Wars of aggression and false flags

.

Chapter 5 in The Economics of War, 2019, pp 88-105 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Wars of aggression are triggered by factors such as exceptionalism, greed, nationalism, unleashed capitalism, blind patriotism, the desire for dominance and collectivism. Since wars of aggression are illegal according to international law, the aggressors justify them on the grounds of protecting civilians in the target country and in terms of self-defence involving pre-emptive strikes. The self-defence pretext can be sold more easily if a false flag attack is staged to demonstrate that the target country or parties related to it initiated an attack when the attack is staged by the country planning a war of aggression. A false flag operation can be costly, both in terms of blood and treasure, but for the aggressor it is a price worth paying to achieve the ultimate objective of benefiting war profiteers.

Keywords: Economics and Finance; Politics and Public Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/9781788978514.00011.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

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:elg:eechap:18828_5

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().