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What shapes elites’ judgments about wars? When they decide that a given conflict is just or
unjust, do they rely on any systematic frameworks? This paper is the first step in a broader
project which will integrate content analysis of newspapers and statesmen’s speeches with case
studies of three wars in the Persian Gulf Region (the Iran-Iraq war, the 1991 Gulf War, and the
2002 Iraq War), in an attempt to discover if there is a correlation between the argumentative
frameworks used by elites and the philosophical tradition of just war thinking in their society
and/or the historical narratives of their own state’s behavior and treatment in past wars.
For this paper, just one war in the Persian Gulf was selected as a focal point – the current
conflict in Iraq. Newspaper editorials in four countries (the United States, Pakistan, Egypt and
Saudi Arabia) were examined to explore the relationship between argument type and attitude
toward the war. In particular, I was interested in testing the role of religiously inspired just war
theories, to see how (and if) they were used in the contentious debate preceding the outbreak of
war. The preliminary findings are presented here.
The paper will proceed as follows. The first section will briefly establish the need for such a
project filling an important gap between theory and empirics in political science. The second lays
out my hypotheses and background assumptions that form the theoretical groundwork for my
research. The subsequent sections explain the methodology in greater detail, and present the
partial, preliminary findings of a trial run of my content analysis methodology. The final section
discusses some implications for my broader hypotheses based on this preliminary data.
Why theorists and comparativists should talk
For years, psychologists, sociologists and a handful of political scientists have studied the
ways in which individuals’ attitudes toward war differ based on the “usual suspects”: age, gender,
race, education, political ideology and even national origin. In addition, there is a large literature
on the relationship between individual personality characteristics and attitude toward war. While
these studies provide interesting insights, their applicability is limited because few are cross-
national and even fewer rely on a theoretical background- -or at least not a political theoretical
background.
Strangely, little work has been done on how such attitudes might correlate with normative
belief systems, and no cross-national research has explored how elite attitudes toward justice and
war might be influenced by one or another of the just war traditions. The seminal work of Brunk,
Convention