Conflict Dynamics and Feedback: Explaining Change in Violence against Civilians within Conflicts

Conflicts are complex, dynamic processes wherein the frequency and intensity of violence changes throughout the contest. In this article, we explore the temporal dynamics of two long-term civil wars—DR-Congo and Sudan—to identify systematic and random conditions that lead to changes in civilian targeting. Violence committed by rival political actors, territorial exchange, and the number and addition of violent agents strongly shape the likelihood that civilian targeting events and casualties increase or decrease over time. General and country differences emerge from vector autoregression analysis to suggest that (1) three types of violent agents—rebels, militias, and the government—are locked in spirals of violence where violence against civilians by one actor leads to subsequent violence by another actor; (2) rebels and government forces respond to the other side’s acquisition of contested territory by increasing counterattacks on civilians, specifically in DR-Congo; and (3) increasing numbers of active nonstate agents lead to higher violence rates in the following months. Among these, civilian targeting by rival actors triggers the most follow-on violent events against civilians.     

Rebel Behavior in the Context of Interstate Competition: Exploring Day-to-Day Patterns of Political Violence in Africa

This study develops a day-to-day theory of political violence that predicts that rebels respond strategically to the onset of interstate conflict that is directly related to a civil war. Government-initiated interstate conflict is theorized to incentivize rebels to signal their resolve, willingness to bear costs, and vulnerability of government forces. In addition, this form of interstate conflict is predicted to decrease violence against civilian populations, as it makes it more likely that rebels will need to rely on civilians for resources in the future. This is contrary to interstate conflict initiated by an external state, as this signal of third-party support makes civilian support more dispensable from the perspective of a rebel movement. Using a country-day data set constructed from event data, evidence is presented that is consistent with this theoretical logic. Interstate conflict, therefore, is shown to play a significant role in explaining the variation of violent events that occur on a day-to-day basis during a civil conflict.     

Attacks on Civilians in Civil War: Targeting the Achilles Heel of Democratic Governments

Previous research has indicated that democracy decreases the risk of armed conflict, while increasing the likelihood of terrorist attacks, but we know little about the effect of democracy on violence against civilians in ongoing civil conflicts. This study seeks to fill this empirical gap in the research on democracy and political violence, by examining all rebel groups involved in an armed conflict 1989–2004. Using different measures of democracy, the results demonstrate that rebels target more civilians when facing a democratic (or semi-democratic) government. Democracies are perceived as particularly vulnerable to attacks on the population, since civilians can hold the government accountable for failures to provide security, and this provides incentives for rebels to target civilians. At the same time, the openness of democratic societies provides opportunities for carrying out violent attacks. Thus, the strength of democracy—its accountability and openness—can become an Achilles heel during an internal armed conflict.     

Fragmentation,Conflict, and Competition: Islamist Anti-civilian Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa

ABSTRACT

In spite of the shared high profile of recent Islamist attacks on civilians in sub-Saharan Africa, patterns of anti-civilian violence differ across and within violent Islamist groups, and the countries in which they are active. This research seeks to explain this variation by situating Islamist violence within the sub-national spaces in which such groups operate, and the wider conflict environment in which they choose to use, or limit the use of, anti-civilian violence. Drawing on data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Dataset, the research finds that violent Islamist groups are more likely to target civilians where they are the most active conflict agent, even when other conflict agents are active in the same spaces; but less likely to do so when they are relatively weak and in competition with other non-state armed groups. Anti-civilian violence is thus deployed strategically by violent Islamist groups, while its function as a signalling or retributive policing tool depends on the relative strength of groups in relation to actors in the wider conflict arena.     

“So,the Killings Continued”: Wartime Mobilization and Post-War Violence in KwaZulu-Natal,South Africa

ABSTRACT

Many post-war states experience continuous low-intensity violence for years after the formal end of the conflict. Existing theories often focus on country-level explanations of post-war violence, such as the presence of spoilers or the nature of the peace agreement. Yet, post-war violence does not affect all communities equally; whereas some remain entrenched in violence, others escape the perpetuation of violent conflict. We argue that communities where wartime mobilization at the local level is based on the formation of alliances between armed groups and local elites are more likely to experience post-war violence, than communities where armed groups generate civilian support based on grassroots backing of the group’s political objectives. We explore this argument in a comparison of three communities in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, which have experienced different levels of post-war violence. The analysis supports the main argument and contributes to the research on the microdynamics of civil war by outlining the implications of certain strategies of wartime mobilization and how these may generate localized legacies.     

Military Structure,Civil Disobedience,and Military Violence

In this article, I argue that factors inherent to the structure of a military organization and their relationship with the political leadership play a role in the organization's tendency to perpetrate violence against civilians during civil disobedience campaigns. To examine this hypothesis, I conducted a three-phased statistical analysis on a database containing 97 campaigns that took place between 1972 and 2012. In the first phase, I examined the relationship between military centric factors and violent crackdowns. In the second phase, I examined the relationship between military centric factors and mass killing. In the third stage, I examined the relationship between two specific types of discrimination in the military and mass killing. I found strong evidence supporting the hypothesis mentioned above. High-risk militaries that served a militarized regime, contained loosely regulated or indoctrinated paramilitaries, and discriminated against the protesting group, were much more likely to perpetrate violence against civilians during civil disobedience campaigns than low-risk militaries. The conclusions of this study suggest that further examination of the military's role in perpetrating violence against civilians during protests and conflict may provide some novel findings.     

Bargaining Between Rebel Groups and the Outside Option of Violence

Although military cooperation among rebel groups in multi-party civil wars could help rebels defeat or extract concessions from an incumbent government, violent conflict among rebel groups is empirically prevalent. Why do rebel groups in multi-party civil wars choose to fight one another? This article models the strategic dilemma facing rebel groups in multi-party civil wars as an alternating-offer bargaining game of incomplete information with an outside option. The game-theoretic model explores the relationship between the status quo distribution of power among rebel groups, the costs of fighting, and the likelihood that one rebel group will opt to unilaterally end bargaining over a set of goods, such as access to supply routes, natural resources, and control over civilian populations. We show that the likelihood of violent conflict between rebel groups is lowest when the status quo distribution of benefits reflects the existing distribution of power.     

Terrorism and External Audiences: Influencing Foreign Intervention Into Civil Wars

This article evaluates the effects of terrorism on interventions into civil wars. Considering civil wars from 1970–1999, this study analyzes how the use of terrorism as a tactic affects external interventions on behalf of opposition groups, interventions on behalf of governments, and diplomatic interventions. While some authors would suggest that groups might utilize terrorism as a tactic to gain external support, this study finds little evidence that groups are actually successful in gaining such support. In fact, terrorism that targets civilians appears to actually decrease the likelihood of military interventions on behalf of opposition groups. Furthermore, in civil wars with high numbers of terrorist attacks there is a greater likelihood of economic intervention on behalf of governments, further weakening the potential benefit for groups in utilizing terrorism as a tactic. While this is certainly a welcome finding, a consideration of five case studies of suicide terrorism (Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Iraq, India, and Turkey) provides evidence that the use of suicide terrorism within civil wars may have decreased the likelihood of external interventions on behalf of the government and of diplomatic interventions. These results are more troubling and suggest potentially grave consequences for mediating many of these conflicts.     

Elections and “sons of the soil” conflict dynamics in Africa and Asia

Recent research reveals that nearly one-third of ethnic civil wars since 1945 have been “sons of the soil” (SoS) conflicts that pit indigenous populations against internal migrants. Despite important differences across SoS conflicts, many share a common trait as they often escalate during elections. While scholars have examined the causal mechanisms behind electoral violence, the relationship between elections and SoS conflicts has been overlooked. By examining a wide range of cases, the article breaks with previous research that privileges in-depth case studies of SoS conflicts with high levels of violence. Using insights from recent fieldwork in Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, and Indonesia, the article sheds light on the causal dynamics that link elections and diverging levels of SoS conflict. In so doing, it illustrates how the severing of patronage networks and the shifting balance of power towards migrants create fertile contexts for political elites to instrumentalize local grievances. Elections are thus more likely to produce violent SoS conflicts when elites (at both the national and local levels) are able to mobilize supporters by playing upon these grievances, often through the politicization of citizenship and/or the ethnicization of the local sphere.     

Revenge and reprisal violence in Kosovo

One of the most often reported but under-studied phenomenon in post-conflict states is that of revenge violence. While such violence is widely acknowledged to occur after wars, it is often dismissed as epiphenomenal to the central problem of restoring order and good governance in the state. This paper seeks to refocus attention on this phenomenon and challenge the way that it is normally portrayed as a normal, almost incidental consequence of armed conflict. It develops an ideal-type distinction between revenge violence and its strategic mirror, reprisal violence. While revenge violence is premised on a judgement of individual responsibility for a prior act of harm, reprisal violence is driven by an assumption of collective guilt. This paper argues that these two types of violent activity—one expressive and the other strategic—are often intermixed in post-conflict states. Moreover, the interplay between them provides political cover for those who would employ violence to achieve strategic or political goals, while lowering the risks involved when doing so by attributing it to revenge for wartime atrocities. In effect, the fact that revenge and reprisal violence are mirror images of one another can serve to explain and subtly justify the use of organised violence against disadvantaged groups in post-conflict states. This paper examines the validity of this heuristic distinction through a within-case analysis of violence in Kosovo from 1999 to 2001 and identifies the policy consequences of this distinction.     

Battle Losses and Rebel Violence: Raising the Costs for Fighting

In many armed conflicts, rebel groups deliberately target civilians. This article examines whether such violence is related to the performance of the rebels on the battlefield. It is proposed that rebel groups who are losing battles target civilians in order to impose extra costs on the government. When rebels attack civilians, the government may incur both political and military costs. Violence against civilians is thus used as an alternative conflict strategy aimed at pressuring the government into concessions. The argument is evaluated by using monthly data for rebel groups involved in armed conflict from January 2002 to December 2004.     

Democratization and Civilian Control of the Military in Taiwan

Over the last 20 years, Taiwan has witnessed an impressive transition from authoritarian one-party rule to liberal democracy. This included considerable changes in the relations between the civilian political elites and the armed forces. While under the emergency laws of the authoritarian regime the military had been a powerful political force, during democratization the elected civilians have managed to curb military political power and have successively widened their influence over former exclusively military prerogatives. This article argues that the development of Taiwan's civil–military relations can be explained as the result of civilians using increasingly robust strategies to enhance their influence over the military. This was made possible by a highly beneficial combination of historical conditions and factors inside and outside the military that strengthened the political power of the civilian elites and weakened the military's bargaining power. The article finds that even though partisan exploitation of civilian control instruments could potentially arouse civil–military conflict in the future, civil–military relations in general will most likely remain supportive of the further consolidation of Taiwan's democracy.     

UN Troop Deployment and Preventing Violence Against Civilians in Darfur

ABSTRACT

Does the presence of UN peacekeeping force lower civilian fatalities at the local level? If it does, is it because of their coercive military capacity or for other reasons such as their roles in monitoring and reporting violent atrocities? To explore these questions, I study the deployment of peacekeeping units in Darfur and its impact on violence against civilians. Using original geocoded data of UN deployments before and after the intervention, I examine what aspects of such deployments impact one-sided civilian killings by government and rebel groups. Results indicate that deploying UN peacekeepers in an area restrains belligerent from targeting civilians. However, the military capacity of peacekeepers is not a significant predictor of violence against civilians. While their ability to defend themselves is extremely important for peacekeepers, these findings caution against the militarization trend in UN peacekeeping and seek to reshift focus on other substantive aspects of peacekeeping.     

Intraethnic Dominance and Control: Violence Against Co-Ethnics in the Early Sri Lankan Civil War

In some ethno-separatist wars, rebel groups direct a large share of violence against members of their own ethnic community. But why do rebels target the co-ethnics they claim to represent in the war against the government? Our aim in this paper is to provide the components for a conceptual framework that we assess using unique disaggregated casualty data on violence committed by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam against co-ethnic Tamils in territories claimed for the Tamil Eelam state in the early phase of the Sri Lankan conflict, 1985–88. We propose that there are two distinct processes of intraethnic violence: violence against co-ethnic civilians and violence against co-ethnic rivals. While the former aims at controlling the population to win the war against the government, the latter aims at establishing leadership dominance over the ethnic minority. We examine the role of ethnic homogeneity in shaping the use of violence directed against the two types of co-ethnic targets in the buildup phase of ethno-separatist war. We conclude that ethnic demographic structures matter for how the rebels treat co-ethnics in the early phase of war before they have established territorial control.     

Expert intervention: knowledge,violence and identity during the Algerian crisis, 1997–1998

Civil wars and humanitarian intervention became two of the most dominant security concerns of the 1990s and Algeria was one of the many sites where these discourses were played out, especially during the wave of massacres that claimed the lives of hundreds (if not thousands) of Algerian civilians between mid-1997 and early 1998. The internationalization of the Algerian Civil War was driven as much by the horrific violence as by a lack of certainty as to the identity of those perpetrating the massacres. The indeterminacy of violence in Algeria provided the warrant for experts to fill the void. Yet interpretations of the violence in Algeria, coupled with the generic logics of intra-national armed conflicts and the use of international coercive force for the protection of human rights, produced divergent problematizations of the crisis. This paper thus examines the ways in which Algeria was, and often was not, produced as a civil war and a humanitarian crisis by expert and scholarly knowledge and practice. Through an analysis of the exclusionary effects of the dominant understandings of political violence in Algeria, we are able to understand the conceptual impasse that faced international action against the massacres.     

Mind the Gap: Civilian Protection and the Politics of Peace Operation Design

Protecting civilians from conflict and atrocities has become a major focus of governments, the UN, and activists. Yet peace operations—the main policy instrument for directly shielding civilians from violence—vary widely in how well they are designed to do so. One much-maligned problem is a gap between a force's ambitions to protect civilians and its physical resources for doing so. Missions plagued by these ambitions–resources gaps gesture toward protecting civilians but are not designed to do so effectively. They can also worsen civilian suffering. This article explores the politics behind these gaps, focusing on the role of powerful states—especially major Western democracies—in creating and facilitating them. It argues that ambitions–resources gaps represent a form of organized hypocrisy that helps political leaders balance competing normative and material pressures to protect civilians while limiting costs and risks. Case studies of France's Operation Turquoise in Rwanda and US support for the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) in Darfur support the argument.     

“Any press is good press?” Rebel political wings,media freedom,and terrorism in civil wars

As part of a recent effort to bridge the studies of terrorism and civil war, new research has begun to emerge on the use of terrorism by rebel groups as a strategy of war. Building on these findings, we examine the role of affiliated political wings in shaping the use of terrorism by rebel groups during civil wars. We contend that the presence of an affiliated political wing during the civil war should increase the use of terrorism by rebel groups only in countries where there are relatively few restrictions on the freedom of the press. As political wings are often designed to engage with the civilian population through the dissemination of information, these apparatuses are in a key position to frame the use of terrorism as part of the rebel’s broader war effort. To test this proposition, we examine the use of terrorism by all rebel groups from 1970 to 2011. The results from the analysis provide strong support for our argument that political wings increase the use of terrorism by rebel groups only when the press is allowed to independently cover terrorist attacks.     

Just the Two of Us? Civil Conflicts,Pro-State Militants,and the Violence Premium

Quantitative literature discussing violence in civil conflicts tends towards a typical model of engagement between governments and revolutionaries. Whilst recent work has shown the significant impact of multiple anti-government groups, a further feature remains understudied—the role of pro-state militants. This article theorizes a “violence premium” when such groups arise, which leads to all connected groups devoting greater energy to conflict than they would in isolation. Employing duration analysis and data from The Troubles in Northern Ireland, where Republicans act as revolutionary insurgents, Loyalists as pro-state militants, and the British Army as government forces, the violence premium is empirically confirmed. Both Loyalists and Republicans deviate from their underlying strategies to attack more frequently when violence by their rivals increases, with Republicans and the British Army engaging in the same way. An extended analysis, accounting for the status of the victim, shows that the violence premium resulting from interaction between Loyalists and Republicans targeted only the civilian population of Northern Ireland, elucidating the sectarian component of The Troubles. These results show that including all conflict parties and considering how they are linked are important features in studies that aim to determine the net level of violence in civil conflicts.     

Does civil war breed authoritarian values? An empirical study of Bosnia-Herzegovina,Kosovo and Croatia

This article analyses how armed conflict affects individual support for liberal values. It is commonly assumed that the consolidation of democracy depends on individual values such as tolerance as well as aspirations of civil and political liberty. For post-conflict societies, consolidating democracy is also a means of reducing the risk of recurring violent conflict. However, democracy has proven to be especially hard to achieve and consolidate in ethnically divided societies. While previous research has centred mainly on institutions and political elites, I expand the focus to also include ordinary citizens. Using survey data from post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and Croatia, I examine the effect of exposure to violence on a scale of authoritarian values. While the effects are small, the results show that war-related violence in some cases leads people to embrace authoritarian values.     

The Role of Intra-Religious Conflicts in Intrastate Wars

Many civil wars are fought between members of different religious communities. It seems plausible to focus on these communities’ interrelations to identify the causal factors responsible for the escalating effects that religion can have in such conflicts. A closer look, however, reveals that processes within religious communities can be crucial in influencing the role religions play in intrastate wars. Within single communities, factions of religious elites compete for material and dogmatic supremacy. Such intra-religious conflicts can motivate religious elites to search for support from political allies to prevail over their religious rivals. In return, they legitimize their political patrons’ claims for political power and their violent campaigns against members of other religious communities. Thus, intra-religious conflicts can effectively contribute to the religious escalation of intrastate wars between different religious communities. This argument is exemplified with reference to conflicts in Thailand, The Philippines, and Iraq.