Table Of ContentPeace Psychology Book Series
Series Editor: Daniel J. Christie
Kathleen Malley-Morrison
Sherri McCarthy
Denise Hines Editors
International
Handbook
of War, Torture,
and Terrorism
Peace Psychology Book Series
Series Editor: Daniel J. Christie
For further volumes:
http://www.springer.com/series/7298
Kathleen Malley-Morrison
Sherri McCarthy • Denise Hines
Editors
International
Handbook of War,
Torture, and Terrorism
Editors
Kathleen Malley-Morrison Sherri McCarthy
Department of Psychology Department of Educational Psychology
Boston University Northern Arizona University
Boston, MA, USA Yuma, AZ, USA
Denise Hines
Department of Psychology
Clark University
Worcester, MA, USA
ISBN 978-1-4614-1637-1 ISBN 978-1-4614-1638-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-1638-8
Springer New York Heidelberg Dordrecht London
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Preface
In the fi rst decade of the twenty- fi rst century, every continent except Antarctica
witnessed at least one major assault from forces within or beyond their borders;
in some areas, armed con fl ict was prolonged. All of these incursions have had
enormous impact on ordinary people and civil society.1 Moreover, regions
that were not themselves subjected to direct assaults often sent troops to fi ght
elsewhere in the world, and not necessarily for peacekeeping purposes. When
state and nonstate political and military leaders initiate armed aggression to
promote their agendas, the people in their communities may react in a variety
of ways: for example, they may personally take up arms; they may provide
political and verbal support to their leaders; they may protest actively—either
violently or nonviolently—against their leaders’ military activities; and/or
they may leave the area or declare their own neutrality.
F rom a psychological perspective, it is important to understand the kinds
of reasoning that individuals bring to bear on the efforts of their leaders to
engage them in armed con fl ict and/or other forms of aggression. In this book,
we examine conceptions of war, torture, terrorism, and national security held
by ordinary people from nine major regions of the world—Western Europe,
Russia and the Balkan Peninsula, the Middle East, the Gulf States (analyses
of responses for this region are only available in the sections of this book for
de fi nitions and invasion), Africa, South and Southeast Asia, East Asia, Central
and South America, and North America. We also provide an in-depth analysis
of the socio-cognitive and emotional/motivational mechanisms that underlie
the thinking of people from these regions concerning the potential right of
governments to invade other countries or torture prisoners in times of war.
B ecause so much of the world has been carved up into nation states, with
borders often created rather arbitrarily by the states with the most armed might,
analyses of military confl i ct have often focused on individual countries and
their involvement in global wars or more circumscribed violence. However,
armed con fl icts among groups are, with increasing frequency, not a matter of
one country invading another to enhance economic or political power, or of a
colony fi ghting for its independence, but a matter of regional issues with cultural
and religious roots that sometimes extend beyond the emergence of nation
1 Civil society has been de fi ned in many ways; it is used here to refer to individuals as well
as voluntary groups, including NGOs, operating outside of the business and governmental
spheres, to pursue common goals and values.
v
v i Preface
states. Thus, in this book, our focus is on the views of individuals in key
regions of the world that vary in regard to the level of current and recent
con fl ict, with less emphasis on the speci fi c countries within each region.
I n the fi r st decade of the twenty-fi r st century, the United Kingdom/
Anglophone region, consisting of Canada and the United States, along with
Australia, the United Kingdom, and Northern Ireland, has experienced the
least amount of armed con fl ict on its own soil, despite suffering from some
terrorist activities (Project Ploughshares 2010). On the other hand, the United
States, to the dismay of many of its allies, has contributed to armed con fl ict in
many other areas of the world, particularly the Middle East. These actions were
fueled in part by military expenditures that amounted, in 2008, to 696.3 billion
dollars—nearly half of all the military expenditures in the world ($1,547.8 bil-
lion) that year (Project Ploughshares 2009). It is also noteworthy that the US
monthly contribution of police, military experts, and troops to UN peacekeep-
ing forces as of April 2011 was relatively small ($110 billion), as compared, for
example, to the United Kingdom ($284 billion), Canada ($213 billion), France
($1,467 billion), and Italy ($1,944 billion) (United Nations 2011).
The regions that were most highly subjected to domination by colonial
and foreign powers throughout most of the twentieth century—that is, the
Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa—are the regions still
experiencing the most armed con fl ict on their own soil in the early twenty-
fi rst century. In Europe, particularly Eastern and Central Europe, armed
con fl ict in the post-Cold War period has been characterized by intrastate vio-
lence re fle ctive of nationalistic strivings—for example, in Chechnya, where
efforts to separate from Russia had been squelched by 2009, although spo-
radic fi ghting continued into 2011. Overall, since WWII, the predominant
form of armed con fl ict has consisted of “societal” warfare—that is, armed
clashes related to civil, ethnic, and communal con fl icts (Marshall and Cole
2009). In 2009, some of the best known of these societal wars were in the
Sudan (particularly involving Darfur and South Sudan), Somalia, and the
Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as Israel (Gaza). The term “societal
warfare” also applies to countries with serious armed con fl ict related to the
production and sale of illegal drugs; in 2009, the major countries involved in
that kind of societal warfare included Afghanistan, Colombia, Mexico, and
Myanmar (Marshall and Cole 2009).
Throughout the world, there still live some people whose collective mem-
ories are marked by World War II, the Cold War, and/or the colonial wars of
liberation. In many regions, the younger generations have little direct experi-
ence with war; in others, dealing with armed con fl ict is a daily struggle lead-
ing to daily losses. In many regions, the leaders of some countries and groups
have long been committed to peaceful coexistence, whereas the leaders of
other countries and groups have long based their power on commitments to
retaliation and conquest. An important task for psychologists is to understand
better the kinds of thinking that allow ordinary citizens within these regions
to tolerate, support, or resist the aggressive agenda of their leaders.
This chapter begins with a brief overview of some of the issues related to
major armed con fl icts, torture, and terrorism at the beginning of the twenty- fi rst
century. It then describes the international collaborative research project
that produced the fi n dings discussed in this volume; this section provides
Preface vii
information on research methodology, including the composition of the inter-
national collaborative known as the Group on International Perspectives on
Government Aggression and Peace (GIPGAP), the nature of the international
survey, and sample recruitment. The remainder of this chapter is devoted
primarily to an overview of the coding systems developed for each of the four
major sections of this volume, which are the following: (1) de fi nitions of war,
torture, and terrorism; (2) conceptions of national security; (3) judgments
concerning the acceptability of invasion; and (4) judgments concerning the
acceptability of torture. The analyses done for these last two sections build on
and extend the work of Alfred Bandura (e.g., 1999) on moral disengagement
and engagement. In particular, we consider the extent to which the sociocog-
nitive mechanisms he identi fi ed as fundamental to moral disengagement can
be identi fi ed in the responses of ordinary people making judgments about the
extent to which governments have a right to invade other countries and tor-
ture prisoners during times of war.
Invasion, Torture, and Terrorism
in the Twenty-First Century
Armed Con fl icts
The post-World War II decline in the frequency of armed con fl icts has contin-
ued into the fi r st decade of the twenty-fi r st century. Depending upon the
de fi nition of armed con fl ict being used in different reports, estimates vary
regarding the number of such con fl icts occurring in any 1 year; nevertheless,
there is general agreement that interstate violence in particular has declined.
De fi ning armed con fl ict as “a political con fl ict in which armed combat
involves the armed forces of at least one state (or one or more armed factions
seeking to gain control of all or part of the state), and in which at least 1,000
people have been killed by the fi ghting during the course of the con fl ict”
(Ploughshares 2010, p. 5), the Ploughshares Project indicates that there were
40 such armed con fl icts in 2000 and only 28 such con fl icts (in 24 different
countries) in 2009—the latter fi gures being the lowest since Ploughshares
began tracking armed con fl ict in 1985. According to the Center for Systemic
Peace (CSP) 2009 Annual Report, in which armed con fl ict is de fi ned to
include interstate and civil wars with a minimum threshold of 500 directly
related deaths, “the global magnitude of warfare has decreased by over 60%
since peaking in the mid-1980s, falling by the end of 2009 to its lowest level
since 1960” ( Center for Systemic Peace 2009, p. 4).
Although there were armed con fl icts in the Middle East, Africa, and South
and Southeast Asia throughout the early twenty- fi rst century, these con fl icts
by no means directly involved all of the countries in each region. For exam-
ple, in 2008, according to Project Ploughshares, 20% of the 50 countries in
Africa experienced armed con fl ict—which accounted for over 39% of all the
confl i cts in the world that year. Similarly, in Asia, 19% of the 42 countries
were subject to armed con fl ict—again just over 39% of all the world con fl icts
of the time. During the same year, in the much smaller region of the Middle
v iii Preface
East (14 countries), armed con fl ict in only four countries (29% of the countries
constituting that region) accounted for 14% of the world’s armed confl i cts.
Less than 10% of the armed con fl icts occurred in Europe (speci fi cally, in part
of Russia) and the Americas (44 countries), primarily in Central and South
America, where there has been prolonged armed con fl ict in Colombia, South
America. On the other hand, armed forces from the Americas and Europe
were involved in some of the armed con fl icts in the other regions—again, not
necessarily as peacekeepers.
Although the number of armed con fl icts in any one year has declined fairly
steadily since the end of World War II, the establishment of the United
Nations, and the establishment of other international nongovernmental orga-
nizations (INGOs) and NGOs, the percentage of deaths that are civilian rather
than military personnel has increased. Among the contributors to noncomba-
tant deaths are aerial bombings by foreign interventionary forces (particu-
larly in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan) and “high-casualty terrorist
bombings” (HCTB) (de fi ned by CSP as “bombings by nonstate actors result-
ing in 15 or more deaths”), which have increased dramatically since the 9/11
attacks in the United States.
De fi nitions of War
I n general in this book, we use the terms “war” and “armed confl i ct” inter-
changeably; indeed, “war” is often de fi ned as “armed con fl ict.” A typical dic-
tionary de fi nition of war is “A state of open, armed, often prolonged con fl ict
carried on between nations, states, or parties” (The Free Dictionary 2010).
From a scienti fi c point of view, such a de fi nition is of limited usefulness
because of its vagueness. What is meant by “open” con fl ict? How long is
“prolonged?” Consequently, within the professional literature, “war” and the
related term “armed confl i ct” are often operationally defi n ed in more con-
crete terms—for example, as military actions involving 1,000 or more com-
bat deaths (e.g., Leblang and Chan 2003). Moreover, within the academic
community, there have been many efforts to differentiate between different
types of war, as well as controversies concerning the best de fi nitions of those
different types. For example, global wars have been differentiated from small
wars, for which there are many different synonyms, such as “brush fi re wars,”
“guerilla wars,” “internal wars,” “interventions,” “political wars,” and “revo-
lutionary wars” (Beaumont 1995). Similarly, “classic wars” (between nations)
have been differentiated from “post-national wars,” generally characterized
by a lack of concern with national borders, an emphasis on protecting human
rights wherever they may be violated, and a military effort to control what is
seen as a global terror risk (Beck 2005).
Although authors vary in the extent to which they use precise terms to
de fi ne these different types or levels of warfare, they often focus on quantita-
tive criteria such as lives lost. For example, Collier et al. (2004) de fi ned civil
wars as violent con fl icts, internal to a country, resulting in at least 1,000 bat-
tle-related deaths a year. They provide one additional criterion, intended to
distinguish civil wars from massacres: that is, nongovernmental forces must
be responsible for at least 5 % of the deaths. Sambanis (2004) provided an
extensive analysis of problems regarding defi n itions of civil war that rely on
Preface ix
absolute thresholds for number of combat deaths and offered a much more
articulated defi n ition that includes such criteria as the following: (a) the
warring parties having publicly stated political objectives; (b) the involve-
ment of the government as one of the warring parties; (c) local representation
and recruitment of insurgents; (d) the ability of the weaker party to sustain
effective resistance; (e) at least 500–1,000 deaths; and (f) a peace that lasts at
least 6 months following a treaty.
Some de fi nitions of war and of particular types of war focus on the pre-
sumed motives of the leaders. In one classic de fi nition, Oppenheim (1952)
said that war is “a contention between two or more States through their armed
forces, for the purpose of overpowering each other and imposing such condi-
tions of peace as the victor pleases” (p. 54, cited in Dinstein 2001, p. 4).
Cramer (2006) de fi ned diversionary wars as “any use of force embarked upon
to help solve domestic political problems” (p. 198). These are only two exam-
ples of how the de fi nition of war varies with motive; the emphasis on these
motives becomes particularly strong when the focus is on “just wars.”
Philosophers, theologians, political theorists, and others have argued for
centuries over whether it is possible to differentiate between just and unjust
wars. In a classic book on the issue, Walzer (1977) delineated what he viewed
as necessary criteria for considering a war to be just; these criteria involved
both the reasons for going to war (j us ad bellum ) as well as the way the war is
conducted (j us in bello ). To meet the criteria for j us ad bellum , (1) there must
be a just cause or purpose for declaring war (e.g., stopping a genocide); (2) the
motivation and intent behind going to war must be morally right (e.g., it must
not be aimed at increasing territory or control of natural resources); (3) it must
be initiated and declared openly by a legitimate authority; (4) it must be a last
resort, after all peaceful alternatives to force have been seriously tried and
exhausted; (5) there must be a chance of success; and (6) the universal good
that comes from war must outweigh the universal harm (Orend 2005).
The second set of criteria, j us in bello , which refer to the conduct of the
war once it has been declared, involve both an internal j us in bello (concerned
with the responsibility to do everything possible to maintain the rights of
one’s citizens) and external j us in bello, which comprises six more rules: (1)
respect and obey international laws concerning weapons; (2) carefully dis-
criminate between civilians (who have noncombatant immunity) and legiti-
mate targets who are harming individuals and their rights; (3) maintain
proportionality in the use of force (i.e., use only the amount of force appropri-
ate to and necessary for achieving their goal); (4) consistent with the Geneva
Conventions, keep prisoners of war (POWs, who are no longer engaged in
harm) away from battle zones until the war ends, and then exchange them for
one’s own POWs; (5) use no weapons that are mala in se or “evil in them-
selves” (e.g., rape, genocide, ethnic cleansing); and (6) refrain from reprisals
(Orend 2005).
In addition to the criteria for identifying a just war before and during the
war, Orend (e.g., 2006) and others have stressed the importance of achieving
justice in the postwar period, j us post bellum . The seven main principles of a
just termination of war include the following: (1) the peace settlement, which
should be publically declared, should be reasonable and not an act of revenge;
