Too Much of a Bad Thing? Civilian Victimization and Bargaining in Civil War

Wood, Reed M.; Kathman, Jacob D.

doi:10.1017/s000712341300001x

Cited by 52 publications

(62 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…For example, terrorism may increase groups' chances of entering into negotiations and obtaining government concessions, and help to advertise the group's cause to a large audience (e.g. Thomas 2014;Wood and Kathman 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Polo

González

2020

Comparative Political Studies

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Existing research has argued that terrorism is common in civil war because it is "effective." Surprisingly, however, only some groups use terrorism during civil wars, while many refrain altogether. We also see considerable variation in the use of terrorism over time. This article presents a theory of terrorism as a mobilization strategy in civil war, taking into account benefits, costs, and temporal dynamics. We argue that the choice and the timing of terrorism arise from the interaction between conditions for effective mobilization and battlefield dynamics. Terrorism can mobilize support when it provokes indiscriminate government repression or when it radicalizes rebels' constituency by antagonizing specific societal groups. The timing of attacks, however, is influenced by battlefield losses, which increase rebels' need to rally civilian support. The analyses of new disaggregated data on rebels' terrorist attacks during conflicts and of ISIS tactics in Iraq and Syria support our theoretical argument.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Polo

González

2020

Comparative Political Studies

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“…Consequently, the micro-level, dynamic determinants of civil war termination have been left relatively under-studied in the literature, which could lead us to biased conclusions (Balcells & Kalyvas, 2014, 1391-1392. In recent years, however, a small but growing body of literature has increasingly explored the role of microdynamics, such as battle intensity and locations, in shaping conflict termination (e.g., Greig, 2015;Ruhe, 2015;Wood & Kathman, 2014). This article joins this emerging debate by exploring not only how the intensity or relative location of the battle matters, but also how different spatio-temporal diffusion patterns of battles impact the likelihood of conflict termination differently.…”

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confidence: 99%

Battle Diffusion Matters: Examining the Impact of Microdynamics of Fighting on Conflict Termination

Ito

Elliott

2019

Journal of Conflict Resolution

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How does diffusion of civil war battles influence conflict termination? Recent advances in civil war literature have found that battle dynamics shape conflict termination by affecting the intra-conflict bargaining between disputants. This article extends the theoretical perspective and argues that how battles diffuse matters in determining conflict termination. While battlefield dynamics should in principle reveal previously unavailable private information, the relevance of information-revealing effect depends on the diffusion patterns of battles. The persistent, and possibly battle-exacerbated, commitment problem can also alter the prospects of conflict termination. We test the argument by distinguishing two distinct diffusion patterns of battles: distant and proximate. The empirical results reveal that distant diffusion, but not proximate diffusion, of battles makes civil conflicts less likely to terminate. The analysis also demonstrates that incorporating diffusion dynamics significantly improves our ability to predict conflict termination.

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“…Overall, then, these results provide partial support for Hypothesis 1 from Chapter 3 (i.e., the higher the quantity of peacekeeping personnel, the lower the amount of violence). Although this conclusion should not be surprising given the previous studies conducted on this topic (Hultman 2010;Hultman, Kathman and Shannon 2013;Hultman, Kathman and Shannon 2014;Kathman and Wood 2014;Haass and Ansorg 2018), it is nonetheless significant to find that the size and composition of an operation continues to play a role in the management of violence when controlling for the relative quality of its peacekeeping personnel.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 88%

“…First, the use of violence against civilians is often determined by strategic considerations. For example, existing theories of bargaining (Boyle 2009;Wood and Kathman 2014), signalling (Hultman 2007;Hultman 2009), and labour market economics (Azam and Hoeffler 2002;Azam 2006) have all been used to explain the strategic use of violence during civil war. A number of studies have also been written about the phenomena of ethnic cleansing and mass killing (Kauffman 1996;Harff 2003;Valentino, Huth and Balch-Lindsay 2004;Sullivan 2012), which can explain the use of violence when seeking to capture a specific piece of territory or when attempting to suppress an elusive guerilla group.…”

Section: Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…So, although it has been demonstrated that even lightly armed peacekeepers or unarmed observers can contribute to the establishment of a lasting peace (Fortna 2008), they do not necessarily have the same effect when it comes to the management of on-going violence. See Hultman, Kathman and Shannon 2013, Hultman, Kathman and Shannon 2014, Kathman and Wood 2014, and Bove and Ruggeri 2016 When hand-coding the personnel data, I followed the same coding process as the one used to construct Kathman's original dataset. This process was objective in nature and consisted of copying the numbers for each personnel category directly from the UN's monthly PDF files into an Excel spreadsheet, primarily via copy and paste commands to limit the chance of coding error.…”

Section: Control Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Does quality matter? An evaluation of the relationship between United Nations peacekeepers and civil war violence

Winchester¹

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Why are some groups of peacekeepers more effective at managing civil war violence than others? Existing studies of operational effectiveness have focused on the quantity, profession, and geographic location of deployed personnel and have suggested that each of these is independently important. However, the relationship, if any, between the quality of UN peacekeepers and their ability to manage on-going violence remains critically understudied. To address this gap, this study begins by developing a novel definition of "peacekeeper quality" that consists of two key factors: professional capabilities and a willingness to act. It then evaluates the extent to which variation in peacekeeper quality contributes to operational effectiveness, at both the state-level and the local-level. I argue that higher quality peacekeepers are more effective than lower quality peacekeepers because they have an easier time coercing local conflict actors. To test this argument, I use an explanatory sequential methodology -a form of mixed-method research that uses qualitative data to help interpret the results of a primarily quantitative study. It starts with a cross-national analysis of all intrastate conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa from 1991-2017 to determine if variation in average operational quality affects the severity of violence at the state-level. It then proceeds to a geographically disaggregated analysis of three peacekeeping operations located in sub-Saharan Africa from 2010-2017 to determine if variation in the average quality of individual groups of peacekeepers affects the severity of violence at the local-level. Finally, it presents a process-tracing case study of MINUSCA's intervention in CAR from 2014-2018 that examines both overall trends and discrete conflict episodes. In short, this dissertation shows how and why peacekeeper quality matters. Specifically, it shows that the UN's highest quality peacekeepers are its iii most effective, that the quantity of peacekeepers continues to affect violence when controlling for quality and that peacekeepers are better at protecting civilians from harm than they are at managing battlefield violence. As a result, future attempts to evaluate the relationship between peacekeepers and violence, or to improve the UN's operational effectiveness, should also account for the role played by peacekeeper quality.iv

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Too Much of a Bad Thing? Civilian Victimization and Bargaining in Civil War

Cited by 52 publications

References 51 publications

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

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

Battle Diffusion Matters: Examining the Impact of Microdynamics of Fighting on Conflict Termination

Does quality matter? An evaluation of the relationship between United Nations peacekeepers and civil war violence

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