disadvantages of war essay

Essay on Disadvantages of War

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100 Words Essay on Disadvantages of War

Loss of human lives.

War often results in a high number of casualties. Soldiers and civilians alike lose their lives, causing immense grief to families and communities.

Damage to Infrastructure

War leads to destruction of infrastructure like homes, schools, and hospitals. This leaves people homeless and disrupts basic services.

Economic Impact

War can devastate a country’s economy. It often leads to increased spending on military, causing a rise in debt and economic instability.

Psychological Effects

People exposed to war suffer from mental health issues such as post-traumatic stress disorder. The psychological impact of war can last for generations.

250 Words Essay on Disadvantages of War

Introduction.

War, as an instrument of national policy, has been universally denounced due to its devastating impact on humanity. Despite the occasional arguments in favor of war as a means of resolving disputes, the disadvantages overwhelmingly outweigh the benefits.

The most immediate and visible disadvantage of war is the human cost. Lives are lost, families are torn apart, and communities are destroyed. The psychological trauma inflicted on soldiers and civilians alike can last for generations, leading to a cycle of violence and despair.

War also has a profound economic impact. The cost of weaponry, logistics, and reconstruction after the devastation can cripple a nation’s economy for decades. It diverts resources from more productive uses, such as education and healthcare, exacerbating poverty and inequality.

Political Consequences

Politically, war can destabilize governments, leading to power vacuums and enabling the rise of extremist groups. It can also strain international relations, leading to a breakdown of global cooperation and peacekeeping efforts.

Environmental Damage

Lastly, the environmental damage caused by war is often overlooked. Bombings and other military activities can cause long-term damage to ecosystems, contributing to climate change and loss of biodiversity.

In conclusion, war presents numerous disadvantages that far outweigh any potential benefits. It inflicts immeasurable human suffering, disrupts economies, destabilizes politics, and harms the environment. As such, diplomatic and peaceful means of resolving disputes should always be prioritized over warfare.

500 Words Essay on Disadvantages of War

War, a state of armed conflict between different nations or states, has been a constant part of human history. Despite its common occurrence, it is a practice that yields numerous disadvantages. This essay delves into the multifaceted disadvantages of war, including the human cost, economic implications, environmental impact, and societal disruptions.

The Human Cost of War

One of the most immediate and devastating disadvantages of war is the human cost. War leads to the loss of human lives on a large scale, causing immeasurable grief and pain to the families of those who perish. Beyond the battlefield, civilians often bear the brunt of the conflict, with widespread displacement, injury, and death resulting from bombings, starvation, and disease. The psychological trauma inflicted on survivors can also lead to long-term mental health issues, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Economic Implications

War also has severe economic implications. The cost of warfare is astronomical, with funds being diverted from essential sectors like education, health, and infrastructure to fuel the war machine. This diversion of resources not only stunts national development but also leads to economic instability. Post-war economies often face inflation, unemployment, and debt, which can take generations to overcome.

Environmental Impact

The environmental impact of war is another significant disadvantage. Modern warfare methods cause extensive damage to the environment, from deforestation and soil erosion to chemical pollution and biodiversity loss. These environmental damages have long-term effects on the ecosystem, affecting the livelihoods of communities and contributing to global environmental issues like climate change.

Societal Disruptions

Lastly, war disrupts societal structures and norms. It leads to the breakdown of law and order, promoting violence, crime, and human rights abuses. War can also lead to the displacement of large populations, causing refugee crises that strain international relations and resources. Additionally, war can deepen social divisions and breed hatred and mistrust among different ethnic, religious, or political groups, making post-war reconciliation and peacebuilding a daunting task.

In conclusion, war carries with it numerous disadvantages that far outweigh any perceived benefits. The human cost, economic implications, environmental impact, and societal disruptions caused by war make it a destructive and undesirable practice. It is crucial for nations and states to invest in peaceful conflict resolution methods and diplomacy to prevent the unnecessary suffering and devastation that war brings.

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Disadvantage of Wars

War is a conflict between two or more groups that attack each other. Although the meaning of wars has changed, their importance has not. Wars have many disadvantages, such as economic depression, environmental problems, and conflict in social structure. The cost of wars is high because guns and war machines are expensive and many of them are broken during the war, causing damage to cities and buildings. Lack of economic improvement also dramatically decreases production and investment, affecting domestic and foreign trade. War machines harm trees, animals, and people, resulting in epidemic disasters. War weakens democracy, limits freedom, and damages human rights. Social services, such as education, also suffer, resulting in a lack of basic needs. In conclusion, wars make the economy weaker, the environment dirtier, and social structure poorer. Without understanding the meaning of peace, wars will continue in the future.

War is an armed conflict between two or more groups which attack each other. Although the meaning of wars has changed, the importance of wars hasn’t changed. The wars have many disadvantages for people, such as, economic depression, environmental problems and conflict in social structure.

One of the main disadvantages of wars is economic depression. Cost of wars is very high because guns and war machines are very expensive. During the war a lot of guns and war machines are used and many of them are broken. Also, the city, which is in war, gets big damage. For instance, many buildings are destroyed by bombs. Not only cost of war is important but also lack of economic improvement is very important. Production and investment dramatically decrease. Thus, the trade of country, such as foreign trade and domestic trade, get nearly stopped. A second disadvantage of wars is environmental problems. Many war machines are

used in war. War machines also harm trees, animals and others. A lot of animals and people are died, so scattered bodies will be in everywhere such as near drinking water sources. After people drunk this water, they most probably are infected by epidemic disasters such as Phthisis and Yellowness. The final disadvantage of wars is conflict in social structure. While war is lasting, the democracy gets weak. People have limited freedom. Military juntas are very harmful for democracy. Also military junta damages human rights. Moreover, some social services become slower. For example, education gets very important damage at school and family. Wars result in lack of basic needs. In conclusion, wars make economy weaker, environment dirtier and social structure poorer. A war has many disadvantages, but in the history many wars were made by a lot of countries. In contrast, many wars are lasting at present. In my opinion, if we don’t understand meaning of peace, these wars will last in the future.

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ENCYCLOPEDIC ENTRY

War is generally defined as violent conflict between states or nations.

Social Studies, Civics

Tank in Iraq Invasion

A United States Army 3rd Infantry Division M1/A1 Abrahms tank during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. While the use of force was authorized by Congress, like many U.S. military conflicts, war was not declared.

Photograph by Scott Nelson/Getty Images

War is generally defined as violent conflict between states or nations. Nations go to war for a variety of reasons. It has been argued that a nation will go to war if the benefits of war are deemed to outweigh the disadvantages, and if there is a sense that there is not another mutually agreeable solution. More specifically, some have argued that wars are fought primarily for economic, religious, and political reasons. Others have claimed that most wars today are fought for ideological reasons. In the United States, the legal power to declare war is vested in Congress; however, the president is the commander-in-chief of the military, so he or she holds power to conduct a war once it has been declared. In many instances, the president has used military force without declaring war . Just War Theory In Western tradition, there is a sense that the reasons for war must be just. This idea dates back to ancient times, but is most clearly traced to the writings of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. They attempted to justify war, and reconcile it with the Christian belief that taking a human life is wrong. To Aquinas, a war must be just in both the reasons for going to war and how war is fought. Reasons for going to war— jus ad bellum —are just if (1) war is declared by an appropriate authority; (2) the war is waged for a just cause; and (3) the war is waged for just intentions. An appropriate authority is a proper, governing authority. A “just cause” may include self-defense or a response to injustice. “Just intentions” mean that it must not be fought for self-interest, but for justice or a common good. In addition, (4) there must be a reasonable chance of success; (5) the good that will be achieved must outweigh the bad; and (6) war must be a last resort. Once just reasons for going to war are satisfied, conduct in the war— jus in bello —must be just as well. Just conduct in a war means that it must be specific and proportional. That is, noncombatants and civilians must not be deliberately targeted. Further, only such force as is necessary must be used, and harms must be proportionate to the goal sought. Law of War Some of the just war theories have been adopted as parts of international agreements and incorporated into the law of war (i.e., international law) that regulates the resort to armed force, the conduct of hostilities, and the protection of war victims. The Geneva Conventions , for example, are a series of international treaties that are designed to protect noncombatants, civilians , and prisoners of war . The treaties were negotiated in Geneva, Switzerland, between 1864 and 1977. The First and Second Geneva Conventions apply to sick and wounded soldiers and sailors. They contain provisions related to protecting the wounded and sick, as well as medical personnel and transports. The Third Geneva Convention applies to prisoners of war , and the Fourth Geneva Convention applies to people in occupied territories. The Third Convention requires humane treatment of prisoners, including adequate food and water. The Fourth Convention includes provisions that forbid torture and the taking of hostages, as well as provisions related to medical care and hospitals.

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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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ReviseSociology

A level sociology revision – education, families, research methods, crime and deviance and more!

How War and Conflict Harm Societies and Prevent Development

Immediate effects include death and injury, longer term consequences include destruction of infrastructure and disruption to social services.

Table of Contents

Last Updated on September 28, 2023 by Karl Thompson

War and conflict harm societies and prevent development through both immediate and longer term effects.

While immediate violent death or injury in battle are two of the more obvious direct consequences of war and conflict, there are many other direct immediate and indirect, longer term negative consequences.

Longer term consequences can drastically add to people’s misery and retard positive development for several years after a conflict ends.

NB – the distinction between direct/ indirect or immediate/ long term isn’t a hard and fast one, they can easily merge together, especially when a conflict drags on for several years – and the breakdown of social infrastructure (usually categorised as a long term, indirect consequence of war) kind of becomes more immediate and direct!)

The distinction is really just an analytical tool, the important thing it highlights is that immediate violent death and injury are usually just the start of the negative consequences of warfare – the consequences are much longer term!

The Immediate effects of War and Conflict

There have been over 10 million conflict deaths in the last 30 years.

There have been 15 conflicts since the Rwandan Genocide in 1994 with death tolls of more than 25 000 people, of which 9 are currently ongoing (in March 2021). The total number of deaths in these conflicts stands at just over 10 million people (upper estimate), but this doesn’t include the people dying in the many smaller conflicts which have taken place in the last 30 years in which fewer than 25 000 people died.

I picked the Rwandan Genocide as a starting point because it is very well-known and relevant to Crime and Deviance as an example of a state crime. It also stands out as one of the few examples of a country that has gone on to see a reasonable level of development since the conflict. (Also, going back 30 years is a pretty standard period for analysis in A-level Sociology!)

The conflicts with highest death tolls in the last 30 years were:

• The Rwandan Genocide needs a mention – there were an estimated 800 000 deaths, but within a very rapid time frame, and much of this done with hand-weapons like machetes, and it was ethnic cleansing, all in all making it particularly horrific.
• The Second Congo War – in central Africa with an upper estimate of 5 million deaths (NB given the relatively small geographical area this was kind of like World War Two in the middle of Africa)
• The War on Terror – 2001 to the present day – with over 1 million deaths
• The War on Iraq – 2003-2007, but which spilled over into a civil war, 2014-2017 – and a total of around 500 000 deaths between the two
• The Syrian Civil War – ongoing and an upper estimate of almost 600 000 deaths.

Thankfully the numbers seem to be coming down. According to one estimate, the total death toll for the 17 most deadly conflicts in the world stood at around 300 000 in 2016, but this had reduced to 100 000 deaths by 2020.

Physical Trauma and Injury

While it is possible to get death tolls statistics for conflicts, these are usually estimated, and estimates can range widely – the Syrian Civil War has a death toll range of between around 400 000 to 600 000 for example.

Given the problems with estimating death tolls in war, it should be unsurprising that it’s very difficult to find estimates for the number of people injured in war and conflict – either through serving on the front line, or civilians being brutalised by ‘soldiers.

In situations of war, when law and order are determined by violence, there must be several cases of violent assault which simply go unreported and unnoticed.

One particularly horrific aspect of physical injury and trauma in conflict zones is through the use of rape as a weapon of war – it’s estimated that 48 women are raped every hour in the DRC for example, a legacy of conflict in that country.

Rape can also be used against boys and men as a way of asserting authority over them.

This report by ReliefWeb provides an overview of the extent of rape as a weapon of war.

Displacement

A rational response to conflict in a region is to flee to another region or country, and many people do. The United Nations reports that there are currently 80 million refugees, or displaced people.

Most refugees come from Syria (5 million) and Turkey hosts the most (3 million). 80% of refugees are hosted in developing countries.

While Displacement is an immediate problem caused by conflict, and results in immediate problems related to living in temporary accommodation (tents), with possible poor sanitation and food shortages, there are also longer-term problems related to lack of status, children being out of education and so on.

Longer Term effects of War and Conflict

Conflicts can drag on for several years, even decades in some countries, with devastating longer-term consequences….

The destruction of physical infrastructure – such as buildings and roads mean that civilians who remain may be living in unsafe buildings with no running water, sewage or electricity – basically a war zone can turn a previously developed neighbourhood into a slum. Power stations and roads may also be damaged in conflicts, and these can be expensive to repair post-conflict, taking up a lot of money that might otherwise be spent on social development.

War also results in the destruction to the economic infrastructure – in a war-torn country business slows down or stops because it is unsafe – with a corresponding downturn in employment and income. Foreign companies may also leave the country, and imports may dry up as it is too risky to do business there. All of this means the cost of goods and the cost-of-living increases.

Disruption to education – schools may be forced to shut down, and refugee children may not be able to get an education. If children spend a year, or two, or more, out of formal education, they will struggle to catch up.

The disruption to health care services – health services have to focus on dealing with battle related injuries – dealing with immediate problems, which means there are fewer resources to go towards other health issues – such as dealing with vaccinations and maternity related health issues.

Longer term health issues – the trauma of war can be felt for decades – as witnessed in the high suicide rates of war Veterans, something which is probably mirrored in people who suffered rape and/ or torture as part of war.

Longer term economic problems – the Global Peace Index notes that the Economic impact of Global Violence in 2019 was over $40 trillion – an almost incomprehensibly high number, and certainly enough money to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

Basically, every social development indicator is negatively affected by war and conflict in a country!

Sources – find out More

• The Global Conflict Tracker
• The Global Peace Index 2023
• Human Rights Watch
• United Nations Refugee Agency
• Spiri – the consequences of conflict
• The Effects of Armed Conflict on Children .

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Essay on War - A nation or organisation may turn to war to reach its goals, but what is the actual cost of progress? Countless lives have been lost to war and continue to be lost. It costs a lot of money and resources as well. Wars have always been brutal, deadly, and tragic, from the American Revolution to World Wars I and II to the Crusades and the ancient Hundred Years' War. Here are a few sample essays on "war" .

100 Words Essay on War

The greatest destroyers of people in modern times are wars. No matter who wins a war, mankind loses in every case. Millions of people have died in battles during the past century, with World Wars I and II being the worst. Wars are typically fought to protect a nation. Whatever the motive, it is hazardous conduct that results in the loss of millions of priceless innocent lives and has dangerous impacts that even future generations will have to deal with.

The results of using nuclear bombs are catastrophic. The weapons business benefits when there is a war elsewhere in the world because it maintains its supply chain. Weapons that cause massive destruction are being made bigger and better. The only way to end wars is to raise awareness among the general public.

200 Words Essay on War

Without a doubt, war is terrible, and the most devastating thing that can happen to humans. It causes death and devastation, illness and poverty, humiliation and destruction. To evaluate the devastation caused by war, one needs to consider the havoc that was wrecked on several nations not too many years ago. A particularly frightening ability of modern wars is that they tend to become global so that they may absorb the entire world. The fact that some people view war as a great and heroic adventure that brings out the best in people does not change the fact that it is a horrible tragedy.

This is more true now that atomic weapons will be used to fight a war. War, according to some, is required. Looking at the past reveals that war has drastically changed throughout the nation's history. The destructive impacts of war have never been more prevalent in human history. We have experienced lengthy and brief wars of various kinds. There have been supporters of nonviolence and the brotherhood of man. Buddha, Christ, and Mahatma Gandhi have all lived. Despite this, war has always been fought, weapons are always used, military power has always been deployed, and there have always been armies in war.

500 Words Essay on War

If we take a closer look at human history, it will become evident that conflicts have existed ever since the primitive eras. Although efforts have been made to end it, this has not been successful so far. Thus, it appears that we are unable to achieve eternal peace. Many defend wars by claiming that nature's rules require them. Charles Darwin is placed in front of them to illustrate their point. He was the one who created the rule of the fittest. He claimed that everything in nature, whether alive or dead, is constantly engaged in a battle for survival. Only the strongest will survive in this fight. Therefore, it is believed that without battle, humankind won't be able to progress.

Impacts of War

People fail to see that war invariably results in severe damage. They ignored the nonviolent principles taught by Mahatma Gandhi, who used them to liberate his country from the shackles of slavery. They fail to consider that if Gandhi could push out the powerful Britishers without resorting to violence, why shouldn't others do the same? Wars are unavoidable calamities, and there are no words to adequately depict the vast quantity and scope of their tragedies. The atrocities of the two world wars must never be forgotten. There was tremendous murder and property devastation during the battles. There were thousands of widows and orphans. War spreads falsehoods and creates hatred. People start acting brutally selfishly. Humanity and morals suffer as a result.

War is an Enemy

War is the enemy of all humanity and human civilisation. Nothing positive can come of it. Consequently, it should never be celebrated in any way. In addition to impeding national progress, it undermines social cohesion. It slows down the rate of human progress. Wars are not the answer to the world's issues. Instead, they cause issues and generate hatred among nations. War can settle one issue but creates far too many other ones. The two most horrific examples of the war's after-effects are Hiroshima and Nagasaki. People are still enduring the effects of war 77 years later. Whatever the reason for war, it always ends in the widespread loss of human life and property.

Disadvantages of War

Massive human deaths and injuries, the depletion of financial resources, environmental degradation, lost productivity, and long-term harm to military personnel are all drawbacks of war. Families are split apart by war. Both towns and cities are destroyed by it. People become more sensitive, and every industry faces collapse. People’s health declines physically and they lose their sense of security. They won't have any security, and those who win the battle will treat the citizens of the defeated nation as their slaves and prohibit them from the right to work. After the war, there will be a lack of jobs and corruption issues for the nation to deal with.

Russia – Ukraine War

The world saw great turmoil beginning in February 2022 with the Russian-Ukraine War. Russia's invasion of Ukraine was the most serious conventional attack on a nation, bringing a severe economic crisis to the world. India has taken a neutral stance for Russia, keeping in mind the two countries' long-standing alliance, especially in its foreign policies and positive international relationships. Russia was concerned about Ukraine's security due to its intention to join NATO and invaded Ukraine in 2014. Additionally, Russia provided help to the rebels in the eastern Ukrainian districts of Donetsk and Luhansk.

The war between Russia and Ukraine has had a substantial impact on oil prices and other commodity prices, as well as increased trade uncertainty. India has economic troubles due to Western countries' supply disruptions and limited trade with Russia.

War has historically been the worst mark on humanity. Although it was made by man, it is now beyond the power of any human force. To preserve humanity, the entire human species must now reflect on this. Otherwise, neither humanity nor war will survive.

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Impact of War on Children and Imperative to End War

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Younger readers of this journal may themselves have been exposed to war during their teen years. Much has been written on the subject in the last two decades – how war affects children, how to rehabilitate war-affected children (tertiary prevention), and how to make the experience of being in a war zone less damaging for children (secondary prevention). However, any degree of immersion in the suffering of children in war impels one to consider ways of removing the vector producing the suffering – war itself (primary prevention). While in a previous essay in this series ( 1 ), I considered ways to prevent specific wars, here I will consider a broader issue of replacing our present war system with a peace system.

The impact of war on children

War affects children in all the ways it affects adults, but also in different ways. First, children are dependent on the care, empathy, and attention of adults who love them. Their attachments are frequently disrupted in times of war, due to the loss of parents, extreme preoccupation of parents in protecting and finding subsistence for the family, and emotional unavailability of depressed or distracted parents. The child may be in substitute care with someone who cares for him or her only slightly – relatives or an orphanage. A certain proportion of war-affected children lose all adult protection – “unaccompanied children,” as they are known in refugee situations.

Second, impacts in childhood may adversely affect the life trajectory of children far more than adults. Consider children who lose the opportunity for education during war, children who are forced to move into refugee or displaced person camps, where they wait for years in miserable circumstances for normal life to resume, if it ever does. Consider a child disabled in war; they may, in addition to loss of a limb, sight, or cognitive capacity, lose the opportunity of schooling and of a social life. A girl who is raped may be marginalized by her society and lose the opportunity for marriage. Long after the war has ended, these lives will never attain the potential they had before the impact of war.

Listing the impacts of war on children is a sadly straightforward task:

Death. Hundreds of thousands of children die of direct violence in war each year ( 2 ). They die as civilians caught in the violence of war, as combatants directly targeted, or in the course of ethnic cleansing.

Injury. Children suffer a range of war injuries. Certain weapons affect them particularly. A landmine explosion is more likely to kill or seriously injure a child than an adult ( 3 ). Thousands of children suffer landmine injuries each year ( 4 ).

Disability. Millions of children are disabled by war, many of whom have grossly inadequate access to rehabilitation services. A child may have to wait up to 10 years before having a prosthetic limb fitted. Children who survive landmine blasts rarely receive prostheses that are able to keep up with the continued growth of their limbs.

Illness. Conditions for maintenance of child health deteriorate in war – nutrition, water safety, sanitation, housing, access to health services. There may be loss of immunity to disease vectors with population movement. Refugee children are particularly vulnerable to the deadly combination of malnutrition and infectious illness. There is also interruption of population immunization programs by war which may be responsible for increases in child mortality.

Rape and prostitution for subsistence. These phenomena which often occur in situations of war, ethnic cleansing, and refugee life leave lasting physical impacts in sexually-transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS, psychological impacts and changes in life trajectory.

Psychological suffering. Children are exposed to situations of terror and horror during war – experiences that may leave enduring impacts in posttraumatic stress disorder. Severe losses and disruptions in their lives lead to high rates of depression and anxiety in war-affected children. These impacts may be prolonged by exposures to further privations and violence in refugee situations.

Moral and spiritual impacts. The experience of indifference from the surrounding world, or, worse still, malevolence may cause children to suffer loss of meaning in their construction of themselves in their world. They may have to change their moral structure and lie, steal, and sell sex to survive. They may have their moral structure forcibly dismantled and replaced in training to kill as part of a military force.

Social and cultural losses. Children may lose their community and its culture during war, sometimes having it reconstituted in refugee or diaspora situations.

Child soldiers. It is estimated that there are tens of thousands of young people under 18 serving in militias in about 60 countries. They are particularly vulnerable to all of the impacts listed above ( 5 ).

Remedial strategies

Action on this cluster of tragic phenomena is usually considered under two categories – how to mitigate some of the damage to children and how to heal children after they are damaged.

Making war less damaging to children (secondary prevention)

1. Implement international humanitarian law regarding the protection of children in war. The Geneva Conventions and the Convention on the Rights of the Child deal with protection of war-affected children with regard to food, clothing, medicine, education, and family reunion. In addition, they are intended to protect children from ethnic cleansing and recruitment into armed forces. However, compliance with these instruments is poor, especially when recruiting children to armed forces is concerned.

2. Ensure that general economic sanctions against a country are never used again, as they were used in Iraq as a substitute for war. Children and poor adults are those who suffer most from economic sanctions. Use of economic sanctions should be considered a war crime, just as is laying siege to a city to starve its population.

3. Ensure special consideration for children who are in flight from war zones and who live in camps for refugees and internally displaced people, especially children who are unaccompanied by adults. Special considerations need to be given for family reunion, systems of distribution of resources (sometimes to women rather than to men), internal layout of camps (to prevent attacks on girls), the provision of facilities for education and play, and special help for child-headed families.

4. Institute measures to reduce sexual exploitation and gender-based violence against women and girls in war. These measures include training of soldiers, including peacekeeping forces; inclusion of relevant interventions in humanitarian responses to population emergencies in war; reporting and support systems for victims of rape in camps for refugees and internally displaced persons; the prosecution of rape as a war crime; and making organized rape a crime against humanity.

5. Parties to a conflict must facilitate humanitarian assistance to ensure that the health infrastructure of children’s lives is not destroyed. Perpetrators should be prosecuted for such actions as destroying clinics, schools, and hospitals – all of which are protected by international law. Where access to health services, such as immunization, is hindered by the violent conflict, there should be humanitarian ceasefires to enable access.

6. Include children’s interests in peace agreements. Since 1999, several peace agreements have specifically referred to children in the post-violence arrangements for disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration ( 6 ). Children are recognized as victims and perpetrators of violence in several truth-and-reconciliation commissions, but children have played little role in these systems.

Rehabilitating children affected by war (tertiary prevention)

During the immediate humanitarian response to victims of war and in the longer-term attempts to reconstruct health services after war, there are attempts by both local and international actors to care for children’s needs for health care. Physical and psychological rehabilitation is instituted to varying degrees depending on the resources available. Sometimes these are minimal or absent. There have been many efforts to help the psychological impacts of war on children. Few have been evaluated.

Some efforts at rehabilitation of war-affected children include social healing moving toward education in the Culture of Peace. This is an approach to primary prevention of recurrence of war.

Imperative to end war

It may strike the reader that, although the many efforts to make war less damaging for children are important and should continue and be strengthened, this is a pathetically feeble response in the light of the intensity and magnitude of the suffering involved. From a certain perspective, there is even something preposterous about an exclusive focus on making war more tolerable for children. We rail against approaching HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, or malaria in this way. Poverty, on the other hand, like war, may be treated with the assumption that it will always be with us, and is a fact of life. These assumptions should be vigorously challenged.

• War is a recent phenomenon in human evolutionary history. For most of our species’ existence there is no evidence of war.
• There are many current cultures without war.
• In the European Union, social institutions for dealing with conflict have evolved to a point where war is unthinkable between member states.
• There are clear alternatives to war in dealing with intra- and inter-state conflicts.
• Judicial process: The World Court resolves many interstate conflicts.
• Democratic functioning is designed to resolve intra-state conflicts. Good design of constitutions is another factor in this function.
• Dialogue: UN conflict management capacities already quietly resolve many serious conflicts. Better resourcing could enhance these capacities. Other agencies also act in this mode.
• Nonviolent struggle is frequently successful in deposing dictators or dysfunctional regimes. Usually this is done without good organization or training. Such efforts could be even more successful with these resources added.
• Cultural change from endorsement and support of violence in conflict response to support and knowledge of peace processes. Consider cultural change in Sweden over the last few centuries from a belligerent country to a peaceful one. UNESCO has worked specifically to promote a culture of peace.

It is time for health professionals to define war as a serious global public health problem. The public health imperative is primary prevention – removing the vector of illness or making conditions unfavorable for survival of the vector. If a peace system can be devised for an entity as large, diverse, and populous as Europe, it can be devised at a global level. It would be naive to suggest that this is easily achievable. But it would be cynical, in the light of the suffering of the war-affected children of the world, to accept war as an inevitable part of the human condition. There are global networks, formal and informal, of health professionals who think in terms of eliminating war and who work to accomplish this. International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) is such a network, particularly focusing on the role of health professionals working to eliminate war ( 7 ). A network with the same goal is TRANSCEND, a peace and development network which includes several physicians ( 8 ).

References:

Nuclear weapons: Why reducing the risk of nuclear war should be a key concern of our generation

The consequences of nuclear war would be devastating. much more should – and can – be done to reduce the risk that humanity will ever fight such a war..

The shockwave and heat that the detonation of a single nuclear weapon creates can end the lives of millions of people immediately.

But even larger is the devastation that would follow a nuclear war.

The first reason for this is nuclear fallout. Radioactive dust from the detonating bombs rises up into the atmosphere and spreads out over large areas of the world from where it falls down and causes deadly levels of radiation.

The second reason is less widely known. But this consequence – 'nuclear winter' and the worldwide famine that would follow – is now believed to be the most serious consequence of nuclear war.

Cities that are attacked by nuclear missiles burn at such an intensity that they create their own wind system, a firestorm: hot air above the burning city ascends and is replaced by air that rushes in from all directions. The storm-force winds fan the flames and create immense heat.

From this firestorm, large columns of smoke and soot rise up above the burning cities and travel all the way up to the stratosphere. There it spreads around the planet and blocks the sun’s light. At that great height – far above the clouds – it cannot be rained out, meaning that it will remain there for years, darkening the sky and thereby drying and chilling the planet.

The nuclear winter that would follow a large-scale nuclear war is expected to lead to temperature declines of 20 or even 30 degrees Celsius (60–86° F) in many of the world’s agricultural regions – including much of Eurasia and North America. Nuclear winter would cause a 'nuclear famine'. The world’s food production would fail and billions of people would starve. 1

These consequences – nuclear fallout and nuclear winter leading to famine – mean that the destruction caused by nuclear weapons is not contained to the battlefield. It would not just harm the attacked country. Nuclear war would devastate all countries, including the attacker.

The possibility of global devastation is what makes the prospect of nuclear war so very terrifying. And it is also why nuclear weapons are so unattractive for warfare. A weapon that can lead to self-destruction is not a weapon that can be used strategically.

US President Reagan put it in clear words at the height of the Cold War: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used. But then would it not be better to do away with them entirely?” 2

Nuclear stockpiles have been reduced, but the risk remains high

40 years after Reagan’s words, the Cold War is over and nuclear stockpiles have been reduced considerably, as the chart shows.

The world has learned that nuclear armament is not the one-way street that it was once believed to be. Disarmament is possible.

But the chart also shows that there are still almost ten thousand nuclear weapons distributed among nine countries on our planet, at least. 3 Each of these weapons can cause enormous destruction; many are much larger than the ones that the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 4

Collectively these weapons are immensely destructive. The nuclear winter scenario outlined above would kill billions of people— billions— in the years that follow a large-scale nuclear war, even if it was fought “only” with today’s reduced stockpiles. 5

It is unclear whether humanity as a species could possibly survive a full-scale nuclear war with the current stockpiles. 6 A nuclear war might well be humanity’s final war.

Close Calls: Instances that threatened to push the ‘balance of terror’ out of balance and into war

The ‘balance of terror’ is the idea that all involved political leaders are so scared of nuclear war that they never launch a nuclear attack.

If this is achievable at all, it can only be achieved if all nuclear powers keep their weapons in check. This is because the balance is vulnerable to accidents: a nuclear bomb that detonates accidentally – or even just a false alarm, with no weapons even involved – can trigger nuclear retaliation because several countries keep their nuclear weapons on ‘launch on warning’; in response to a warning, their leaders can decide within minutes whether they want to launch a retaliatory strike.

For the balance of terror to be a balance, all parties need to be in control at all times. This however is not the case.

In the timeline, you can read through some of the close calls during the past decades.

The risk of nuclear war might well be low – because neither side would want to fight such a war that would have such awful consequences for everyone on the planet. But there is a risk that the kinds of technical errors and accidents listed here could lead accidentally to the use of nuclear weapons, as a nuclear power can incorrectly come to believe that they are under attack.

This is why false alarms, errors, and close calls are so crucial to monitor: they are the incidents that can push the ‘balance of terror’ out of balance and into war.

Accidents and errors are of course not the only possible path that could lead to the use of nuclear weapons. There is the risk of a terribly irresponsible person leading a country possessing nuclear weapons. There is the risk of nuclear terrorism, possibly after a terrorist organization steals weapons. There is the possibility that hackers can take control of the nuclear chain of command. And there is the possibility that several of these factors play a role at the same time.

A timeline of nuclear weapons ‘close calls’ 7

Below this post, you find additional lists of close calls, where you find much more information on each of these incidents.

How to reduce the risk of nuclear war?

An escalating conflict between nuclear powers – but also an accident, a hacker, a terrorist, or an irresponsible leader – could lead to the detonation of nuclear weapons.

Those risks only go to zero if all nuclear weapons are removed from the world. I believe this is what humanity should work towards, but it is exceedingly hard to achieve, at least in the short term. It is therefore important to see that there are additional ways that can reduce the chance of the world suffering the horrors of nuclear war. 8

A more peaceful world : Many world regions in which our ancestors fought merciless wars over countless generations are extraordinarily peaceful in our times. The rise of democracy, international trade, diplomacy, and a cultural attitude shift against the glorification of war are some of the drivers credited for this development. 9

Making the world a more peaceful place will reduce the risk of nuclear confrontation. Efforts that reduce the chance of any war reduce the chance of nuclear war.

Nuclear treaties : Several non-proliferation treaties have been key in achieving the large reduction of nuclear stockpiles. However, key treaties – like the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty between the US and Russia – have been suspended and additional agreements could be reached.

The UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which became effective in 2021, is a recent development in this direction.

Smaller nuclear stockpiles : Reducing the stockpiles further is seen as an important and achievable goal by experts.

It is considered achievable because smaller stockpiles would still provide the deterrence benefits from nuclear weapons. And it is important as it reduces the risk of accidents and the chance that a possible nuclear war would end civilization.

Better monitoring, better control: The risk can be further reduced by efforts to better control nuclear weapons – so that close calls occur less frequently. Similarly better monitoring systems would reduce the chance of false alarms.

Taking nuclear weapons off ‘hair-trigger alert’ would reduce the risk that any accident that does occur can rapidly spiral out of control. And a well-resourced International Atomic Energy Agency can verify that the agreements in the treaties are met.

Better public understanding, global relations, and culture : Finally I also believe that it will help to see clearly that billions of us share the same goal. None of us wants to live through a nuclear war, none of us wants to die in one. As Reagan said, a nuclear war cannot be won and it would be better to do away with these weapons entirely.

A generation ago a broad and highly visible societal movement pursued the goal of nuclear disarmament. These efforts were to a good extent successful. But since then, this goal has unfortunately lost much of the attention it once received – and this is despite the fact that things have not fundamentally changed: the world still possesses weapons that could kill billions. 10 I wish it was a more prominent concern in our generation so that more young people would set themselves the goal to make the world safe from nuclear weapons.

Below this post you find resources on where you can get engaged or donate, to help reduce the danger from nuclear weapons.

I believe some dangers are exaggerated – for example, I believe that the fear of terrorist attacks is often wildly out of proportion with the actual risk. But when it comes to nuclear weapons I believe the opposite is true.

There are many today who hardly give nuclear conflict a thought and I think this is a big mistake.

For eight decades, people have been producing nuclear weapons. Several countries have dedicated vast sums of money to their construction. And now we live in a world in which these weapons endanger our entire civilization and our future.

These destructive weapons are perhaps the clearest example that technology and innovation are not only forces for good, they can also enable catastrophic destruction.

Without the Second World War and the Cold War, the world might have never developed these weapons and we might find the idea that anyone could possibly build such weapons unimaginable. But this is not the world we live in. We live in a world with weapons of enormous destructiveness and we have to see the risks that they pose to all of us and find ways to reduce them.

I hope that there are many in the world today who take on the challenge to make the world more peaceful and to reduce the risk from nuclear weapons. The goal has to be that humanity never ends up using this most destructive technology that we ever developed.

Resources to continue reading and finding ways to reduce the risk of nuclear weapons

• Hiroshima : John Hersey’s report for the New Yorker about the bombing of Hiroshima, published in August 1946.
• ’80,000 Hours’ profile on Nuclear Security : an article focusing on the question of how to choose a career that makes the world safer from nuclear weapons.
• The ‘Future of Life Institute’ on Nuclear Weapons : this page includes an extensive list of additional references – including videos, research papers, and many organizations that are dedicated to reducing the risk from nuclear weapons.

Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Charlie Giattino, Hannah Ritchie, and Edouard Mathieu for reading drafts of this and for their very helpful comments and ideas.

Additional lists of close calls with nuclear weapons

* Future of Life Institute – Accidental nuclear war: A timeline of close calls .

* Alan F. Philips, M.D. – 20 Mishaps That Might Have Started Accidental Nuclear War , published on Nuclear Files

* Josh Harkinson (2014) – That Time We Almost Nuked North Carolina

* Union of Concerned Scientists (2015) – Close Calls with Nuclear Weapons

* Chatham House Report (2014) – Too Close for Comfort: Cases of Near Nuclear Use and Options for Policy authored by Patricia Lewis, Heather Williams, Benoît Pelopidas, and Sasan Aghlani

* Wikipedia – List of Nuclear Close Calls

On Nuclear Winter see:

* Jägermeyr, Jonas, Alan Robock, Joshua Elliott, Christoph Müller, Lili Xia, Nikolay Khabarov, Christian Folberth, et al. (2020) – ‘ A Regional Nuclear Conflict Would Compromise Global Food Security’ . Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, no. 13 (31 March 2020): 7071–81.

* Robock, A., L. Oman, and G. L. Stenchikov (2007) – Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences , J. Geophys. Res., 112, D13107, doi:10.1029/2006JD008235.

* Alan Robock & Owen Brian Toon (2012) – Self-assured destruction: The climate impacts of nuclear war . In Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 68, 66–74.

* Alan Robock & Owen Brian Toon (2016) – Let’s End the Peril of a Nuclear Winter , In the New York Times, Feb. 11, 2016.

Some additional points:

* The risk of nuclear winter (initially termed ‘nuclear twilight’) was only discovered in the early 1980s, more than 3 decades after the bombs were first used.

* The main mechanism by which a nuclear winter is expected to cause a decline in global food production is by reducing the growing season, the days in a row without frost. See Robock, Oman, and Stenchikov (2007).

* Robock estimates that the smoke and soot would rise as high as 40 kilometers (25 miles) into the atmosphere. See Robock and Toon (2016).

* Before the nuclear famine kills people from hunger, many will die from hypothermia.

* In addition to the impact on the climate, the ozone layer is expected to get depleted in such a scenario. This would allow more ultraviolet radiation to reach our planet’s surface, harming plant and animal life.

* In general there is only relatively little scientific work that focuses on nuclear winter and additional, good research could be useful to provide a better understanding. Due to the lack of research there remains uncertainty about how devastating a nuclear winter would be. In particular there is disagreement on how likely it is that all of humanity would die in a nuclear winter.

* The paper by Jägermeyr et al (2020) shows that among the countries with the largest food production losses would be the US and Russia, those countries that have the largest stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

For anyone who interested in the impact of nuclear winter on food production and famine, Ord (2020) cites the following:

* Cropper, W. P., and Harwell, M. A. (1986) – “Food Availability after Nuclear War,” in M. A. Harwell and T. C. Hutchinson (eds.), The Environmental Consequences of Nuclear War (SCOPE 28), vol. 2: Ecological, Agricultural, and Human Effects. John Wiley and Sons.

* Helfand, I. (2013) – Nuclear Famine: Two Billion People at Risk? Physicians for Social Responsibility.

* Xia, L., Robock, A., Mills, M., Stenke, A., and Helfand, I. (2015) – Decadal Reduction of Chinese Agriculture after a Regional Nuclear War . Earth’s Future, 3(2), 37–48.

Reagan in his State of the Union address in 1984, quoted in the New York Times: Bernard Gwertzman (1984) – Reagan reassures Russians on war . In the New York Times January 26, 1984.

There are nine countries that are known to possess nuclear weapons: Russia, United States, France, China, United Kingdom, Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea. South Africa once possessed nuclear weapons and is the first state to voluntarily give up nuclear weapons.

The explosive power of a nuclear weapon is called the yield of a nuclear weapon. It is the amount of energy released when that weapon is detonated. It is usually measured in ‘TNT equivalents’.

The bomb that the US dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of 13–18 kilotons of TNT. (one kiloton are 1000 tonnes)

The largest bomb that was ever detonated is the ‘Tsar Bomba’ built by the USSR and detonated in October 1961. Its yield was about 50 megatons of TNT. That’s 50,000 kilotons of TNT or about 3,333-times the yield of the bomb in Hiroshima.

The scenario in Robock, Oman, and Stenchikov (2007) is based on the nuclear stockpiles after the large reduction that was achieved after the end of the Cold War. It shows that the world still retains enough weapons to produce “a large, long-lasting, unprecedented global climate change,” as the authors put it. Since the publication of this study, the stockpiles have been reduced further, as the chart shows, but not very strongly so.

For a recent discussion of this question see Ord (2020) – The Precipice.

This list is largely based on Toby Ord’s 2020 book The Precipice . His list can be found in Chapter 4 and Appendix C of his book.

Ord in turn relies mostly on a document from the US Department of Defense from 1981: Narrative Summaries of Accidents Involving US Nuclear Weapons (1950–1980) .

This list is mostly based on the ’80,000 Hours’ profile on Nuclear Security and Toby Ord (2020) – The Precipice.

For big overviews of this literature see the forthcoming book Christopher Blattman (2022) – Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace and Steven Pinker (2011) – The Better Angels of our Nature for a big overview

Lawrence S. Wittner – Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement . Stanford University Press.

One indication for the declining interest in the last generation: Mentions of “nuclear war” in books and newspapers peaked in 1985 and declined strongly since then (see Google Ngram for ‘nuclear war’ ).

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The Objectives of War: Glory and Justice, Advantage or Annihilation?

The Cold war is a defining war as it ostensibly birthed a new and enhanced peaceful international system. As a result, the post-Cold War world created is depicted as a nonviolent and prosperous environment due to the culmination of fighting and the territorial expansion of liberalism. With the promotion of democracy and the rise of multilateral international institutions across nations, many predicted a change in warfare due to the evolution of arms control constraint during the Cold War or the obsolescence of war itself due to rising nuclear disarmament in the new unipolar world (Cox, 2011). While the 21st Century has not become the peaceful era many foretold, and the nature of warfare has significantly changed, the goals which actors seek to achieve or preserve continue to remain constant. According to Hans Speier (1941), three types of war exist: absolute war, instrumental war, and agnostic fighting, which are orientated respectively toward the objectives of annihilation, advantage, glory, and justice. Thus, in this essay, I argue that while the modes of warfare and actors involved have evolved in the post-Cold War world, the critical military objectives of war Speier’s identified have remained the same. A critical examination of the prevalence of the annihilation and absolute war follows, followed by advantage and instrumental wars, and finally glory and justice in agnostic fighting.

Annihilation

The first section of this essay will examine the objective of annihilation, which is the primary intention of ‘absolute war’. Absolute war is waged without rules in which the absolute enemy is a symbol of ‘strangeness, evil and danger to the community as a whole’ (Speier, 1941:445). This lack of social homogeneity results in a war waged without a sense of mutual obligation, and instead, all available means of violence are enforced. The historical types of war in which restrictions are abandoned are those against ‘barbarians, savages and infidels’. For instance, the Crusades were a series of ruthless religious wars between Christians and Muslims in the Middle Ages. At that time, the use of weapons in wars was prohibited among Christians, but an exception was allowed in fighting the Mohammedans, exhibiting the rejection of restrictions (Speier, 1941:446). In modern times, ideological wars fought in the name of strong political beliefs can be compared to those waged against unbelievers. For instance, the twentieth Century can be referred to as an ‘age of genocide’ as considering the wars in the last 100 years in which genocides have occurred, every situation has been one in which the war has provided the cover for genocide exhibiting the intention of annihilation. This has proceeded into the post-Cold war era through the Islamist uprising in Algeria 1991-2002, the war in Bosnia Herzegovina 1992-1995, and the Second Congo War 1998-2003, which all produced mass fatalities (Bartrop, 2002: 525).

However, the literature on whether absolute war may be a trend in the post-Cold War world contradicts this. While the collapse of the Cold War may have decreased the dominance of capitalist-communist identities, they have been replaced by increased religious, ethnic, or regional identities. As a result, these changes have resulted in a growth of available identities and hubs seeking to deploy them, instigating ‘new wars’ in the future (Maynard, 2015:42; Kaldor, 2013). According to Kaldor (2002), these ‘new wars’ will be fought by state and nonstate actors, and instead of seizing territory through military means, battles will be rare and violence is directed principally against civilians as a method of commanding territory rather than against adversary forces. Thus, genocidal tendencies have come to dominate contemporary war as increasingly states go to war because of uncertainty in their control over ‘their’ territory. These wars are mainly directed against civilian populations aided by technological revolutionised uses of airpower (Kaldor, 2013; Shaw, 2000).

However, in contrary to Kaldor’s ‘new wars’ thesis, there has been a steady decrease in the number of civil wars since 1989 as economic development is increasingly dependent on intellectual capital that must be enticed rather than coerced; hence, the incentives for governments to limit conflicts is more persuading in the post-Cold War period. (Melander et al., 2009). Likewise, due to the rise of multilateral organisations and international institutions such as the United Nations and NATO, wars among powers are rarely allowed to run their natural course due to foreign intervention to prevent mass fatalities since ‘the greater the humanitarian crisis generated by a conflict, the greater the pressure to meddle’ (Freedman, 1998: 49). However, Luttwak (1999) argues this is problematic as it causes war to become an endemic conflict because the outside intervention blocks the transformative effects of decisive victory and exhaustion; therefore, peace cannot ensue, resulting in eventual annihilation.

Nonetheless, the increase in technological military weapons, including nuclear weapons and missile systems that have expanded the means of destruction and human cost of war, indicates that the objective of annihilation remains constant in modern warfare. Together these studies indicate that if a major war were to erupt between the nuclear powers, annihilation would undoubtedly be achieved; thus, while the modes of warfare and actors involved have changed from in the post-Cold War world, the objective of annihilation remains constant.

The second section of this essay will examine Speier’s (1941) concept of instrumental wars that seek to achieve ‘advantage’ by attaining values that the enemy controls, most notably economic values. As a result, ‘war assumes the form of robbery in which the death of the victim may constitute murder but does not mean waste’ as the victor is likely to gain highly valuable strategic and economic benefits (Spier, 1941: 449). Colonial campaigns conducted by western states and the wars fought to prevent the liberation of the colonies are critical examples of instrumental war. For instance, the Battle of Plassey (1757) helped establish British imperialism over India, gaining access to the country’s commodities, including Indian spices, textiles, precious stones, opium, and control over trading routes. Overall, territory has been a powerful influence on conflict throughout history as a recent reanalysis of the Correlates of War (COW) data suggests that of the 79 interstate wars between 1816 and 1997, 43 (54%) should be classified as territorial, suggesting that explicitly territorial issues are more likely to lead to war, recurring conflict, and result in high fatalities should war occur (Vasquez and Valeriano, 2010).

In the post-Cold War world, strong international concern to preserve existing state boundaries is evidence of the significant role of territoriality. The evolution of international institutions and international law to protect these boundaries has benefited many states, protecting their most critical territorial possessions and reducing the threat of predation from other states (Johnson and Toft, 2014:33). Although the territorial integrity norm is primarily a western phenomenon, interstate conflict over territory continues, from Kashmir and Israel/Palestine to the South China Sea. For instance, the Israel and Palestine conflict is one of the world’s longest-running conflicts between two movements that both lay claim to the same territory in Israel since an initial United Nations proposal to distribute each group part of the land failed; thus, Israel and the encompassing Arab nations have fought several wars over the territory since (BBC, 2021).

Additionally, a considerable amount of literature has been published on future ‘resource wars.’ Contemporary conflicts would be categorised by a new violent scramble for resources among local warlords, regional hegemons, and international powers due to the combination of population and economic growth leading to a relentless expansion in demand for raw materials. For instance, global climate change could multiply strains on natural resources and trigger water wars, catalyse the spread of disease or induce mass migrations stimulating further armed conflicts (Klare, 2001; Victor, 2007).

However, critics argue that future resource wars are unlikely and rarely occur since resource money may magnify and prolong some conflicts as well as, the root causes of those hostilities usually lie elsewhere. Furthermore, there has been a steady decline in conquest wars since the Cold War from more than half to less than 30% (Holsti, 2010). Liberals assert this is due to conquest wars becoming unprofitable due to economic globalisation, such as increases in international trade, expanding overseas investment, and the high international costs since the international community condemns the use of force in all territorial disagreements, including those where political authority is ambiguous (Meierding, 2016).

Therefore, only in civil wars does the question of resources such as oil, diamonds, minerals, and territory play a significant role; this was especially true as Cold War superpowers halted their financial support to local actors. Hence, the abundance of resources, not their scarcity, fuels such conflicts, such as the current tensions between North and South Sudan over oil, which are remnants of civil war and a failed secession process, not a desire to control new resources (Tertrais, 2012:16; Meierding, 2016; 261). However, modern nationalist movements are frequently linked to concepts of territory, especially homeland, for a specific, often ethnic group; therefore, as established in the previous section, identity conflicts remain prevalent in modern society. Consequently, while instrumental wars are likely to be contained to intrastate conflicts rather than interstate, they remain prevalent; hence, the objective of advantage remains constant in the post-Cold world (Le Billon, 2007).

Glory and Justice

Finally, in the last section of this essay, I will explore the prevalence of the ‘agnostic fight’ in which victory is a symbolic revelation of ‘glory and justice’ provided that shared rules and norms are meticulously respected. Violence throughout history in both inter and intrastate conflicts has been glorified and sanctified through defending national ‘honour’, values, and security to either maintain or alter the status quo. For instance, historical societies such as the Roman Empire, Vikings, Malorian knights, Shaolin monks, the Samurai and Zulus were built on the demand for glory achieved in a battle to prove an individual’s self-worth (French, 2016). However, over time due to the construction of sovereign states and the ‘humanitarian revolution’ as coined by Pinker, war has no longer come to be associated with personal achievement or heroism; instead, we are experiencing ‘war fatigue’ (Mueller, 1989) and ‘debellicization’ (Mandelbaum, 2002). In developed countries from the last 20th Century, each element that built a war-friendly mentality such as nationalism, territorial ambition, an international culture of honour and indifference to human casualties has become outdated, resulting in an overall decline in global violence (Tertrais, 2012; Pinker, 2011: 283).

However, there are some specific cases in which ‘glory and justice’ remain prevalent. Great power states treasure their status in the international order and consider war to preserve their prestige despite the political and military consequences, as per the British intervention in the Falklands (1982) to re-establish their sovereignty. The re-conquering of the Falklands demonstrated Britain’s capability to project its hard power far away and display its financial capacity to do so. As the UK’s reputation was stained from its failure in the 1956 Suez Crisis, a victory in the Falklands would be considered an astonishing achievement and restore the image of a strong and victorious United Kingdom, thus achieving merited glory and justice (Grandpierron, 2017).

Despite this, the post-Cold War era has seen frequent military expeditions to be authorised on humanitarian concerns to ‘preserve the peace’; the 21st Century is now witnessing a legitimisation of warfare where it has become the weapon of choice for powerful state actors. The ‘War on Terror’ initiated by the Bush administration in 2001 illustrates this clearly. From the beginning, the war was presented as a legally acceptable act of self-defence that adhered to the ‘just war’ principles; therefore, labelling the acts of terrorism as an act of war provided Washington with a just cause. Additionally, it was constructed as a war of last resort with no diplomatic options available in order to combat the evil of terrorism; combined with the Christianity of the Bush administration, the war has been portrayed as a crusade for freedom fought in defence of liberty and is comparable to the Second World War, or “the ultimate good war” (Dexter, 2008: 66). As previously mentioned, great powers will go to great lengths to maintain their prestigious status. 9/11 shattered the perceptions of invulnerability the US projected as a global leader; hence, the war provided a stage to reassert Washington’s power.

Conversely, Fletcher (2002) argues that war and justice are not synonymous. Justice is about restoring moral order in the universe, whereas war pursues interests that can only be achieved through death and destruction and compartmentalise the two risks imitating the holy mission of the enemy. Therefore, if the War on Terror was indeed in the pursuit of justice, the provisions of the Bill of Rights bearing on a fair trial should apply in Guantanamo as they do in the United States (ibid:7). Many Islamic fundamentalists perceived American bases in Saudi Arabia as an invasion of Dar el Islam, thus justified attack. However, as the law of war has evolved, religion is no longer a ‘just cause’, only self-defence against aggression has been normalized as such. As a result, despite a normative shift occurring in which people in the developed world perceive war as ‘disgusting, ridiculous and unwise’, it has now been repackaged as legitimised self-defence. Hence, the objectives of glory and justice continue to be achieved through the evolution of the actors and modes involved in warfare (Mueller, 1990:326).

In conclusion, despite the birth of a new international system that aided the development of international institutions and liberal norms after the Cold War, war and its fundamental objectives continue to endure in contemporary society. With the invention of new technological military weapons, actors with a persistent aspiration to attain control over resources in inter-state conflicts and the desire for great power states to assert their dominance in the international order through acts of self-defence, absolute and instrumental wars and agnostic fights continue to ensue. However, the rise of foreign liberal intervention to interrupt the natural courses of war to save civilians prevents decisive victories and obstructs the intended objectives resulting in endemic conflicts such as the Israel and Palestine dispute. As a result, more actors are often involved today, and eventual annihilation becomes an ever-increasing likely conclusion. Therefore, by analysing the three objectives: annihilation; advantage and glory; and justice, this essay has shown that while the modes of warfare and actors involved have evolved in the post-Cold War world, the critical military objectives of war Speier identified have remained apparent.

Reference List

Bartrop, P. (2002). “The Relationship Between War and Genocide in the Twentieth Century: A Consideration”. Journal of Genocide Research , 4(4), pp.519–532.

BBC (2021). “Israel-Gaza violence: The Conflict Explained”. BBC News . [online] 21 May. Available at: h ttps://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-44124396 [Accessed 26 May 2021].

Cox, M. (2011). “The Uses and Abuses of history: The end of the Cold War and Soviet Collapse”. International Politics , 48(4-5), pp.627–646.

Dexter, H. (2008). “The ‘New War’ on Terror, Cosmopolitanism and the ‘Just War’ Revival”. Government and Opposition , 43(1), pp.55–78.

Fletcher, G.P. (2002). Romantics at War: Glory and Guilt in the Age of Terrorism . Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Freedman, L. (1998). The Changing Forms of Military Conflict . Survival, 40(4), pp.39–56.

French, S.E. (2016). The Code of the Warrior: Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present . Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.

Grandpierron, M. (2017). Preserving “Great Power Status”: The Complex Case of the British Intervention in the Falklands (1982). Croatian International Relations Review , 23(79), pp.127– 156.

Holsti, K.J. (1998). Peace and War: Armed Conflicts and International Order 1648-1989. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Johnson, D.D.P. and Toft, M.D. (2014). “Grounds for War: The Evolution of Territorial Conflict”. International Security , 38(3), pp.7–38. 

Kaldor, M. (2013). In Defence of New Wars. Stability: International Journal of Security and Development , 2(1).

Klare, M.T. and Holt, H. (2001). Resource War: The New Landscape of Global Conflict. New York: Henry Holt And Company.

Le Billon, P. (2007). “Geographies of War: Perspectives on ‘Resource Wars’.” Geography Compass , 1(2), pp.163–182.

Luttwak, E.N. (1999). “Give War a Chance”. Foreign Affairs , [online] 78(4), pp.36–44. Available at: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1999-07-01/give-war-chance [Accessed 26 May 2021].

Mandelbaum, M. (2002). The Ideas that Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy, and Free Markets in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Public Affairs.

Maynard, J.L. (2015). “Identity and Ideology in Political Violence and Conflict”. St Antony’s International Review , [online] 10(2), pp.18–52. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/26229187 [Accessed 26 May 2021].

Meierding, E. (2016). “Dismantling the Oil Wars Myth”. Security Studies , 25(2), pp.258–288.

Melander, E., Öberg, M. and Hall, J. (2009). “Are ‘New Wars’ More Atrocious? Battle Severity, Civilians Killed and Forced Migration Before and After the End of the Cold War”. European Journal of International Relations , 15(3), pp.505–536.

Mueller, J. (1990). “The Obsolescence of Major War”. Bulletin of Peace Proposals , [online] 21(3), pp.321–328. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/44481533 .

Pinker, S. (2011). The Better Angels of our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes . London: Allen Lane.

Shaw, M. (2000). “The Contemporary Mode of Warfare? Mary Kaldor’s Theory of New Wars”. Review of International Political Economy , [online] 7(1), pp.171–180. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4177336 [Accessed 26 May 2021].

Speier, H. (1941). “The Social Types of War”. American Journal of Sociology , 46(4), pp.445– 454.

Tertrais, B. (2012). “The Demise of Ares: The End of War as We Know It?”. The Washington Quarterly , 35(3), pp.7–22.

Vasquez, J.A. and Valeriano, B. (2010). “Classification of Interstate Wars”. The Journal of Politics , 72(2), pp.292–309.

Victor, D.G. (2007). “What Resource Wars?”. The National Interest , [online] 92(), pp.48–55. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/42896095 [Accessed 26 May 2021].

Further Reading on E-International Relations

• The Angolan Civil War: Conflict Economics or the Divine Right of Kings?
• Restorative Justice as a Response to Atrocity: Profound or Merely Pragmatic?
• No Peace Without Justice: The Denial of Transitional Justice in Post-2001 Afghanistan
• Were Fukuyama, Mearsheimer or Huntington Right about the Post-Cold War Era?
• Transitional Justice in Colombia: Between Retributive and Restorative Justice
• Misreading Clausewitz: The Enduring Relevance of On War

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The Advantages and the Disadvantages of War, Research Paper Example

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The advantages and the disadvantages of war will be reviewed from the perspectives of Boot (2006), Coyne & Matthews (2011), Howard (2000), Lomborg (2003) and Tzu (2009). The distinct perspectives of the benefits of war will be reviewed and followed by the disadvantages of war.

Wars are expensive in terms of human costs and economic costs. Notwithstanding, wars have brought numerous technological advantages to mankind.  Nuclear energy was initially discovered and applied as a military device. Plastic surgery had been invented in order to remove the scars from the soldiers who had derived in the wars. GPS devices were initially used on spy satellites which were applied during the period of the Cold war (Boot, 2006).

The race into space and the search for extraterrestrial life was an outcome of the Second World War.  Many military philosophers have perceived that if a nation desires peace, they must be ready for war. If it were not for the Revolutionary war, the United States would not exist. If it were not for the Civil war between the states, slavery might have continued as a legal institution in the United States. Wars bring out the worst and the best in societies (Boot, 2006; Howard, 2000).

War is disadvantageous as a result of the human and the economic costs. Many nations apply the fear of incurring the disadvantages of war as a bargaining tool. War is an ineffective means of resolving disputes due to its attribute of causing the destruction of economic and human resources which might otherwise benefit the opposing factions. There are three conditions which cause nations which would normally resolve their differences peacefully to go to war with one another and to accept the potential disadvantage of war (Coyne & Mathers, 2011: Tzu, 2009).

Wars occur when the two opposing sides do not concur with regards to their relative influence and strength. This disagreement causes an imbalance in the judgments which evaluate the potential benefits and the potential disadvantages of war.  This aspect of disagreement is defined as the private information aspect of war. The second conditions which cause two nations to war with one another and accept the potential advantages in addition to the potential disadvantages of war are based on the commitment challenge. If the dissemination of power which is present between two nations has the possibility of shifting, the shift in power between the two nations may cause a peaceful negotiation of the two factions with regards to accepting the potential disadvantages to war for each side Coyne & Mathers, 2011,; Tzu, 2009).

If the weaker opponent is experiencing an increase in influence and strength, this increase may cause the opposing side to be willing to negotiate against war.  The weaker opponent may not choose to go to war, due to the aspect that a future position may have a greater promise of increased influence and strength. The nation which is losing influence and strength may wish to negotiate a peaceful agreement which keeps everything in the perspective of the moment. The nation which is losing influence and strength may doubt if the peaceful agreement can be maintained Coyne & Mathers, 2011).

It is comprehensible that the opposing state which is gaining influence and strength may behave motivations to renegotiate a novel collection of demands when the influence and strength have favorably shifted in their favor. This aspect may cause the weaker opposing nation to resort to war if the concessions which had been peacefully agreed upon are not maintained. The nation which is gaining power and influence may have a preference for peaceful negotiations and it may be willing to honor the outcomes of present negotiations. The two factions may dispute the viability of this promise once the situation changes and one off the opposing nations has the forceful strength to negotiate issues which had not been previously negotiated.  Peacefully and apply military force in order to procure those benefits. This aspect is acknowledged as the commitment challenge of war  ( Coyne & Mathers, 2011; Lomberg, 2013; Tzu, 2013).

The third reason for war is often indivisible challenges. The indivisible challenges may incorporate religious, philosophical issues and territorial challenges. Quite often resources can be divided, however religious distinctions and territorial disputes cannot be divided among actors. War and the human and economic costs which area associated may be avoided if the challenging subject of dispute can be associated to another challenge which can be more easily resolved or if one of the factions makes some sort of concession to the other. Usually the origin of an indivisible challenge is a pressure political group within one of the nations which possesses considerable influence (Coyne & Mathers, 2011; Lomberg, 2013; Tzu 2009).

This implies that one or both of the opposing nations may have a variety of actors. The significance of indivisibility challenges is slight when compared to the aspects of information and commitment challenges. This leaves the information and the commitment challenges as the two logical reasons that opposing nations go to war with one another (Coyne & Mathers, 2011).  The benefits of war were reviewed by Sun Tzu who had been a Chinese tactician and high ranking military official. Sun Tzu originally wrote the Art of War in the sixth century before the Common Era (Tzu, 2009). The Art of War which was composed by Sun Tzu is composed of thirteen chapters. Every chapter in the book is dedicated to a specific aspect of waging war. The Art of War is one of the most significant military strategy treatises that have ever been written. The themes which have been covered in the book which is titled the Art of War have been extended to spheres of influences which exceed military tactics (i.e., commerce, legal reflection and marketing strategies) (Tzu, 2009).

Sun Tzu thought that war was a required evil which must be evaded at all consequences. The war should be waged rapidly in order to overcome and limit the human and economic hardships. There has been no war which has caused any nation to profit (Lomberg, 2013; Tzu, 2009) A nation which becomes triumphant in war does so due to the aspect of taking decisive action prior to the opponent’s realization of their menacing position. Sun Tzu believed that holocausts and criminal war activities should be avoided due to the characteristic of motivating increased resistance from the opponent and the capacity of holocausts and criminal war activities to enable the tide of war to turn in the opponent’s favor ( Lomberg, 2013; Tzu, 2009).

The victorious faction should be able to capture the government of the opposing nation without completely destroying the government or the infrastructure. The destruction of the opposing nation’s government or infrastructure should be conducted as a final option. Sun Tzu also perceived that the location of the military forces in strategic positions was of great significance. The choice of positioning a military force in opposition to other nation’s military force must be performed objectively upon the need for the avoidance of the potential expense of human and economic loss (Tzu, 2009).

War has its advantages. War has its disadvantages. Wars are usually conducted by two opposing factions. These two opposing factions are usually willing to accept the advantages of war in exchange for the human and economic costs of war. Wars have led to invention. The benefits of the inventions which have been gained by war have been able to benefit many during the times of peace.

Sun Tzu believed that in order to avoid war, one of the nations must be willing to apply the disadvantages of war as a persuasive factor against waging war. Nations can apply techniques of negotiation in order to avoid the information, commitment and indivisible aspects which cause wars. If it were not for war, the United States would have never been conceived. If the Civil war had not been waged between the opposing factions of the United States, slavery would have perpetuated as an acceptable institution in the United States. If the United States had not become involved in the Second World War, the Holocaust may have never ended and other holocaust may have ensued.

The aspect of the United States, Russia, the European Union, China, Japan and India launching satellites and spaceships into space in order to search for extraterrestrial life is an outcome of the benefits of the Second World War. Many of the inventions which are applied today, (i.e., GPS tracking systems, microwave ovens and cellular phones) are results of technologies which have been developed for wartime applications. Wars have their disadvantages; however, wars also have their advantages.

Boot, M. (2006). War made new: Weapons, warriors and the making of the modern world.  USA: Gotham Books.

Coyne, C.J. & Mathers. R.L. (2011). The handbook on the political economy of war . UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Howard, M. (2000). The invention of peace: reflections on war and international order . USA: Yale University Press.

Lomborg, B. (2013). How much have global problems cost the world? New York:  Cambridge University Press.

Tsu, s. (2009). The art of war by Sun Tzu- classic edition . (L. Giles, Trans.), El Paso, TX: El Paso Norte Press.

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Guest Essay

The View Within Israel Turns Bleak

By Megan K. Stack

Ms. Stack is a contributing Opinion writer who has reported from the Middle East.

It was the pictures of Palestinians swimming and sunning at a Gaza beach that rubbed Yehuda Shlezinger, an Israeli journalist, the wrong way. Stylish in round red glasses and a faint scruff of beard, Mr. Shlezinger unloaded his revulsion at the “disturbing” pictures while appearing on Israel’s Channel 12.

“These people there deserve death, a hard death, an agonizing death, and instead we see them enjoying on the beach and having fun,” complained Mr. Shlezinger, the religious affairs correspondent for the widely circulated right-wing Israel Hayom newspaper. “We should have seen a lot more revenge there,” Mr. Shlezinger unrepentantly added. “A lot more rivers of Gazans’ blood.”

It would be nice to think that Mr. Shlezinger is a fringe figure or that Israelis would be shocked by his bloody fantasies. But he’s not, and many wouldn’t be.

Israel has hardened, and the signs of it are in plain view. Dehumanizing language and promises of annihilation from military and political leaders. Polls that found wide support for the policies that have wreaked devastation and starvation in Gaza. Selfies of Israeli soldiers preening proudly in bomb-crushed Palestinian neighborhoods. A crackdown on even mild forms of dissent among Israelis.

The Israeli left — the factions that criticize the occupation of Palestinian lands and favor negotiations and peace instead — is now a withered stump of a once-vigorous movement. In recent years, the attitudes of many Israelis toward the “Palestinian problem” have ranged largely from detached fatigue to the hard-line belief that driving Palestinians off their land and into submission is God’s work.

This bleak ideological landscape emerged slowly and then, on Oct. 7, all at once.

The massacre and kidnappings of that day, predictably, brought a public thirst for revenge. But in truth, by the time Hamas killers rampaged through the kibbutzim — in a bitter twist, home to some of the holdout peaceniks — many Israelis had long since come to regard Palestinians as a threat best locked away. America’s romantic mythology and wishful thinking about Israel encourage a tendency to see Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the main cause of the ruthlessness in Gaza, where Israel has killed more than 35,000 people. The unpopular, scandal-ridden premier makes a convincing ogre in an oversimplified story.

But Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, the creeping famine, the wholesale destruction of neighborhoods — this, polling suggests, is the war the Israeli public wanted. A January survey found that 94 percent of Jewish Israelis said the force being used against Gaza was appropriate or even insufficient. In February, a poll found that most Jewish Israelis opposed food and medicine getting into Gaza. It was not Mr. Netanyahu alone but also his war cabinet members (including Benny Gantz, often invoked as the moderate alternative to Mr. Netanyahu) who unanimously rejected a Hamas deal to free Israeli hostages and, instead, began an assault on the city of Rafah, overflowing with displaced civilians.

“It’s so much easier to put everything on Netanyahu, because then you feel so good about yourself and Netanyahu is the darkness,” said Gideon Levy, an Israeli journalist who has documented Israel’s military occupation for decades. “But the darkness is everywhere.”

Like most political evolutions, the toughening of Israel is partly explained by generational change — Israeli children whose earliest memories are woven through with suicide bombings have now matured into adulthood. The rightward creep could be long-lasting because of demographics, with modern Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews (who disproportionately vote with the right) consistently having more babies than their secular compatriots.

Most crucially, many Israelis emerged from the second intifada with a jaundiced view of negotiations and, more broadly, Palestinians, who were derided as unable to make peace. This logic conveniently erased Israel’s own role in sabotaging the peace process through land seizures and settlement expansion. But something broader had taken hold — a quality that Israelis described to me as a numb, disassociated denial around the entire topic of Palestinians.

“The issues of settlements or relations with Palestinians were off the table for years,” Tamar Hermann told me. “The status quo was OK for Israelis.”

Ms. Hermann, a senior research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, is one of the country’s most respected experts on Israeli public opinion. In recent years, she said, Palestinians hardly caught the attention of Israeli Jews. She and her colleagues periodically made lists of issues and asked respondents to rank them in order of importance. It didn’t matter how many choices the pollsters presented, she said — resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict came in last in almost all measurements.

“It was totally ignored,” she said.

The psychological barrier between Israelis and Palestinians was hardened when Israel built the snaking West Bank barrier, which helped to forestall attacks on Israelis toward the end of the second intifada — the five-year Palestinian uprising that erupted in 2000, killing about 1,000 Israelis and roughly three times as many Palestinians. The wall helped keep West Bank suicide bombers from penetrating Israel and piled extra misery on ever-more-constrained Palestinian civilians, many of whom refer to it as the apartheid wall.

Many Israelis, Ms. Hermann told me, are at a loss when asked to identify the border where Israel ends and the West Bank begins. Her research from 2016 found that only a small percentage of Israelis knew for sure that the Green Line was the border delineated by the 1949 Armistice. The question of whether this border should even be depicted on Israeli school maps has been a heated topic of debate within Israel; with a rueful laugh, Ms. Hermann described many of the classroom maps as “from the river to the sea.”

Such ignorance is a luxury exclusive to Israelis. Palestinians make it their business to know exactly where the border between Israel and the West Bank lies, which checkpoints are open on a given day, which roads they may and may not use. These are not abstract ideas; they dictate the daily movements of Palestinians, and confusing them could be fatal.

Israel’s uneasy detachment turned to rage on Oct. 7.

A handful of songs with lyrics calling for the annihilation of a dehumanized enemy have been circulated in Israel these past months, including “Launch,” a hip-hop glorification of the military promising “from kisses to guns, until Gaza is erased” and suggesting that the West Bank city of Jenin is under the “plague of the firstborn,” a reference to the biblical story in which God smites the eldest sons of Egypt. The smash hit “ Harbu Darbu ,” addressed to “you sons of Amalek,” promises “another X on the rifle, ’cause every dog will get what’s coming to him.”

“There is no forgiveness for swarms of rats,” another song goes . “They will die in their rat holes.”

Israeli shops hawk trendy products like a bumper sticker that reads, “Finish them,” and a pendant cut into the shape of Israel, with East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza seamlessly attached.

Israeli protesters have repeatedly taken to the streets in anguish over the hostages held in Gaza and rage at Mr. Netanyahu (who faced intense domestic opposition long before Oct. 7) for failing to save them. But the demonstrations should not be conflated with international calls to protect civilians in Gaza. Many Israelis want a cease-fire to free the hostages, followed by the ouster of Mr. Netanyahu — but the protests do not reflect a groundswell of sympathy for Palestinians or a popular desire to rethink the status quo ante of occupation and long-silenced peace talks.

If anything, with the world’s attention fixed on Gaza, Israel’s far-right government has intensified the domination of Palestinians. The single largest Israeli land grab in more than 30 years happened in March , when Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced the state seizure of 10 square kilometers of the West Bank. The land takeovers are accompanied by a bloody campaign of terror , with an ever-less-distinguishable mix of soldiers and settlers killing at least 460 Palestinians in the West Bank since Oct. 7, the Palestinian health ministry says.

Meanwhile, inside Israel, the police have handed out guns to civilians and set up de facto militias in the name of self-defense. But questions about whom these newly armed groups are meant to defend, and from whom, have created a creeping unease.

The weapons have gone not only to West Bank settlements or towns adjacent to Palestinian territories and Lebanon but also to communities set deep in Israel’s interior, particularly places that are home to a mix of Arab and Jewish residents . An analysis published in January by the newspaper Haaretz found that while the national security ministry wouldn’t disclose which communities got gun licenses or the criteria used to decide, Arab communities — even those on Israel’s frontier — did not seem to be eligible.

The guns sent a chill through Palestinian citizens of Israel, who have often been invoked in defense of the state. Look, Israel’s advocates often say, Arabs live more freely in Israel than anywhere else in the Middle East.

Hassan Jabareen, a prominent Palestinian lawyer who founded Adalah, Israel’s main legal center for Arab rights, told me that many Arab citizens of Israel — who constitute one-fifth of the population — live in fear.

Israel’s attacks on Gaza have in the past provoked community protests, riots and clashes among Arabs and Jews in Israel. After Oct. 7, though, the message was clear: Stay quiet.

“The police left no doubt that we were enemies of the state,” Mr. Jabareen said, “when they started arming the Jewish citizens of Israel and called Jewish citizens to come to the station and take your arms to defend yourself from your Palestinian neighbor.”

Diana Buttu, a Palestinian lawyer who lives with her family in the Israeli city of Haifa, told me that these past months have been thick with unease. She has long imagined herself as a living holdover from the once-thriving Arab population that was largely displaced from what is now Israel. A “remnant,” she calls herself, who for years moved through Israel feeling invisible.

Now the sense of invisibility has melted. Both Ms. Buttu and Mr. Jabareen said that the current atmosphere in Israel had drawn closer and sharpened in their minds the mass displacement known in Arabic as the nakba, or catastrophe, as if history might yet loop back. Mr. Netanyahu evoked the same era when he referred to Israel’s current onslaught as “Israel’s second war of independence.”

“They didn’t see us,” Ms. Buttu said. “We were the ghosts; we were just there. And now it’s like, ‘Wow, they’re here.’ There is an interest in trying to get rid of Palestinians. We’re on the rhetorical front lines.”

Long before this current storm of violence, Mr. Netanyahu’s far-right government had worked to strengthen Jewish supremacy. The 2018 “nation-state law” codified the right to national self-determination as “unique to the Jewish people,” removed Arabic as an official language and established “Jewish settlement as a national value” that the government must support. Palestinian members of the Knesset famously shredded copies of the bill in Parliament and yelled, “Apartheid,” but it passed all the same.

In 2022, Israel reauthorized its controversial family unification law, largely barring Palestinians who marry Israeli citizens from receiving legal status — or living with their spouses in Israel — if they are from the West Bank or Gaza. The law also applies to people from the “enemy states” of Lebanon, Syria and Iraq (homes to Palestinian refugee communities), as well as Iran.

With legal disadvantages and social pressures mounting, Palestinian citizens of Israel have started to look abroad for support. Mr. Jabareen told me that his organization is preparing an application to the United Nations to request international legal protections for Palestinians inside Israel. In March a Palestinian citizen of Israel was granted asylum in Britain after arguing that returning would very likely expose him to persecution because of his political views and activism for Palestinian rights and Israel’s “apartheid system of racial control of its Jewish citizens over its Palestinian citizens.”

Another stark sign of Israel’s hardening is the hundreds of Israelis — mostly Arabs, but some Jews, too — who have been arrested, fired or otherwise punished for statements or actions regarded as endangering national security or undermining Israel’s war efforts. Even a social media post expressing concern for Palestinians in Gaza is enough to draw police scrutiny.

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a scholar who lectures at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Queen Mary University of London, said on a podcast that Zionism should be abolished, that Israel may be lying about the extent of sexual assault that took place on Oct. 7 and that Israelis were “criminals” who “cannot kill and not be afraid, so they better be afraid.” Israeli police responded in April by jailing Ms. Shalhoub-Kevorkian overnight and asking a judge to keep her locked up while they investigated her on suspicion of incitement. The judge decided to release her but acknowledged that she “may have crossed the line from free expression to incitement.”

For nearly two decades — starting with the quieting of the second intifada and ending calamitously on Oct. 7 — Israel was remarkably successful at insulating itself from the violence of the occupation. Rockets fired from Gaza periodically rained down on Israeli cities, but since 2011 , Israel’s Iron Dome defense system has intercepted most of them. The mathematics of death heavily favored Israel: From 2008 until Oct. 7, more than 6,000 Palestinians were killed in what the United Nations calls “the context of occupation and conflict”; during that time, more than 300 Israelis were killed.

Human rights organizations — including Israeli groups — wrote elaborate reports explaining why Israel is an apartheid state. That was embarrassing for Israel, but nothing really came of it. The economy flourished. Once-hostile Arab states showed themselves willing to sign accords with Israel after just a little performative pestering about the Palestinians.

Those years gave Israelis a taste of what may be the Jewish state’s most elusive dream — a world in which there simply did not exist a Palestinian problem.

Daniel Levy, a former Israeli negotiator who is now president of the U.S./Middle East Project think tank, describes “the level of hubris and arrogance that built up over the years.” Those who warned of the immorality or strategic folly of occupying Palestinian territories “were dismissed,” he said, “like, ‘Just get over it.’”

If U.S. officials understand the state of Israeli politics, it doesn’t show. Biden administration officials keep talking about a Palestinian state. But the land earmarked for a state has been steadily covered in illegal Israeli settlements, and Israel itself has seldom stood so unabashedly opposed to Palestinian sovereignty.

There’s a reason Mr. Netanyahu keeps reminding everyone that he’s spent his career undermining Palestinian statehood: It’s a selling point. Mr. Gantz, who is more popular than Mr. Netanyahu and is often mentioned as a likely successor, is a centrist by Israeli standards — but he, too, has pushed back against international calls for a Palestinian state.

Daniel Levy describes the current divide among major Israeli politicians this way: Some believe in “managing the apartheid in a way that gives Palestinians more freedom — that’s [Yair] Lapid and maybe Gantz on some days,” while hard-liners like Mr. Smotrich and Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir “are really about getting rid of the Palestinians. Eradication. Displacement.”

The carnage and cruelty suffered by Israelis on Oct. 7 should have driven home the futility of sealing themselves off from Palestinians while subjecting them to daily humiliations and violence. As long as Palestinians are trapped under violent military occupation, deprived of basic rights and told that they must accept their lot as inherently lower beings, Israelis will live under the threat of uprisings, reprisals and terrorism. There is no wall thick enough to suppress forever a people who have nothing to lose.

Israelis did not, by and large, take that lesson. Now apathy has been replaced by vengeance.

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Megan K. Stack is a contributing Opinion writer and author. She has been a correspondent in China, Russia, Egypt, Israel, Afghanistan and the U.S.-Mexico border area. Her first book, a narrative account of the post-Sept. 11 wars, was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. @ Megankstack