How Wartime Experiences Affect Beliefs About Military Power
Christopher Chiego
University of Pennsylvania
Abstract:
How do actors learn from wars? Explanations for war that stress the presence of asymmetric information argue that fighting during a war provides information about the relative military power of each side, which leads to a war-ending convergence of beliefs about such power. But how the fighting informs the different actors on each side is less clear in the current literature. In this chapter, I argue that civilians who have direct experiences with enemy forces during a war should be more likely to negatively assess their own side’s relative military power after the war compared to civilians who only have indirect experiences with the enemy. The impact of experiencing an invasion, occupation, or other direct experience provides both an unmanipulable signal of military weakness as well as a psychological shock that leads to significantly more negative assessments by civilians of their side’s relative military power compared to civilians with only indirect wartime experiences. Such assessments then play an important role in determining the likelihood of the conflict recurring after the initial war ends.
Discussants:
Dan Reiter (Emory University)
Laia Balcells (Georgetown University)
Jeff Carter (University of Mississippi)
OPSC Coordinator:
Emily Hencken Ritter (Vanderbilt University)
Graduate Assistant:
Heesun Yoo (Vanderbilt University)
