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We Really Must Stop Starting Wars

Technology is turning war into an outdated, ineffective means of resolving conflict. Here’s a crazy idea: Let’s avoid war.

By Farhad Manjoo

Opinion Columnist

Let us not go again to war. Let us not go to war because we cannot afford to “win” another war. There would be no winning this war. There is only losing, at a cost that staggers every dimension on all sides — in lives, in money, and in the squandered opportunity to do anything better with our collective time and resources on this already beset planet.

I’m speaking here of war with Iran, our current precipice. But I issue the warning more generally, too. Bookmark this page and pull it up as prophylaxis anytime the drums of war begin rattling anew: War isn’t just tragic. It is increasingly dumb and pointless, too.

War is becoming an outdated means of human conflict resolution. Technology is turning armed conflict into an endeavor increasingly dominated by what war scholars call “asymmetric warfare” — meaning that weaker powers like Iran can now marshal so much strength that they are no longer very weak, exacting a mighty cost of victory even to the world’s pre-eminent global superpower. Then there is climate change, which has ratcheted up the opportunity cost of every conflict; anytime we are fighting each other, we are absconding in the larger and more important fight for the habitability of the planet.

You may debate whether any particular historical war worked out well for its agitators. But there should be no debate that many of America’s recent wars have ended in misery for all. Our politicians talk of war as a last resort, but that is only to keep up appearances, because the truth is too terrible to admit: that our ever-more-expensive war machine (a cost of nearly $740 billion in 2020 ) can buy us little peace. Rather than a last resort, war now offers no resort. War can no longer be defended as the thing to do after everything else has failed. War must instead be seen as failure itself.

I had thought the futility of war might be grasped by most American politicians by now. One of Donald Trump’s rare bright spots as a candidate was his departure from the post-9/11 Bush-Cheney doctrine that doubled down on heedless American military interventionism. In his oft-stated aversion to “endless war,” Trump’s sentiment matched the public’s — a Pew poll this summer showed that most Americans, including most military veterans, now believe that our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have not been worth fighting. Trump seemed to be heeding the public’s caution back in the summer when he abruptly called off a strike against Iran in retaliation for its shooting down an American surveillance drone.

But in killing Iran’s most important military leader, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Trump opened the door to war. Now Iran is retaliating, and a cycle of escalation looks possible — even if, for now, Trump is backing away from further conflict . It’s beginning to feel a lot like 2003 again, with some of the same pundits and politicians who were in favor of a war with Iraq now repeating similar talking points about Iran. While noting that he’d like to avoid war, Trump himself has suggested that war with Iran would be a cakewalk: “It wouldn’t last very long, I can tell you that,” the president told Fox Business in June .

Don’t fall for it. It’s plain dishonesty: How could anyone who has lived through the quagmire of Iraq and Afghanistan think war with Iran will be anything but long and brutal? In those conflicts, America’s overwhelming military might stumbled on local culture, geography, ethnic and religious rivalries, and most of all the determination of an entrenched, committed foe that could melt in and out of the local population.

As Vox’s Alex Ward points out , Iran has almost three times as many people as Iraq did when we invaded in 2003. It also has treacherous geography, and it controls a great many proxy forces across the Middle East and even in likely sleeper cells in Europe and Latin America. Iran also possesses a sophisticated cyberwar operation — it is believed to be behind recent hacks into American banks and other targets and to have spread disinformation and propaganda on social networks around the world.

The United States would overwhelm Iran in a conventional head-on war, but like China and Russia, Iran has adopted a deep capacity to mount “hybrid war” — conflict that involves both conventional and unconventional means of war. (For example, Iran could expand its operations on oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz , dealing a costly rise in global energy prices.) As Ward concludes: “A U.S.-Iran war would be a bloody hell during and after the fighting.”

This gets to the immense folly at the heart of our military might. Though the United States spends more on the military than the next nine countries combined , we have not been able to purchase much peace through strength. That’s because our strength is clearly of a type, and our years in Iraq and Afghanistan have made plain our vulnerabilities.

Among other shortcomings, our military is still buying mostly big, old defense technologies (like aircraft carriers and bombers) from the military-industrial complex, even if many of these technologies face obsolescence under a future of artificial intelligence, unmanned battlefield robots and other cyberweapons . Our country’s efforts at adopting artificial intelligence technology in the military might not be enough to counter our rivals, including Russia and China.

The upshot is this: The United States holds military supremacy over the world’s waters and the airspace, but our control is limited and contestable. The last two decades have made clear that even for America, war is never simple. We should fear it. We should avoid it.

And we ought to look for more fruitful things to do with our money and our lives, like making life on earth more livable, not less.

Office Hours With Farhad Manjoo

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

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An earlier version of this column misstated an opinion of most Americans about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They believe that those wars have not been worth fighting, not that they "have not been not worth fighting."

How we handle corrections

Farhad Manjoo became an opinion columnist for The Times in 2018. Before that, they wrote the State of the Art column. They are the author of “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society.” @ fmanjoo • Facebook

Essays About War: Top 5 Examples and 5 Prompts

War is atrocious and there is an almost universal rule that we should be prevented; if you are writing essays about war, read our helpful guide.

Throughout history, war has driven human progress. It has led to the dissolution of oppressive regimes and the founding of new democratic countries. There is no doubt that the world would not be as it is without the many wars waged in the past.

War is waged to achieve a nation or organization’s goals, but what is the actual cost of progress? War has taken, and continues to take, countless lives. It is and is very costly in terms of resources as well. From the American Revolution to World Wars I and II to the Crusades and Hundred Years’ War of antiquity, wars throughout history have been bloody, brutal, and disastrous. 

If you are writing essays about war, look at our top essay examples below.

1. War Is Not Part of Human Nature by R. Brian Ferguson

2. essay on war and peace (author unknown), 3. the impacts of war on global health by sarah moore.

• 4.  The Psychosocial Impacts of War and Armed Conflict on Children by Iman Farajallah, Omar Reda, H. Steven Moffic, John R. Peteet, and Ahmed Hankir

5. ​​Is war a pre-requisite for peace? by Anna Cleary

5 prompts for essays about war, 1. is war justified, 2. why do countries go to war, 3. the effects of war, 4. moral and ethical issues concerning war, 5. reflecting on a historical war.

“Debate over war and human nature will not soon be resolved. The idea that intensive, high-casualty violence was ubiquitous throughout prehistory has many backers. It has cultural resonance for those who are sure that we as a species naturally tilt toward war. As my mother would say: “Just look at history!” But doves have the upper hand when all the evidence is considered. Broadly, early finds provide little if any evidence suggesting war was a fact of life.”

Ferguson disputes the popular belief that war is inherent to human nature, as evidenced by archaeological discoveries. Many archaeologists use the very same evidence to support the opposing view. Evidence reveals many instances where war was waged, but not fought. In the minds of Ferguson and many others, humanity may be predisposed to conflict and violence, but not war, as many believe. 

“It also appears that if peace were to continue for a long period, people would become sick of the monotony of life and would seek war for a changed man is a highly dynamic creature and it seems that he cannot remain contented merely with works of peace-the cultivation of arts, the development of material comforts, the extension of knowledge, the means and appliances of a happy life.”

This essay provides an interesting perspective on war; other than the typical motivations for war, such as the desire to achieve one’s goals; the author writes that war disrupts the monotony of peace and gives participants a sense of excitement and uncertainty. In addition, it instills the spirit of heroism and bravery in people. However, the author does not dispute that war is evil and should be avoided as much as possible. 

“War forces people to flee their homes in search of safety, with the latest figures from the UN estimating that around 70 million people are currently displaced due to war. This displacement can be incredibly detrimental to health, with no safe and consistent place to sleep, wash, and shelter from the elements. It also removes a regular source of food and proper nutrition. As well as impacting physical health, war adversely affects the mental health of both those actively involved in conflict and civilians.”

Moore discusses the side effects that war has on civilians. For example, it diverts resources used on poverty alleviation and infrastructure towards fighting. It also displaces civilians when their homes are destroyed, reduces access to food, water, and sanitation, and can significantly impact mental health, among many other effects. 

4.   The Psychosocial Impacts of War and Armed Conflict on Children by Iman Farajallah, Omar Reda, H. Steven Moffic, John R. Peteet, and Ahmed Hankir

“The damage done by war-related trauma can never be undone. We can, however, help reduce its long-term impacts, which can span generations. When we reach within ourselves to discover our humanity, it allows us to reach out to the innocent children and remind them of their resilience and beauty. Trauma can make or break us as individuals, families, and communities.”

In their essay, the authors explain how war can affect children. Children living in war-torn areas expectedly witness a lot of violence, including the killings of their loved ones. This may lead to the inability to sleep properly, difficulty performing daily functions, and a speech impediment. The authors write that trauma cannot be undone and can ruin a child’s life.  

“The sociologist Charles Tilly has argued that war and the nation state are inextricably linked. War has been crucial for the formation of the nation state, and remains crucial for its continuation. Anthony Giddens similarly views a link between the internal pacification of states and their external violence. It may be that, if we want a durable peace, a peace built on something other than war, we need to consider how to construct societies based on something other than the nation state and its monopoly of violence.”

This essay discusses the irony that war is waged to achieve peace. Many justify war and believe it is inevitable, as the world seems to balance out an era of peace with another war. However, others advocate for total pacifism. Even in relatively peaceful times, organizations and countries have been carrying out “shadow wars” or engaging in conflict without necessarily going into outright war. Cleary cites arguments made that for peace to indeed exist by itself, societies must not be built on the war in the first place. 

Many believe that war is justified by providing a means to peace and prosperity. Do you agree with this statement? If so, to what extent? What would you consider “too much” for war to be unjustified? In your essay, respond to these questions and reflect on the nature and morality of war. 

Wars throughout history have been waged for various reasons, including geographical domination, and disagreement over cultural and religious beliefs. In your essay, discuss some of the reasons different countries go to war, you can look into the belief systems that cause disagreements, oppression of people, and leaders’ desire to conquer geographical land. For an interesting essay, look to history and the reasons why major wars such as WWI and WWII occurred.

In this essay, you can write about war’s effects on participating countries. You can focus on the impact of war on specific sectors, such as healthcare or the economy. In your mind, do they outweigh the benefits? Discuss the positive and negative effects of war in your essay. To create an argumentative essay, you can pick a stance if you are for or against war. Then, argue your case and show how its effects are positive, negative, or both.

Many issues arise when waging war, such as the treatment of civilians as “collateral damage,” keeping secrets from the public, and torturing prisoners. For your essay, choose an issue that may arise when fighting a war and determine whether or not it is genuinely “unforgivable” or “unacceptable.” Are there instances where it is justified? Be sure to examples where this issue has arisen before.

Humans have fought countless wars throughout history. Choose one significant war and briefly explain its causes, major events, and effects. Conduct thorough research into the period of war and the political, social, and economic effects occurred. Discuss these points for a compelling cause and effect essay.

For help with this topic, read our guide explaining “what is persuasive writing ?”If you still need help, our guide to grammar and punctuation explains more.

Martin is an avid writer specializing in editing and proofreading. He also enjoys literary analysis and writing about food and travel.

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clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

Opinion 7 opinions on the war in Ukraine after one year

One year after Russia invaded Ukraine , Post Opinions is looking back at what has transpired and forward to what is to come.

The selection of opinions below forms a snapshot of that coverage, intended to help you understand the war.

These charts suggest peace isn’t coming anytime soon

By Michael O’Hanlon, Constanze Stelzenmüller and David Wessel of the Brookings Institution

After gathering data on territory, economics, refugees and more, O’Hanlon, Stelzenmüller and Wessel came to the same conclusion : The war could last for quite some time.

“Pressure to make peace could rise within and outside Ukraine and Russia in 2023 (or thereafter),” they write . “But the data doesn’t suggest that will happen right now.”

How to break the stalemate in Ukraine

By the Editorial Board

The Post’s Editorial Board reviewed the year of war and looked for solutions .

“To thwart Russia and safeguard Ukraine’s sovereignty, the United States and its European allies have little choice but to intensify their military, economic and diplomatic support for Kyiv,” the Editorial Board concluded .

Why Ukraine will win the war

By Mark Hertling, retired Army lieutenant general

Hertling examined five phases of the war and says Ukraine’s forces significantly outperformed Russia’s in each one.

“Ukraine’s armed forces have admirably adapted in each phase of this fight, learning lessons from training they received over the past decade, and from the scars earned on the battlefield itself,” he writes . “And Russia has repeatedly demonstrated an inability to do the same.”

How the war will enrich Ukraine when it’s over

By Iuliia Mendel, journalist and former press secretary for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky

Sharing a story of a New Year’s Eve delivery she received while hiding in her bathroom from Russian strikes, Mendel shows how she believes the war will make Ukraine stronger when it’s over .

“Today’s war heroes, organizers and businesspeople will be the leaders of tomorrow,” she writes . “The energies unleashed by this war will enrich the country that comes after it.”

What a year of war has revealed of three leaders

By David Ignatius , Post Opinions columnist

Three figures have largely defined the war so far: Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and President Biden. Ignatius looks at what we’ve learned about each leader over the last year.

“Putin was convinced that his cold-eyed, brutal resolve would outlast everyone else’s,” Ignatius writes . “But a year on, Putin’s staying power begins to look questionable, while Zelensky and Biden have never looked stronger.”

You can’t understand the war without knowing history

By Timothy Snyder, the Levin professor of history at Yale University

Snyder dives into the contrast between the historical importance of this war and the lack of coursework in history.

“Ukrainian history makes today’s world make more sense,” he writes .

Putin can win only if Hawley-esque isolationists multiply

By George F. Will , Post Opinions columnist

Will homes in on how American politics could affect the war’s result .

“Putin can win only by Ukraine’s allies choosing to lose by not maximizing their moral and material advantages,” he writes . “He is counting on Western publics’ support for Ukraine being brittle, and especially on the multiplication of Josh Hawleys.”

What to know about Ukraine’s counteroffensive

The latest: The Ukrainian military has launched a long-anticipated counteroffensive against occupying Russian forces , opening a crucial phase in the war aimed at restoring Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty and preserving Western support in its fight against Moscow.

The fight: Ukrainian troops have intensified their attacks on the front line in the southeast region, according to multiple individuals in the country’s armed forces, in a significant push toward Russian-occupied territory.

The front line: The Washington Post has mapped out the 600-mile front line between Ukrainian and Russian forces .

How you can help: Here are ways those in the United States can support the Ukrainian people as well as what people around the world have been donating.

Read our full coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war . Are you on Telegram? Subscribe to our channel for updates and exclusive video .

• Opinion | ‘A lot of grim realism’: What our columnists heard in Ukraine April 4, 2024 Opinion | ‘A lot of grim realism’: What our columnists heard in Ukraine April 4, 2024
• Opinion | I am proud to have spoken out against Putin’s crimes in Ukraine April 3, 2024 Opinion | I am proud to have spoken out against Putin’s crimes in Ukraine April 3, 2024
• Opinion | Zelensky: ‘We are trying to find some way not to retreat’ March 29, 2024 Opinion | Zelensky: ‘We are trying to find some way not to retreat’ March 29, 2024

How to Write War Essay: Russia Ukraine War

Understanding the Purpose and Scope of a War Essay

A condition of armed conflict between nations or between groups living in one nation is known as war. Sounds not like much fun, does it? Well, conflicts have been a part of human history for thousands of years, and as industry and technology have developed, they have grown more devastating. As awful as it might seem, a war typically occurs between a country or group of countries against a rival country to attain a goal through force. Civil and revolutionary wars are examples of internal conflicts that can occur inside a nation.

Your history class could ask you to write a war essay, or you might be personally interested in learning more about conflicts, in which case you might want to learn how to write an academic essay about war. In any scenario, we have gathered valuable guidance on how to organize war essays. Let's first examine the potential reasons for a conflict before moving on to the outline for a war essay.

• Economic Gain - A country's desire to seize control of another country's resources frequently starts conflicts. Even when the proclaimed goal of a war is portrayed to the public as something more admirable, most wars have an economic motivation at their core, regardless of any other possible causes.
• Territorial Gain - A nation may determine that it requires additional land for habitation, agriculture, or other uses. Additionally, the territory might serve as buffer zones between two violent foes.
• Religion - Religious disputes can stem from extremely profound issues. They may go dormant for many years before suddenly resurfacing later.
• Nationalism - In this sense, nationalism simply refers to the act of violently subjugating another country to demonstrate the country's superiority. This frequently manifests as an invasion.
• Revenge - Warfare can frequently be motivated by the desire to punish, make up for, or simply exact revenge for perceived wrongdoing. Revenge has a connection to nationalism as well because when a nation has been wronged, its citizens are inspired by patriotism and zeal to take action.
• Defensive War - In today's world, when military aggression is being questioned, governments will frequently claim that they are fighting in a solely protective manner against a rival or prospective aggressor and that their conflict is thus a 'just' conflict. These defensive conflicts may be especially contentious when conducted proactively, with the basic premise being that we are striking them before they strike us.

How to Write War Essay with a War Essay Outline

Just like in compare and contrast examples and any other forms of writing, an outline for a war essay assists you in organizing your research and creating a good flow. In general, you keep to the traditional three-part essay style, but you can adapt it as needed based on the length and criteria of your school. When planning your war paper, consider the following outline:

Introduction

• Definition of war
• Importance of studying wars
• Thesis statement

Body Paragraphs

• Causes of the War
• Political reasons
• Economic reasons
• Social reasons
• Historical reasons
• Major Players in the War
• Countries and their leaders
• Military leaders
• Allies and enemies
• Strategies and Tactics
• Military tactics and techniques
• Strategic planning
• Weapons and technology
• Impact of the War
• On the countries involved
• On civilians and non-combatants
• On the world as a whole
• Summary of the main points
• Final thoughts on the war
• Suggestions for future research

If you found this outline template helpful, you can also use our physics help for further perfecting your academic assignments.

Begin With a Relevant Hook

A hook should be the focal point of the entire essay. A good hook for an essay on war can be an interesting statement, an emotional appeal, a thoughtful question, or a surprising fact or figure. It engages your audience and leaves them hungry for more information.

Follow Your Outline

An outline is the single most important organizational tool for essay writing. It allows the writer to visualize the overall structure of the essay and focus on the flow of information. The specifics of your outline depend on the type of essay you are writing. For example, some should focus on statistics and pure numbers, while others should dedicate more space to abstract arguments.

How to Discuss Tragedy, Loss, and Sentiment

War essays are particularly difficult to write because of the terrible nature of war. The life is destroyed, the loved ones lost, fighting, death, great many massacres and violence overwhelm, and hatred for the evil enemy, amongst other tragedies, make emotions run hot, which is why sensitivity is so important. Depending on the essay's purpose, there are different ways to deal with tragedy and sentiment.

The easiest one is to stick with objective data rather than deal with the personal experiences of those who may have been affected by these events. It can be hard to remain impartial, especially when writing about recent deaths and destruction. But it is your duty as a researcher to do so.

However, it’s not always possible to avoid these issues entirely. When you are forced to tackle them head-on, you should always be considerate and avoid passing swift and sweeping judgment.

Summing Up Your Writing

When you have finished presenting your case, you should finish it off with some sort of lesson it teaches us. Armed conflict is a major part of human nature yet. By analyzing the events that transpired, you should be able to make a compelling argument about the scale of the damage the war caused, as well as how to prevent it in the future.

Tired of Looming Deadlines?

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Popular War Essay Topics

When choosing a topic for an essay about war, it is best to begin with the most well-known conflicts because they are thoroughly recorded. These can include the Cold War or World War II. You might also choose current wars, such as the Syrian Civil War or the Russia and Ukraine war. Because they occur in the backdrop of your time and place, such occurrences may be simpler to grasp and research.

To help you decide which war to write about, we have compiled some facts about several conflicts that will help you get off to a strong start.

Russia Ukraine War

Russian President Vladimir Putin started the Russian invasion in the early hours of February 24 last year. According to him. the Ukrainian government had been committing genocide against Russian-speaking residents in the eastern Ukraine - Donbas region since 2014, calling the onslaught a 'special military operation.'

The Russian president further connected the assault to the NATO transatlantic military alliance commanded by the United States. He said the Russian military was determined to stop NATO from moving farther east and establishing a military presence in Ukraine, a part of the Soviet Union, until its fall in 1991.

All of Russia's justifications have been rejected by Ukraine and its ally Western Countries. Russia asserted its measures were defensive, while Ukraine declared an emergency and enacted martial law. According to the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the administration's objective is not only to repel offensives but also to reclaim all Ukrainian land that the Russian Federation has taken, including Crimea.

Both sides of the conflict accuse the other of deploying indiscriminate force, which has resulted in many civilian deaths and displacements. According to current Ukraine news, due to the difficulty of counting the deceased due to ongoing combat, the death toll is likely far higher. In addition, countless Ukrainian refugees were compelled to leave their homeland in search of safety and stability abroad.

Diplomatic talks have been employed to try to end the Ukraine-Russia war. Several rounds of conversations have taken place in various places. However, the conflict is still raging as of April 2023, and there is no sign of a truce.

World War II

World War II raged from 1939 until 1945. Most of the world's superpowers took part in the conflict, fought between two military alliances headed by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, and the Axis Powers, led by Germany, Italy, and Japan.

If you'd like to explore it more in-depth, consider using our history essay service for a World War 2 essay pdf sample!

After World War II, a persistent political conflict between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their allies became known as the Cold War. It's hard to say who was to blame for the cold war essay. American citizens have long harbored concerns about Soviet communism and expressed alarm over Joseph Stalin's brutal control of his own nation. On their side, the Soviets were angry at the Americans for delaying their participation in World War II, which led to the deaths of tens of millions of Russians, and for America's long-standing unwillingness to recognize the USSR as a genuine member of the world community.

Vietnam War

If you're thinking about writing the Vietnam War essay, you should know that it was a protracted military battle that lasted in Vietnam from 1955 to 1975. The North Vietnamese communist government fought South Vietnam and its main ally, the United States, in the lengthy, expensive, and contentious Vietnam War. The ongoing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union exacerbated the issue. The Vietnam War claimed the lives of more than 3 million individuals, more than half of whom were Vietnamese civilians.

American Civil War

Consider writing an American Civil War essay where the Confederate States of America, a grouping of eleven southern states that seceded from the Union in 1860 and 1861, and the United States of America battled each other. If you're wondering what caused the civil war, you should know that the long-standing dispute about the legitimacy of slavery is largely responsible for how the war started.

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

After over a century, the Israel-Palestine conflict has evolved into one of the most significant and current problems in the Middle East. A war that has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people destroyed their homes and gave rise to terrorist organizations that still hold the region hostage. Simply described, it is a conflict between two groups of people for ownership of the same piece of land. One already resided there, while the other was compelled to immigrate to this country owing to rising antisemitism and later settled there. For Israelis and Palestinians alike, as well as for the larger area, the war continues to have substantial political, social, and economic repercussions.

The Syrian Civil War

Pro-democracy protests broke out in southern Deraa in March 2011 due to upheavals against oppressive leaders in neighboring nations. When the Syrian government employed lethal force to quell the unrest, widespread protests calling for the president's resignation broke out.

The country entered a civil war as the violence quickly increased. After hundreds of rebel organizations emerged, the fight quickly expanded beyond a confrontation between Syrians supporting or opposing Mr. Assad. Everyone believes a political solution is necessary, even though it doesn't seem like it will soon.

Russia-Ukraine War Essay Sample

With the Russian-Ukrainian war essay sample provided below from our paper writing experts, you can gain more insight into structuring a flawless paper.

Why is there a war between Russia and Ukraine?

Final Words

To understand our past and the present, we must study conflicts since they are a product of human nature and civilization. Our graduate essay writing service can produce any kind of essay you want, whether it is about World War II, the Cold War, or another conflict. Send us your specifications with your ' write my essay ' request, and let our skilled writers help you wow your professor!

Having Hard Time Writing on Wars?

From the causes and consequences of wars to the strategies and tactics used in battle, our team of expert writers can provide you with a high-quality essay!

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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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How to Write a Perfect Essay On/About War (A Complete Guide)

War is painful. It causes mass death and the destruction of infrastructure on an unimaginable scale. Unfortunately, as humans, we have not yet been able to prevent wars and conflicts from happening. Nevertheless, we are studying them to understand them and their causes better.

In this post, we will look at how to write a war essay. The information we will share here will help anyone craft a brilliant war essay, whatever their level of education.

Let?s commence.

What Is a War Essay?

A war essay is an essay on an armed conflict involving two states or one state and an armed group. You will be asked to write a war essay at some point if you are taking a history course, diplomacy course, international relations course, war studies course, or conflict management course.

When asked to write about a war, it is important to consider several things. These include the belligerents, the location of the conflict, the leading cause or causes of the conflict, the course of the event so far, and the possible solutions to the conflict.

The sections below will help you discover everything you need to know about how to write war essays.

An essay about war can take many forms, including:

• Expository essay ? where you explore the timeline of the wars (conflicts), losses/consequences, significant battles, and notable dates.
• Argumentative essay . A war essay that debates an aspect of a certain war.
• Cause and Effect essay examines the events leading to war and its aftermath.
• Compare and contrast a war essay that pits one war or an aspect of the war against an
• Document-based question (DBQ) that analyzes the historical war documentation to answer a prompt.
• Creative writing pieces where you narrate or describe an experience of or with war.
• A persuasive essay where use ethos, pathos, and logos (rhetorical appeals) to convince your readers to adopt your points.

The Perfect Structure/Organization for a War Essay

To write a good essay about war, you must understand the war essay structure. The war essay structure is the typical 3-section essay structure. It starts with an introduction section, followed by a body section, and then a conclusion section. Find out what you need to include in each section below:

1. Introduction

In the introduction paragraph , you must introduce the reader to the war or conflict you are discussing. But before you do so, you need to hook the reader to your work. You can only do this by starting your introduction with an attention-grabbing statement . This can be a fact about the war, a quote, or a statistic.

Once you have grabbed the reader's attention, you should introduce the reader to the conflict your essay is focused on. You should do this by providing them with a brief background on the conflict.

Your thesis statement should follow the background information. This is the main argument your essay will be defending.

The introduction section of a war essay is typically one paragraph long. But it can be two paragraphs long for long war essays.

In the body section of your war essay, you need to provide information to support your thesis statement. A typical body section of a college essay will include three to four body paragraphs. Each body paragraph starts with a topic sentence and solely focuses on it. This is how your war essay should be.

Once you develop a thesis statement, you should think of the points you will use to defend it and then list them in terms of strength. The strongest of these points should be your topic sentences.

When developing the body section of your war essay, make sure your paragraphs flow nicely. This will make your essay coherent. One of the best ways to make your paragraphs flow is to use transition words, phrases, and sentences.

The body section of a war essay is typically three to four paragraphs long, but it can be much longer.

3. Conclusion

In the conclusion section of your war essay, you must wrap up everything nicely. The recommended way to do this is to restate your thesis statement to remind the reader what your essay was about. You should follow this by restating the main points supporting your thesis statement.

Your thesis and the restatement of your main points should remind your reader of what your essay was all about. You should then end your essay with a food-for-thought, a recommendation, or a solution. Whatever you use to end your essay, make sure it is relevant to what you have just covered in your essay, and it shows that you have widely read on the topic.

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How to write a war Essay? ? The Steps

Several wars have taken place on earth, including:

• World War I and II
• Russian Civil War
• Chinese Civil War
• Lebanese Civil War
• Syrian Civil War
• The Spanish Civil War
• The American Civil War
• Afghanistan War

The list of wars that have happened to date is endless.

Writing a war essay is never easy. You need to plan your work meticulously to develop a brilliant war essay. If you are assigned to write a war essay or paper, follow the steps below to develop a brilliant essay on any conflict.

1. Read The Assignment Instructions Carefully

You must know precisely what to do to write a brilliant war essay. College professors typically provide multiple instructions when they ask students to write college essays. Students must then read the instructions carefully to write precisely what their professors want to see.

Therefore, when you get a war essay assignment, you must read the instructions carefully to understand what is needed of you entirely. Know exactly what conflict your professor wants you to focus on, what aspect of the conflict (the origin, the chronology of events leading to the war, external factors, etc.), what sources they want you to use, and the number of pages they want.

Knowing what your professor needs will help you to develop it nicely.

2. Do Your Research

After reviewing the war assignment instructions, you should research the topic you?ve been asked to focus on. Do this by Googling the topic (and its variations), searching it in your college database, and searching it in scholarly databases. As you read more on the topic, take a lot of notes. This will help you to understand the topic better, plus its nuances.

Once you understand the topic well, you should start to think about what precisely your essay should focus on. If you like, this will be the foundation of your essay or the thesis statement.

Once you settle on the thesis statement, read more on the topic but focus on information that will help you defend your thesis statement.

3. Craft A Thesis Statement and Create an Outline

At this point, you should have a rough thesis statement . Once you have read more information on it as per the previous step, you should be able to refine it into a solid and argumentative statement at this point.

So refine your thesis statement to make it perfect. Your thesis statement can be one or two sentences long but never more. Once you have created it, you should create an outline.

An outline is like a treasure map ? it details where you must go comprehensively. Creating an outline will give you an overview of what your essay will look like and whether it will defend your thesis statement. It will also make it easier for you to develop your essay.

Ensure your outline includes a striking title for your conflict essay, the topic sentence for each body paragraph, and the supporting evidence for each topic sentence.

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• Writing a compelling claim in an essay
• How to write sound arguments and counterarguments

4. Start Writing the Introduction

When you finish writing your essay, you should start writing the introduction. This is where the rubber meets the road ?the actual writing of your war essay begins.

Since you have already created a thesis statement and an outline, you should not find it challenging to write your introduction. Follow your outline to develop a friendly compact, and informative introduction to the conflict your essay will focus on.

Read your introduction twice to make sure it is as compact and as informative as it can be. It should also be straightforward to understand.

5. Write The Rest of Your Essay

Once you have created the introduction to your war essay, you should create the body section. The body section of your essay should follow your outline. Remember the outline you created in step 3 has the points you should focus on in each body paragraph. So follow it to make developing your essay?s body section easy.

As you develop your essay's body section, ensure you do everything nicely. By this, we mean you develop each topic sentence entirely using the sandwich paragraph writing method.

Also, make sure there is a nice flow between your sentences and between your paragraphs.

6. Conclude Your War Essay

After writing the rest of your essay, you should offer a robust conclusion. Your conclusion should also follow your outline. As usual, it should start with a thesis restatement and a restatement of all your main points.

It should then be followed by a concluding statement that provides the reader with food for thought. You should never include new information in your conclusion paragraph. This will make it feel like another body paragraph, yet the purpose of your conclusion should be to give your reader the feeling that your essay is ending or done.

7. Proofread and Edit Your Essay

This is the last step of writing a war essay or any other one. This step is final, but it is perhaps the most important step. This is because it distinguishes an ordinary essay from an extraordinary one.

You should proofread your essay at least thrice, especially if it is short. When you do it the first time, you should look for grammar errors and other basic mistakes. Eliminate all the errors and mistakes you find. When you do it the second time, you should do it to ensure the flow of your essay is perfect.

And when you do it the third and last time, you should use editing software like Grammarly.com to catch all the errors you might have missed.

When you proofread your war essay in this manner, you should be able to transform it from average to excellent. After completing this step, your war essay will be ready for submission.

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Tips for Writing a Brilliant War Essay

Follow the tips below to develop a brilliant essay.

• A brilliant topic is always vital.

When you are assigned a war essay, you should do your best to choose or create a brilliant topic for your essay. A boring topic focusing on something discussed and debated a million times will never be brilliant.

• A strong thesis statement is essential.

Along with a brilliant topic, you need a strong thesis statement to make your war essay brilliant. This is because a strong thesis statement is like a lighthouse ? it will guide safely to the harbor (conclusion).

• Do not be afraid to discuss the tragedy.

Sometimes war details can feel too graphic or gruesome, leading to hesitance on the part of students when they are writing articles. Do not hesitate or be afraid to discuss tragedy if discussing tragedy will add to the substance of your essay.

• Be impartial.

Sometimes it can be challenging to write an impartial essay, especially if you relate to or strongly support one side in a conflict. Well, this should never happen. As a researcher, you must be as impartial as you can be. You must inform your reader of all the facts available to you without bias so they have an accurate impression of whatever you are talking about.

• Ensure your work has flow.

This is one of the most important things you must do when writing a war essay. Since war essays sometimes discuss disparate issues, ending with a disjointed essay is straightforward. You should do all you can to ensure your workflows are well, including using transition words generously. 

• Proofread your work.

You should always proofread your essays before submission. This is what will always upgrade them from ordinary to extraordinary. If you don?t proofread your work, you will submit subpar work that will not get you a good grade.

• Explore unexplored angles.

Chances are, whatever war or conflict you write about has already been written on or reported on a million times. If you want your essay to be interesting, you should explore unexplored angles on conflicts. This will make your work very interesting.

War Essay Sample to Inspire your Writing

Here is a short sample of a war essay on the Russia-Ukraine War.

The most affected cities in the Russia-Ukraine War 2022

The Russia-Ukraine war has killed tens of thousands and displaced millions across Ukraine. It has also led to the destruction of civilian homes and infrastructure across Ukraine. The eastern cities of Bakhmut, Kharkiv, and Mariupol are the most affected cities in the Russia-Ukraine War 2022.

Bakhmut in southeastern Ukraine is the site of the bloodiest and longest-running battle between Russian and Ukrainian forces. The city is strategic as it is close to supply routes that the Russians use in the occupied territories of southern Ukraine. It is estimated that as much as 90% of Bakhmut has been destroyed in Russia?s bid to take over the city.

Mariupol is a Ukrainian port city between Russia and the Russian-occupied Crimea. Russia decided to take the city early on to deny Ukraine a foothold close to its border and operation areas in the south. Yet the city was defended by a fanatic Ukrainian military battalion that swore not to give it up. This led to Russia bombing much of the city to the ground. In the end, Russia won the battle for Mariupol and now controls the city and the surrounding area.

Kharkiv is Ukraine?s second biggest city. It is less than 45 minutes away from the Russian border. Taking the city was one of the top priorities for Russia at the start of the war because of its proximity to Russia. Nevertheless, Ukraine deployed much of its army to defend the city and has managed to do so. Nevertheless, this has come at a cost. Much of Kharkiv?s infrastructure is destroyed. Its power lines, highways, roads, railways, dams, and industries are destroyed.

The Russia-Ukraine conflict has affected much of Ukraine, especially the eastern cities of Bakhmut, Kharkiv, and Mariupol. All three cities have suffered tremendous infrastructure damage in the past few months. Efforts must be made by the two state parties and the international community to prevent further destruction of Ukrainian cities in this conflict.

War Essay Topic Ideas

Not sure what to write about in your war essay? Here are some ideas to get your creative juices flowing.

• Causes of Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2022
• What led to Russia?s annexation of Crimea in 2014?
• Causes of Tigray conflict in Ethiopia
• Somalia-Kenya border conflict
• Conflict in eastern DRC
• Secessionist movements in the UK
• Western Sahara versus Morocco
• Causes of the Libyan Civil War
• The American war of independence
• The American civil war
• The English civil war
• The Napoleonic wars
• The French invasion of Russia
• Causes of the crusader wars
• The German invasion of Poland and its consequences
• The battle of Stalingrad and its bearing on the cause of WWII
• The causes of World War I
• The Japanese invasion of Southeast Asia
• What caused America to end the Vietnam War
• The Cuban Missile Crisis
• The fall of the Berlin Wall
• The Arms Race
• Role of the cold world war in shaping the world we live today
• The causes and consequences of the Syrian Civil War
• The role of propaganda in the Iraq War
• Implications of the Syrian Civil War

As you Come to the End, ?

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The World War II: Impact and Consequences Essay

World War II had a great impact on social order and international relations between the nations and continents. A major influence on international policies was the relations between the two opposite camps, the Allies and the Axis, and the views each held of the other. The Allies and the Axis were reluctant to follow any line that risked running into the antagonism of the other for fear of alienating their ally and therefore endangering one of the precepts of their distant policies (Gordon 32). In an epoch of growing international anxiety and doubt, Germany remained one of the few relatively sure supports upon which they could depend on. Certainly, in the formulation and conduct of international war policy the significance attached to the views and position of the other was considerable, indeed the contacts and discussions between them were often decisive. The history of World War II suggests that the greatest impact this war had in African and Asian countries was through the processes of decolonization and modernization coming to these geographical regions.

World War II changed the landscape of North Africa and opened new opportunities for independence. The countries became independent immediately after the end of the war, but the war changed the national consciousness and self-determination of the nations. For either to be successful the cooperation of their partner across North Africa was considered imperative. Neither the Allies nor the Axis was prepared to take any initiative alone: among diplomatic, military and political circles there was a refusal to act either against Italian hostility in North Africa or German treaty violations in Europe without the guaranteed support of their partner (Hargreaves 65). This perceived incapability to operate without the backing of the other extended at several vital junctures to the point where the Allies and the Axis allowed the other, possibly willingly so, to determine their own policies (Gordon 65).

The main African countries involved in World War II were under Italian rule and included the Italian North Africa, the Italian east Africa. Also, such Asian Middle East countries as Iran, Syria and Lebanon were involved. The outcome this emphasis placed on the other’s strategy was to strengthen the case for appeasing Italy and Germany. Each was depressed from taking a firm posture by the belief that the other was not committed to a policy of confrontation. During the first months of World War II, the countries recognized that, whatever their public statements, the British were not committed to a hard line over Italian hostility (Hargreaves 77). Later, following the reoccupation of the Africa, a similar sight was held in London of French attitudes. Equally important, each knew, indeed it was explicitly stated, that their ally would not act without them and without having first received a formal promise of their support. The Allies and the Axis pacification policies were further reinforced by the denial to accept a trade-off by which support for a policy of resistance against one fascist aggressor would be exchanged for the promise of support against the other (McGowen 87). The only result of these political maneuvers was to further damage their relations, with each berating the other for failing to provide the necessary support. In fact, these often hurtful exchanges had more to do with seeking to place the onus for (in)action onto their ally’s shoulders than with any wish to adopt a policy of resistance towards fascist hostility (Gordon 63). “Between Cairo and Cape Town operational activities were at first confined to a few ports and airfields. Freetown, an important staging-post and assembly-point for naval convoys, was quickly affected” (Hargreaves 51). The outcomes drawn from these common considerations, firstly, that it was impossible to act without the backing of their ally and, secondly, that their union was no more than half- hearted in its desire to oppose Italy or Germany (and also that they lacked the means even if they had desired to accept such a policy), accentuated their already unsure policies, impeded any firm answer, and acted as a further impetus to the policies of appeasement.

When considering the African and Asian responses to Italian hostility in East Africa, a contrast has been made between ‘the complicated “game” and the determination of the English Government; of a strong-willed British administration wanting to do all it could to halt Italy and defend the League but being held back by the cynical policies of the French (Hargreaves 66). The obvious contradiction with France’s traditional record of determination in upholding the settlement and the League, and with Great Britain’s previous half-hearted and flexible approach towards both, is explained away by a supposed dual volte-face in which each at the same time assumed the mantle of the other. This actually rapid and total about-turn in policy simply cannot explain the complexity of the Allies and the Axis policies. For both there were numerous issues to be taken into account, some pushing towards opposition to the Axis ambitions and defense, others towards maintaining Italian friendship through acceptance of her expansion at Africa’s expense. Although these were not felt equally, there were strong cases made on either side of the dispute in both countries (McGowen 34). In their respective parliaments, governments and public views the war crisis produced widely divergent, and often contradictory, opinions towards the Axis. The result was that neither was firmly attached either to opposing or conniving at Italian hostility. For the Allies and the Axis leaders the importance of the Africa crisis, coming at a critical time in international affairs, lay in its repercussions beyond Africa – in the Mediterranean, in Europe, and above all in their future relations with Germany (Gordon 49). Not surprisingly, their opinion turned as much towards Berlin as towards Rome, Addis Ababa or Geneva throughout the whole affair. Faced with growing evils in Europe, complicated by an expansionist Japan in the Far East, the significance of Italy greatly increased. With Germany rearming and clearly seeking to expand to the African and Asian continents and east the value of Italian support could not be overlooked. The result was an effort, led by the French but closely followed and supported by London, to tie Italy more closely to the western camp. “Political doctrines apart, all France’s African subjects suffered new hardships in consequence of the interruption of peacetime patterns of production and trade, and of increased demands by their rulers” (Hargreaves 53).

Not only was there a concern not to estrange their union and to keep as close to them as possible but both the Allies and the Axis also considered that their own policy could not be successful without the fuIl and active participation of each other. This refusal to operate outside a joint Allies approach acted throughout the crisis as a restraint on the policy initiatives that emerged from the Allies and the Axis whether they were for greater concessions or stronger coercive measures. Although for Great Britain the issue was less one of dependence there was still a great emphasis placed on Paris (McGowen 65). This was certainly much in evidence when consideration was given to the issue of sanctions. The issue of French military support should Italy attack the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean in some ‘mad dog’ attack was repeatedly raised. Equally, there was a general insistence that France should prepare fuIl-scale armed operations against Italy before sanctions could even be considered, and any policy of opposing Italian ambitions was simply considered impossible without the full military and diplomatic support of the French (Gordon 69). The war in Asia took place between Japanese and communist Chinese armies aimed to protect their national interest and became independent.

Time and again the Allies pointed to failure to provide this as a reason for their own unwillingness to consider sanctions. At the same time they insisted on the necessity of keeping in step with France and made this principle of their policy clear to all involved. British statements that they had no understanding with African countries, their demands that before sanctions were apprised upon France must be prepared to undertake large-scale military operations (in fact, take the brunt of these as well as from any Italian retaliation) and their refusal to offer in exchange for French support over Africa a guarantee of British support for future sanctions against Germany, only added to the general suspicion in Paris (Hargreaves 74). British demands that a sanctions policy be adopted, and moreover that it be led by France, met with little support (McGowen 48). French leaders, aware of British silence on this issue, saw no reason to do anything other than drag their heels – certainly they often argued that London would be only too pleased if sanctions were avoided.

Similar to Africa, Asia was intestinally involved in the war with poor military resources and colonial state power. It has been argued that the crisis posed a straightforward, if awkward, choice for the Allies and the Axis between resistance and appeasement, between threats (backed up if necessary by collective action) and sufficient concessions to Italy to prevent her from resorting to arms combined with pressure on the Asians to concede. In this the choice that confronted Paris and London over Asian nations reflected the wider and longer-term choice over policy towards the fascist powers. The choice was not, though, so simple. The recognized pattern of appeasing Mussolini and the desire to preserve the advantages of Italian friendship pushed them in one way; concern for the League and for the widespread public support it enjoyed pushed them in another (McGowen 65). Neither Government, though, saw the option in such stark terms. For both it was an issue of attempting to balance the many demands placed on them. Nor were conciliation and coercion considered as being equally exclusive but rather as two paths to be followed simultaneously. Both the Allies and the Axis were pushed towards what were often incompatible options by conflicting advice and concerns. The understandable inclination was to seek to avoid these alternatives, to preserve both Italian co-operation in Europe and the prestige and force of the League; neither France nor Great Britain accepted that by attempting to keep both they would fall between two stools (Gordon 77). The World War II led to formation of Asian states including the Republic of China (under Communist regime,) The North and South Korea, the Taiwan, and Vietnam. The decolonization process touched Indochina, Algeria, Indonesia and Madagascar, the dominion of India and Pakistan. Such states as Israel and Palestine were created in the Middle East.

The story of the Allies and the Axis policies towards the African and Asian countries is in large part that of how the Governments sought to come to terms with this dilemma. Neither saw a simple choice between coercion and conciliation and in neither country was the eventual outcome of the debate a clear decision either to resist or to cede to Italian demands. When faced with the threat and then the fact of Italian hostility against a fellow member of the League both France and Great Britain worked fervently to find a diplomatic solution (Hock 101). The central, seemingly insoluble, problem remained how this could satisfy both the League and Italy; how Italian needs could be sufficiently fulfilled to keep her in the anti-German camp while not delivering a fatal blow to the League and to the system of collective security. Such hopes proved to be based on an unfounded optimism or, more probably, on an irresolution characteristic of both countries’ leaderships. At the heart of British and French policies lay what were to prove intractable problems arising from inherent inconsistencies (McGowen 51). Furthermore, however understandable the policies pursued, they were always poorly adapted to the nature of Mussolini’s power. Given this, it is not surprising that their open rejection of effectual sanctions and their public acceptance of Italy’s need to expand did little to convince Mussolini of the need to accept anything less than the complete annihilation of North Africa. This gulf between fascist Italy and the democracies always worked against a successful resolution of the crisis along the lines envisaged in the Allies and the Axis. The weaknesses inherent in such an approach and the basic incompatibility of the two halves of the dual-line were never fully accepted by the Allies and the Axis policy-makers (Gordon 88).

Pushed in often opposite directions by various international and domestic considerations, the Allies and the Axis policies in Asia and Africa were equally ambivalent. The first inclination for both was to temporize, to leave the problem to others, to urge conciliation all round and to attempt to avoid the awkward dilemma posed by Italy’s hostility (Hock 103). Driven by conflicting advice, interests and considerations, weakened in their formulation by the absence of decisive leadership and in their application both by material weaknesses and the lack of Anglo-French solidarity, ended in failure: the League was ruined as an instrument of peace-keeping, the Italian alliance permanently damaged and mutual relations strained almost to breaking point. “The secretary of state entered 1941 certain that he wanted no confrontation with Japan over China or Southeast Asia until the situation in Europe had improved” (Lee 14).

Having unsuccessfully turned to each other for a lead, ministers and their military advisers looked to Great Britain for a way out of their predicament. Safe in the knowledge that British opposition would rule out any military response, the new direction was instructed to open talks under the auspices of the League. The crisis was, however, far from over (Hock 107). The importance of Asian theater was that for the Allies, all hopes of improving relations with Germany were dependent on one thing – the support of France. Everything turned on first neutralizing any French demands for action and then winning her over to the appeasement of Europe. For the Government in London the present dangers, and future possibilities, all revolved around an agreement with Paris. Both approached the events from this same sense of weakness (McGowen 38). Attempts to look to other allies (in the case of France to Poland, the Little Entente, the Soviet Union and Italy; for Great Britain to her Dominions) never got off the ground. Faced with growing threats in Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa, Great Britain had to abandon her inclination to be the arbiter of Europe (Hock 106).

Their immediate reactions, however, were often to condemn their partner as much as the aggressor. The French attacked what they regarded as Great Britain’s lack of solidarity, their failure to provide adequate commitments to the defense of Western Europe, and for playing too much to a German tune. They also questioned the inconsistency with which the British sought to apply the Covenant against Italy while denying its value in Europe. In London French intransigence was blamed for the long-lasting failure to reach a settlement with Germany (McGowen 23). The inherent issues in relations between Britain and France in Asia were heightened by the fact that before either reached a policy decision the other’s attitude was solicited and, despite a pronounced lack of confidence, their support made an essential precondition for any diplomatic move (Kelly 81). Throughout both crises each constantly referred to the attitudes of other actors. In turn, the League, the United States, France’s Eastern European allies, British Dominions, and numerous other states as far apart as Turkey and Japan, were considered in policy deliberations. What really mattered, however, was the attitude of their partner across the Channel. Beyond the limitations imposed by material resources and the broad outlook and aims of the two leaderships, it was these considerations that each gave to the other’s position that was the major determinant of international policy (McGowen 87).

In Asia and Africa, the Allies relations were marked by requests and refusals for action against international hostility: British attempts to halt Italian ambitions in Ethiopia were blocked by French unwillingness to follow their lead; over the Asia the roles were apparently reversed, with Great Britain’s non-co-operation holding back the French. In both cases there is much in this that is simply myth. The myth, however, both at the time and since, proved to be remarkably useful. Consequently it took deep root (McGowen 47). That the Allies tensions were added to by these diplomatic exchanges is evident. Over the crisis the British disapproval of the French failure to stand by them was strongly voiced. In return, Paris attacked what many there considered to be Great Britain’s willingness to raise the stakes to dangerous levels.

Those successes offered twin rescue to a beleaguered Imperial Army. First, the colossal drain of the China “incident” might at last be ended by an occupation of French Indochina that would nearly sever the remaining flow of Western aid to Chiang Kai-shek. It was a perversion of the “total war” officers’ original attempt to achieve autarky (Lee 16).

In both cases these connections had a direct and lasting collision. In large part these divergences make clear the failure to overcome either crisis successfully (McGowen 54; McGowen 66).

In sum, African countries and Asian nations were the stronger partners is beyond doubt. The greater reliance of the Allies on ally was shown in the frequent use made of the unequal relations. None the less, the Allies retained a clear edge of political maneuver and took its own part in the policy of pacification. The direct insinuation of their recognized interdependence was a refusal to maneuver in the political arena outside the boundaries of what was jointly agreed and applied. World War II proposed great opportunities for Asian and African nations to become independent but it also ruined their cultural and social achievements. Their interdependence also meant that the world’s powers chose to bow to the other’s position. Critics told that the world’s powers would adjust their position to that of dependent nations. This is a mistaken impression and expression. The debate constantly placed Asian nations at the centre of their decisions and any action to resolve the war crisis, either along the path of further concessions or greater pressure on the Axis, was based on winning co-operation.

Works Cited

Gordon, J. W. The Other Desert War: British Special Forces in North Africa , 1940-1943 Greenwood Press, 1987.

Hargreaves, J.D. Decolonization in Africa ; Longman, 1996.

Hock, D. Legacies of World War II in South and East Asia . Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2007.

Kelly, O. Meeting the Fox: The Allied Invasion of Africa, from Operation Torch to Kasserine Pass to Victory in Tunisia . Wiley, 2002.

Lee, L.E. World War II in Asia and the Pacific and the War’s aftermath, with General Themes: A Handbook of Literature and Research . Greenwood Press, 1998.

McGowen, T. World War II. Childrens Press, 2002.

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IvyPanda. (2023, October 20). The World War II: Impact and Consequences. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-world-war-ii-the-impact-and-consequences/

"The World War II: Impact and Consequences." IvyPanda , 20 Oct. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/the-world-war-ii-the-impact-and-consequences/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'The World War II: Impact and Consequences'. 20 October.

IvyPanda . 2023. "The World War II: Impact and Consequences." October 20, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-world-war-ii-the-impact-and-consequences/.

1. IvyPanda . "The World War II: Impact and Consequences." October 20, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-world-war-ii-the-impact-and-consequences/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The World War II: Impact and Consequences." October 20, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-world-war-ii-the-impact-and-consequences/.

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Essay: Russia Is Back to the Stalinist Future

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Russia Is Back to the Stalinist Future

With a Soviet-style election, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has come full circle.

• Human Rights

In 1968, the American scholar Jerome M. Gilison described Soviet elections as a “ psychological curiosity ”—a ritualized, performative affirmation of the regime rather than a real vote in any sense of the word. These staged elections with their nearly unanimous official results, Gilison wrote, served to isolate non-conformists and weld the people to their regime.

Last Sunday, Russia completed the circle and returned to Soviet practice. State election officials reported that 87 percent of Russians had cast their vote for Vladimir Putin in national elections, giving the Russian president a fifth term in office. Not only were many of the reported election numbers mathematically impossible , but there was also no longer much of a choice: All prominent opposition figures had been either murdered , imprisoned , or exiled . Like in Soviet times, the election also welded Russians to their regime by serving as a referendum on Putin’s war against Ukraine. All in all, last weekend’s Soviet-style election sealed Putin’s transformation of post-Communist Russia into a repressive society with many of the features of Soviet totalitarianism.

Russia’s return to Soviet practice goes far beyond elections. A recent study by exiled Russian journalists from Proekt Media used data to determine that Russia is more politically repressive today than the Soviet Union under all leaders since Joseph Stalin. During the last six years, the study reports, the Putin regime has indicted 5,613 Russians on explicitly political charges—including “discrediting the army,” “disseminating misinformation,” “justification of terrorism,” and other purported crimes, which have been widely used to punish criticism of Russia’s war on Ukraine and justification of Ukraine’s defense of its territory. This number is significantly greater than in any other six-year period of Soviet rule after 1956—all the more glaring given that Russia’s population is only half that of the Soviet Union before its collapse.

In addition to repressive criminal charges and sentences, over the last six years more than 105,000 people have been tried on administrative charges, which carry heavy fines and compulsory labor for up to 30 days without appeal. Many of these individuals were punished for taking part in unsanctioned marches or political activity, including anti-war protests. Others were charged with violations of COVID pandemic regulations. Such administrative punishments are administered and implemented rapidly, without time for an appeal.

On March 4, 2022, a little over a week after the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, Russia’s puppet parliament rapidly adopted amendments to the Russian Criminal Code and Criminal Procedure Code that established criminal and administrative punishments for the vague transgressions of “discrediting” the Russian military or disseminating “false information” about it. This widely expanded the repressive powers of the state to criminally prosecute political beliefs and activity. Prosecutions have surged since the new laws were passed, likely leading to a dramatic increase in the number of political prisoners in the coming years. In particular, punishments for “discrediting the army” or “justification of terrorism”—which includes voicing support for Ukraine’s right to defend itself—have resulted in hundreds of sentences meted out each year since the war began. The most recent such case: On Feb. 27, the 70-year-old co-chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning human rights group Memorial, Oleg Orlov, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for “discrediting” the Russian military.

As the Proekt report ominously concludes, “[I]n terms of repression, Putin has long ago surpassed almost all Soviet general secretaries, except for one—Joseph Stalin.” While this conclusion is in itself significant, it is only the tip of the iceberg of the totalitarian state Putin has gradually and systematically rebuilt.

A man votes in Russia’s presidential election in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk on March 15. ladimir Nikolayev/AFP via Getty Images

As in the Soviet years, there is no independent media in Russia today. The last of these news organizations were banned or fled the country after Putin’s all-out war on Ukraine, including Proekt, Meduza, Ekho Moskvy, Nobel Prize-winning Novaya Gazeta, and TV Dozhd. In their place, strictly regime-aligned newspapers, social media, and television and radio stations emit a steady drumbeat of militaristic propaganda, promote Russian imperialist grandeur, and celebrate Putin as the country’s infallible commander in chief. In another reprise of totalitarian practice, lists of banned books have been dramatically expanded and thousands of titles have been removed from the shelves of Russian libraries and bookstores. Bans have been extended to numerous Wikipedia pages, social media channels, and websites.

Human rights activists and independent civic leaders have been jailed, physically attacked, intimidated into silence, or driven into exile. Civic organizations that show independence from the state are banned as “ undesirable ” and subjected to fines and prosecution if they continue to operate. The most recent such organizations include the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, Memorial, the legendary Moscow Helsinki Group, and the EU-Russia Civil Society Forum . In their place, the state finances a vast array of pro-regime and pro-war groups, with significant state resources supporting youth groups that promote the cult of Putin and educate children in martial values to prepare them for military service. Then there are the numerous murders of opposition leaders, journalists, and activists at home and abroad. Through these various means, almost all critical Russian voices have been silenced.

Private and family life is also increasingly coming under the scope of government regulation and persecution. The web of repression particularly affects the LGBT community, putting large numbers of Russians in direct peril. A court ruling in 2023 declared the “international LGBT movement” extremist and banned the rainbow flag as a forbidden symbol, which was quickly followed by raids and arrests . Homosexuality has been reclassified as an illness, and Russian gay rights organizations have shut down their operations for fear of prosecution. Legislation aimed at reinforcing “traditional values”—including the right of husbands to discipline their wives—has led to the reduction in sentences and the decriminalization of some forms of domestic violence.

Russia’s Military Is Already Preparing for Its Next War 

Moscow is rebuilding its military in anticipation of a conflict with NATO in the next decade, Estonian officials warn.

It’s Time to Declare Putin an Illegitimate Leader

Russia’s sham elections next month—with voting on occupied Ukrainian territory—should not be recognized.

Ukraine Isn’t Putin’s War—It’s Russia’s War

Jade McGlynn’s books paint an unsettling picture of ordinary Russians’ support for the invasion and occupation of Ukraine.

Many of the techniques of totalitarian control now operating throughout Russia were first incubated in territories where the Kremlin spread war and conflict. Chechnya was the first testing ground for widespread repression, including massive numbers of victims subjected to imprisonment, execution, disappearance, torture, and rape. Coupled with the merciless targeting of civilians in Russia’s two wars in Chechnya, these practices normalized wanton criminal behavior within Russian state security structures. Out of this crucible of fear and intimidation, Putin has shaped a culture and means of governing that were further elaborated in other places Russia invaded and eventually came to Russia itself.

In Russian-occupied Crimea and eastern Ukraine since 2014, there has been a widespread campaign of surveillance, summary executions, arrests, torture, and intimidation—all entirely consistent with Soviet practice toward conquered populations. More recently, this includes the old practice of forced political recantations: A Telegram channel ominously called Crimean SMERSH (a portmanteau of the Russian words for “death to spies,” coined by Stalin himself) has posted dozens of videos of frightened Ukrainians recanting their Ukrainian identity or the display of Ukrainian symbols. Made in conjunction with police operations, these videos appear to be coordinated with state security services.

In the parts of Ukraine newly occupied since 2022, human rights groups have widely documented human rights abuses and potential war crimes. These include the abduction of children, imprisonment of Ukrainians in a system of filtration camps that recall the Soviet gulags, and the systematic use of rape and torture to break the will of Ukrainians. Castrations of Ukrainian men have also been employed.

As Russia’s violence in Ukraine has expanded, so, too, has the acceptance of these abominations throughout the state and in much of society. As during the Stalin era, the cult of cruelty and the culture of fear are now the legal and moral standards. The climate of fear initially employed to assert order in occupied regions is now being applied to Russia itself. In this context, the murder of Alexei Navalny ahead of the presidential election was an important message from Putin to the Russian people: There is no longer any alternative to the war and repressive political order he has imposed, of which Navalny’s elimination is a part.

All the techniques and means of repression bespeak a criminal regime that now closely resembles the totalitarian rule of Stalin, whom Putin now fully embraces. After Putin first came to power in 1999, he often praised Stalin as a great war leader while disapproving of his cruelty and brutality. But as Putin pivoted toward war and repression, Russia has systematically promoted a more positive image of Stalin. High school textbooks not only celebrate his legacy but also whitewash his terror regime. There has been a proliferation of new Stalin monuments, with more than 100 throughout the country today. On state-controlled media, Russian propagandists consistently hammer away on the theme of Stalin’s greatness and underscore similarities between his wartime leadership and Putin’s. Discussion of Stalinist terror has disappeared, as has the memorialization of his millions of victims. Whereas only one in five Russians had a positive view of Stalin in the 1990s, polls conducted over the last five years show that number has risen to between 60 percent and 70 percent. In normalizing Stalin, Putin is not glossing over the tyrant’s crimes; rather, he is deliberately normalizing Stalin as a justification for his own war-making and repression.

Putin now resembles Stalin more closely than any other Soviet or Russian leader. Unlike Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Konstantin Chernenko, and Yuri Andropov—not to mention Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin—Putin has unquestioned power that is not shared or limited in any way by parliament, courts, or a Politburo. State propaganda has created a Stalin-like personality cult that lionizes Putin’s absolute power, genius as a leader, and role as a brilliant wartime generalissimo. It projects him as the fearsome and all-powerful head of a militarized nation aiming, like Stalin, to defeat a “Nazi” regime in Ukraine and reassert hegemony over Eastern and Central Europe. Just as Stalin made effective use of the Russian Orthodox Church to support Russia’s effort during World War II, Putin has effectively used Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill as a critical ally and cheerleader of Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine. And just like Stalin, Putin has made invading neighboring countries and annexing territory a central focus of the Kremlin’s foreign policy.

A young Communist holds a flag depicting Stalin before placing flowers on his tomb in Moscow on March 5, during a memorial ceremony to mark the anniversary of the Soviet leader’s death. Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images

Putin’s descent into tyranny has been accompanied by his gradual isolation from the rest of society. Like the latter-day Stalin, Putin began living an isolated life as a bachelor even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Like the later Stalin, Putin lacks a stable family life and is believed to have replaced it with a string of mistresses, some of whom are reported to have borne him children for whom he remains a remote figure. Like Stalin, he stays up late into the early-morning hours, and like the Soviet dictator, Putin has assembled around him a small coterie of trusted intimates, mostly men in their 60s and 70s, with whom he has maintained friendships for decades, including businessmen Yury Kovalchuk and Igor Sechin, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, and security chief Nikolai Patrushev. This coterie resembles Stalin’s small network of cronies: security chief Lavrentiy Beria, military leader Kliment Voroshilov, and Communist Party official Georgy Malenkov. To others in leadership positions, Putin is a distant, absolute leader who openly humiliates seemingly powerful officials, such as spy chief Sergey Naryshkin , when the latter seemed to hesitate in his support during Putin’s declaration of war on Ukraine.

Through near-total control of domestic civic life and media, his widening campaign of repression and terror, relentless state propaganda promoting his personality cult, and his vast geopolitical ambitions, Putin is consciously mimicking the Stalin playbook, especially the parts of that playbook dealing with World War II. Even if Putin has no love for Soviet Communist ideology, he has transformed Russia and its people in ways that are no less fundamental than Stalin’s efforts to shape a new Soviet man.

Putin’s massive victory in a Soviet-style election last weekend represents the ratification by the Russian people of his brutal war, militarization of Russian society, and establishment of a totalitarian dictatorship. It is a good moment to acknowledge that Russia’s descent into tyranny, mobilization of society onto a war footing, spread of hatred for the West, and indoctrination of the population in imperialist tropes represent far more than a threat to Ukraine. Russia’s transformation into a neo-Stalinist, neo-imperialist power represents a rising threat to the United States, its European allies, and other states on Russia’s periphery. By recognizing how deeply Russia has changed and how significantly Putin is borrowing from Stalin’s playbook, we can better understand that meeting the modern-day Russian threat will require as much consistency and as deep a commitment as when the West faced down Stalin’s Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.

Adrian Karatnycky is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, the founder of Myrmidon Group, and the author of Battleground Ukraine: From Independence to the War with Russia , to be published by Yale University Press in June 2024.

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International Edition

Essay on War and Peace

No doubt war is an evil, the greatest catastrophe that befalls human beings. It brings death and destruction, disease and starvation, poverty, and ruin in its wake.

One has only to look back to the havoc that was wrought in various countries not many years ago, in order to estimate the destructive effects of war. A particularly disturbing side of modern wars is that they tend to become global so that they may engulf the entire world.

But there are people who consider war as something grand and heroic and regard it as something that brings out the best in men, but this does not alter the fact that war is a terrible, dreadful calamity.

This is especially so now that a war will now be fought with atom bombs. Some people say war is necessary. A glance at the past history will tell that war has been a recurrent phenomenon in the history of nation.

No period in world history has been the devastating effects of war. We have had wars of all types long and short. In view of this it seems futile to talk of permanent and everlasting peace or to make plans for the establishment of eternal peace.

We have had advocates of non violence and the theory of the brotherhood of man. We have had the Buddha, Christ and Mahatma Gandhi. But in spite of that, weapons have always been used, military force has always been employed, clashes of arms have always occurred; war has always been waged.

War has indeed been such a marked feature of every age and period that it has come to be regarded As part of the normal life of nations. Machiavelli, the author of the known book, The Prince, defined peace as an interval between two wars Molise, the famous German field marshal declared war to be part of God’s world order.

Poets and prophets have dreamt of a millennium, a utopia in which war will not exist and eternal peace will reign on earth. But these dreams have not been fulfilled. After the Great War of 1914-18, it was thought that there would be no war for a long time to come and an institution called the League of Nations was founded as a safeguard against the outbreak of war.

The occurrence of another war (1939-45), however, conclusively proved that to think of an unbroken peace is to be unrealistic And that no institution or assembly can ever ensure the permanence of peace.

The League of Nations collapsed completely under the tensions and stresses created by Hitler. The United Nations Organization with all the good work that It has been doing is not proving as effective as was desired.

Large numbers of Wars, the most recent ones being the one in Vietnam, the other between India and Pakistan, or indo-china War, Iran-Iraq war or Arab Israel war, have been fought despite the UN. The fact of the matter is that fighting in a natural instinct in man.

When individuals cannot live always in peace, it is, indeed, too much to expect so many nations to live in a state of Eternal peace. Besides, there will always be wide differences of opinion between various nation, different angles of looking at matters that have international importance, radical difference in policy and ideology and these cannot be settled by mere discussions.

So resort to war becomes necessary in such circumstances. Before the outbreak of World War II, for instance, the spread of Communism in Russia created distrust and suspicion in Europe, democracy was an eyesore to Nazi Germany, British Conservatives were apprehensive of the possibility of Britain going Communist.

In short, the political ideology of one country being abhorrent to other times were certainly not conducive to the continuance of peace. Add to all this the traditional enemities between nations and international disharmony that have their roots in past history.

For example, Germany wished to avenge the humiliating terms imposed upon her at the conclusion of the war of 1914-18 and desired to smash the British Empire and establish an empire of her own. Past wounds, in fact, were not healed up and goaded it to take revenge.

A feverish arms race was going on between the hostile nations in anticipation of such an eventuality, and disarmament efforts were proving futile. The Indo-Pakistan war was fought over the Kashmir issue.

The war in Vietnam Was due to ideological differences. It also appears that if peace were to continue for a long period, people would become sick of the monotony of life and would seek war for a changed man is a highly dynamic creature and it seems that he cannot remain contented merely with works of peace-the cultivation of arts, the development of material comforts, the extension of knowledge, the means and appliances of a happy life.

He wants something thrilling and full of excitement and he fights in order to get an outlet for his accumulated energy. It must be admitted, too, that war Has its good side. It spurs men to heroism and self-sacrifice. It is an incentive to scientific research and development. War is obviously an escape from the lethargy of peace.

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