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.

During the nineteenth century, states routinely defeated insurgent foes+ Over the twentieth century, however, this pattern reversed itself, with states increasingly less likely to defeat insurgents or avoid meeting at least some of their demands+ What accounts for this pattern of outcomes in counterinsurgency~COIN! wars? We argue that increasing mechanization within state militaries after World War I is primarily responsible for this shift+ Unlike their nineteenth-century predecessors, modern militaries possess force structures that inhibit information collection among local populations+ This not only complicates the process of sifting insurgents from noncombatants but increases the difficulty of selectively applying rewards and punishment among the fence-sitting population+ Modern militaries may therefore inadvertently fuel, rather than deter, insurgencies+ We test this argument with a new data set of 286 insurgencies~1800-2005! and a paired comparison of two U+S+ Army divisions in Iraq~2003-2004!+ We find that higher levels of mechanization, along with external support for insurgents and the counterinsurgent's status as an occupier, are associated with an increased probability of state defeat+ By contrast, we find only partial support for conventional power-and regime-based explanations, and no support for the view that rough terrain favors insurgent success+ With more than 300 insurgencies fought since 1800, the current "face" of battle in Iraq and Afghanistan is a familiar one+ Despite the recent burst of research investigating civil war onset and dynamics, however, less attention has been devoted to Author names are alphabetical+ We thank -Toft, along with three anonymous reviewers and the editors of IO, for helpful comments and conversations+ We also thank the soldiers and marines who agreed to be interviewed+ Sara Evans, Raymond Hicks, and Samantha Lomeli provided excellent research assistance+ We are also grateful for critical feedback on earlier versions from seminar participants at Columbia

How are civilian attitudes toward combatants affected by wartime victimization? Are these effects conditional on which combatant inflicted the harm? We investigate the determinants of wartime civilian attitudes towards combatants using a survey experiment across 204 villages in five Pashtun-dominated provinces of Afghanistan -the heart of the Taliban insurgency. We use endorsement experiments to indirectly elicit truthful answers to sensitive questions about support for different combatants. We demonstrate that civilian attitudes are asymmetric in nature. Harm inflicted by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) is met with reduced support for ISAF and increased support for the Taliban, but Taliban-inflicted harm does not translate into greater ISAF support. We combine a multistage sampling design with hierarchical modeling to estimate ISAF and Taliban support at the individual, village, and district levels, permitting a more fine-grained analysis of wartime attitudes than previously possible.

D oes ethnicity matter for explaining violence during civil wars? I exploit variation in the identity of soldiers who conducted so-called "sweep" operations (zachistki) in Chechnya as an empirical strategy for testing the link between ethnicity and violence. Evidence suggests that the intensity and timing of insurgent attacks are conditional on who "swept" a particular village. For example, attacks decreased by about 40% after pro-Russian Chechen sweeps relative to similar Russianonly operations. These changes are difficult to reconcile with notions of Chechen solidarity or different tactical choices. Instead, evidence, albeit tentative, points toward the existence of a wartime "coethnicity advantage." Chechen soldiers, enmeshed in dense intraethnic networks, are better positioned to identify insurgents within the population and to issue credible threats against civilians for noncooperation. A second mechanism--prior experience as an insurgent--may also be at work. These findings suggest new avenues of research investigating the conditional effects of violence in civil wars.To find a bandit, I would quietly gather information and appear at his door at two or three at night, shake his hand, and say hello. After such a visit, this bandit would disappear. With three or four more operations, everyone would be clear on everything.

List and endorsement experiments are becoming increasingly popular among social scientists as indirect survey techniques for sensitive questions. When studying issues such as racial prejudice and support for militant groups, these survey methodologies may improve the validity of measurements by reducing nonresponse and social desirability biases. We develop a statistical test and multivariate regression models for comparing and combining the results from list and endorsement experiments. We demonstrate that when carefully designed and analyzed, the two survey experiments can produce substantively similar empirical findings. Such agreement is shown to be possible even when these experiments are applied to one of the most challenging research environments: contemporary Afghanistan. We find that both experiments uncover similar patterns of support for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) among Pashtun respondents. Our findings suggest that multiple measurement strategies can enhance the credibility of empirical conclusions. Open-source software is available for implementing the proposed methods.

A core proposition from decades of research on internal wars asserts that democracies, with their casualty-averse publics, accountable leaders, and free media, are uniquely prone to losing counterinsurgency~COIN! wars+ Yet one should question this finding, for two reasons+ First, existing studies overwhelmingly adopt no-variance research designs that only examine democracies, leaving them unable to assess their performance relative to autocracies+ Second, these studies do not control for confounding factors that bias causal estimates+ Democracies, for example, typically fight wars of choice as external occupiers, while most autocracies face homegrown insurgencies, a function in part of divergent levels of state capacity possessed by democratic and autocratic combatants+ This study corrects for both problems using a new dataset of insurgencies~1800-2005! and matching to test whether democracies experience significantly higher rates of defeat and shorter wars+ No relationship between democracy and war outcomes or duration is found once regime type is varied and inferential threats are addressed+ I thank Elizabeth Saunders and Todd Sechser for helpful comments and Kait Mauritz for excellent research assistance+ I also thank the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University, where this research note was written, and Princeton University for financial and institutional support+ 1+ Horne 1977, 548+ 2+ The scholarly literature on public opinion and casualty sensitivity is extensive+ For excellent overviews, see Gartner 2008, 95-97; and Gelpi, Feaver, and Reifler 200502006, 10-16+ The belief that democratic publics are reflexively casualty-averse~Mueller 1994 and 1973, 62! has given way to a International Organization 64, Winter 2010, pp+ 167-92

Information about insurgent groups is a central resource in civil wars: counterinsurgents seek it, insurgents safeguard it, and civilians often trade it. Yet despite its essential role in civil war dynamics, the act of informing is still poorly understood, due mostly to the classified nature of informant "tips." As an alternative research strategy, we use an original 2,700 respondent survey experiment in 100 villages to examine attitudes toward the Guardians of Peace program, a widespread campaign by the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan to recruit local informants. We find that coethnic bias-the systematic tendency to favor cooperation with coethnics-shapes attitudes about informing and beliefs about retaliation, especially among Tajik respondents. This bias persists even after adjusting for additional explanations and potential confounding variables, suggesting that identity considerations such as coethnicity may influence attitudes toward high-risk behavior in wartime settings. Recent studies of wartime dynamics have also suggested multiple motives for informing that stem more from bat

Governments, militaries, and aid organizations all rely on economic interventions to shape civilian attitudes toward combatants during wartime. We have, however, little individual-level evidence that these “hearts and minds” programs actually influence combatant support. We address this problem by conducting a factorial randomized control trial of two common interventions—vocational training and cash transfers—on combatant support among 2,597 at-risk youth in Kandahar, Afghanistan. We find that training only improved economic livelihoods modestly and had little effect on combatant support. Cash failed to lift incomes, producing a boom-and-bust dynamic in which pro-government sentiment initially spiked and then quickly reversed itself, leaving a residue of increased Taliban support. Conditional on training, cash failed to improve beneficiaries’ livelihoods but did increase support for the Afghan government for at least eight months after the intervention. These findings suggest that aid affects attitudes by providing information about government resolve and competence rather than by improving economic livelihoods.