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Article contents

The conduct and consequences of war.

• Alyssa K. Prorok Alyssa K. Prorok Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
•  and  Paul K. Huth Paul K. Huth Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.72
• Published in print: 01 March 2010
• Published online: 22 December 2017
• This version: 25 June 2019
• Previous version

The academic study of warfare has expanded considerably over the past 15 years. Whereas research used to focus almost exclusively on the onset of interstate war, more recent scholarship has shifted the focus from wars between states to civil conflict, and from war onset to questions of how combatants wage and terminate war. Questioned as well are the longer-term consequences of warfare for countries and their populations. Scholarship has also shifted away from country-conflict-year units of analysis to micro-level studies that are attentive to individual-level motives and explanations of spatial variation in wartime behavior by civilians and combatants within a country or armed conflict. Today, research focuses on variations in how states and rebel groups wage war, particularly regarding when and how wars expand, whether combatants comply with the laws of war, when and why conflicts terminate, and whether conflicts end with a clear military victory or with a political settlement through negotiations. Recent research also recognizes that strategic behavior continues into the post-conflict period, with important implications for the stability of the post-conflict peace. Finally, the consequences of warfare are wide-ranging and complex, affecting everything from political stability to public health, often long after the fighting stops.

• interstate war
• laws of war
• civilian victimization
• war termination
• war severity
• post-conflict peace

Updated in this version

Updated introduction, subheadings, references, and substantial revision throughout.

Introduction

Over the past 15 years, research by social scientists on the conduct and consequences of war has expanded considerably. Previously, scholarly research had been heavily oriented towards the analysis of the causes of interstate war and its onset. Three simultaneous trends, however, have characterized scholarship on war since the early 2000s. First, studies of the dynamics of civil war have proliferated. Second, war is conceptualized as a series of inter-related stages in which the onset, conduct, and termination of wars as well as post-war relations are analyzed theoretically and empirically in a more integrated fashion. Third, studies have shifted away from country-conflict-year units of analysis to micro-level studies that are sensitive to spatial variation in behavior within a country or conflict.

This article reviews and assesses this body of recent scholarship, which has shifted the focus from war onset to questions of how combatants wage war and what are the longer-term consequences of warfare for countries and their populations. Scholarly research examines the conduct and consequences of both interstate and civil wars.

The analysis is organized into three main sections. It begins with research on how states and rebel groups wage war, with particular attention given to questions regarding war expansion, compliance with the laws of war, and war severity. Section two turns to the literature on war duration, termination, and outcomes. Different explanations are discussed, for when and why wars come to an end; then, the question of how war’s end influences the prospects for a stable post-war peace is considered. In section three, recent scholarship is examined on the consequences of war for post-war trends in political stability and public health. The concluding discussion addresses some of the important contributions associated with recent scholarship on the conduct and consequences of war as well as promising directions for future research.

The Waging of Civil and International Wars

What accounts for the nature of the wars we see? This broad question drives a new research tradition in conflict studies that compliments traditional analyses of war onset by shifting the focus to state behavior during war. This research goes beyond understandings of why states fight one another to engaging questions of why states join ongoing wars, when and why they follow the laws of war, and what explains the severity of wars. Taken together, these questions open the black box of wartime behavior.

Intervention and the Expansion of Interstate Wars

Research on war expansion developed as a natural outgrowth of analyses of war onset: scholars studying why states initiate conflict shifted focus to understand why third parties join ongoing wars. The link between alliances and joining behavior has been central to studies of war expansion, spawning a broad research tradition that focuses on alliances and geography, differences among types of alliances, and the characteristics of alliance members. Siverson and Starr ( 1991 ), for example, find a strong interaction effect between geography and alliances, in that a warring neighbor who is an ally increases the likelihood of a state joining an existing conflict. Leeds, Long, and Mitchell ( 2000 ) also find that the specific content of alliance obligations is critical to understanding when states choose to intervene, and that states uphold the terms of their alliance commitments nearly 75% of the time. Most recently, Vasquez and Rundlett ( 2016 ) found that alliances are essentially a necessary condition for war expansion, highlighting the importance of this factor in explaining joining behavior.

Alliance behavior is also an important topic in the study of democratic wartime behavior. While Choi ( 2004 ) presents findings suggesting that democracies are particularly likely to align with one another, Reiter and Stam ( 2002 ) provide counter-evidence that democracies are willing to align with non-democracies when it serves their strategic interests. Given the tendency to uphold alliance obligations, and empirical evidence showing that war initiators are more successful when their adversary does not receive third-party assistance (Gartner & Siverson, 1996 ), recent theoretical research suggests that states, understanding joining dynamics, might manipulate war aims to reduce the likelihood of outside intervention (Werner, 2000 ).

These studies suggest that war expansion should be understood as the consequence of a decision calculus undertaken by potential joiners. While much of the contemporary literature focuses on alliance behavior, this only indirectly gets at the question of who will join ongoing conflicts. A full explanation of war expansion from this perspective would also require that we explain when states form alliances in the first place. Further, the analyses of Gartner and Siverson ( 1996 ) and of Werner ( 2000 ) suggest that strategic thinking must be the focus of future research on war expansion. Recent research begins to address this issue: DiLorenzo and Rooney ( 2018 ) examine how uncertainty over estimates of third party resolve influence war-making decisions of states, finding that rival states are more likely to initiate conflict when domestic power shifts in potential joiner states (i.e., allies) increase uncertainty over the strength of that alliance commitment. Future research should continue to investigate the links between expectations of third-party behavior and initial war initiation decisions, as this research highlights important selection processes that empirical research has not yet fully explored.

Finally, recent research goes further to connect war initiation and expansion by arguing that commitment problems—one of the key bargaining failures leading to war initiation—also helps explain war expansion. Shirkey ( 2018 ) finds that wars caused by commitment rather than information problems are more likely to expand, as they are generally fought over greater war aims, are more severe, and last longer. These factors generate risks and rewards for intervention that encourage expansion.

The literature on interstate war expansion has made progress in the last decade with much closer attention to modeling strategic calculations by combatants and potential interveners. The result has been a better understanding of the interrelationship between onset and joining behavior and the realization that the timing and the sequence in which sides intervene is critical to war expansion (Joyce, Ghosn, & Bayer, 2014 ).

Expansion of Civil Wars

The analog to studies of war expansion in the interstate context has traditionally been the study of intervention in the civil war context. Research in this field treats the decision to intervene in much the same way as the war expansion literature treats the potential joiner’s decision calculus. That is, intervention is the result of a rational, utility-maximizing decision calculus in which potential interveners consider the costs and benefits of intervention as well as the potential for achieving desired outcomes. Understood in these terms, both domestic and international strategic considerations affect the decision to intervene, with the Cold War geopolitical climate much more conducive to countervailing interventions than the post-Cold War era has been (Regan, 2002a ), and peacekeeping-oriented interventions most likely in states with ethnic, trade, military, or colonial ties to the intervening state (Rost & Greig, 2011 ).

Whether states are most likely to intervene in easy or hard cases is a central question. While Aydin ( 2010 ) showed that states will delay intervention when previous interventions by other states have failed to influence the conflict, Rost and Grieg ( 2011 ) showed that state-based interventions for peacekeeping purposes are most likely in tough cases—long ethnic wars and conflicts that kill and displace large numbers of civilians. Finally, Gent ( 2008 ) shows that the likelihood of success may not affect the intervention decision equally for government and opposition-targeted interventions. He finds that both types of intervention are more likely when governments face stronger rebel groups, thus implying that intervention in support of rebel groups occurs when the likelihood of success is highest, but intervention supporting governments is most likely when states face their most intense challenges.

There are two likely sources of the discrepancies in this literature. First, most analyses have focused exclusively on the intervener’s decision calculus, or the supply side, failing to account for variation in the demand for intervention. Second, there is significant inconsistency in the literature’s treatment of the goals of interveners. Some analyses assume that states intervene to end conflicts, while others don’t make this limiting assumption but still fail to distinguish among interventions for different purposes.

Newer research takes important strides to address these issues. First, Salehyan, Skrede Gleditsch, and Cunningham ( 2011 ) developed a theory of third party support for insurgent groups that explicitly modeled both supply-side and demand-side factors driving the intervention decision. They found that demand is greatest among weak rebel groups, but supply is greatest for strong groups. Second, research by Cunningham ( 2010 ) explicitly measured whether third party states intervene with independent goals, and Stojek and Chacha ( 2015 ) theorized that intervention behavior is driven by economic motivations. Trade ties increase the likelihood of intervention on the side of the government.

Finally, Kathman ( 2010 ) focused on contiguous state interveners in examining motives for intervention. He developed a measure of conflict infection risk that predicts the likelihood of conflict spreading to each contiguous state. Empirically, he finds that, as the risk of contagion increases, so does the probability of intervention by at-risk neighbors. This research develops a convincing mechanism and empirical test to explain a subset of interventions and provides a clear link from intervention research to recent research on civil conflict contagion. While the contagion literature is too broad to review here, mechanisms posited for civil war expansion across borders range from refugee flows (Salehyan & Gleditsch, 2006 ), to ethnic kinship ties (Forsberg, 2014 ), to increased military expenditures in neighboring states (Phillips, 2015 ).

The literature on intervention into civil wars has grown significantly over the past decade as internationalization of civil conflicts has become common and often results in escalatory dynamics that are of deep concern to analysts and policymakers.

Compliance With the Laws of War

Scholars have recently begun studying the conditions under which compliance with the laws of war is most likely and the mechanisms most important in determining compliance. This research shifts the focus toward understanding state behavior during war and the strategic and normative considerations that influence decision-making processes of states. Two key questions drive scholarship in this tradition; first, does international law constrain state behavior, even when the state is threatened by severe conflict, and second, can observed compliance be attributed to ratification status, or is it instead a result of strategic decision making?

Scholars have yet to provide conclusive answers to these questions; while compliance is observed in many circumstances, most scholars attribute observed restraint to factors other than international law. Legro ( 1995 ), for example, found that international agreements had limited impact on Britain and Germany’s use of unrestricted submarine warfare, strategic bombing of civilian targets, and chemical weapons during WWII. In analyses of civilian targeting during interstate war, Downes ( 2006 ) and Valentino, Huth, and Croco ( 2006 ) also found that international law itself has little impact on a state’s propensity for civilian targeting. Downes argued that civilian targeting occurs most often when states are fighting protracted wars of attrition and desire to save lives on their own side, or when they intend to annex enemy territory with potentially hostile civilians. Valentino et al. ( 2006 ) similarly found that the decision to target civilians is driven by strategic considerations and is unconstrained by treaty obligations relating to the laws of war. Finally, Fazal and Greene ( 2015 ) found that observed compliance is explained by identity rather than law; violations are much more common in European vs. non-European dyads than in other types of dyads.

While these analyses suggest that international law has little effect on state behavior and that observed compliance is incidental, Price ( 1997 ) and Morrow ( 2014 ) argued that law does exert some influence on compliance behavior. Price attributed variation in the use of chemical weapons to the terms of international agreements, arguing that complete bans are more effective than partial bans. Morrow ( 2014 ), however, demonstrated that law’s impact varies depending upon issue area, regime characteristics, and adversary identity. Of eight issue areas, he found the worst compliance records on civilian targeting and prisoners of war, which perhaps accounts for the largely negative conclusions drawn by Downes ( 2006 ) and Valentino et al. ( 2006 ). Additionally, Morrow found, unlike Valentino et al., that democratic states are more likely to comply after ratification than before, suggesting that obligations under international law do affect state behavior, at least in democracies. Finally, he demonstrated that compliance increases significantly when an adversary has also ratified a given treaty, arguing this effect is due to reciprocity.

More recent scholarship expands this research, showing that law may affect state behavior through additional mechanisms that previous research had not considered. For example, Kreps and Wallace ( 2016 ) and Wallace ( 2015 ) found that public support for state policies as diverse as drone strikes and torture of prisoners of war are critically influenced by international law. International condemnation of U.S. policies reduces public support most when such condemnation focuses on legal critiques. This suggests that international law influences state behavior in democracies through its effect on public opinion, not through liberal norms of nonviolence. Additionally, Appel and Prorok ( 2018 ) and Jo and Thompson ( 2014 ) showed that external constraints influence states’ compliance behavior. Specifically, Appel and Prorok showed that states target fewer civilians in interstate war when they are embedded in alliance and trade networks dominated by third party states who have ratified international treaties prohibiting the abuse of non-combatants during war. Jo and Thompson showed that states are more likely to grant international observers access to detention centers when they are more reliant upon foreign aid. These findings suggest that international law can influence state behavior indirectly, through pressure exerted by international donors and backers.

Scholarship on compliance with the laws of war in interstate wars has made considerable progress over the past decade. We now know much more about the contingent support of democratic state leaders and publics for compliance with the laws of war. This key finding opens up new areas of research on the strategic efforts of political and military leaders to convince publics of their commitment to international law and whether those strategies are likely to be successful.

Civilian Targeting in Civil War

The mistreatment and deliberate targeting of civilian populations is an active area of research by scholars who study civil wars (Hultman, 2007 ; Humphreys & Weinstein, 2006 ; Kalyvas, 2006 ; Valentino et al., 2004 ; Weinstein, 2007 ; Wickham-Crowley, 1990 ). Most research on this topic treats the use of violence against civilians as a strategic choice; that is, combatants target civilians to induce their compliance, signal resolve, weaken an opponent’s support base, or extract resources from the population. In his seminal work on the topic, Kalyvas ( 2006 ) demonstrated that combatants resort to the use of indiscriminate violence to coerce civilian populations when they lack the information and control necessary to target defectors selectively. Similarly, Valentino ( 2005 ) and Valentino et al. ( 2004 ) found that incumbents are more likely to resort to mass killing of civilians when faced with strong insurgent opponents that they are unable to defeat through more conventional tactics.

More recent analyses have built upon these earlier works, adding levels of complexity to the central theories developed previously and examining new forms of violence that previous studies did not. Balcells ( 2011 ) brought political considerations back in, finding that direct violence is most likely in areas where pre-conflict political power between state and rebel supporters was at parity, while indirect violence is most likely in locations where the adversary’s pre-war political support was highest. Wood ( 2010 ) accounted for the impact of relative strength and adversary strategy, finding that weak rebel groups, lacking the capacity to protect civilian populations, will increase their use of violence in response to state violence, while strong rebel groups display the opposite pattern of behavior. Lyall ( 2010a ) also found conditionalities in the relationship between state behavior and insurgent reactions, demonstrating that government “sweep” operations are much more effective at preventing and delaying insurgent violence when carried out by forces of the same ethnicity as the insurgent group. Finally, Cohen ( 2016 ) advanced research by focusing on wartime sexual violence. She found that rape, like other forms of violence, is used strategically in civil war. Specifically, armed groups use rape as a socialization tactic: groups that recruit through abduction engage in rape at higher rates, to generate loyalty and trust between soldiers.

This large body of research provides many insights into the strategic use of violence against civilians during civil war. However, until recently, little research addressed questions of compliance with legal obligations. With the recent formation of the International Criminal Court, however, states and rebel groups are now subject to legal investigation for failure to comply with basic principles of the laws of war.

Emerging research suggests that the International Criminal Court (ICC) and international law more generally do affect the behavior of civil war combatants. For example, Hillebrecht ( 2016 ) found that ICC actions during the Libyan civil war reduced the level of mass atrocities committed in the conflict, while Jo and Simmons ( 2016 ) found that the ICC reduces civilian targeting by governments and rebel groups that are seeking legitimacy, suggesting international legal institutions can reduce violations of humanitarian law during civil war. These findings should be tempered, however, by recent research suggesting that ICC involvement in civil wars can, under certain conditions, extend ongoing conflicts (Prorok, 2017 ).

Finally, beyond the ICC, Stanton ( 2016 ) and Jo ( 2015 ) both demonstrated that international law constrains civil war actors by establishing standards against which domestic and international constituencies judge the behavior of governments and rebel groups. Particularly when rebels are seeking legitimacy, Jo argues, they are more likely to comply with international legal standards in a variety of areas, from protection of civilian populations to child soldiering. This research suggests that even without direct intervention by the ICC, international law can influence the behavior of governments and rebels engaged in civil war.

While recent research has shown that the laws of war can influence civilian targeting in civil wars, the large loss of civilian life in the Syrian civil war highlights how fragile the commitment to international law can be. It points to important future research questions about when threats of various sanctions by the international community against non-compliance are actually credible and which actors can apply effective coercive pressure.

Losses Suffered in Wars

Recent scholarship has taken up the issue of war severity. Empirical research suggests that the tactics and strategies used by states during war, and the political pressures that compel them to adopt those policies, affect the severity of conflict. Biddle ( 2004 ), for instance, argued that war-fighting strategies influence the magnitude of losses sustained during war, and found that states employing the modern system of force reduce their exposure to lethal firepower, thus limiting losses. Valentino, Huth, and Croco ( 2010 ) examined the reasons behind different strategic choices, arguing that democratic sensitivity to the costs of war pressure democratic leaders to adopt military policies designed to limit fatalities. They found that increasing military capabilities decreases civilian and military fatalities, while reliance on guerrilla or attrition strategies, as well as fighting on or near one’s own territory, increases fatalities. They reported that democracies are significantly more likely to join powerful alliances and less likely to use attrition or guerrilla strategies, or to fight on their own territory.

Speaking to the conventional wisdom that interstate warfare is on the decline, recent research by Fazal ( 2014 ) suggests that modern medical advances mean that, while war has become less fatal, it has not necessarily become less severe. This raises questions about common understandings of broad trends in conflict frequency and severity as well as questions about best practices for measuring conflict severity. Future research should grapple with both of these issues.

Civil war studies have recently begun to focus more on conflict severity as an outcome in need of explanation. Many key explanatory factors in early research mirrored those in interstate war research, making comparison possible. For example, like interstate war, civil war scholarship consistently finds that democracies suffer less severe conflicts than nondemocracies (Heger & Salehyan, 2007 ; Lacina, 2006 ; Lujala, 2009 ). Regarding state military strength, research by Lujala ( 2009 ) demonstrated that relative equality between government and rebel forces leads to the deadliest conflicts, as rebels with the strength to fight back will likely inflict more losses than those without the ability to sustain heavy engagement with government forces. Finally, recent research by Balcells and Kalyvas ( 2014 ) mirrored work on interstate war by focusing on how the military strategies adopted by combatants affect conflict intensity. They found that civil conflicts fought via conventional means tend to be more lethal than irregular or symmetric nonconventional (SNC) wars, as only the former involve direct confrontations with heavy weaponry. While research on conflict severity is still developing, these studies suggest that democracy, military strength, and strategy are consistent predictors of conflict severity, although the mechanisms posited for the effects of these variables sometimes differ between civil and interstate war.

What this research does not provide clear answers on is how battle losses trend throughout the course of conflict, as most factors examined in the above research are static throughout a conflict. As our ability to measure conflict severity at a more micro temporal and spatial level has improved, emerging research is beginning to address these questions. For example, Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon ( 2014 ) find that increasing UN troop presence decreases battlefield deaths by increasing the costs of perpetrating violence. Dasgupta Gawande, and Kapur ( 2017 ) also found reductions in insurgent violence associated with implementation of development programs, though the pacifying effects of such programs are conditional upon local state capacity. Additional research shows that trends in violence in Islamist insurgencies vary predictably, with violence suppressed due to anticipated social disapproval during important Islamic holidays (Reese, Ruby, & Pape, 2017 ). Recent research also suggests local variation in cell-phone coverage affects local levels of insurgent violence, as increasing cell-phone communication improves the state’s ability to gather information and monitor insurgent behavior, thereby reducing insurgent violence (Shapiro & Weidmann, 2015 ). These recent studies represent an important trend in conflict severity research that more carefully examines the dynamics of escalation and de-escalation within given conflicts, both spatially and temporally. We encourage additional research in this vein.

The Duration, Termination, and Outcome of War

What accounts for the duration, termination, and outcomes of interstate and civil wars, and the durability of the peace that follows these conflicts? These questions represent a central focus of contemporary conflict studies, and are closely linked in terms of their explanations. A major innovation in this literature in the past 10 to 15 years has been the extension of the bargaining model of war from its original application in the context of war onset (Blainey, 1973 ; Fearon, 1995 ) to its use in the context of war duration, termination, and outcome.

The turn to bargaining models has placed relative military capabilities and battlefield developments at the center of much of the theoretical literature in this area. This focus, however, has spawned a backlash in recent years, as patterns that contradict the implications of bargaining models are detected and theorized. The bargaining approach and its critiques are discussed in the following sections.

Duration of Wars

Understood within the bargaining framework, war duration is closely linked to factors that influence the relative strength of combatants. Theoretical and empirical research suggests that longer wars occur when opponents of relatively equal strength cannot achieve breakthroughs on the battlefield (Bennett & Stam, 1996 ; Filson & Werner, 2007b ; Slantchev, 2004 ), although this pattern does not hold for wars involving non-state actors where a large asymmetry in power increases war duration (Sullivan, 2008 ).

Additional research suggests, however, that relative military strength may not be the best predictor of war duration. Bennett and Stam ( 1996 ), for example, demonstrated that military strategy has a large impact on war duration, independent of military strength, with attrition and punishment strategies leading to longer wars than maneuver strategies. The type of political objectives sought by a war initiator may also offset the impact of military strength, as war aims that require significant target compliance generally lead to longer wars (Sullivan, 2008 ). Still others argue that domestic political sensitivity to concessions-making increases conflict duration, while domestic cost sensitivity leads to shorter wars (Filson & Werner, 2007a ; Mattes & Morgan, 2004 ). Thus, democracies are expected to fight shorter wars (Filson & Werner, 2007b ), whereas mixed regimes will fight longer wars as they gamble for resurrection in the face of high domestic costs for war losses (Goemans, 2000 ). Research by Lyall ( 2010b ), however, suggests that this relationship is conditional upon conflict type, as he found no relationship between democracy and war duration in the context of counterinsurgency wars.

Biddle ( 2004 ) more directly challenged bargaining models of war duration by comparing the predictive power of models including traditional measures of relative military capabilities to those accounting for combatants’ methods of force employment. Biddle demonstrated that models taking force employment into account generate more accurate predictions of war duration than those assuming an unconditional relationship between military power and war duration. A second important challenge to traditional applications of bargaining models comes from Reiter ( 2009 ). He demonstrated that the argument that decisive battlefield outcomes promote quick termination is conditional upon the absence of commitment problems. When compliance fears dominate information asymmetries, battle losses and the expectation of future losses may not be sufficient to end conflict, as belligerents will continue fighting in pursuit of absolute victory to eliminate the threat of the losing state defecting from post-war settlements. Reiter thus demonstrates that commitment problems and information asymmetries have varying effects on war duration, and both must be accounted for in models of conflict duration and termination.

Despite these critiques, more recent research continues to approach the question of war duration from the bargaining perspective. Shirkey ( 2012 ), for example, argued that late third-party joiners to interstate conflicts lengthen those disputes by complicating the bargaining process. Joiners add new issues to the war and increase uncertainty about relative power among combatants, thus requiring additional fighting to reveal information and find a bargained solution. Weisiger ( 2016 ) similarly focused on information problems, but attempts to unpack the mechanism by focusing on more specific characteristics of battlefield events. Using new data on the timing of battle deaths for specific war participants, Weisiger found that settlement is more likely after more extensive fighting, and that states are more likely to make concessions after their battle results have deteriorated. Finally, recent research has also begun to problematize resolve, considering how variation in actors’ resolve affects their willingness to stay in a fight or cut losses (Kertzer, 2017 ). This represents a fruitful area for future research, as conceptually and empirically unpacking resolve will shed new light on costs of war and how they relate to war onset, duration, and termination.

Scholars studying the duration of civil wars also commonly apply a rationalist perspective. Factors that increase the costs of sustaining the fight generally shorten wars, while those that raise the costs of making concessions tend to lengthen conflicts. Along these lines, research suggests that the availability of contraband funding for rebel groups lengthens conflicts by providing rebels with the economic resources to sustain their campaigns (Fearon, 2004 ). However, additional research demonstrates that the influence of contraband is mitigated by fluctuations in its market value (Collier, Hoeffler, & Söderbom, 2004 ), by how rebels earn funding from resources (through smuggling versus extortion; Conrad, Greene, Igoe Walsh, & Whitaker, 2018 ), and by the composition of state institutions (Wiegand & Keels, 2018 ).

Research suggests that structural conditions also affect civil war duration, such as the stakes of war, ethnic divisions, and the number of combatants involved. For example, ethnic conflicts over control of territory are generally longer than those fought over control of the central government (Balch-Lindsay & Enterline, 2000 ; Collier et al., 2004 ; Fearon, 2004 ). Regarding the role of ethnicity, Wucherpfennig, Metternich, Cederman, and Skrede Gleditsch ( 2012 ) demonstrated that the effect of ethnic cleavages is conditional on their relationship to political institutions. Regarding the complexity of the conflict, Cunningham ( 2011 ) found that civil wars with a greater number of combatants on each side are longer than those with fewer combatants. Findley ( 2013 ), however, showed that the number of conflict actors has varying effects across different stages of conflict, encouraging cooperation early on while impeding lasting settlement.

Third party intervention has also received significant attention in the civil war duration literature, with scholars generally arguing that intervention affects duration by augmenting the military strength of combatants. Empirical findings in early studies are mixed, however; while results consistently show that unbiased intervention or simultaneous intervention on both sides of a conflict increase war duration (Balch-Lindsay & Enterline, 2000 ; Balch-Lindsay, Enterline, & Joyce, 2008 ; Regan, 2002b ), biased interventions generate more inconsistent results.

In a valuable study addressing limitations of earlier research, Cunningham ( 2010 ) focused on the goals of third parties, and found that when interveners pursue agendas that are independent of those of the internal combatants, wars are more difficult to terminate due to decreased incentives to negotiate and a higher likelihood that commitment problems stymie settlements. This suggests that the empirical finding that intervention lengthens war may be driven by a subset of cases in which third parties intervene with specific goals. Ultimately, analyses focused on intervention do not account for the potential selection effect that influences when states will intervene. If Gent ( 2008 ) is correct, biased intervention should be most likely when the power ratio between government and rebel forces is close to parity, a factor which, if ignored, may bias the results of these analyses.

More recent studies have continued to unpack intervention, demonstrating that there are important distinctions beyond the biased versus balanced debate. Sawyer, Cunningham, and Reed ( 2015 ), for example, showed that different types of external support affect rebel fighting capacity differently. Specifically, fungible types of support like financial and arms transfers are particularly likely to lengthen conflict because they increase uncertainty over relative power. Similarly, Narang ( 2015 ) also focused on the uncertainty induced by external support. He showed that humanitarian assistance inadvertently increases both actors’ uncertainty over relative power, thereby prolonging civil war.

Until recently, this literature suffered from a major weakness in that it relied empirically on state-level variables that did not fully capture the dyadic nature of its theoretical propositions. Cunningham, Skrede Gleditsch, and Salehyan ( 2013 ) new dyadic data represents an important contribution to the field, as it explicitly measures the relative strength, mobilization capacity, and fighting capacity of rebel groups and applies a truly dyadic empirical approach. New research in this field should continue to approach questions of war duration and outcome with dyadic data and theory along with more micro-level studies that seek to explain variation in rebel and state fighting across different geographic locations and over time (e.g., Greig, 2015 ).

Ending Wars as a Bargaining Process

Interstate wars rarely end in the complete destruction of the defeated party’s military forces. Instead, new information is revealed through combat operations and negotiating behavior which enables belligerents to converge on a mutually agreeable settlement short of total war. Wittman ( 1979 ) provided the first formal articulation of the bargaining model in the context of war termination. He argued theoretically that war continues until both adversaries believe they can be made better off through settlement. Subsequent analyses have focused on both the battlefield conditions and strategies of negotiations leading states to believe settlement is the better option.

These analyses show that, as a state’s resources are depleted from battle losses, it has incentives to negotiate a settlement more acceptable to its adversary rather than suffer total defeat (Filson & Werner, 2002 ; Smith & Stam, 2004 ). Further, fighting battles reduces uncertainty by revealing information about resolve, military effectiveness, and the true balance of power between adversaries, causing expectations on the likely outcome of the war to converge, and making settlement possible (Wagner, 2000 ). Wartime negotiations provide adversaries with additional information, which Slantchev ( 2011 ) argued makes war termination more likely.

Challenging traditional notions regarding the likelihood of termination in the face of large asymmetries in capabilities, Slantchev ( 2011 ) argued that war termination depends upon states’ abilities to both impose and bear the costs of fighting. If a weaker state can minimize the costs it bears while forcing its adversary to expand its war effort, the benefits of fighting relative to its costs are reduced, and the stronger state may choose termination. The implication of this argument relates closely to Biddle’s ( 2004 ) empirical critique of the bargaining literature, which finds modern methods of force employment can mitigate losses during war, thereby shifting the balance of costs and benefits independent of relative military capabilities. Reiter’s ( 2009 ) critique of bargaining approaches also has implications for war termination. While traditional approaches argue that fighting battles reveals information and increases the likelihood of termination, Reiter suggested that this is only the case if belligerents expect their opponent to comply with the post-war status quo. If commitment problems are severe, information revealed during battles and war-time negotiations will have little effect on termination.

Biddle’s argument that country-year measures of military capabilities are inexact and crude proxies for the concepts advanced in theoretical models is a strong one that should be taken seriously by scholars. We therefore appreciate the contributions of Ramsay ( 2008 ) and Weisiger ( 2016 ), which use more fine-grained battle trend data rather than country-level measures of military capabilities to empirically test the implications of bargaining theories of war termination, and advocate future research adopting this strategy for testing the implications of bargaining theories.

Much of the literature on civil war termination also focuses on how battlefield developments affect the termination of civil wars. Collier et al. ( 2004 ) built on the idea of war as an information revelation mechanism, arguing that the probability of settlement should increase as war duration increases and more information is revealed regarding the relative strength of each side. Others focus on the costs of battle, with research showing that settlements are more likely when the costs of battle are high and the relative payoffs from victory decrease (Walter, 2002 ). Also, a relatively equal balance of power between combatants creates a mutually hurting stalemate, in which neither side can achieve victory, and settlement becomes more likely (Walter, 2002 ).

Empirical results support many of these theoretical predictions. Several scholars show that the longer a civil war lasts, the more likely it is to terminate (Collier et al., 2004 ; Fearon,, 2004 ; Regan, 2002b ), and that the probability of negotiated settlement increases as conflict duration increases (Mason, Weingarten, & Fett, 1999 ). The magnitude of conflict, measured as total war deaths, also correlates positively with the probability of adversaries initiating negotiations (Walter, 2002 ). Finally, Walter ( 2002 ) found that military stalemates significantly increase the likelihood of negotiations as well as the implementation of a ceasefire.

While these results support the theoretical predictions surrounding “hurting stalemates,” Walter’s coding of stalemates does not account for the timing of the stalemate or the number of stalemates that occur throughout the course of conflict. We therefore see great value in more recent research that uses new micro-level data to more closely capture actual battle dynamics and incorporate more information at the conflict and group-level. For example, Hultquist ( 2013 ) used a novel troop strength measure to better capture relative strength between rebel and government forces. He found that relative power parity increases the likelihood of negotiated settlement, while power imbalances extend civil war. Making use of fine-grained data on battle event dates and locations, Greig ( 2015 ) showed that the location, and changes in location over time, of battle events relays information to combatants that, in turn, affects their willingness to negotiate and settle their conflicts. We encourage additional research in this vein moving forward.

Domestic-Level Factors and War Termination

Recent research suggests that domestic political conditions influence war termination. Specifically, domestic political accountability, the domestic audience’s expectations, and cost-sensitivity affect leaders’ decisions to continue fighting versus settling on specific terms (Mattes & Morgan, 2004 ). Along these lines, Goemans ( 2000 ) argued that the postwar fate of leaders influences their choice between terminating and continuing a war. The threat of severe punishment by domestic actors increases the costs of war losses for leaders of semi-repressive regimes, leading them to continue fighting a war they are losing in the hope of achieving victory. Thus, war termination does not follow strictly from battle trends.

Empirically, Goemans ( 2000 ) found that losing mixed regimes suffer significantly more battle deaths than democratic or autocratic losers, and that wars fought against losing mixed regimes last, on average, almost twice as long as those fought against either democratic or autocratic losers. Taken together, these results suggest that mixed regime leaders are likely to sustain rather than terminate a losing war, and more generally, that regime type significantly influences war termination. Croco ( 2015 ) refined Goemans’s work by arguing that the individual responsibility of leaders for involving their country in a war has important effects on war termination patterns, with culpable leaders more likely to fight for victory in order to avoid being punished domestically for poor wartime performance. Croco and Weeks ( 2013 ) refined this logic further, showing that only culpable leaders from democracies and vulnerable nondemocracies face increased punishment risk from war losses. Koch and Sullivan ( 2010 ) provide another take on the relationship between domestic politics and war termination, demonstrating that partisanship significantly affects democratic states’ war termination decisions. Faced with declining approval for military interventions, their results demonstrate, right-leaning governments will continue the fight, while left-leaning executives will be more likely to end their military engagements.

The analog to studying domestic-level factors in interstate conflict would be to examine the effect of internal state and rebel characteristics on civil war termination. Traditionally, civil war studies have focused only on state characteristics, as data on rebel groups’ organization and internal characteristics has been unavailable. Early research argued that state capacity, regime characteristics, and ethnic/religious divisions influenced war termination by influencing the balance of power, accountability of leaders, and stakes of conflict, but empirical results provided mixed support for these theories (e.g., DeRouen & Sobek, 2004 ; Svensson, 2007 ; Walter, 2002 ).

More recent research has made significant strides in understanding how internal characteristics of combatants affect civil conflict termination by using new data to explore how the composition and practices (i.e., leader characteristics, governance, and internal cohesion) of rebel groups influence civil conflict dynamics. This research demonstrates that some of the same leader-accountability mechanisms that affect interstate war termination also influence civil conflict. For example, Prorok ( 2016 ) used novel data on rebel group leaders to show that culpable leaders are less willing to terminate or settle for compromise outcomes than their non-culpable counterparts in civil wars, just like in interstate conflicts. Heger and Jung ( 2017 ) also advanced existing research by using novel data on rebel service provision to civilian populations to explore how good rebel governance affects conflict negotiations. They found that service-providing rebels are more likely to engage in negotiations and to achieve favorable results, arguing that this reflects the lower risk of spoilers from groups with broad support and centralized power structures. Finally, Findley and Rudloff ( 2012 ) examined rebel group fragmentation’s effects on conflict termination and outcomes. Using computational modeling, they find that fragmentation only sometimes increases war duration (on fragmentation, also see Cunningham, 2014 ).

These studies underscore the value of exploring rebel group internal structures and practices in greater detail in future research, as they have an important impact on how, and when, civil wars end.

Victory/Defeat in Wars

Recent scholarship on victory and defeat in war suggests, as in the duration and termination literatures, that domestic politics, strategies of force employment, military mechanization, and war aims mediate the basic relationship between military strength and victory. Empirical results show that strategy choices and methods of force employment have a greater impact on war outcomes than relative military capabilities (Biddle, 2004 ; Stam, 1996 ), that high levels of mechanization within state militaries actually increase the probability of state defeat in counterinsurgency wars (Lyall & Wilson, 2009 ), and that weak states win more often when they employ an opposite-strategy approach in asymmetric conflicts (Arreguin-Toft, 2006 ) or when the stronger party’s war aims require high levels of target compliance (Sullivan, 2007 ). High relative losses and increasing war duration also decrease the likelihood of victory for war initiators, even if prewar capabilities favored the aggressor (Slantchev, 2004 ).

More recent research focuses on counter-insurgent conflicts, using new micro-level data and modeling techniques to address questions of counterinsurgent effectiveness in these complex conflicts. For example, Toft and Zhukov ( 2012 ) evaluated the effectiveness of denial versus punishment strategies, finding that denial (i.e., increasing the costs of expanding insurgent violence) is most effective, while punishment is counterproductive. Relatedly, Weidmann and Salehyan ( 2013 ) used an agent-based model applied to the U.S. surge in Baghdad to understand the mechanisms behind the surge’s success. They found that ethnic homogenization, rather than increased counterinsurgent capacity, best accounts for the surge’s success. Finally, Quackenbush and Murdie ( 2015 ) found that, counter to conventional wisdom, past experiences with counterinsurgency or conventional warfare have little effect on future success in conflict. States are not simply fighting the last war.

An important area of research that has fostered significant debate among scholars focuses on explaining the historical pattern of high rates of victory by democracies in interstate wars. The strongest explanations for the winning record of democracies center on their superior battlefield initiative and leadership, cooperative civil-military relations, and careful selection into wars they have a high probability of winning (Reiter & Stam, 2002 ). Challenging these results both theoretically and empirically, however, Desch ( 2002 ) argues that “democracy hardly matters,” that relative power plays a more important role in explaining victory. This debate essentially comes down to the relative importance of realist-type power variables versus regime type variables in explaining military victory; while scholars such as Lake ( 1992 ) and Reiter and Stam ( 2002 ) argued that regime type matters more, Desch asserted that relative power is the more important determinant of military victory.

Ultimately, we find Desch’s objections to the relevance of democracy to be overstated and his theoretical and empirical justifications to be largely unconvincing. First, Desch’s analysis is biased against Reiter and Stam’s argument because it is limited to dyads that Desch labels “fair fights,” that is, dyads with relatively equal military capabilities. This does not allow Desch to test the selection effect that Reiter and Stam discuss. Second, Desch failed to recognize that many of the realist variables he attributes the greatest explanatory power to are actually influenced by the foreign and military policies adopted by democratic leaders (Valentino et al., 2010 ). Democracy thus has both a direct and an indirect effect on war outcomes, and because Desch ignores the latter, he underestimates democracy’s total impact. Finally, the impacts of power variables may be overstated, as recent research demonstrates that military power’s influence is conditional upon method of force employment and military mechanization (Biddle, 2004 ; Lyall & Wilson, 2009 ).

More recent research examines some of the mechanisms suggested for the unique war-time behavior of democracies, raising some questions about existing mechanisms and suggesting alternatives to explain democratic exceptionalism. For example, Gibler and Miller ( 2013 ) argued that democracies tend to fight short, victorious wars because they have fewer territorial (i.e., high salience) issues over which to fight, rather than because of their leaders’ political accountability. Once controlling for issue salience, they find no relationship between democracy and victory. Similarly, using novel statistical techniques that allow them to account for the latent abilities of states, Renshon and Spirling ( 2015 ) showed that democracy only increases military effectiveness under certain conditions, and is actually counterproductive in others. Finally, new research by Bausch ( 2017 ) using laboratory experiments to test the mechanisms behind democracy and victory suggested that only some of these mechanisms hold up. Specifically, Bausch found that democratic leaders are actually more likely to select into conflict and do not mobilize more resources for war once involved, contrary to the selection and war fighting stories developed by Reiter and Stam ( 2002 ). He did find, however, that democratic leaders are less likely to accept settlement and more likely to fight to decisive victory once conflict is underway, and that democratic leaders are more likely to be punished than autocrats for losing a war. Thus, the debate over the democratic advantage in winning interstate wars continues to progress in productive directions.

Theoretical arguments regarding civil war outcomes focus on state/rebel strength, positing that factors such as natural resource wealth, state military capacity, and third-party assistance influence relative combatant strength and war outcomes. Empirical studies find that increasing state military strength decreases the likelihood of negotiated settlement and increases the probability of government victory (Mason et al., 1999 ). Characteristics of the war itself also affect outcomes, with the probability of negotiated settlement increasing as war duration increases (Mason et al., 1999 ; Walter, 2002 ), and high casualty rates increasing the likelihood of rebel victory (Mason et al., 1999 ).

Debate remains over how third-party interventions affect civil war outcomes. UN intervention decreases the likelihood of victory by either side while increasing the probability of negotiated war terminations (DeRouen & Sobek, 2004 ). This impact is time sensitive, however (Mason et al., 1999 ). Further, the impact of unilateral interventions is less clear. While Regan ( 1996 ) found intervention supporting the government to increase the likelihood of war termination, Gent ( 2008 ) found military intervention in support of rebels to increase their chance of victory but that in support of governments to have no significant impact. More recent research by Sullivan and Karreth ( 2015 ) helps explain this discrepancy. They argued that biased intervention only alters the chances for victory by the supported side if that side’s key deficiency is conventional war-fighting capacity. Empirically, they show that because rebels are generally weaker, military intervention on their behalf increases their chance of victory. For states, however, military intervention only increases their odds of victory if the state is militarily weaker than or at parity with the rebels.

Additional new research by Jones ( 2017 ) also represents an important step forward in understanding the effects of intervention in civil war. By examining both the timing and strategy of intervention, Jones demonstrated that the effects of intervention on conflict outcomes are much more complex than previous research suggests.

Post-War Peace Durability

As with studies on war duration, termination, and outcomes, much of the literature on the stability of post-war peace grows from extensions of the bargaining model of war. For these scholars, recurrence is most likely under conditions that encourage the renegotiation of the terms of settlement, including postwar changes in the balance of power (Werner, 1999 ) and externally forced ceasefires that artificially terminate fighting before both sides agree on the proper allocation of the spoils of war (Werner & Yuen, 2005 ). Building off of commitment problem models, Fortna ( 2004b ) argued that strong peace agreements that enhance monitoring, incorporate punishment for defection, and reward cooperation help sustain peace. Specific measures within agreements, however, affect the durability of peace differently. For example, troop withdrawals and the establishment of demilitarized zones decrease the likelihood of war resumption, while arms control measures have no significant impact (Fortna, 2004b , p. 176).

Postwar intervention is also expected to increase peace duration by ameliorating commitment problems, as peacekeepers act as a physical barrier and reduce security fears, uncertainty, and misperceptions between former adversaries (Fortna, 2004a ). Empirical results support this theoretical prediction, and while the size of the force is not significant, both monitoring and armed forces missions increase the durability of post-war peace (Fortna, 2004a ).

The debate that remains in this literature is whether or not peace agreements can effectively mitigate the influence of relative power variables. Recent research by Lo, Hashimoto, and Reiter ( 2008 ) suggests that they cannot. They demonstrated that cease-fire agreement strength has almost no significant impact on post-war peace duration, while factors encouraging renegotiation receive partial support. While discrepancies in results may be in part attributable to differences in time periods covered, this result essentially confirms Warner and Yuen’s ( 2005 ) finding that externally imposed war termination invites resumption of conflict, regardless of the presence of strong cease-fire agreements.

If, at the end of a civil conflict, each side maintains its ability to wage war, issues of credibility can undermine the peace and cause the conflict to resume. Thus, wars ending in negotiated settlements are more likely to recur than those ending with a decisive victory because both sides have the ability to resume fighting to gain greater concessions and neither can credibly commit to the peace (Licklider,, 1995 ; Walter, 2002 ). More recent research confirms that conflicts ending in military victory are less likely to recur than those ending in settlement (Caplan & Hoeffler, 2017 ; Toft, 2009 ), though Toft suggested that this is particularly true for rebel victories.

This understanding of post-war peace in terms of the bargaining model’s commitment problem has led scholars to examine three primary avenues through which commitment problems might be overcome and peace maintained. First, partition has been advanced as a possible solution to post-war instability. The separation of warring factions is expected to reduce security fears by creating demographically separate, militarily defensible regions (Kaufmann, 1996 ). Empirical evidence generally supports this strategy. Partitions that successfully separate warring ethnic groups significantly reduce the risk of renewed conflict (Johnson, 2008 ), while those that do not achieve demographic separation increase the risk of renewed hostilities (Tir, 2005 ). Further, relative to de facto separation, autonomy arrangements, or maintenance of a unitary state, partition is significantly less likely to lead to war recurrence (Chapman & Roeder, 2007 ).

Second, third-party intervention is expected to play a role in ameliorating the security dilemma arising from commitment problems in post-conflict states (Fearon, 2004 ; Walter, 2002 ). Empirical results confirm that third-party security guarantees are critical to the signing and durability of peace settlements (Walter, 2002 ). Once settlement has been reached, third-party guarantees and international peacekeeping establish punishments for defection (Fortna, 2008 ; Walter, 2002 ), thereby reducing incentives for and increasing costs of renewed conflict. More recent research that employs more fine-grained data on the size and composition of UN peacekeeping forces suggests, however, that this type of third-party guarantee is most effective when it has the military power to enforce the peace. Specifically, Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon ( 2016 ) found that increasing UN troop presence increases peace durability, but the presence of other types of UN monitors has little effect on peace duration. By using more fine-grained data, this study makes an important contribution by allowing us to parse the mechanisms driving the role of third party guarantees in promoting peace.

Third, the incorporation of power-sharing arrangements that guarantee the survival of each side into the postwar settlement is also expected to solve post-civil war commitment problems (Walter, 2002 ). These arrangements allow adversaries to generate costly signals of their resolve to preserve the peace, thus ameliorating security fears (Hartzell & Hoddie, 2007 ). Empirical results indicate that given a negotiated settlement, the agreement’s ability to ameliorate security concerns is positively associated with the preservation of peace. Thus, the more regulation of coercive and political power included in an agreement, and the greater the number of dimensions (political, territorial, military, economic) of power sharing specified, the more likely agreements are to endure (Hartzell & Hoddie, 2007 ).

More recently, scholars have begun to extend this research by focusing more broadly on settlement design. Whereas previous research tended to simply count the number of power-sharing dimensions, newer analyses focus on issues such as the quality of the agreement (Badran, 2014 ) and equality in the terms of settlement (Albin & Druckman, 2012 ). Martin ( 2013 ), for example, found that provisions that share power at the executive level are less effective than those that regulate power at the level of rank-and-file or the public, as elite-level power-sharing is relatively easy for insincere actors to engage in at a relatively low cost. Cammett and Malesky ( 2012 ) found that proportional representation provisions are particularly effective at stabilizing post-conflict peace because of their ability to promote good governance and service provision, while Joshi and Mason ( 2011 ) similarly found that power-sharing provisions that expand the size of the governing coalition result in more stable peace. These analyses suggest that delving further into the design and content of settlement agreements is a positive avenue for future research. Future research should also examine how implementation of peace agreements proceeds, and how the timing and sequencing of implementation affects the durability of peace (e.g., Langer & Brown, 2016 ).

Finally, emerging research on civil war recurrence also shifts focus toward rebel groups and how their composition and integration affect post-conflict peace. For example, new research finds that rebel group fragmentation hastens the recurrence of civil war (Rudloff & Findley, 2016 ), while greater inclusion of former rebels in government improves prospects for post-conflict peace (Call, 2012 ; Marshall & Ishiyama, 2016 ). Emerging research on post-conflict elections also represents an important area for further study, as debate remains over how elections affect conflict recurrence. While some argue that they destabilize the peace (Flores & Nooruddin, 2012 ), others suggest they actually reduce the risk of conflict recurrence (Matanock, 2017 ).

The Longer-Term Consequences of Wars

What are the political, economic, and social consequences of interstate and civil wars, and what explains these postwar conditions? As Rasler and Thompson ( 1992 ) recognized, the consequences of war are often far-reaching and complex. Given this complexity, much of the literature varies significantly in quality and coverage; while post-war political change has received significant attention from political scientists, the social and health-related consequences of war are less well-known.

Post-War Domestic Political Stability and Change

Scholarship on post-war political stability focuses on both regime and leadership change, positing political accountability as a central mechanism in both cases. Interstate war has been theorized to induce internal revolution both indirectly (Skocpol, 1979 ) and directly (Bueno De Mesquita et al., 2003 ; Goemans, 2000 ). Empirical results support the accountability argument, as war losses and increasing costs of war increase the likelihood of post-war leadership turnover (Bueno De Mesquita & Siverson, 1995 ) as well as violent regime overthrow (Bueno De Mesquita, Siverson, & Woller, 1992 ). Related work shows that accountable leaders are also more likely to face foreign-imposed regime change at the hands of war victors (Bueno De Mesquita et al., 2003 ).

A central focus of recent research has been the conditional relationship between war outcomes and regime type. In his seminal study, Goemans, 2000 ) found that leaders of mixed and democratic regimes are more likely to be removed from office as a result of moderate losses in war than are leaders of autocracies. These findings, however, have been challenged by recent scholarship. Colaresi ( 2004 ) finds no difference in leadership turnover rates across all regimes types under conditions of moderate war losses, and Chiozza and Goemans ( 2004 ), employing a different measure of war outcomes and discounting the impact of termination over time, find that defeat in war is most costly for autocratic leaders and has no significant impact on tenure for democratic leaders.

Recently, research in the civil war literature has begun to focus more on post-war democratization, elections, and how groups transition from fighting forces to political parties. Much of the early work in this area focused on the link between war outcomes and the development of democratic institutions in the post-war period, specifically arguing that negotiated settlements facilitate democratization by requiring the inclusion of opposition groups in the decision-making process (Doyle & Sambanis, 2006 ; Gurses & Mason, 2008 ). More recent research, however, challenges this conventional wisdom, showing that the benefits of negotiated settlement are limited to the short-term and that economic factors are better predictors of post-war democratization (Fortna & Huang, 2012 ).

Recognizing that not all negotiated settlements are created equal, scholars have also begun to examine how variation in power-sharing provisions influences democratization. Debate remains on this topic as well, however. While some argue that power-sharing facilitates democratization by generating costly signals that create the stability necessary for democratization (Hoddie & Hartzell, 2005 ), others argue that they undermine democratization by reifying wartime cleavages, incentivizing political parties to seek support only from their own wartime constituencies, and undermining public confidence in governmental institutions (Jung, 2012 ). However, after accounting for non-random selection into power-sharing, Hartzell and Hoddie ( 2015 ) found that the inclusion of multiple power-sharing provisions in peace agreements increases post-civil war democratization. Future research should delve further into this debate, and consider more carefully whether specific types of provisions or institutional designs vary in their ability to promote democracy. Joshi ( 2013 ) represents an important first step in this direction, finding that institutional designs that favor inclusivity (e.g., parliamentary systems and proportional representation) are more successful at producing democracy.

Debate also continues over the effects of international intervention on post-conflict democratization. While some scholars expect intervention to facilitate postwar democratization by mitigating commitment problems and raising the costs of defection (Doyle & Sambanis, 2006 ), others suggest it is used as a tool by interveners to impose amenable, generally non-democratic, institutions in the target country (Bueno De Mesquita & Downs, 2006 ). Doyle and Sambanis ( 2006 ) found multidimensional UN missions incorporating economic reconstruction, institutional reform, and election oversight, to be significantly and positively correlated with the development of postwar democracy. However, Gurses and Mason ( 2008 ) and Fortna and Huang ( 2012 ) challenged this finding, reporting no significant relationship between UN presence and postwar democratization, and Paris ( 2004 ) and Bueno de Mesquita and Downs ( 2006 ) showed that peacebuilding missions and UN interventions actually decrease levels of democracy.

Future research should attempt to reconcile many of these open debates in both the interstate and civil conflict literatures. It should also build upon emerging research on post-conflict elections (Flores & Nooruddin, 2012 ; Matanock, 2017 ) and rebel governance (Huang, 2016 ). Huang’s work on rebel governance, in particular, shows that how rebels interact with civilian populations during conflict has important implications for post-conflict democratization.

Public Health Conditions in the Aftermath of Wars

Social scientists have recently begun to study the consequences of war for the postwar health and well-being of civilian populations. Theoretical arguments developed in this literature generally do not distinguish between interstate and civil war, instead developing mechanisms that apply to both types of conflict. The most direct public health consequence of war, of course, results from the killing and wounding of civilian populations. Scholars argue, however, that more indirect mechanisms cause longer-term public health problems as well. War, for example, is expected to undermine long-term public health by exposing populations to hazardous conditions through the movement of refugees and soldiers as vectors for disease (Ghobarah, Huth, & Russett, 2003 ; Iqbal, 2006 ), damaging health-related facilities and basic infrastructure (Li & Wen, 2005 ; Plümper & Neumayer, 2006 ), and reducing government spending and private investment on public health (Ghobarah et al., 2003 ).

Many empirical analyses, unfortunately, do not directly address the mechanisms outlined above. Overall, findings indicate that both civil and interstate war increase adult mortality in the short and long term (Li & Wen, 2005 ) and decrease health-adjusted life-expectancy in the short term (Iqbal, 2006 ). Conflict severity is also influential; while low-level conflict has no significant effect on mortality rates, severe conflict increases mortality and decreases life-expectancy in the long run (Li & Wen, 2005 ; Hoddie & Smith, 2009 ; Iqbal, 2006 ). Comparing the health impacts of interstate and civil wars, analysts have found interstate conflict to exert a stronger, negative impact on long-term mortality rates than civil war, despite the finding that civil war’s immediate impact is more severe (Li & Wen, 2005 ). Finally, many analysts have found that the negative, long-term effects of war are consistently stronger for women and children (Ghobarah, et al., 2003 ; Plümper & Neumayer ( 2006 ) than for men.

This developing field provides important new insights into the civilian consequences of war, but remains underdeveloped in many respects. First, while some evidence suggests that civil and interstate war might affect public health differently, the mechanisms behind these differences require further elaboration. Research by Hoddie and Smith, represented an important contribution in this respect, as it distinguishes between different conflict strategies, finding that conflicts involving extensive violence against noncombatants have more severe health consequences than those in which most fatalities are combat-related. Second, theoretical models are generally much more developed and sophisticated than the data used to test them. While data availability is limited, efforts should be made to more closely match theory and empirics.

Third, analyses that employ disaggregated measures of health consequences (Ghobarah et al., 2003 ) provided a more thorough understanding of the specific consequences of war and represent an important avenue for additional theoretical and empirical development. Iqbal and Zorn ( 2010 ) thus focus specifically on conflict’s detrimental impact on the transmission of HIV/AIDS, while Iqbal ( 2010 ) examines the impact of conflict on many different health-based metrics, including infant mortality, health-associated life expectancy, fertility rates, and even measles and diphtheria vaccination rates. These studies represent important advances in the literature, which should be explored further in future research to disentangle the potentially complex health effects of civil and interstate conflict.

Finally, recent research has begun to conceptualize health more broadly, accounting for the psychological consequences of wartime violence. Building upon research in psychology, Koos ( 2018 ) finds that exposure to conflict-related sexual violence in Sierra Leone generates resilience: affected households display greater cooperation and altruism than those unaffected by such violence during conflict. Bauer et al. ( 2016 ) similarly find that conflict fosters greater social cohesion and civic engagement in the aftermath of war. This is an important area for future research. As conceptions of conflict-related violence broaden, our conceptualizations of the consequences of violence should also expand to include notions of how conflict affects psychological health, community cohesion, and other less direct indicators of public health.

This final section highlights some of the contributions generated by scholarship on the conduct and consequences of war, as well as some of the gaps that remain to be addressed. First, this body of scholarship usefully compliments the large and more traditional work of military historians who study international wars, as well as the work of contemporary defense analysts who conduct careful policy analyses on relevant issues such as wartime military tactics and strategy as well as weapon system performance. The bargaining model of war has also proven a useful theoretical framework in which to structure and integrate theoretical analyses across different stages in the evolution of war.

Second, a number of studies in this body of work have contributed to the further development and testing of the democratic peace literature by extending the logic of political accountability models from questions of war onset to democratic wartime behavior. New dependent variables, including civilian targeting, imposition of regime change, the waging of war in ways designed to reduce military and civilian losses, and victory versus defeat in war have been analyzed. As a result, a number of new arguments and empirical findings have improved our understanding of how major security policy decisions by democratic leaders are influenced by domestic politics.

Third, this literature has advanced scholarship on international law and institutions by examining questions about compliance with the laws of war and the role played by the UN in terminating wars and maintaining a durable post-war peace. The impact of international law and institutions is much better understood on issues relating to international political economy, human rights, and international environmental governance than it is on international security affairs. As a result, studies of compliance with the laws of war, the design of ceasefire agreements, or international peace-building efforts address major gaps in existing literature.

Fourth, this new body of research has explicitly focused on the consequences of war for civilian populations, a relatively neglected topic in academic research. Research on questions such as the deliberate targeting of civilians during wars and the longer-term health consequences of war begin to address this surprising gap in research. As such, this new literature subjects the study of terrorism to more systematic social science methods and also challenges the common practice of restricting terrorism to non-state actors and groups when, in fact, governments have resorted to terrorist attacks on many occasions in the waging of war.

While this literature has advanced scholarship in many ways, there remain several theoretical and empirical gaps that future research should aim to address, two of which are highlighted here. First, while research on interstate war duration and termination is more theoretically unified than its civil war counterpart, the dominance of the bargaining model in this literature is currently being challenged. Recent research on asymmetric conflict suggests that the basic tenants of the bargaining model may not hold for non-symmetric conflict, while research on force employment and mechanization suggest that traditional power measures exert a conditional impact at best. Additional research is needed to determine the conditions under which bargaining logic applies and its relative importance in explaining wartime behavior and war outcomes.

Second, the accumulation of knowledge on civil war’s conduct and consequences has lagged behind that on interstate war, partially because the civil war literature is younger, and partially because sub-national level data is only now becoming more readily available. While bargaining logic is often applied to civil war, we have little cross-national information on relative capabilities and battle trends, and thus a very limited understanding of the way in which these variables affect civil war duration and outcomes. New micro-level data and studies that are beginning to address these problems represent a promising direction forward for civil conflict research.

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• Published: 12 December 2023

The effects of war on Ukrainian research

• Gaétan de Rassenfosse   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7862-0918 1 ,
• Tetiana Murovana 1 , 2 &
• Wolf-Hendrik Uhlbach 1  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  10 , Article number:  856 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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The ongoing war in Ukraine has profoundly impacted the Ukrainian scientific community. Numerous researchers have either emigrated or transitioned to alternate professions. For those who remain in research, the destruction of civil infrastructure and psychological stress may dramatically slow down research progress. There is limited knowledge concerning the war’s influence on Ukrainian research. This study presents the results of a representative survey of over 2500 Ukrainian scientists. The data suggest that by the Fall of 2022, about 18.5% of the population of Ukrainian scientists fled the country. Notably, these emigrant scientists were amongst the most research-active in Ukraine. However, a significant portion of these migrant scientists are under precarious contracts at their host institutions. Of the scientists who stayed in Ukraine, about 15% have left research, and the others experience a marked reduction in research time. A large number of stayers have lost access to critical input for their research (23.5%) or cannot physically access their institution (20.8%). Finally, should the war stop today, it seems that Ukraine has already lost about seven percent of its scientists. These observations bear significant policy implications. In light of the vulnerable position of migrant scientists, the provision of more and longer scholarships emerges as a paramount concern for this group of scientists. Concerning stayers, institutions across Europe and beyond can offer a host of support programs, such as remote visiting programs, access to digital libraries and computing resources, as well as collaborative research grants.

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Introduction.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, has killed many civilians, caused massive displacements of the population, and destroyed infrastructure to a significant extent. According to the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, Russia fired half its stockpile of missiles in the first 9 months of the war, resulting in severe civilian casualties. Footnote 1 Furthermore, in early 2023, about 18% of the population, or eight million people, have taken shelter in Europe, and a sizable share of the population has relocated to safer regions in Ukraine (UNHCR Operational Data Portal, 2022a ).

The full-scale war (the ‘war’ in the remainder of the paper) is disrupting many sectors of activity. The Ukrainian science sector is no exception, with universities’ closure—or destruction—and the career change, temporary or permanent, and escape of Ukrainian scientists (Stone, 2022a ). History is rich with accounts of the mass fleeing of scientists, and economists have sought to quantify the impact these events had on innovation in the host countries (Borjas & Doran, 2012 , 2015 ; Moser et al., 2014 ; Ganguli, 2015a ). The skills and tacit knowledge brought by migrants are generally seen as beneficial to the host countries (e.g., Saxenian, 2000 ; Franzoni et al., 2014 ), feeding the narrative of immigrant-friendly policies. Some observers of the current situation have called for hosting programs for refugee scientists and other active support measures for scientists staying in Ukraine (Duszyński et al., 2022 ; Kondratov et al., 2022 ; Maryl et al., 2022 ; Chhugani et al., 2022 ). Others have discussed how the war has affected collaborative research programs involving Russia (Stone, 2022b ; Witze, 2022 ; Wojcik et al., 2022 ), noting a tendency towards reduced collaboration. The European Commission predicts that Russia “is likely to be severely hit” by the discontinuation of scientific partnerships with the EU and other countries (Ravet et al., 2022 ).

In the present paper, we seek to quantify critical parameters reflecting the extent to which the war has hit the Ukrainian scientific community. These include the extent of the ‘brain drain’ and other measures related to the research time and conditions of Ukrainian scientists, who either stayed in Ukraine or migrated to safer places. We report the results of a representative online survey of 2559 scientists conducted between 21 September and 8 December 2022. The target population includes research-active employees of higher education institutions (HEIs) and public research organizations (PROs) who worked in Ukraine when the war struck.

Related literature

The scientific human capital of countries is an essential factor for long-run competitiveness and growth. However, human capital is mobile, and extreme events, such as wars, economic downturns, and natural disasters, often prompt talented individuals to relocate to places offering greater safety and more attractive conditions. If sustained, this trend can have lasting effects on the home country (e.g., Gibson & McKenzie, 2011 ), a phenomenon known as the ‘brain drain’ in the literature (e.g., Docqier & Rapoport, 2012 ).

An important dimension of such brain drain that received much attention from prior research is the emigration of scientists (e.g., Ganguli, 2014 ). Especially in times of war, leaving the country might be an appealing option for residents of that country, including scientists. However, not everyone has equal opportunities to emigrate, with more gifted individuals having more options than others (Ganguli, 2015b ). Thus, it is likely that in times of disruption and war, countries lose their most productive scientists at a higher rate.

There is ample evidence suggesting that emigrant scientists can benefit professionally from migration. Such instances can facilitate learning and access to new knowledge and resources and have been associated with higher productivity after moving (Franzoni et al., 2014 ; Pellegrino et al., 2023 ). However, the extent to which such positive effects can unfold ultimately hinges upon the environments and opportunities migrant scientists face (Kahn & MacGarvie, 2016 ; Gaulé, 2014 ). In the context of refugee scientists, it is conceivable that emigrating scientists are willing to accept sub-optimal conditions outside academia or in research environments that do not fully suit their expertise. Further, given the temporary nature of such arrangements, not all scientists might be integrated into the local research environment.

The net effect of the emigration of scientists to home countries is similarly ambiguous. On the one hand, emigration hurts the departed country. Losing its most productive scientists is not only a loss in itself for the country, but it may also harm the productivity of local collaborators (Azoulay et al., 2010 ; Jaravel et al., 2018 ) and the training and mentoring of future generations of scientists (Ganguli, 2014 ). On the other hand, the literature has identified some positive effects. First, internationally mobile scientists can act as ‘bridges,’ contributing to the creation of international networks and giving scientists in their home countries access to knowledge, resources, and collaborators (Fry, 2023 ; Agrawal et al., 2011 ; Scellato et al., 2017 ; Kerr, 2008 ). Furthermore, if emigration remains temporary, returning scientists can contribute to the diffusion of knowledge, know-how, and scientific practices, which can also benefit scientists who stayed in their home countries (Jonkers & Cruz-Castro, 2013 ; Scellato et al., 2017 ; Saxenian, 2000 ; Wang, 2015 ). Thus, a country’s ability to benefit from the emigration of scientists depends on whether those scientists maintain ties to local scientists or eventually return.

Given high-skilled emigration’s profound policy implications, the topic has received a great deal of attention from prior research. However, we know comparatively little about how stayers fare in times of war. Scientists remaining in their home countries are affected by war in a multitude of ways that have been poorly documented. In an extreme context such as war, the physical and psychological burden for those who remain might be particularly brutal. A number of studies focus on how workers, such as soldiers and doctors, suffer from being deployed in war zones (De Rond & Lok, 2016 ; Hällgren et al., 2018 ). This evidence points to the fact that exposure to, or direct involvement in, the war causes stress and trauma and might make it impossible to conduct research.

There might also be additional effects on stayers. The destruction of infrastructure and resources might prevent scientists from accessing their lab or necessary materials, severely impeding scientific progress. Power outages and air raid alerts might also disrupt research. Furthermore, scientists might direct their attention away from research to deal with the consequences of the war. This could entail, for instance, internal migration to safer regions, increased responsibility to take care of family members, a greater focus on other income-generating activities, such as activities outside of academia, or a patriotic call to help the country in other ways, including enrolling in civil services or the military.

The Ukrainian scientific context

In Ukraine, as in many other former states of the Soviet Union, research and higher education were organized in separate institutions. Traditionally, basic research was conducted exclusively at the National Academies of Sciences, and universities did not conduct any research but solely focused on education (Balazs et al., 1995 ). With the post-soviet transformation and greater need for international recognition, incentives and pressures for university scientists to conduct research have increased (e.g., Shaw, 2013 ). Despite these changes, teaching remains the main activity, and the remuneration of academics is primarily based on their teaching load (Shaw, 2013 ). Further, the National Academies of Sciences remain essential for basic research (Balazs et al., 1995 ). Scientists can achieve different levels of post-graduate education, starting with a candidate of sciences degree (equivalent to a Ph.D.) and a doctor of sciences (Sc.D.) being the highest degree. Determining the precise number of research-active scientists is a challenging task. Reported numbers vary between 41,000 full-time equivalents in 2018 and 110,000 researchers in 2020 (State Statistics Service of Ukraine, 2020 ).

According to information provided by the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine ( 2023 ), as of July 2023, 74 out of ~300 universities were damaged or destroyed. About 51% of these are in the Eastern regions, and an additional 27% are in the South.

Since the beginning of the war, international support for Ukrainian scientists has been large and covered both movers and stayers. On the one hand, foreign governments, institutions, universities, and individual scientists offered Ukrainian scientists hosting arrangements (including, e.g., research grants and visiting positions), and initiatives to facilitate the discovery of such opportunities popped up, such as Science4Ukraine and through the ERA4Ukraine platform. On the other hand, initiatives to support scientists remaining in Ukraine have been proposed (Chhugani et al., 2022 ), for instance, through mentoring programs (e.g., the EURAXESS virtual mentoring program ‘Shape the future of a Researcher coming to Europe’) or collaborative research grants (National Research Foundation of Ukraine 2022 , EURAXESS Bulgaria, 2023 ). In our view, however, although we cannot conclusively assert it, the bulk of the initiatives concern migrants, with support for stayers being less frequent or at least not as visible as for migrants.

Prior studies assessing the effects of war on Ukrainian scientists

Assessing the extent to which the war affects Ukrainian scientists and their research efforts is not trivial. A number of surveys have been conducted for various purposes and targeting various sub-populations. For instance, the initiative UAScience.reload ( 2022 ) conducted several surveys on Ukrainian scientists. In responses they received in spring 2022, they found that ~14.7% of scientists were outside Ukraine. For their second wave, conducted in fall 2022, they report a similar number of 12% (out of 1729 total respondents), see UAScience.reload ( 2023 ). In another survey, Maryl et al. ( 2022 ) aim to understand better the situation of Ukrainian scientists abroad. They collected 619 responses and reported that most scientists maintained their activities at their Ukrainian home institution, often with no or reduced salaries. They further find that over half of scientists abroad are affiliated with a foreign institution, mainly through temporary arrangements. Based on a bibliographic analysis of scientists with a pre-war Ukrainian affiliation, Ganguli and Waldinger ( 2023 ) find that ~5% of the most prolific scientists have started publishing with a foreign affiliation and that the number of papers published by Ukrainian scientists has decreased by ~10% compared to the pre-war level.

Survey design

To address the research questions, we conducted a survey that we distributed in four distinct waves from 21 September to 8 December, 2022. The survey follows the same structure in all waves. It starts with asking for the respondent’s consent and proceeds with two filtering questions, ensuring the participants belong to the target population. Of the 3231 initial respondents, 413 were not employed by a Ukrainian HEI or PRO at the start of the war. Another 259 respondents spent less than 3 hours per week on research activities on average over the last three years before the start of the war. The Supplementary Material presents the survey flow and the detailed list of questions.

Wave 1 forms the bulk of the final sample. It targets a random selection of 6996 scientists affiliated with a Ukrainian scientific institution who published at least one paper listed in the Web of Science or Scopus databases between 2011 and 2021. Following prior studies (e.g., Franzoni et al., 2012 ), we collected contact details for survey participants from publicly disclosed email addresses listed in scientific publications. We obtained 1188 answers (before filtering), leading to an adjusted response rate of 19.3% (829 undeliverable emails). This figure is on the low end of other online surveys of scientists (Crespi et al., 2011 ; Franzoni et al., 2012 ; Baruffaldi & Landoni, 2012 ; Sauermann & Roach, 2014 ), probably owing to the challenging situations survey participants face. We have been able to infer the gender, region, and prolificacy of most sampled scientists, allowing us to perform a non-response analysis (see Supplementary Material).

Wave 2 reaches Ukrainian scientists through their universities. We sent an email to the corporate email addresses of all universities in the country using a list provided by the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine. We also selected the top 100 universities and manually searched for contact details of their faculties or schools, institutes, departments, and chairs (Osvita 2022 ). Wave 3 reaches scientists through social media platforms (Facebook Messenger, LinkedIn, Telegram, Viber, and WhatsApp) and communication by the National Research Foundation of Ukraine. Finally, we disseminated Wave 4 through a mailing to Ukrainian email addresses gathered by a collective of Ukrainian scientists from scientific publications.

In contrast to Wave 1, Waves 2–4 were also allowed to be distributed through referrals. We encouraged target participants to forward the survey invitation to colleagues so that the response rate is irrelevant for these Waves. Besides, given the ad-hoc sampling in these Waves and the lack of information on non-respondents, we have no sound basis to perform non-response analyses. Table S1 and the Supplementary Material present additional information on the data sources for each wave. Figure S1 depicts the number of responses received each week for each wave, and Table S2 summarizes the main characteristics of respondents by wave. As can be seen, the majority of the responses were collected in a narrow time window of five weeks.

Representativeness of the survey

The four waves reach the target population through different networks and channels. A sampling strategy of this sort ensures a broad coverage of the population of interest in such a difficult situation. However, it calls for sampling adjustments to match the population’s key characteristics.

Sampling weights

We assess how our final sample’s characteristics compare with the population of Ukrainian scientists. As shown in Table S2 , we slightly oversampled Female scientists, who represent 55% of the population of Ukrainian scientists but 62.1% of the sample. It further becomes evident that we under-sampled the extreme age groups, i.e., scientists below 30 and above 64 years old, but oversampled scientists between 30 and 59 years old. These age differences are likely a consequence of the sampling strategy, which targeted publishing and research-active scientists—hence, it is not clear that they represent a ‘bias’ in the statistical sense. Furthermore, we under-sampled Associate professors but oversampled Professors and Senior Researchers. The categories available in the survey were finer-grained than those we found in official statistics. We allocated our categories to those in the official statistics following the rules set out in Table S4 .

To assess the distribution of respondents across regions, we assign the home region of respondents based on the name of the home affiliation they voluntarily provided to us. As most affiliation names were in Ukrainian, and many were abbreviated, we manually assigned the official institution name as provided by official sources, which also contains the Oblast in which the institution is located (Unified State Electronic Database on Education 2022 ). Figure S4 suggests that researchers from the center, particularly the capital city, are disproportionately represented in our sample. The map in Figure S5 shows the distribution of respondents across regions. Although we collected responses from all Ukrainian regions (except Crimea and Sevastopol), we note that responses spread unevenly. Around 50% of respondents come from Kyiv City and the regions of Kharkiv and Lviv. Only a few, and somewhat fewer than expected, come from the Kirovohrad, Luhansk, and Chernihiv regions.

Finally, social scientists are over-represented among our respondents, whereas Physical scientists are under-represented. The main reference numbers for the population used in Table S2 are those extracted from publishing authors between 2019–2021 based on the subject codes assigned to their publications. We fractionally allocate the 71,204 unique authors, defined by the author ID assigned by Scopus, to the scientific fields they pertain to. Footnote 2

The above analyses reveal systematic differences between the sample at hand and the population along several characteristics. Further biases might arise from attrition, multiple responses, and non-responses (see supplementary material ‘Assessing Representativeness’ for a detailed discussion). Should these characteristics correlate with the extent to which individuals are affected by the war, sampling adjustments are required to derive population-level estimates from our sample. To alleviate this concern, we compute post-stratification weights following the method in DeBell & Krosnick ( 2009 ), as implemented in the R package ‘anesrake.’ This package implements an iterative process to match the proportions in the sample to the proportions in the target population for multiple characteristics. As the size and composition of sub-samples vary, depending on the variable of interest, we recompute the weights for each analysis. We do not compute sampling weights for the specific analyses on the sub-samples of stayers and emigrants since the population of interest is no longer the full population of Ukrainian scientists. To illustrate attrition in the sub-samples, we include missing responses as an additional category.

The validity of our statistical approach rests on two main assumptions. The sampling weights only account for bias if (1) they include all relevant observable characteristics (i.e., affecting response rate and correlated with the outcome of interest), and (2) there are no other omitted relevant unobservable characteristics (e.g., scientists in distress or cities that were particularly hit by the war may be less likely to respond and also be more affected by the war). Given that the scientists most affected by the war are less likely to respond to the survey, our estimates on how the war affects individual scientists are likely to be conservative.

Survey results

In what follows, we will first focus on the most relevant population-wide outcomes, namely emigration, together with changes in time dedicated to research and occupational mobility. We will then zoom in on two distinct sub-populations, emigrants and stayers, and assess how the war affects them.

Population-wide effects

We first assess scientists’ emigration rate from Ukraine and whether certain groups of scientists were systematically more likely to emigrate. We estimate that 18.5% of scientists have left the country since the start of the war (Fig. 1A ). This 18.5% figure is surprisingly close to that estimated by the UNHCR for the whole Ukrainian population at the time of the survey (UNHCR Operational Data Portal 2022b ). It suggests that scientists are not more likely than the rest of the population to leave the country. Indeed, the mass migration of Ukrainians at all skill levels has already been observed by the UNHCR (UNHCR Operational Data Portal 2023 ). In normal times, the barriers to migration are purposefully more porous for high-skilled migrants. In times of war, however, these barriers are considerably lifted, allowing all socio-economic categories to migrate—at least those with financial means to flee the country. In that sense, similar emigration rates for scientists and Ukrainians as a whole are not necessarily surprising. However, this finding is interesting in its own right and does provide an external validation of our study design.

This figure shows the coefficients and the 90% and 95% confidence intervals of linear probability models predicting an individual’s likelihood to leave Ukraine ( A ) or academia ( B ) based on a number of demographic characteristics. * in panel A indicates that the variable is not included in the regression model.

The multivariate regression results in Fig. 1A investigate individual-level characteristics correlating with migration. They suggest that the most productive and research-active scientists left the country at a higher rate. In particular, scientists who spent more than 20 hours per week conducting research, scientists among the top ten percent most prolific, and scientists with the highest degrees (Ph.D. or Sc.D.) were significantly more likely to leave Ukraine compared to the other scientists (8%, 12%, and 11% higher, respectively). An F-test confirms that these indicators of research activity are jointly statistically significant ( F  = 7.417).

Female scientists’ probability of leaving the country was also higher (5%, significant at the 10% probability threshold), with about 74% of the movers being female (not reported). In principle, men aged 18–60 were restricted from leaving the country, making it surprising to observe male migrant scientists. However, there were specific exemptions in place. For instance, male scientists were permitted to undertake brief journeys for conferences and research collaborations. Exceptions also extended to foreign students, individuals with disabilities, single fathers, and those who have three or more children. Footnote 3 The 74% figure is the combined effect of an overrepresentation of females among Ukrainian scientists and a greater likelihood of females leaving the country than men. We note that it is ten percentage points below the 85% figure reported by the UNHCR for the Ukrainian population (UNHCR Operational Data Portal 2022c ).

Another way the war affects Ukrainian research is that scientists spend less time conducting research or entirely leave academia. We estimate that 17.6% of surveyed scientists (migrants or not) are no longer in academia or research. Having left Ukraine significantly correlates with the probability of leaving academia or research (Fig. 1B ). Scientists who left the country were 17% more likely to leave academia or research than non-migrants. Scientists from the South and East regions, close to the border with Russia, were also significantly more likely to leave academia or research than scientists from the other regions. However, they were not more likely to leave the country. This result can likely be explained by the fact that the war particularly affected these regions. We shed additional light on this issue in the section ‘ Situation of scientists remaining in Ukraine .’

Turning now to the time that Ukrainian scientists spend on research, at home or abroad, we estimate that Ukraine has lost about 20% of its research capacity. The time the ‘representative’ scientist spends on research went from 13 hours before the war to about 10 hours since the war (Fig. 2A ). Footnote 4 The contraction in research activity is not as severe as in economic activity. The Ukrainian Central Bank reported that the GDP fell by 29.1% in 2022 (Reuters 2023 ). However, the numbers are silent on the qualitative change that may have taken place. Some surveyed scientists noted that it is “psychologically difficult for everyone to work,” implying that research hours may not be as productive as before the war. Other scientists, by contrast, reported “escaping into writing articles to abstract [oneself] from terrible realities.” Furthermore, we cannot exclude the possibility that some scientists find themselves in better conditions to conduct research at home or abroad.

Distribution of the number of hours per week allocated to research before and during the war ( A ).

Situation of emigrant scientists

As just established, the most productive and research-active scientists left the country at a higher rate. It is, therefore, of particular interest to shed more light on their situation, their potential to further develop their scientific human and social capital, and their willingness to return. Many scholars account that temporary migration can be beneficial for home countries thanks to ‘reverse spillovers’ (e.g., Docquier & Rapoport, 2012 ). For these spillovers to happen, however, emigrant scientists need to be in situations where they can develop their scientific capabilities and continue conducting academic research.

Over 75% of scientists actively engage with scientists at their host institution. At the time of the survey, close to 30% went as far as submitting a paper to a peer-reviewed journal or a conference proceeding (not reported). As shown in Fig. S6A , most scientists reported experiencing novelty in various forms, such as exposure to new ideas, tools, methods, and data. For example, 64% of scientists reported being exposed to new ideas to a large or very large extent. This result can partly be explained by the fact that 25–40% of scientists spend more than 10% of their research time in an entirely new field (not reported).

We view exposure to novelty as an opportunity unless it reveals a skill mismatch. Such mismatches are a legitimate concern as hosting arrangements did not primarily prioritize research fit. To further probe this topic, we have asked scientists about the perceived effect of the stay abroad. An overwhelming majority of scientists (87%) believe their stay at the host institution will improve their scientific abilities, see Fig. S6B . This finding aligns with previous research that shows increased productivity for migrant scientists and inventors in other settings (Franzoni et al., 2014 ; Pellegrino et al., 2023 ). Should scientists return to Ukraine after the war, returnees may present an opportunity to lift Ukrainian research.

Despite this favorable perception, most migrant scientists are under precarious contracts. About 58% of them were (or were to be) affiliated with an HEI or PRO (Fig. 3A ). Among those, 89% have secured a contract, including a formal employment contract (29%), a paid visiting scientist position (15%), or a scholarship (45%) as reported in Fig. 3B . However, only a fraction of these contracts lasted more than one year (26%, not reported). Thus, at the time of the survey, a mere 14% of migrant scientists had secured a long-term contract in an academic host institution. This heterogeneity of arrangements and prevalence of short-term contracts align with the unpreparedness of many host countries and can be attributed to the uncertainty surrounding the duration of the war.

Type of institutions hosting migrant scientists ( A ) and type of agreement for migrant scientists hosted by an HEI or PRO ( B ).

Furthermore, not all migrant scientists planned to return to Ukraine after the war, as Fig. 4A suggests. We estimate that ~2.5% of the total mass of Ukrainian scientists may not return to Ukraine. Footnote 5 However, we do not find evidence that the willingness to return differs systematically between highly productive and less productive scientists (t-stat = −0.78, p value = 0.44, not reported).

Self-reported likelihood that migrant scientists return to Ukraine ( A ) and distribution of the changes in their interactions with various groups of Ukrainian scientists ( B ). 1.4% missing in B third bar.

Additionally, migrant scientists declare to interact less with their fellow Ukrainian colleagues than before the war (Fig. 4B ). This disconnection is strongest with scientists in Ukraine but is also visible with Ukrainian scientists in the host or other countries. The separation of the diaspora of Ukrainian scientists is likely to aggravate as the war lingers, making it more difficult to ‘reconnect’ after the war.

Situation of scientists remaining in Ukraine

We now turn to scientists who remained in Ukraine, the ‘overlooked majority’ of Ukrainian scientists. Some scientists reported staying in Ukraine to “help the armed forces.” One scientist declared having enrolled in the army “as a genetic fingerprinting specialist.” Another shared that he can use his “knowledge and professional skills [… to help his country…] more effectively […] outside of teaching and scientific work.”

As the excerpts suggest, stayers may not be conducting research to the same extent as before. About 40% of stayers indicated to conduct less research than before the war. Note that this finding is likely an underestimation of the true value, as the survey only allowed the selection of categories of research time (i.e., up to 3 hours, 3–5 hours, 5–10 hours, 10–20 hours, more than 20 hours), and changes within categories remain unobserved. Multivariate regressions (Ordered Logit Models, see Fig. 5 ) reveal some heterogeneity in changes in research time. They suggest that the most productive scientists and those working at the National Academies of Sciences were better able to maintain their research time. In contrast, controlling for productivity, the more research-active scientists, i.e., those who spent more than 20 hours per week doing research before the war, are more likely to report a significant decline in their research time, see Fig. 5 .

Results of an ordered logit regression on the extent of reduction in research. The outcome variable consists of five categories that indicate category changes in research time, where no change and an increase in research time were combined as the baseline category ( A ).

A sizeable proportion of scientists in our sample indicated to have stopped conducting research altogether (10.1%) or reduced their research time to below three hours per week (18.6%), our threshold for defining non-research-active scientists. Some scientists also indicated a more significant occupational change. A total of 15.3% of stayers indicated to have left academia altogether. The most research-active, as well as more senior researchers, were amongst the most likely to leave academia. However, one should interpret this finding cautiously, as respondents might have different perceptions of what ‘leaving academia’ means, particularly for those working at a public research institution (see Table S9 ).

Scientists who remain in Ukraine are much more likely to be exposed to life-threatening situations and challenged to find ways to mitigate these consequences. One way is to move to safer places within Ukraine. We estimate that 19.9% of stayers did so. Furthermore, note that, sometimes, research is not feasible even though resources have not been destroyed and access remains. Ukraine’s power plants and electricity grid were the target of regular, massive shelling campaigns (Center for Eastern Studies, 2023 ). As one respondent explains, “Blackouts and bombing almost totally blocked the realization of the complex experimental protocols to study the nonlinear optical response of smart nanocomposites.” A total of 23.5% of stayers report that they no longer have access to important inputs to their research (Fig. 6 B). However, even though resources may be intact, 20.7% of stayers can no longer access their research institution in its original location. Of these, for 14.5%, access is only possible online, and for 4.2%, the institution itself has been relocated (Fig. 6 A). A set of multivariate regressions reported in Table S9 suggests that scientists in the East and South regions were more likely to experience that situation but that there are otherwise no statistically significant differences across other demographic dimensions.

Type of access to Ukrainian institution ( A ) and type of access to research inputs ( B ).

Concluding remarks

The study highlights the effects of the war on Ukrainian research, based on a survey conducted between September 21 and December 8, 2022. We estimate that by the Fall of 2022, ~18.5% of the population of Ukrainian scientists fled the country. The findings further suggest that the most research-active Ukrainian scientists were among the most likely to leave the country. Measured in terms of time dedicated to research, we find that Ukraine has lost about a fifth of its research capacity. Besides these immediate effects, the current situation will also have long-term consequences. Science is fast-paced and competitive, and returning to scientific activities after the war may be challenging. Assuming that half of those who put aside their academic activities will not come back to science, our results suggest that Ukraine has already lost roughly seven percent of its scientists as a direct consequence of the war. Footnote 6 Furthermore, as most research-active scientists leave the country, this brain drain will likely result in a ‘lost generation’ of Ph.D. students who will lack mentors and are already facing challenges due to interruptions caused by the war.

It is, however, important to note that this survey can only provide a snapshot of the complex situation faced by Ukrainian scientists, shaped by the context at the time of data collection. This caveat is particularly relevant considering questions aimed at capturing intentions, for instance, the intention to return. Follow-up surveys are needed to provide more insights about the long-term effects of the war on science in Ukraine and shed more light on the situations of scientists at home and abroad. Furthermore, even though we go to great lengths to ensure the representativeness of the survey, responses should always be interpreted bearing potential non-response bias in mind. Finally, we have left many other important dimensions aside, not least the psychological effects of the war due to the constraints imposed by a survey research design.

A competitive science sector is an essential component of a modern nation. Foreign policymakers can help prevent further deterioration of Ukraine’s science sector and plant the seeds of its renewal. Given the precarious conditions of migrant scientists, offering more and longer scholarships seems to be the number one priority for this group of scientists. Taking as a benchmark the contribution of the European Commission for a postdoctoral fellowship under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action (MSCA), we estimate that the funding need is in the ballpark of €700 million per year. Footnote 7 By hosting Ukrainian scientists, Europe allows them to keep abreast of scientific advances and provides them an opportunity to lift their research skills. Providing temporary academic shelter for Ukrainian scientists also helps them remain in the global scientific community, minimizing further losses to the Ukrainian science sector as the war continues.

However, such arrangements are unlikely to convert into long-term opportunities for migrant scientists. Obtaining positions in European scientific institutions was challenging enough before the war, and the influx of Ukrainian scientists puts pressure on an already underfunded and competitive system. Hence, it is unlikely that host countries’ scientific institutions will offer enough long-term, stable prospects.

Although a significant focus has been put on migrant scientists, policy measures should not neglect scientists who remained in Ukraine. As a significant proportion of these scientists have lost access to their institutions and primary research inputs, measures should be considered to facilitate the continuation of research. These measures include remote visiting programs, access to online libraries and computing resources, or joint research grants. In light of the finding that migrant scientists seem to be slowly losing contact with their fellow Ukrainian colleagues, such programs also have the benefit of maintaining ties and fostering knowledge exchange between Ukrainian scientists.

Additionally, providing funding for encouraging returnees may also be beneficial when the war has ended. As our study shows, migrant scientists are being exposed to new knowledge and methods, which the country may need for its reconstruction. Furthermore, assuming that university funding will still be tied to teaching activities in post-war Ukraine, encouraging students to return to universities in Ukraine will also create more possibilities for Ukrainian scientists to return.

The war in Ukraine has caused disruptions in the scientific community, but with determined effort and concrete measures, we are hopeful that a brighter future for science can be achieved.

Data and materials availability

Researchers who wish to access anonymized survey responses and replication code should send a formal email to the corresponding author, accompanied by a statement of purpose.

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For instance, an author with four publications classified in Physical Sciences and one publication classified in Life Sciences will be classified as 80% Physical Sciences and 20% Life Sciences. Scientific fields are defined as the highest-level classification of the ASJC subject fields that Scopus assigns to each journal (we manually adjusted the most apparent lumping and splitting errors on the complete list of authors).

There is also unauthorized migration, as reported, e.g., in https://www.dw.com/en/how-ukrainian-men-try-to-get-around-the-ban-to-leave-the-country/a-62529639 . Last accessed 17 Oct 2023.

These figures are obtained by taking the mid-point values of the time category and multiplying them with the proportion of scientists in that category. We have assumed a value of 30 hours for the category “More than 20 hours” and a value of 0 hour for the category “Up to 3 hours.” Missing data were grouped with the category “Up to 3 hours.”

We obtain the 2.5% figure by allocating the scientists who did not respond or do not know yet if they will return to Ukraine based on the proportions observed for those who know.

We obtain the 7% figure as follows. Eleven percent of the ‘drop-outs’ among the 81.5% of scientists who remained in Ukraine, represents 9% of all Ukrainian scientists before the war. If half of them do not return to science, that’s 4.5%. Adding the 2.5% Ukrainians who may not return lead to 7%.

The gross MSCA allowance is €5080 per month (depending on country) + €600 of mobility allowance + €660 family allowance, totaling €76,000 per year. This number is then multiplied by the proportion of migrant scientists among the total number of scientists in Ukraine (18.5% of about 50,000).

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge valuable input on the survey design and implementation from colleagues including Stefano Baruffaldi, Patrick Gaulé, Chiara Franzoni, Charles Ayoubi, and Olena Iarmosh. The paper also benefitted from feedback received during presentations at the European Commission, the SNSF, the Ukrainian National Research Foundation, and the Concordi conference.

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de Rassenfosse, G., Murovana, T. & Uhlbach, WH. The effects of war on Ukrainian research. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 10 , 856 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-02346-x

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How the war on drugs impacts social determinants of health beyond the criminal legal system

Aliza cohen.

a Department of Research and Academic Engagement, Drug Policy Alliance, New York, NY, USA

Sheila P. Vakharia

Julie netherland, kassandra frederique.

b Drug Policy Alliance, New York, NY, USA

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There is a growing recognition in the fields of public health and medicine that social determinants of health (SDOH) play a key role in driving health inequities and disparities among various groups, such that a focus upon individual-level medical interventions will have limited effects without the consideration of the macro-level factors that dictate how effectively individuals can manage their health. While the health impacts of mass incarceration have been explored, less attention has been paid to how the “war on drugs” in the United States exacerbates many of the factors that negatively impact health and wellbeing, disproportionately impacting low-income communities and people of colour who already experience structural challenges including discrimination, disinvestment, and racism. The U.S. war on drugs has subjected millions to criminalisation, incarceration, and lifelong criminal records, disrupting or altogether eliminating their access to adequate resources and supports to live healthy lives. This paper examines the ways that “drug war logic” has become embedded in key SDOH and systems, such as employment, education, housing, public benefits, family regulation (commonly referred to as the child welfare system), the drug treatment system, and the healthcare system. Rather than supporting the health and wellbeing of individuals, families, and communities, the U.S. drug war has exacerbated harm in these systems through practices such as drug testing, mandatory reporting, zero-tolerance policies, and coerced treatment. We argue that, because the drug war has become embedded in these systems, medical practitioners can play a significant role in promoting individual and community health by reducing the impact of criminalisation upon healthcare service provision and by becoming engaged in policy reform efforts.

KEY MESSAGES

• A drug war logic that prioritises and justifies drug prohibition, criminalisation, and punishment has fuelled the expansion of drug surveillance and control mechanisms in numerous facets of everyday life in the United States negatively impacting key social determinants of health, including housing, education, income, and employment.
• The U.S. drug war’s frontline enforcers are no longer police alone but now include physicians, nurses, teachers, neighbours, social workers, employers, landlords, and others.
• Physicians and healthcare providers can play a significant role in promoting individual and community health by reducing the impact of criminalisation upon healthcare service provision and engaging in policy reform.

Introduction

Social determinants of health (SDOH) are “the conditions in the environments where people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age that affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks.” [ 1 ] There is a growing recognition in the fields of public health and medicine that SDOH play a key role in driving health inequities and disparities, such that a focus on individual-level medical interventions will have limited effects without the consideration of the macro-level factors that dictate how effectively individuals can manage their health. For instance, differences in access to nutritious foods, safe neighbourhoods, stable housing, well-paying job opportunities, enriching school environments, insurance, and healthcare can lead to differential health outcomes for individuals, their families, and their communities. And as these mid- and downstream SDOH have gained more attention, we must also focus on more macro SDOH in order to understand “how upstream factors, such as governance and legislation, create structural challenges and impose downstream barriers that impact the ability and opportunity to lead a healthy lifestyle.” [ 2 ]

One underexplored upstream SDOH is the “war on drugs” in the United States and how it exacerbates many of the factors that negatively impact health and wellbeing, disproportionately affecting low-income communities and people of colour who already experience structural challenges including discrimination, disinvestment, and racism [ 3 ]. President Richard Nixon launched the contemporary drug war in the U.S. in 1971 when he signed the Controlled Substances Act and declared drug abuse as “public enemy number one.” [ 4 ] Since the declaration of the U.S. drug war, billions of dollars each year have been spent on drug enforcement and punishment because it was made a local, state, and federal priority [ 5 ]. For the past half century, the war on drugs has subjected millions to criminalisation, incarceration, and lifelong criminal records, disrupting or altogether eliminating access to adequate resources and supports to live healthy lives.

Drug offences remain the leading cause of arrest in the nation; over 1.1 million drug-related arrests were made in 2020, and the majority were for personal possession alone [ 6 ]. Black people – who are 13% of the U.S. population – made up 24% of all drug arrests in 2020, despite the fact that people of all races use and sell drugs at similar rates [ 6–8 ]. While incarceration rates for drug-related offences skyrocketed in the 1980s and 1990s, they have decreased in recent years motivated both by cost savings and criminal legal reform efforts to promote a public health approach to drug use. However, estimates still suggest that roughly 20% of people who are incarcerated are there for a drug charge, and racial disparities in incarceration persist [ 9 , 10 ].

Meanwhile, the illicit drug supply has become increasingly unpredictable and contaminated due to drug supply disruptions, contributing to an exponential increase in drug overdose deaths [ 11 , 12 ]. Estimates suggest that one million people died of a drug-involved overdose between 1999 and 2020, with over 100,000 deaths occurring in a calendar year for the first time in 2021 [ 13 , 14 ]. Since 2015, overdose deaths have disproportionately impacted racial and ethnic minorities; Black people have had the biggest increase in overdose fatality rates, and today, Black and Native people have the highest overdose death rates across the U.S [ 15 ]. The most recent “fourth wave” of the overdose crisis can be attributed to a fentanyl-contaminated drug supply caused by drug prohibition; criminalisation that leads to stigma and fear of punishment that deters people from getting support they might need; and a lack of robust, scaled-up investment in harm reduction and evidence-based treatment services [ 16 , 17 ]. Although harm reduction interventions, including supervised consumption spaces (also called supervised injection facilities, drug consumption rooms, or overdose prevention centres) and heroin-assisted treatment have been widely studied and found effective outside of the U.S., these strategies have not been widely adopted in this country [ 18–21 ].

The drug war has also become deeply embedded within many of the systems and structures of U.S. life well beyond the criminal legal apparatus [ 3 ]. Since the health impacts of incarceration have been studied elsewhere, this paper will specifically discuss the impacts of criminalisation in other facets of life [ 22 ].

We argue that an underlying drug war logic has fuelled the expansion of drug surveillance and control mechanisms in numerous facets of everyday life in the U.S. We define drug war logic as a logic that prioritises and justifies drug prohibition, criminalisation, and punishment to purportedly address the real and perceived health harms of drug use over a public health approach to address these issues. In coining this term, we hope to make more visible the implicit assumptions about drug use that are often unnamed but common in the policies and practices across different institutions. We acknowledge that many actors in these settings where drug war logic is embedded, including physicians and other healthcare providers, are often well-intentioned yet unaware of how they may be perpetuating this logic through their own actions. We argue that drug war logic defies and contradicts widely accepted understandings of addiction as a health issue and has, in many cases, made a public health approach more challenging to implement [ 23 ]. Notably, the American Society of Addiction Medicine defines addiction as “a treatable, chronic medical disease involving complex interactions among brain circuits, genetics, the environment, and an individual’s life experiences.” [ 24 ] As this paper will outline, drug war logic undermines rather than supports the health of people who use drugs, their families, and their communities by treating drug use as a criminal issue.

Drug war logic is made concrete, not just within criminal legal systems, but also through mandated drug reporting and monitoring systems in treatment and healthcare settings, compulsory drug testing in employment and for the receipt of social services, the proliferation of zero-tolerance workplaces and school zones, mandated treatment in order to receive resources or avoid loss of benefits, background checks for work and housing, and numerous other measures which will be discussed in detail below. As a result, the drug war’s frontline enforcers are no longer police alone but now include physicians, nurses, teachers, neighbours, social workers, employers, landlords, and others who are required to engage in these forms of surveillance and punishment.

This commentary will use a SDOH lens to explore a number of systems where the drug war and its logic have taken root, impacting individual and community health and subjecting many people in the U.S. to surveillance due to suspected or confirmed drug use. Healthcare providers must have a robust understanding of the impact of drug war logic in employment, housing, education, public benefits, the family regulation system (commonly referred to as the child welfare system), the drug treatment system, and the healthcare system because these deeply impact the health of their patients, particularly their patients who use drugs (For the purposes of this paper, we are using the term “Family Regulation System,” coined by Emma Williams and used by other scholars, instead of the more commonly used term “Child Welfare System” to reflect the fact that, particularly for low-income families and families of color, state intervention often occurs in order to regulate their families rather than to prioritize the welfare of the entire family unit, of which the child is a part).

Employment, with its link to income and health insurance, is an important determinant of health. However, drug testing, criminal background checks, and exclusions of those with criminal histories from certain professions create significant barriers to obtaining and maintaining employment. Beginning in the 1980s, employment-based drug testing became widespread. In a 1994 report, the National Research Council noted that “[i]n a period of about 20 years, urine testing has moved from identifying a few individuals with major criminal or health problems to generalized programs that touch the lives of millions of citizens.” [ 25 ] Between 2017 and 2020, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that approximately 21% of respondents were tested as part of the hiring process, and 15% were subject to random employee drug testing [ 26 ].

Despite the widespread use of testing, less than 5.5% of results are positive for any drug, according to data from Quest Diagnostics, one of the largest testing companies in the country [ 27 ]. There is little evidence that these policies are effective in reducing drug use, improving workplace safety, or increasing productivity [ 28–30 ]. Notably, drug tests cannot specify how much of a drug was consumed, whether the person is currently intoxicated or impaired, or if they have a SUD. Drug tests cannot indicate if drug use will impact a person’s ability to perform their work or if they present a safety risk. Rather, drug tests simply show whether or not someone has a particular metabolite in their system [ 31–35 ].

Beyond workplace drug testing, hundreds of thousands are excluded from stable, well-paid work because of drug-related convictions. Over 70 million people – more than 20% of the U.S. population – have some type of criminal record [ 36 ]. A drug arrest or charge, even without a conviction, can be a barrier to getting a job because it can appear in many web searches and background checks [ 37 ]. Criminal background checks have become cheaper and easier to access, even though these records are notoriously inaccurate [ 38 , 39 ]. In addition, more than a quarter of jobs in the U.S. require some kind of licence, and a drug conviction history can automatically prevent people from getting a professional licence for their trade, like trucking or barbering [ 40 ].

These employment barriers disproportionately affect Black men, who already face additional impediments to employment and who are most harmed by the drug war and criminalisation [ 41 ]. The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued guidance stating that denying employment based on criminal records could be a form of racial discrimination because people of colour are more likely to be targeted by law enforcement and thus more likely to have an arrest or conviction record [ 42 , 43 ]. As a recent report by the Brennan Centre points out: “the staggering racial disparities in our criminal justice system flow directly into economic inequality” [ 36 ]. This same report found that those with a history of imprisonment earned 52% less than those with no history of incarceration.

Employment is a health issue that should be of concern to healthcare providers because it provides income, access to health insurance and medical treatment, and social connection [ 44 ]. Precarious employment and low income are linked to poor health, and some research has shown that people who use drugs and who are precariously employed face increased vulnerability to violence and HIV infection [ 45–47 ]. Being unemployed can lead to poverty and negative health effects and is associated with increased rates of drug use and SUDs [ 48 ].

Rather than supporting people who use drugs in accessing employment and the health benefits attached to it, drug war logic in employment settings can erect barriers. Eliminating or greatly restricting workplace drug testing as well as banning criminal background checks and professional licencing restrictions are important steps towards restoring access to employment and the many health benefits it confers.

Housing is another key SDOH that is significantly impacted by drug war policies and practices. Drug war surveillance in housing began with the passage of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, which prohibited public housing authorities (PHAs) from allowing tenants to engage in drug-related activity on or near public housing premises and deemed such activity grounds for immediate eviction [ 49 ].

The Cranston-Gonzalez National Affordable Housing Act of 1990 expanded on this so that if a tenant’s family member or guest - regardless of whether they live on-site - engages in drug-related activity, the tenant and their household can be evicted [ 50 ]. Additionally, the Act states that evicted households must be banned from public housing for a minimum of three years unless the tenant completes an agency-approved drug treatment program or has otherwise been “rehabilitated successfully.” [ 50 ]

Six years later in 1996, Congress passed the Housing Opportunity Program Extension Act, which established “One Strike” laws and expanded on previous acts to give PHAs the authority to evict tenants if they or a guest was suspected of using or selling drugs, even outside of the premises [ 51 ]. This series of public housing policies requires neither a drug arrest nor proof that a tenant or their guest is involved in drug use, sales, or activity [ 52 ].

Private housing markets can also enforce zero-tolerance drug policies. In over 2,000 cities across the U.S., landlords can certify their property as “crime-free” by taking a class, implementing “crime prevention” architecture, and including clauses in their leases that allow for immediate eviction should a tenant, family member, or guest engage in “criminal activity,” particularly drug-related activity, on or off the premises [ 53 , 54 ]. Landlords, in close partnership with law enforcement, can invoke these laws by claiming to enforce crime-free ordinances, regardless of whether the alleged drug-related activity is illegal. In states across the U.S., private landlords have evicted tenants following an overdose [ 55–59 ]. In practice, these programs and ordinances increase the surveillance and displacement of low-income Black and Latinx tenants while not decreasing crime and potentially deterring someone from calling 911 for medical assistance in case of an overdose [ 55 ].

Evictions can lead to unstable housing or homelessness, which is associated with a host of chronic health problems, infectious diseases, emotional and developmental problems, food insecurity, and premature death [ 60–63 ]. Lacking a permanent address and reliable transportation makes it more difficult to receive and store medications and travel to a hospital or clinic; this is compounded with the stigma and discrimination that unhoused people often face from healthcare providers [ 64 ]. Being unhoused or housing unstable is also associated with difficulty obtaining long-term employment and education [ 65–67 ]. Longitudinal studies have found that family eviction has both short- and long-term impacts among newborns and children, including adverse birth outcomes, poorer health, risk of lead exposure, worse cognitive function, and lower educational outcomes [ 68 ]. These negative health outcomes are compounded for people with SUDs [ 69 ]. Unhoused people who use drugs are often forced into more unsafe, more unsanitary, and riskier injection and drug-using practices to avoid detection [ 70 ]. Evictions and homelessness are also associated with increased risk of drug-related harms, including non-fatal and fatal overdose, infectious diseases, and syringe sharing [ 71–73 ]. In addition, evictions can disrupt relationships between users and trusted sellers, making an already unregulated drug supply even more unpredictable [ 70 ].

While housing is understood as a key component of health and safety for all people, including people who use drugs, drug war logic can encourage and facilitate displacement, making it hard for housed people to remain so and creating barriers for those who are unhoused to find safe, affordable housing options. Solutions for improving housing access include ending evictions and removing housing bans based solely on drug-related activity or suspected activity, restricting landlords from using criminal background checks to exclude prospective tenants, and ending collaborations between housing complexes and law enforcement. Housing interventions that can improve the health of people who use drugs, in particular, include investing in Housing First programs and permanent supportive housing, providing eviction protection to people who call for help during an overdose emergency (i.e. expanding 911 Good Samaritan laws), and establishing overdose prevention centres.

Education is also understood as a strong predictor of health [ 74–76 ], but drug war logic in educational settings can subject young people who use drugs to punishment rather than needed support. Adolescent substance use is associated with sexual risk behaviour, experience of violence, adverse childhood experiences, and mental health and suicide risks, which should justify greater mental health and support services in schools [ 77 ]. Despite this, punitive responses to suspected or confirmed drug use, ranging from surveillance and policing to drug testing and expulsion, are commonplace in the field of education.

In 2018, 94% of high schools used security cameras, 65% did random sweeps for contraband, and 13% used metal detectors [ 78 ]. Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia have almost as many police and security officers in schools as they do school counsellors [ 79 , 80 ]. Drug use is one of the most common sources of referrals of students to police [ 80 ]. And recent estimates show that over a third of all U.S. school districts with middle or high schools had student drug testing policies [ 81–83 ].

Drug war policies also impact higher education, which is integral to economic mobility [ 84 ]. Prior to December 2020, federal law prohibited educational grants and financial aid to people in prison, one-fifth of whom were there for a drug offence, and drug convictions could lead to temporary or indefinite suspension of federal financial aid for students [ 85 ]. Still today, fourteen states have some temporary or permanent denial of financial aid for college or university education for people with criminal records [ 86 ].

These education policies – surveillance, policing, drug testing, zero tolerance, and barriers to financial aid – restrict access to education and ultimately impede economic wellbeing and positive health outcomes. For example, dropout risk increases every time a student receives harsh school discipline or comes into contact with the criminal legal system, including through school police officers [ 87 ]. Dropping out, in turn, is associated with higher unemployment and chronic health conditions [ 88 ]. In addition, discipline, such as expulsion for a drug violation, can contribute to more arrests for drug offences or the development of SUDs [ 89–91 ]. In contrast, school completion can help reduce higher risk substance use patterns [ 92 ], and education is a strong predictor of long-term health and quality of life [ 93 ].

Rather than supporting young people in completing their education and getting the support they may need, drug war logic prioritises punishing them in schools while often restricting access to financial aid and educational services for those seeking higher education. If we want to improve the health of young people, we need to reverse these policies. For example, the American Academy of Paediatrics opposes the random drug testing of young people based on an exhaustive review of the literature finding it did more harm than good [ 94 ]. Removing police from schools, ending zero-tolerance policies, and offering young people who use drugs counselling and support, instead of expulsion, could also help improve completion rates, ultimately leading to better health outcomes.

Public benefits

Though economic and food insecurity are linked with poor health outcomes, decades of drug policies have restricted access to public assistance programs. In 1996, Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) [ 95 ], and one of the stated goals was to facilitate the transition from reliance on public assistance to full-time employment [ 96 ]. This law restricted benefits for people who use drugs, people with prior drug convictions, and their families in several ways.

The PRWORA introduced a lifetime ban on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) cash assistance benefits for people with felony drug convictions, unless the state modified or opted out of the ban. Today, one state - South Carolina - fully bars people with felony drug convictions from receiving SNAP, and twenty-one states have instituted a modified SNAP ban [ 97 ]. Seven states fully bar people with felony drug convictions from receiving TANF, and seventeen states and the District of Columbia have instituted modified TANF bans [ 97 ]. Common features of modified bans can include mandatory drug treatment, drug testing, and parole compliance [ 98 , 99 ]. These zero-tolerance bans have discriminatory and disproportionate impacts among Black and Latinx people and women, who are disproportionately incarcerated for federal and state drug offences [ 100 ].

Drug testing of public benefits applicants is less discussed in the peer-reviewed literature [ 101 ]. Although the PRWORA authorised, but did not require, drug screenings of public benefits applicants, today 13 states drug test TANF applicants [ 102 , 103 ]. States that drug test as a condition of receiving TANF can only test if drug use is suspected. For example, some states automatically require people with felony drug convictions to take a drug test [ 104 ], while other states require all applicants to undergo a drug screening questionnaire and then require a test if there is suspicion of drug use [ 105 ]. Many TANF applicants, who are already low income, are expected to pay for their drug tests. The impact of drug testing on people with felony drug convictions is compounded since they are already disproportionately poor, unemployed, and food insecure compared to people who have never been incarcerated [ 106–108 ].

In most states that test, a positive drug test can temporarily or permanently disqualify a person from receiving TANF benefits [ 105 ]. Even if cash assistance is allocated to other household members (e.g. children) through a different parent or guardian, overall benefits for the family can be reduced. In some cases, a person who tests positive for drugs may still receive benefits but only if they complete mandated, abstinence-based treatment [ 105 ]. Such policies and practices can deter many eligible candidates and those in need of support from ultimately seeking these public benefits altogether [ 109 ].

There are numerous negative health consequences associated with food and economic insecurity [ 110–112 ]. In particular, studies have found that loss or reduction of SNAP is associated with increased odds of household and child food insecurity and increased odds of forgoing health or dental care [ 113 ]. Loss or reduction of TANF is associated with increased risk of hunger, homelessness or eviction, utility shutoff, inadequate medical care, and poor health [ 114 ].

When people are seeking financial and nutritional support to better care for themselves and their families, especially in crisis, drug war logic justifies more barriers to SNAP and TANF and the discontinuation of assistance precisely when people need it the most. To better support financial and economic security of low-income people, advocates can support removing TANF and SNAP bans for people who have felony drug convictions, ending drug testing requirements for public assistance, eliminating mandatory drug treatment requirements for public benefits applicants and recipients, and adequately investing in public benefit programs to ensure they provide enough assistance for families.

Family regulation

The family regulation system (FRS) often treats any drug use as a predictor of child abuse or neglect, even though research shows that poverty is one of the largest predictors of adverse infant and child health outcomes [ 115 ]. Drug war logic within the FRS justifies the separation and punishment of families for drug use even absent evidence of abuse or neglect. Half of all states and the District of Columbia require healthcare professionals to report any suspected drug use during pregnancy to FRS authorities, and eight states require them to drug test patients suspected of drug use [ 116 ]. Statutes in nineteen states and the District of Columbia define any drug use during pregnancy as a form of child maltreatment [ 117 ]. These policies exist even though most people who use drugs use them infrequently and do not meet criteria for SUDs [ 118 ]. Additionally, evidence proving causal links between prenatal drug use and child harm and maltreatment is limited. Research finds that in utero exposure to drugs may not have long-term negative developmental impacts on the child and that confounding variables, like poverty and food insecurity, have significant and often stronger impacts on child development than drug use [ 117 ].

Drug testing, mandatory reporting, and the prospect of punishments result in poorer health outcomes for pregnant people who use drugs, especially if they struggle with their use. A fear of punishment and family separation leads some pregnant people who use drugs to avoid honest, open conversations about healthcare needs or how to reduce drug use harms so that many delay, avoid, or forgo prenatal care altogether [ 119 , 120 ].

Like healthcare professionals, most school teachers, counsellors, social workers, and mental healthcare providers are required by law to report any suspicion of child maltreatment or neglect, which then initiates an FRS investigation [ 121 ]. A child can be removed from their home if the caregiver tests positive for drugs, even absent any other evidence of mistreatment or abuse. In addition, a positive drug test can lead to a parent being mandated to complete abstinence-based treatment even if the parent does not meet criteria for a diagnosable SUD [ 122 ]. Intervention by the FRS, such as placing children in foster care, can lead to adverse education, employment, and mental and behavioural health outcomes among children; increased parental mental illness diagnoses; and increased parental drug use to cope with the trauma of family separation [ 123–125 ].

These policies have disproportionate impacts on Black people. Black pregnant women are more likely to be tested for drug use, and Black women are reported to the FRS at higher rates than white women [ 126–128 ]. Over half of Black children will experience an FRS investigation at some point during their lifetime [ 129 ]. One study that analysed cumulative foster system removals between 2000 and 2011 found that 1 in 17 U.S. children, 1 in 9 Black children, and 1 in 7 Indigenous children will experience foster placement before they turn 18, and data show that many FRS cases involve allegations of parental drug use at some point [ 130 ]. These disparities in FRS involvement are not because Black parents are using drugs or mistreating their children at higher rates; rather, it’s because Black families, especially poor Black families, more often encounter state systems – like public hospitals and public benefits offices – and mandated reporters within these systems that monitor behaviour and drug use [ 131 ].

Drug war logic prioritises separation, coercion, and punishment in families where drug use occurs or is suspected. For pregnant people and parents who do use problematically, their use should be treated as a public health issue, according to international bodies like the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on drugs [ 132 ]. Advocates can support legislative policy changes to prohibit removals based on drug tests alone, eliminate mandatory reporting for drug use alone, and repeal laws that define drug use during pregnancy as de facto child abuse or maltreatment. Healthcare professionals can also advocate to only allow drug testing when medically necessary and when the parent provides informed consent; support practices that keep parents and infants together, like breastfeeding and skin-to-skin contact, that can mitigate the effects of neonatal abstinence syndrome [ 133 , 134 ]; and create programs providing both perinatal healthcare and SUD treatment to improve access and continuity of care as well as initiation and maintenance of medications for addiction treatment.

Substance use treatment system

Substance use treatment can be an essential lifeline for people with SUD working towards recovery. Yet surveillance and punishment are embedded into SUD treatment through the numerous constraints placed upon clients because of the role of institutional referral sources in treatment, such as the criminal legal system, the FRS, social services, and others. Studies suggest that roughly 25% of clients in publicly funded treatment were referred from the criminal legal system as a condition of their probation, parole, or drug court program [ 135 ]. This has led to therapeutic jurisprudence: the belief that the criminal legal system can support and facilitate efforts towards rehabilitation using the threat of incarceration [ 136 ]. Another 25% of clients are referred to treatment by other sources, including the FRS, social services, schools, and employers [ 133 ]. Criminal legal controls such as those from the courts, or formal social controls such as those from the other aforementioned institutions, coerce clients to either comply with treatment or face other harsh consequences, like incarceration, the termination of parental rights, or losing public benefits [ 137 ].

Treatment providers monitor client compliance and abstinence by conducting and observing routine urine drug tests, and providers are often in regular contact with referral sources about client progress in treatment. Any drug use or negative progress reports can be used as grounds to sanction those on probation, parole, or in drug court which can lead to incarceration and, in cases of drug courts, longer sentences than if participants had accepted a jail sentence [ 136 ]. Clients referred by other sources can also face ramifications for positive drug tests or treatment non-compliance, impacting child custody hearings as well as their ability to secure certain social services and resources, stay enrolled in school, or remain employed.

Referral sources influence the type of care that clients receive in facilities, including evidence-based treatments. Research suggests that only 5% of clients with opioid use disorder (OUD), who were referred to treatment from the criminal legal system, received either methadone or buprenorphine, compared to nearly 40% those who were not referred by the system [ 138 ]. This represents an extension of a broader problem within the criminal legal system wherein access to these gold standard medications for OUD is almost nonexistent in most jails and prisons across the U.S [ 139 ].

Drug war logic is also deeply rooted in the restrictions for prescribing and dispensing methadone and buprenorphine since they are controlled substances under the oversight of the Drug Enforcement Agency, a federal law enforcement entity. When taken in effective doses, these life-saving medications can cut the risk of overdose and all-cause mortality dramatically among people with OUD [ 140 ]. However, due to tight federal restrictions and guidelines for these controlled medications, patients can be subjected to routine drug testing, counselling requirements, daily clinic visits, and observed or highly monitored medication dispensing. Patients deemed non adherent to medications or who test positive for other drugs can then be subjected to dose reductions, required to attend treatment more frequently, or even terminated from care altogether [ 141 ]. The tight restrictions on both methadone and buprenorphine, combined with the oversight of the DEA, create obstacles for prescribers and stigmatise these medications by conveying that they cannot be used like other medications in routine healthcare [ 142 ]. These policies have also contributed to striking racial disparities in who receives buprenorphine versus methadone due to costly co-pays and insurance coverage issues [ 143 ]. Studies also suggest that the DEA’s involvement in monitoring buprenorphine has made pharmacies reluctant to stock the medication or to dispense it to patients for fear of triggering an investigation [ 144 , 145 ]. Ultimately, it is estimated that only 10% of all people with OUD receive these medications [ 146 ].

Providers can take steps to extract the drug war from our substance use treatment system, through their conscious and judicious documentation of treatment progress since those records could be used by criminal legal and other referral sources in decisions about clients and their families. In addition, eligible buprenorphine prescribers should begin prescribing to patients and join advocacy efforts to change policies to expand access to buprenorphine and methadone through looser restrictions.

Healthcare system

People with SUDs often have high rates of co-occurring medical needs requiring treatment, including psychiatric disorders, infectious diseases, and other chronic health conditions. However, research suggests that people with SUDs are often deterred from seeking healthcare to address their medical needs due to prior negative and stigmatising experiences with providers, and that having experienced discrimination in healthcare is associated with greater risk behaviours, psychological distress, and negative health outcomes among people who use drugs [ 147–149 ]. Some of these challenges are due to a lack of training on how to work with patients with SUDs, in addition to pre-existing personal biases and stigmatising views held by healthcare professionals, which impacts the type of care they provide [ 142 ].

The widespread use of drug testing in healthcare settings also creates ethical challenges and conflicts for providers and patients since results are often entered into the electronic health record (EHR). While EHRs are typically thought of as beneficial and intended for greater transparency and access, they also pose challenges surrounding patient privacy, confidentiality, and autonomy; they can, therefore, make patients reluctant to disclose drug use or consent to drug testing [ 150 ]. For instance, medical records that include drug test results, can be accessed by a wide variety of actors in the medical system, subpoenaed for court, and used in future medical decision making without the patient’s knowledge or consent. Providers might not receive adequate training to weigh the need for these tests as part of treatment adherence monitoring with the potential social or legal ramifications of these tests for the patient. Patients might also not be adequately informed of these potential consequences prior to testing.

Universal drug screening and testing in obstetric and gynecological care is an example wherein testing intersects with the role of most healthcare providers as mandated reporters. Mandated reporting for suspected child abuse or neglect due to parental drug use is purported to protect the foetus or children in the parents’ custody, yet this can often be a deterrent for patients to seek medical treatment altogether if they believe that they may lose their children or be subject to other mandates. The racial and class disparities in how such testing is used, as well as the punitive measures used against families, have been noted earlier in the text but is a compelling reason for healthcare providers to consider making recommendations for counselling or supportive case management in order to address family challenges.

Healthcare providers need more training and resources to work with patients with SUDs to ensure that they are engaging them in evidence-based treatments and treating their complex medical needs while avoiding some of the lifelong and harmful ramifications that can occur when drug testing, health records, and mandated reporting deter patients from seeking and receiving care.

Because of the social, economic, and health effects of drug policies, the work of ending the drug war cannot be situated within criminal legal reform efforts alone. The drug war and a punitive drug war logic impact most systems of everyday life in the U.S., subjecting people to surveillance, suspicion, and punishment and undermining key SDOH, including education, employment, housing, and access to benefits. Combined, these have resulted in poorer health outcomes for individuals, families, and communities, particularly for people who use drugs. These policies and practices, while race-neutral as written, are not [ 151 ]. The targeted effects on people of colour further entrench health and economic disparities. As the public and policymakers call for a health approach to drug use, it is vital to recognise how systems meant to care and support are often unable to serve their intended purposes; rather than help people who use drugs or are suspected of using drugs, they frequently punish them.

In their day-to-day practice, healthcare professionals must understand the deep roots of the drug war as well as their role in both perpetuating and undermining drug war logic and practices. Healthcare providers can treat people who use drugs with dignity, respect, and trust and ensure that healthcare and treatment decisions are made in partnership with individuals. Medical professionals can also work to situate drug use within a larger social and economic context [ 152 ], understanding that drug-related harms often stem from lack of resources – like housing and food precarity, economic insecurity, and insufficient healthcare – rather than from drugs themselves. Treatment need not be the only antidote for people who experience drug-related harms but should be one option among an array of health services, resources, and support.

At the mezzo- and institutional levels, healthcare providers can advocate to shift hospital and programmatic policies around drug testing, mandatory reporting, and collaborations with law enforcement. As outlined in this paper, drug testing is not an effective monitoring strategy for care and support, but rather, it is more often a punitive tool of surveillance. If drug testing cannot be eliminated, at the very least, patients should have the right to understand the implications of drug testing and provide explicit consent for the test. To the extent possible, providers should not share private patient information with police or state agencies. Healthcare professionals should understand the implications of reporting positive drug tests and suspicion of use and should work to change these policies where possible and inform their patients of them. Providers can ensure that their patients who use drugs have access to evidence-based, non-coercive harm reduction and treatment options in addition to robust and supportive primary healthcare. Healthcare professionals involved with medical education and licensure can work to ensure that all students graduate with a deep understanding of SDOH and the impact of the drug war on individual and community health.

Finally, healthcare providers can get involved with policy-level changes to end drug testing, mandatory reporting, zero-tolerance policies, coerced treatment, and denial of services and resources based on arrest or conviction records at the municipal, state, and federal levels. Providers can follow the leadership and expertise of people who use drugs, some of whom have organised themselves into user unions [ 153 ]. Policy advocacy can include drafting and joining sign-on letters, delivering expert testimony, speaking to media, writing op-eds, and lobbying medical professional organisations to release policy statements. Providers, who see firsthand the consequences of the war on drugs, are well positioned to be effective advocates in undoing these harmful policies that have for too long undermined key SDOH [ 154 ]. In order to improve individual and collective health, healthcare providers should resist drug war logic and work to transform these systems so they can truly promote health and safety.

For the purposes of this paper, we are using the term “Family Regulation System,” coined by Emma Williams and used by other scholars, instead of the more commonly used term “Child Welfare System” to reflect the fact that, particularly for low-income families and families of color, state intervention often occurs in order to regulate their families rather than to prioritize the welfare of the entire family unit, of which the child is a part.

Authors contribution

All authors (AC, SV, JN, KF) were involved in the conception and drafting of the paper, revising it critically for intellectual content; and the final approval of the version to be published. All authors agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work.

Disclosure statement

All authors are employed by the Drug Policy Alliance, a non-profit policy advocacy organisation. No other interests to disclose.

Data availability statement

The views expressed in the submitted article are those of the authors.

War Research Paper

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I. Introduction

Academic writing, editing, proofreading, and problem solving services, get 10% off with 24start discount code, ii. theoretical overview, b. war initiation, iii. empirical evidence, iv. policy implications, a. the cold war, v. future directions, vi. conclusion.

The question of why states go to war has long been central to the study of international relations. The various answers put forward by scholars to this question have led to vigorous debates both between and within competing theoretical traditions that purport to explain state behavior. As this question has been studied over time, scholars have not settled on any one explanation for why some states choose to fight (or choose not to fight), why certain states enter into rivalries (or choose to end rivalries), or why factors that lead to conflict in one situationmay not lead to conflict in another. For much of the post–World War II era, the study of conflict was greatly impacted by the ongoing cold war rivalry between the United States of America and the Soviet Union; this rivalry not only had the potential of leading to major war involving both of these countries and their allies but also had substantial impact throughout the world as new states were emerging from colonization and were often forced to choose sides in the larger cold war rivalry. The end of the cold war, however, led to numerous new questions, including how one state that, by most measures, was among the most powerful states ever to have existed could cease to exist almost overnight; whether a new rival to U.S. power would emerge; what shape conflict would take in the post–cold war era; and, perhaps most importantly, what the end of the cold war said about international relations scholarship, almost none of which predicted the end of the cold war.

This research paper on rivalry, conflict, and interstate war begins with an examination of the evolution of major theories of why states enter into rivalries and conflict. Given the expanse of explanations for state behavior, this research paper will focus primarily on realism and neorealism, the evolution of neorealism, constructivism, democratic peace theory, and rational choice explanations for the start of conflict. This section is not an exhaustive account of all theories of state behavior but does capture much of the debate over why states fight. Next, the research paper turns to the ways in which empirical evidence is used to support or question various theoretical arguments. Finally, the paper examines both real and potential policy implications of international relations scholarship before turning to a discussion of future avenues of research.

The destruction wrought by World War I led to an immediate questioning of how the states of Europe had allowed themselves to enter into such a devastating conflict and, as importantly, how to avoid future conflicts. Policymakers, led by U.S. PresidentWoodrowWilson, fervently believed in the principles of idealism, a view that appropriately designed international institutions that provided appropriate legal avenues to redress grievances, coupled with a system of collective security, could prevent major power wars in the future. The result of this belief was the creation of the League of Nations, an organization that would adjudicate disputes between states before they descended into conflict and, should one state attack another, lead a collective response of all member states against the aggressor state (collective security). The League of Nations faced many setbacks, not the least of which was the failure of the United States Senate to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, meaning that the United States, then the world’s largest economy, would not be a member. As the League of Nations proved unable to successfully confront series of challenges in the 1930s, including German abrogation of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, Italian aggression against Ethiopia, and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, idealism as a both a theoretical and policy exercise appeared to be a failure. World War II simply furthered the point.

After World War II, Hans Morgenthau (1948) published his seminal work, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace. In this work, Morgenthau argued that one of the primary failures of idealism was that it had attempted to impose morality on the state without recognizing the underlying cause of conflict: the perpetual pursuit of power. In the book, he argued that states did not abide by the same moral rules as individuals in their normal interactions; rather, each state was concerned primarily with the national interest, as defined by the pursuit of power. The most capable politicians would be those who appropriately considered each action in terms of whether it would benefit the national interest, not primarily whether it was moral. According to Morgenthau, war was the inevitable result of clashes between states competing to increase their power and could not be ended by the creation of international institutions, as the idealists had argued.

Morgenthau’s (1948) work, though well respected, did have its flaws. Primary among them was that by arguing that states were always seeking power, his theory did not allow for variation that would explain when and why war was likely to occur. In particular, Kenneth Waltz (1979) argued that a good social science explanation had to have some variation in explanation (the independent variable) that explained a variation in outcome (the dependent variable). By not having any variation in explanation, Morgenthau’s theory could not explain why states were not in a perpetual state of war. In summary, states seeking power was a background assumption, not an explanation for war. Waltz’s ultimate answer to Morgenthau and traditional realism was Theory of International Politics in 1979, a work that he argued was not an attempt to explain or predict a state’s foreign policy behavior, but rather to provide a general explanation for the propensity for balances of power to emerge in the international system and, in general terms, what distribution of power in the international system is the most stable. In this work, Waltz laid the groundwork for the neorealist school of thought.

Waltz (1979) argues that the best explanation of state behavior is based on three assumptions: (1) States are unitary actors—each state can be thought of as an autonomous decision maker, (2) states are security seeking— each state pursues policies that will maximize its own external security, and (3) the international system is anarchic—there is no authority over states to which they must answer or to which they can appeal. Since states are driven primarily by security interests, states will seek to balance against states that are more powerful as no international agent could prevent the more powerful state from attacking them. If one state begins to emerge as more powerful than all others, alliances will shift to balance that state’s power. Based on these assumptions, Waltz argues that the primary source of variation in the international system is the structure of the distribution of power between states. A system with one dominant state is unipolar, a system dominated by two states is bipolar, and a system dominated by more than two states is multipolar. According to Waltz, rivalries between states are driven by the logic of the balance of power. The Soviet Union and the United States competed with one another not because they were ideologically opposed, but rather because they were the two most powerful states in the system: The logic of the balance of power dictated that they be rivals.

Waltz (1979) went on to argue that war is less likely in a bipolar system than in a multipolar one. His argument rests on the difference between external and internal balancing. External balancing requires states to depend on allies in order to balance other powerful states in the international system; no state is powerful enough to balance others individually. Internal balancing, in contrast, is the process whereby a state uses its own resources to build up its security, not relying on allies. In a multipolar system, states have to rely on external balancing since no state is individually powerful enough to balance other states in the system; the competition for allies and the potential for one ally to pull others into a conflict makes external balancing relatively less stable than internal balancing.When states balance internally, as they are able to do in a bipolar world, they are less likely to compete for allies and less likely to be drawn into conflict due to the behavior of allies. Therefore, a bipolar system, according to Waltz, should be more stable.

Waltz’s (1979) explanation of the distribution of power in the international system fit nicely with Robert Jervis’s (1978) “Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma,” an article examining the effects of anarchy in the international system. Jervis expands on the concept of the security dilemma, which is related to the idea of balance of power. In essence, the security dilemma is the problem that in the anarchic international system, any action by a state to build up its ability to defend itself lessens the security of other states. The reason for this insecurity is that any increase in military capability of one state necessarily makes surrounding states less secure. In turn, those states build up their capabilities, which lessen the security of the original state, leading it to build up again. This cycle explains that both states with purely defensive intentions may find themselves in an arms race and, if one state determines that it must use its weapons because it cannot afford additional buildups, potential conflict. To this basic concept, Jervis added the variable of whether offensive weapons or defensive weapons were dominant in an era and whether this dominance could be perceived. In an era where most weapons and tactics are offensive in nature and this dominance is recognized by all, war becomes more likely as states must use their weapons offensively in order to defeat rivals. When defensive weapons and tactics are dominant and all states recognize this, war is less likely as states perceive attacking a rival to be more difficult. Like Waltz, Jervis’s argument considers rivalry to be a function of anarchy: States are in security dilemmas with one another—rivalry relationships— because the nature of the international system is anarchic.

Other neorealists expanded on the theory or challenged some of Waltz’s core assumptions. Stephen Walt (1987) expanded Waltz’s original work, which applied only to great powers, to regional settings, arguing that state behavior was not necessarily always to balance against a larger power, but also, at times, to join, or bandwagon, with a more powerful state. His work focused on factors other than the balance of power to determine that states actually balance against threat, not just power. The factors that shape threat include power, geographic proximity, offensive power, and aggressive intentions. Geography is particularly important in a regional setting since geographically proximate states are more likely to have the military capability sufficient to attack one another and to compete over issues such as contested borders and resources. He argues that balancing is more common than bandwagoning behavior but that certain conditions favor the latter over the former. In particular, when states are faced with a much stronger power, they may bandwagon, particularly if no other ally is readily available. In addition, particularly aggressive states are more prone to provoke balancing behavior. For Walt, then, rivalry relationships are driven by a combination of factors—it is not only the power of surrounding states, but also their proximity and the perception that those states are threatening.

For critics of the neorealist explanation of rivalry and conflict, Walt’s inclusion of aggressive intent revealed a fundamental flaw in neorealism: that it did not account for state intentions. In essence, by relying only on the security dilemma and anarchy, neorealism had no real explanation for why states would choose to fight. As the cold war drew to an end and then ended spectacularly with the collapse of the Soviet Union, several different strands of scholarship rose up in response to neorealism. Neoclassical realism returned to the teachings of Morgenthau to conclude that power matters and states are security seekers but that, at its core, war is caused by states with aggressive intent, commonly referred to as revisionist states. These states are dissatisfied with the status quo in the world, particularly institutions that may be designed to maintain existing power structures, and seek to topple that existing order.

Other scholars argued that a focus on power alone was problematic if no attention was paid to the meaning of that power. Scholars in this new school of thought, known as constructivism, were led by Alexander Wendt (1992), particularly his article “Anarchy Is What States Make of It.” In this article,Wendt argues that actors interact to create intersubjective meanings. In essence, states continuously interact to create and re-create their relationship. The identities they create affect their perceptions of the other’s intent and the use of power. In this way, according to Wendt, U.S. military power will have different meanings for states depending on their relationship with the United States. Canada, for example, is far less concerned about American military power than Cuba. Similarly, the United States is far more concerned about one or two nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran than hundreds in the hands of Israel, or with China’s nuclear arsenal as opposed to the United Kingdom’s. If all that mattered were power, constructivists argue, the United States would feel just as threatened by the United Kingdom as China (or the Soviet Union in the cold war). For constructivist, then, rivalry relationships are created and re-created over time through interactions of actors. The United States–Soviet cold war was the result not just of the presence of nuclear weapons and large conventional forces, but also of the continual perception of the other as an enemy, and behaviors on both sides that reinforced that perception. Constructivist explanations allow for factors such as culture, religion, and national identity to play a role in establishing rivalries, though such factors are not always at play in constructivist work.

At the same time, for Wendt (1992), anarchy does not require states to be competitive or to enter into security dilemmas; rather, they are able to interact in other ways. Some states have managed to reorient their identities over time. For example, Germany and France have left rivalry behind in the context of the European Union; Egypt and Israel, once bitter combatants, have a long-lasting peace agreement; and Japan and the United States, bitter enemies in World War II, emerged as powerful allies.

Although many of these theories provide an explanation for why rivalries emerge, whether it is simply balancing behavior in the case of neorealism or the construction of rivalry identities in constructivism, often they provide less explanation for the actual outbreak of war. To summarize, the theories may help explain which states are likely to fight but are less able to explain the actual initiation of conflict. This research paper now turns to a section that reviews some theoretical explanations for the initiation of conflict, though, like this section on rivalry, it is not a complete reflection on why wars occur.

Neorealism as described by Waltz (1979) and even as modified by Walt (1987) does not purport to explain the timing of decisions to go to war. Neither does constructivism; like neorealism, constructivism seeks to understand the reasons why rivalries emerge (and subside) between states but is not as effective at explaining the microcauses of war initiation. Several other veins of theoretical scholarship, however, purport to explain particular decisions to enter into conflict. This section focuses initially on variants of neorealist explanations for war before shifting to a discussion of expected utility theory.

Some neorealist scholars, drawing on the insight of scholars like Waltz, argue that much like rivalry, the decision to fight war is driven by the balance of power. In particular, many neorealists, particularly followers of power transition theory, coalesce around the idea that war is most likely to occur during a transition phase in the prevailing international power structure. In essence, when one state is beginning to surpass the strength of another, war is likely to occur. Scholars differ on which state is likely to initiate conflict; some argue that a rising revisionist state will challenge the old dominant power(s) as soon as it is able in order to confirm its status as the most powerful in the system and to overturn the existing order that was designed to benefit another state (see Organski & Kugler, 1980). Others argue that war is more likely to be initiated by the state in relative decline; as a rising state begins to challenge its place as the most powerful in the system, the old power(s) will initiate a war to prevent the new state from rising up (see Copeland, 2000).

Critics of this approach make the point that the focus on power alone still does not explain war initiation per se in that it does not purport to explain on which issues rising and declining powers will disagree. Constructivists, in particular, would argue that at the turn of the 20th century, the United States surpassed both the United Kingdom and Germany as the most powerful economy in the world and had begun to establish itself as a military power with the Spanish American War. Nonetheless, no one legitimately feared a British–American showdown. On the other hand, Germany and Britain did enter into a rivalry relationship that led eventually to war. This outcome begs the question of why one set of states fought while the others did not.

One large vein of literature that attempts to explain state decision making, including decisions of war and peace, is expected utility theory. Expected utility theory (EUT) is a use of rational choice theory to explain state decisions. Though many scholars use variants of EUT, rational choice, or both, one of the most influential works leading to the theories development in international relations is Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and David Lalman’s (1992) War and Reason (see also work by Fearon, 1995; Schultz, 2001). This work, like all rational choice theory, does rest on certain assumptions. First, these theories assume that individual actors behave as if they are rational. Second, actors have a set of preferences that they are able to rank order. Third, actors are able to assess the cost and benefits of different alternatives to achieve their preferences. Finally, by weighing costs and benefits, actors choose between these alternatives to maximize their expected utility. Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman focus on each state’s leader as the actor ultimately responsible for making decisions regarding war and peace. It is important to note that neither they, nor most other rational choice theorists, argue that leaders are infallible. The leaders weigh different factors and make mistakes, either in the calculation of the costs of one action or the potential benefit of attaining certain desires. An actor’s actions may also be influenced by norms and values—some actors may not consider certain actions because the actions are deemed unacceptable.

The theory works by looking at a given situation and determining what course of action helps the state (or leader) maximize utility. If two states disagree over a border, for example, the leaders of the two states must weigh different courses of action that are possible. For the purposes of this example, let us say that State A must choose whether to do nothing, initiate negotiations, or initiate an attempt to take the territory by force. To each action, State B has a similar set of choices (do nothing, negotiate, or respond with force). If State B does not respond with force to an initiation of force by A, it is presumed that A wins that interaction. One important aspect of EUT comes through in this example, however: For conflict to occur, the two states must have incompatible preferences. In this case, both states want the same piece of territory. In another case, it may be control over certain resources or influence in a third state. Power competition may matter in the calculations of leaders, but conflict occurs over conflicts in desired outcomes.

One possibility that EUT allows is that leaders will make decisions at least in part designed to keep them in power. The diversionary war theory, a variant of EUT, argues that leaders faced with political unrest at home may initiate a crisis or war in order to improve their domestic political standing by “gambling for resurrection” (see Downs & Rocke, 1994; Smith, 1996). Though not all theorists making this argument use an explicit rational choice framework, the argument fits well. Leaders weigh the possibility of losing office without initiating a conflict versus the possibility of losing office if they initiate conflict. If they determine that they are more likely to maintain office by initiating conflict, they may do so. Proponents of diversionary war arguments often point to the Falkland Islands conflict between Argentina and the United Kingdom in 1982 as a prime example of leaders facing domestic difficulties (Argentina’s in this case) initiating a crisis over islands possessed by the United Kingdom but claimed by Argentina, in order to improve their domestic standing. Argentina ultimately lost the conflict, and the military government in Argentina fell.

EUT does draw a number of criticisms. First, it assumes that state leaders do make rational calculations about the cost and benefits of various actions. Critics of this approach argue that most people are incapable of making such complex calculations and point to the numerous mistakes leaders seem to make in decisions to initiate conflict as an example. For example, Robert Jervis’s (1976) Perception and Misperception in International Politics examines numerous causes of leaders making flawed judgments due to a variety of factors that impaired their decision making. In particular, leaders are often more accepting of information that confirms their previously held beliefs than information that contradicts it; leaders misinterpret the intentions of enemies, often seeing all actions by a perceived enemy in a negative light; and leaders may underestimate the cost of acting when they are predisposed to act and may overestimate costs when predisposed to do nothing. In response, rational choice theorists do acknowledge that people are not perfect decision makers but that, on balance, leaders exhibit what is termed bounded rationality. In essence, leaders do pursue the actions that they perceive to be the most beneficial, even when mistaken.

A second criticism is that rational leaders should probably never fight a war since some mutually agreeable negotiated settlement should exist that is preferable to suffering the cost of war. James Fearon’s (1995) “Rationalist Explanations for War” answers this criticism by arguing that war is essentially an exercise in seeking information. If leaders knew the outcome of a war in advance, they would not fight because a negotiated settlement in which neither side would suffer the cost of war would be preferable. Leaders, however, lack certain information. They believe they know the relative military capabilities of the two sides, and they believe that they know their level of resolve—roughly the cost they are willing to bear to win (measured in lives lost, expenditures, time, etc.). Likewise, leaders have information about the other side’s capability and resolve. These estimations, both of a state’s own power and of the opponent’s power, are imperfect. As wars are fought, information about these factors becomes available; when one side is clearly winning, the two sides update their knowledge about each other and are able to achieve a negotiated settlement. This explanation is also important in that it has been used by other scholars as a launching point to explain the reemergence of conflict and rivalries. Conflicts that end with clear victors are less likely to reemerge in the future than conflicts in which neither side is clearly defeated, since states have better information about their relative capabilities.

A third criticism of rational choice theory is more difficult to address: This criticism is that rational choice, while a useful tool, does not provide an effective explanation for preference formation of actors or for the methods that some actors are willing to use but others are not. Some rational choice theorists make room for the role of other theoretical explanations to establish the basic preferences of actors, including the possibility of normative restraints on options available to actors. More complex models take such factors into account by assigning them weights in a theory—some actors may weigh normative constraints more heavily than others. Some actors may be more willing to accept risk than others—something that can be modeled. The ability to include all such factors into a model does further the criticism, however, by suggesting that by incorporating so many possible factors into models, rational choice theorists may be providing insufficient explanations of behavior. In essence, in any particular case, a post hoc model can be constructed to provide a perfectly rational explanation for a state’s or leader’s behavior.

The best way to resolve this dilemma from a rational choice standpoint is to fully specify the source of an actor’s preference. As noted previously, some scholars, including Bueno de Mesquita, assume that political survival is the ultimate goal of a leader. Decisions on rivalry, conflict, and war are made with an eye to how those decisions impact political survival for a leader or party. In this manner, decisions to go to war that could be detrimental to remaining in power—whether due to loss in war or domestic unpopularity—are unlikely to be made, while decisions that lead to a leader’s staying in power will be made. In some instances, a leader may be unlikely to remain in power regardless of decisions made and may, in fact, gamble that a certain action, if successful, will result in his staying in power, no matter how unlikely that outcome is (a very small chance of staying in power may be better than no chance of staying in power). Even in specifying assumptions ahead of time, however, rational choice theories may be accused of post hoc rationalization—the idea that any action a leader made can be rationalized after the fact. By the same token, postevent analysis may also lead to the opposite criticism: that a leader should have realized the actions he was taking would lead to a fiasco.

In concluding this section, it is important to note that explanations for why states consider other parties to be rivals and why they fight may or may not be related. Neorealist theories may be combined to explain both (a) that states will balance against any state that is larger and (b) war occurs when one state is threatening to displace another in the power order. On the other hand, neoclassical realists, constructivists, and rational choice theories would all argue that there must be some form of disagreement for conflict to occur. For neoclassical realists, a revisionist state unhappy with the status quo may be necessary; for constructivists, two states must share concepts of one another that preclude peaceful relations; for rational choice theorists, the explanation lies in incompatible preferences: Both states want something that requires a settlement with the other state.When one or both states believe it is more likely to achieve its preference through conflict, conflict occurs.

Empirical evidence for the different theoretical perspectives is somewhat hard to adjudicate. In this case, the history of the world, even if the analysis is limited to the 20th century or post–World War II era, is so rich with examples that support for many different theoretical perspectives is possible. For example, neorealists examining World Wars I and II often disagree about whether Germany was a state on the rise threatening to supplant the United Kingdom or Germany was already the dominant state threatened by a rising Russia, then a rising Soviet Union (for the former view, see Organski & Kugler, 1980; for the latter view, see Copeland, 2000). Historical details can be argued to support both positions. Debates on empirical support for various theories in international relations often come down to debates on the appropriate methodology for studying the issue. Some scholars focus on qualitative approaches (e.g., Copeland; Mearsheimer, 2001), using in-depth analysis of a few select cases to demonstrate their arguments, while others use statistical analysis of interactions between many different states over time (e.g., Diehl & Goertz, 2000; Vasquez & Henehan, 2007). Scholars emphasizing the qualitative approach argue that studying cases in depth provides a more nuanced understanding of the factors that lead to certain outcomes. More quantitatively focused scholars argue that by looking only at a small subset of cases, qualitative work may not sufficiently explain a wide range of cases or may misapply lessons from a few exceptional cases. Quantitative work, on the other hand, is often criticized for being probabilistic—it can explain tendencies but may not explain the particulars of many cases.

Nonetheless, the combination of quantitative and qualitative work on rivalries has led to some interesting conclusions. First, interstate wars frequently recur between the same sets of actors, suggesting that rivalries between states are an important source of international conflicts. Although conflicts are often between similarly sized opponents (suggesting balancing behavior), that is not always the case. As important appears to be a factor suggested by Fearon’s work and followed up by others: the importance of a clear victor. In wars where one side does not achieve a clear victory or outside actors impose a ceasefire, war is more likely to reemerge than if one state achieves its principal war aims. Second, wars are often about incompatible preferences. Several scholars, led by John Vasquez, have emphasized the importance of territorial disputes in predicting where wars will occur. In a similar vein, research on enduring rivalries—relationships between states marked by repeated conflict—suggests that rivalries are often likely to emerge in postcolonial areas or after great power conflict, two times when borders are most in flux. A third finding in studies of enduring rivalries is that when one state in a rivalry is a democracy, the rivalry tends to be shorter, and if both states in a rivalry become democracies, it is likely to end. This finding is in keeping with the democratic peace literature that suggests democracies are highly unlikely to fight other democracies, though democracies may be just as war prone as other states with nondemocracies.

On this last point, recent studies have indicated that the interest of a state’s leader may influence decisions on war and, at times, peace. New quantitative research indicates that, contrary to the diversionary war argument discussed above, leaders are most likely to start conflicts when they are secure in office. Although some examples of leaders gambling for their jobs may exist, on balance, most wars are started by leaders who are not facing significant opposition. This finding holds across regime types (Chiozza & Goemans, 2003).

Nonetheless, as continued disagreement on the real causes of World Wars I and II demonstrate, empirical questions regarding the sources of rivalries and conflict are not fully settled. International relations are quite complex; no simple, concise explanation has been found that explains the particulars of all conflicts or rivalries, though, as discussed previously, certain patterns have emerged from the data over time. Conclusions drawn from the data, however, may impact the policy decisions of states, as is discussed in the next section.

Understanding the dynamics of rivalry formation and the initiation of conflict has the potential to help prevent future conflicts. Frequently, however, it seems that insights from international relations theory either do not inform the decisions of policymakers or are misapplied. This section focuses on aspects of U.S. decision making during the cold war, the U.S. war in Iraq, and U.S. actions vis-à-vis China.

During the cold war, the United States worked to maintain a system of alliances around the world to contain the Soviet Union. The United States fought wars on the Korean peninsula and in Vietnam to support allies that were not central to the defense of U.S. security in the interest of preventing the spread of communism. It also spent a great deal of money and provided arms to countries around the world in order to ensure that they were friendlier to the United States than to the Soviet Union, sometimes supporting insurgencies against Soviet-backed governments. Although this section focuses on the United States, it is important to note that the Soviet Union engaged in similar behavior. International relations theory in general would not seem to be very sympathetic to these actions. Neorealists, particularly those influenced by Waltz, would argue that in a bipolar system, the primary focus of balancing behavior should be internal, not external. The United States may have expended resources it did not need to in order to confront the Soviet Union.

Neoclassical realism and constructivism would also seem to have suggested that the United States use a more cautious approach. For neoclassical realists, if the United States was perceived as a threat by engaging in aggressive acts, even ones intended to confront communism, balancing behavior against the United States should have been expected. Although U.S. policymakers seemed to have believed that the United States had to demonstrate its strength around the world to encourage states to ally with it, the predominant conclusion of neorealist theory is that states balance against the most powerful actors in the system. For constructivists, by continuing to treat the Soviet Union and all communist states as enemies and interpreting all actions through that lens, the United States helped to perpetuate the cold war dynamic.

In terms of the war in Iraq, two prominent neorealist scholars, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (2003), penned an article prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, arguing against the move. Part of President George W. Bush’s motivation in invading Iraq was the spread of democracy to the Middle East, which seems to be based on the democratic peace theory that arose from international relations scholarship. Walt and Mearsheimer argued, however, that the war would not serve U.S. interest for several reasons, primarily because Iraq was not a true threat and could be easily deterred, contained, or both. They further noted that the war could have unintended consequences, and that an aggressive, unilateral foreign policy by the United States could provoke balancing behavior. Although the Bush administration did use the notion of democratic peace to help justify the invasion, on a larger level international relations theory seems not to have played a large role in the decision-making process.

Regarding China, different international relations theories suggest different futures—and recommended courses of action—for U.S. policy. If neorealism is correct and the natural tendency of states is to balance against more powerful ones, the United States should continue to expect China to build up its military and should, in fact, continue to arm itself in an effort to defend itself against China. In the neorealist view of the world as anarchic, states must be prepared to defend themselves. In this case, the United States must be ready to defend itself and its interests against China. Note that this does not mean that the United States should take an aggressive tone or provoke confrontations with China—neorealists would not want the United States to hasten balancing behavior even if it is inevitable.

Neoclassical realism, although concerned about Chinese power, would also concern itself with Chinese intent. Is China a revisionist state that is dissatisfied with the status quo? If China is dissatisfied, then the United States should be alarmed. If it is not or if the United States can reasonably accommodate China without weakening its own position, the United States may have little to fear in a more powerful China. Finally, constructivism would suggest that the United States will have a major role to play in defining its future relationship with China. If the United States treats China primarily as a threat, China is likely to reciprocate, and the relationship may become one marked by rivalry, much like the cold war. If, on the other hand, the United States seeks to work with China as a partner, a rivalry relationship becomes much less likely. This debate on the preferred approach to China is ongoing both in government and among international relations scholars. Organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations, a well-respected nonpartisan foreign policy organization, have held numerous forums and published several books examining this question, eliciting debate from individuals from multiple schools of thought.

To conclude, international relations theory often produces policy recommendations that are at odds with the policies ultimately chosen by the United States. Nonetheless, some prominent academics, including Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice at the highest levels and individuals such as Joseph Nye and Larry Diamond at lower levels, have played a role in policy formation. Potential reasons that scholars of international relations have had a difficult time in influencing policy on questions of conflict may include (a) a focus on explaining past conflicts rather than predicting future behavior, (b) widespread disagreement among scholars on preferred policies, and (c) theoretic explanations that do not always readily translate into policy prescriptions. Finally, it may also be the case that theory could lead to self-fulfilling prophecies. If the United States engages in balancing behavior with China at the behest of neorealist scholarship and China reciprocates, both neorealists and constructivists could claim to be correct. Constructivists would be able to argue that the United States provoked the balancing behavior with its actions, while the neorealists would argue that China’s behavior proved them to be correct all along.

The international system is in a constant state of change, a fact recognized even by scholars who argue that the basic motivations of states are consistent over time. Among the questions with which future scholars must grapple are these: (a) Will the United States and China emerge as rivals in a new cold war; (b) do terrorists organizations such as al Qaeda represent a true threat to the traditional notions of statehood; (c) has economic globalization, particularly close ties between the economies of states like China and the United States, lessened the likelihood of future wars; (d) have normative shifts over the past 60 years made states less likely to resort to war; and finally (e) what will future conflict look like?

Each of these questions has an impact on the future study of international relations. Part of the answer to the first question may depend on the advice that international relations scholars provide to policymakers on the United States–China relationship. Question two addresses an underlying assumption of this research paper: that states matter. Future scholars must weigh the balance they give to interstate war and rivalry versus war between states and nonstate actors. The third question asks whether economic ties and economic globalization have changed the way states interact. The United States is a major market for Chinese goods; any conflict between China and the United States would be bad from an economic standpoint. In answer to the fourth question, constructivists would argue that the use of war as an instrument of policy simply is not accepted among states as it once was and that states who engage in aggressive war—even the United States—face consequences for their actions. Finally, the weapons and tactics of war have evolved over time. Future wars may not look like past ones; for example, many states, now including the United States, have dedicated commands that focus on cyberwarfare. These are just some of the questions facing the field of international relations; they do not even address debates that still continue over the causes of past events or unforeseen circumstances that will arise in the future.

This research paper has provided an introduction to several schools of thought on what leads to rivalries between states and the causes of interstate war. The field of international relations has many schools of thought that attempt to answer these questions, and the schools of thought themselves are subject to great debates. While neorealists focus on the role of power and the natural tendency to balance against power due to the vagaries of international anarchy and the need for security, constructivists emphasize that states and leaders have a role in constructing their own reality. Although these theories may provide some insight into which states will be rivals (states competing for power or states who enter a cycle of competition), they may be less powerful in explaining the actual emergence of war. For that, theories that analyze the preferences and actions of leaders provide useful insights into the decisions that lead to war. Such arguments often focus on the incompatibility of preferences between actors. Finally, the empirical evidence available does not lead to definitive conclusions. Sadly, the reality of the persistence of war affords ample opportunity for theorists to argue over war’s cause.

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• Israeli Views of the Israel-Hamas War

1. Views of the Israel-Hamas war

Table of contents.

• Views of the Israeli military response against Hamas
• Attitudes toward Israel’s war cabinet
• Current concerns about the war
• Confidence in Biden
• Views of how Biden is handling the Israel-Hamas war
• Who is Biden favoring in the conflict, or is he striking the right balance?
• Views of the U.S.
• Who Israelis want to play a role in diplomatically resolving the war
• Success against Hamas
• Israel’s future national security
• The future of Gaza
• Views of Palestinian leaders
• Palestinian statehood and coexistence
• Acknowledgments
• Methodology

At the time of the survey in March and early April, Israelis voiced differing views of the war. Reactions to the military response against Hamas were generally mixed, as were attitudes toward the principal decision-makers – the three members of Israel’s war cabinet . However, most Israelis shared concerns that the war could expand across the region and last a long time.

When asked to assess their country’s military response against Hamas in Gaza, about four-in-ten Israelis say it has been about right. Another 34% say it has not gone far enough, while 19% say it has gone too far.

Israeli Arabs are much more critical of the military response, with 74% saying it has gone too far. Only 4% of Israeli Jews agree.

Views of the military response are divided along ideological lines. Roughly half of those who place themselves on the right (52%) say the military response has been insufficient. About a quarter of those in the center (24%) agree and only 9% of Israelis on the left say the same.

On the other hand, a majority of Israelis on the ideological left (55%) say the military response to Hamas has gone too far. Only 15% of those in the center and 5% of those on the right share this view.

Among Israelis who have a favorable view of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, roughly half (49%) say the response to Hamas has been about right, but another 45% say it has not gone far enough. Only 1% of those who favor Netanyahu think the military response has gone too far.

In the days following the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, the country’s then-governing coalition struck a deal with National Unity, an opposition party, to join an emergency government . The leader of the party, Benny Gantz, together with Netanyahu and Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, formed the core of the new war cabinet , which was tasked with navigating the course of the conflict. (The survey was conducted before Gantz threatened to leave the war cabinet .)

Of the cabinet’s three voting members, Gallant enjoys the most public support in our survey: 61% of Israelis say they have a very or somewhat favorable view of him. Around half say the same about Gantz. As for Netanyahu, approximately four-in-ten Israelis have a positive view of the prime minister. 

For more on views of Palestinian leaders, refer to Chapter 3 .

The majority of Israelis (58%) see their prime minister in a negative light. The share of Israelis who have a somewhat or very unfavorable view of Netanyahu is the largest it has been since the Center first started asking the question in 2013, up 6 percentage points from last year.

Related: A growing share of Americans have little or no confidence in Netanyahu

Netanyahu’s favorability ratings have fallen among Jews and Arabs alike. However, roughly half of Israeli Jews still see him positively, compared with only 7% of Israeli Arabs.

Favorability among right-leaning Israelis – the mainstay of Netanyahu’s political coalition – has also declined. In this group, 69% have a favorable view of Netanyahu, compared with 85% last year.

Views of the three members of Israel’s war cabinet vary by ethnicity, ideology and levels of religious observance.

• About three-quarters of Israeli Jews have a favorable view of Gallant, but only 9% of Israeli Arabs agree. Of the three war cabinet members, Gantz has the highest share of support among Israeli Arabs (30%).

• Among those on the ideological right, about two-thirds have a favorable view of the prime minister. Only 18% of centrists and 8% of those on the left share this view. Gantz, a centrist party leader, is favored by 71% of Israelis in the center and a smaller majority (56%) of those on the left.
• Most Hiloni (“secular”) Jews in Israel (76%) say they have a favorable view of Gantz – more than double the share of Haredim (“ultra-Orthodox”) and Datiim (“religious”) who say the same (32%). Netanyahu, who relied on religious parties and their voters to build his governing coalition, is seen favorably by 88% of Haredi and Dati Jews, but by only 21% of the Hiloni public.

Most who have a favorable view of the prime minister feel similarly about Gallant, his minister of defense and fellow Likud member (84% have a favorable view of him). Gantz has less appeal among those who express a favorable view of Netanyahu – only about a third in this group also hold a favorable view of his political rival.

Thinking about the course of the war, most Israelis express a great deal of concern about its scope and duration.

Around six-in-ten are extremely or very concerned about the war expanding to other countries in the region, and about seven-in-ten are seriously worried about the war lasting a long time. (The survey was fielded amid escalating conflict along Israel’s border with Lebanon but prior to Iran’s missile attack on Israel in mid-April.)

Jewish and Arab Israelis are equally concerned that the war might expand to other countries (61% in each group voice this concern), though Arabs are slightly more likely than Jews to say they worry about a long war (77% vs. 66%).

Approximately a quarter of Israelis on the ideological left and in the center are extremely concerned about the war expanding across the region – roughly double the share of right-leaning Israelis who express the same level of alarm.

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Guest Essay

America’s Military Is Not Prepared for War — or Peace

By Roger Wicker

Mr. Wicker, a Republican, is the ranking member of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee.

“To be prepared for war,” George Washington said, “is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.” President Ronald Reagan agreed with his forebear’s words, and peace through strength became a theme of his administration. In the past four decades, the American arsenal helped secure that peace, but political neglect has led to its atrophy as other nations’ war machines have kicked into high gear. Most Americans do not realize the specter of great power conflict has risen again.

It is far past time to rebuild America’s military. We can avoid war by preparing for it.

When America’s senior military leaders testify before my colleagues and me on the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee behind closed doors, they have said that we face some of the most dangerous global threat environments since World War II. Then, they darken that already unsettling picture by explaining that our armed forces are at risk of being underequipped and outgunned. We struggle to build and maintain ships, our fighter jet fleet is dangerously small, and our military infrastructure is outdated. Meanwhile, America’s adversaries are growing their militaries and getting more aggressive.

In China, the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, has orchestrated a historic military modernization intended to exploit the U.S. military’s weaknesses. He has overtaken the U.S. Navy in fleet size, built one of the world’s largest missile stockpiles and made big advances in space. President Vladimir Putin of Russia has thrown Europe into war and mobilized his society for long-term conflict. Iran and its proxy groups have escalated their shadow war against Israel and increased attacks on U.S. ships and soldiers. And North Korea has disregarded efforts toward arms control negotiations and moved toward wartime readiness.

Worse yet, these governments are materially helping one another, cooperating in new ways to prevent an American-led 21st century. Iran has provided Russia with battlefield drones, and China is sending technical and logistical help to aid Mr. Putin’s war. They are also helping one another prepare for future fights by increasing weapons transfers and to evade sanctions. Their unprecedented coordination makes new global conflict increasingly possible.

That theoretical future could come faster than most Americans think. We may find ourselves in a state of extreme vulnerability in a matter of a few years, according to a growing consensus of experts. Our military readiness could be at its lowest point in decades just as China’s military in particular hits its stride. The U.S. Indo-Pacific commander released what I believe to be the largest list of unfunded items ever for services and combatant commands for next year’s budget, amounting to $11 billion. It requested funding for a raft of infrastructure, missile defense and targeting programs that would prove vital in a Pacific fight. China, on the other hand, has no such problems, as it accumulates the world’s leading hypersonic arsenal with a mix of other lethal cruise and attack missiles.

Our military leaders are being forced to make impossible choices. The Navy is struggling to adequately fund new ships, routine maintenance and munition procurement; it is unable to effectively address all three. We recently signed a deal to sell submarines to Australia, but we’ve failed to sufficiently fund our own submarine industrial base, leaving an aging fleet unprepared to respond to threats. Two of the three most important nuclear modernization programs are underfunded and are at risk of delays. The military faces a backlog of at least $180 billion for basic maintenance, from barracks to training ranges. This projects weakness to our adversaries as we send service members abroad with diminished ability to respond to crises.

Fortunately, we can change course. We can avoid that extreme vulnerability and resurrect American military might.

On Wednesday I am publishing a plan that includes a series of detailed proposals to address this reality head-on. We have been living off the Reagan military buildup for too long; it is time for updates and upgrades. My plan outlines why and how the United States should aim to spend an additional $55 billion on the military in the 2025 fiscal year and grow military spending from a projected 2.9 percent of our national gross domestic product this year to 5 percent over the next five to seven years.

It would be a significant investment that would start a reckoning over our nation’s spending priorities. There will be conversations ahead about all manner of budget questions. We do not need to spend this much indefinitely — but we do need a short-term generational investment to help us prevent another world war.

My blueprint would grow the Navy to 357 ships by 2035 and halt our shrinking Air Force fleet by producing at least 340 additional fighters in five years. This will help patch near-term holes and put each fleet on a sustainable trajectory. The plan would also replenish the Air Force tanker and training fleets, accelerate the modernization of the Army and Marine Corps, and invest in joint capabilities that are all too often forgotten, including logistics and munitions.

The proposal would build on the $3.3 billion in submarine industrial base funding included in the national security supplemental passed in April, so we can bolster our defense and that of our allies. It would also rapidly equip service members all over the world with innovative technologies at scale, from the seabed to the stars.

We should pair increased investment with wiser spending. Combining this crucial investment with fiscal responsibility would funnel resources to the most strategic ends. Emerging technology must play an essential role, and we can build and deploy much of it in less than five years. My road map would also help make improvements to the military procurement system and increase accountability for bureaucrats and companies that fail to perform on vital national security projects.

This whole endeavor would shake our status quo but be far less disruptive and expensive than the alternative. Should China decide to wage war with the United States, the global economy could immediately fall into a depression. Americans have grown far too comfortable under the decades-old presumption of overwhelming military superiority. And that false sense of security has led us to ignore necessary maintenance and made us vulnerable.

Our ability to deter our adversaries can be regained because we have done it before. At the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, in the twilight of the Soviet Union, George H.W. Bush reflected on the lessons of Pearl Harbor. Though the conflict was long gone, it taught him an enduring lesson: “When it comes to national defense,” he said, “finishing second means finishing last.”

Regaining American strength will be expensive. But fighting a war — and worse, losing one — is far more costly. We need to begin a national conversation today on how we achieve a peaceful, prosperous and American-led 21st century. The first step is a generational investment in the U.S. military.

Roger Wicker is the senior U.S. senator from Mississippi and the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Most Israelis rate military’s campaign in Gaza ‘about right’ or not enough

A survey by Pew Research found only 1 in 5 Israelis said the military campaign in Gaza had gone too far.

A majority of Israelis support their country’s military response to Hamas in Gaza but are divided over its scope, according to a survey by Pew Research published Thursday.

The survey found 39 percent of Israelis said that the country’s military response against Hamas in Gaza has been “about right,” and 34 percent said it has “not gone far enough” — indicating continued support for the war. Another 19 percent said they think it has gone too far. The survey was conducted between March 3 and April 4, mostly before Israeli airstrikes killed seven aid workers for the charity group World Central Kitchen and predating this week’s airstrike in Rafah that killed at least 45 Palestinians.

More than 36,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the war started, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. The Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas killed about 1,200.

On Sunday, in one of the most horrifying scenes of the war, an Israeli strike in southern Gaza’s Rafah killed at least 45 Palestinians, some of whom burned alive , according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Israel said the attack was a “targeted” strike against two Hamas militants and that it was investigating the “unexpected and unintended fire” at the camp.

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Though opinions on the military response differed, most Israelis expressed confidence that Israel will be able to achieve its goals in the fight against Hamas, the Pew survey found. There was, however, shared concern about the duration and scope of the war. Just under 7 in 10 are seriously concerned about the war lasting a long time, the survey found.

Laura Silver, associate director of research at Pew, said that the results of the poll showed that Israelis remained broadly optimistic about the war in Gaza, though people across Israeli society perceived the war in vastly different ways.

“People who have a favorable view of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are much more likely to say that the military response to Hamas has been about right or has not gone far enough than those who have an unfavorable view of him,” Silver said.

On Wednesday, Israel’s national security adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi, told Kan public radio that he was expecting “another seven months of fighting” in Gaza to eliminate Hamas and other militant groups.

In the poll, there was a lack of clear consensus among Israelis over the future of governance in Gaza. Forty percent said Israel should govern the enclave after the war, while 18 percent said the Palestinian Authority , which administers parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, should be in charge of Gaza, the poll found.

Palestinian citizens of Israel are sharply split on the matter with Israeli Jews. Most Palestinian citizens of Israel said either the people in Gaza should make that decision or approve of the Palestinian Authority running it.

Netanyahu has been widely criticized for his government’s lack of a postwar political strategy for Gaza. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and war cabinet member Benny Gantz have in recent weeks ratcheted up the heat on Netanyahu over this issue.

A growing share of Israelis — 58 percent — hold a negative view of Netanyahu, who has faced mass anti-government protests for failing to bring back all the hostages kidnapped by Hamas militants on Oct. 7. That’s a jump of 6 percentage points from last year and the highest since Pew first started asking this question in 2013, the Pew Center said.

Many Israelis also appeared critical of President Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza, with 60 percent expressing disapproval. In the United States, Biden is facing stiff domestic pressure and scrutiny from some Democrats and supporters over his policies on Gaza amid a high civilian death toll and catastrophic humanitarian crisis.

But Israelis want the United States to play a major role in diplomatically resolving the war, higher than that of any other country; 72 percent favored the United States for the task, compared with 38 percent support for European countries. Egypt, which has been involved in negotiations over a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas, received support from 45 percent Israelis, higher than the United Nations and other regional countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

The Pew Research Center survey was conducted through face-to-face interviews with a random sample of 1,001 Israeli adults; the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4 percentage points for overall results.

Israel-Gaza war

The Israel-Gaza war has gone on for six months, and tensions have spilled into the surrounding region .

The war: On Oct. 7, Hamas militants launched an unprecedented cross-border attack on Israel that included the taking of civilian hostages at a music festival . (See photos and videos of how the deadly assault unfolded ). Israel declared war on Hamas in response, launching a ground invasion that fueled the biggest displacement in the region since Israel’s creation in 1948 .

Gaza crisis: In the Gaza Strip, Israel has waged one of this century’s most destructive wars , killing tens of thousands and plunging at least half of the population into “ famine-like conditions. ” For months, Israel has resisted pressure from Western allies to allow more humanitarian aid into the enclave .

U.S. involvement: Despite tensions between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and some U.S. politicians , including President Biden, the United States supports Israel with weapons , funds aid packages , and has vetoed or abstained from the United Nations’ cease-fire resolutions.

History: The roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and mistrust are deep and complex, predating the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 . Read more on the history of the Gaza Strip .

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Ultrasound offers a new way to perform deep brain stimulation

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Deep brain stimulation, by implanted electrodes that deliver electrical pulses to the brain, is often used to treat Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders. However, the electrodes used for this treatment can eventually corrode and accumulate scar tissue, requiring them to be removed.

MIT researchers have now developed an alternative approach that uses ultrasound instead of electricity to perform deep brain stimulation, delivered by a fiber about the thickness of a human hair. In a study of mice, they showed that this stimulation can trigger neurons to release dopamine, in a part of the brain that is often targeted in patients with Parkinson’s disease.

“By using ultrasonography, we can create a new way of stimulating neurons to fire in the deep brain,” says Canan Dagdeviren, an associate professor in the MIT Media Lab and the senior author of the new study. “This device is thinner than a hair fiber, so there will be negligible tissue damage, and it is easy for us to navigate this device in the deep brain.”

In addition to offering a potentially safer way to deliver deep brain stimulation, this approach could also become a valuable tool for researchers seeking to learn more about how the brain works.

MIT graduate student Jason Hou and MIT postdoc Md Osman Goni Nayeem are the lead authors of the paper, along with collaborators from MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Boston University, and Caltech. The study appears today in Nature Communications .

Deep in the brain

Dagdeviren’s lab has previously developed wearable ultrasound devices that can be used to deliver drugs through the skin or perform diagnostic imaging on various organs . However, ultrasound cannot penetrate deeply into the brain from a device attached to the head or skull.

“If we want to go into the deep brain, then it cannot be just wearable or attachable anymore. It has to be implantable,” Dagdeviren says. “We carefully customize the device so that it will be minimally invasive and avoid major blood vessels in the deep brain.”

Deep brain stimulation with electrical impulses is FDA-approved to treat symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. This approach uses millimeter-thick electrodes to activate dopamine-producing cells in a brain region called the substantia nigra. However, once implanted in the brain, the devices eventually begin to corrode, and scar tissue that builds up surrounding the implant can interfere with the electrical impulses.

The MIT team set out to see if they could overcome some of those drawbacks by replacing electrical stimulation with ultrasound. Most neurons have ion channels that are responsive to mechanical stimulation, such as the vibrations from sound waves, so ultrasound can be used to elicit activity in those cells. However, existing technologies for delivering ultrasound to the brain through the skull can’t reach deep into the brain with high precision because the skull itself can interfere with the ultrasound waves and cause off-target stimulation.

“To precisely modulate neurons, we must go deeper, leading us to design a new kind of ultrasound-based implant that produces localized ultrasound fields,” Nayeem says. To safely reach those deep brain regions, the researchers designed a hair-thin fiber made from a flexible polymer. The tip of the fiber contains a drum-like ultrasound transducer with a vibrating membrane. When this membrane, which encapsulates a thin piezoelectric film, is driven by a small electrical voltage, it generates ultrasonic waves that can be detected by nearby cells.

“It’s tissue-safe, there’s no exposed electrode surface, and it’s very low-power, which bodes well for translation to patient use,” Hou says.

In tests in mice, the researchers showed that this ultrasound device, which they call ImPULS (Implantable Piezoelectric Ultrasound Stimulator), can provoke activity in neurons of the hippocampus. Then, they implanted the fibers into the dopamine-producing substantia nigra and showed that they could stimulate neurons in the dorsal striatum to produce dopamine.

“Brain stimulation has been one of the most effective, yet least understood, methods used to restore health to the brain. ImPULS gives us the ability to stimulate brain cells with exquisite spatial-temporal resolution and in a manner that doesn’t produce the kind of damage or inflammation as other methods. Seeing its effectiveness in areas like the hippocampus opened an entirely new way for us to deliver precise stimulation to targeted circuits in the brain,” says Steve Ramirez, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Boston University, and a faculty member at B.U.’s Center for Systems Neuroscience, who is also an author of the study.

A customizable device

All of the components of the device are biocompatible, including the piezoelectric layer, which is made of a novel ceramic called potassium sodium niobate, or KNN. The current version of the implant is powered by an external power source, but the researchers envision that future versions could be powered a small implantable battery and electronics unit.

The researchers developed a microfabrication process that enables them to easily alter the length and thickness of the fiber, as well as the frequency of the sound waves produced by the piezoelectric transducer. This could allow the devices to be customized for different brain regions.

“We cannot say that the device will give the same effect on every region in the brain, but we can easily and very confidently say that the technology is scalable, and not only for mice. We can also make it bigger for eventual use in humans,” Dagdeviren says.

The researchers now plan to investigate how ultrasound stimulation might affect different regions of the brain, and if the devices can remain functional when implanted for year-long timescales. They are also interested in the possibility of incorporating a microfluidic channel, which could allow the device to deliver drugs as well as ultrasound.

In addition to holding promise as a potential therapeutic for Parkinson’s or other diseases, this type of ultrasound device could also be a valuable tool to help researchers learn more about the brain, the researchers say.

“Our goal to provide this as a research tool for the neuroscience community, because we believe that we don’t have enough effective tools to understand the brain,” Dagdeviren says. “As device engineers, we are trying to provide new tools so that we can learn more about different regions of the brain.”

The research was funded by the MIT Media Lab Consortium and the Brain and Behavior Foundation Research (BBRF) NARSAD Young Investigator Award.

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