Attitudes Toward a Military Enforcement of Human Rights

In recent years, Western countries and NATO have repeatedly intervened in international conflicts using military means (e.g., Kosovo, Macedonia, and Afghanistan). The countries involved in these military operations have stated that these interventions did not serve strategic goals; instead, their prime purpose was to enforce human rights. Against this background the present paper aims to answer two main questions: First, how can attitudes toward such military interventions be measured? Second, how are these attitudes related to prosocial and antisocial personality dispositions? Two studies were conducted to address these questions. A first study with 275 university students from Germany enabled us to develop a short and reliable scale to measure attitudes toward the military enforcement of human right. A second study (N = 190) revealed that authoritarianism and the willingness to aggressively sanction the antisocial behavior of others were positively related to this attitude, while no significant relationship with prosocial dispositions emerged. Furthermore, it could be shown that a high concern for human rights only then was connected to a positive attitude toward their military enforcement if persons indicated to handle their daily conflicts in an aggressive manner.