New Published Study: International Law Affects US Troops’ Willingness to Resist War Crimes

A faculty-student team at Human Security Lab has published a new scientific paper on the attitudes of US troops toward the duty to disobey unlawful orders to target unarmed civilians.

The paper will appear in the open-access journal Research and Politics. the first study from a survey experiment carried out in July 2025, asking a random sample of US troops to define in their own words what makes an order “manifestly unlawful.” The survey included experiments to determine what predicts troops willingness to disobey such orders in specific scenarios, and found that only thinking ahead abstractly about the duty to disobey influenced whether troops reported a willingness to actually disobey orders to shoot at protesters or nuclear-bomb civilian cities.

The study was conducted by political scientist Charli Carpenter with psychology PhD candidate Heather Kumove and political science PhD candidate Geraldien Santoso. A team of undergraduate student researchers - Will Hood, Aeden Kerr, Morgan LaValley and Fatima Marashi - assisted with analyzing the open-ended questions from the survey.