Condemning or Condoning the Perpetrators? International Humanitarian Law and Attitudes Toward Wartime Violence

Abstract

What are the implications of international law for attitudes toward wartime violence? Existing research offers contrasting views on the ability of international legal principles to shape individual preferences, especially in difficult situations involving armed conflict. Employing cross-national survey evidence from several conflict and post-conflict countries, this article contributes to this debate by evaluating the relationship between individuals’ knowledge of the laws of war and attitudes toward wartime conduct. Findings show that exposure to international law is associated with a significant reduction in support for wartime abuses, though the results are stronger for prisoner treatment than for targeting civilians. Analysis further reveals that legal principles generate different expectations of conduct than alternative value systems that are rooted in strong moral foundations regarding the impermissibility of wartime abuses. The findings are relevant for understanding the relationship between international law and domestic actors, and how legal principles relate to the resort to violence.

Attitudes toward the Use of Force: Instrumental Imperatives, Moral Principles, and International Law

“…This subjection of warfare to law has gone hand in hand with U.S. policy makers' increasingly referring to international law in order to render the use of force acceptable to the U.S. public (Brunnee and Toope 2012;Nuñez-Mietz 2018). Ample experimental research has established that framing the use of force as legal increases U.S. public support (Chaudoin 2014;Chilton and Versteeg 2016;Tomz 2008;Wallace 2013Wallace , 2019 This is an important finding. However, it remains unclear whether it is the content of particular rules that appeals to respondents or the fact that these rules are declared legal (Berinsky 2007;Kreps and Wallace 2016).…”

Breaking Bad? How Survey Experiments Prime Americans for War Crimes

“…On the other hand, researchers invested in valid findings must aim to avoid affecting our subject matter in either direction as it is being measured. Further, we would argue that researchers like ourselves also have a moral obligation to avoid influencing public opinion in ways that are likelier to remove constraints against war crimesbecause we know that it is partly citizens' belief in the illegality of certain acts that reduces support for them (Wallace 2019). This perhaps applies most of all to researchers such as ourselves who study mass violence, much as war correspondents are argued to have particular ethical obligations to report from conflict zones in ways that disseminate facts while avoiding the pitfalls by which the media can be used to inflame conflict situations (Galtung and Ruge 1965;Lynch 2015;Lynch and McGoldrick 2005).…”

“…For our part, in future studies that we conduct on attitudes toward international law, we pledge to provide all respondents, even those in the control group, the correct information on the status of international law-after they answer the question of interest to the dependent variable. Since earlier research shows that accurate knowledge of war law reduces support for war crimes, this approach would potentially counteract any conditioning effect of the experiment (Carpenter and Montgomery 2020;Wallace 2019). 12 In short, given the potential for such experiments to misinform and mislead, we will aim to follow standard IRB practice and disciplinary ethical guidelines for experiments involving deception-even when deception is inadvertent rather than intentional (Yanow and Schwartz-Shea 2016).…”

“…Our findings are troubling: Americans who answered the Iran Scenario question, were more likely than others to subsequently express a belief that directly and intentionally attacking the civilian population is sometimes permissible under the laws of war, even if they opposed the strike. This finding is important because it is belief in the constraints of international law that offset Americans' willingness to target civilians (Wallace 2019). Respondents are also more likely to prefer to engage in war crimes if told that most other Americans would do so, suggesting that the circulation of such survey results by the media could amplify the erosion of prohibition norms.…”