Further research to be conducted on the “Quesako Cycle”

News notes

The author who discovered the “Quesako Cycle,” Jean-Baptiste RENARD, was born in 1952. He believes that the research should be continued by others. The research already conducted has been described in the reference book Un phénomène cyclique qui favorise les guerres (A Cyclical Phenomenon That favor Wars), published in french by L’Harmatan. Despite a few typographical errors in some of the tables, the French version remains the reference on the subject.

Definitions

The definition of war adopted here is that of the UCDP, as are the types of conflicts. (See the reference book.)

However, the concept of “disputed incompatibility regarding the government and/or the territory” has not been adopted and will not be adopted. It leads to analyses limited to two causes of war: either territorial or governmental. It is not as simple as that, and this approach did not seem to offer a viable foundation for the future. While the existence of an incompatibility is indisputable, limiting wars to these two cases is not realistic.

Databases on Wars

The “Quesako Cycle ” study used only two referenced databases:

  • COW (Correlate Of Wars) (from 1817 to shortly after 2000)
  • UCDP (Uppsala Conflict Data Program) (from 1989 to the present)

The author did not use other existing databases—of which there are many—but which did not meet the credibility standards of these two databases. Many existing lists of wars allow one to draw whatever conclusions one wishes from analyses that lack rigor, due to the imprecise nature of the data used. Any additional study conducted using other data sources must be examined with caution and care.

There are two tasks to be carried out:

  • Create a COW + UCDP aggregate. This task is fairly straightforward and should take just a few weeks. For his work, J-B Renard used COW, supplemented by his own data. The COW + UCDP aggregate should become the benchmark for all research on the subject. The “Quasako Cycle” will only be recognized once other statistical studies have been conducted using credible databases.
  • Start a database on the wars of the last two millennia. This is a titanic undertaking that is extremely time-consuming. The best approach would be to do it gradually, validating individual data points as you go. It will likely take 10 years to build a reliable reference database.

Tools

The first challenge a researcher interested in cyclical phenomena may face is finding a spreadsheet program that allows for date calculations without being constrained by Excel’s limitations. Any date prior to January 1, 1900, cannot be calculated in Excel without writing custom code and managing dates across multiple cells—a somewhat complicated process for a single date.

OpenOffice allows you to work with dates spanning all centuries, just as you would in a spreadsheet program like Excel. There are no date restrictions. You should verify that the date calculations take into account all changes to calendars over the centuries.

This spreadsheet was used for the statistical analysis.

It would be desirable to develop a specialized tool capable of processing the existing data and automatically converting it into a graph. This has not been done yet. A skilled computational mathematician should be able to do this without too much effort. It will likely take a few months of work to produce something that is easily reusable.

This article is still a work in progress. It will be updated in the coming days.

August 4, 2026

Jean-Baptiste RENARD