During the 20th century civilians constituted upwards of 80% of the casualties in civil wars. While many of these are unintended, the brutal nature of many conflicts illustrates that governments and insurgent groups often employ strategies of explicit and gross violence against civilians. Rape, torture, disappearances, and indiscriminate killings against non-combatants by both government forces and insurgent organizations appear to be common characteristics of many modern civil wars. Yet the scale and scope of civilian targeting varies tremendously both across and within armed conflicts. Insurgents and incumbent governments depend on civilian loyalty and support to achieve their war objectives. Yet, during civil conflicts both sides at times engage in mass abuses against non-combatants. Targeting civilians, however, may prove counterproductive, driving civilians into the adversary's arms. This raises an important empirical question: what motivates political actors to target civilians when doing so often appears to be a suboptimal strategy?
This project examines violence against non-combatants during civil conflict by investigating the evolution of strategies adopted by states, rebels, and civilians. It is argued that changes in the frequency and severity of insurgent- and state-sponsored violence are a function of the strategic interactions between state and rebel forces and the balance of relative capabilities between these actors. In brief, an actor's strategy of violence is related to its ability to entice civilian support, which is in turn contingent upon its ability to provide benefits to these supporters. Weak (or weakening) actors are unlikely to possess the capacity to provide benefits sufficient to elicit support. As a result, they are more likely to adopt violence as a means to temporarily coerce support and enforce loyalty. This relationship, however, is conditioned by the opponent's adopted strategies. High levels of violence employed by adversaries may reduce the level of capabilities necessary for an actor to entice support.
This project adds to recent research explaining civil war violence by exploring both how rebel and state strategies of violence are constructed and how these strategies evolve and change as conflict unfolds over time. It also contributes to an understanding of the microfoundations of these strategies by unpacking the linkages between civilian support for rebels and government, actor capacities, and the level of violence chosen by each side. Furthermore, this project will produce the most detailed dataset to date on civil war violence. The dataset used herein captures the level, frequency, and type of violence committed annually by both insurgent and state forces.
Determining what factors are responsible for variations in violence and unpacking the manner in which the complex interactions among actors influence strategy choice is a necessary first step to designing policies that can mitigate civilian victimization. The theoretical and empirical contributions of this project will assist policy makers and academics in devising strategies that diminish the civilian cost of civil wars. Furthermore, the dataset constructed to test the hypotheses outlined above will be useful to both policymakers and academics who require longitudinal and cross sectional data on violence committed by civil war actors
