Conflict and Peace
What you must understand
This domain spans the causes, conduct and settlement of major conflicts and the attempts to build peace. Candidates need:
- Causes - alliance systems, militarism, imperial rivalry, nationalism, economic pressure, and immediate triggers; distinguish long-term structural causes from short-term sparks.
- Total war - mobilisation of civilian economies, propaganda, rationing, bombing, and the blurring of combatant and civilian.
- Peacemaking - treaties, reparations, territorial settlement, disarmament, and the tension between punitive and conciliatory approaches.
- Institutions - the League of Nations and later the United Nations; collective security, mandates, vetoes and peacekeeping.
- Memory and commemoration - how societies narrate war shapes later politics.
Traps in questions
- Trigger versus cause. An assassination is a trigger, not a structural cause; explain the conditions that made it decisive.
- Assuming treaties ended conflict. Settlements often created grievances that fed later conflict.
- Overrating institutions. The League's failures are usually structural (no enforcement, great-power absence) rather than merely bad luck.
- Ignoring the home front. Questions on total war expect civilian experience, not only battles.
Worked example
On the causes of a major war: structure your answer as long-term pressures (alliances, arms races, imperial competition), medium-term decisions (mobilisation plans, ultimatums), and the short-term trigger. Then evaluate which level carries most explanatory weight and why. That layered answer demonstrates causation skills rather than listing events.
Rule of thumb: separate structural causes, decisions and triggers, then argue about relative weight.