The academy in peril: The university at a moral crossroads

As military conflicts rage across multiple regions, a new and ethically troubling market has emerged: betting platforms allowing users to wager on the outcomes, durations and territorial expansions of real-world wars.

From Kyiv to Gaza, wars are now being commodified through global gambling platforms, many of which operate in legal grey zones. Analysts warn that the normalisation of betting on war outcomes reflects a broader erosion of civic ethics and raises urgent questions for higher education institutions globally.

Gambling on geopolitics

In April 2024, Le Monde uncovered a disturbing reality from the Ukrainian front: frontline soldiers, gripped by gambling addiction, were selling off essential military gear, thermal scopes, encrypted radios, and even drones to fund bets on online platforms.

The scandal grew so severe that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky issued an emergency directive banning gambling for active personnel under martial law and ordering a full-scale investigation.

This is not an isolated event. Major gambling companies like Bet365 and William Hill now casually list odds on war alongside tennis finals and Premier League fixtures. “Will Kyiv fall by Q3?” or “Will Russia seize more territory before year’s end?” appear as clickable wagers, indistinguishable from sports bets in layout or tone. The interface is clean. The reality it masks is anything but.

Meanwhile, a parallel universe of crypto-backed prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi offers a more highbrow veneer. They claim to trade in insight, not indulgence. But the difference is academic. These platforms allow users to bet on whether tactical nuclear weapons will be used in Eastern Europe or when the United States might withdraw troops from global conflict zones. Because they operate through decentralised infrastructure and blockchain protocols, they often evade both regulation and accountability.

What we are witnessing is not the evolution of gambling; it is its mutation into something altogether darker. In this new economy, war is not merely observed or reported. It is modelled, forecasted, and speculated upon. The line between probability and profit has collapsed. This is no longer just betting. It is the algorithmic monetisation of the unknown. It is financial war-gaming with real-world stakes.

Here, the fog of war becomes a tradable asset. Tragedy becomes a line item. Civilians disappear into statistics. And the market keeps moving.

From dice to data: A long but shifting history of war wagering

Wagering on war is not a modern invention. It is an ancient instinct, evidence that even in the blood-soaked mud of conflict, humans have long sought to predict, control or profit from violence.

Roman soldiers gambled with dice in military encampments. In 18th-century America, revolutionary governments ran lotteries to fund militias. During the World Wars, informal betting among troops was common, sometimes even encouraged as a form of psychological relief.

But the shift from campfire wagers to crypto-led prediction markets marks a fundamental transformation. Early signs emerged in the early 2000s, when online gambling sites began hosting bets on real-world conflict.

That marked the beginning of war’s formal entrance into the digital betting economy, an evolution that has since metastasised. Platforms have evolved from fringe websites to decentralised ecosystems like Polymarket and Kalshi, where war is just another ‘event class’ in a predictive portfolio.

The history of war gambling didn’t disappear. It simply upgraded. From dice and smoke to data and blockchain. And with each upgrade, the moral distance grew until the line between observer and speculator, between citizen and profiteer, nearly disappeared.

Gambling on war: When speculation crossed ethical lines

Before the United States tightened federal regulations on online gambling with the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, there were few restrictions on betting markets that ventured into ethically fraught territory, including wagers on the outbreak of war.

In a startling example, during the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, American bettors placed thousands of bets not on sports or elections, but on the timing and outcome of military conflict.

At the now-defunct online casino BetonSports.com, approximately 4,400 bets totalling US$250,000 were made on whether the US would go to war. Similarly, at TradeSports.com, a prediction market based in Ireland, over 3,000 bets amounting to US$620,000 were placed on the war’s start date.

These wagers, made during a time of global uncertainty, sparked public outcry and moral debate. Critics called them grotesque and exploitative. Supporters insisted they were merely instruments of geopolitical forecasting. But the backlash helped pave the way for tighter regulation, culminating in the 2006 federal law that effectively shuttered many war-based speculative platforms in the US.

Waging bets on war

The ban did not stop the phenomenon; it internationalised it. During the Syrian civil war, which began in 2011, prediction markets flourished. Bettors speculated on the conflict’s duration, Assad’s hold on power, and the likelihood of foreign intervention. Platforms like Intrade and Gambling911.com even allowed users to place bets on regime change.

The Afghanistan conflict also became a speculative marketplace. Bookmakers offered odds on the timing of troop withdrawals, the return of Taliban control, and the level of violence in key regions.

Perhaps the most infamous example was the 2011 NATO-led intervention in Libya. The British firm Ladbrokes accepted bets on whether NATO would intervene, how long the military campaign would last, and the fate of Muammar Gaddafi – a surreal fusion of global tragedy and betting slip.

An economy of atrocity

We are witnessing a disturbing shift. War, once the domain of diplomats and generals, is now enmeshed in digital speculation. What was once deliberated in war rooms now unfolds in livestreams, crypto markets and viral feeds.

As platforms grow more advanced, so does the machinery of monetised violence. Suffering is no longer just reported; it is streamed, tracked and traded. Atrocity becomes not only content but also capital. Attention is currency. Death becomes data.

This is not a system failure. It is the system in sharp focus. In the era of predictive platforms, tragedy is no longer a disruption; it is an input. A metric. A market signal.

If, as Shoshana Zuboff argues, surveillance capitalism turned human behaviour into profit, then conflict capitalism turns war itself into an asset class. Platforms no longer just observe conflict; they instrument it. Bombings, borders and bodies are fed into real-time analytics.

Markets don’t just react to violence; they anticipate it, model it and, at times, encourage its persistence.

The platforms don’t deny this. They brand it as innovation: smarter intelligence, better foresight. But in practice, they resemble extractive industries, mining chaos for yield, profiting from volatility, not peace.

We used to speak of the gamification of war. Now we live with its financialisation. Airstrikes become market fluctuations. Refugee movements trigger algorithmic alerts. Ceasefire delays present arbitrage opportunities.

Worse still, we’ve adapted. War is no longer an ethical crisis; it’s a probabilistic event. Something to be priced, predicted, and even profited from.

Slavoj Žižek reminds us: ideology’s true obscenity today is not in what it conceals, but in what it displays without shame. We know the system. And still, we play along. We don’t just watch the world burn. We place bets on how long it takes.

The academy’s collapse: When conscience goes quiet

Universities were meant to be the ones who say stop. The ones who draw lines. Who speak out when the world turns upside down, when civilian massacres are folded into market metrics, when war becomes a line item in a predictive model. Instead, many have gone silent. Or worse, joined the chorus.

We see institutions celebrating disruption, chasing optimisation, and funding shiny centres for AI and blockchain innovation. But we hear almost nothing about how these same technologies are turning conflict into content and death into data. This isn’t just a missed opportunity. It’s complicity.

Higher education hasn’t simply failed to resist this transformation. It has helped normalise it. Professionalised it. Branded it.

The language of the university has been rewritten. ‘Impact’ now means engagement metrics.

‘Innovation’ means investor interest. ‘Global citizenship’ is a line on a brochure. And ethics? Ethics is a department. Not a foundation.

This isn’t a drift. It’s a collapse. A loss not of relevance, but of moral centre.

Reclaiming the university’s moral imagination

The real question isn’t just about war. It’s about whether the university still matters. And if it does, then recovery begins not with PR campaigns – but with courage.

Three actions won’t fix it. But they can mark the start of a return.

• Teach ethics as infrastructure, not accessory: Start ethics where everything else starts: at the blueprint. Not as an afterthought. Teach students not only how to build systems, but also when not to.

• Turn silence into speech: Institutions must speak clearly when others profit from violence. Not with panels. With plain words: some things are not for sale. War is one of them.

• Make the university uncomfortable again: Invite in the voices that disturb: survivors, whistleblowers, theologians, ethicists. Let the classroom feel what the world feels: uncertain, unresolved, human.

To profit from war is to gamble with our humanity. To make tragedy tradable is to lose something we can’t easily get back.

If the university can’t meet this moment with clarity and conscience, it won’t just forfeit its moral standing. It will prove it never truly had one.

Let the line be drawn now.
Not with white papers.
Not with branding campaigns.
But with presence.
With refusal.
With conscience.

James Yoonil Auh is a professor at KyungHee Cyber University in South Korea. He has worked across the United States, Asia and Latin America on projects linking ethics, technology and education policy.

This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.