The existence of a clear-cut division between “civil and military” is in many ways a foundation for international law and diplomacy. It is also a given starting point in many studies on current issues relating to war and peace, as well as in historical interpretations of past conflicts. Yet the civil–military dichotomy is not always a useful way of approaching complex matters, and by adopting such a starting point, some issues risk being overlooked. There are numerous historical examples, from the American Civil War, to wars of national liberation ending colonialization, to insurrections shaking political status quo such as the Marxist–Leninist revolutions; all illustrate that neither the agents of war nor the victims fit neatly into one of two clear categories. In a contemporary setting, non-traditional forms of warfare that make use of cyber space or autonomous systems further serves not only to undermine ideas of internal–external security but also to blur the distinction between civil and military. In the everyday making and implementation of policy, these concepts are indeed fluid and the borders between them highly variable, continuously contested, and renegotiated. As concepts, they can be seen as co-constitutive in the everyday usage. Civil and military are therefore best understood as norms, whose contents and interrelationship are contextually determined. At the same time, civil and military are organizational principles of the state, and as such the distinction is, arguably, too important, too deep-seated within the modern state-system, and too engrained in how legal and political order are understood to disappear in the near future.
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“Civil and Military” as a Constitutive Categorization of the Study of War and Politics
Jan Angstrom and Sofia K. Ledberg
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Emotions and Warfare: The Social Dynamics of Close-Range Fighting
Siniša Malešević
Emotions play a central role in warfare. Nearly all soldiers who encounter combat zones experience intense emotional reactions. Some of these emotions are negative, such as fear, panic, anger, rage, or shame, while others are more positive, including pride, elation, joy, or exhilaration. These emotional responses are usually characterized by physiological and psychological changes that affect the bodies and minds of soldiers facing close-range fighting encounters. Researchers have documented a number of physiological effects that accompany intense emotional reactions on the battlefield, including hormonal increases, heavy breathing, increased heart rate, dilation of the pupils, and the loss of urinary control, among others. These similarities in biological responses have led some scholars to make generalizations about the inherent uniformity of emotional reactions on the battlefield. However, recent studies indicate that emotional dynamics in the combat zone are more complex and flexible. In particular, much contemporary historical, sociological, and anthropological scholarship shows that the emotional responses of soldiers are highly variable and context-dependent. Although some physiological reactions are present in many battlefield situations, they too, like psychological effects, tend to be specific to time and place. In other words, there are pronounced historical and cultural differences in the emotional responses of soldiers in combat zones. Facing the same realities of the close-range fighting, soldiers tend to display different emotional reactions and these reactions are more variable as the cultural and historical contexts change. Military organizations have become aware that emotions are central to the behavior of soldiers on the battlefield and they continue to devise new methods to control and shape the emotional reactions of soldiers.
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Changing Patterns of Political Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa
Kate M. Carter and Scott Straus
Contrary to common assumption, major forms of large-scale organized political violence in sub-Saharan Africa have declined in frequency and intensity, and the region is not uniquely prone to the onset of warfare. African civil wars in the 2000s and 2010s are less common compared to the mid-1990s. The character of warfare has also changed. Contemporary wars are generally small-scale, fought on state peripheries and increasingly across multiple states, and involve factionalized insurgents who typically cannot hold significant territory or capture state capitals. Episodes of large-scale mass killing of civilians are also on the decline. That said, other forms of political violence that receive less attention in the academic literature are increasing or persistent. These include electoral violence and violence over access to livelihood resources, such as land and water. Geopolitical shifts since the end of the Cold War are a leading candidate to explain the changing frequency and character of warfare in sub-Saharan Africa. New global priorities, including changes in external state funding opportunities for insurgents, an emphasis on change through elections, investments in conflict mediation strategies, and the rise of China are hypothesized as critical factors shaping the new patterns of warfare.
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The Diversification of Deterrence: New Data and Novel Realities
Shannon Carcelli and Erik A. Gartzke
Deterrence theory is slowly beginning to emerge from a long sleep after the Cold War, and from its theoretical origins over half a century ago. New realities have led to a diversification of deterrence in practice, as well as to new avenues for its study and empirical analysis. Three major categories of changes in the international system—new actors, new means of warfare, and new contexts—have led to corresponding changes in the way that deterrence is theorized and studied. First, the field of deterrence has broadened to include nonstate and nonnuclear actors, which has challenged scholars with new types of theories and tests. Second, cyberthreats, terrorism, and diverse nuclear force structures have led scholars to consider means in new ways. Third, the likelihood of an international crisis has shifted as a result of physical, economic, and normative changes in the costs of crisis, which had led scholars to more closely address the crisis context itself. The assumptions of classical deterrence are breaking down, in research as well as in reality. However, more work needs to be done in understanding these international changes and building successful deterrence policy. A better understanding of new modes of deterrence will aid policymakers in managing today’s threats and in preventing future deterrence failures, even as it prompts the so-called virtuous cycle of new theory and additional empirical testing.
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The Theoretical and Empirical Approaches to Uncertainty and Conflict in International Relations
Muhammet A. Bas and Robert Schub
Uncertainty is pervasive in international politics. This uncertainty can have many sources. Each source has different origins and implications for the likelihood of conflict. Existing theories focus on three sources: (1) uncertainty due to asymmetric information about adversary traits that affect war payoffs, (2) uncertainty about adversary intentions, and (3) fundamental uncertainty about conflict-relevant processes. Scholarship details the implications of each type of uncertainty for war and peace as well as the prospects for reducing the uncertainty. While theoretical work is quite rich, empirical studies generally lag behind due to measurement challenges and difficulties in specifying clear, testable implications. Nonetheless, using novel proxies for different forms of uncertainty has generated notable progress.
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War in Political Philosophy
Helen Frowe
We can distinguish between three moral approaches to war: pacifism, realism, and just war theory. There are various theoretical approaches to war within the just war tradition. One of the central disputes between these approaches concerns whether war is morally exceptional (as held by exceptionalists) or morally continuous with ordinary life (as held by reductivists). There are also significant debates concerning key substantive issues in the ethics of war, such as reductivist challenges to the thesis that combatants fighting an unjust war are the moral equals of those fighting a just war, and the challenge to reductivism that it undermines the principle of noncombatant immunity. There are also changing attitudes toward wars of humanitarian intervention. One underexplored challenge to the permissibility of such wars lies in the better outcomes of alternative ways of alleviating suffering. The notion of unconventional warfare has also recently come to prominence, not least with respect to the moral status of human shields.
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Clarifying Causal Mechanisms in International Relations
Patrick James
Theory and evidence about causal mechanisms, at some point (probably) long ago, reached the carrying capacity for integration into knowledge through expression in words alone. Causal mechanisms, through the implementation of systemism in the discipline of international relations, need clarifying. Systemism is used to convey and analyze the contents of a primary source, Causes of War, by Jack Levy and William Thompson. Explaining war is the most long-standing empirical problem, in the sense of Laudan, in the field of international relations. (Laudan suggested, quite helpfully, a shift from empirical content to problem-solving ability for assessing theories with regard to scientific progress.) The diagrammatic approach from systemism is used to translate a narrative from Levy and Thompson into a series of figures that include causal mechanisms from respective areas of theorizing about the causes of war. The overall purpose of this exercise is to show how the approach from systemism possesses the potential to convey causal mechanisms in a way that facilitates scientific progress. All of this augurs well for a visual turn—toward approaches, such as systemism, that can help to more effectively assemble the massive amount of information now available into knowledge about international relations.
Systemism’s essence has been conveyed by its most long-standing exponent, Bunge: a commitment to building comprehensive theories. Systemism transcends reductionism and holism as the other available “coherent views” with respect to operation of a social system. Instead of theorizing at the level of the system (holism) or its components (reductionism), systemism allows for linkages operating at macro- and microlevels, along with back and forth between them. Systemism also includes inputs from, and outputs to, the environment. This comprehensive procedure facilitates the comparison of alternative visions regarding cause and effect. Thus systemism is an approach rather than a substantive theory. One of its distinguishing merits is a capacity to facilitate criticism and comparison of theories through their representation in diagrams that are constructed under a set of rules to convey causal mechanisms.
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War and Religion: The Iran−Iraq War
Peyman Asadzade
Religion has historically played a central role in motivating rulers to start and individuals to participate in war. However, the decline of religion in international politics following the Peace of Westphalia and the inception of the modern nation-state system, which built and highlighted a sense of national identity, undermined the contribution of religion to politics and consequently, conflict. The case of the Iran−Iraq War, however, shows a different pattern in which religion did play a crucial role in motivating individuals to participate in war. Although the evidence suggests that religious motivations by no means contributed to Saddam’s decision to launch the war, an overview of the Iranian leaders’ speeches and martyrs’ statements reveals that religion significantly motivated people to take part in the war. While Iraqi leaders tried to mobilize the population by highlighting the allegedly Persian-Arab historical antagonism and propagating an Iraqi-centered form of Arab nationalism, Iranian leaders exploited religious symbols and emotions to encourage war participation, garner public support, alleviate the suffering of the people, and build military morale. The Iranian leadership painted the war as a battle between believers and unbelievers, Muslims and infidels, and the true and the false. This strategy turned out to be an effective tool of mobilization during wartime.
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Military Learning and Evolutions in Warfare in the Modern Era
Nathan W. Toronto
The way militaries learn has evolved over time, and the first two decades of the 21st century once again see military learning on the cusp of change. Since the start of the modern era in the early 18th century, military learning has evolved from a focus on technical, tactical skills relevant to specific combat branches to a generalized study of war and warfare that blends theory and practice. These changes have come about in response to developments in human capital, battlefield technology, and warfare, or how military forces fight. The early 21st century has witnessed a new shift in warfare, from networked warfare—in which information is synchronized across location, targeting, and precision guidance systems to find, fix, and destroy the enemy with deadly efficiency—to unconventional information warfare—in which non-state actors have access to many of the same information resources and, combined with cyber capabilities that rely on anonymity and occasional state support, negate many of the advantages of networked warfare. This portends a change in how militaries learn, to patterns of learning that can cope with a battlespace that is potentially omnipresent, where states must incorporate all elements of national power coherently in order to achieve success in war.
These changes are evident not only on the battlefield, but also in military schools. The theories of Napoleonic warfare born at the dawn of the modern era seem increasingly inadequate for the realities of modern combat. This calls for the generation of new bodies of knowledge by military officers and other specialists in the field. The notion that war itself is politics conducted by other means is increasingly under threat. Likewise, curricula at military schools bear an increasing resemblance to curricula at academic civilian programs in security studies, leadership, and international relations, and more and more civilians are sitting side by side with military officers in the classroom. Since the end of World War II, the bounds of the battlefield have bled into the traditionally civilian space of information, so the study of war and warfare is no longer the unique province of the military officer. This process has accelerated in the 21st century, and a range of defense analysts, scholars, and policymakers have commented on how military forces prepare to fight.
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Leaders, Generals, Juntas: The Military in Politics and International Conflict Initiation
Peter White
International conflict—war, crises, international disputes, and rivalries between states—has a clear influence on the military’s role in politics and vice versa. Given that the military is the primary instrument for defending the state from conventional military threats, international conflict has been an early focus of the civil–military relations literature. Generally, very high levels of involvement in politics—for example, coups, military rule, military officers in high-level government positions—are associated with a greater propensity to initiate international conflict on the part of states. However, there is disagreement as to the reasons for this pattern—for example, preferences for aggression on the part of a politically active military, diversionary incentives for a coup-threatened civilian leader, or institutional pathologies brought on by shared civil–military power are all proffered as possible explanations.
Politically active militaries tend to do poorly in conflict. There are two reasons for this. The first is the dysfunction endemic in a military that splits its time between politics and proficiency in arms—as opposed to one that specializes in defense. The second reason is that when the politically active military poses a risk of coup to the political leadership of the state, the latter will often engage in such “coup-proofing” practices as purges, onerous command and control measures, the reshuffling of commanders, and the build-up of security organizations intended to offset the military. These measures not only make it harder for the military to stage a coup, they also make it harder for the military to defend the state.
Although military involvement in politics makes “acute” conflict—war, militarized disputes, or crises—more likely, these types of international conflict tend to lead to reduced levels of political involvement by the military. War or a crisis can make a coup more difficult as the military is moved away from the centers of political power. International conflict—especially when it goes poorly—also can lead to reform and professionalization within the military, which decreases the appetite for political involvement. At the same time, indicators of a more severe “chronic” threat environment—hostile neighbors, unfavorable geography, or long-standing international rivalries—can make military intrusions into politics more likely.
Article
Theory of Regional War and Peace
Benjamin Miller
The explanation of the variations in war and peace patterns across different regions, and transitions between war and peace in the same region, is based on the introduction of the state-to-nation imbalance in a certain region—this imbalance is a key substantive underlying cause of regional war propensity. Variations in this cause account for some of the major differences in the level of war and peace among different regions. Different strategies of addressing this problem (based on global or regional/domestic factors) then produce different types and levels of regional peace. The relative influence of global versus regional/domestic factors on regional war and peace is notably addressed. The study distinguishes between “hot” and “cold” (i.e., more or less intense) types of regional war and peace, and argues that global factors (i.e., the involvement of external powers) may at most bring about the less intense cold phenomena (“cold” war and “cold” peace), whereas the more demanding hot outcomes that constitute the two extremes of the regional war-peace continuum (“hot” war and “warm” peace) depend on domestic/regional causes. The key domestic/regional factors are the level of state capacity and of national congruence (both internal and external) in the region. Each of the regional outcomes is related to the combination of independent variables affecting it. This should make it possible to examine the proposed integrated effects of the state-to-nation balance and the international system on regional war and peace.
Article
Empirically Assessing the Bargaining Theory of War: Potential and Challenges
Erik A. Gartzke and Paul Poast
What explains war? The so-called bargaining approach has evolved quickly in the past two decades, opening up important new possibilities and raising fundamental challenges to previous conventional thinking about the origins of political violence. Bargaining is intended to explain the causes of conflict on many levels, from interpersonal to international. War is not the product of any of a number of variables creating opportunity or willingness, but instead is caused by whatever factors prevent competitors from negotiating the settlements that result from fighting. Conflict is thus a bargaining failure, a socially inferior outcome, but also a determined choice.
Embraced by a growing number of scholars, the bargaining perspective rapidly created a new consensus in some circles. Bargaining theory is radical in relocating at least some of the causes of conflict away from material, cultural, political, or psychological factors and replacing them with states of knowledge about these same material or ideational factors. Approaching conflict as a bargaining failure—produced by uncertainty and incentives to misrepresent, credible commitment problems, or issue indivisibility—is the “state of the art” in the study of conflict.
At the same time, bargaining theories remain largely untested in any systematic sense: theory has moved far ahead of empirics. The bargaining perspective has been favored largely because of compelling logic rather than empirical validity. Despite the bargaining analogy’s wide-ranging influence (or perhaps because of this influence), scholars have largely failed to subject the key causal mechanisms of bargaining theory to systematic empirical investigation. Further progress for bargaining theory, both among adherents and in the larger research community, depends on empirical tests of both core claims and new theoretical implications of the bargaining approach.
The limited amount of systematic empirical research on bargaining theories of conflict is by no means entirely accident or the product of lethargy on the part of the scholarly community. Tests of theories that involve intangible factors like states of belief or perception are difficult to pursue. How does one measure uncertainty? What does learning look like in the midst of a war? When is indivisibility or commitment a problem, and when can it be resolved through other measures, such as ancillary bargains? The challenge before researchers, however, is to surmount these obstacles. To the degree that progress in science is empirical, bargaining theory needs testing.
As should be clear, the dearth of empirical tests of bargaining approaches to the study of conflict leaves important questions unanswered. Is it true, for example, as bargaining theory suggests, that uncertainty leads to the possibility of war? If so, how much uncertainty is required and in what contexts? Which types of uncertainty are most pernicious (and which are perhaps relatively benign)? Under what circumstances are the effects of uncertainty greatest and where are they least critical? Empirical investigation of the bargaining model can provide essential guidance to theoretical work on conflict by identifying insights that can offer intellectual purchase and by highlighting areas of inquiry that are likely to be empirical dead ends. More broadly, the impact of bargaining theory on the study and practice of international relations rests to a substantial degree on the success of efforts to substantiate the perspective empirically.
Article
The Expansion of Economic Freedom and the Capitalist Peace
Erich Weede
On the one hand, the idea of a capitalist peace is a set of loosely integrated but testable propositions. On the other hand, it is part of a wider, libertarian philosophy of life. The wider conception aims at minimizing government. Although there has been a proliferation of variables assessing capitalism and economic interdependence—from economic freedom via contract intensity to the avoidance of state ownership or protectionism—the most frequently analyzed proposition about the capitalist peace says that trade makes military conflict and war less likely. By and large, the evidence supports this proposition in dyadic designs as well as in monadic designs. This cross-design validity of the proposition is important because it distinguishes the peace by trade proposition from the democratic peace proposition. Most researchers agree that war is extremely unlikely in dyads where both nations are democracies. But only a minority contends that democracies are less frequently involved in military conflict than other states. The dyadic and the monadic findings are compatible because military conflict looks even more likely between an autocracy and a democracy than between two autocracies. Whereas the democratic peace is limited in application, the pacifying impact of trade or economic interdependence is more general. Moreover, the democratic peace may be embedded in a wider economic or capitalist peace. There is strong evidence that democracy rests on a foundation of capitalism or economic freedom and the prosperity that has been gained only by capitalism or some degree of economic freedom. Moreover, economic freedom and prosperity contribute to the avoidance of civil war. Better still, not only does economic freedom promote economic growth and prosperity among those nations where people enjoy economic freedom, but the economic freedom of rich countries provides poor countries with the advantages of backwardness and catch-up opportunities.
Capitalist peace theory evolves. It has been suggested that the pacifying impact of trade rests on the expectation that trade, or access to resources and markets, will continue. This suggestion requires a new look at economic sanctions, too. By interfering with trade, sanctions must undermine the expectation of future benefits of trade and globally interconnected markets. Given the rareness of evidence in favor of the effectiveness of economic sanctions in eliminating undesirable policies of other nations, a capitalist peace perspective implies the recommendation to use sanctions much less frequently than politicians do. They are likely to eliminate a pacifying factor when it is most urgently needed.
The wider or visionary perspective on the capitalist peace is useful not only in connecting it with the issue of sanctions, but also in demonstrating the inherent limitations of capitalism as a tool to achieve peace. From a static perspective, capitalism, economic freedom, or trade may exert some pacifying impact, as argued previously. But capitalism is a dynamic economic order. It is about “creative destruction.” Capitalism is not egalitarian. Nations grow at different speeds. They rise and decline. Capitalism and unequal economic growth upset pecking orders and contribute to power transitions that are related to risks of war, especially great power war. Whether the contribution of capitalism to power transitions—or its pacifying impact—prevails cannot be judged with much confidence.
Article
Economic Interdependence and Conflict
Hyo Joon Chang and Scott L. Kastner
Recent studies on commercial liberalism have paid more attention to microfoundations linking economic interdependence to peace. Using a bargaining model of war, these studies have specified and tested different causal mechanisms through which economic ties function as a constraint, a source of information, or a transformative agent. Recent scholarly efforts in theoretical development and some empirical testing of different causal processes suggest the need to consider scope conditions to see when an opportunity cost or a signaling mechanism is likely to be salient. Future research can be best benefited by focusing on how economic interdependence affects commitment problems and empirically assessing the relative explanatory power of different causal arguments.
Article
Geopolitics, Geography, and War
Christopher J. Fettweis
The study of international relations has always been multidisciplinary. Over the course of the last century, political scientists have borrowed concepts, methods, and logic from a wide range of fields—from history, psychology, economics, law, sociology, anthropology, and others—in their effort to understand why states act as they do. Few of those disciplines contributed more to the course of 20th-century international relations scholarship than geography. As the layout of the chessboard shapes the game, so do the features of the Earth provide the most basic influence upon states. That geography affects international relations is uncontroversial; what is not yet clear, however, is exactly how, under what conditions, and to what extent. After all, a board can teach only a limited amount about the nature of a game.
Many theories of state behavior involve several ceteris-paribus assumptions about the setting for international interaction, even if the substantial variation in geographical endowments assures that all things will never be equal. Some states are blessed (or cursed) with a rich supply of natural resources, good ports, arable land, and temperate climate; others struggle with too little (or too much) rainfall, temperature extremes, mountain ranges or deserts, powerful neighbors, or lack of access to the sea. While the number of studies examining the effects of the constants of geography on state behavior may pale in comparison to those that focus on the variables of human interaction, international relations has not been silent about geography. What insights have come from the many investigations into the relationship between the game of international politics and the board it is played on, the surface of the Earth?
Article
Evolution, Adaptation, and Imitation in International Relations
Richard Ned Lebow
Evolution, as a biological process and a metaphor, has utility in our understanding of international relations. The former is largely inapplicable for obvious, conceptual, and empirical reasons; but the latter is more promising, though those who use it must be explicit about its limitations. There must be considerations on how evolution contrasts with conscious adaption and imitation, on the argument for the need to distinguish among them analytically and empirically, and on the further exploration of the different conditions in which these other two mechanisms might be relevant.
Article
Symbolic Politics as International Relations Theory
Stuart J. Kaufman
The symbolic politics theory of ethnic war starts from the insight that most political behavior is not rational but intuitive, driven by “symbolic predispositions” such as ideological beliefs, normative values, and prejudice. The way leaders lead is by using rhetoric not to appeal rationally to followers’ interests but to appeal emotionally to their symbolic predispositions.
According to symbolic politics theory, the path to ethnic conflict begins with group narratives that are hostile to another group. These narratives help to generate hostile and prejudiced symbolic predispositions. If group members perceive a social threat, such as to their group identity or status, they become more likely to join mass movements agitating for a politics of redistribution—discriminating in favor of their own group at the expense of rival groups. If people feel physically threatened, they become more likely to support a politics of protection leading to violent ethnic conflict. These popular attitudes and moods are turned into social movements or military mobilization if aggressive leaders emerge, framing political issues in terms of these threats, and if those leaders are both credible and supported by effective organizations. A series of case studies has demonstrated that this process—from narratives to prejudice and threat perceptions, harnessed by leadership and organization—is what occurred in ten ethnic civil wars, including the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Israel-Palestine, and the Philippines. The theory also explains less violent cases such as Gandhi’s nationalist movement in India.
This theory is hypothesized to apply to international war, as the politics of national identity is similar to the politics of ethnic identity. The theory also suggests a way of reconciling realist, liberal, and constructivist accounts of international relations through political psychology and a scientific realist ontology.
Article
Hierarchy and International Relations: Theory and Evidence
David A. Lake
The literature on international hierarchy is emerging as a progressive research program. This new theory of international relations is generating novel propositions that are being empirically confirmed. Some propositions, like the hierarchical peace, provide new explanations for previously identified phenomena. Other propositions on defense spending, crisis joining,e trade, and civil wars and repression establish new empirical relationships that—if they are not actually inconsistent with existing theories—were not previously identified. If the measure of progress is the uncovering of new facts, the new hierarchy studies are clearly moving in the right direction. Further progress requires more and better measures of hierarchy and continued testing of propositions derived from the theory.
Article
Empirics of Stable Peace
Reşat Bayer
Much of the empirical international relations research implicitly equates peace with the absence of war. Moreover, causes of war are seen as sufficient for understanding peace. Such an approach turns peace into a nonevent. The stable peace literature has challenged this perspective in several ways. Firstly, peace is multilayered and additional dimensions are considered beyond violence. Secondly, it attempts to explain movements among different levels (or qualities) of peace. This study reviews the stable peace literature. It also considers alternate conceptualizations of peace. Findings from comparative case studies are considered next to those from the emerging quantitative literature that explicitly focuses on peace. Attention to internal peace and links between micro and macro levels of analysis are some of the areas highlighted as needing greater attention.
Article
War Making and the Building of State Capacity: Expanding the Bivariate Relationship
Karen A. Rasler and William R. Thompson
A central cleavage in the war making-state making literature is between advocates of the notion that warfare has been the principal path to developing stronger states and critics who argue that the relationship no longer holds, especially in non-European contexts. It is suggested that the problem is simply one of theoretical specification. Increasingly intensive warfare, as manifested in European combat, made states stronger. Less intensive warfare, particularly common after 1945, is less likely to do so. Empirical analysis of a more representative data set on state capacity (revenues as a proportion of gross domestic product [GDP]), focusing on cases since 1870, strongly supports this point of view. The intensiveness of war is not the only factor at work—regime type and win/loss outcomes matter as well—but the relationship does not appear to be constrained by the level of development.
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