Misfortunes of War: Press and Public Reactions to Civilian Deaths in Wartime

Larson, Eric B.; Savych, Bogdan

doi:10.7249/mg441

Cited by 26 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 4 publications

(4 reference statements)

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“…When it comes to civilian casualties, some readers might have an additional issue in mind: is such information made readily available in the real world? To answer 'no' would be to overstate the point, as is confirmed by online appendix A1 (see also Larson and Savych, 2006). Nonetheless, the other point raised by our content analysis is that, even where civilian casualties are mentioned in news coverage, the numbers are often disputed or left unreported.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Civilian Casualties and Public Support for Military Action: Experimental Evidence

Johns

Davies

2017

Journal of Conflict Resolution

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(RES-062-23-1952) as part of a project to investigate 'Foreign policy attitudes and support for war among the British public'. We gratefully acknowledge the support from both funders, and the guidance we received from colleagues in designing the surveys. The research in this article has been presented at the 2012 Annual Convention of the International Studies Association and at seminars at Nuffield College, the University of Essex and the University of Lancaster. In all cases, we thank participants for comments and suggestions. 2At the height of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, civilians risked being the forgotten casualties. They received much less attention from the same American media which give extensive and sympathetic coverage to the deaths, repatriation and funerals of military casualties (Althaus et al., 2014). They were downplayed by the same British leaders who solemnly read out tributes to fallen service personnel in Parliament. And military strategists in both countries favored a doctrine of air strikes which, despite advances in precision munitions, still risks foreign civilian lives in significant numbers in order to minimize the risks to their own troops.In more recent years, however, civilian casualties have begun to receive more attention. This is partly due to the strategic choice mentioned above: with action increasingly taken via unmanned drones, military casualties have become much rarer while civilian death tolls continue to mount. The need to protect civilians has also become central to the case for military action in a context like Syria (e.g. Landay et al., 2015;Wright, 2015), even if the risks to US and British military remain equally central to the case against intervention.Given the earlier imbalance, it is not surprising that civilian casualties were largely overlooked in research -much of it triggered by Iraq and Afghanistan -on the drivers of public support for war. Since military casualties were more conspicuous in public debate, it made sense that they would have a greater influence on citizens' reactions, and in turn that researchers would focus on military casualty aversion. Now that civilian casualties are becoming more prominent in media coverage of conflict, however, a question arises about public reactions. Would we expect reporting of foreign civilian deaths to have a dampening effect on public support for military action? Or did media and academic focus on military casualties reflect the public's own preoccupation with its own servicemen and women over foreign civilians? Answering this question would make both an empirical and a normative contribution. It would improve our understanding of the conditions under which citizens are prepared to support military action. It would also tell us whether support for force is systematically higher than it would be if civilian deaths become a more central presence in elite discussion and media coverage of military action. 3The scant existing evidence makes it hard to assess the strength of public reactions to civilian casualt...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Civilian Casualties and Public Support for Military Action: Experimental Evidence

Johns

Davies

2017

Journal of Conflict Resolution

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“…The size of the effect of civilian casualties was similar in size to that of military casualties and as large as many of the “principal policy objectives” such as foreign policy restraint and humanitarian intervention that Eichenberg stresses. Larson and Savych () suggest one explanation for this finding. Their study also finds that Americans attach considerable importance to avoiding civilian casualties.…”

Section: Precision Weapons Civilian Casualties and Support For The mentioning

confidence: 94%

Precision Weapons, Civilian Casualties, and Support for the Use of Force

Walsh

2014

Political Psychology

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Precision weapons such as drones have become important elements of the military strategies of the United States and other countries. How does the use of precision weapons influence public support for the use of force?The public is averse to casualties, mission failure, and collateral damage. I argue that precision weapons increase the salience and importance of avoiding civilian harm. Individuals adopt their expectations about the outcomes of using these weapons and have lower tolerance for attacks that result in civilian deaths. This proposition is consistent with the results of two survey experiments. In the first, the possibility of civilian casualties leads to larger declines in support for the use of force than do military casualties or mission failure. In the second, respondents primed with information about an attack with precision weapons exhibited less tolerance for civilian harm than those primed with other weapons systems, despite the fact that the outcomes described to all respondents were identical.

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“…57 Following the subsequent Battle of Mogadishu in October 1993 when 18 US troops were killed and footage broadcast of two being dragged through the streets, several prominent journalists and policymakers blamed the US media for getting the US military involved. 63 We live with 1,000s of road casualties, and deaths from drinking and smoking. 59 The fear of 'another Mogadishu' -of a 'tragedy' of lives lost without enhancing the national interestmeant preventing such images (and thereby constraining policy) because of a fear of what more images would represent.…”

Section: Looking Past the Imagementioning

confidence: 99%

Images as weapons of war: representation, mediation and interpretation

O’Loughlin¹

2010

Rev. Int. Stud.

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Belief that images have become the critical ‘weapon’ in contemporary warfare has enjoyed great currency in the past decade. This belief rests upon certain understandings about the impact visual footage of terrorist attacks or still images of the abuse of prisoners have had on public opinion in different parts of the world. These understandings, in turn, reflect simplistic models of representation and mediation in which citizens are assumed to know little of the ‘true’ situation of war but are easily and primarily shocked by unexpected graphic images. To explore these relationships, this article presents analysis of original research from a three-year study of military practitioners, media coverage of security events, and collaborative audience ethnography across towns and cities in the UK. While military practitioners feel frustration that communicating with publics is ‘like talking to a brick wall’, analysis of audience interpretations of Abu Ghraib and other events suggests varied and negotiated understandings in which audiences account for processes of mediation as well as reflect on the event being represented. Images cannot necessarily be considered primary to explaining how an individual interprets a news story, and, to the extent and manner in which images do matter, this often depends on what longer historical narratives such images are situated within – by media or audiences themselves. No image is intrinsically shocking. For policymakers concerned with public diplomacy, for journalists and for audiences themselves there is a need for further research into the role images – Weber's ‘visual language’ – play amid today’s conditions of diffused war.

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Misfortunes of War: Press and Public Reactions to Civilian Deaths in Wartime

Cited by 26 publications

References 4 publications

Civilian Casualties and Public Support for Military Action: Experimental Evidence

Civilian Casualties and Public Support for Military Action: Experimental Evidence

Precision Weapons, Civilian Casualties, and Support for the Use of Force

Images as weapons of war: representation, mediation and interpretation

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