Humane Warfare

The christian historical consciousness: understanding war in twentieth‐century Europe

“…'When Wilson took the United States into the First World War he did so to end the reason for wars … In 1917, when the United States finally entered the war, it identified the defeat of Prussian militarism with a modernising project'. 72 To the extent that German militarism reemerged under Hitler, the same could be said about the Second World War. To allude to Patoč[ c c a r o n ] ka, it was peace that governed the Allied will to war -and indeed magnified it further.…”

Moral Dynamics andMilitary Operations

“…15 The former is much stronger than "respect for others": the latter equates with the desired "ethos", the spirit of the institution. Christopher Coker adds a third institutional moral resource, "moral imagination", 16 which is how people interpret the moral consequences of their actions, beyond the technical, legal and political, a term in other contexts recognised as hermeneutics. Moral imagination encapsulates the idealism, or rather aspiration, of Article One of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, "All human beings .…”

Casualties of war and sunk costs: Implications for attitude change and persuasion

“…For many years, it has been assumed that public support for any given military operation (e.g. an invasion of another country) should be inversely related to war casualties, such that higher loss of life is associated with less support for that operation, and vice versa (Coker, 2001;Gentry, 1998;Luttwak, 1996). As noted in a recent review by Gelpi, Feaver, and Reifler (2009), however, the actual picture is somewhat more complicated, as factors other than war casualties can determine public support for the war, such as likelihood of a successful outcome (Eichenberg, 2005).…”