Civil-Military Relations and Civilian Victimization in Civil War

Abstract

Why do some states victimize noncombatants during civil war? Scholars have identified regime type, international norms, and battlefield conditions as important factors explaining variation in outcomes. Here I argue that understanding variation in civilian victimization requires the identification of the institutional interests of those in control of the state. Civilian victimization is likely when the military controls pre-war planning and execution because of the institutional goal of winning wars quickly and efficiently by attacking every major source of enemy power. This often includes noncombatants. Most civilian leaders’ institutional goals, however, are centered around governance. Thus, these leaders prefer restraint from victimization because they often believe such barbarity will result in future difficulties for governance. I test my argument alongside others through a binary regression analysis of 103 conflict dyads between 1989 and 2010 and find that the variable for militarily dominated governments maintains significance across model specifications and features the largest effect size of any variable.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

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8 Darren G. Hawkins, Delegation and Agency in International Organizations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Legro, Cooperation Under Fire; Thomas, The Ethics of Destruction.

9 Laia Balcells, Rivalry and Revenge: The Politics of Violence During Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Alexander B. Downes, Targeting Civilians in War. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Daniel Krcmaric, “Varieties of Civil War and Mass Killing: Reassessing the Relationship Between Guerrilla Warfare and Civilian Victimization.” Journal of Peace Research 55, no. 1 (2020): 18–31; Benjamin A. Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Valentino, Huth and Balch-Lindsay, “‘Draining the Sea’”; Reed M.Wood, Jacob D Kathm, and Stephen E Gent, “Armed Intervention and Civilian Victimization in Intrastate Conflicts.” Journal of Peace Research 49, no. 5 (2012): 647–660; Jen Ziemke, “Turn and Burn: Loss Dynamics and Civilian Targeting in the Angolan War. Journal of Economics and Politics 20, no. 1 (2012): 18–30.

10 Valentino, Huth and Balch-Lindsay, “‘Draining the Sea’”

11 Valentino, Final Solutions.

12 Valentino, Final Solutions, 233.

13 Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence.

14 Ziemke, “Turn and Burn.”

15 Downes, Targeting Civilians.

16 Wood, Kathm, and Gent, “Armed Intervention.”

17 Krcmaric, “Varieties of Civil War.”

18 Krcmaric, “Varieties of Civil War,” 29.

19 Balcells, “Rivalry and Revenge.”

20 Hawkins, Delegation and Agency; Legro, Cooperation Under Fire; Thomas, The Ethics of Destruction.

21 Hull, Absolute Destruction; Legro, Cooperation Under Fire; Stanton, Violence and Restraint in Civil War; Thomas, The Ethics of Destruction; Valentino, Huth, and Balch-Lindsay, “‘Draining the Sea’”

22 Stanton, Violence and Restraint.

23 Stanton, Violence and Restraint.

24 Stanton, Violence and Restraint, 9.

25 Jason Seawright, “Regression Based Inference: A Case Study in Failed Causal Assessment” In Rethinking Social Inquiry Diverse Tools, Shared Standards, ed. Henry E. Brady, and David Collier, 2^nd ed. (Washington, DC: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2010), 269.

26 Alexander L.George, and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 145

27 Arden Bucholz, Moltke and the German Wars, 1864-1871 (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Hull, Absolute Destruction.

28 Bucholz, Moltke and the German Wars; Hull, Absolute Destruction.

29 Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence; Valentino, Huth, and Balch-Lindsay, “‘Draining the Sea’”; Valentino, Final Solutions.

30 Balcells, Rivalry and Revenge; Krcmaric, “Varieties of Civil War.”

31 I refer to non-state armed actors in civil wars as insurgents or rebels interchangeably because both terms apply to irregular and conventional civil wars.

32 Hull, Absolute Destruction; Barry Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany Between the World Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); Jack L Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984).

33 Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine, 58–59.

34 Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine, 48.

35 Jurgen Brauer, and Hubert P. Van Tuyll, Castles, Battles, & Bombs: How Economics Explains Military History Chicago (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

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37 Jason Lyall, “Does Indiscriminate Violence Incite Insurgent Attacks? Evidence From Chechnya.” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 53, no. 3 (2009): 331–362.

38 Jacqueline L. Hazelton, Bullets Not Ballots: Success in Counterinsurgency Warfare (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).

39 Paul Pierson, “Big Slow-Moving and Invisible” In Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, eds. James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 195–197.

40 Deborah D. Avant, The Institutional Sources of Military Doctrine: The United States in Vietnam and Britain in the Boer War and Malaya (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Bucholz, Moltke and the German wars; Hull, Absolute Destruction.

41 Avant, The Institutional Sources of Military Doctrine; Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency

42 Charles Townshend, Britain’s Civil Wars: Counterinsurgency in the Twentieth Century (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 33–36.

43 Neta Crawford, Accountability for Killing: Moral Responsibility for Collateral Damage in America’s Post-9/11 Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Thomas, The Ethics of Destruction, 158-159.

44 Avant, The Institutional Sources of Military Doctrine, 12–13.

45 Hull, Absolute Destruction; Pierson, 195–197; “Big Slow-Moving and Invisible”

46 Avant, The Institutional Sources of Military Doctrine; Bucholz, Moltke and the German wars; Hull, Absolute Destruction.

47 Milan W. Svolik, “Power Sharing and Leadership Dynamics in Authoritarian Regimes,” American Journal of Political Science 53, no. 2 (2009): 477–494

48 Peter Feaver, Armed Servants : Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).

49 Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).

50 James Ron, Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel (Oakland: University of California Press, 2003); Scott Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).

51 Emma Gilligan, Terror in Chechnya: Russia and the Tragedy of Civilians in War. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

52 Stanton, Violence and Restraint, 64–66.

53 Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright, and Erica Frantz, “Autocratic Breakdown and Regime Transitions: A New Data Set.” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 2 (2014): 313–331.

54 Stanton, Violence and Restraint, 71.

55 Stanton, Violence and Restraint, 71.

56 Stanton, Violence and Restraint, 79.

57 Stanton, Violence and Restraint, 79.

58 Meaning more than two opponents.

59 All variables are derived from Stanton’s replication data. I use 0 as the reference category for all binary measures.

60 Stanton, Violence and Restraint, 21.

61 Stanton, Violence and Restraint, 76.

62 Geddes, Wright, and Frantz, “Autocratic Breakdown.”

63 Kathleen Thelen, “How Insitutions Evolve: Insight from Compartitive Historical Analysis” In Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, eds. James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 226.

64 A Person’s correlation test shows no strong correlation between the military domination variable, and autocracy (0.257**), anocracy (−0.151), or democracy (−0.119). **Correlations is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).

65 Cohen, Dara Kay. Rape During Civil War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016), 90; Krcmaric, “Varieties of Civil War”, 27; Stanton, Violence and Restraint, 98.

66 Gary King, Michael Tomz, and Jason Wittenberg. “Making the Most of Statistical Analyses: Improving Interpretation and Presentation.” American Journal of Political Science 44, no. 2 (2000): 347–361.

67 This approach is modeled after Krmeric’s (2018, 27) excellent study.

68 Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 138–159.