Analysing dyadic level of First World War in the context of perception theories

Wars and following peace and treaties have been the most important subject of historical research. Wars between the groups, clans, tribes or states have been the most important channel of communication, and by this means religions have been spreaded, cultures have been united, new inventions have been experienced and communication has been provided in many areas. Apparently wars have been the most important research topic of historians, because wars are activities where the most knowledge can be obtained. However, wars have been investigated only in the framework of cause and effect. Although there are no much studies in the literature, it is an agreeable fact that war is a preventable case or a case which impact can be minimized. It has been overlooked that state governors are human being and they have fears, dreams or passions. Just at this point, perception-misperception is seen to have a significant effect on the road to war. The objective of this study was to review World War I, which affected almost all nations worldwide and there is still no consensus among the historians about its causes, in terms of the actors and states from perception-misperception framework. This war, which has resulted in demolition of empires and caused loss of nearly 9 million soldiers, to be experienced due to misperception or exaggerated perception is quite frightening. Ofcourse states, regimes and sociological structure have been in a change over centuries. States that could not keep in step with this change might have to be demolished or disintegrated. However, nobody expected such a great destruction, which has also affected the civilian populations. Although history books have written that the event creating spark of this war was assassination of the crown prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, state pairs have been involved in the road to war with different interests and expectations. A rapid change have been felt in the world as of the end of 19th century. However, the leaders have not realized this change. This war, which has demolished states, caused great destructions and later named as a world war, to be caused by a misperception from the aspect of state pairs is quite frightening. Herein, with this study each state pair was separately examined and the conditions with misperception were tried to be determined. In order to determine a large number of misperceptions, not only the state pairs between different alliance blocks, but also the state pair within the same alliance were also included in the study. At this point, conditions with misperception problems were tried to be determined by investigating all developments experienced between the World War I as actor (state) pairs. In this study, states and their decision makers were examined together on the road to war, and how have the decision makers dragged a country to war was reviewed with in thesample of Word War I. Keywords: ActorPairs, Perception, Word War One, Leader Analysis, Misperception.