The scholarship on asymmetric military disputes has been a field of inquiry that is somewhat distinct from more general approaches to military conflict, although it has an overlapping history, going back to Thucydides, who stated that weaker states suffer at the hands of ‘[the] strong [who] do what they can [whilst] the weak suffer what they must.’ Thucydides’ observation underpins assumptions that many realists make, and we can say that data supports this observation for most cases. Consequentially, the tendency of research is to associate minor powers with inherent vulnerabilities: social, cultural and political (Sutton, 1999: 401). To avoid acerbating these vulnerabilities, minor powers seek to avoid military conflict with major powers. A realist assumption is that states’ primary goal is to survive (Waltz, 1979). Yet, as will be seen in this chapter, some scholarship on asymmetric conflict has provided theoretical insight into how seemingly deviant minor powers can be enmeshed in such military struggles. By combining the findings of several theoretical contributions, in line with ‘problem-driven pragmatism’ to reach a more comprehensive answer, this book proposes a theory of minor powers in interstate asymmetric conflict.

By returning to the prior scholarship, we are able to identify some tentative answers, yet the need for further empirical testing is justified given no prior focus on conjunctural causation, that is, how the impact of a particular condition only unfolds in the presence or absence of other condition(s). Conjunctural causation differs from additive causation where the goal in the latter is to establish the net effects of independent variables (one variable does not offset the effects of another). Following the logic of conjunctural causation, causal conditions do not exert their effect in a linear, additive and unifinal manner (B.R. Schneider, 2009: 58). Rather, each condition may play a different role in a different combination. Conditions can also offset each other. This ties in with the concept of equifinality, that there may be different conjunctions producing the same outcome. This conceptualisation opens room for more complexity in understanding asymmetric conflict, which is potentially complementary to previous scholarly contributions. The study also frames causality in more complex terms, such as involving necessary and sufficient conditions, something that has not been done in previous studies.