A Behavioralist Theory of Compliance with the Laws of War

Abstract

States are an abstraction utterly lacking in the capacity to exercise a choice between alternatives. Those who would answer the question, Why do states choose to comply with or violate the laws of war?, must first ask and answer the prior, yet much more impenetrable, question: Why do the individuals who exercise decisional authority commit their states to comply with or violate the laws of war? States do not make decisions; people do. Any theory of compliance that aspires to sufficient determinacy to guide practitioners and scholars alike must account for the individual level of analysis and in particular the microfoundations of personality that frame decisions and yield variation across the range of decisionmakers. Part I briefly surveys and critiques existing theories of international generally and particularly with respect to the laws of war. Part II presents an alternative theory that draws from the insights of behavioralism to trace the causal processes whereby the personalities of individual decisionmakers associate with decisions to comply with or violate obligations arising under the regime governing the resort to anticipatory self-defense. Part III employs historical data to heuristically test the theory, and Part IV anticipates criticisms, propose directions for further research, and summarizes ongoing experimental efforts.

Keywords: Laws of war, compliance, behavioralism, psychology, formal model, international law