding of conflict; the development of conceptual, theoretical, and empirical links between micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis; and a theoretically informed way of specifying the scope conditions that apply to findings.