‘The substance of international politics is conflict and its adjustment among groups of people who acknowledge no common supreme authority.’ Conflict has featured in historical records, and is the popular reason for an interest in world affairs. One of the conscious purposes of the study of world society is to analyse, to understand and hopefully to find means of resolving conflict.

Having examined world society as a system of states, and also in the broader perspective of values that are universal, we can now see whether our analysis helps in an understanding of conflict. It will be a good test of our analysis.

The view that conflict is inherent in world society has been widely accepted. Some historians take the view that, like road accidents, political clashes are bound to occur. In addition to the nature of man and the competitive structure of states, there are personal and local factors that make conflicts inevitable and unpredictable. The self defeating nature of traditional state politics, which we have examined, has seemed to confirm these views.

These are views that were widespread before there had been much analysis of world affairs, apart from that which is a by-product of description. Consideration of perceptions, role behaviour, legitimization and decision-making at the inter-state level, and of values and transactions in world society that cut across state boundaries, have begun to open up new lines of enquiry. Now many serious scholars are drawing on studies in other disciplines, carrying out empirical work, and developing peace studies – that is, studies of how to create self-supporting conditions of peace, and not merely the absence of war which is thought to be possible if there were adequate deterrents.