ABSTRACT
The problem of understanding why war crimes continue to occur and how they might be prevented has long seemed intractable. 2 With the development of the field of social psychology over the last 60 years and the resulting debates about the relationship between character, situational influences, and human behavior, a number of theories about why war crimes occur have emerged, along with proposals as to how such crimes might be prevented in the future. In this chapter, I discuss a number of recent approaches to war crimes in the field of military ethics, and argue that these approaches are based on fundamental misunderstandings about the causes of war crimes and how they might be prevented.
