War Attitudes Research Articles

What I don't know can hurt you: Collateral combat damage seems more acceptable when bystander victims are unidentified.

Five experiments (N = 2,204) examined responses to a realistic moral dilemma: a military pilot must decide whether to bomb a dangerous enemy target, also killing a bystander. Few people endorsed bombing when the bystander was an innocent civilian; however, when the bystander's identity was unknown, over twice as many people endorsed the bombing. Follow-up studies tested boundary conditions and found the effect to extend beyond modern-day conflicts in the Middle East, showing a similar pattern of judgment for a fictional war. Bombing endorsement was predicted by attitudes towards total war, the theory that there should be no distinction between military and civilian targets in wartime conflict. Bombing endorsement was lower for UK compared to US participants due to differences in total war attitudes. This work has implications for conflicts where unidentified bystanders are common by revealing a potentially deadly bias: people often assume unidentified bystanders are guilty unless proven innocent.

TRENDS: Diploma divide: Educational attainment and the realignment of the American electorate

The divide between college graduates and non-college graduates is an increasingly important political cleavage. In this paper, I document the rise of the diploma divide on the micro and macro levels. First, I use ANES and CES data to assess the relationships between educational attainment, partisanship, and vote choice. I find that post-2000, educational attainment is an increasingly strong predictor of partisanship and, in turn, vote choice. I demonstrate that differences in racial and culture war attitudes between college graduates and non-graduates drive the diploma divide. I then show that the increasing salience of education at the individual level has reshaped the macro-level political alignment. Between 2000 and 2020, the percentage of a county’s population with a BA is one of the strongest predictors of changes in vote share, with highly educated counties becoming more Democratic and less educated counties becoming more Republican. Finally, I demonstrate that county-level educational context conditions the effect of degree-holding on individual-level behavior. Having a college education is a stronger predictor of Democratic partisanship in counties where a larger proportion of the population holds a college degree. Overall, these results demonstrate the diploma divide is one of the dominant political cleavages in contemporary American politics.

The role of social psychological processes in journalist's war and peace journalism attitudes

Previous studies have shown factors including media ownership, socio-political censorship, ethnic division and, the lack of professional training as obstacles to practising Peace Journalism principles. This research explored how social psychological processes including intergroup contact and outgroup attitudes influence Peace Journalism attitudes. Turkish Cypriot (TC) and Greek Cypriot (GC) journalists living in the divided and conflicted island of Cyprus participated. Findings highlighted that quantity and quality of contact are positively correlated with positive feelings, common ingroup identity (CII) and Peace Journalism attitudes and negatively correlated with intergroup anxiety and War Journalism (WJ) attitudes. Results shed light on the benefits of positive and frequent contact among journalists and with outgroup members that enhance positive social psychological processes as well as Peace Journalism attitudes. By recognizing the importance of intergroup contact, Peace Journalism attitudes can be improved by decreasing social-psychological tensions and contribute to reconciliation, peace-building processes, and sustainable peace in conflicted societies.

‘In the Ráth Camp, rugby or soccer would not have been tolerated by the prisoners’: Irish Civil War attitudes to sport, 1922-3

ABSTRACT Traditionally, the historiography of sport in Ireland has largely been dominated by writings on the Gaelic Athletic Association. This phenomenon is even more pronounced when one considers the historiography of sport during the Irish Revolution (1912–1923). Owing no doubt to the numerous intertwining relationships between the GAA’s codes, its administrators, players, and the campaign for Irish independence this is hardly surprising. However, more recently historians have begun to shed light on some lesser-known connections between non-Gaelic games and the movement for Irish independence. This article focuses specifically on the period known as the Irish Civil War (1922–1923) and examines the political and cultural significance of sport during the fraternal conflict.

The translation of Watchmen: a job for superheroes?

This case study explores the many challenges that an audiovisual translator must face, conceiving translation as a means for diffusing culture. For that purpose, a case study is carried out on the Spanish translation of the 2019 series Watchmen, created by Damon Lindelof. Subtitles have been chossen for this analysis, due to the increasing popularity of this modality in Spain, as in other dubbing countries where a coexistence of dubbing and subtitling has been established (Perego et al., 2014).The study delves into the main translation difficulties posed by this series and is based on an interview held with the translator. In first place, Watchmen is a portray of the contemporary social and political society, digging into themes such as white supremacy, racism, war, and cultural attitudes. These deep historical roots in society may cause a cultural gap that must be overcome by the translator (Botella, 2017).Moreover, references to the comic are not only present in the dialogues —to be conveyed by the subtitler— but also in the visual and auditive signs that converge to create a multisemiotic complex. This study presents a categorisation of the challenges found and the solutions employed, to prove that the translator must be aware of the multiple codes of significance and acquire certain film knowledge. Therefore, to achieve difference and create from the ingenious mind, the translator must perform as a filmmaker or a cineliterate film viewer, rather than from a linguistic mind (McClarty, 2012).

Doomed to Repetition? Havana, Washington, Miami, and Moscow, from the Cold War to Today

This paper offers a broad historical overview of US economic sanctions against Cuba, starting with the imposition of the partial trade embargo on 19 October 1960, taking the story up to the present day. Additionally, it develops a comprehensive survey of the numerous scholarly and policy debates which closely follow the changes in United States’ post-Cold War attitudes and actions towards its southern neighbor and which demonstrate the thinking behind centers of power in Washington and Miami related to US’ Cuba policies. The paper also glances over the latest developments under Cuba’s new President Miguel Díaz-Canel and the notable return to the harsh Cold War rhetoric, which transcends the boundaries of the localized Washington-Miami-Havana axis of the past thirty years. Referring to historic patterns, the paper concludes that the conjecture between the recent complication in the US-Cuba relations and Moscow’s ambition to reinstate its erstwhile position as an unavoidable international factor would afford Havana with the opportunity to reclaim once again the dubious honor of becoming one of the focal points in the renewed competitive coexistence between the United States and Russia.

‘Thou shalt not kill’: a survey experiment on the effects of moral primes on war attitudes in Turkey

ABSTRACT Through an original survey experiment on a nationally representative sample of the Turkish population, this article demonstrates that respondents who are primed on the immorality of the use of force against others are substantially more willing to support only conditional military intervention in a civil war in another country. Further statistical analyses reveal that the activation of moral beliefs largely depends on the degree of approval of the moral statement and previously held foreign policy predispositions on isolationism. These findings contribute to the research on priming and public opinion regarding the use of force in general and, in particular, interventions in civil wars.

Unearthing the Holocaust on the Russian Front

Unearthing the Holocaust on the Russian Front Joshua Rubenstein Omer Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz. 398 pp. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018. ISBN-13 978-1451684537. $30.00. Father Patrick Desbois, In Broad Daylight: The Secret Procedures behind the Holocaust by Bullets. 281 pp. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2018. ISBN-13 978-1628728576. $25.99. The Nazi penchant for violence never fails to outstrip our collective imagination. Even now, with all we have unearthed and learned, the burden of such knowledge is unfathomable. The details challenge the limits of nightmarish horror: gas chambers; mobile gas vans; open air massacres engulfing millions of innocent Jews, Poles, Roma, and homosexuals, to mention four of the most prominent categories of victims. Yet among educated people who have some idea of the scale of the Holocaust there has long been an unbalanced understanding of how the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews evolved to engulf Jewish communities throughout Europe. The fate of Anne Frank, a teenage girl who together with members of her family tried to hide in an attic apartment in Amsterdam, has come to symbolize the fate of the Jews: targeted for persecution, they were chased down, herded into cattle cars from cities and towns in Western and Central Europe, then shipped to killing centers in Poland, where they were murdered on an industrial scale in places like Auschwitz, Treblinka, Chełmno, Sobibór, Majdanek, and Bełżec. Anne Frank and Auschwitz—if you can recognize these names and what they represent, then you can claim at least some idea of what happened. But what about German-occupied Soviet territory? Did the Nazis send their victims to Poland as well? How many Soviet Jews were captured and [End Page 409] killed? For decades, the Holocaust on the Eastern Front was an opaque dimension to the catastrophe: Soviet archives were closed to Western and even Soviet students of history; Cold War attitudes inhibited recognition of the role of the Red Army in defeating the Wehrmacht, the full-scale suffering of the Soviet people, and the specific fate of Soviet Jews. It hardly mattered that the murder of 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar (by the killers’ own count!) outside Kiev in September 1941—three months and a week after the German invasion of Soviet territory on June 22—was widely recognized because of the poem by Evgenii Evtushenko and the symphony by Dmitrii Shostakovich. It is necessary to understand that the open-air massacre at Babi Yar was one of thousands of such atrocities and that, in fact, the mass murder of the Jews began with the German invasion of Soviet territory. Many students of history regard the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942, when the Nazi party leaders informed the High Command of their plans to annihilate the Jews of Europe, as an initial step toward the mass killing. But by that time, the Einsatzgruppen (mobile shooting units), which followed the Wehrmacht into occupied Soviet territory, along with numerous other German police units and local collaborators, succeeded in killing nearly a million Jews. Over such an immense area, under the conditions of active warfare—the Soviet regime was the only government in a German-occupied country in Europe that continued to resist—the Germans decided it was not practicable to send the victims to the killers; it made more sense in their demented minds to send the killers to the victims, where, like locusts descending on a wheat field, the killers could assemble and murder the Jews wherever they found them. ________ There is little in the personal background of Father Patrick Desbois to suggest the direction that life has taken him. Born in 1955, raised among farmers and shopkeepers in central France, he initially pursued mathematics at Dijon University before a personal revelation led him away from atheism. He taught mathematics at a high school in Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) and volunteered for Mother Teresa in Calcutta before returning to France to enter a seminary; for several years, he was a parish priest. But a family memory always haunted him: his beloved Grandfather Claudius had been deported by the Nazis...

Patrick O’Farrell and the Making of Harry Holland: Militant Socialist

Patrick O'Farrell's Harry Holland: Militant Socialist (1964) grew from a doctoral thesis completed in the mid-1950s, at the Australian National University, at the height of the Cold War. The circumstances of its creation are important to understanding the assumptions upon which the biography depends. Of Irish Catholic descent and from the Grey Valley, the birthplace of New Zealand's first wave of revolutionary industrial unionism, O'Farrell had observed first-hand the unravelling of this radical and socialist impulse in the late 1940s and early 1950s as Cold War attitudes enveloped the political world. Interpreting the political career of Harry Holland from within the more intense Cold-War-Canberra environment brought a sharper edge to O'Farrell's biography. The extent of this influence is made clear in Manning Clark's detailed account of the oral examination of O'Farrell's PhD preserved in his personal papers. A reassessment of Harry Holland's role as leader from this perspective suggests a need to revisit the historical debate about the relationship between socialism and the New Zealand Labour Party.

Patrick O'Farrell and the Making of <em>Harry Holland: Militant Socialist</em>

Patrick O’Farrell’s Harry Holland: Militant Socialist (1964) grew from a doctoral thesis completed in the mid-1950s, at the Australian National University, at the height of the Cold War. The circumstances of its creation are important to understanding the assumptions upon which the biography depends. Of Irish Catholic descent and from the Grey Valley, the birthplace of New Zealand’s first wave of revolutionary industrial unionism, O’Farrell had observed first-hand the unravelling of this radical and socialist impulse in the late 1940s and early 1950s as Cold War attitudes enveloped the political world. Interpreting the political career of Harry Holland from within the more intense Cold-War-Canberra environment brought a sharper edge to O’Farrell’s biography. The extent of this influence is made clear in Manning Clark’s detailed account of the oral examination of O’Farrell’s PhD preserved in his personal papers. A reassessment of Harry Holland’s role as leader from this perspective suggests a need to revisit the historical debate about the relationship between socialism and the New Zealand Labour Party.

Moral Power: How Public Opinion on Culture War Issues Shapes Partisan Predispositions and Religious Orientations

Party-driven and religion-driven models of opinion change posit that individuals revise their positions on culture war issues to ensure consonance with political and religious predispositions. By contrast, models of issue-driven change propose that public opinion on cultural controversies lead people to revise their partisan and religious orientations. Using data from four panel studies covering the period 1992–2012, we pit the party- and religion-based theories of opinion change against the issue-based model of change. Consistent with the standard view, party and religion constrain culture war opinion. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, but consistent with our novel theory, opinions on culture war issues lead people to revise their partisan affinities and religious orientations. Our results imply that culture war attitudes function as foundational elements in the political and religious belief systems of ordinary citizens that match and sometimes exceed partisan and religious predispositions in terms of motivating power.

War and Social Attitudes: Revisiting Consensus Views

We study the long-run effects of conflict on social attitudes, with World War II and Central and Eastern Europe as our setting. Earlier work has relied on self-reported measures of victimization, which are prone to endogenous misreporting. With our own survey-based measure, we replicate consensus findings linking victimization to increased political participation and civic engagement. Those findings collapse when tested instead with an objective measure of victimization based on historical reference material. Also, in a reversal of earlier short-run findings, we show that conflict breeds optimism in the long-run. Last, we shed doubt on another consensus by failing to provide evidence that conflict hinders trust.

Dancing with Knives: American Cold War Ideology in the Dances of West Side Story

In cultural studies today, there is emerging an interpretive revolution “from below” – that is, a radical reassessment of the politics of cultural forms, based on a recovery of the embodied and affective subject as the center of meaning-making. Making sense of dance performances is therefore methodologically important because of their particular ability to offer insight into these two aspects of subjectivity. As an artifact of Cold War American culture, Jerome Robbins’ choreography in the film West Side Story (1961) enforces an ideological distinction between legitimate and illegitimate forms of violence, through its portrayals of “cool” affect as a necessary disposition, and organized violence as a necessary evil. Our close analysis of the dances “Rumble” and “Cool” offers new insights into the affective “map” that provided the ideological foundation for American political theorists and policy makers in formulating their Cold War attitudes.

Religious Roots of War Attitudes in the United States: Insights from Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Persian Gulf

Existing scholarship regarding the impact of faith on foreign policy public opinion is divided on whether religious factors have any direct influence that is independent of political predispositions. I address this debate by analyzing the effect of religious background on attitudes toward the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Persian Gulf. Using American National Election Study data sets and a series of regression estimates, I find that the impact of religious factors—in terms of affiliation, attitudes on the Bible, and religious behavior—on perceptions toward each of the wars is rather indirect via political predispositions. The contribution of the piece lies in utilizing the Karlson, Holm, and Breen method to capture for the first time the exact scope of mediated effects for religious variables. In so doing, the study provides new insights on the patterns of interaction between religious and political factors shaping war-related attitudes.

The Reconciliation Attitudes of Former Child Soldiers in Northern Uganda

Introduction: While the reintegration processes of former child soldiers have been widely studied, little attention has been paid to their reconciliation attitudes, and in particular possible associations between these reconciliation attitudes and different risk factors. Therefore, this study examined reconciliation attitudes of formerly abducted adolescents living in post-conflict Northern Uganda, compared to non-conscripted youth, and possible associations with war-related stressful experiences and daily stressors. Methods: Four hundred forty five war-affected adolescents living in Northern Uganda were included, of which 214 (48.1%) were formerly abducted. All completed questionnaires on exposure to stressful war experiences (Stressful War Events Questionnaire), daily stressors (Adolescent Complex Emergency Daily Stressors Scale), and attitudes towards reconciliation (Openness to Reconciliation Questionnaire). Associations between several sociodemographics, war-related and daily stressors and reconciliation attitudes were explored using hierarchical linear regression models. Results: Findings showed that conscripted youth experienced more stressful war experiences and daily stressors than non-conscripted youth, and that they scored higher on the different reconciliation attitudes (goodwill attitudes, positive feelings towards the future, feelings of avoidance and of revenge). Having been recruited as child soldier was associated with more revenge attitudes compared to non-abducted children, and girls showed more goodwill attitudes than boys. Above, a larger exposure to war-related and daily stressors was associated with overall higher reconciliation attitudes, although particular interaction effects showed complex relationships here. Conclusion: Overall war-related stressors, daily stressors and, to a lesser degree, abduction status and gender are associated with reconciliation attitudes. The findings have implications for agencies working to promote postconflict recovery among war-affected children.

Mothers unite!: organizing for workplace flexibility and the transformation of family life

1. American Mothers, American Troubles2. Power in Numbers3. Why Join?4. Do Mommy War Attitudes Prevent Organizing?5. Workplace Flexibility Options6. Are We in a Movement Now? Can We Get There?7. Mothers Need Leadership TooAppendix: Interview Research Methodology Notes Index

Biggles sees red: Saving Australia from the communist menace

James Bigglesworth, known as ‘Biggles’, is a children’s fictional character created by the English author Captain W. E. Johns in the 1930s. The ‘Biggles’ books became some of the most popular children’s titles of the twentieth century. Biggles had adventures worldwide, but after World War II his adversaries were often communists. These stories reflect Cold War tensions, and many explore issues that are directly pertinent to Australian readers, including Korea, China and even a story set in Australia itself – where Biggles was particularly popular – in which Biggles thwarts a planned communist uprising involving Aborigines. This article explores the extent to which the books were influential in shaping Cold War attitudes during the 1950s and 1960s, in light of Johns’ expressed intentions when writing the books.

Child-Sized History: Fictions of the Past in U.S. Classrooms by Sara L. Schwebel (review)

Reviewed by: Child-Sized History: Fictions of the Past in U.S. Classrooms by Sara L. Schwebel Elizabeth D. Blum Child-Sized History: Fictions of the Past in U.S. Classrooms. By Sara L. Schwebel. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2011. xi + 255 pp. $34.95 paper. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter left quite an impression on young Sara Schwebel. She and her friends reenacted bits and pieces of the dramatic pioneer story after their third-grade teacher read the story aloud to them. Certainly, Schwebel, now the author of Child-Sized History, is not alone in remembering the impact and connection of these books on a child’s impression of history. Schwebel’s carefully researched, meticulous book documents the pedagogical problems of historical fiction for children, and also presents solutions to encourage historical thinking and analysis. Child-Sized History skillfully traces the threads of historiography, pedagogy, and education policy in the late twentieth century, focusing on the decades since 1980. Trade books became “safe” pedagogical choices in the 1980s, due to the possibility of multiple interpretations and conservative values. In addition, they seemed to fulfill the necessity of promoting multiculturalism within schools, a requirement for federal funding. Praised for their ability to help students identify with characters and causes in the past, these books were also singled out by librarians as containing reliable historical information. Unfortunately, teachers consequently neglected the fact that the “historical narrative [in these stories] has been constructed by a particular person at a particular moment in time,” often for a particular reason (p. 12). Since historical fiction fills a niche in multiculturalism education, Schwebel focuses on three topics frequently associated with those pedagogical goals: Native Americans, war (specifically the American Revolution), and African Americans (especially slavery). Portrayals of Native Americans abound in children’s literature, yet Schwebel notes that authors tend to rely on stereotypical tropes and use Native Americans more as a way to comment on the present rather than as a way to focus on their culture in its own right. For example, Conrad Richter’s The Light in the Forest (1953) fits squarely in with Cold War attitudes emphasizing Native Americans and the West as antidotes to prevailing [End Page 399] fears about communism. In the 1980s, John Reynolds Gardiner’s Stone Fox (1980) reflects white fears of politically engaged tribes and loss of property just as it tells the story of a boy who competes in a dogsled race. Stories of slavery and African Americans face similar issues with stereotyping. In addition, Schwebel notes that even books describing racism as a societal problem locate the solution within white agency and action, minimizing African American self-determination. It is difficult to find points of contention with Schwebel’s work, although a longer look at the themes in children’s literature and historical fiction complicates her post–World War II picture. Schwebel found three thematic periods with the American Revolution books: The first, during the 1940s and 1950s, stressed war as patriotic and moral and pressed for “American egalitarianism.” In the second, following the Vietnam War, authors stressed the misguided nature of war entirely, while the third, seemingly following postmodern theory, criticized the nature of war as well as the “deviousness of leaders promulgating them” (p. 84). But anti-war messages in children’s literature certainly do not begin with the 1970s. The Newbery awards have been given since 1922, and authors presented anti-war messages in several books in the wake of World War I and the raging isolationism of the 1920s. Schwebel, of course, clearly has not written a book claiming to examine exhaustively the trends in all award-winning children’s literature or historical fiction, yet a longer look gives her findings a clearer context. In addition, although Schwebel focuses on race as a category of analysis in two chapters, she omits probably the most thorny and contentious issue in children’s books—that of gender. Nowhere is the conservatism of historical fiction and award-winning literature more visible than in issues of gender. Teaching historical fiction that depicts times when women’s oppression was “normal” without some level of gender analysis can certainly reinforce stereotypical views of both...

On the (In)Compatibility of Attitudes Toward Peace and War

Although attitudes toward peace and war are usually treated as two opposite poles of one dimension, in this article we argue that they may represent two distinct dimensions. To investigate this idea, we developed and tested a new balanced measure, the Attitudes Toward Peace and War (APW) Scale, in three studies (N = 4,742) in the United States and Denmark. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses showed that attitudes toward peace and war formed two distinct, though negatively related, factors. Structural equation modeling showed that antecedents of attitudes toward peace included egalitarian ideological beliefs, the values of international harmony and equality, and empathic concern for others, and consequences included intentions to engage in peace‐related activities. On the other hand, antecedents of attitudes toward war included authoritarian ideological beliefs, the values of national strength and order, and less personal distress, and consequences included intentions to engage in warlike activities. Results also showed that political affiliation had an impact on the relationship between peace and war attitudes, with conservatives less likely to find the attitudes incompatible. The findings support the view that attitudes toward peace and war represent two distinct dimensions.

Popular Responses to the Atomic Bomb in China 1945-1955

The dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 is now recognized as a momentous event in world history, but at the time it did not make the headlines in one of China’s biggest selling and most influential newspapers. The Shanghai Shenbao covered the attack in a short article taken from a Tokyo news agency entitled ‘Formation of B29 planes attacks Hiroshima’ which was published on 8 August. The article reported that the small number of planes that attacked the city had done a great deal of damage and appeared to have used a new kind of bomb, and followed this with news of American air raids on several other Japanese cities. 1 The diary of Zheng Zhenduo, a writer living in Shanghai, confirms that the bombing of Hiroshima was not initially seen as a major event: he makes no references to the atomic bomb or air raids on Japan, whereas news of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria reached him the next day when the local market was thrown into chaos as a result. 2 A few days later the Shenbao printed President Truman’s speech explaining that the US had revealed its new weapon, the atomic bomb, but the Soviet invasion was the headline news. 3 Mao Zedong, in the Communist base in remote north-west China, announced that an atomic bomb cannot decide a war because it is the people’s struggle that matters. 4 In these first few days the atomic bomb was reported but was scarcely seen as a major event, and yet ten years later the government of the People’s Republic of China was depicting atomic energy as the basis for a new age in which food could be manufactured from water and children could travel to the moon. This paper looks at how Chinese people learned about the atomic bomb, how they reacted, and how this process was integrated with the transnational production of Cold War attitudes and changed from apocalyptic fear to scientific fantasy. 5