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In Wars of Law , Tanisha M. Fazal assesses the unintended consequences of the proliferation of the laws of war for the commencement, conduct, and conclusion of wars over the course of the past one hundred fifty years. Fazal outlines three main arguments: early laws of war favored belligerents, but more recent additions have constrained them; this shift may be attributable to a growing divide between lawmakers and those who must comply with international humanitarian law; and lawmakers have been consistently inattentive to how rebel groups might receive these laws. By using the laws of war strategically, Fazal suggests, belligerents in both interstate and civil wars relate those laws to their big-picture goals. Why have states stopped issuing formal declarations of war? Why have states stopped concluding formal peace treaties? Why are civil wars especially likely to end in peace treaties today? In addressing such questions, Fazal provides a lively and intriguing account of the implications of the laws of war.

Past studies conclude that a territorial integrity norm caused territorial conquest to decline sharply after 1945, virtually subsiding after 1975. However, using new and more comprehensive data on territorial conquest attempts, this study presents a revised history of conquest after 1945. Unlike attempts to conquer entire states, attempts to conquer parts of states remained far more common than previously recognized. More than conquest declined in frequency, its relationship with war evolved. Challengers attempting conquest before 1945 often initiated a war, then sought to occupy large territories. Today, challengers more often seize small regions, then attempt to avoid war. Adopting this strategy, the fait accompli, challengers increasingly came to target territories with characteristics that reduce the risk of provoking war—such as a low population and the absence of a defending military garrison—but challengers nonetheless take a calculated gamble. In part because seizures of smaller territories with such characteristics have not declined, the operative constraint appears to be against war-prone aggression, not territorial revision. The evolution of conquest is a symptom of war's decline, not its cause. Most of the evidence that the territorial integrity norm suppressed conquest or war withers under investigation with new data. Attempts to get away with seizing small pieces of territory are likely to be a defining element of the twenty-first-century international security landscape.

Contemporary studies of conflict have adopted approaches that minimize the importance of negotiation during war or treat it as a constant and mechanical activity. This is strongly related to the lack of systematic data that track and illustrate the complex nature of wartime diplomacy. I address these issues by creating and exploring a new daily-level data set of negotiations in all interstate wars from 1816 to the present. I find strong indications that post-1945 wars feature more frequent negotiations and that these negotiations are far less predictive of war termination. Evidence suggests that increased international pressures for peace and stability after World War II, especially emanating from nuclear weapons and international alliances, account for this trend. These original data and insights establish a dynamic research agenda that enables a more policy-relevant study of conflict management, highlights a historical angle to conflict resolution, and speaks to the utility of viewing diplomacy as an essential dimension to understanding war.

We conduct a survey experiment to examine the effects of international compromise, war, and foreign government rhetoric on presidential approval. We find that, in certain conflicts, popular approval tracks fairness heuristics—leaders seeking to maximize voter approval prefer equitable divisions of disputed goods and are risk acceptant for divisions below this threshold. Moreover, aggressive rhetoric by a foreign leader increases domestic leaders' expected approval from war, decreases the value of compromise, and provides them with powerful incentives to fight harder. Thus, leaders motivated by popular approval have preferences that are inconsistent with the non-satiated, risk-averse preferences defined over shares of an objective good—that is, with those that much of the rationalist literature on conflict assumes. Fairness heuristics and the rhetorical framing of disputes during the conflict process may be at least as important as material factors in understanding why some disputes result in war.

Extant scholarship on interstate war and conflict resolution predominantly utilizes formal models, case studies, and statistical models with wars as the unit of analysis to assess the impact of battlefield activity on war duration and termination. As such, longstanding views of war have not been tested systematically using intraconflict measures, and deeper studies of war dynamics have also been hampered. I address these gaps by creating and introducing the Interstate War Battle (IWB) dataset, which captures the outcomes and dates of 1,708 battles across 97 interstate wars since 1823. This article describes the sources used to create these data, provides definitions, and presents descriptive statistics for the basic battle data and several daily-level measures constructed from them. I then use the data to test the implications of two major theoretical perspectives on conflict termination: the informational view, which emphasizes convergence in beliefs through battlefield activity; and Zartman’s ripeness theory, which highlights costly stalemates in fighting. I find suggestive evidence for informational views and little support for ripeness theory: new battlefield outcomes promote negotiated settlements, while battlefield stagnation undermines them. The IWB dataset has significant implications, highlights future research topics, and motivates a renewed research agenda on the empirical study of conflict.

Military successes present war leaders with a choice between maintaining their existing aims and strategy and changing one or the other to extend their gains or make the war cheaper. \"Staying the course\" minimizes the risk of failure but also foregoes possible gains. Making a change increases the risk of failure but leaves nothing on the table. I argue that emotional responses—particularly contentment and joy—account for leaders' preferences for changing or maintaining their approach to war. Joy, elicited by novel good news, makes change more likely because it leads to the derogation of risks and obstacles. Contentment, elicited by expected good news, tends to produce resistance to change. I substantiate my claims through World War II-era case studies from Japan and the United States.

This article examines the relationship between third-party actors and the intentional targeting of non-combatants in interstate war. It argues that war participants kill fewer civilians in war when their expectation of third-party punishment is high. Combatants will anticipate a high likelihood of third-party sanctions when their alliance and trade networks are dominated by third parties that have ratified international treaties prohibiting the intentional targeting of non-combatants. The study hypothesizes that war combatants kill fewer civilians in war as the strength of ratifiers within their alliance and trade networks increases. Quantitative tests on a dataset of all interstate wars from 1900–2003 provide strong statistical and substantive support for this hypothesis.

The war in Ukraine is the biggest, bloodiest and longest war in Europe since 1945. Its initial stage holds similarities with several other armed conflicts and wars in the last 50 years on Cyprus and in the territories of the former Soviet Union and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). Among the cases in exYugoslavia, greatest similarity is seen with the war in Croatia (1991–1995). This conflict stemmed from two almost simultaneous breakdowns of multinational ‘socialist federations’ and their communist regimes that were similar in structure. The dissimilarity of the second stage of the war in Ukraine and the war in Croatia is primarily due to the processes of NATO and EU enlargement coupled with the USA’s policy of using NATO enlargement and Ukraine as tools to harm and weaken Russia. The conflict about Ukraine and the promise of NATO membership given to it has become an indirect war between Russia and the US-led West, where Ukraine is the West’s proxy and the main victim of the war. Like what occurred in Croatia in August 1995 and in Azerbaijan in September 2023, the final outcome of the war in Ukraine will be decided on the battlefield, not around a diplomatic table. Still, it will be very different from that in Croatia. Responsibility for the war in Ukraine and its consequences must be shared between the two direct belligerents, the co-responsible USA, and other NATO members. Keywords: Ukraine, Russia, Croatia, USA, NATO, internal war, interstate war

With a lower risk of casualties and a high degree of precision, air power is an attractive foreign policy tool to powerful states that have increasingly relied upon it in recent years. This paper presents newly collected data on uses and effectiveness of air power in interstate wars from 1914 to 2003. The dataset provides more complete and comparable cases that can be useful in answering questions of not only the coercive effectiveness of air power, but also of the decision to use air power in conflict, of ethical concerns arising from the use of air power, and of the interaction of air power with other military and foreign policy tools. In addition to introducing the dataset and discussing trends in the data, a preliminary empirical application is provided, re-examining the relationship between strategy and air power effectiveness.

The democratic peace literature has convincingly shown that democracies do not fight other democracies. Theoretical explanations of this empirical phenomenon often claim that the citizenry in democracies prefers peaceful resolution of interstate conflicts. Still, there is a dearth of studies exploring the public’s preferences and values directly. We seek to rectify this by investigating, in a novel way, the relationship between regime type and citizens’ bellicosity. A comprehensive multilevel research design is employed, with data spanning 72 countries over the period of 1981–2008. This enables us to test one of the theoretical mainstays of the democratic peace thesis, viz., that regime type helps shape individuals’ attitudes toward war-fighting. Our results lend special support to normative democratic peace theory: Citizens of democracies are significantly more pacifistic than citizens of non-democracies. This result upholds when we rigorously control for other relevant factors, including specific characteristics of individuals and rival theoretical explanations.