Civilian Mindsets and Attitudes toward Peace in Wartime: Evidence from Ukraine

Abstract Under what conditions do civilians in countries at war support peace settlements? This study develops a theory of civilian attitudes that integrates two major forces shaping wartime thinking to illuminate when people support peaceful compromise. We argue that survival and injustice are two crucial and often competing mindsets that shape how individuals understand and navigate violent conflicts. Civilians exhibiting an injustice-oriented mindset focus more on the objectives of their collective identity group, developing wartime attitudes out of concern for in-group grievances and goals. In contrast, civilians with a survival-based mindset concentrate on the concrete dangers war poses to themselves and their loved ones. To explore these ideas, we fielded two waves of a pre-registered survey in wartime Ukraine in the summer of 2022 and spring of 2023. We find that there is considerable variation across individuals in the extent to which they hold a survival or injustice mindset about the war. Moreover, this variation is strongly linked to their attitudes toward peace across both waves. At the same time, individual mindsets are insensitive to experimental primes, suggesting that they may not be easily manipulated.