Who Supports War for Justice and Why? Evidence from Russia and Ukraine

Abstract

We study the acceptability of war as a necessary tool to obtain justice under certain conditions across individuals from Russia and Ukraine in 2011. We discuss which socio-economic, political and individual characteristics shape the support for using destructive military force to achieve justice. Overall, the acceptance of war for justice is relatively low in both countries. Using logistic regressions, we found that there are characteristics that significantly reduce the support for war for justice in both countries, such as gender and level of happiness. Support in both countries is also significantly larger among respondents who are interested in politics and are married. Additionally, there are conditions which produce different results between the countries, such as religiosity, country aims, employment, confidence in the government, concern over possible war and political orientation