NSCC/SA: Strategies of Violence, Tools of Peace, and Changes in War Termination

This award was funded through the Social and Behavioral Dimensions of National Security, Conflict, and Cooperation competition, a joint venture between NSF and the Department of Defense.

This project seeks to understand four critical recent changes in the process and outcomes of war termination in both civil and interstate armed conflicts: military victory has become less common, formal peace treaties have become less common in interstate war but more common in civil war, military and political outcomes of war have diverged, and clauses of war guilt are much more common today. These changes have been largely ignored by scholars, but may do more to hinder than to help the long-term prospects for peace. This project examines the implications of changing strategies of violence for war termination. The investigators will derive and test hypotheses linking strategies and conditions such as guerrilla warfare, international intervention, peacekeeping, and laws regulating the conduct of war to the process and outcomes of war termination. This research will be based on an unusually comprehensive dataset that spans two centuries with extensive and comparable measures for both interstate and civil wars.