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What are the positive and negative effects of war?

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Negative effects of war can include loss of life, destruction of cities and the environment, and human suffering. Positive effects of war can include the defeat of problematic governments, the correction of injustices, advances in technology and medicine, and a reduction of unemployment.

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As other Educators have already noted, the negative effects of war include the loss of millions upon millions of lives. In World War Two, around 60 million people were killed. Conversely, a positive effect of war is its potential to save lives. If World War Two had not have happened—if the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries had not declared war against Nazi Germany—it’s likely Adolf Hitler’s regime would have systematically killed millions upon millions of more people.

As you mull over the positive and negative effects of war, you might want to rethink the use of “positive” and “negative.”

War is a terrible, ghastly, deadly enterprise. For people involved in wars, it’s much more than a “negative”: it’s constant terror, suffering, and possible death. You might want to check out some nonfiction accounts of war, like Evan Wright’s Generation Kill , to get a clearer understanding of war’s brutality.

Furthermore, the upside or “positive effects" of certain wars seem to be debatable. Many people believe America’s Civil War was a positive war. It ostensibly led to the prohibition of slavery. Yet some notable figures, like historian Howard Zinn and legal scholar Michelle Alexander, see the aftermath of the Civil War as a way for America to implement a different sort of slavery, which isn’t a “positive.”

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Chapin, Chastity. "What are the positive and negative effects of war?" edited by eNotes Editorial, 6 Dec. 2020, https://www.enotes.com/topics/history-general/questions/what-are-the-negative-and-positive-effects-of-war-370778.

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Contrary to the common belief that war has only negative effects, it also has some positive impacts. However, whereas the negative effects of war are the same regardless of the place of war, the positive effects may vary depending on where the war occurred. The most common negative impacts of war include loss of human lives, economic losses due to destruction of capital as well as disruption of trade, human suffering, the spread of diseases, displacement of people and destruction of the environment, among others.

On the other hand, war can also impact the economy positively in the short term as during the Great Depression during the 1930s in the United States. The war mobilization efforts and military spending stirred capacity utilization and reduced unemployment through increased army conscription. Technological advancements are also a positive impact of war. The railroad networks of the Europeans for instance, that had a significant military strategic input in terms of countering enemy attacks, also helped the civilians. The GPS system which was specifically developed to enhance navigation by U.S military during the 1990’s has found great use among the civilians to date. The First World War helped establish machinery that would help maintain world peace. The League of Nations was founded after WWI as a platform to settle disputes peacefully and even though it has been criticized for failing to avoid World War II, it set precedence for the formation of the United Nations. Some wars have also led to the end of despotic leadership in various countries across the world such as the Libyan civil war that led to the ousting of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

In conclusion, even though war has negative effects, it also has some notable positive impacts.

http://www.joshuagoldstein.com/jgeconhi.htm
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https://www.britannica.com/event/Libya-Revolt-of-2011

Mbiti, Tim. "What are the positive and negative effects of war?" edited by eNotes Editorial, 3 Aug. 2015, https://www.enotes.com/topics/history-general/questions/what-are-the-negative-and-positive-effects-of-war-370778.

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The question of positive and negative effects of war is primarily dependent upon the nature of a particular war, but one can argue with certainty that all wars have disastrous effects on both the combatants and civilians, and a few wars have some positive outcomes. The issue might be better phrased as, "Is a particular war justified by its potential benefits?"

In World War II, for example, the world was facing an ideology in Europe--National Socialism ("Nazis")--that destroyed and would go on to destroy, if successful, an uncountable number of people based on racial, religious, and medical characteristics. The approximately 8 million Jews who were killed by the Nazis would have been only a minor number had the Nazi regime succeeded in its goal of controlling western and eastern Europe. To stop this movement, those who opposed the Nazi ideology went to war, but in the process of defeating the Nazis (and the Japanese), a staggering number of civilians were killed, wounded and displaced. In addition, the number of killed and wounded combatants, on all sides, is staggering. Although one can argue this war had to be fought, the human cost is actually unknowable.

All wars have benefits, the principal two being technological advances and advances in medical science. War accelerates both technological and medical advances because all sides are attempting to invent better ways of killing and better methods of preserving the lives of combatants, and some of these advances benefit the civilian populations, assuming they survive the war.

It is reasonable to conclude that all wars are bad, but, in rare cases, war is forced upon the participants by the actions of one or all parties. It is also reasonable to believe that the negative effects of war, in all cases, far exceed the potential benefits. The fact is, there are no good wars. There are only wars that are less bad than others. If you interviewed a thousand combatants in various wars, you would find it difficult to find any who would want to go through combat a second time.

Holliday, Stephen. "What are the positive and negative effects of war?" edited by eNotes Editorial, 18 Nov. 2014, https://www.enotes.com/topics/history-general/questions/what-are-the-negative-and-positive-effects-of-war-370778.

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The negative effects of war are, of course, death and destruction. Millions can die in big wars like WWII. Cities can be devastated, hurting a country’s economy. These things cause terrible human misery.

There are, however, also possible positive effects of war. War can correct terrible injustices. For example, the US Civil War caused an end to slavery in that country. World War II ended the Holocaust. Wars can also lead to technological advances that help society. One instance of this is the development of air travel after WWII, which was strongly influenced by the wartime development of large, long-range bombers.

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Schimmel, Isabell. "What are the positive and negative effects of war?" edited by eNotes Editorial, 1 Nov. 2012, https://www.enotes.com/topics/history-general/questions/what-are-the-negative-and-positive-effects-of-war-370778.

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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Wars and violent conflicts

In-depth articles

Effects of war

There are no real victors in wars as all parties involved have to suffer the consequences with often high numbers of casualties on both sides. Rather than dealing with the consequences resulting from a war and its end, this text will look into its direct effects on people, politics, the economy and the environment.

Victims of war

World War I (1914–1918) resulted in 17 to 20 million deaths. The number of victims of World War II (1939–1945) is estimated at between 50 and 56 million (some sources even mention 80 million). Even if the end of World War II marks an end to the killing of such a scale, and no other war since then has led to so much destruction, around 800,000 people have still died in violent conflicts between 1989 and 2010 since the end of the Cold War (UCDP Battle-Related Deaths Dataset v.5-2010).

The real number of victims of a war can only be estimated. It depends, for instance, on whether ‘victims’ are only defined as those who died as a direct result of armed violence. This would mean disregarding those who, during a war, died from exposure, epidemics or as a result of (sexual) violence and hunger. It also disregards those who have died years later from wounds or illnesses sustained in the war—such as the radiation victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

One look at the consequences of the US intervention in Vietnam and Cambodia (1965–1975) provides a clearer picture of this problem. The number of deaths in the Vietnam War is estimated at three million. Since its end, the Vietnamese government claims that more than 42,000 people have died from deadly accidents caused by old ammunition. In the war against the North Vietnamese troops, US armed forces used 15 million tons of bombs and explosives of which 800,000 tons still pollute 20 per cent of the country. A similar scenario exists in Cambodia. According to UNICEF, between four and six million landmines still lurk near paths, on fields and near schools or wells in the villages. It is mostly the civilian population that suffers—every third landmine victim is a child. According to the Landmine Monitor 2009, at least 19,505 people were killed and 44,024 wounded between 1979 and the end of 2009.

“The war will never be over, never, as long as somewhere a wound it had inflicted is still bleeding,” Heinrich Böll, German Nobel Prize winner for literature, characterised the long-term effects of wars. War-wounded—be they soldiers or civilians—often suffer from the physical injuries for decades. Often, they have to learn to live with mutilations, having been blinded or deafened.

The psychological effects, too, have an impact on the everyday lives of the survivors. Fear and insecurity resulting from daily experiences of war—whether as perpetrators or victims—leave traces. Late symptoms can be post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety. These consequences affect civilians and soldiers alike.

Another consequence of war is the transformation of national citizens into refugees. According to the United Nations, at the time of writing there are 15 million refugees worldwide who have had to leave their home due to conflicts or persecution. Three-quarters live in developing countries. The war has taken away their home and their livelihoods, often long-term. Hunger, malnutrition, illnesses and diseases directly threaten the refugees and their children. The situation of refugees becomes all the more difficult when international attention and support dwindles while there is still no end to their legal, economic and social state of limbo and no durable solution in sight. Notably, when refugees have to live in larger “camps”, various different security risks arise both for the refugees and their environment that can lead to new violent conflicts.

Politics and the economy

The most far-reaching political effect of a war is the fact that it can annihilate state and community. During a war, citizens’ freedoms are curtailed. Under a state of emergency or martial law, freedom of speech and freedom of choice as well as activities by political and other societal groups are often considerably restricted. Both internally and externally, images of the enemy are created. Distrust grows between citizens with different opinions , while relations with opposing or ‘enemy’ states are destroyed and poisoned for years.

“This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children,” lamented Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th President of the United States and Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces during World War II. According to the internationally renowned NGOs Oxfam International, Saferworld, and International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA), the following are also amongst the costs of war:

Increased military expenditures that other sectors of the economy are lacking;
Destruction of livelihoods and infrastructure (e.g. water supply and transportation system);
Limitations regarding economic activities through insecurities, limited mobility and the allocation of civil labour to the military as well as flight of capital.
Macroeconomic effects such as inflation, limitations regarding savings, investments and exports as well as increased debt.
Loss of development aid;
Transfer of assets to the illegal economy.

The conquest of foreign territories and the forced re-distribution of land, means of production and labour that go along with it also have economic consequences.

Environment

In 2001 the United Nations declared 6 November of each year as the “International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflicts.” Then-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wanted to raise awareness of the devastating ecological and long-term environmental side effects of wars that is just as damaging to humankind as direct violence. Damage caused by oil, chemicals, landmines or unexploded ordnance often takes a long time before it is repaired; the pollution of water, air and soil threatens the livelihoods of many people and causes entire populations to flee.

New technologies, too, such as depleted uranium munitions, threaten the environment. The smallest amounts of radioactive uranium can cause cancer or damage kidneys and other organs. This brings us to a second aspect of the effects of war on the environment. Besides “immediate” side effects, natural resources are sometimes destroyed for tactical reasons. Known examples are the bombardment of oil production facilities in the Gulf wars to damage the economy, the deliberate mining of pastures to rob the enemy of its basic food supply or the use of chemical warfare agents such as Agent Orange that was used by the United States in the Vietnam War as a defoliant and to destroy crop plants. “At times, natural resources are deliberately destroyed as a tactic. But more often than not, the environment is simply another innocent victim caught in the crossfire. The poor, as usual, suffer disproportionately, as they rely most heavily on the environment not only for food but also for medicine, livelihoods, and materials for shelters and homes“, warned Kofi Annan of the environmental effects of war.

Sources and further information:

Institut für Friedenspädagogik Tübingen e.V. (German)
Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor
Oxfam - Africa's Missing Billions: International arms flows and the cost of conflict
Universität Gießen - Folgen von Krieg (German)
UNRIC (Vereinte Nationen: Regionales Informationszentrum der UNO)
Uppsala University Department of Peace and Conflict Research

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Does the “Good Fight” Exist? Ethics and the Future of War

Nicholas Romanow | 04.07.22

Samuel Moyn, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (Macmillan, 2021)

Can a “humane” war ever be fought? Or is such a question doomed to irrelevance by an innate contradiction in its terms? These are two of the driving questions in Samuel Moyn’s Humane , a polemic against the US-led march into an era of endless war.

Moyn’s exploration of these question leads him to conclude, in part, that efforts to make warfighting more ethical and less cruel have in turn made war more common and long-lasting. Moyn also sets his sights on the military establishment, castigating it for a long succession of abuses, cover-ups, and manipulations. Published as the US military continues its transition from the post-9/11 wars to an era of great power competition, Moyn’s book is a thought-provoking reflection on the evolution of ethical and legal considerations in the use of military force. Still, it poorly anticipates the ethical dilemmas that military officers will face today and tomorrow.

Moyn’s central thesis (while seemingly paradoxical) is relatively intuitive. If war becomes less brutal, both decision makers and the public will raise fewer objections to going to war. If fewer people object to war, then wars will become easier to initiate and harder to terminate. Moyn traces this logic from the nineteenth century, through both world wars and the Cold War, and into the post–Cold War period. He highlights a fissure that emerged between peace advocates who oppose war of any kind, for any reason, and humanitarians who work to mitigate the worst effects of inevitable conflict. In effect, Moyn suggests, the efforts of the humanitarian camp actually contribute to making war more likely by reducing some of the most catastrophic impacts of war.

Throughout the book, Moyn maintains a caustic tone directed at those who have strived to constrain the use of force and hold the military to a high standard of accountability and self-control. This derision is off-putting for junior officers who hold their military mentors, and their efforts to apply violence in ways that limit any unnecessary harm, in high esteem. In his memoir, Call Sign Chaos , retired General and former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis wrote that “the need for lethality must be the measuring stick against which we evaluate the efficacy of our military.” Yet in the very same book, he observed that “rules of engagement are what separate principled militaries from barbarians and terrorists.” Moyn dismisses concepts such as strict rules of engagement and civilian casualty reporting as mere public relations tactics the military uses to avoid bad press.

The refinement of military ethics is a task without end; as long as war causes unnecessary damage and suffering, the task can and must continue. But the author overlooks ongoing efforts within the joint force to develop, refine, and enforce a robust set of military ethics—a defining feature of the military as a profession. Mentors and role models who embrace and pass on this professional obligation help establish a virtuous cycle where, at its best, each generation of new officers is cultivated to hold itself to an ever higher standard.

Consider such unforgivable abuses of military force such as the treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. This episode and those like it are rightfully remembered as scandals in American military history. That’s why it’s important that they remain well-discussed, not just in American public discourse but in professional military education, as well. These are exceptions rather than the rule in American military affairs—unacceptable exceptions, but exceptions nonetheless. Efforts to ensure these cases are not only remembered institutionally within the military, but used to develop ethical leaders, are therefore vital. Black Hearts —a book about the brutal rape of an Iraqi girl and murder of her family by US soldiers—is required reading for every West Point cadet and a case study based on it forms the centerpiece of the academy’s capstone officership course. This and other efforts to develop ethical leaders matters in ways Moyn’s book fails to recognize.

The military justice system enshrined in the Uniform Code of Military Justice and upheld by the judge advocate general’s corps in every service is not just a publicity stunt. Rather, the concept of legality in warfighting is integrated in the daily routines of every servicemember. Conducting military operations ethically, morally, and legally is not an afterthought meant to massage the military’s public image. For junior officers who have recently completed their indoctrination training, including the wide range of legal briefings this entails, the implication that for a professional military the law of armed conflict is simply a farce does not align with actual experiences.

Moyn’s book was published last fall, within days of the withdrawal of US and allied forces from Afghanistan. But its analysis ends with the post-9/11 wars and counterterrorism mission, which are presented as an example of a dystopian end state wherein hyper-precise strike warfare against high-value targets has allowed the military to morph into some kind of global police force. This is a worthy discussion, but only part of a complete and current one, which limits its utility. There is no discussion on the impacts on military ethics of the raging debate in security circles on strategic competition, gray zone conflict, or the Thucydides Trap and tensions between the United States and China. While counterterrorism operations, stability operations, and irregular warfare will persist, these are no longer the raison d’etre for the armed services in the way they were for the better part of the previous two decades. Instead, competing in ambiguous situations that sit in the challenging middle ground between armed conflict and peace will require leaders who can confront murky ethical conundrums. Today’s officers can learn from the moral shortcomings that Moyn chronicles, but they must do so while deliberately planning for the challenges ahead.

This is the key for military readers of Humane , especially junior officers who will spend the years and even decades to come confronting new ethical challenges. Exploring whether wars can ever be fought humanely is a worthy endeavor. Tracing efforts to do so—and questioning whether they unintentionally expand the likelihood of war—is equally so. One of Moyn’s central contentions—that technology reduces risks in ways that can prolong wars—is convincing, at least to a degree. The use of unmanned aerial vehicles seems to have finally defeated General William T. Sherman’s adage that “every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.” Strikes by unmanned platforms controlled by aviators sometimes thousands of miles away have virtually eliminated the risk associated with manned aircraft missions, enabling such operations to continue in perpetuity because public resistance to military activity is most often tied to the casualties of American servicemembers. However, members of the military profession cannot reach that conclusion and stop there, but must look forward to future ethical challenges. As drone use proliferates globally, it is possible that this technology will one day be used against American servicemembers, either by an adversarial state or a terrorist group. How do the ethics of unmanned platforms—their development, what weapons they carry, whether artificial intelligence can and should be incorporated into them, and ultimately their employment—change in such a shifting environment?

Technology is an important motif throughout the book, especially its role shaping the laws and ethics of war. The advent of aerial bombardment and nuclear weapons made warfare far more destructive long before it became more precise. This history, which Moyn charts well, should inform ongoing debates over whether autonomous weapons, digital technology, and other emerging advances will pull warfare in the direction of more precision or more destruction.

No domain of warfare is as inadequately covered by the current body of law governing conflict as the domain of cyber. The deniability of cyberattacks allows them to skirt the traditional dichotomy of jus ad bellum and jus in bello . Cyberattacks may be referred to as acts of war in policy discourse, but no cyberattack has escalated into a full-blown war. Meanwhile, many cyberattacks occur in the absence of a state of war, such as last year’s Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack . Attacks like these also blatantly violate noncombatant immunity and often target critical infrastructure or private firms. Cyberattacks can also be perpetrated for a variety of purposes other than mere destruction, such as for espionage, extortion, or terrorism.

At the same time, we have yet to experience the “ cyber Pearl Harbor ” that would prove that a cyber weapon can be used to inflict casualties on an enemy. Despite the abundance of ink spilled on enshrining cyber norms and the need for a “ Digital Geneva Convention ,” cyberspace remains an unregulated battleground. While events like the Colonial Pipeline attack prove the possible effects of a coordinated cyber offensive, there are no clear boundaries on how far such a campaign may go before it is considered an overt act of war. At what point will cyberattacks trigger kinetic responses? How much certainty in the hacker’s identity will be needed to justify a response? Will the United States and other major powers accept constraints on their own cyber capabilities to avoid more and more devastating attacks? Is it even possible for these constraints to be enforced and verified? Perhaps both the legal aspects and the ethics of cyberwarfare were beyond the scope of Moyn’s book, but military professionals have no choice but to contend with these issues.

Moyn’s work is a thoroughly researched piece of intellectual history. Junior military professionals should read Humane and will find it useful, but should consider the ways in which the book’s utility is limited. Ultimately, they should take away from it a reinvigorated commitment to confronting head on the arduous ethical and moral dilemmas that a military officer will undoubtedly face throughout his or her career.

Ensign Nicholas Romanow ( @nickromanow ) is a cryptologic warfare officer in the US Navy stationed in the Washington, DC area. He holds a BA in international relations and global studies from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was also an undergraduate fellow at the Clements Center for National Security.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense., or that of any organization the author is affiliated with, including the United States Navy.

Image credit: Senior Airman Helena Owens, US Air Force

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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.

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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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The ethics of warfare: Is it ever morally right to kill on a massive scale

War has been puzzling philosophers for centuries, and it isn’t hard to see why. What could be more intuitive or ethical than the belief that it is morally wrong to kill on a massive scale?

However, many would argue that there are times when war is morally permissible, and even obligatory. The most famous way of ethically assessing war is to use ‘Just War Theory’; a tradition going back to St. Augustine in the 5th Century and St. Thomas in the 13th Century. Just War theory considers the reasons for going to war (Jus ad bellum) and the conduct of war (Jus in bello). This distinction is important. A war might be ethical but the means unethical, for instance, using landmines, torture, chemicals and current debate is concerned with drones.

Just War theory sets out principles for a war to be ethical. The war must be:

Waged by a legitimate authority (usually interpreted as states)
In a just cause
Waged with right intention
Have a strong probability of success
Be a last resort
Be proportional

In addition, there are three principles for conduct in war:

Discrimination (distinguishing between enemy combatants and non-combatants)
Proportionality (the harms must be proportional to the gains)
Actions must be militarily necessary

When attempting to apply and interpret these principles considerable disagreement arises, as evidenced by the – still ongoing – debate about the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. Just war principles are used to address the question of whether the war lacked legitimate authority without a UN Resolution.

Legitimate authority is at issue in all conflicts, including those considered to be acts of terrorism or insurgency. Think about recent uprisings such as the 2011 ousting of Gaddafi's regime in Libya and the other movements loosely termed the Arab Spring; and most timely the current debate about whether to arm the ‘rebels’ in Syria. Are these legitimate authorities? And does legitimate authority make sense anymore?

Establishing ‘just cause’ is also problematic, for example, self-defence is widely recognised, and the UN Charter grants states a right to defend themselves. However, other ‘just causes’ are more difficult to defend. Particularly controversial is humanitarian intervention, even though it is sometimes seen as obligatory and indeed, the most ethical reason for war. It was for humanitarian reasons that NATO intervened in Kosovo in 1999, but, there are other instances where humanitarian disasters are left (perhaps most controversially the failure to intervene in the Rwandan genocide in 1994).

All criteria are problematic and hard to meet. Think about ‘right intention’ with regard to the 2003 Iraq war and discussions about the ‘real’ motives of Bush and Blair. And when we come to proportionality, the contemporary debate is particularly fraught. Can it ever be proportional to use drones where there is no risk to life on one side and risk to many lives (including civilian lives) on the other? And when battles are fought in villages and homes by those with no uniforms, how can the principle of discrimination ever be respected – and indeed should it be?

The character of war is changing fast and the ethics needs to keep pace with that change. These particular principles might well need revision. But we should not imagine the fundamental ethical issues have changed. It is still the case that in a sense war is inherently unethical. To be justified, significant ethical reasons are required and although imperfect Just War theory continues to be one way to seek such reasons.

Heather Widdows, Professor of Global Ethics, Department of Philosophy, Co-Leader of Saving Humans IAS theme

Is war a necessary evil?

In this book’s chapters on the history of war, its causes and effects, and the effort to control war through ethics and law, it becomes clear why the author of this very useful volume wishes he were a pacifist but is not. A cursory review of the history of warfare and its effects is enough to demonstrate that war is a great evil, even if at times a necessary one. We should work to end war, and knowing its history, what causes it and how we might mitigate the harm it does are important parts of that work.

Yale University Press, 288p, $26

A. C. Grayling’s three chapters on the history of war lead to the question of what causes war, an exploration not of the causes of this or that war but of war as a phenomenon. He explores two main answers to this question: 1) Humans are innately violent, or 2) human societies are organized in such a way that war becomes more likely than not. The or in the last sentence should be an and, because Grayling recognizes that even if humans are instinctively violent, war—as opposed to conflict—is possible only where political and social structures create the capacity to conduct a war.

This insight is probably the most important in the book, and it is twin to another: Once political and social structures provide the framework for war, they create institutions that make war likely. I write these words the day after Memorial Day in the United States, and no more evidence is needed for Grayling’s claim that the idea of war is carried in the DNA of society and the economy than to see the sentimentalism and commercialization so prominently on display on this holiday.

There are points to quibble with in this volume, but in the end Grayling’s call for an “aversion therapy of truth” that does not romanticize war but shows us war’s “mangled bodies, blown apart children, blood running into gutters,” not to mention the pain and suffering of those whose family members are fighting the war, is compelling. Yet this therapy of truth is not what any society really wants; it is certainly not what the United States wants. Watch or listen to any baseball game on Memorial Day and you will hear the announcers solemnly intone the virtues of those who “made the ultimate sacrifice” in between hawking the goods of the local car dealers and alerting fans to the next bobblehead giveaway.

Historians are likely to find Part One, “War in History and Theory,” the most interesting part of the book, as political scientists or psychologists may find Part Two, “The Causes and Effects of War.” But for this ethicist, Part Three, “Ethics, Law, and War,” is particularly helpful, noting as it does the complementary nature of classic just war tradition and international humanitarian law. In seeking to limit the damage of war, these traditions represent the highest aspirations of humankind. They speak to the human capacity for compassion that is every bit as innate as our propensity to violence.

At the same time, Grayling does not spare his reader from the “frightening evidence of cruelty and barbarism” that war everywhere provides. His brief discussion of rape as a strategy of war is extremely important, even if such a discussion is almost inescapably pornographic. Nevertheless, attending to the relationship between war and rape is a bracing antidote to the unfortunate tendency to discuss just war theory in the language of the seminar room rather than the profanity-laced argot of the battlefield.

What does Grayling see as the future of war? Here the sections on the history, causes and ethics of war are joined in the recognition that war has always been and will always be driven by technological innovation. Acknowledging this is also to acknowledge that the political and social conditions necessary for technological innovation are universally associated with war. Technology determines the kind of fighting that is possible, and the fighting reveals where technology needs to evolve next.

At this juncture, says Grayling, the most worrisome development on the horizon is so-called lethal autonomous weapons, or LAWS. Like many novel warfighting technologies, LAWS pose serious challenges to just war thinking and international law. Necessity, discrimination and proportionality are conditions that are important to the ethics and law of war, but each requires nuanced judgment when applied. Will the killer robots that future battlefields may see be capable of that kind of nuanced judgment? As Grayling puts it, will a robot be able to discriminate between a terrified civilian trying to surrender and an enemy soldier about to attack?

Grayling tells us at the start of his book that he is as close to being a pacifist as it is possible to be without actually being one. He is not a pacifist because he admits that, sometimes, war is a necessary evil. Yet accepting the judgment that war can be justified is not incompatible with working to make it exceptionally rare. Here the pacifist and the just war thinker can make common cause. And the place to begin, says Grayling, is to recognize the fact that the very idea of war is far too easily and thoughtlessly accepted. Alas, war is not the exception but the rule. If war were genuinely the exception, it would not be a “permanent presence in the budgets, decisions, and attitudes of states.”

Grayling is not a flamethrower or culture warrior. He is that rarest of breeds: a careful, sober scholar who is a prophetic witness to the need for change.

This article also appeared in print, under the headline “A necessary evil?,” in the August 21, 2017 , issue.

Paul Lauritzen is a professor of religious ethics at John Carroll University in Ohio.

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World Psychiatry
v.5(1); 2006 Feb

Mental health consequences of war: a brief review of research findings

R. srinivasa murthy.

1 Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean, World Health Organization, Post Box 7608, Abdul Razak Al Sanhouri Street, Naser City, Cairo 11371, Egypt

RASHMI LAKSHMINARAYANA

2 London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Keppel Street, London, WC1E 7HT, UK

Among the consequences of war, the impact on the mental health of the civilian population is one of the most significant. Studies of the general population show a definite increase in the incidence and prevalence of mental disorders. Women are more affected than men. Other vulnerable groups are children, the elderly and the disabled. Prevalence rates are associated with the degree of trauma, and the availability of physical and emotional support. The use of cultural and religious coping strategies is frequent in developing countries.

The year 2005 is significant in understanding the relationship between war and mental health. This is the 30th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam war and of the start of the war in Lebanon. Every day the media bring the horrors of the ongoing "war" situation in Iraq. Some recent quotations from the media depict the impact of war on mental health: "We are living in a state of constant fear" (in Iraq); "War takes a toll on Iraqi mental health"; "War trauma leaves physical mark"; "War is hell... it has an impact on the people who take part that never heals"; "War is terrible and beyond the understanding and experience of most people"; "A generation has grown up knowing only war".

Wars have had an important part in psychiatric history in a number of ways. It was the psychological impact of the world wars in the form of shell shock that supported the effectiveness of psychological interventions during the first half of the 20th century. It was the recognition of a proportion of the population not suitable for army recruitment during the Second World War that spurred the setting up of the National Institute of Mental Health in USA. The differences in the presentation of the psychological symptoms among the officers and the soldiers opened up new ways of understanding the psychiatric reactions to stress.

During the last year, a large number of books and documents have addressed the effects of war on mental health. They include the WPA book "Disasters and mental health" ( 1 ); the World Bank report "Mental health and conflicts - Conceptual framework and approaches" ( 2 ); the United Nations (UN) book "Trauma interventions in war and peace: prevention, practice and policy" ( 3 ); the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) document "The state of the world's children - Childhood under threat" ( 4 ); the book "Trauma and the role of mental health in postconflict recovery" ( 5 ) and a chapter on "War and mental health in Africa" in the WPA book "Essentials of clinical psychiatry for sub-Saharan Africa" ( 6 ).

Though there have not been any world wars since the Second World War, there have been wars and conflicts throughout the last 60 years. For example, in the 22 countries of the Eastern Mediterranean region of the World Health Organization (WHO), over 80% of the population either is in a conflict situation or has experienced such a situation in the last quarter of century ( 7 ).

War has a catastrophic effect on the health and well being of nations. Studies have shown that conflict situations cause more mortality and disability than any major disease. War destroys communities and families and often disrupts the development of the social and economic fabric of nations. The effects of war include long-term physical and psychological harm to children and adults, as well as reduction in material and human capital. Death as a result of wars is simply the "tip of the iceberg". Other consequences, besides death, are not well documented. They include endemic poverty, malnutrition, disability, economic/ social decline and psychosocial illness, to mention only a few. Only through a greater understanding of conflicts and the myriad of mental health problems that arise from them, coherent and effective strategies for dealing with such problems can be developed.

The importance that the WHO attributes to dealing with the psychological traumas of war was highlighted by the resolution of the World Health Assembly in May 2005, which urged member states "to strengthen action to protect children from and in armed conflict" and the resolution of the WHO Executive Board in January 2005, which urged "support for implementation of programmes to repair the psychological damage of war, conflict and natural disasters" ( 8 ).

The WHO estimated that, in the situations of armed conflicts throughout the world, "10% of the people who experience traumatic events will have serious mental health problems and another 10% will develop behavior that will hinder their ability to function effectively. The most common conditions are depression, anxiety and psychosomatic problems such as insomnia, or back and stomach aches" ( 9 ).

This paper briefly reviews the evidence from published literature about the impact of war on the mental health of the general population, the refugees, the soldiers and specific vulnerable groups. For the purpose of this paper, the term "war" is used to include both wars waged between countries (e.g., the Iraq-Kuwait war) and conflicts within countries (e.g., Sri Lanka). The review presents data concerning some major wars/conflicts (the countries involved are considered in alphabetic order) and then briefly outlines the risk factors emerging from the literature.

IMPACT OF WAR ON MENTAL HEALTH

Afghanistan.

More than two decades of conflict have led to widespread human suffering and population displacement in Afghanistan. Two studies from this country are significant in terms of both their scope and their findings.

The first study ( 10 ) used a national multistage, cluster, population based survey including 799 adult household members aged 15 years and above. Sixty-two percent of respondents reported experiencing at least four trauma events during the previous ten years. Symptoms of depression were found in 67.7% of respondents, symptoms of anxiety in 72.2%, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in 42%. The disabled and women had a poorer mental health status, and there was a significant relationship between the mental health status and traumatic events. Coping strategies included religious and spiritual practices.

The second study ( 11 ), using a crosssectional multicluster sample, was conducted in the Nangarhar province of Afghanistan, to estimate the prevalence of psychiatric symptoms, identify resources used for emotional support and risk factors, and assess the present coverage of basic needs. About 1011 respondents aged 15 years and above formed the sample. Nearly half of the population had experienced traumatic events. Symptoms of depression were observed in 38.5% of respondents, symptoms of anxiety in 51.8% and PTSD in 20.4%. High rates of symptoms were associated with higher numbers of traumatic events experienced. Women had higher rates than men. The main sources of emotional support were religion and family.

The Balkans

The conflict in the Balkans is probably one of the most widely studied ( 12 - 14 ) in recent years. Mental health of survivors of both sides was examined ( 15 ).

An initial study ( 16 ) among Bosnian refugees demonstrated an association between psychiatric disorders (depression and PTSD) and disability. A threeyear follow-up study on the same group concluded that former Bosnian refugees who remained living in the region continued to exhibit psychiatric disorders and disability after initial assessment ( 17 ).

A cross-sectional cluster sample survey among Kosovar Albanians aged 15 years or older found that 17.1% (95% CI 13.2%-21.0%) reported symptoms of PTSD ( 18 ). There was a significant linear decrease in mental health status and social functioning with increasing amount of traumatic events in those aged 65 years or older, and with previous psychiatric illnesses or chronic health conditions. Internally displaced people were at increased risk of psychiatric morbidity. Men (89%) and women (90%) expressed strong feelings of hatred towards the Serbs, with 44% of men and 33% of women stating that they would act on these feelings.

In a study of the mental health and nutritional status among the Serbian ethnic minority in Kosovo, the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ)-28 scores in the subcategories of social dysfunction and severe depression were high, with women and those living alone or in small family units being more prone to psychiatric morbidity ( 19 ). In a community sample of 2,796 children aged between 9 and 14 years, high levels of post-traumatic symptoms and grief symptoms were reported ( 20 ). This was related to the amount and type of exposure. Girls reported more distress than boys.

Cambodia has had a long history of violence, highlighted by the civil war in the 1960s, culminating with the "Khmer Rouge" rule that destroyed the social fabric of the society. Studies have found that refugees had high levels of psychiatric symptomatology after 10 years ( 21 ).

A household survey of 993 adults from Site 2, the largest Cambodian displaced- persons camp on the Thailand- Cambodia border, found that more than 80% felt depressed and had a number of somatic complaints despite good access to medical services ( 22 ). Approximately 55% and 15% had symptom scores that correlated with Western criteria for depression and PTSD, respectively. However, despite high reported levels of trauma and symptoms, social and work functioning were well preserved in the majority of respondents. Cumulative trauma continued to affect psychiatric symptom levels a decade after the original trauma events ( 23 ). This study also reported that there was support for the diagnostic validity of PTSD criteria, with the notable exception of avoidance. The inclusion of dissociative symptoms increased the cultural sensitivity of PTSD. Psychiatric history and current physical illness were found to be risk factors for PTSD ( 24 ).

Changes in the structure of the society have led to a breakdown of the existing protective networks such as the village chief and the elders in the village, especially for women ( 25 ). Traditional healers (monks, mediums, traditional birth attendants), who played an important role in maintaining the mental health of communities in the past, have lost their designated positions in the community following the conflict ( 26 ).

Twenty-seven Cambodian young people, who were severely traumatized at ages 8 to 12, were followed up 3 years after a baseline evaluation. A structured interview and self-rating scales showed that PTSD was still highly prevalent (48%) and that depression was present in 41% ( 27 ).

The human rights abuses in the Chechen population have been well documented ( 28 ). A report on a small number of Chechen asylum seekers in the UK adds to the evidence on the abuses and related psychological fallouts ( 29 ). Psychosocial issues were explored in a survey conducted in settlements housing displaced people (n=256) ( 30 , 31 ). Two thirds of respondents agreed with the statement that the conflict has triggered mental disturbance or feelings of being upset. Nearly all respondents indicated that they had family members having difficulty in coping with their disturbance or upset feelings. Coping strategies used were praying, talking, keeping busy, and seeking the support of family members.

Iraq has been at war at numerous times in history: a series of coups in the 1960s, the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), the anti-Kurdish Al-Anfal campaign within the country (1986-1989), the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait resulting in the Gulf war (1991), and the conflict starting in 2003. The UN-imposed economic sanctions following the Gulf war have had a profound impact on the health of Iraqis. The human rights abuses have also been recorded ( 32 ).

There are few studies on the impact of these conflicts on mental health. A study on 45 Kurdish families in two camps reported that PTSD was present in 87% of children and 60% of their caregivers ( 33 ). A study on 84 Iraqi male refugees found that poor social support was a stronger predictor of depressive morbidity than trauma factors ( 34 ). During the last three years of occupation by foreign forces, there have been many news reports about the mental health of the population, but no systematic study.

Israel has been in a situation of conflict for over four decades. A large number of systematic studies have been undertaken in different population groups. A recent study ( 35 ) found that 76.7% of subjects exposed to war-related trauma had at least one traumatic stress-related symptom, while 9.4% met the criteria for acute stress disorder. The most common coping mechanisms were active information search about loved ones and social support. Another study ( 36 ) reported that, twenty years after the war with Lebanon, an initial combat stress reaction, PTSD-related chronic diseases and physical symptoms were associated with a greater engagement in risk behaviours.

Lebanon has been ravaged by a civil war (1975-1990) and by an Israeli invasion in 1978 and 1982. The mental health impact of these conflicts has been studied extensively.

A random sample of 658 people aged between 18 and 65 years was randomly selected from four Lebanese communities exposed to war ( 37 ). The lifetime prevalence of DSM-III-R major depression varied across the communities from 16.3% to 41.9%. Exposure to war and a prior history of major depression were the main predictors for current depression.

The correlation between mother's distress and child's mental health was explored in a study in Beirut ( 38 ). The level of perceived negative impact of war-related events was found to be strongly associated with higher levels of depressive symptomatology among mothers. The level of depressive symptomatology in the mother was found to be the best predictor of her child's reported morbidity. In a study carried out in 224 Lebanese children (10-16 years), the number of traumatic experiences related to war was positively correlated to PTSD symptoms, with various types of war traumas being differentially related to the symptoms ( 39 ).

A cross-sectional study conducted among 118 Lebanese hostages of war ( 40 ) found that psychological distress was present in 42.1% of the sample compared to 27.8% among the control group. Significant predictors for distress were years of education and increase in religiosity after release.

During the last decade a large number of studies have reported high levels of psychosocial problems among children and adolescents, women, refugees and prisoners in Palestine.

A study conducted by the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme among children aged 10-19 years ( 41 ) revealed that 32.7% suffered from PTSD symptoms requiring psychological intervention, 49.2% from moderate PTSD symptoms, 15.6% from mild PTSD symptoms, and only 2.5% had no symptoms. Boys had higher rates (58%) than girls (42%), and children living in camps suffered more than children living in towns (84.1% and 15.8% respectively).

A study on Palestinian perceptions of their living conditions during the Second Intifada ( 42 ) found that 46% of parents reported aggressive behaviour among their children, 38% noted bad school results, 27% reported bed wetting, while 39% stated that their children suffered from nightmares. The study also revealed that more refugee (53%) than non-refugee (41%) children behaved aggressively. Thirty-eight percent of the respondents said that shooting was the main influence, 34% stated that it was violence on TV, 7% cited confinement at home and 11% reported that it was the arrest and beating of relatives and neighbours. Seventy percent of refugees and non-refugees stated that they had not received any psychological support for the problems of their children.

In a series of studies during the last 10 years from the Gaza Community Mental Health Centre ( 43 ), the most prevalent types of trauma exposure for children were witnessing funerals (95%), witness to shooting (83%), seeing injured or dead strangers (67%) and family member injured or killed (62%). Among children living in the area of bombardments, 54% suffered from severe, 33.5% from moderate and 11% from mild or doubtful levels of PTSD. Girls were more vulnerable.

The physical and mental health problems of the survivors of the genocide in Rwanda have been well documented ( 44 ). In a recent community based study examining 2091 subjects ( 45 ), 24.8% met symptom criteria for PTSD, with the adjusted odds ratio of meeting PTSD symptom criteria for each additional traumatic event being 1.43. Respondents who met PTSD criteria were less likely to have positive attitudes towards the Rwandan national trials, suggesting that the effects of trauma need to be considered if reconciliation has to be successful. There have been reports on the state of health among the large numbers of refugees (500,000-800,000 in five days) who fled to Goma, Zaire following the capture of the capital Kigali, but none of them has considered the mental health dimension.

The conflict between the majority Sinhala and minority Tamil population in Sri Lanka has been ongoing for nearly 30 years. One of the first studies that looked into the psychological effects of the conflict on the civilian population was an epidemiological survey ( 46 ), which reported that only 6% of the study population had not experienced any war stresses. Psychosocial sequelae were seen in 64% of the population, including somatization (41%), PTSD (27%), anxiety disorder (26%), major depression (25%), alcohol and drug misuse (15%), and functional disability (18%). The breakdown of the Tamil society led to women taking on more responsibilities, which in turn made them more vulnerable to stress ( 47 ). Children and adolescents had higher mental health morbidity ( 48 ).

A study carried out in ex-combatants in Somalia found high psychiatric morbidity and use of khat ( 49 ). A UNICEF study found evidence of psychological effects of the prolonged conflict situation in a high proportion of a sample of 10,000 children ( 50 ). There is near total disruption of the mental health services in the country.

Sudanese refugees fled into northern Uganda in two major waves in 1988 and 1994. Symptoms of PTSD and depression were found to be highly prevalent among Sudanese children living in the refugee camps ( 51 ). Refugees had higher rates of individual psychopathology than the general population, and it was observed that the cumulative stress grew as the years in exile progressed. The consequences of long-term exile were still present 5-15 years later, with an increase in the rates of suicide and alcohol use.

RISK FACTORS

From the large amount of studies reviewed, some broad risk factors and associations can be drawn.

Women have an increased vulnerability to the psychological consequences of war. There is evidence of a high correlation between mothers' and children's distress in a war situation. It is now known that maternal depression in the prenatal and postnatal period predicts poorer growth in a communitybased sample of infants. Social support and traditional birth attendants have a major role in promoting maternal psychosocial well being in war-affected regions. The association between gender- based violence and common mental disorders is well known. Despite their vulnerability, women's resilience under stress and its role in sustaining their families has been recognized.

There is consistent evidence of higher rates of trauma-related psychological problems in children. The most impressive reports are those from Palestine. Of the different age groups, the most vulnerable are the adolescents.

The direct correlation between the degree of trauma and the amount of the psychological problems is consistent across a number of studies. The greater the exposure to trauma - both physical and psychological - the more pronounced are the symptoms.

Subsequent life events and their association with the occurrence of psychiatric problems have important implications for fast and complete rehabilitation as a way of minimizing the ill effects of the conflict situations.

Studies are consistent in showing the value of both physical support and psychological support in minimizing the effects of war-related traumas, as well as the role of religion and cultural practices as ways of coping with the conflict situations.

CONCLUSIONS

The occurrence of a wide variety of psychological symptoms and syndromes in the populations in conflict situations is widely documented by available research. However, research also provides evidence about the resilience of more than half of the population in the face of the worst trauma in war situations. There is no doubt that the populations in war and conflict situations should receive mental health care as part of the total relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction processes. As happened in the first half of the 20th century, when war gave a big push to the developing concepts of mental health, the study of the psychological consequences of the wars of the current century could add new understandings and solutions to mental health problems of general populations.

A number of issues have emerged from the extensive literature on the prevalence and pattern of mental health effects of war and conflict situations. Are the psychological effects and their manifestation universal? What should be the definition of a case requiring intervention? How should psychological effects be measured? What is the long-term course of stress-related symptoms and syndromes? ( 52 ). All these issues need to be addressed by future studies.

It is important to report that the WHO and some other UN-related bodies have recently created a task force to develop "mental health and psychosocial support in emergency settings" ( 53 - 55 ), which is expected to complete its activity in one year.

Ethics: Antiwar Arguments that War Is Immoral and Unethical

Chris Clor/Getty Images

Belief Systems
Key Figures in Atheism
M.A., Princeton University
B.A., University of Pennsylvania

There are few wars so popular that everyone in a society supports it; thus, even when support is unusually widespread, there will always be a few who dissent from popular opinion and object to their country engaging in war, arguing that the conflict is immoral and unethical. Quite often, they are attacked for their stand and accused of being unpatriotic, immoral, naive, and even treasonous.

Although some might agree with the "unpatriotic" label and claim that patriotism is a misplaced loyalty, that is relatively rare. Instead, those who oppose either war generally or some specific war will instead argue that it is the support of war which is immoral, naive, or even a betrayal of their nation's deepest and most important values.

Although they may be wildly wrong and profoundly mistaken, it would be a serious error to fail to recognize that people who personally adopt an antiwar stance normally do so for what they regard as very moral and rational reasons. Understanding the antiwar arguments better will go a long way towards healing the division between both sides on a conflict.

Presented here are both general and specific arguments. The general arguments are those which tend to be used against the morality of any war at all, concluding that war is pragmatically (due to its consequences) or inherently immoral. The specific arguments allow that some wars at some times may be moral and/or justified, but they are used to object to some war in particular as failing to meet just standards.

General Arguments Against War

What Is Pacifism? Is pacifism a result of being naive, or of being committed to nonviolent principles? Is it an incredibly moral and difficult position to adopt, or is it rather a treasonous and uncaring philosophy? The truth is probably somewhere in between, which may explain why society can't quite decide how to react to pacifism and pacifist critiques of society's violence.

Killing Innocent People is Wrong One of the most common antiwar arguments is the fact that wars result in the deaths of innocent people and, therefore, war is necessarily immoral. This objection accepts that a state may have a vested interest in pursuing attackers and even killing them, but points out that the justice involved with such actions is quickly offset when innocent lives are put at risk or even lost.

Life Is Sacred The pacifist position against war or violence generally is often based upon the deontological argument that all of life (or just all human life) is sacred, and hence it is immoral to ever act in a way which would cause the deaths of others. Quite often the reasons for this position are religious in nature, but religious premises involving God or souls are not absolutely required.

Modern War & "Just War" Standards There is a long-standing tradition in Western culture of differentiating between "just" and "unjust" wars. Although Just War theories were developed primarily by Catholic theologians and most explicit references to a Just War theory today tend to come from Catholic sources, implicit references to it can be found widely because of the way in which it has become incorporated into Western political thought. Those using this argument try to make the case that today, all wars are unethical.

Wars Cannot Achieve Political & Social Goals Because so many wars are defended by relying upon the need to achieve important political or social goals (some selfish and some altruistic), it is only natural that one important rebuttal to war is to argue that even if it seems that such goals might be achieved, in fact the use of war will ultimately prevent them from ever becoming a reality. Thus, wars are unethical because they hinder rather than help in attaining important ends.

Wars Risk the Future of the Human Race The generally limited nature of warfare, even at its most brutal, ended after World War II with the development of nuclear weapons. Between those and the vastly improved biological and chemical weapons which have become standard in the military arsenals of so many nations, the destructive capacity of even a single conflict has grown to such proportions that no one can pretend to be uninvolved and unaffected. Thus, the potential devastation means that wars today are immoral acts.

War Shouldn't be a Government Power Some have argued that the power to conduct warfare is so immoral that it should perhaps be denied to governments completely. This is a deontological position - although it does object to the extreme consequence of modern warfare, it takes a further step and argues that war has become something which is inherently outside the moral sphere of state activity.

Specific Arguments Why Wars of Aggression Are Wrong

One of the most common objections to individual wars is to condemns acts of violent aggression. It's possible, but unlikely, for different countries to attack each other simultaneously, so that means that some nation has to initiate the violence and begin the war itself. Thus, it seems reasonable to conclude that there is always an aggressor and hence someone who has acted immorally.

War Violates International Law It's not unusual for those who want to stop a war from happening or to stop a war which has already begun to appeal to a "higher authority," namely international law. According to this argument, the actions of states with respect to each other cannot be arbitrary; instead, they must conform to more impersonal standards of the international community. Otherwise, those actions are unethical. On previous occasions, international agreements, such as the Kellogg-Briand Pact, even aimed to outlaw war altogether.

War is Contrary to National Self-Interest A common argument used to object to a particular war is that the conflict somehow fails to serve "national interests." This is a favorite objection of isolationists who argue that their country should never involve itself in foreign disagreements, but even those who approve of engaging closely with other nations may object when that engagement involves sending the military to achieve some change through force and violence.

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#Essays on War: Why Do We Fight?

I have recently started to think about the reason for my service. “Why did I voluntarily sign up to potentially die in war?” This question was posed to me and my Army ROTC battery. Specifically, we were asked, ”Why would anyone apply for a job that strains an individual’s physical health, with the potential for horrible conditions, horrible outfits, questionable pay and, on top of it all, possible death in a country no one has ever heard of for people they have never met?” I have heard multiple reasons from individuals in my battery, cadets and cadre alike, and those reasons have nothing to do with selfish gain or self-preservation. They all all have to do with selfless love. There appears to be a deeper meaning in why service men and women, soon-to-be or otherwise, decide to fight our country’s battles.

Most say it is to fight for their country, home, and loved ones. Others say it’s to serve a cause greater than themselves. Some join because they need a job to support their families. I am serving with all of the above causes in mind, while also keeping them close to my heart. However, I would go a step further into the selfless logic behind military service.

My reason for volunteering body and mind for war is a hereditary duty to set the example of living to make a positive difference in innocent people’s lives, because I honor them enough to put my life at risk so they can live in peace and continue to make this world better in their own way. Even if I do not know these innocent people intimately, I will still carry out my duty because of the love I feel for any potentially benevolent person dedicated to doing good. Whatever anyone’s individual motivations for serving this country in war, I would like to believe this is every veteran’s resolve when they go to work in the defense of our nation and its people.

I believe those who have served, are going to serve, or are interested in serving cannot and should not take personally the negative things that might be said about their service. The members of my family who have served in the military have had the less than enjoyable experience of being accused of being baby killers, murderers, contracted assassins, or foot soldiers of big government by citizens with anti-war sentiments. I’ve been called all of these as well. Having an opinion is the political right of the American people. Let them have their opinions. Swearing to defend the laws of our country and the rights of its people is a part of the oath we take as service members.

Service men and women of the United States have a history of faithfully fighting for the legal rights of the American people and the human rights of all people. They have sacrificed their time, energy, and in many cases their lives, so the citizens of our planet can live in peace and freedom. That was what the members of my family were tasked with when they served, and it will be my turn to carry that task very soon. I understand that discussion of political activity is important and the pen is mightier than the sword, but sometimes we must use the sword to protect the pen against those who would threaten the stability of our planet and its people, whether they are terrorists with a political agenda or tactful leaders with visions of conquest and domination. These are the reasons to why I fight.

Alexander Amoroso is a U.S. Army ROTC cadet at Santa Clara University in California. He is the recipient of the Gentry Winters Historical Honors Scholarship, the Award for Excellence in Military History from the U.S. Army Center of Military History, and the Association of the United States Army and the Veterans of Foreign Wars Award. He has also been published in the works of Thought Notebook , Ash and Bones , the Army Magazine and is an associate member of the Military Writers Guild.

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Header Image: Still image from "War Comes to America," the seventh film in Frank Capra's "Why We Fight" series. ( Public Domain )

Here’s How Bad a Nuclear War Would Actually Be

Detailed modeling of missile trajectories in the case of a U.S.-Russia nuclear war.

W e know that an all-out U.S.-Russia nuclear war would be bad. But how bad, exactly? How do your chances of surviving the explosions, radiation, and nuclear winter depend on where you live? The past year’s unprecedented nuclear saber-rattling and last weekend’s chaos in Russia has made this question timely. To help answer it, I’ve worked with an amazing interdisciplinary group of scientists (see end credits) to produce the most scientifically realistic simulation of a nuclear war using only unclassified data, and visualize it as a video . It combines detailed modeling of nuclear targeting, missile trajectories, blasts and the electromagnetic pulse, and of how black carbon smoke is produced, lofted and spread across the globe, altering the climate and causing mass starvation.

As the video illustrates, it doesn’t matter much who starts the war: when one side launches nuclear missiles, the other side detects them and fires back before impact. Ballistic missiles from U.S. submarines west of Norway start striking Russia after about 10 minutes, and Russian ones from north of Canada start hitting the U.S. a few minutes later. The very first strikes fry electronics and power grids by creating an electro-magnetic pulse of tens of thousands of volts per meter. The next strikes target command-and-control centers and nuclear launch facilities. Land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles take about half an hour to fly from launch to target.

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Major cities are targeted both because they contain military facilities and to stymie the enemy’s post-war recovery. Each impact creates a fireball about as hot as the core of the sun, followed by a radioactive mushroom cloud. These intense explosions vaporize people nearby and cause fires and blindness further away. The fireball expansion then causes a blast wave that damages buildings, crushing nearby ones. The U.K. and France have nuclear capabilities and are obliged by NATO’s Article 5 to defend the U.S. so, Russia hits them too. Firestorms engulf many cities, where storm-level winds fan the flames, igniting anything that can burn, melting glass and some metals and turning asphalt into flammable hot liquid.

Unfortunately, peer-reviewed research suggests that explosions, the electromagnetic pulse, and the radioactivity aren’t the worst part: a nuclear winter is caused by the black carbon smoke from the nuclear firestorms. The Hiroshima atomic bomb caused such a firestorm, but today’s hydrogen bombs are much more powerful. A large city like Moscow, with almost 50 times more people than Hiroshima, can create much more smoke, and a firestorm that sends plumes of black smoke up into the stratosphere, far above any rain clouds that would otherwise wash out the smoke. This black smoke gets heated by sunlight, lofting it like a hot air balloon for up to a decade. High-altitude jet streams are so fast that it takes only a few days for the smoke to spread across much of the northern hemisphere.

This makes Earth freezing cold even during the summer, with farmland in Kansas cooling by about 20 degrees centigrade (about 40 degrees Fahrenheit), and other regions cooling almost twice as much. A recent scientific paper estimates that over 5 billion people could starve to death, including around 99% of those in the US, Europe, Russia, and China – because most black carbon smoke stays in the Northern hemisphere where it’s produced, and because temperature drops harm agriculture more at high latitudes.

It’s important to note that huge uncertainties remain, so the actual humanitarian impact could be either better or worse – a reason to proceed with caution. A recently launched $4M open research program will hopefully help clarify public understanding and inform the global policy conversation, but much more work is needed, since most of the research on this topic is classified and focused on military rather than humanitarian impacts.

We obviously don’t know how many people will survive a nuclear war. But if it’s even remotely as bad as this study predicts, it has no winners, merely losers. It’s easy to feel powerless, but the good news is that there is something you can do to help: please help share this video! The fact that nuclear war is likely to start via gradual escalation, perhaps combined by accident or miscalculation, means that the more people know about nuclear war, the more likely we are to avoid having one.

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10 + 1 reasons to oppose war

Published by

Esther Epp-Tiessen @ MCC Ottawa Office

On February 24, 2022, Russian military forces began an invasion of Ukraine by land, sea and air. Missiles struck several major cities in Ukraine, including the capital city Kyiv. Casualties continue to grow as Russian soldiers enter the country.

We are assessing the changing situation with local partners to determine the appropriate response. MCC’s response will be focused on longer-term scale up of existing programs that support vulnerable people and extending those services to internally displaced populations. Learn more about MCCs response to the crisis in the Ukraine.

As we witness violence around the world, it is a time to mourn the loss of human life in war. And the time to commit, once again, to building a culture of peace.

Resistance to war is part of the very heart of MCC. As an agency of Anabaptist-Mennonite churches, MCC holds to the confession that war and participation in war are counter to the way of Jesus . For us, resistance to war is at the core of our identify as pacifist Christians.

But there are many other reasons to oppose war. And we suspect that many Canadians—who may not share our theological commitments—can nevertheless affirm these reasons.

War kills and harms soldiers . War kills, injures and disables the very people who must carry it out. It causes high levels of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and can lead to moral injury as well – namely, the deep shame, guilt, anger or anxiety experienced by soldiers as a result of killing or harming others. Some soldiers may commit suicide. Between 2010 and 2017, 130 Canadian soldiers took their own lives.
War kills and harms civilians. In the 20 th century, some 200 million people were killed in war, and many millions have already been killed in this century. War not only kills, it also mains people, separates family members, causes disease, hunger and other forms of deprivation. Toxic substances released by some weapons result in severe birth defects, long after wars are officially over. Another frequent weapon of war is rape and other forms of sexual violence against women and girls. The human cost of war is staggering and the impacts extend over generations.
War creates refugees. War causes people to flee their homes for safety, sometimes crossing an international border. The UN reports that at the end of 2021 82.4 million people are forcibly displaced around the world. The personal upheaval for these individuals is profound, the social and political consequences breath-taking.
War harms the natural environment. War contaminates earth, air and water. It destroys natural habitats, killing their flora and fauna. The use of Agent Orange by the U.S. to defoliate the Vietnamese countryside continues to wreak havoc on Vietnam decades later, while use of Depleted Uranium in Iraq will mean radioactive contamination for thousands of years to come. Even in peacetime, standing armies harm the environment because of their enormous carbon footprint.
War’s financial cost is enormous. Consider these statistics: Canada’s 12-year military engagement in Afghanistan cost $8.4 billion , while U.S. conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq (and related violence in Pakistan and Syria) from 2001 to 2016 cost about $4.8 trillion . The Institute for Economics & Peace determined that in 2016, the impact of violence (including war) to the global economy was $14.3 trillion – the equivalent of more than $5 per day for every person alive. What might be possible if those funds were invested in peacebuilding rather than war-making?
War sets back development. The destruction of homes, schools and hospitals, as well as transportation, electrical, water treatment and sanitation systems in wartime can set back economic, social and community development for decades. Wars prevent farmers from farming, children and youth from going to school and ordinary people from going to work. A typical civil war in a medium-sized country costs more than 30 years of GDP growth . No wonder the United Nations in 2015 identified the promotion of peaceful and inclusive societies as one of its key Sustainable Development Goals .
War empowers the weapons dealers. War is good business for those who manufacture and trade in weapons and weapons system. In 2021 just 100 companies sold $531 billion worth of arms, and just one company —U.S.-based based Lockheed Martin—had $65.4 billion in sales. Weapons dealers often have undue influence on politics and foreign policy. In 1961 outgoing U.S. President Eisenhower warned against the power of the “military-industrial complex” to perpetuate war; in many ways, his predictions have come to pass .
War distorts truth . In 1918, U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson’s 1919 stated, “The first casualty when war comes is truth.” How very true! War promotes prejudices and stereotypes about people considered “enemy” and often portrays the enemy as less than human , thereby legitimizing the use of violence against them. War reduces moral categories to the simple binary of “we are good, they are evil.” Nuanced public discussion becomes increasingly difficult and sometimes impossible.
War does not address root causes. While war may end in some measure of “peace” if accompanied by comprehensive peace negotiations, it rarely addresses the grievances that give rise to it, whether hunger, class division, religious or ethnic conflict, access to land and resources, political exclusion, etc. Because of this, many wars lead to new wars. The war against ISIS, for example, is rooted in the Iraq War, which is rooted in the Gulf War.

Martin Luther King Jr. stated, “Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.” Many reasons confirm his words.

By Esther Epp-Tiessen, Public Engagement Coordinator for the MCC Ottawa Office.

Download MCC’s 2021 Peace Sunday Packet: Defending Hope.

To learn more about how you can get involved in peace and justice work and to stay informed, subscribe to our newsletter and visit our website here> .

This post was updated on March 8, 2022

PRESS RELEASE – While Parliament Rests for the Summer, Gaza Bleeds: Canadian Humanitarian Agencies Call for Action

Budget 2024: A Call for Peacebuilding

Mcc 2024 pre-budget submission.

A glimpse of peace

Signs and wonders in a time of lament

Haitian civil society is saying “no” to military intervention. Canada must respect that.

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Advanced Essay #4: Violence always has negative consequences

I don’t care what anybody says, I personally think that violence always has a negative consequence. I stepped outside of myself and imagined multiple scenarios where violence could possibly have a positive consequence. Within all of those circumstances lies a negative consequence for someone or something. The first scenario I envisioned was a professional fighting ring. Of course both fighters signed up or wants to be apart of the fight and are possibly making millions of dollars but at the end of the day someone gets hurt. For some, the benefits or good aspects about pursuing the fight may outweigh the bad ones but within that scheduled fight is a negative consequence. I could go in-depth about the long term effects of constantly getting punched in the face but my point has been proven for this scenario.

Another scenario I envisioned was if someone attempted to hurt you or someone you love. Of course defending yourself or your loved one would be the most reasonable thing to do but in order to do so there is going to be some pain involved. I’m a very passive person and would rather choose violence as a last resort, when it’s absolutely necessary. Some people say that violence is never the answer but I personally find that statement to be false. I can think of tons of situations and scenarios where violence would be the most logical choice of action but none of them make the consequence positive for everyone/everything involved.

With that being said, it’s all about how you deal with those negative consequences that come with violence. The Youth Art and Self-Empowerment Project (YASP) deal with children under 18 years of age that committed crimes. Children in the program have been charged as adults after they committed their crime and YASP do not agree with this. “The number of teenagers under the age of 18 who are held in adult jails and prisons in Pennsylvania has increased drastically over the last fifteen years.” They battle this process by providing space for incarcerated young people to express themselves creatively and to develop as leaders both within and beyond the prison walls. They’re focused on ending the practice of automatically trying and incarcerating young people as adults.

Violence isn’t always physical. One can be teased and get their feelings hurt which is just one of the mental/verbal ways people can be hurt. Women are often targeted by men in unwanted sexual ways. A CNN article further explains the issues surrounding this topic in their article “ Hey baby! Women speak out against street harassment ”

“Fear and discomfort are what define sexual harassment. Not every catcall is followed by unwanted physical advances, and yet that reality has to be considered a distinct possibility for safety's sake.” The only way for this type of violence to not be negative is if the women likes it or is ok with it. What are the chances of that?

A more simple and straight-forward example is war. War is a state of armed conflict between different nations or states, or different groups of people within a nation or state. The negative short term effects of war are the many lives lost during battle. There’s a possibility for many negative long term effects from a war but The New York Times give a real life example and explanation of the long term effects World War II has. “America didn’t just lose the war, and the lives of 58,000 young men and women; Vietnam changed us as a country. In many ways, for the worse. It made us cynical and distrustful of our institutions, especially of government. For many people, it eroded the notion, once nearly universal, that part of being an American was serving your country.” The negative consequences of violence don’t always happen right away.

In conclusion, one of the reasons why violence continues to occur is because people don’t always see the consequences. We are often blinded by how we are affected or the lack of. In the actions of sexual assault/harassment, physical violence, and verbal violence the offender may not realize the consequences because the harm is being inflicted upon them. With sexual harassment and verbal violence if the offended doesn’t speak up the offender could never know the impact they had on that person. Men who catcall women don’t realize how degrading it can be. Before and during acts of violence

Works Cited:

Smith, Emily. "Hey Baby! Women speak out against street harassment." CNN. October 6, 2012. Accessed March 10, 2017. http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/06/living/street-harassment/.

Youth Art & Self-Empowerment Project (n.d.): n. pag. Print.

Marlantes, Karl. "Vietnam: The War That Killed Trust." New York Times . Accessed January 7, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/07/opinion/sunday/vietnam-the-war-that-killed-trust.html?_r=0.

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Sun. Aug 18th, 2024

Creating Socialism

Writing From the Left, Building The Resistance

10 Reasons Why War Is Wrong

By Luke Andreski

Supporting war

In Russia, in Russian-speaking Ukraine, and in many other parts of the world there are people who believe the invasion of Ukraine is both justified and legitimate.

These people are not ‘insane’, they’re not ‘mad foreigners’ and they’re not monsters. Aside from their allegiance to Russia, they are just like us. They go about their lives, care for their children, have friendships, passions and hobbies, just like us.

And, just as we believe in our own viewpoints, they believe their reasons for supporting Russia’s invasion are justifiable and self-evident.

To understand this better it is worth considering the wars we ourselves may have supported.

The second Iraq war (resulting in anything from 500,000 to 1 million civilian deaths)
The invasion of Afghanistan (200,000 deaths of civilians and soldiers, 1 to 1.5 million war injuries, 5 to 10 million driven from their homes)
The Libyan invasion (20,000 deaths, 500,000 displaced)
The war in Yemen (130,000 killed)
The Syrian war (200,000 killed)

These wars were supported or justified by many people here in the UK. People who were neither mad nor monstrous used arguments to justify these wars which are very similar to those the Russian government is now using to justify its invasion of Ukraine.

However, there are many reasons why the justifications for the Russian invasion, or for any war, are wrong.

Here are a few.

War’s pragmatic failings

1. the legitimisation of violence.

Violence legitimises violence. That’s an obvious psychological truth. If I use violence to attack, abrogate or resist the needs or wishes of others, or to enforce my will, then why shouldn’t others see this as justifying their own use of violence? “You did it, so why shouldn’t I?” War legitimises and normalises the use of violence – and do we want to live in a world where violence is legitimised and normalised? From a purely pragmatic point of view, I’d suggest not.

2. War makes further war more likely

The winning of a war, the enforcement of the will of one nation, or one part of a nation, over another, creates resentment. When it comes to violence and war, the law of the conservation of energy comes into play, both socially and psychologically. War’s violence translates after the war is over into deep-rooted resentments, hatreds and prejudices, which find expression further down the road in terrorism, rebellion or new war. There’s a great deal of evidence to suggest that WW1 spawned WW2 – and as for WW2, you can highlight a causal trail all the way to the current war in Ukraine.

So, unless you want a forever war, it’s better to avoid war entirely.

3. War rarely achieves its stated aim

Let’s check the success rate of wars, at least as far as their stated or alleged aims.

WW2 was too little too late when it came to protecting German Roma, gays or Jews. It empowered the Soviet Union (who continued these persecutions) and contributed to the UK’s decline in prestige and power.

Neither the Vietnam War nor the multiple invasions of Afghanistan succeeded in achieving their alleged aims of bringing democracy to these countries.

The second Iraq war and the War on Terror spawned ISIS. Libyans experienced far greater peace and security under Gaddafi than they experience now – and, if our participation in the Syrian war was meant to protect and empower ordinary Syrians, it seems we’ve achieved the very opposite result.

Wars are an inept way of getting things done.

4. War is stupid

As the great Isaac Asimov once said, “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” This very much applies to war, and the reasons are plain enough. We live in a complex world: a world of complex humans, complex social and biological networks, complex technological and economic systems.

Understanding and foresight are needed to navigate our way in such a world. If we want to change our world for the better, we need planning, intelligence, good data and sensitivity. Violence or force?

They’re of little use when it comes to complexity.

5. War is expensive

The direct financial cost of war is enormous.

The Vietnam war cost $1,000,000,000.

The Iraq war cost $1,900,000,000.

The US invasion of Afghanistan cost $2,300,000,000.

And that’s just the cost to the US taxpayer. Add in the costs to other involved nations, and the cost to the ‘host’ nations in terms of smashed infrastructure, lost economic opportunity, and healthcare costs, and we are talking appalling sums of money.

Then supplement this with the cost of standing armies and their weapons across the globe…

Now imagine if even half of this had been spent on pre-emptive investments in the health systems, education systems and the economies of the attacked countries. After such an investment, would the excuses for war still have prevailed?

The waste of human effort and wealth on war is a staggering act of species self-harm.

6. War contributes to climate change

Speaking of species self-harm, the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity is climate change. And yet, through declaring war on each other instead of CO 2 emissions, we exacerbate this threat. War is both a human tragedy and a climate crime.

So, pragmatically, for selfish and practical reasons alone, war is slack-jawed stupidity at its worst. But there are also moral reasons why war is wrong.

The moral case against war

7. using force to achieve your aims is immoral.

It’s always immoral to use force to get your own way. Why? Because force attacks both a person’s equality and their right to be free.

You are not being treated as an equal if someone forces you to do something. Force asserts inequality.

Nor are you free if someone forces you to do something.

Both freedom and equality are at the heart of morality. In fact, morality ceases to apply where there is no freedom. Morality is not relevant to robots or machines; it is only relevant to humans because we are free. And anything that stops morality from being relevant can only be immoral.

8. Innocents always die

Innocents die in wars – and killing innocents is always wrong. Pragmatic proportionality is not a part of moral logic. “Kill this baby so a hundred others can live” – well, that might be pragmatic but it’s not moral.

So, because innocents always die in war, and because the killing of innocents can never be morally justified, war is always immoral.

“What about defensive, utterly unavoidable war?”

We can argue whether such a thing ever truly exists, but, even if it does, as soon as you begin killing innocents, your war becomes immoral.

There is no such thing as a good war, because nothing which incorporates immoral killing is good.

9. Killing people is wrong

Here’s where things get simple.

It’s immoral to kill people. That’s because we are all equal: sparks in the same fire, water in the same flood.

None of us has the right to kill.

Therefore war is immoral.

People like to trot out the self-defence argument at times like this, but the self-defence argument isn’t really a moral one; it’s pragmatic. “I want to live. The only way I can continue to live is by killing them before they kill me. So I’ll kill them.”

Pragmatic is fine, but then you hit the pragmatic arguments from earlier in this article. Violence is stupid. It’s the last refuge of the incompetent. It would be smarter not to get into the position of kill or be killed.

10. The lives of other people are as important and valuable as your own

Now we get to the heart of morality. The lives of other people are as important and valuable as your own. That’s what morality means.

War blows this out of the water.

If we’re all equal, and all lives are as important as our own, you’ll do everything, absolutely everything, to avoid war.

That’s how a moral nation behaves.

Duty and sense

That’s it. Ten reasons why war is wrong.

It’s immoral and it’s stupid. Given our creativity and intelligence, as individuals, as nations and as a species, we are capable of avoiding war, and it’s our moral obligation to do so.

It’s Russia’s moral duty.

It’s the UK’s moral duty.

It’s the duty of all humanity.

Luke is a founding member of the @EthicalRenewal collective and author of Short Conversations: During the Plague (2020), Intelligent Ethics (2019) and Ethical Intelligence (2019).

Why Is War Bad

“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity.” -Dwight D. Eisenhower. War is a filthy thing; the word itself drives a extensive sense of panic into the souls of millions. And yet, even with that fear metastasized across the nation, fear that usually comes in the form of a tiny silver sphere and the unmistakable stench of gunpowder, our government leaders still choose to risk people's lives for petty arguments. We threatened and threatened the other countries with promises of demolished cities overtaken by fire, explosions so bright and destructive it made the sun look like a mere lightning bug , but nobody listened. The first bomb was dropped on March 24th, 2040. The bomb, originally named RDS-220 by the Soviet Union, was dropped right in the middle of North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang. Shortly after, the media was flooded with images of once …show more content…

Maybe my past history of mental illnesses and crippling anxiety would exempt me from an over glorified suicide. But that’s the thing about war, nothing is ever predictable. I should have known. Perhaps I had, somewhere deep in the rationalized part of my brain. War was a filthy thing, a supernova of sorts; it pulled everyone and everything unwillingly into its center before exploding with patches of light that destroyed everything in its path. Patches of light, almost like the ones dancing across my vision. The fistful of hair wrapped snugly in a vice-like grip was beginning to bring tears to my eyes; however, he burning pain that shot through my scalp was nothing compared to the burning deep in my heart. The wails of a woman, presumably my mother, but possibly my own, were stuck in a never ending loop, consisting of pleas and indistinguishable sobs that made my head throb. The light yellow walls of the kitchen and the deep red shade of the door came into focus through bleary eyes, causing panic to constricted around my chest like a

Examples Of How To Tell A True War Story Rhetorical Analysis

“War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; makes you dead.” (80).

Erich Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front

Throughout history, war has always been described as an atrocity and an unnecessary reason for the loss of life. This is not the case. War is necessary for the survival of the economy, the sustainability of non-renewable resources, and the progression of inventions.

A Long Way Gone By Ishmael Beah: An Analysis

War is a horrible thing that comes out of hatred in people’s hearts and produces tragedy around it. War comes and goes but in its path are people who have to suffer through the hardships it brings. Two of the most notable aspects of war is that war is a fight for power and that produces loss of family.

Effects of War Exposed in All Quite on the Western Front, Bury the Dead, and Paths of Glory

3 Works Cited

"From the happy expression on their faces you might have supposed that they welcomed the war. I have met with men who loved stamps, and stones, and snakes, but I could not imagine any man loving war." Margot Asquith revealed her discontent with war in this quote. War is defined in the American Heritage Dictionary as a concerted effort or campaign to combat or put an end to something considered injurious. A rather contradicting definition from the dictionary when one examines war's true meaning and the effect it has on mankind. Wars do not put an end to something considered injurious, war starts them. War stems from human greed

Fly Away Peter Essay

War is not one of the most pleasant images this world has seen. Usually it is regarded as one of the most

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Stuffed between two pillows,my head was still and my breathing was warm and hard,with the prickling feeling of guilt covering me like a blanket.I ached to sob, but my eyes wouldn't succumb,they seemed adement on keeping my irises dry and stinging from perpetual burning.

The War Works Hard Analysis

Wars are often glorified in tone to give praise and respect for those on the battlefields. There is an overall understanding that there are sacrifices needed in order to accomplish a larger goal. Excluded from this understanding is the realization that the effects of war

`` Night `` By Elie Wiesel

War is a monster that ends dissension and in its wake it leaves a trail of needless consequences when put to use.

The Impact Of Hiroshima By John Hersey's Hiroshima

“We have to protect our Earth, so our children and grandchildren will never suffer like that,’ she said. And she looked ahead. ‘Maybe nuclear weapons won’t be abolished while I’m alive,’ she said. ‘But I will never give up.” (Hanley, NBC News). August 6, 1945 at 8:16 in the morning, the United States dropped the world's first atomic bomb on thousands of unsuspecting people in Hiroshima, Japan. Not only did this catastrophic event kill thousands of civilians, but it also resulted in other nations obtaining and learning how to create these deadly weapons, weapons that we still have today. In the book Hiroshima by John Hersey he gives readers a new look at that day, through the eyes of six victims who survived the horrific attack on Hiroshima, he shows how the entire city of Hiroshima suffered, and were left alone to fend for themselves.The book Hiroshima by John Hersey, sheds light on the immense dangers of nuclear warfare, and the government's responsibility for its people, affected by a war they aren’t fighting in.

Spanish Civil War Speech

“War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword, perish by the sword, and those who don’t take the sword perish by smelly diseases.”

The Things They Carried

“War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.” (80)

O Brien War Quotes Analysis

Summary: The Tragedy Of War

“The Tragedy of war is that it uses man’s best to do man’s worst” wise words from Henry Fosdick. When it comes down to the time where an individual hits rock bottom, a man either do its best or do its worst. Although, Man can do its best and do its worst at the same time. There are many reasons how man’s best can result to man’s worst. Henry Fosdick statement is both true and false.

Is War Justified Essay

“War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children. This famous quote is from James Earl “Jimmy” Carter, Jr., who served as the 39th President of the United States. It implies that war can be justified under strict circumstances where it can be necessary, but it is still abhorrent. War is defined as a state of armed conflict between different countries or different groups within a country. Justification refers to the action of showing something to be right or reasonable. War brings many negative and catastrophic impacts not just to the country, but to the people living in the country as well, which this paper

Advantages and Disadvantages of War

War is a seen by those who are against it as the most devastating and dreaded type of human interaction ADDIN EN.CITE Hedges2003517Hedges (2003)5175176Hedges, C.War is a force that gives us meaning2003Gütersloh, GermanyRandom House9781400034635http://books.google.co.ke/books?id=k-KlOS_4b-8C HYPERLINK l "_ENREF_4" o "Hedges, 2003 #517" Hedges (2003). In the society, we leave in, discussions about war are held and preparations for warfare are a normal day-to-day occurrence. Proponents of war argue that nations get a meaning from war and not just carnage and destruction in it way. ADDIN EN.CITE Hedges2003517Hedges (2003)5175176Hedges, C.War is a force that gives us meaning2003Gütersloh, GermanyRandom House9781400034635http://books.google.co.ke/books?id=k-KlOS_4b-8C HYPERLINK l "_ENREF_4" o "Hedges, 2003 #517" Hedges (2003) argues that war gives life a meaning and purpose there by giving people a reason to leave. According to Hedges, with war an excitement hangs in the air. War provides a cause and a resolve to a country as it allows its citizens to be noble ADDIN EN.CITE Hedges2003517(Hedges, 2003)5175176Hedges, C.War is a force that gives us meaning2003Gütersloh, GermanyRandom House9781400034635http://books.google.co.ke/books?id=k-KlOS_4b-8C( HYPERLINK l "_ENREF_4" o "Hedges, 2003 #517" Hedges, 2003).

Why Is War Bad

War, an age-old scourge that has plagued humanity throughout history, represents the epitome of human failure. It is a manifestation of the darkest aspects of human nature, unleashing devastation and suffering on an unimaginable scale. While conflicts may arise from a multitude of reasons, the consequences of war are universally destructive, encompassing loss of life, economic ruin, and profound psychological trauma.

At the heart of why war is bad lies the staggering loss of human life. Every conflict inevitably results in the tragic deaths of soldiers and civilians alike, shattering families and communities. The toll of war extends far beyond the battlefield, leaving behind a trail of grief and sorrow that reverberates for generations. From the trenches of World War I to the bombed-out cities of World War II, the human cost of war is etched into history, a grim reminder of its senseless brutality.

Furthermore, war exacts a heavy toll on the economic prosperity of nations involved. The resources diverted towards military endeavors drain vital funds away from essential services such as healthcare, education, and infrastructure. The cost of rebuilding shattered cities and infrastructure in the aftermath of conflict imposes a heavy burden on future generations, perpetuating cycles of poverty and instability. Moreover, the disruption of trade routes and markets further exacerbates economic hardship, plunging societies into turmoil and despair.

Beyond its immediate physical and economic consequences, war inflicts lasting psychological scars on those caught in its wake. The horrors witnessed on the battlefield and the trauma of losing loved ones leave indelible marks on the human psyche. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, and depression are just a few of the mental health challenges faced by veterans and civilians alike. The psychological wounds of war endure long after the guns fall silent, haunting survivors and impeding their ability to lead fulfilling lives.

In conclusion, war stands as a testament to humanity's failure to resolve conflicts through peaceful means. Its devastating impact on human life, economic stability, and mental well-being underscores the urgent need for diplomacy and dialogue as pathways to peace. As we confront the complex challenges of the modern world, let us strive to cultivate empathy, understanding, and cooperation, forging a future where the horrors of war are but a distant memory.

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War is a recurring theme in literature, often depicted as a brutal and destructive force that brings out the worst in humanity. In Tim O'Brien's novel "The Things They Carried," the theme of war is explored through the experiences of soldiers in the Vietnam War. The novel delves into the physical and emotional burdens carried by the soldiers, highlighting the toll that war takes on individuals and their relationships. One of the central themes in "The Things They Carried" is the psychological impact of war on soldiers. O'Brien vividly portrays the mental and emotional struggles faced by the soldiers as they grapple with fear, guilt, and trauma. The weight of their experiences is reflected in the physical objects they carry, each item symbolizing a different aspect of their emotional baggage. Through the characters' internal monologues and reflections, O'Brien conveys the profound psychological effects of war on the human psyche. Another key aspect of the theme of war in "The Things They Carried" is the sense of camaraderie and brotherhood that develops among the soldiers. Despite the horrors they witness and the hardships they endure, the soldiers form deep bonds with one another, relying on each other for support and companionship. These relationships serve as a source of strength and comfort in the face of adversity, highlighting the resilience and solidarity that can emerge in the midst of war. In addition to exploring the personal experiences of soldiers, "The Things They Carried" also delves into the larger societal implications of war. O'Brien raises questions about the morality of war, the nature of patriotism, and the human cost of conflict. By depicting the harsh realities of war and its impact on individuals and communities, the novel challenges readers to confront the complexities of war and its lasting effects on those who experience it firsthand. In conclusion, the theme of war in "The Things They Carried" is a powerful and poignant exploration of the human experience in times of conflict. Through vivid storytelling and compelling characters, Tim O'Brien sheds light on the physical, emotional, and moral dimensions of war, offering a nuanced and thought-provoking portrayal of its effects on individuals and society as a whole....

The Cold War During World War II

The Cold War, a period of geopolitical tension between the Soviet Union and its allies on one side and the United States and its allies on the other, emerged during the closing stages of World War II. Although the term "Cold War" itself was not coined until after the war, the seeds of conflict were sown during the wartime alliance between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union. Despite their shared goal of defeating Nazi Germany, underlying ideological differences and geopolitical ambitions fueled mistrust and suspicion between the two superpowers. One of the key factors contributing to the onset of the Cold War was the divergent visions for the postwar world held by the Western Allies and the Soviet Union. While the Western Allies sought to establish a liberal international order based on principles of democracy, free markets, and self-determination, the Soviet Union aimed to expand its sphere of influence and promote communism throughout Eastern Europe and beyond. This fundamental clash of ideologies laid the groundwork for decades of confrontation and competition. Another significant factor shaping the Cold War during World War II was the breakdown of wartime cooperation between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union. Despite their wartime alliance, tensions simmered beneath the surface as disagreements arose over issues such as the opening of a second front in Europe, the division of postwar Germany, and the future of Eastern Europe. The Yalta and Potsdam conferences, where Allied leaders attempted to negotiate the postwar order, highlighted the growing mistrust and rivalry between the Western powers and the Soviet Union. The Cold War during World War II had far-reaching consequences for the international system and shaped the course of world history for decades to come. It transformed the geopolitical landscape, dividing the world into competing blocs led by the United States and the Soviet Union. The arms race, nuclear proliferation, proxy wars, and ideological struggles that characterized the Cold War era were all rooted in the tensions and rivalries that emerged during World War II. Ultimately, the Cold War reshaped the balance of power in the world and left a lasting legacy that continues to influence global politics to this day. In conclusion, the Cold War during World War II was a complex and multifaceted phenomenon driven by a combination of ideological, geopolitical, and historical factors. It emerged from the ashes of the wartime alliance between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union and fundamentally reshaped the international system in the postwar era. Understanding the origins and dynamics of the Cold War during World War II is essential for comprehending the broader historical context of the twentieth century and the enduring impact of this pivotal period in world history....

Nazi Germany
Russian Empire
Colonialism

War Essay: Is War Inevitable?

War, throughout the annals of human history, has been a recurring phenomenon, leaving behind a trail of destruction and despair. The question of whether war is an inevitable aspect of the human condition has been a subject of debate among scholars, philosophers, and policymakers for centuries. While some argue that war is an inherent part of human nature, others contend that it is a result of specific socio-political factors. Examining both perspectives sheds light on the complexity of the issue. On one hand, proponents of the inevitability of war often point to the aggressive tendencies ingrained in human nature. Evolutionary psychology suggests that humans have inherited a predisposition for violence as a means of survival and competition for limited resources. This view is supported by historical evidence of warfare dating back to ancient civilizations, where conflicts over territory, resources, and power were commonplace. Additionally, the presence of conflict in the animal kingdom further reinforces the argument that war is a natural and inevitable aspect of human behavior. However, the assertion that war is an inherent part of human nature overlooks the role of societal and political factors in driving conflicts. Wars are often the culmination of complex geopolitical tensions, ideological differences, and power struggles between nations and groups. Economic interests, political ambitions, and nationalist sentiments can fuel aggression and escalate disputes into full-scale conflicts. Moreover, the proliferation of weapons technology and the arms race exacerbate the potential for violence, making it easier for conflicts to escalate and causing devastating consequences for civilians caught in the crossfire. Nevertheless, the history of human civilization also offers examples of societies that have successfully maintained peace and resolved conflicts through diplomacy, negotiation, and cooperation. International institutions such as the United Nations were established with the aim of preventing wars and promoting peaceful resolution of disputes through dialogue and mediation. Efforts to address root causes of conflict such as poverty, inequality, and injustice can mitigate the risk of violence and foster a more peaceful world. In conclusion, while the debate over the inevitability of war continues, it is evident that war is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon influenced by various factors. While human nature may incline towards aggression, societal and political dynamics play a significant role in shaping the occurrence and escalation of conflicts. By addressing underlying causes and promoting dialogue and cooperation, it is possible to mitigate the risk of war and build a more peaceful world for future generations....

War I And World War II

War I and World War II were two of the most devastating conflicts in human history, each with its own unique causes and consequences. While both wars involved many of the same countries and alliances, they were separated by a period of just over two decades and had vastly different outcomes. World War I, also known as the Great War, was sparked by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in 1914. This event set off a chain reaction of alliances and declarations of war that quickly engulfed much of Europe in conflict. The war was characterized by trench warfare, chemical weapons, and high casualty rates. The Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919, officially ended the war but left many unresolved issues that would later contribute to the outbreak of World War II. World War II, which began in 1939 with the invasion of Poland by Germany, was even more destructive than its predecessor. The war saw the rise of totalitarian regimes in Germany, Italy, and Japan, as well as the widespread use of new technologies such as tanks, aircraft, and atomic weapons. The war ended in 1945 with the defeat of the Axis powers and the establishment of the United Nations in an effort to prevent future conflicts. Despite the differences between War I and World War II, both conflicts had a profound impact on the course of history. The aftermath of World War I led to the rise of fascism and communism in Europe, while World War II saw the beginning of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. The wars also brought about significant social and cultural changes, including the empowerment of women in the workforce and the advancement of civil rights for minorities. In conclusion, War I and World War II were two of the most significant events of the 20th century, shaping the world we live in today. While the wars were devastating in terms of human life and destruction, they also brought about important changes in politics, society, and technology. It is essential to remember the lessons of these conflicts to prevent similar tragedies from occurring in the future....

World War I: Did Peace Lead To War?

World War I, often referred to as the Great War, was one of the most significant conflicts in human history, reshaping political landscapes, economies, and societies around the globe. The aftermath of the war saw the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, which aimed to establish peace and prevent future conflicts. However, the question arises: did this peace truly lead to stability, or did it sow the seeds for future conflicts? The Treaty of Versailles, while officially ending World War I, imposed harsh conditions on Germany, holding it responsible for the war and demanding reparations. The treaty's punitive nature humiliated Germany and fueled resentment among its people, laying the groundwork for the rise of Adolf Hitler and the outbreak of World War II. Thus, one could argue that the peace imposed by the Treaty of Versailles ultimately failed to prevent future conflict, as evidenced by the outbreak of another devastating world war just two decades later. Moreover, the redrawing of national boundaries and the dismantling of empires in the aftermath of World War I created numerous ethnic and territorial tensions, particularly in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The arbitrary division of territories often ignored ethnic and cultural realities, leading to longstanding conflicts and instability in regions such as the Balkans and the Levant. The unresolved issues left by the peace settlements of World War I continued to simmer and erupt into violence in the decades that followed, further undermining the notion that the peace achieved was lasting. Additionally, the economic repercussions of World War I and the subsequent peace settlements contributed to global instability. The war had drained the economies of many nations, leading to widespread poverty, unemployment, and social unrest. The reparations imposed on Germany exacerbated its economic woes and contributed to the global economic downturn of the 1920s and 1930s. The resulting economic instability provided fertile ground for the rise of extremist ideologies and political movements, leading to further conflict and upheaval in the years to come. In conclusion, while the Treaty of Versailles sought to establish peace in the aftermath of World War I, its punitive nature, unresolved territorial issues, and economic repercussions ultimately undermined its effectiveness. Instead of fostering stability, the peace settlements of World War I planted the seeds for future conflicts, highlighting the complexities and challenges of achieving lasting peace in the aftermath of war....

Global Economy

War Guilt Clause: Responsibility For The War On Germany

The War Guilt Clause, also known as Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, placed the responsibility for World War I solely on Germany and its allies. This clause was a source of great controversy and resentment in Germany, as it was seen as a harsh and unfair punishment. The clause stated that Germany was responsible for causing the war and therefore had to accept all the consequences, including paying reparations to the victorious Allied powers. Many historians argue that the War Guilt Clause was a significant factor in the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany. The humiliation and economic hardship caused by the Treaty of Versailles, including the War Guilt Clause, created a sense of injustice and resentment among the German people. This resentment was exploited by Hitler, who promised to restore Germany's honor and greatness by overturning the treaty and seeking revenge on those who had imposed such harsh terms. The War Guilt Clause also had long-lasting consequences for international relations. By placing all the blame on Germany, the clause ignored the complex web of alliances and rivalries that had contributed to the outbreak of World War I. This oversimplification of the causes of the war hindered efforts to promote reconciliation and cooperation among the former belligerents. Instead, it fueled a sense of grievance and victimhood that persisted for decades and contributed to the tensions that led to World War II. In conclusion, the War Guilt Clause was a controversial and divisive provision of the Treaty of Versailles that had far-reaching consequences. By assigning sole responsibility for the war to Germany, the clause exacerbated existing grievances and resentments, paving the way for the rise of Hitler and the outbreak of World War II. It also hindered efforts to promote reconciliation and cooperation among the former belligerents, perpetuating a cycle of mistrust and hostility. The legacy of the War Guilt Clause serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of assigning blame and seeking retribution in the aftermath of a conflict....

Historical Figures

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Why Is War Bad

Show More There is no doubt that war is bad. but they are part of our reality. They exist because humans have not been able, after thousands of years of supposed civilization, to agree on basic issues of coexistence. It is the greatest catastrophe that can occur to humans. It brings death and destruction, the slaughter without mercy and carnage, disease and hunger, poverty and ruin in its wake. One only has to think about the ravages that occurred in several countries not many years ago, in order to estimate the destructive effects of the war . A particularly disturbing aspect of modern wars is that they tend to become global in order to engulf the entire world. A war has the imminent consequence, the death of civilians who have nothing to do with war, …show more content… Regardless of the final outcome of a war, the ecological environment surrounding the combat zone is permanently affected, causing a long period of time to be impossible to inhabit or cultivate the affected region. This causes in the short and long term the forced movement of people to other urban centers that are not prepared to receive new people, with the social problems that entails. Likewise, the vegetation and animal population affected by the combat zone is often destroyed or reduced to zero, with the environmental impact that this causes. This happens more with the atomic bombs that can leave the affected place inavitable. The production, testing, transport and use of these advanced weapons are perhaps the most destructive effects of war on the environment. Although its use has been strictly limited since the bombing of Japan by the US military. At the end of World War II , military analysts have serious concerns about the proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. (Take the current Syrian conflict as an …show more content… Historically, it has been shown that wars are cyclical and are usually motivated by the negative outcome of an earlier war and for the same reasons as the original war. This causes that the country that today is attacked, in some time becomes an aggressor country. The clearest example of this is in European history from 1850 to the present. Since then great wars have been unleashed which, fundamentally, are motivated by the same original conflict. This could be a possibility more than we can not be one hundred percent sure. Currently the Civil War in Syria is going for a sixth consecutive year and when this war is over, it may be that the Syrian government rises and becomes the aggressor or Start a war against those who caused so many deaths and

Short Story Dangerousland By Oakland Ross

Wars are cruel. No matter how many conflicts are presented in the society, it’s still better to not start a war. War has been always considered the worst solution for any problem, because it has many bad effects on individuals and the society without solving the problem itself. In the short story “Dangerland” by Oakland Ross, the cruelty of war causes the lack of morality.…

Summary Of Violence In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

While violence plays a large role in war, some may seem senseless but when taken into account, being in war makes violence unavoidable. In The Things They Carried by Tim O’brien, Tim writes about his whole platoon and the violence they face. Things may come off as senseless, but being in war makes it so that violence can not really be avoided. War itself means to be in armed conflict within two nations or states. When in armed conflict, all violence is inevitable because violence is in human nature, and when violence is put to the test in war, it is inescapable.…

Red Badge Of Courage And Camouflaging The Chimera Essay

War is always a way for men to get what they want or in most cases to settle a disagreement they have with each other. War is never a good thing because many innocent people die at war, they have their own lives and are dragged into fight for something they were originally not a part of. In some cases, however, men are more than glad to go into war and fight for anything, some treat it as an honorable thing to do, while others do it for their pride. The poems Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane and Camouflaging the Chimera by Yusef Komunyakaa are an example of the different points of view of two men who think differently about war.…

Why Chris Hedges's War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning

In the book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, the author Chris Hedges examines why people engage in war and how they justify it to themselves. Hedges, argues that war serves as a sense of purpose to those who are exposed to this lethal and potent addiction. Consequently, this myth of war convinces the addict they are working together for a noble cause and that their adversary is fighting against evil. With that being said, war is as addictive as the most potent drug as well as the cause of immeasurable…

The Harmful Effects Of War In The Wars By Timothy Findley

War has been a constant part of human history. Whether it was World War I or World War II, war has greatly affected all aspects of life. Soldiers, families, countries, and societies, have all suffered through these times. Ultimately, the effects of war are extremely detrimental. Timothy Findley’s masterpiece The Wars portrays the detrimental effects of war and how these effects are endured on a personal level, familial level, and a communal level.…

Comparing The Vietnam War And The Civil War

“The pen is mightier than the sword,” was once said by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. As kids we were always taught that war is a terrible thing. Most people taught us that war can always be avoided and that it is a waste of life. As kids a lot of us played war.…

The Horrors Of War In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

A war can have a number of causes that lead to horrific consequences such as the…

Liam O Flaherty The Sniper Analysis

War is war, that fact alone will never change. No matter how many people try to sugar coat the word, it always has the same ending. Only one winning side, broken families, broken homes and broken people. It’s become one of the most common subjects in the news and the only subject that is on practically everyone’s mind. With heroes on both sides with one goal it’s just another death game life has set up for us humans.…

Mass Destruction And Long-Term Effects Of The Atomic Bombs

Its possibility of opening of mass destruction and genocide everywhere was looming risk. The United Nations was quick to create regulations concerning this matter and outlawed the use of all arms classified as Weapons of Mass Destruction, or WMD’s. A Weapon of Mass Destruction is a nuclear, radiological, chemical, biological or other weapon that can kill and bring significant harm to a large number of humans or cause great damage to human-made structures, natural structures, or the biosphere. Another long-term effect caused by the introduction of the atomic bomb, arguably, is the beginning of the Cold War.…

Gulf War Vs Us-Iraq War

In the 1990, the Middle East and the whole World changed. On August 2, Iraq invaded Kuwait and began the brutal occupation. Iraq was not the only country affected. The invasion created a global conflict, which lasts to this day.…

Pros And Cons Of Atomic Weapons

Furthermore, the use of nuclear weapons can and will harm the environment. Atomic weapons are the one creation that can destroy life on Earth. According to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) website ¨It would take less than 0.1% of the explosive yield of the current global nuclear arsenal to bring about devastating agricultural collapse and widespread famine.¨ That is one scary scenario that could happen.…

Argumentative Essay: Is War Justified?

Does this change your mind ? War is violent , although it can also at times be passive . It is described in many different ways . Most say you need to experience it to understand what it is , war can not truly be defined . War is what it is made , it is the tactics , the men and women lost , and the time period .…

War Is Never Good Essay

War is Never Good War is a destruction which can be performed with weapons or without weapons. It is caused by several reasons such as inequality and religion. War has never contributed in creating something; it always advocates disaster. War is itself an evil and is on the top of many kinds of evil like unemployment, illness, poverty, illiteracy and instability. Conflict has never done well to anyone.…

Negatives Of War

War has been in this world for a tremendous amount of time. The very first war that has been recorded took place in mesopotamia in 2700 BCE.wars have been caused by several reasons, such as economic gain. A country would want to take over another's wealth, many countries have fought for riches, food,oils, minerals, or even for the ownership of cattles and horses. Wars can also be caused by territorial gain. A country may believe that they need more land for living, agricultural plans, or different reasons.…

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Yemen was already a hard place to raise an autistic daughter. Then war started

By Haitham Alqaoud , for CNN

Editor’s note: This story is part of As Equals , CNN’s ongoing series on gender inequality. For information about how the series is funded and more, check out our FAQs .

Sanaa, Yemen — In his house on the outskirts of Yemen’s capital Sanaa, Mothafar squats on the floor, proudly displaying the pencil sketches made by his 21-year-old daughter, Emtenan, who sits silently beside him, dressed fully in black.

The drawings speak volumes. One shows a child curled up into a ball inside a deep hole in the ground, a lush tree sprouting out of them. Another depicts a man pulling a young girl away from a school building, to which she looks back with a devastated look on her face.

Emtenan has autism and finds it challenging to interact with others socially and typically avoids eye contact, her father explains. A therapist has been working closely with her to help her use sketches to express herself.

“Look at these drawings,” Mothafar said proudly. “She has so much talent and I’m sure there is so much more she can do. But given the situation we’re in… there is only so much I can give her,” the widower and father of five told CNN. He asked that he and his daughter be referred to only by their first names, because of the ignorance and stigma associated with autism in Yemen.

Emtenan, 21, who is autistic and largely non-verbal, works with a therapist who helps her use her drawings to communicate. Courtesy Emtenan

As a farmer with no formal education, Mothafar says he knew little about autism until he had Emtenan, and says he feels guilty for not spotting early signs of the condition.

“I thought she was only being a silly child,” he says, recalling her screaming fits, repetitive movements and inability to play with other children by the age of 4. “I didn’t know [what the condition was], and neither did anyone we knew.”

Being a woman with autism, Emtenan belongs to two marginalized groups in a country that has long ranked among the lowest globally for gender equality.

“Yemen’s society still regards women as objects that must be concealed and hidden,” said Afrah Nasser , Yemen researcher at Human Rights Watch. They face cultural and social barriers, such as restrictions on their movement, marriage choices and access to education. They are also subject to gender-based violence.

Women with autism face even greater challenges, due to the stigma and lack of awareness that persist around the condition. “By virtue of women facing more hardships than men in the various aspects of life, the plights of autistic women are multiple that of a man,” Nasser told CNN.

This pencil drawing shows a man pulling a young girl away from a school building, as tears roll down her face. Due to her autism, Emtenan struggled to settle down in school. Courtesy Emtenan

Autism spectrum disorder refers to “a broad range of conditions characterized by challenges with social skills… and communication, repetitive behaviors, resistance to changes in routine, or restricted interests,” according to Dr. Daniel Geschwind, professor of human genetics, neurology and psychiatry at UCLA.

There is wide variation in the type and severity of symptoms people experience and so therapies and interventions also vary and should be based on an individual’s needs. Early diagnosis enables early intervention and behavioral adjustment, which helps improve an autistic person’s condition and quality of life.

But in Yemen, spotting the signs of autism in a child is the family’s responsibility, Dr. Tameem Al-Basha, professor of special education at the Ibb University, told CNN, because the health sector has been destroyed by a civil war, which is entering its tenth year. The devastation has caused one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises and stripped many people with autism of the opportunity for diagnosis or treatment.

Rising costs in wartime a huge barrier to care

It was not until she turned 6 that Emtenan was diagnosed with autism. She spoke only a few words, had frequent tantrums, was hyperactive and would break things, Mothafar explained. School was also a struggle as she couldn’t settle well in class or follow simple instructions.

“No one advised us to visit a specialist. I would’ve done something [earlier],” added the 54-year-old, who says he now does everything he can to support his daughter.

But the treatment facilities closest to them charged exorbitant fees, he said, and the one he could afford was 22-km from their home. The journey there cost $8, triple what it did before the war. “Now, just thinking of the cost of transportation to make these trips, is exhausting,” he said.

Ultimately, Mothafar said he could not keep up. “After the war [began], things worsened greatly as the economic and security situation meant that I was less and less capable of giving her the care she needed,” he said. But his daughter’s behavior had been improving so their medical visits went down to twice a month, then monthly, and eventually stopped when Emtenan was 13. At that time, the war was already underway.

Conflict affected not just prices but also Emtenan’s temperament: “The sound of bombs and shelling also added to her agitation,” Mothafar told CNN.

Children look on as smoke billows above the residential area following airstrikes of the Saudi-led coalition targeting Houthi-held military positions on March 07, 2021 in Sanaa, Yemen. Mohammed Hamoud/Getty Images

These days, a therapist visits Emtenan for a full day each month. At 5,000 Yemeni rials ($20 USD) a visit, that is all her father can afford, telling CNN he earns approximately 50,000 rials ($95) a month growing tomatoes, though his brother in Saudi Arabia sends about $50 a month to help.

“During these visits, she’s taught how to express and take care of herself, she’s also encouraged to do house chores and interact with others, and her surroundings. She’s responding well,” Mothafar said, though she still speaks in short sentences and doesn’t engage with her surroundings with ease.

A healthcare system itself on life support

The number of facilities still able to offer treatment is unknown, says Abdullah Bunyan, head of the independent National Union of Yemeni Disabled Associations. There were 118 organizations registered with the union before the war, but “we are unable to define the exact number of entities still able to offer support and treatment, due to the economic and security situation in Yemen,” he told CNN.

Nouriya Mishlen is the head of the independent People of Determination Foundation for Special Education in Sanaa, a center providing treatment and rehabilitation for people with special needs. As an independent entity, the center relies on donations, which dropped significantly when the war began. The four-room facility is run down; the furniture appears worn and in disrepair. In some classrooms, carpets and curtains are absent, and even some bathrooms lack functioning water pumps. The small garden outside is overgrown.

“In the past, our operating costs were affordable, including rent, electricity, water, and psychologist salaries,” Mishlen told CNN. “However, inflation and war have doubled the prices, and we are barely able to cover our operational costs.”

Human resources are equally low. According to 2016 figures from the World Health Organization, there are just 0.2 psychiatrists and 0.4 psychologists per 100,000 people in Yemen; in the US, this figure is 10.5 psychiatrists and 29.8 psychologists per 100,000 people.

Mothafar is grateful he’s found a reliable female therapist to assist Emtenan. “To have her taken care of here at home is ideal. I feel reassured that she’s safe, with another woman,” he explained. But having access to a carer doesn’t offer protection from society’s judgement.

"If she was a boy, it wouldn’t have been an issue. But she’s a girl. Her behavior has brought us scandal and shame" Adel al-Yazidi, father of an autistic teenager

Multiple studies show that families often suffer from negative societal responses to children with autism, especially when they exhibit socially inappropriate behaviors in public. For girls, this would include speaking loudly, yelling or screaming, aggressiveness, defiance and stubbornness, especially toward cultural norms like modest clothing or being quiet among men they are not familiar with.

“Some kids might face abuse, especially these days,” with the war and living conditions at their worst, said Fayad al-Derwish . The architect, who was born in 1990, grew up with autism in Yemen and faced bullying as a child.

According to al-Derwish, Oxfam’s Water and Sanitation Lead in Yemen, it is common for people in rural areas, home to around two-thirds of Yemen’s estimated 34 million people, to see the onset of autism as possession by a djinn, or devil. “If you have any health issue or psychological issue, the first thing the sheikh [local religious leader] in the village does is he brings a piece of steel, burns it with fire, and puts it on your stomach. If you go to a swimming pool in Yemen, you’ll see this mark on peoples’ stomachs,” said al-Derwish.

Dr. Sahar Taresh, senior lecturer at Malaysia’s Lincoln University College, researches awareness levels of autism in her home country of Yemen. Taresh said that while autistic people of both genders are subjected to abuse based on the belief their condition is caused by an evil spirit, “women are more prone to such treatment as a result of fear of being ‘loved by a djinn,’ and the possibility of her tarnishing her family’s reputation, or bringing them shame by her actions.”

Women have long faced discrimination and hostility in Yemen, which in turn affects their access to resources. For most years between 1998 and 2022, Yemen performed the worst on the United Nations’ Development Programme’s gender inequality index. This means that while, theoretically, both men and women have equal access to the same therapy opportunities for autism, family and society choose to “prioritize males over females,” said Adila Al-Khader, secretary-general of the Yemeni Women’s Union .

This gender inequality deepened, and the discrimination of Yemeni women worsened , as a result of the conflict. Destitution and displacement added to the many layers of vulnerability for girls and women, exposing them to more gender-based violence, particularly those with disabilities.

A Yemeni woman prepares food for her family outside a shelter at a makeshift camp for Internally Displaced Persons in Sanaa, Yemen, on August 22, 2023. Yahya Arhab/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

‘Protecting her from herself’

Adel al-Yazidi’s 16-year-old daughter was diagnosed with autism and severe ADHD at the age of 5 and has trouble communicating and concentrating. While living in Saudi Arabia in 2020 she wandered out of her house and fell victim to a group of young men who sexually abused her.

Adel al-Yazidi, said he and his wife now chain the teen’s legs to her bed for most of the day to keep her at home, safe from sexual abuse. In a visit with a journalist, the girl showed no sign of upset over her restricted movement, cheerfully bouncing and interacting with her father.

“It’s to protect her from herself. I have no other choice,” said the father of three during a video call from Cairo, where the family is currently based. Her mother explained that they struggle to stop her daughter from wandering off.

“If she was a boy, it wouldn’t have been an issue. It wouldn’t have mattered what he does or does not do. He’d be able to fend for himself. But she’s a girl,” al-Yazidi said. “Her every action matters. And her behavior has brought us scandals and shame,” he added.

Khader, of the Yemeni Women’s Union, explained that many Yemeni families hide their autistic daughters because they know they won’t be embraced by society, or accepted as wives. “They are looked down upon and disrespected, and are therefore mistreated by their own families,” both verbally and physically, she said.

"I wish I could give her more. I want her to lead a life as normal as can be… I’ll do my best to help her achieve it" Mothafar, whose daughter, Emtenan, is severely autistic

A therapist in Sanaa, who asked not to be named due to the stigma associated with caring for women with autism, told CNN she’s seen marks of what she believed was beating and torture on a 16-year-old girl with autism. She added that such girls are often kept out of sight, and sometimes get married to grooms who aren’t told the truth about their condition, and are then left to their own fates, which could include marital abuse or divorce.

Khader, of the Yemeni Women’s Union, says that the biggest problem in Yemen lies with families’ lack of understanding of how to deal with girls growing up with autism. But she adds that increasing community awareness about this disorder will greatly contribute to reducing bullying and increasing the integration of this group into society and in their families.

“Training and qualifying women specialists in the field of autism spectrum, as well as creating specialized and free centers, will also [help] significantly.”

In the meantime, Mothafar refuses to give up on his daughter. They interact mostly with close friends and family who treat Emtenan’s condition with respect to avoid her facing any harassment or mistreatment, and Mothafar is careful to keep it that way. “It’s something I can’t tolerate if anyone refers to her condition in a mocking or bullying way,” he said. “I wish I could give her more. I want her to lead a life as normal as can be, where she interacts with the world in a normal way, establishes relationships and completes her education… I’ll do my best to help her achieve it.”

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What are the positive and negative effects of war?

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Introduction

The Waging of Civil and International Wars

Intervention and the Expansion of Interstate Wars

Expansion of Civil Wars

Compliance With the Laws of War

Civilian Targeting in Civil War

Losses Suffered in Wars

The Duration, Termination, and Outcome of War

Duration of Wars

Ending Wars as a Bargaining Process

Domestic-Level Factors and War Termination

Victory/Defeat in Wars

Post-War Peace Durability

The Longer-Term Consequences of Wars

Post-War Domestic Political Stability and Change

Public Health Conditions in the Aftermath of Wars

Wars and violent conflicts

Effects of war

Victims of war

Politics and the economy

Environment

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Ethics: Antiwar Arguments that War Is Immoral and Unethical

General Arguments Against War

Specific Arguments​ Why Wars of Aggression Are Wrong

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