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Attacks on Civilians in Civil War: Targeting the Achilles Heel of Democratic Governments
Abstract
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.
... The literature provides contrasting and incomplete explanations for this behavior. Some research suggests that rebels in democratic countries are more likely to target civilians (Hultman 2012;Stanton 2013). However, state attributes alone are unlikely to completely explain insurgent targeting. ...
... Other studies of intentional civilian victimization by rebels use the term terrorism for this violence (Stanton 2013;Thomas 2014;Fortna 2015), so we follow this practice. 2 The burgeoning literature on civilian victimization during war explores regime characteristics (Eck and Hultman 2007;Hultman 2012;Stanton 2013), rebel group attributes (Wood 2010), and interrebel dynamics (Wood and Kathman 2015). Civil wars in democracies are particularly prone to rebel targeting of civilians (Hultman 2012;Stanton 2013). ...
... 2 The burgeoning literature on civilian victimization during war explores regime characteristics (Eck and Hultman 2007;Hultman 2012;Stanton 2013), rebel group attributes (Wood 2010), and interrebel dynamics (Wood and Kathman 2015). Civil wars in democracies are particularly prone to rebel targeting of civilians (Hultman 2012;Stanton 2013). These governments are uniquely accountable to the well-being of civilians and may be coerced into conciliatory actions to protect the public (Hultman 2012;Stanton 2013). ...
How do conciliatory and coercive counterinsurgency tactics affect militant group violence against civilians? Scholars of civil war increasingly seek to understand intentional civilian targeting, often referred to as terrorism. Extant research emphasizes group weakness, or general state attributes such as regime type. We focus on terrorism as violent communication and as a response to government actions. State tactics toward groups, carrots and sticks, should be important for explaining insurgent terror. We test the argument using new data on terrorism by insurgent groups, with many time-varying variables, covering 1998 through 2012. Results suggest government coercion against a group is associated with subsequent terrorism by that group. However, this is only the case for larger insurgent groups, which raises questions about the notion of terrorism as a weapon of the weak. Carrots are often negatively related to group terrorism. Other factors associated with insurgent terrorism include holding territory, ethnic motivation, and social service provision.
... Civilian victimization -the targeted abuse of civilians by an armed actor to achieve a political goal -is a costly part of intrastate conflicts. 1 Recent scholarship views civilian victimization as a strategic choice, implemented by armed actors to increase bargaining leverage and gain political concessions (Arendt 1970, Hultman 2012, Pape 2003, Wood 2010, Wood and Kathman 2014. Rebels employ violence against civilians to increase external support or control territory and the flow of information and resources (Kalyvas 2006, Rueda 2016, Salehyan, Siroky and Wood 2014, Weinstein 2005, Wood 2010, 2014a,b, Wood and Kathman 2014. ...
... 5 Yet one regularity, as studies have shown, is that rebels victimize more when they are fighting democracies (Eck and Hultman 2007, Heger 2015, Hultman 2007, Wood 2010, 2014a. According to Hultman (2012), the Achilles' heel of democracy is that free and fair participation in open and competitive elections paints a target on the back of citizens during episodes of armed conflict. This finding is problematic for two reasons. ...
... While the extant literature develops important conditions influencing the behavior of rebel organizations, the relationship between regime type and civilian victimization by rebels needs further theoretical exploration. The existing literature considering the role of regime on civilian abuses by rebel groups leverages previous work on the strategic nature of terrorism (Fortna 2015, Hultman 2012, Pape 2005, Stanton 2013. Terrorist organizations are assumed to be purposive actors who strategically engage in terrorist attacks to achieve some desired political outcome (Pape 2003). ...
Recent scholarship contends that during civil conflict rebels victimize civilians more when fighting democracies than authoritarian states. Yet to understand why rebels victimize civilians, it is important to consider when rebels target civilians and the severity of violence rebels use against civilians. Considering this distinction is critical to understanding the strategic calculus that rebels face while fighting states with varying regime types. By doing so, I argue that although civilian victimization by rebel groups is more likely in democracies, the count of civilians killed by rebels is higher when rebels fight authoritarian states. Employing a dataset of armed conflicts from 1989 to 2009 and a series of hurdle models, this study finds that rebel organizations fighting in more authoritarian regimes are less likely to engage in civilian victimization; however, if they do use violence against civilians, the count of civilians targeted is higher.
... Similarly, Hultman (2008) and Eck and Hultman (2007) suggest that if control begins to slip away, actors may resort to widespread indiscriminate violence to demonstrate the inability of the competing actor to effectively provide security. This has been found to be particularly relevant in the cases where democracies are the incumbents, as the population can hold it accountable for such security failures (Hultman 2012). Along these lines, others have suggested that certain structural constraints shape the patterns of violence that occurs. ...
... First, by and large, the American forces were not going to resort to the killing of civilians to overcome their identification problem. Indeed, there is a good deal of empirical evidence (Hultman 2012;Eck and Hultman 2007;Valentino, Huth, and Balch-Lindsay 2004) that democracies are far less likely to engage in mass killings during armed conflicts for any number of reasons including norms (Harff 2003) or the costs of doing so (Li 2005). ...
The papers of this dissertation explore two dimensions of wars of occupation. The first paper concerns the outcomes of such wars. It proposes a theory of democratic accountability that links the level of casualties suffered by an occupying force to its leadership???s decision to withdraw from the contested territory. I argue that war casualties act as the cost that drives patterns of domestic support in democratic states. Political elites seeking electoral gain will give meaning to those casualties, frequently arguing that the benefits that might come with continued fighting will not justify those costs, and that such wars are not necessary for the state???s survival. I suggest that once these divisions occur at the elite level, it becomes very difficult to maintain support among the population. This leads to the finding that while democracies may not win or lose any less than autocracies, they consistently abandon them at significantly lower levels of casualties. In the second paper, I use an experimental survey to determine if news of American casualties or elite opinion drives attitudes about the war in Afghanistan. Existing experiments in this area typically portray elite support as split along traditional partisan lines, and support or opposition among the subjects is usually driven by their partisan attachments. But this approach rarely reflects reality, where elite foreign policy and security opinions frequently cut across partisan divisions. The findings reveal that news of American casualties has little independent effect on attitudes towards the Afghanistan conflict. Instead, overall support for the conflict only declines when elite opinions in response to those deaths cut across standard partisan divisions. The final paper pivots to a discussion of the dynamics of violence in these wars. Here, I examine whether the factors that were effective in reducing attacks against counterinsurgents in Iraq had the same effect on patterns of selective and indiscriminate violence against civilians. I find that greater American troop density in a given district is associated with declines in targeted attacks on Iraqi civilians, but this has no effect on the rate of indiscriminate attacks.
... Violence against civilians is commonly used by the rebel group as a strategy with the aim of antagonizing the population against the government, demonstrating that it cannot protect them. For the government, targeting civilians aims to weaken the rebel support base (Hultman 2012). 48 Among the numerous violent events that have affected the countries in the last decades, to name only some examples, the fighting that broke out in the western region of Darfur in 2003 between SLM/SLA, JEM and the government led to the spread of hunger, disease and violence with thousands of civilians killed. ...
The report quantifies exposed and vulnerable populations to climate change in Africa based on climate, demographic and socio-economic scenarios and analyses past trends, to detect statically significant associations between net migration and climate. It follows a spatial demographic approach and covers the entire territory of Africa with data and projections at high geographical resolution spanning from 1975 to 2100. These macro analyses are complemented by case studies looking at the relation between climate change displacement and urbanization in Egypt, drought migration in the Sahel regions and the role of conflicts in Sudan and South Sudan. Finally, the report considers individual perspectives using survey data on the perceptions in Africa about climate change and the desire to migrate. The findings of this report support the ongoing integration of EU policymaking on climate change, adaptation and migration. Specifically, it highlights the importance of further mainstreaming an understanding of climate change processes into demographic processes and adaptation actions at a local level.
... 21 Non-state violence against civilians can also be part of a coercive strategy to inflict costs on governments and harm political adversaries. 22 Rebel or terror groups may also resort to violence against civilians when they are too weak to challenge government military forces directly. 23 Importantly, these theoretical approaches focus on structural factors that incentivize violence against civilians rather than proximate events that set off such violence. ...
Although past research has addressed why civilians are targeted, we know less about why non-state actors escalate violence against civilians at particular times. This article seeks to identify the events that trigger spikes in violence against civilians committed by non-state actors. We employ an innovative method to identify 24 such escalations in Africa committed by 20 different non-state groups between 1989 and 2015. Rigorous case studies reveal three major types of triggers, including situations in which (1) groups lose relative power, (2) groups gain relative power, and (3) opponents attack civilians. Specifically, we find that opponent military advances—which results in a relative loss of power for the non-state actor—are the most common trigger. More broadly, 75 percent of all escalations are tied to a group’s relative loss in power. These results improve understandings of civilian targeting by non-state actors and may inform efforts to forecast such violence before it occurs.
... There are strong international norms against such actions, which implies that engaging in this form of behavior would decrease the likelihood of continued third-party involvement (Salehyan et al. 2011). This is evident in the finding that governments tend to rely on militias to target civilian populations (Raleigh 2012), as well as the fact that democratic regimes are sensitive to these types of attacks in the context of domestic unrest (Eck and Hultman 2007;Hultman 2012). 10 Finally, the third reason to anticipate a decrease in attacks targeting civilians has to do with the position of rebels relative to the government. ...
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.
... Indeed, weaker governments are more likely to employ tactics of civilian targeting to undermine their opponent's capacity. 38 In the Pakistan case, where the army made use of collective violence in targeting local and foreign fighters by demolishing private residences (e.g., in Operation Kalosha II), it triggered multiple attacks against army bases and enraged locals. 39 Similarly, where government militias in Iraq have engaged in revenge killings, many civilians have lost trust in them and prefer the ISIS despite disagreeing with the latter's brutality and interpretation of Islam. ...
Powerful states frequently employ foreign aid to pursue international security objectives. Yet aid's effectiveness will be undermined if it exacerbates the effects of conflict on civilians within recipient states. This article investigates how international development aid and U.S. military aid influence recipient governments' incentives and ability to target civilians. U.S. military aid has a persuasion effect on state actors, which decreases a recipient state's incentives and necessity to target civilians. Development aid flows, however, trigger a predation effect in some environments, exacerbating civilian targeting. An analysis of aid flows in 135 countries on civilian killings between 1989–2011 provides support for both the persuasion and predation effects associated with aid.
... In fact, an abundance of truly outstanding work has been produced over the last ten years that I will not have a chance to discuss. This includes group-level research on rebel organization (Krause 2014, Staniland 2014, rebel alliances (Posner 2004, Furtado 2007, Akcinaroglu 2012, Christia 2012, Seymour 2014, rebel fractionalization (Woldemariam 2011, Warren & Troy 2015, rebelon-rebel fighting (Cunningham et al. 2012, Fjelde & Nilsson 2012, Nygard & Weintraub 2015, Warren & Troy 2015, and rebel treatment of civilians (Humphreys & Weinstein 2006;Weinstein 2007;Flanigan 2008;Wood 2009Wood , 2014aBalcells 2010;Metelits 2010;Hultman 2012;Wood et al. 2012;Taydas & Peksen 2012;Fjelde & Hultman 2014;Salehyan et al. 2014;Stewart 2015). It also includes micro-level research on individuals' decisions to join insurgencies (Weinstein 2007, Humphreys & Weinstein 2008, commit atrocities including rape (Wood 2009, Cohen 2013, resist rebel governance (Arjona 2014), and demobilize and integrate into society (Humphreys & Weinstein 2008, Annan et al. 2011 This article is also not an exhaustive examination of all the questions that still need to be answered or the research that still needs to be done. ...
Post-2003 civil wars are di�erent from previous civil wars in three strik-
ing ways. First, the majority are situated in Muslim majority countries.
Second, most of the rebel groups �ghting these wars espouse radical Is-
lamist ideas and goals. Third, of the radical groups �ghting these wars,
most are pursuing transnational rather than national aims. Current
civil war theories can explain some of what is going on, but not ev-
erything. In this article I argue that the transformation of information
technology, especially the advent of the Web 2.0 in the early 2000s, is
the big new innovation that is likely driving many of these changes. I
o�er a theory to explain why rebel groups, especially those in Muslim
countries, have chosen to pursue a particular type of extreme ideology
and goals. I then identify the six big implications this new information
environment is likely to have on rebel behavior in the future. Innova-
tions in information and communication technology are currently man-
ifesting themselves in the rise of global Jihadi groups in the Muslim
world. But we can expect them to be exploited by other groups as well.
... 22 Many also find that non-democratic regimes are associated with a significant risk of government VAC, 23 but a few find that democracy is correlated with a greater risk of rebel VAC. 24 Some also include per capita GDP and/or trade openness. The former proxies a state's level of economic development and/or income earning opportunities in the regular economy, while the latter captures how a state's economy (and more broadly its society) is integrated with the rest of the world. ...
‘Habituation to atrocity’ is characterized as an actor’s increased willingness to carry out high-level violence against civilians (VAC) owing to the choice of low-level attacks in an earlier period. We theoretically analyse habituation to atrocity using a rational choice model in which a government, rebel organization or militia group allocates resources to fighting, attacking civilians and identity formation to achieve territorial control. Based upon concepts available in the rational addiction literature, the model generates a demand function for VAC in which substantial additional demand arises owing to the ‘bad habit’ generated by previous atrocities. The model guides our empirical inquiry into VAC for a sample of forty-nine African countries over the period 1997 to 2014. We find that the number of past low-level civilian attacks (even sometimes those involving zero fatalities) significantly affects the number of high-level attacks in the present. We also find that previous low-level civilian attacks sometimes better predict high-level attacks than civil conflict. Our work suggests that regional and global datasets on ‘small’ VAC incidents can serve as valuable early warning indicators of more severe atrocities.
Available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14623528.2016.1216109
... Both governments and insurgents pursue a wide range of activities while conflict is ongoing. They may practice violent strategies such as guerilla warfare (Valentino, Huth, and Balch-Lindsay 2004), sexual violence (Cohen 2013;Cohen and Nordås 2014), and civilian targeting (Hultman 2012), but they may also choose to engage in conciliatory nonviolent actions (Chenoweth and Stephan 2011), for example, by joining peace negotiations (Fortna 2008;Slantchev 2003), granting concessions (Walter 2006), or engaging in public goods provision (Crowley 1991). Understanding DCJ use can help us further explain when and why certain behaviors will be pursued: are combatants that use sexual violence less likely to prosecute and punish their own? ...
While armed conflict is ultimately about violent interaction between combatant groups, a variety of policies are pursued in conjunction with violence that contribute to the course of conflict and its outcomes. One underdeveloped area of research is the use of judicial and quasi-judicial processes during armed conflict. These processes, including trials, truth commissions, reparations, amnesties, purges, or exiles, are directly related to the actions and abuses of the conflict itself—a phenomenon we refer to as during-conflict justice (DCJ). To enable researchers to answer questions about when and why governments and rebels resort to these strategies, and to what effect, we created a global, cross-national dataset which includes 2,205 justice processes implemented during 204 internal armed conflicts between 1946 and 2011. Using these data, this article investigates the conditions under which governments and rebels employ DCJ as well as the potential effects of DCJ usage on conflict dynamics and outcomes.
... Violence against civilians by rebel groups can also be part of a coercive strategy designed to inflict costs on governments in the effort to extract concessions (Hultman 2012). Although terrorism scholars often seek to distinguish insurgent violence against civilians from terrorist attacks that occur outside the context of civil wars (Hoffman 1998, p. 41), many groups commonly perceived as terrorist organizations, including the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Irish Republican Army, and most regional al-Qaeda affiliates, meet the criteria for belligerents in most definitions of "civil war" (Crenshaw 2001, Pape 2005. ...
This article reviews the political science literature on political violence against civilians, including genocide, mass killing, and terrorism. Early work on these subjects tended to portray this kind of violence as irrational, random, or the result of ancient hatreds between ethnic groups. Most scholars studying political violence today, however, understand it to be primarily, if not exclusively, instrumental and orchestrated by powerful actors seeking to achieve tangible political or military objectives. Scholars continue to disagree, however, about the specific motives that drive belligerents to target civilians or the conditions under which large-scale violence against civilians is most likely.
... While the absolute size of the civil war best predicts civilian killings by the government, rebel perpetrated civilian killings are far greater when an insurgency lacks a clear epicenter and the rebel franchise has become decentralized. Prior studies on rebel perpetrated civilian killings (Hultman 2012) found fewer civilian killings in territorial conflicts. The finding here suggests that one of the ways in which the nature of the dispute effects civilian killings by the rebels is by impacting the amount of territory that the rebels are contesting. ...
This study models the structural sources of variation in the use of selective (discriminate) repression within 89 civil wars fought between 1981 and 2005. The severity of repressive violence is modeled as a function of the amount of territory being contested by the insurgents. This idea is operationalized using measures of the location, size, and density of insurgency violence. The analysis finds evidence that the repressive behavior of both governments and rebel groups is linked to conflict geography. Governments violate physical integrity rights more frequently and kill more civilians the greater the overall amount of territory under contestation. Rebels kill more civilians in highly dispersed insurgencies that lack a clear epicenter.
Does increasing counterinsurgent mechanization result in higher levels of unintentional civilian casualties? Existing research on unintentional civilian victimization in recent conflicts has focused on air strikes, but this question remains unexplored in research examining counterinsurgent force structure for ground units. However, a host of counterinsurgency practitioners in Iraq have cited the mechanized forces’ effectiveness in delivering precision fires that limit civilian casualties. We propose an armored restraint theory, suggesting that mechanized crews’ armored protection enhances soldiers’ decision space when making the consequential choice to employ lethal force. When this enhanced decision space is combined with units that systematically respect jus in bello principles and non-combatant immunity norms, it results in armored restraint, which may reduce government-caused civilian casualties in civil conflicts. We test this theory using micro-data from Iraq and find mechanized units are associated with significantly lower civilian casualty levels compared to dismounted units.
There is an ongoing discussion regarding the role of mechanized forces in counterinsurgency warfare. Proponents note that they boost counterinsurgents’ ability to fight while critics point out that they diminish their ability to gather information. This note adds to this discussion by focusing on violence against civilians, an outcome that theory suggests should be affected by mechanization via both of these channels. Results from quantitative analyses employing new data on mechanization and covering the period 1989–2016 indicate that mechanization is unrelated to the number of civilians killed by government forces but positively associated with that killed by rebels. These results are in line with the idea that mechanization increases counterinsurgents’ fighting but decreases their information-gathering abilities. By offering quantitative evidence that mechanized forces have a place in modern counterinsurgency, these results contribute to both academics’ and practitioners’ understanding of armed intrastate conflict.
During a civil war, does external intelligence assistance reduce violence perpetrated by the recipient government against civilians? I contend that intelligence assistance reduces violence against civilians by facilitating identification problems and adopting a “winning-hearts-and-minds strategy,” which enhances the recipient government's legitimacy and intelligence potential. Enhanced intelligence capability solves the recipient government's identification problems. I examined this logic using a dataset on external support and one-sided violence between 1990 and 2008. The empirical findings show that external intelligence assistance reduces the recipient government's violence against civilians.
This article examines the effect of foreign military intervention on rebel governance in terms of disaggregated human security. Case studies reveal that, on the one hand, a ‘thirst for legitimacy’ influenced by military intervention has led rebel groups to engage in internal and external diplomatic activities. Moreover, their efforts to develop fundamental rebel governance structures have had clearly positive effects on human security. On the other hand, when repelled from a territory by military interventions, rebel groups have attempted to control their remaining territories through the imposition of fear, which can devastate human security in rebel-held areas.
Counting conservatively, data show about 100 million mass atrocity-related deaths since 1900. A distinct empirical phenomenon, mass atrocities are events of enormous scale, severity, and brutality, occur in wartime and in peacetime, are geographically widespread, occur with surprising frequency, under various systems of governance, and can be long-lasting in their effects on economic and human development, wellbeing, and wealth, more so when nonfatal physical injuries and mental trauma also are considered. As such, mass atrocities are a major economic concern. Given the multidisciplinary nature of the subject matter, the pertinent conceptual, theoretical, and empirical literatures are voluminous and widely dispersed, and have not been synthesized before from an economics point of view. We address two gaps: a “mass atrocities gap” in the economics literature and an “economics gap” in mass atrocities scholarship. Our goals are, first, to survey and synthesize for economists a broad sweep of literatures on which to base further work in this field and, second, for both economists and noneconomists to learn how economic inquiry contributes to understanding the causes and conduct of mass atrocities and, possibly, to their mitigation and prevention. In drawing on standard, behavioral, identity, social network, and complex systems economics, we find that the big puzzles of the “how” and “why” of mass atrocities, and mass participation therein, are being well addressed. While new research on such topics will be valuable, work should also progress to develop improved prevention approaches. (JEL D72, D74, K38, N40, Z13)
Recent scholarship contends that during civil conflict rebels victimize civilians more when fighting democracies than authoritarian states. Yet to understand why rebels victimize civilians, it is important to consider when rebels target civilians and the severity of violence they use against civilians. Considering this distinction is critical to understanding the strategic calculus that rebels face while fighting states with varying regime types. By doing so, I argue that although civilian victimization by rebel groups is more likely in democracies, the count of civilians killed by rebels is higher when rebels fight autocracies. Employing a dataset of armed conflicts from 1989 to 2009 and a series of hurdle models, this study finds that rebel organizations fighting in authoritarian regimes are less likely to engage in civilian victimization; however, if they do use violence against civilians, the count of civilians targeted is higher.
To what extent do gender relations in society influence the likelihood of negotiations during intrastate disputes? A substantial body of literature recognizes gendered inequalities as integral to understanding conflict, yet they have received little attention in systematic studies of conflict management. I argue that patriarchal gender relations that reflect a preference for masculinity over femininity influence states’ propensity to negotiate with rebels. I draw on the concept of practices to explain how gender relations shape government preferences for negotiations. Specifically, I contend that practices of excluding women from fully participating in public life institutionalize violence as the preferred way of managing conflict. The implication is that countries with more patriarchal gender relations are less likely to engage in negotiations during intrastate conflicts. I test this argument on all civil conflict dyads between 1975 and 2014. The analyses show that countries that marginalize women’s participation in public life are significantly less likely to engage in negotiations. The results provide strong support for my theoretical argument and offer systematic evidence in support of core claims of the feminist peace theory.
This article discusses the trends and micro-dynamics of violence in northern Mali. Using a mixed research design, we focus on the violence used by jihadist groups during the first phases of the Malian civil war (2012–2015). Integrating research on civil war and terrorism, we distinguish between direct and remote violence. Quantitative analyses show that the involvement of jihadist groups in this conflict had a strong impact on the level and intensity of violence of all warring parties. Qualitative analysis of data collected during field research done in Mali between 2016 and 2017 complements the quantitative work. It enlightens that relational dynamics strongly influence the decision to resort to violence within non-state armed groups, including jihadist ones, while local contexts often explain temporal and geographic variations in violence.
Do rebel group violations of international humanitarian law during civil war—in particular, attacks on noncombatant civilians—affect conflict outcomes? I argue that in the post-Cold War era, rebel groups that do not target civilians have used the framework of international humanitarian law to appeal for diplomatic support from Western governments and intergovernmental organizations. However, rebel group appeals for international diplomatic support are most likely to be effective when the rebel group can contrast its own restraint toward civilians with the government's abuses. Rebel groups that do not target civilians in the face of government abuses, therefore, are likely to be able to translate increased international diplomatic support into more favorable conflict outcomes. Using original cross-national data on rebel group violence against civilians in all civil wars from 1989 to 2010, I show that rebel groups that exercise restraint toward civilians in the face of government violence are more likely to secure favorable conflict outcomes. I also probe the causal mechanism linking rebel group behavior to conflict outcomes, showing that when a rebel group exercises restraint toward civilians and the government commits atrocities, Western governments and intergovernmental organizations are more likely to take coercive diplomatic action against the government. The evidence shows that rebel groups can translate this increased diplomatic support into favorable political outcomes.
Studies of the onset of genocide and accompanying early warning and forecasting efforts have focused almost exclusively on states. This article suggests that genocide prediction must move beyond a purely state-centric approach. Specifically, I suggest three major avenues that will refine and complement existing research and related prediction efforts. These include 1) theorizing and analyzing non-state actors who commit genocide, 2) engaging in conflict-centered approaches, and 3) addressing the onset and triggers of genocide within subnational spaces. I conclude with a discussion of how these three avenues can be pursued simultaneously to inform more robust genocide prevention endeavors.
This book explores the role of gender in influencing war-fighting actors’ strategies towards the attack or protection of civilians.
Traditional narratives suggest that killing civilians intentionally in wars happens infrequently, and that the perpetration of civilian targeting is limited to aberrant actors. Recently, scholars have shown that both state and non-state actors target civilians, even while explicitly deferring to the civilian immunity principle. This book fills a gap in the accounts of how civilian targeting happens, and shows that these actors are in large part targeting women rather than some gender-neutral understanding of civilians. It presents a history of civilian victimization in wars and conflicts, and then lays out a feminist theoretical approach to understanding civilian victimization. It explores the British Blockade of Germany in World War I, the Soviet ‘Rape of Berlin’ in World War II, the Rwandan genocide, and the contemporary conflict in northeast Nigeria. Across these case studies, the authors lay out how gender is key to how war-fighting actors understand both themselves and their opponents, and therefore plays a role in shaping strategic and tactical choices. It makes the argument that seeing women in nationalist and war narratives is crucial to understanding when and how civilians come to be targeted in wars, and how that targeting can be reduced.
Why do armed groups ever direct violent attacks against humanitarian organizations? While scholars have analyzed wartime violence against civilians, little research exists on violence against other noncombatants, like humanitarian organizations. Violence against aid workers, however, is common in wartime, with devastating consequences for civilians, who suffer when aid organizations respond by reducing services. This article argues that much of the violence against humanitarian organizations is strategic. By serving as substitute providers of public goods, aid organizations can bolster the government. Insurgents thus target aid workers in an effort to force them out of particular regions, undermining government support. To test this argument, we analyze variation in violence across space and time using an original panel dataset on attacks against aid workers in Afghanistan, 2008-2012. Despite aid organizations' attempts to remain neutral, we find evidence that insurgents strategically target aid workers in areas where their services likely strengthen government support. © The Author (2017). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Studies Association. All rights reserved.
For scholars of Venezuela and Colombia the transnational dimensions of the Colombian armed con ict are an evident and hardly new fact. In the international literature in the elds of Con ict Studies and International Relations, however, some of the aspects of how Colombia’s internal con ict have affected the bilateral relations between Bogota and Caracas are hardly considered. In this paper we argue that the dominant orthodoxy that distinguishes between internal and external con ict stands in the way of a comprehensive understanding of how armed con ict within states can affect disputes among states.
We provide a review of existing studies on internal strife and inter-state con ict, and identify the main factors they have singled out as connecting both dimensions. These factors are evaluated in light of the Colombo-Venezuelan crises between 2006-2010. We propose that a model transcending the inter-intra divide needs to analyze factors against the backdrop of two relevant conditions, namely state capacity and international rivalry. The paper concludes with a re ection on the way future research could take.
Previous literature has shown a link between violent victimization and pro-sociopolitical behavior. This study asks why victimization is shown to increase the likelihood of political participation in regions of ongoing armed conflict. I argue that previous answers to this question have overlooked a key variable for predicting civilian behavior: individual-level social context. As a step forward in connecting social networks to behavior outcomes, I present the kinship network as a novel measure for proxying an individual’s valuable and private social interactions. Building on previous victimization literature, I suggest that to comprehensively understand the effects of victimization, scholars should account for social context. Specifically, I examine the hypothesis that as kinship ties strengthen, victimization positively influences the likelihood of political participation. To test this argument, I turn to the Mexican criminal conflict. I use original survey data of 1,000 respondents collected in July 2012 from the ongoing drug war in Mexico, and in doing so, I find that kinship plays a key role in motivating political participation during armed conflicts in that survivors of criminal violence with strong ties to kinship networks are the most likely to participate in political groups; these results are robust to state-level fixed effects and are unlikely to be driven by victimization selection bias.
What is the impact of foreign troop support on combatant-perpetrated sexual violence against civilians? We hypothesize that biased troop support increases the risk of sexual violence by the subordinate party both as a consequence of strategic considerations and as a product of a situation increasingly conducive to opportunistic behavior. Time-series cross-section analyses of all civil wars during 1989–2012 are largely supportive of our expectation. Rebel groups are more likely to perpetrate sexual violence the more troop support the state receives. Likewise, state forces are more prone to commit sexual violence the more they are challenged by troops supporting the rebel group(s).
How does a state’s commitment to international criminal accountability mechanisms affect the tactics of rebel groups fighting against it? I examine the conflict between Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army, spanning four phases from 1996 until 2015, and parse out whether Uganda’s stance on the Rome Statute and the International Criminal Court affected the LRA’s propensity to target civilians. I use descriptive statistics of civilian and military casualties and qualitative case studies, drawing largely on newspaper and NGO reports of events in the conflict. I find that the affect of Uganda’s signaling on justice on the LRA’s civilian targeting is conditioned by several factors, including principal-agent relationships among the LRA, inconsistency of signaling and subsequent doubts about credibility, and learning processes among all actors about the role of the ICC in ongoing conflict. Advisor: Courtney Hillebrecht
Where does large-scale violence take place? Large-scale collective violence is a multifaceted phenomenon and includes armed conflicts between government and organized opposition groups, violence between communal groups, and one-sided violence against civilians perpetrated by agents of the state or other armed actors. These forms of violence are usually studied as separate occurrences. In this chapter we are interested in the spatial dimension of these conflicts, exploring whether different forms of violence are predominantly rural or urban phenomena.
This article presents a rational choice model of a regime's incentive to allocate resources to fighting rebels and killing civilians when facing an internal threat to its political or territorial control. Assuming that intentional violence against civilians is an inferior input and fighting rebels is subject to increasing marginal returns, three weak state conditions - anocracy, new state status, and low income - increase civilian atrocities within the model. Also, two other risk factors for mass atrocities - discrimination and Cold War conditions - can be seen as "price reducers" for killing civilians, thus increasing the quantity demanded for civilian atrocities in the model. The modeling exercises show how intentional violence against civilians can be viewed through an economic lens of optimal choice and how rational choice theory provides a parsimonious way to theorize and generate empirically testable hypotheses about risk factors for genocide and mass killing.
We present a rational choice model depicting a regime’s incentive to allocate resources to fighting rebels and killing civilians when it perceives an internal threat to its political or territorial control. The model guides our empirical inquiry of risk factors for genocide onset. Based on logit methods applied to a pooled sample of 155 countries over the period 1955–2006, we find that key variables highlighted in the theoretical model elevate genocide risk. Specifically, measures of threat, anocratic Polity scores, new state status, and low income significantly increase genocide risk, which we interpret as consistent with weak state perspectives on mass atrocity. Moreover, the threat measures matter even after controlling for internal war and the anocracy result holds even after removing components of the Polity dataset that are “contaminated” with factional violence, including genocide. Extensions of the empirical analysis to a variety of alternative measures, variables, and estimators show the robustness of weak state risk factors for genocide.
Kaldor's ‘new wars’ argument has stimulated a forceful debate over the last decade. Albeit providing important insights, this debate has messily conflated arguments, concepts and theories. As a result, when it comes to enhancing our understanding of contemporary armed conflicts, it is bringing diminishing results. In this article we suggest avenues for further research and point to current research programs that may help put the debate ‘back on track’ and push the discussion forward by examining systematically some of the aspects Kaldor described as defining features of ‘new wars’. Concretely, we stress the importance of undertaking a longer historical perspective for drawing inferences; call for bringing warfare in the study of civilian victimization; highlight the conceptual differences between ‘new wars’ and civil wars and emphasize the importance of taking their transnational dimension seriously; make a plea for disaggregation for capturing relevant temporal and spatial variation; and draw attention to new data sets and the opportunities they offer to statistically test the ‘new wars’ argument. In a concluding section, we broadly outline the significance of this discussion for policy making.
Although scholars have focused primarily on transnational terrorism, much of the terrorism occurring worldwide is domestic terrorism carried out by rebel groups fighting in civil wars. This article examines variation in terrorism across civil wars, asking why some rebel groups use terrorism, while others do not. Rebel groups make strategic calculations, assessing how their government opponents and their own civilian constituencies will react to terrorism. Rebel groups challenging democratic governments are more likely to use terrorism, believing that their opponents will be sensitive to civilian losses and, therefore, likely to make concessions in response to violence. Rebel groups also consider the costs of violence, which depend on characteristics of the rebel group’s civilian constituency. Rebel groups with broad civilian constituencies select lower-casualty civilian targets to minimize public backlash. Evidence from a new data set on rebel-group terrorism in civil wars from 1989 to 2010 provides support for these arguments
While some groups work hard to foster collaborative ties with civilians, others engage in egregious abuses and war crimes. We argue that foreign state funding for rebel organizations greatly reduces the incentives of militant groups to the ‘win the hearts and minds’ of civilians because it diminishes the need to collect resources from the population. However, unlike other lucrative resources, foreign funding of rebel groups must be understood in principal-agent terms. Some external principals — namely, democracies and states with strong human rights lobbies — are more concerned with atrocities in the conflict zone than others. Multiple state principals also lead to abuse as no single state can effectively restrain the organization. We test these conjectures with new data on foreign support for rebel groups and data on one-sided violence against civilians. Our results provide support for these hypotheses. Most notably, we find strong evidence that principal characteristics help influence agent actions.
Stuart J. Kaufman is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Kentucky.
The author would like to thank Leokadia Drobizheva, Airat Aklaev, Nicholas Dima, Stephen Bowers, and Vasile Nedelciuc for their help in organizing this research. This research was supported by funds from the University of Kentucky, and by grants from the International Research and Exchanges Board and the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, with funds provided by the U.S. Department of State (Title VIII) and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Valuable suggestions and advice were provided by Jeff Chinn, Charles Davis, Pal Kolsto, Karen Mingst, and Stephen Saideman. None of these people or organizations is responsible for the views expressed.
1. See, e.g., Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (New York: St. Martin's, 1993). Some more sophisticated approaches including this argument are Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Crawford Young, The Politics of Cultural Pluralism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976); and Elizabeth Crighton and Martha Abele MacIver, "The Evolution of Protracted Ethnic Conflict: Group Dominance and Political Underdevelopment in Northern Ireland and Lebanon," Comparative Politics, Vol. 23, No. 2 (January 1991), pp. 127-142.
2. Among the first to publish this insight was Barry R. Posen in "The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict," Survival, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Spring 1993), pp. 27-47.
3. The most sophisticated mobilization theory of political violence is Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1978). The competing theory is from Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict. On diversionary theories of war, see Jack S. Levy, "The Diversionary Theory of War: A Critique," in Manus I. Midlarsky, ed., Handbook of War Studies (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989). The classic exposition of the spiral model is Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976).
4. This process is described and defined in Alvin Rabushka and Kenneth Shepsle, Politics in Plural Societies (Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill, 1972).
5. Posen, "The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict."
6. Carol Tavris, Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion, rev. ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), p. 91.
7. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976 [1832]), pp. 137-138 and passim.
8. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict.
9. Jack L. Snyder, "Perceptions of the Security Dilemma in 1914," in Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein, eds. Psychology and Deterrence (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).
10. Donald Horowitz, "Making Moderation Pay: The Comparative Politics of Ethnic Conflict Management," in Joseph V. Montville, ed., Conflict and Peacemaking in Multiethnic Societies (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1990).
11. Horowitz, "Making Moderation Pay."
12. Stephen Van Evera, "Hypotheses on Nationalism and War," International Security, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Spring 1994), pp. 5-39.
13. Horowitz, "Making Moderation Pay."
14. Horowitz, "Making Moderation Pay."
15. I show the presence of these factors in Yugoslavia and Azerbaijan in Stuart J. Kaufman, "An 'International' Theory of Interethnic War," Review of International Studies, Vol. 22, No. 2 (April 1996), pp. 149-171. On Georgia, see Stephen S. Jones, "Populism in Georgia: the Gamsakhurdia Phenomenon," in Donald Schwartz and Razmik Panossian, eds., Nationalism and History: The Politics of Nation Building in Post-Soviet Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), pp. 127-149. On Sri Lanka, see K.M. de Silva, Managing Ethnic Tensions in Multi-Ethnic Societies: Sri Lanka 1880-1985 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1986).
16. This process is noted in Horowitz, "Making Moderation Pay"; and Rabushka and Shepsle, Politics in Plural Societies, among others.
17. For more detail, see Kaufman, "An 'International' Theory of Interethnic War."
18. Jones, "Populism in Georgia."
19. See Michael E. Brown, "The Causes and Regional Dimensions of Internal Conflict," in Michael E. Brown, ed., The International Dimensions of Internal Conflict (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), p. 586.
20. See V.P. Gagnon, "Ethnic Nationalism and International Conflict: The Case of Serbia," International Security, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Winter 1994/95), pp. 130-166.
21. Stuart J. Kaufman, "The Irresistible...
When all else fails, aggrieved groups of society often resort to violence to redress their grievance - either by seeking to overthrow the ruling government or by attempting to secede. The strength of the rebel group relative to the state determines what direction the conflict will take. In institutionally and economically capable countries, any opposition group is likely to be inferior to the government. These groups will see secession as the most viable strategy to improve living conditions. Inconsistent, poor, and resource-dependent regimes are typically quite unstable and should therefore be more likely to attract coups and revolutions. In addition, large and ethnically diverse countries contain a higher number of peripheral and possibly marginalized groups, as well as remote and inaccessible terrain, both of which are expected to favor secessionist insurgency. Smaller countries, in contrast, offer few opportunities for separatist claims but, in such countries, capturing the state might also be a more realistic objective. This article provides a first test of these presumptions by estimating the effect of several popular explanatory factors separately on the risk of territorial and governmental conflict, 1946-99. The analysis offers considerable support and demonstrates that territorial and governmental conflicts are shaped, in large part, by different causal mechanisms. The reputed parabolic relationship between democracy and risk of civil war only pertains to state-centered conflicts, whereas democracy has a positive and near-linear effect on the risk of territorial rebellion. Moreover, the analysis strongly suggests that the puzzling no-finding of ethnicity in several prominent studies is affected by their inability to account for rebel objective in civil war.
Research published in the American Political Science Review shows that anocracies—as defined by the middle of the Polity index of political regime—are more susceptible to civil war than are either pure democracies or pure dictatorships. Yet, certain components of the Polity index include a factional category, where political competition is ``intense, hostile, and frequently violent. Extreme factionalism may be manifested in the establishment of rival governments and in civil war'' (Gurr 1989, 12). Not surprisingly, these components exhibit a strong relationship with civil war. When they are removed from the Polity index, however, the original relationship disappears. I conclude that the original finding is not driven by the relationship between political institutions and civil war but rather by a less provocative relationship between political violence and civil war.
With more than 12,000 deaths in nine years, a homegrown Maoist insurgency, reinforced by ethnic and socioeconomic cleavages, has resulted in high levels of political violence and human rights violations in Nepal. With fresh district-level data and drawing on theoretical insights from both the conflict and human rights literatures, research that has relied primarily on cross-national comparisons, the authors develop and test hypotheses using a subnational research design. They find an exchange of violence between government and opposition forces that depends on the political and geographical opportunities for violence. Their findings contribute new evidence for the importance of geography but also suggest that democracy and social capital influence the selection of violence by both government and opposition.
Geographical factors play a critical role in determining how a civil war is fought and who will prevail. Drawing on the PRIO/Uppsala Armed Conflict dataset covering the period 1946-2000, the authors have determined the location of all battle-zones for all civil wars in this time period, thereby identifying the geographic extent and the center point of each conflict. Using ordinary least squares (OLS) and three-stage least squares (3SLS) estimation techniques, factors are analyzed that determine the scope of the conflict (area of the conflict zone) and the location of the conflict relative to the capital. It is found that in addition to geographical factors such as the total land area of the country, scope is strongly shaped by such factors as the adjacencies of a border of a neighboring country, the incidence of natural resources in the conflict zone, and the duration of the conflict. The distance of the conflict zone from the capital is influenced by the scope of the conflict, the size of the country, whether or not the objective of the rebels is to secede, and whether or not the rebel group has a religious or ethnic identity. Also, evidence is found of an endogenous relationship between scope and location.
This article studies the various mechanisms by which democracy affects transnational terrorism. New theoretical mechanisms are identified that either complement or encompass existing arguments. Different effects of democracy on transnational terrorism are assessed for a sample of about 119 countries from 1975 to 1997. Results show that democratic participation reduces transnational terrorist incidents in a country, while government constraints increase the number of those incidents, subsuming the effect of press freedom. The proportional representation system experiences fewer transnational terrorist incidents than either the majoritarian or the mixed system.
We examine formally the link between domestic political institutions and policy choices in the context of eight empirical regularities that constitute the democratic peace. We demonstrate that democratic leaders, when faced with war, are more inclined to shift extra resources into the war efforts than are autocrats. This follows because the survival of political leaders with larger winning coalitions hinges on successful policy. The extra effort made by democrats provides a military advantage over autocrats. This makes democrats unattractive targets, since their institutional constraints cause them to mobilize resources for the war effort. rn addition to trying harder, democrats are more selective in their choice of targets. Because defeat is more likely to lead to domestic replacement for democrats than far autocrats, democrats only initiate wars they expect to win. These two factors lead to the interaction between polities that is often referred to as the democratic peace.
Why do some armed civil conflicts last longer than others? Drawing on a contest success function model, we show that geographic factors (such as location, terrain, and natural resources) interact with rebel fighting capacity and together play a crucial role in determining the duration of conflict. Using precisely dated duration data in event history models and geographic data for the conflict location, we find that conflicts located at considerable distance from the main government stronghold, along remote international borders and in regions with valuable minerals last substantially longer. In addition, we find that rebel military capacity in its own right increases the prospects of a civil conflict ending within a short time period. Our findings imply that the distances an army must travel to project power, rebel fighting capacity, and characteristics of conflict region affect how a civil war is fought and who will prevail.
Theories of conflict emphasize dyadic interaction, yet existing empirical studies of civil war focus largely on state attributes and pay little attention to nonstate antagonists. We recast civil war in a dyadic perspective, and consider how nonstate actor attributes and their relationship to the state influence conflict dynamics. We argue that strong rebels, who pose a military challenge to the government, are likely to lead to short wars and concessions. Conflicts where rebels seem weak can become prolonged if rebels can operate in the periphery so as to defy a government victory yet are not strong enough to extract concessions. Conflicts should be shorter when potential insurgents can rely on alternative political means to violence. We examine these hypotheses in a dyadic analysis of civil war duration and outcomes, using new data on nonstate actors and conflict attributes, finding support for many of our conjectures.
When revolutionaries or insurgents, broadly defined, indiscriminately attack civilians, they generally attack "complicitous civilians," i.e., those categories of noncombatants which the revolutionaries see as benefiting from, supporting and/or having a substantial capacity to influence the states that the revolutionaries are attempting to displace or overthrow. Such "categorical" terrorism will be most extensive when revolutionaries view these states (or complicitous civilians themselves) as perpetrators of extensive, indiscriminate violence against the revolutionaries and their constituents. However, if significant numbers of complicitous civilians are seen by rebel groups as potential supporters (or as capable of being influenced by nonviolent appeals or protests), then they will not be indiscriminately attacked. Whether specific categories of civilians will be perceived as potential allies by revolutionaries depends mainly on the prior history of political interaction and cooperation between these civilians and the revolutionaries. Categorical terrorism is most likely where there has been little such interaction or cooperation, resulting in weak political alliances between the revolutionaries and complicitous civilians – for example, where the revolutionaries and complicitous civilians speak different languages, practice different religions, claim the same land, and/or are territorially segregated.
This analysis begins by exploring various reasons that the concept of terrorism has evaded a widely agreed upon definition for so long despite the efforts of so many writers. Emphasis is placed on the difficulties associated with all “essentially contested concepts.” In addition, the investigation calls attention to such problems as conceptual “stretching” and “traveling.” In an effort to solve the difficulties, the inquiry attempts to determine a consensus definition of terrorism by turning to an empirical analysis of how the term has been employed by academics over the years. Specifically, the well-known definition developed by Alex Schmid, based upon responses to a questionnaire he circulated in 1985, is compared with the way the concept has been employed by contributors to the major journals in the field: Terrorism, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, and Terrorism and Political Violence. The 22 “definitional elements” of which Schmid's definition is composed are compared to the frequency with which they appear in the professional journals. If these elements appear frequently in both the Schmid definition and those employed by the journal contributors, they are then used to form a consensus definition of the concept. The most striking feature of this academic consensus over the meaning of terrorism is the virtual absence of references to the psychological element, heretofore widely thought to be at the heart of the concept.
Many post-independence rebel movements in Africa have unleashed extremely brutal forms of violence, especially against the peasantry. Such violence, which has bewildered many observers, cannot be explained by reference to African ‘culture’, nor as an expression of rational self-interest. Instead, it must be seen in the light of the essentially urban issues that have fomented rebellion, which cannot however be successfully pursued in major towns, where incumbent regimes possess a monopoly of force. Retreating to the countryside, however, rebels can rarely swim among the peasantry like Mao's fishes in the sea. The African rural setting is generally deeply inimical to liberation war, because peasants enjoy direct control over their own land, and surplus expropriation takes place through the market, rather than through an exploitative landlord class. The African situation, too, has tended to favour ‘roving’ rather than ‘stationary’ rebellions, in Olson's terms; many rebels are merely passing through the countryside, on their way to seek power in towns. Having little in common with the peasantry, and nothing to offer it, they resort to violence as the only way to control it. However incoherent their objectives, and however brutal their methods, rebellions nonetheless reflect a serious urban malaise that needs to be addressed.
This article explores the strategic motivations for insurgent violence against civilians. It argues that violence is a function of insurgent capacity and views violence and security as selective benefits that insurgents manipulate to encourage support. Weak insurgent groups facing collective action problems have an incentive to target civilians because they lack the capacity to provide sufficient benefits to entice loyalty. By contrast, stronger rebels can more easily offer a mix of selective incentives and selective repression to compel support. This relationship is conditioned by the counterinsurgency strategies employed by the government. Indiscriminate regime violence can effectively reduce the level of selective incentives necessary for insurgents to recruit support, thus reducing their reliance on violence as a mobilization tool. However, this relationship only holds when rebels are sufficiently capable of credibly providing security and other incentives to civilian supporters. These hypotheses are tested using data on one-sided violence from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program. The statistical analysis supports the hypothesis that comparatively capable insurgents kill fewer civilians than their weaker counterparts. The results also suggest a complex interaction between insurgent capability and government strategies in shaping insurgent violence. While weaker insurgents sharply escalate violence in the face of indiscriminate regime counterinsurgency tactics, stronger groups employ comparatively less violence against civilians as regime violence escalates.
Many sources of economic data cover only a limited set of states at any given point in time. Data are often systematically missing for some states over certain time periods. In the context of conflict studies, economic data are frequently unavailable for states involved in conflicts, undermining the ability to draw inferences of linkages between economic and political interactions. For example, simply using available data in a study of trade and conflict and disregarding observations with missing data on economic variables excludes key conflicts such as the Berlin crisis, the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Gulf War from the sample. A set of procedures are presented to create additional estimates to remedy some of the coverage problems for data on gross domestic product, population, and bilateral trade flows.
An original argument about the causes and consequences of political violence and the range of strategies employed. © 2010 Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. All rights reserved.
In this chapter, we investigate the question of democratic civil peace- That is, democratic peace at the intrastate level. We use interchangeably the terms civil war and intrastate violence for events where organized violence is used for political goals, although conventionally the term war is often reserved for conflicts where the annual number of battle deaths exceeds 1,000. We study the determinants of the onset of civil war as well as the incidence, duration, and severity of violent events. Recent research on civil war uses arguments regarding the opportunity and motivation for rebellion as a theoretical point of departure. We discuss how democratic institutions may affect both the opportunity and the willingness to use violence for political purposes. Democratic institutions display great variations, however, in terms of inclusiveness, effectiveness, and stability. The opportunity and motivation framework allows us to derive expectations concerning when and under what conditions democratic institutions may succeed in reducing the risk, incidence, duration, and severity of civil war. The general hypothesis emerging from this discussion is that democratic governance is beneficial for the reduction of civil war and that specifoc forms of democracy are likely to reduce violence more than others. Specifically, we investigate these propositions: Democracy is negatively related to the onset and severity of civil war and positively to duration. Democracy relates to civil war through an inverted U-curve: Semidemocracies are most prone to violence. Political instability is positively related to civil war. The curvilinear effect of democracy on civil war persists even when controlling for political instability. Civil war occurs more frequently in conjunction with elections. The effect of democracy on civil war is more pronounced for government conflicts than for territorial conflicts. The effect of democracy on civil war is stronger for developed countries. A politically different neighborhood is positively related to civil war. The negative effect of democracy on civil war is more pronounced for inclusive types of democracy. These relationships are generally strengthened after the end of the Cold War. We test these hypotheses on the Uppsala/PRIO conflict data, and investigate the robustness of our results. We use two measures of democracy, the democracy index from the Polity project and the new SIP index, with some robustness tests using two additional measures, Vanhanen's Polyarchy index and the Freedom House Political Rights measure. Overall, we find democracy to be strongly related to civil war, with the results for severity being the most robust.
Coherent democracies and harshly authoritarian states have few civil wars, and intermediate regimes are the most conflict-prone. Domestic violence also seems to be associated with political change, whether toward greater democracy or greater autocracy. Is the greater violence of intermediate regimes equivalent to the finding that states in political transition experience more violence? If both level of democracy and political change are relevant, to what extent is civil violence related to each? Based on an analysis of the period 1816-1992, we conclude that intermediate regimes are most prone to civil war, even when they have had time to stabilize from a regime change. In the long run, since intermediate regimes are less stable than autocracies, which in turn are less stable than democracies, durable democracy is the most probable end-point of the democratization process. The democratic civil peace is not only more just than the autocratic peace but also more stable.
We investigate the causes of civil war, using a new data set of wars during 1960-99. Rebellion may be explained by atypically severe grievances, such as high inequality, a lack of political rights, or ethnic and religious divisions in society. Alternatively, it might be explained by atypical opportunities for building a rebel organization. While it is difficult to find proxies for grievances and opportunities, we find that political and social variables that are most obviously related to grievances have little explanatory power. By contrast, economic variables, which could proxy some grievances but are perhaps more obviously related to the viability of rebellion, provide considerably more explanatory power.
Human Rights Quarterly 17.1 (1995) 170-191
Current US foreign policy goals put great stress on extending democracy, and US legislation -- never systematically enforced -- has banned aid to gross violators of human rights for two decades, making exceptions for aid which benefits needy people.
Gross violations of human rights which are criminalized in international law include genocide, extrajudicial executions, and torture. These violations are labeled herein as violations of life-integrity.
Based on a coded content analysis of Amnesty International Reports for 1987 and Freedom House rankings, this article will examine the relationship between life-integrity violations and freedom in 145 states during 1987 and will probe two alternate hypotheses. Our findings support the second, which asserts that there will be more conflict mobilized and incentives for repression -- i.e., worse violations of life integrity -- as democracy is extended before it is fully institutionalized (More Murder in the Middle). This article further examines the effects of ethnic discrimination, war, development, and inequality (and the linkages among them) on life-integrity violations, and considers the implications for research and policy.
Since the end of the Cold War, democracy has gained new ground in many states and has become a renewed object of US foreign policy in the Clinton Administration. The sterile and ideological debate over the precedence, linkage, or priority of social and economic rights versus political and civil rights in less developed or poorer states has been almost forgotten as people in those states protest and rebel against their authoritarian governments. One premise of the ideological assertion that political and civil rights must be subordinated for the sake of development was that despotism led to economic growth. The assumption that authoritarianism was more likely than democracy to produce growth has been disconfirmed by Kurzman, reviewing three decades of data: 1952-1982.
Several questions can be posed about these developments. Do democracy and democratization protect the most basic of human rights? What are the most basic rights? Why should we expect that it does? If it does not, how can this be explained?
I begin with the assumption that the right to exist and to be free from bodily invasion and terror of being caught, held, and disappeared is a basic desideratum among humans which transcends culture and ages. Sociologically, rights are claims successfully wrested from governments and other power holders. I label certain acts as violations of life-integrity because the violations negate an integrated set of claims respecting the biological and social integration of persons and groups: A) the integrity of mind and body (denied by genocide, murder, torture, and terror); B) of being the owner of one's labor and being able to move (denied by slavery, segregation, and apartheid); C) the integration of self and family which creates progeny (denied by prohibiting marriage and family development); and D) of the reciprocal guarantees for the protection of human groups (denied by genocide).
These rights, and their violations (see Figure 1) are defined in international law and in four of six cases criminalized by special conventions. For two decades, US domestic laws regulating foreign aid have recognized these rights under "respect for the integrity of the person" in the annual State Department report on countries' human rights practices.
Although there is hypothetically more than one dimension of life-integrity (e.g., rights 4, 5, and 6 in Figure 1 might have another dimension behind them), the present research examines only one dimension, Dimension A, which includes the right to life; the right to personal inviolability; and the right to be free of fear of arbitrary seizure, detention, and punishment. [Figure 1]
Given the similarity between Dimension A (hereinafter referred to as life-integrity) and the substance of guarantees of personal security dating from the Magna Carta which are embedded in the western liberal tradition, one might expect that the more states embodied the ideal of liberal democracy, the higher respect such states would have for life-integrity (or the more checks there would be against violations). Citizens would be free to express themselves and to participate politically without fear of loss of life, liberty, and violation by state agents. Thus, respect...
Most observers believe that the 'democratic rules of the game' provide a peaceful means for resolving political conflicts. This may be true but not all groups or even single individuals in democratic societies need play by these rules. This analysis uses two data sets: one that classifies most countries of the world based on how they were ruled in the mid-1980s, and the other on the frequency with which their nationals either perpetrated or were victimized by terrorists attacks, to investigate the relationship between terrorism and democracy. The findings suggest that stable democracy and terrorism go together. An analysis of the data reveal that terrorist attacks occur most often in the world's most stable democracies, and that, further, both the perpetrators and victims of those attacks are citizens of the same democracies.
The question of the linkage of democratic forms of government with the incidence of terrorist violence is explored. Distinguishing between the presence of terrorist groups in a nation and violent terrorist events, and using multiple indicators of democratic development, evidence is presented clearly linking democracy with the presence of terrorist groups. Terrorist groups are less likely to be found in non‐democratic settings than in democratic ones.
A game-theoretic model is analyzed for discussing the determination of looting and fighting activity during a civil war between two ethnoregional groups. The Nash equilibrium of this game emphasizes population size, production capacity and productivity, and access to external funding as the main determinants of the size of the armies and the intensity of looting activity. The Nash equilibrium of the game between the two warlords involves an excessive level of looting. Some lessons are drawn from this framework to bring out the minimum redistribution of resources between groups that must take place in a peaceful equilibrium.
dqThis book presents a theory that accounts for the different strategies pursued by rebel groups in civil war, explaining why patterns of insurgent violence vary so much across conflicts. It does so by examining the membership, structure, and behavior of four insurgent movements in Uganda, Mozambique, and Peru. Drawing on interviews with nearly two hundred combatants and civilians who experienced violence firsthand, it shows that rebels' strategies depend in important ways on how difficult it is to launch a rebellion. The book thus demonstrates how characteristics of the environment in which rebellions emerge constrain rebel organization and shape the patterns of violence that civilians experience.dq--BOOK JACKET.
Sexual violence during war varies in extent and takes distinct forms. In some con- flicts, sexual violence is widespread, yet in other conflicts—including some cases of ethnic conflict—it is quite limited. In some conflicts, sexual violence takes the form of sexual slavery; in others, torture in detention. I document this variation, particularly its absence in some conflicts and on the part of some groups. In the conclusion, I explore the relationship between strategic choices on the part of armed group leadership, the norms of combatants, dynamics within small units, and the effectiveness of military discipline. While sexual violence occurs in all wars, it occurs to varying extent and takes distinct forms. During the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the sexual abuse of Bosnian Muslim women by Bosnian Serb forces was so systematic and wide- spread that it comprised a crime against humanity under international law. In Rwanda, the widespread rape of Tutsi women comprised a form of genocide, according to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Yet sexual violence in some conflicts is remarkably limited, despite wide- spread violence against civilians. Sexual violence is relatively limited even in some cases of ethnic conflict that include the forced movement of ethnic popu- lations; the conflicts in Israel/Palestine and Sri Lanka are examples. Some
Abstract will be provided by author.
The burgeoning literature on civil conflicts seldom considers why some civil wars are so much deadlier than others. This article investigates that question using a new data set of the number of combat deaths in internal conflicts from 1946 to 2002. The first section presents descriptive statistics on battle deaths by era, conflict type, and region. The article then tests state strength, regime type, and cultural characteristics as predictors of the number of combat deaths in civil war. The determinants of conflict severity seem to be quite different from those for conflict onset. Democracy, rather than economic development or state military strength, is most strongly correlated with fewer deaths; wars have also been less deadly on average since the end of the cold war. Religious heterogeneity does not explain the military severity of internal violence, and surprisingly, ethnic homogeneity may be related to more deadly conflicts.
This article investigates the effect of regime type on the number of civilian fatalities that states inflicted in interstate wars between 1900 and 2003. As opposed to several previous studies, the author finds little support for normative arguments positing that democracies kill fewer civilians in war. In fact, the author finds that democracies are significantly more likely than nondemocracies to kill more than fifty thousand noncombatants. Democracies also kill more civilians when they are involved in wars of attrition and kill about as many (and perhaps more) noncombatants than autocracies in such wars. These findings provide qualified support for institutional arguments about democratic accountability. Other implications of the institutional view, however, are not upheld, such as the argument that democracies select easy wars that should result in few civilian casualties because they are won quickly and decisively. Finally, democracies do not appear to kill fewer civilians in more recent wars.
Greed, grievances, and mobilization are generally offered as explanations for rebellion and civilwar. The authors extend arguments about the precursors to nonviolent protest, violent rebellion, and civil war. These arguments motivate a series of hypotheses that are tested against data from the Minorities at Risk project. The results of the analysis suggest, first, that the factors that predict antistate activity at one level of violence do not always hold at other levels; second, the response by the state has a large impact on the subsequent behavior of the rebels; and third, the popular notion of diamonds fueling civil unrest is generally not supported. The authors draw inferences from their results to future theoretical and policy development.
Students of international politics have often argued that state leaders initiate the use of force internationally to divert attention away from domestic problems. The author contends that these arguments concerning the relationship between domestic unrest and international conflict are not supported empirically because they focus too narrowly on the incentives state leaders have to use external force as a diversionary tactic without considering alternative solutions to quieting domestic unrest. It is hypothesized that democratic leaders will respond to domestic unrest by diverting attention by using force internationally. On the other hand, authoritarian leaders are expected to repress the unrest directly, and these acts of repression will make them less likely to use force internationally. An analysis of the initiation of force by the challenging states in 180 international crises between 1948 and 1982 strongly supports these hypotheses. The results of the analyses and their implications for the literature on diversionary conflicts and the rapidly growing literature on democratic peace are discussed.
Democracy has been defined and measured in various ways. This article argues that combining two basic dimensions of democracy - competition and participation - can yield a theoretically satisfactory measurement of democracy that employs three measures: degree of electoral competition, degree of electoral participation and a combined index of democratization. These variables have been used in the author's previous comparative studies of democracy. The new dataset combines previous data and extends these to cover the period 1810-1998. That dataset includes 187 contemporary and former independent states from the year 1810 or from the year of independence. In the dataset, original electoral and other political data needed to calculate the values of Competition and Participation variables are given and documented separately for each country. The values of the three variables are calculated and given for each year over the period of comparison. Finally, the new dataset is compared with the Polity98 measures of democracy and the combined Freedom House ratings of political rights and civil liberties.
In 2007, 34 armed conflicts were active worldwide, up by one from 2006 and by five from 2003, the year with the lowest number of active armed conflicts since the 1970s. While the number of conflicts increased, the number of wars, i.e. conflicts with over 1,000 battle-related deaths in a year, dropped by one to four. Five of the conflicts from 2006 were no longer active in 2007, but during the year, two previously recorded conflicts (in Mali and Pakistan) were restarted by new actors and two (in Angola and Peru) by previously recorded rebel groups. For the first time since 2004, two new conflicts were recorded: a conflict over governmental power in Niger and a territorial conflict in DRC. A conflict may involve one or more dyads or pairs of warring parties. In the 236 conflicts active since 1946, 487 dyads have been recorded in the new UCDP Dyadic Dataset. While most intrastate conflicts involve a single rebel group fighting the government, in 30 of the conflicts two or more dyads were active simultaneously. In 2002 and 2003, over 30% of the active conflicts involved more than one rebel group. The number of active rebel groups and changes in the set of groups are important elements of the complexity of any armed conflict, and the study of these aspects should be greatly facilitated with the new dataset. By adding the dyadic dimension to the study of conflicts, the analysis of a range of phenomena that have hardly been captured by previously available data is made possible.
This article presents new data on the direct and deliberate killings of civilians, called one-sided violence, in intrastate armed conflicts, 1989—2004. These data contribute to the present state of quantitative research on violence against civilians in three important respects: the data provide actual estimates of civilians killed, the data are collected annually and the data are provided for both governments and rebel groups. Using these data, general trends and patterns are presented, showing that the post-Cold War era is characterized by periods of fairly low-scale violence punctuated by occasional sharp increases in violence against civilians. Furthermore, rebels tend to be more violent on the whole, while governments commit relatively little violence except in those few years which see mass killings. The article then examines some factors that have been found to predict genocide and evaluates how they correlate with one-sided violence as conceptualized here. A U-shaped correlation between regime type and one-sided violence is identified: while autocratic governments undertake higher levels of one-sided violence than other regime types, rebels are more violent in democratic countries.
This is the first article to analyze a large sample of terrorist groups in terms of their policy effectiveness. It includes every foreign terrorist organization (FTO) designated by the U.S. Department of State since 2001. The key variable for FTO success is a tactical one: target selection. Terrorist groups whose attacks on civilian targets outnumber attacks on military targets do not tend to achieve their policy objectives, regardless of their nature. Contrary to the prevailing view that terrorism is an effective means of political coercion, the universe of cases suggests that, first, contemporary terrorist groups rarely achieve their policy objectives and, second, the poor success rate is inherent to the tactic of terrorism itself. The bulk of the article develops a theory for why countries are reluctant to make policy concessions when their civilian populations are the primary target.
Many sources of economic data cover only a limited set of states at any given point in time. Data are often systematically missing for some states over certain time periods. In the context of conflict studies, economic data are frequently unavailable for states involved in conflicts, undermining the ability to draw inferences of linkages between economic and political interactions. For example, simply using available data in a study of trade and conflict and disregarding observations with missing data on economic variables excludes key conflicts such as the Berlin crisis, the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Gulf War from the sample. A set of procedures are presented to create additional estimates to remedy some of the coverage problems for data on gross domestic product, population, and bilateral trade flows.
By analytically decoupling war and violence, this book explores the causes and dynamics of violence in civil war. Against the prevailing view that such violence is an instance of impenetrable madness, the book demonstrates that there is logic to it and that it has much less to do with collective emotions, ideologies, and cultures than currently believed. Kalyvas specifies a novel theory of selective violence: it is jointly produced by political actors seeking information and individual civilians trying to avoid the worst but also grabbing what opportunities their predicament affords them. Violence, he finds, is never a simple reflection of the optimal strategy of its users; its profoundly interactive character defeats simple maximization logics while producing surprising outcomes, such as relative nonviolence in the 'frontlines' of civil war.
One central element of the current war on terrorism is “draining the swamps,” addressing conditions within a state that produce international terrorism. This paper empirically examines what factors lead a state to become a “swamp,” drawing on a theoretical approach that guides current U.S. policy. This theory looks at the ability of a state to impose costs on terrorist groups within its own borders. The lower the operating costs within a state, the greater the amount of terrorism produced within that state. Using data on the number of international terrorist events originating from a state from 1968 to 1998, an empirical model incorporating variables designed to test this theoretical argument as well as relevant control variables is employed. Strong support was found for the state strength approach, suggesting that one way to address the threat of international terrorism is to strengthen a government's ability to control its own territory.
Does a state's use of indiscriminate violence incite insurgent attacks? To date, most existing theories and empirical studies have concluded that such violence is highly counterproductive because it creates new grievances while forcing victims to seek security, if not safety, in rebel arms. This proposition is tested using Russian artillery fire in Chechnya (2000 to 2005) to estimate indiscriminate violence's effect on subsequent patterns of insurgent attacks across matched pairs of similar shelled and nonshelled villages. The findings are counterintuitive. Shelled villages experience a 24 percent reduction in posttreatment mean insurgent attacks relative to control villages. In addition, commonly cited “triggers” for insurgent retaliation, including the lethality and destructiveness of indiscriminate violence, are either negatively correlated with insurgent attacks or statistically insignificant.
Terrorism is designed to change minds by destroying bodies; it is a form of costly signaling. Terrorists employ five primary strategies of costly signaling: attrition, intimidation, provocation, spoiling, and outbidding. The main targets of persuasion are the enemy and the population that the terrorists hope to represent or control. Terrorists wish to signal that they have the strength and will to impose costs on those who oppose them, and that the enemy and moderate groups on the terrorists' side cannot be trusted and should not be supported. Each strategy works well under certain conditions and poorly under others. State responses to one strategy may be inappropriate for other strategies. In some cases, however, terrorists are pursuing a combination of strategies, and the response must also work well against this combination.
This article investigates the relationship between regime characteristics and the likelihood of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) terrorist incidents. Odds ratios establish that democratic ideals—democratic rule, strong rule of law, and honest regimes—are associated with more CBRN incidents. Failed states may be where some terrorist groups form or take refuge, but these states have not been the venue of choice for CBRN incidents. Religious (cults and fundamentalists) and nationalist/separatist groups are not more likely than others to engage in CBRN attacks. To date, indiscriminate CBRN attacks are as likely as discriminate attacks to cause casualties. Transnational terrorist groups are less adept than others in concealing their acquisition of CBRN substances. For some regressions, democratic rule and strong rule of law are positive determinants of CBRN incidents.
Why do some wars result in the intentional killing of large numbers
of civilians? In this article we examine the incidence of mass killing
in all wars from 1945 to 2000. In the statistical analysis of our data
set of 147 wars, we find strong evidence supporting our hypothesis that
mass killing is often a calculated military strategy used by regimes
attempting to defeat major guerrilla insurgencies. Unlike conventional
military forces, guerrilla armies often rely directly on the local
civilian population for logistical support. Because guerrilla forces
are difficult to defeat directly, governments facing major guerrilla
insurgencies have strong incentives to target the guerrillas'
civilian base of support. We find that mass killing is significantly
more likely during guerrilla wars than during other kinds of wars. In
addition, we find that the likelihood of mass killing among guerrilla
conflicts is greatly increased when the guerrillas receive high levels
of active support from the local population or when the insurgency
poses a major military threat to the regime. a
b
In the last decade, the field of international relations has
undergone a revolution in conflict studies. Where earlier approaches attempted
to identify the attributes of individuals, states, and systems that produced
conflict, the ?rationalist approach to war? now explains violence as the product
of private information with incentives to misrepresent, problems of credible
commitment, and issue indivisibilities. In this new approach, war is understood
as a bargaining failure that leaves both sides worse off than had they been able
to negotiate an efficient solution. This rationalist framework has proven
remarkably general?being applied to civil wars, ethnic conflicts, and interstate
wars?and fruitful in understanding not only the causes of war but also war
termination and conflict management. Interstate war is no longer seen as
sui
generis, but as a particular form within a single, integrated
theory ofconflict.
The toll of civil conflict is largely borne by civilian populations, as warring factions target non-combatants through campaigns of violence. But significant variation exists in the extent to which warring groups abuse the civilian population: across conflicts, across groups, and within countries geographically and over time. Using a new dataset on fighting groups in Sierra Leone, this article analyzes the determinants of the tactics, strategies, and behaviors that warring factions employ in their relationships with noncombatants. We first describe a simple logic of extraction which we use to generate hypotheses about variation in levels of abuse across fighting units. We then show that the most important determinants of civilian abuse are internal to the structure of the faction. High levels of abuse are exhibited by warring factions that are unable to police the behavior of their members because they are more ethnically fragmented, rely on material incentives to recruit participants, and lack mechanisms for punishing indiscipline. Explanations that emphasize the importance of local community ties and contestation do not find strong support in the data.
The authors analyze a unique data source to study the determinants of violence against civilians in a civil war context. During the Vietnam War, the United States Department of Defense pioneered the use of quantitative analysis for operational purposes. The centerpiece of that effort was the Hamlet Evaluation System (HES), a monthly and quarterly rating of 'the status of pacification at the hamlet and village level throughout the Republic of Vietnam'. Consistent with existing theoretical claims, the authors find that homicidal violence against civilians was a function of the level of territorial control exercised by the rival sides: Vietnamese insurgents relied on selective violence primarily where they enjoyed predominant, but not full, control; South Vietnamese government and US forces exercised indiscriminate violence primarily in the most rebel-dominated areas. Violence was less common in the most contested areas. The absence of spatial overlap between insurgent selective and incumbent indis-criminate violence, as well as the relative absence of violence from contested areas, demonstrates both the fundamental divergence between irregular and conventional war and the need for cautious use of violent events as indicators of conflict.
This article reports a test of a structural model of the antecedents of genocide and politicide (political mass murder). A case-control research design is used to test alternative specifications of a multivariate model that identifies preconditions of geno-/politicide. The universe of analysis consists of 126 instances of internal war and regime collapse that began between 1955 and 1997, as identified by the State Failure project. Geno-/politicides began during 35 of these episodes of state failure. The analytic question is which factors distinguish the 35 episodes that led to geno-/politicides from those that did not. The case-control method is used to estimate the effects of theoretically specified domestic and international risk factors measured one year prior to the onset of geno-/politicide. The optimal model includes six factors that jointly make it possible to distinguish with 74% accuracy between internal wars and regime collapses that do and those that do not lead to geno-/politicide. The conclusion uses the model to assess the risks of future episodes in 25 countries.
Recent work in comparative politics and international relations has shown a marked shift toward leaders as the theoretical unit of analysis. In most of the new theoretical models a core assumption is that leaders act to stay in power. There exists, however, remarkably little systematic empirical knowledge about the factors that affect the tenure of leaders. To provide a baseline of empirical results we explore how a broad range of domestic and international factors affects the tenure of leaders. We focus in particular on the effect of conflict and its outcome. We find that political institutions fundamentally mediate the costs and benefits of international conflict and that war is not necessarilyex postinefficient for leaders. This suggests that the assumption that war isex postinefficient for unitary rational actors can not be simply extended to leaders. Therefore, a focus on leaders may yield important new rationalist explanations for war.
This paper presents an analysis of terrorism based on a signalling game in which an uninformed government uses the first-period attacks of the (informed) terrorist to assess terrorists' capabilities. Based on posterior beliefs, the government decides in period 2 whether to resist or to capitulate. A perfect Bayesian equilibrium for the two-period signalling game is derived in which the government prefers the associated partial-pooling equilibrium over the never-surrender equilibrium. This pooling equilibrium is associated with probabilistic regret owing to ex post wrong inferences. Intelligence is valued, because it can limit this regret if it can reduce the variance of government priors.