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44 Law & Soc. Inquiry 192 (2019)
Condemning Or Condoning the Perpetrators: International Humanitarian Law and Attitudes toward Wartime Violence

handle is hein.journals/lsociq44 and id is 195 raw text is: Law & Social Inquiry Volume 44, Issue 1, 192-226, February 2019 Condemning or Condoning the Perpetrators? International Humanitarian Law and Attitudes Toward Wartime Violence Geoffrey P. R. Wallace What are the implications of international law for attitudes toward wartime violence? Existing research offers contrasting views on the ability of international legal principles to shape individual preferences, especially in difficult situations involving armed conflict. Employing cross-national survey evidence from several conflict and post-conflict countries, this article contributes to this debate by evaluating the relationship between individuals' knowledge of the laws of war and attitudes toward wartime conduct. Findings show that exposure to international law is associated with a significant reduction in support for war- time abuses, though the results are stronger for prisoner treatment than for targeting civil- ians. Analysis further reveals that legal principles generate different expectations of conduct than alternative value systems that are rooted in strong moral foundations regarding the impermissibility of wartime abuses. The findings are relevant for understanding the rela- tionship between international law and domestic actors, and how legal principles relate to the resort to violence. I. INTRODUCTION Can international laws regulating wartime conduct promote more humanitarian views among populations experiencing recent or ongoing armed conflict? Indeed, a central belief underlying instruments like the 1949 Geneva Conventions is that the dissemination of knowledge about the laws of war can play a central role in improving compliance during armed conflict.' Even if international law may offer salutary effects in some circumstances, one long-held view instead suggests that such agreements yield few, if any, benefits when core security issues are at stake (Mearsheimer 1994-1995; Valentino, Huth, and Croco 2006). By contrast, other work points to the ability of international law to alter preferences and policies on controversial questions even when they involve the use of violence or the protection of human rights, though sometimes with important qualifications (Simmons 2009; Conrad and Ritter 2013; Y. Lupu 2013; Fariss 2014). Geoffrey P. R. Wallace is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington. Email: gprwall@uw.edu. For their helpful comments at various stages, he thanks Kristine Eck, Robert Keohane, Giovanni Mantilla, Krzysztof Pelc, Beth Simmons, Sophia Jorddin Wallace, the participants in the 2015 workshop The Laws of War as an International Regime: History, Theory, and Prospects at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University, and the three anonymous reviewers. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2011 annual meetings of the International Studies Association and the Midwest Political Science Association, as well as at the 2017 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. All errors remain the author's own. 1. For instance, each of the four agreements making up the Geneva Conventions contains a specific provision requiring contracting parties to disseminate information about the regulations within their national societies, such as Article 127 of the Third Convention governing prisoners of war. 12 2019 American Bar Foundation. 192

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