Abstract
The psychological willingness to fight for one’s country has become an increasingly important issue in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 and the ongoing war near the eastern flank of Europe. This article presents three new analyses of the seventh wave of the recently completed World Values Survey that are designed to shed light on the features and factors that play a role in citizens’ attitudes toward defending their own country. Our goal was to find individual and societal characteristics that may help to explain variation in willingness to fight globally, as well as between and within two countries on the eastern flank that we use as case studies: the Czech Republic and Slovakia. In the conclusion, we explore some of the limitations of these studies, as well as some of their most important implications. Before reporting on and discussing our findings, we set the context for the rationale for our selection of material and methodology by briefly describing some of the relevant literature on the willingness to fight for one’s country.