War-weariness and Cumulative Effects: Victors, Vanquished, and Subsequent Interstate Intervention

Jeffrey Pickering
Additional contact information
Jeffrey Pickering: Department of Political Science, Kansas State University

Journal of Peace Research, 2002, vol. 39, issue 3, 313-337

Abstract: It is often assumed that policymakers and populations grow weary from war. The costs associated with the use of military force are thought to become readily apparent in the wake of devastating conflicts, and support for military forays is expected to erode as a result. Although the notion is compelling, to date, empirical studies of war-weariness have yielded mixed results. This article re-examines war-weariness theory. It focuses upon a recent, but largely neglected, refinement in the theory as well as insights gleaned from the foreign-policy learning literature. The theory is recast with emphasis placed on the collective weight of consecutive war wins and consecutive war losses. War-weariness is postulated to follow a series of war defeats. A series of victories is assumed to produce the opposite effect. Bolstered by past success, decisionmakers in states that have a run of war wins should use military force more frequently. To test the article's hypotheses, time series, cross-section negative binomial and OLS regressions of 66 states for the period 1946-96 are employed. Interstate military intervention is the type of force analyzed. Intervention initiations are found to not only increase as states win successive wars, they also increase as war losses mount. This U-shaped relationship holds for large-scale interventions as well. Although these results provide little empirical support for a cumulative approach to war-weariness, they do suggest that a state's war record affects decisions to intervene militarily. In the realm of low-scale military force, the weight of the past does affect policymakers and is important for understanding contemporary policy.

Date: 2002
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://jpr.sagepub.com/content/39/3/313.abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:joupea:v:39:y:2002:i:3:p:313-337

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Peace Research from Peace Research Institute Oslo
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().