There are a lot of factors involved in whether and when the AI decides to declare war, including their relationships with other players and the state of their finances. In 0.50 you can now get some extra info about who they would consider declaring war on and with what odds by holding down ALT and mousing over different players in the scoreboard (have to have ALT down before putting the mouse on the player whose decisions you want to check out). You have to have the chipotle cheat code entered in CivilizationIV.ini to see this.
One thing I've run into and been thinking about is the issue of role-playing versus playing to win ... a human player with a huge power advantage over the rest of the world will pursue conquest/domination, but the AI never ignores its relations with other players and thus some leaders are unlikely to ever go that route even if they have a big military advantage.
On Aggressive AI this isn't much of a problem though ... the AI is much less tied to relationships and will push an advantage when it has one.