I've been reading up about the use of volatile variables in Java. I understand that they ensure instant visibility of their latest updates to all the threads running in the system on different cores/processors. However no atomicity of the operations that caused these updates is ensured. I see the following literature being used frequently A write to a volatile field happens-before every read of that same field . This is where I am a little confused. Here's a snippet of code which should help me better explain my query. volatile int x = 0; volatile int y = 0; Thread-0: | Thread-1: | if (x==1) { | if (y==1) { return false; | return false; } else { | } else { y=1; | x=1; return true; | return true; } | } Since x & y are both volatile, we have the following happens-before edges between the write of y in Thread-0 and read of y in Thread-1 between the write of x in Thread-1 and read of x in Thread-0 Does this imply that, at any point of time, only one of the threads can be in its 'else' block(since a write would happen before the read)? It may well be possible that Thread-0 starts, loads x, finds it value as 0 and right before it is about to write y in the else-block, there's a context switch to Thread-1 which loads y finds it value as 0 and thus enters the else-block too. Does volatile guard against such context switches (seems very unlikely)?