Carrots, Sticks, and Insurgent Targeting of Civilians

Abstract

How do conciliatory and coercive counterinsurgency tactics affect militant group violence against civilians? Scholars of civil war increasingly seek to understand intentional civilian targeting, often referred to as terrorism. Extant research emphasizes group weakness, or general state attributes such as regime type. We focus on terrorism as violent communication and as a response to government actions. State tactics toward groups, carrots and sticks, should be important for explaining insurgent terror. We test the argument using new data on terrorism by insurgent groups, with many time-varying variables, covering 1998 through 2012. Results suggest government coercion against a group is associated with subsequent terrorism by that group. However, this is only the case for larger insurgent groups, which raises questions about the notion of terrorism as a weapon of the weak. Carrots are often negatively related to group terrorism. Other factors associated with insurgent terrorism include holding territory, ethnic motivation, and social service provision.

The Power to Resist: Mobilization and the Logic of Terrorist Attacks in Civil War

“…3 Civil conflict scholars are increasingly seeking to understand rebel terrorism. The burgeoning literature on terrorism in civil war explores a number of factors such as regime type (Stanton, 2013), rebel capabilities (Hultman, 2007;Polo & Gleditsch, 2016), rebel group goals (Akcinaroglu & Tokdemir, 2018), intergroup competition (Belgioioso, 2018), rebel funding sources (Fortna et al, 2018), peace processes and mediation attempts (Findley & Young, 2015;Pospieszna & DeRouen, 2017), and coercive versus conciliatory state behavior (Asal et al, 2019). This work is important but it often downplays two aspects: the potential for terrorism to alienate popular support for rebels and the temporal dynamics of terrorist violence, especially the timing of terrorist attacks during civil wars.…”

Sovereignty Rupture as a Central Concept in Quantitative Measures of Civil War

“… 21. For example, of the fourteen studies of civil war and armed conflict published by the Journal of Conflict Resolution between January 1 and August 2, 2018 that used cross-country data analysis (includes publication via “online first,” excludes articles the primary function of which was to present a new data set), ten used a twenty-five yearly battle-related death threshold (or lower) and four used the UCDP/PRIO ACD or a data set built on it but did not explain their criteria for what constituted a civil war. The former are Gleditsch et al (2018), Fisk (2018), Bohnet, Cottier, and Hug (2018), Prorok (2018), Otto (2018), Conrad et al (2019), Maekawa (2019), Wiegand and Keels (2019), Asal et al (2018), and Kim and Hong (2019). The latter are Blankenship (2018), Kim (2018), Lee (2018), and Roy (2018). …”

Violence Against Civilians During Armed Conflict: Moving Beyond the Macro- and Micro-Level Divide

“…Stanton (2016) finds that although militarily strong governments are more likely to engage in cleansing, they are not any more likely to adopt other strategies of violence toward civilians. Cross-national studies of rebel group terrorism-defined as attacks against civilian populations aimed at coercing the opponent-show that weak rebel groups are no more likely than strong rebel groups to engage in terrorism (Asal et al 2019;Fortna 2015;Stanton 2013Stanton , 2016.…”