What Sustains and Ends Wars: Will to Fight to Secure Ontological Significance vs. Material Capacity to Pursue Power
Principal Investigator: Scott Atran, Changing Character of War Centre, University of Oxford
Co-Investigators: Robert Johnson (University of Oxford), John Alderdice (University of Oxford), Dominic Johnson (University of Oxford), Richard Davis (Artis International), and Angel Gomez (Artis International)
Years of award: 2024-2028
Managing Services Agency: Air Force Office of Scientific Research
Project Description:
The proposed research aims to assess the relative contributions of psychosocial versus material factors in sustaining and ending wars. The main research focus is on the understudied subject of Will to Fight (WTF) in a quest for “Ontological Significance.” Ontological significance involves affirmation of group identities and associated ideals often held to be sacred and indivisible. WTF for ontological significance is thus resistant to analyses exclusively in terms of prevailing bargaining and realist theories of war-termination that center on belligerents’ concern with material fighting capacity and balance of power. The research deploys a multidisciplinary, multinational team and multimethod techniques to triangulate data drawn from current and historical cases of conflict: field and lab surveys with cross-sectional and experimental design; historical archives, records and reports; linguistic text-analyses and social media effects monitoring. Studies involve use of an original theoretical framework based on the concept of “Devoted Actors” (in contrast to rational-actor theories), a novel set of interactive measures for tracking contributing factors to WTF, and a DoD-supported programmable Artificial Intelligence Reader that filters at scale, in near-realtime, open-source internet data curated in terms of the theoretical framework.
The project advances existing research by mapping out the dynamic interplay of material with psychosocial factors in general, and of group identities with core values in particular, for deciding whether to fight on or to negotiate an end to costly intergroup conflict. This bears on U.S. national defense, international influence, warfighting strategy, and conflict resolution.