Professor Oona Hathaway Advocates for Civilian War Compensation in New Article

Professor Oona Hathaway ’97 recently co-authored an article in the UC Davis Law Review, “War Hazards Compensation for Civilians,” with Sarah Donilon ’26 and Carter Squires ’26 in which they propose that civilians affected by war be compensated for their detriments or loss. 

“By providing such compensation to any civilian harmed by their military operations, states can offer some measure of solace and support,” they write. “Creating such a plan also renders visible the often-invisible harm done to civilians — and thus makes plain the true costs of war.”

In this Q&A, Hathaway delves deeper into the objectives of the War Hazards Compensation for Civilians plan and shares the benefits of student collaboration with her scholarship.

To what do you attribute the rising number in civilian war casualties? 

The number of civilians who have been killed in war in the last decade has grown. As I explained in an op-ed in The New York Times earlier this year:

“According to my calculations, from 1989 to 2014, battle-related deaths from cross-border conflicts averaged fewer than 15,000 a year. Beginning in 2014, the average has risen to over 100,000 a year.”

That is an eightfold increase. Not all of these casualties are civilians, but many, if not most, are. It is difficult to know exactly why this has happened. But we can look at the conflicts that have taken place in that time and see that the increase in casualties is driven by a number of conflicts — especially those in Ukraine, Ethiopia, and the Middle East. These involve both conflicts between states (for example, Russia-Ukraine) and wars within states (for example, Syria). Since that op-ed was published, the U.S. has launched its war against Iran, which has killed close to 2,000 civilians. What we see, then, is an erosion of the postwar international legal order, which is grounded in the prohibition on the use of force by states against other states. That erosion is, at least in part, what has produced a rise in deaths from war, including among civilians.

What do you hope the long-term effects will be of your War Hazards Compensation for Civilians plan? Do additional legal measures need to be implemented to reduce civilian harm in times of war? 

One thing that academics can do is identify real-world problems and offer new ideas for solving those problems. That is what my co-authors and I are trying to do in this article. In the long term, my hope is that we have made clear that there is a moral and legal case for providing compensation to civilians — not just those who are unlawfully killed, but also those who are lawfully killed, for example, as lawful collateral damage. Why should the families whose family members are lawfully killed be the only ones who bear the burden of that harm? Shouldn’t the state that has caused that harm, even if not illegally, bear some of that burden? These are questions we want policymakers to ask themselves. We also want to make clear how rare compensation is — and how much it varies for reasons that are difficult to justify. And we want to show that it would be entirely feasible to right this wrong by building on a compensation system that already exists to compensates harm to civilians in war zones — those civilians who are working for the military as private military contractors.

Is the goal of compensation to reduce the amount of civilian harm or to reduce the amount of war?

Both. We think that there is a strong moral and legal case for compensating civilians for the harm done to them when states wage war. No war, no matter how carefully waged, perfectly protects civilians from harm. It is also true that if there were a system for compensating harm to civilians in wartime, it would be clearer to everyone how much civilian harm there has been. Such a system would make more visible the harm that is now too often invisible. And it would force those who advocate for war to recognize that they are imposing terrible costs on people who have done nothing wrong. While there is no guarantee that this would reduce the amount of war, we hope that it would make it more likely that the harm to civilians is taken into account when policymakers are making decisions to launch a war — or to continue it.

You’ve recently authored several articles with your students — how does this type of collaboration benefit you as a scholar, and how do you see it benefit your students? 

I love writing with my students. I always learn so much from them, and we become true collaborators. While the articles usually start with a question that I pose or an idea I want to explore, inevitably my co-authors end up teaching me a great deal that I did not know, and that is always thrilling. I bring knowledge of the field and experience writing law review articles and shaping them to fit the expectations of law review editors. They bring knowledge and experience from their prior education and careers and expertise they develop over the term by digging deeply into the underlying facts and law. They also often approach problems without the blinders on that those of us who have long been working in the field might have. There is a creative energy that comes from being fresh to a field of study. Together, we bounce ideas off one another, turn over crazy theories, and puzzle out hard problems. That makes it all a lot of fun. And when it leads to a published article, that’s something that they can be proud of — and in the process they learn firsthand what it takes to produce a publishable piece of scholarship. For those that want to enter academia at some point, that is a particularly valuable experience.