![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most serious ethical challenge to pacifism is the argument for the necessity of military action to protect civilians from violence. Whether articulated by IR scholars or armed rebels, such argumentation depends upon largely uninvestigated notions about the efficacy of violence as a tool for protection. This paper takes on this presumed link between violence and protection by examining the case of Syria, where this argument has had particular salience, and whether the formation of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in 2011, a few months into the violent repression of anti-government protests, did in fact serve to protect civilians as intended. This case points to an often overlooked distinction between the refusal of soldiers to fire on unarmed activists and the subsequent decision of these soldiers to turn their arms back on the regime to ‘protect’ unarmed activists—two courses of action that can have radically different effects on conflict dynamics involving a nonviolent movement. Through analysis of casualty figures, military/security force behaviour, and regime discourse, the article finds, counter-intuitively, that the arming of the opposition did not ultimately protect civilians and may have actually made them more vulnerable than they were when the protest movement remained primary nonviolent.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Richard Jackson and two anonymous reviewers for feedback on an earlier draft of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Furthermore, ‘FSA’ is no longer a particularly meaningful label for the rebels fighting today.
2. I am aware that, in an important way, guerrilla warfare does not ‘meet the regime on its own terms’, as it represents an indirect strategy for countering the direct strategy of a more ‘powerful’ state actor (Arreguín-Toft Citation2001). But I am using ‘on its own terms’ in a broader sense here to mean simply the use of any armed strategy to pursue one’s goals.
3. This paragraph draws heavily from Wallace (Citation2017, 43–44).
4. For further discussion, see Wallace (Citation2017, 34–35).
5. The next few paragraphs on Sharp’s thinking draw heavily from Wallace (Citation2017, 76–78).
6. The advantage gained here due to the contrast and unevenness between the approaches taken by the two sides could be seen as an extreme case of what Arreguín-Toft (Citation2001) calls an ‘opposite-approach interaction’ in asymmetric warfare, which tends to favour the ‘weaker’ party due to the way in which it creates a long, drawn-out war of which the more ‘powerful’ party will soon tire and/or pushes the more ‘powerful’ party to resort to barbarism that can backfire. (Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this point.) The most well-known instance of an ‘opposite-approach interaction’ is when the ‘weaker’ party uses an ‘indirect strategy’ (like guerrilla warfare) against the ‘direct strategy’ used by the more ‘powerful’ party. The nonviolent action literature, however, would draw a bold line, as I do here, between these armed strategies employed by the ‘weaker’ party – whether direct or indirect – and nonviolent resistance.
7. There are two factors that could make these changes less likely: tightly controlled state media and social distance between the identity groups comprising the military/security forces and nonviolent movement.
8. Although this distinction between ‘material data’ and ‘discursive data’ is not completely tenable – there are ontological and epistemological disagreements on these questions, as discourse enters into even what we might call strictly ‘material fact’ (e.g. the data counting numbers of civilians killed depend on someone’s categorisation of these particular people as civilians, not combatants) – I will nonetheless maintain this imperfect distinction as an organisational tool.
9. It is important to note that the nonviolent movement has persisted despite the armed takeover of the resistance. Nonetheless, it still makes sense to characterise the resistance as becoming predominantly armed due to the way in which armed groups have taken over in most representations of the resistance in local and international media. See Bartkowski and Kahf (Citation2013) for further discussion.
10. For instance, in Homs, where the opposition reportedly militarised earlier and more intensively than other parts of the country, armed elements may have started appearing as early as May 2011 (ICG Citation2012b). But, according to one activist in Homs interviewed by Human Rights Watch, there were no armed defectors in the first few weeks of the uprising, and they really only started increasing in June/July 2011 when there might be 15–20 defectors per neighbourhood showing up at protests to ‘defend’ protestors if fired upon (HRW Citation2011a).
11. Note that both sources sympathise with the rebels; the Syrian government does not publish casualty figures systematically.
12. The VDC receives data from human rights activists, field volunteers, and reporters throughout Syria; once data is received from reliable sources, the organisation ensures that no one is double-counted, tries to find information on victims like photographs/videos, and, finally, sends casualty lists back for verification (VDC, N.d.a).
13. It is unclear whether these statistics consistently include civilian deaths caused by both government/-allied forces and rebels, or only the former. Sometimes, the VDC seems to categorise as ‘civilians’ only those civilians killed by government/-allied forces, while classifying civilians killed by rebels under ‘regime’s casualties’; other times, like in later monthly lists of civilian deaths, however, ‘armed opposition groups’ is one of the actors listed as responsible for ‘civilian’ deaths, suggesting that civilians killed by rebels are counted under the ‘civilian’ category (VDC, N.d.a; and, for instance, VDC, N.d.b). The data in this graph may, therefore, underestimate the numbers of civilians killed, particularly those directly killed by the armed rebel groups.
14. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this point.
15. All the speeches were initially found on the SANA (Syrian Arab News Agency) website, http://sana.sy/eng/article/543.htm (accessed 29 March 2013). This page appears to be no longer accessible; four of the seven speeches can, however, also be found at http://al-bab.com/documents-section/country-documents#Syria (accessed 20 October 2016).
16. Pro-regime militias.
17. Intelligence services.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
M. S. Wallace
M. S. Wallace teaches in the Conflict Resolution program at Portland State University and previously taught in the International Affairs and Political Science programs at the University of New Hampshire and Brown University. She is also Contributing Editor of the War Prevention Initiative’s Peace Science Digest. Her recent book, Security without Weapons: Rethinking Violence, Nonviolent Action, and Civilian Protection (Routledge 2017), explores nonviolent alternatives for civilian protection in war zones—and particularly the unarmed civilian peacekeeping work of Nonviolent Peaceforce in Sri Lanka.