Consequences of war: the framework (History HL)

The big idea: Wars do not stop when the fighting stops. This micro gives you a checklist of the ways a war changes the world — the categories you use to plan almost any Paper 2 essay on effects.

Paper 2 loves the word effects. An essay might ask you to examine the effects of a war, or to judge how far a war changed a country.

The danger is writing a story of what happened. Examiners want you to sort the effects into clear themes and then weigh them.

Two more habits make these categories powerful. First, split effects into short-term and long-term.

Second, notice that effects are linked. Harsh reparations caused economic misery, which then fed the political rise of extreme parties — so your themes talk to each other.

The first thing many wars produce is a peace settlement — the deal that officially ends the fighting. Historians judge these deals by whether they lasted.

Successes and failures of peacemaking: A peace can succeed by ending conflict fairly and building lasting cooperation. It can fail by being so harsh or so weak that it plants the seeds of the next war.

The classic failure is the Treaty of Versailles (1919). Many Germans saw it as a humiliating diktat, and its resentments helped Hitler rise.

Peacemaking also means the international organisations built to stop future wars. After 1919 came the League of Nations; after 1945 came the United Nations.

Next come territorial changes. Wars redraw the map — borders move, empires break up, and brand-new states appear.

New states from old empires: After the First World War four empires collapsed — German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman.

Out of the wreckage came new countries such as Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. This is also a shift in the balance of power — the rough sharing of strength among the leading states.

Territory and power go together. When Germany was carved up after 1945, the real winners were two new superpowers — the USA and the USSR.

War as the midwife of revolution: The strain of the First World War helped cause the Russian Revolution of 1917, which ended the tsar and created the world's first communist state. War does not just change borders — it can change the very kind of government a country has.

Peacemaking isn't always a failure

So far every example has been a failure — Versailles, the League of Nations. That's a trap. Examiners reward students who can also name a peace settlement that worked, so you can argue both sides.

Build a balanced argument: For a question on "the successes and failures of peacemaking", don't just describe Versailles. Contrast it with San Francisco (1951) or the Korean Armistice (1953) to show peacemaking can also prevent renewed war — even when, like Korea, the settlement is only partial.

The changing role of women beyond Europe and the USA

The changing role of women is not only a European or American story. Wars in Asia and the Middle East reshaped women's lives too — sometimes through direct combat roles, not just factory work.

Vietnam War (1956–1975): women in combat and logistics: In Vietnam, women served as soldiers, medics and porters for the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces, and ran supply routes along the Ho Chi Minh Trail under bombardment. This was a step beyond the mostly civilian, factory-based roles seen in the two World Wars — women here took on direct combat and combat-support functions.

Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988): women on the home front: During the Iran–Iraq War, Iranian women were mobilized into the workforce, healthcare and civil-defence roles to sustain the war effort, while state propaganda also promoted an idealised image of women as mothers and supporters of martyrdom. This shows the same wartime pattern as Europe — women's labour expands to fill gaps left by men at the front — but shaped by a very different, non-Western political and religious context.

A non-European case study: the Six Day War (1967)

So far every example has been European. But the syllabus expects you to be able to discuss territorial changes and political impact from wars outside Europe too — and examiners often set two-region comparison questions. The Six Day War (June 1967), fought between Israel and the neighbouring Arab states of Egypt, Jordan and Syria, is a compact, exam-ready case study for both themes.

Territorial changes: the map redrawn in six days: In under a week, Israel captured territory from three neighbours at once:

- The Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip, from Egypt - The West Bank, including East Jerusalem, from Jordan - The Golan Heights, from Syria

This roughly tripled the territory under Israeli control. Unlike the Versailles settlement, there was no peace conference to formalise these changes — the new lines were simply where the fighting stopped, which is why they remained disputed and unresolved for decades afterwards.

Pairing it in an exam answer: If a question asks you to compare territorial changes or short-term political impact across two wars from different regions, the Six Day War pairs well with a European example like the First World War: both redrew borders without a negotiated settlement everyone accepted, and both triggered an immediate political shock (Nasser's loss of standing is a strong parallel to the collapse of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires).

The last three categories are about people and money — how war drains an economy, reshapes society, and takes lives.

Now the social effects — the changes to how ordinary people live. War can break down old class barriers and shift what jobs people do.

The changing role of women: This is the social effect examiners ask about most. During both world wars, with millions of men at the front, women moved into factories, farms and offices in huge numbers.

Many historians link this wartime work to women winning the vote — in Britain in 1918, in Germany in 1919, and in the USA in 1920.

Don't overstate the change: Be balanced. After both wars, many women were pushed back into the home so returning soldiers could have their jobs.

So the change was real but often partial and temporary — a great point to argue in an essay rather than simply claiming 'war freed women'.

Finally, the human cost — the dead and the wounded. Examiners want you to know the scale and to draw one key distinction.

Military vs civilian casualties: Military casualties are soldiers killed or wounded. Civilian casualties are ordinary people — from bombing, hunger, disease or genocide.

The pattern of the 20th century is stark: wars grew more deadly for civilians, because of aerial bombing and the deliberate targeting of populations.

Use casualties as evidence, not decoration: Rough figures are fine — say 'around 60 million' for WWII. The analysis mark comes from the point that civilian deaths overtook military deaths, showing how total war had become.