Realising our principal aim of the prevention of war requires a far deeper and wider understanding throughout society of war's root causes.

We need more education programs to highlight the well-understood causative elements involved, particularly those relating to gross failures of human justice and fair trade.

Historically (as currently), major considerations relate to peoples’ fair access to land, water and other life-support resources. If at times that stemmed from a mutual struggle for survival, far more frequently it has been about the powerful forcing the less powerful to hand over their vital resources. An example of this was the land ‘enclosures’ in England, Scotland and Spain that drove people off in favour of sheep for the expanding wool trade: in short, the well-to-do disadvantaging the poor to augment their wealth and ‘position’ in society (read more...). Indeed it was a most persistent attitude highly criticized in his Liberal Radical days by Winston Churchill (read more...).

One could imagine that with its potential to supply the needs of all, the Industrial Revolution might have reversed that, but despite Adam Smith’s wise counsel, the societal discrepancies went on growing (read more...). Moreover, for many Western states, the ‘remedy’ for economic problems at home was to ‘colonise’ more and more overseas lands and their peoples. And if that was not bad enough, as forecast by economist John Hobson, (1902) this led directly to the very serious Empire rivalries which caused WW1. (read more...)

• For further information about the immediate causes and broader origins of wars Australia has been involved in see “Australia’s Foreign Wars: Origins, Costs, Future!?”
• A wider range of print and online resources relevant to the causes of particular wars is available on the Australian War Memorial website. 

Author: Ian Buckley, March 2008