Stanford University Press Blog

Challenging the Myth of Respecting Noncombatant Immunity

Risk management, warfare and the unmeasured gaps.

Yagil Levy

March 2008, Kirkuk, Iraq— U.S. Army Soldiers from the 3^rd Battalion 6th Field Artillery, 10th Mountain Division and Iraqi army soldiers working together. U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Samuel Bendet, CC BY 2.0. Via Flickr.

 

Studies show that states expose their own civilians and soldiers and enemy noncombatants to varying levels of risk. The most known is sociologist Martin Shaw's argument that the new Western way of war in the post-Vietnam era is characterized by the transfer of risk from soldiers to enemy noncombatants to reduce the military casualties and, by implication, the political costs stemming from the growing social sensitivity to casualties domestically.¹

However, scholarly gaps still remain. Among them, variations in risk transfer have not been sufficiently measured and therefore conclusions—whether militaries shift or take risks— are largely unsupported empirically.

I tried to partly bridge this and other gaps in my new book, Whose Life Is Worth More?. Using empirical data drawn from the US, Britain, and Israel—democracies involved in prolonged warfare, in which policy-makers confront domestic constraints on the use of force—the book shows how states develop hierarchies of risk and death, an ordered scale of value that they apply to the lives of their soldiers relative to the lives of their civilians and enemy noncombatants. In the most interesting circumstances, states compensate for the aversion to sacrifice by attempting to increase the legitimacy of using aggressive fire to shift risk from their own soldiers onto enemy civilians.

Transfer of risk occurs when forces attack the enemy from a distance by using excessive lethality through artillery, aircraft, drones, and other means, sometimes with limited discrimination between combatants and noncombatants. Alternatively, exercising greater caution to avoid civilian casualties, for example, by adopting more restrictive rules of engagement to better discriminate between combatants and noncombatants, will likely increase the danger to soldiers.

What Killed the ‘Civic Culture’?

How Americans shifted from civic optimism to political polarization.

DAVID H. KAMENS

Ballot Box circa 1870. Photography by the National Museum of American History - From the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution in the Vote: The Machinery of Democracy exhibit. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.

 

In 1963 the seminal political scientists Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba coined the term “civic culture” to describe the exceptional nature of American democracy. Compared to Western Europe, American democracy had features that were unusual. The following were essential features of this political culture: citizen optimism, confidence in government, generalized trust of other citizens, consensus between the parties on the policies of post war reconstruction of Europe, and civil discourse between political combatants. American citizens also exhibited different behavior: they were more engaged in their communities via volunteer activities, they exhibited less suspicion of others’ motives, and they were more involved in political discourse within their families and in the community. Women were also more engaged in familial political discussions. Voting rates were higher and “we’re all in it together” was a common sentiment.

In today’s U.S. political system polarization, distrust, lack of confidence in major institutions, and contentiousness have taken hold. Robert Putnam¹ described this phenomenon as “Bowling Alone,” a narrative in which citizens withdraw from communities into the private life of family and work. Earlier Morris Janowitz (1978; 1983) had pointed to declining civic consciousness, symbolized by the rejection of the ‘citizen-soldier’ model of citizenship, as a major social change. The decision to end the draft in 1973 and turn to an all-volunteer army signaled the death of this concept. In this view citizen rights then became a more compelling issue than citizen responsibilities. In both explanations the result is declining civic consciousness and patriotism.

Seymour Lipset² in 1996 offered an alternative to these perspectives. He focused on the return to normalcy that post- war policies and the reconstruction of Europe produced in the U.S. The result was a resurgence of classic American cultural narratives. American individualism revived from its slumbers in the ‘50s when elites emphasized collective action and social mobilization to combat Russian aggression; to reconstruct Europe; and to avoid nuclear annihilation. A more activist model of citizenship emerged. A revival of populism energized Americans, particularly younger generations, which gave rise to the turbulent ‘60s.

The Cycle of American Policy Reform

For Americans with disabilities home care is a right.

DAVID PETTINICCHIO

September 1997–  President Clinton, Vice President Gore, Chris Jennings and others participate in a Disability Community Outreach group meeting. Public Domain. Via the National Archives Catalog.

 

Democratic presidential candidate, Pete Buttigieg, recently unveiled a plan about how Americans with disabilities will fit into his “Medicare for all who want it.” This is a big deal. While healthcare reform is on everyone’s mind, candidates have been silent about how their plans will specifically address long-term community-based care for non-elderly people with disabilities. Millions of Americans currently depend on Medicaid funds in order to realize their civil right to live free from confining and isolating residential facilities.

Medicaid (not Medicare) is the largest payer of in-home care in the US but that doesn’t mean people with disabilities are entitled to it. As a result, cuts to Medicaid almost always lead to cuts to optional community-based care, not nursing home care which states are legally required to provide. 

Millions of Americans currently depend on Medicaid funds in order to realize their civil right to live free from confining and isolating residential facilities.

For years following the early 1980’s implementation of a waiver system meant to channel money from nursing homes to home care, both Democrats and Republicans recognized this institutional problem.  Despite numerous (often bipartisan) attempts to reform the bias favoring nursing home care, little real change has come about.  

The 1990s began with a great deal of promise as the ADA was supposed to clarify and extend disability rights, although it wasn’t immediately clear how the ADA alone could limit needless institutionalization without actual reforms to Social Security and Medicaid. Bill Clinton’s focus on healthcare reform signalled new political opportunities to legislators and activists. By then, growing inpatient and disillusioned with the political process, activists took to the streets demanding that long-term community-based care be part of the healthcare reform conversation – an eerily familiar cry as the disability community today is left wondering where they fit into proposed Democratic plans.

Introduction to Empire of Guns

How a Quaker gunmaker shaped Britain's gun industry.

PRIYA SATIA

The Death of General Mercer at the Battle of Princeton, January 3, 1777 by John Trumbull. Public Domain. Via the Yale University Art Gallery

We are proud to present an excerpt from the paperback edition of Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution by Priya Satia.

For more than 125 years, between 1688 and 1815, Britain was in a state of more or less constant war. The British gun industry was vital to the kingdom’s survival. In 1795, however, during war with revolutionary France, one of the British government’s regular gun suppliers, Samuel Galton Jr. of Birmingham, became the subject of scandal. Galton was a Quaker and a prominent, if not the prominent, gunmaker in England. The Quaker church, the Religious Society of Friends, had silently accepted his family business for nearly a century, but now suddenly demanded he abandon it. Their censure forced Galton to defend himself publicly. At the core of his defense were two related claims: first, that everyone in the Midlands, including fellow Quakers, in some way contributed to the state’s war-making powers; he was no worse than the copper supplier, the taxpayer, or the thousands of skilled workmen manipulating metal into everything from buttons to pistol springs for the king’s men. Second, like other metalware, guns were instruments of civilization as much as war, as essential to preserving private property in a society of increasingly mobile strangers as doorknobs and hinges. Galton saw himself as part of a military-industrial society in which there was little, if any, economic space outside the war machine and in which the paraphernalia of war doubled as the paraphernalia of civilization based on property. He took the Society of Friends’s easy tolerance of his family business up to 1795 as evidence in support of his case. Was there any merit in Galton’s view? Was Britain’s emerging industrial economy actually a military economy? And if it was, why did the Society of Friends suddenly find that reality intolerable in 1795?

The backdrop of the industrial revolution as told here is not the whims of calico fashion but the Nine Years’ War, the War of the Spanish Succession, the War of the Austrian Succession, the Seven Years’ War, the American War of Independence, and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

The story of Britain’s transformation from a predominantly agrarian, handicraft economy to one dominated by industry and machine manufacture—the commonly accepted story of the industrial revolution—is typically anchored in images of cotton factories and steam engines invented by unfettered geniuses. The British state has little to do in this version of the story. For more than two hundred years, that image has powerfully shaped how we think about stimulating sustained economic growth—development—the world over. But it is wrong: state institutions drove Britain’s industrial revolution in crucial ways. Galton was right: war made the industrial revolution.