Rivalry and Revenge: Making Sense of Violence against Civilians in Conventional Civil Wars
نویسنده
چکیده
Recent research on violence against civilians during wars has emphasized warrelated factors over political ones. For example, factors such as control of territory or characteristics of the armed groups have been prioritized at the expense of factors such as ideological alignments or local political competition. In this paper, I argue that the emphasis on war-related factors is conditioned by the scope conditions of previous theories, which have focused on irregular civil wars. I switch the locus of attention to socalled conventional civil wars, and I introduce a theoretical framework that takes into account both political and war-related factors. Hypotheses are tested using data on 1,377 municipalities during the Spanish Civil War. I find that levels of prewar electoral competition explain variation in levels of direct violence from both the left and the right in the areas they controlled at the beginning of the war, but that war-related factors gain explanatory relevance after the onset of conflict, when control changes from one group to the other. In particular, there is a clear endogenous trend whereby subsequent levels of violence are highly correlated with initial levels of violence. I argue that the mechanism behind this is civilian collaboration with armed groups. In short, the paper demonstrates that an understanding of the determinants of violence requires a theory combining political cleavages and wartime dynamics.
منابع مشابه
Warfare, Political Identities, and Displacement in Spain and Colombia
This paper explores the causes of displacement during civil wars. Recent scholarship has shown that conventional civil wars – those in which forces are relatively balanced – and irregular civil wars – those in which one side is substantially stronger than the other – exhibit different patterns of violence. We hypothesize that, while the mode of violence differs, the form of displacement should ...
متن کاملStrategic Protection, Pro-Government Interventions, and Violence against Civilians in Civil Wars
متن کامل
2008 / 02 Scale Invariance with Specific Application to IED Violence in Iraq 2003 - 2007
In this paper we explore whether violence in Iraq is gravitating towards a steady state level of violence observed in other civil wars, such as those in Colombia, Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, among others. Using data from the Iraq Body Count for 2003-2007, we explore whether civilian casualties follow a power law distribution. We replicate previous analyses of civilian casualties and confirm that c...
متن کاملEconomic and Political Causes of Genocidal Violence: A comparison with findings on the causes of civil war
Genocide is different from civil war: it usually involves deaths on a much larger scale and targets particular groups – mostly civilians often with the aim of exterminating them. The violence is one-sided, and, fortunately, genocides are much rarer than civil wars. Although with genocide, as with civil wars, it is possible to identify underlying political and economic patterns that make genocid...
متن کاملAccounting for the dynamics of one-sided violence : Introducing KOSVED
This article presents the Konstanz One-Sided Violence Event Dataset (KOSVED) which allows researchers to study the dynamics of civilian abuse in 17 civil wars. The dataset provides, based on a multitude of sources, detailed information on the number of civilians killed or harmed by government or rebel troops. Where information is available, KOSVED also documents the dates of these events as wel...
متن کامل