Research Seed Grant | 2008-2009
Declaring War and Peace
This project as a whole is motivated by two observations: First, in interstate war, states have all but stopped using formal declarations of war to begin war and formal peace treaties to conclude war. And second, in civil wars, the opposite trend is evident: rebel groups (not governments) are increasingly likely to issue formal declarations of war/independence, and civil wars are much more likely to end with formal peace treaties today as compared to earlier eras.
To date, I have completed a quantitative analysis of interstate wars. This analysis has led me to reject all but two hypotheses: that states engaged in interstate war decline to use war formalities today as a way of avoiding obligations to comply with the law of war, or jus in bello; and that members of the United Nations are particularly unlikely to engage the formalities of war because they do not want to admit to engaging in war (which is highly restricted by the UN Charter).
A survey of the original data set used to conduct the quantitative analysis suggests that India’s post-colonial wars will be particularly fertile ground for further examination of these hypotheses. India is one of the only states to engage the formalities of war in the post-Geneva era, but it has not always done so. Although I plan to use the case studies primarily for the purpose of process tracing, the inclusion of the 1962 Sino-Indian war, which offers variation on the variable of UN membership, will also allow for some comparative case analysis for the purpose of hypothesis testing.
