2006 Helen Dwight Reid Award

For the best doctoral dissertation completed and accepted in the previous two years (2004 or 2005) in the field of international relations, law, and politics.

Award Committee: James R. Kurth, Chair, Swarthmore College; John J. Mearsheimer, University of Chicago; Helen Milner, Princeton University

Recipient: Alexander B. Downes, University of Chicago

Dissertation: "Targeting Civilians in Wartime"

Dissertation Chair: John J. Mearsheimer, University of Chicago

Citation: We have selected Alexander Downes as the winner of this year's Helen Dwight Reid Award. His dissertation, "Targeting Civilians in Wartime," examines and tests competing explanations for why states choose to target civilians in the course of their military operations during wartime. Downes addresses a question of central and continuing importance, refutes the answer which focuses upon the type of regime and which is now dominant in the field, and convincingly demonstrates the power of his own explanation, which focuses upon calculations by government leaders of the costs of a war and the dangers of losing it.

Analysts of international politics have long debated competing explanations about why states go to war and how they behave in war. Among the classical candidates has been the type of regime, and in the past two decades this explanation has become the most prominent and widely accepted among both professional scholars and policy elites. In particular, "democratic peace" theory is widely considered one of the most robust findings of political science, i.e., democratic states are much less warlike than authoritarian ones. This is especially true with regard to a state's decision to go to war, but also with the way it wages war, e.g., a democracy is supposed to be less likely to choose a strategy that calls for targeting enemy civilians.

Downes' dissertation refutes this contention. In doing so, he uses both large-N statistical techniques (e.g., all countries which participated in interstate war since 1815) and process tracing in several detailed historical cases (e.g., U.S. versus German strategic bombing in World War II; U.S. strategic bombing since World War II; the British blockade of Germany and the German use of unrestricted submarine warfare in World War I, etc.). Downes finds that regime type exerts little influence on the choice of governments to target civilians, with liberal democracies employing this strategy at about the same rate as authoritarian states. Indeed, when liberal democracies are engaged in costly wars of attrition, they are more likely to target civilians than are non-liberal states.

Downes proposes an alternative explanation based upon government leaders' perceptions of (1) the costs of fighting (e.g., military fatalities), "the cost reduction logic," and (2) the likelihood of defeat, "the desperation logic." The power of his explanation is convincingly demonstrated in the detailed process tracing in his case studies. In these studies, he not only shows a mastery of the scholarly literature on the topic, but in several he goes beyond the conventional understanding among historians to offer an original reinterpretation of the history of the case.

In summary, Alexander Downes addresses a question of central and continuing importance in international politics; advances an original and counter-conventional explanation; and, deploying lucid theoretical reasoning and a vast body of evidence, provides an exceptionally comprehensive, systematic, and convincing demonstration of his argument. The result is a dissertation of high distinction, one that makes an extraordinary and valuable contribution to advancing the professional understanding of international relations. All future efforts to explain the targeting of civilians in war should take this commanding work into account.