Varieties of civil war and mass killing

2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Krcmaric
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Empirical Test ◽  
Conventional Wisdom ◽  
Mass Killing ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Hearts And Minds

Why do some civil wars feature the mass killing of civilians while others do not? Recent research answers this question by adopting a ‘varieties of civil war’ approach that distinguishes between guerrilla and conventional civil wars. One particularly influential claim is that guerrilla wars feature more civilian victimization because mass killing is an attractive strategy for states attempting to eliminate the civilian support base of an insurgency. In this article, I suggest that there are two reasons to question this ‘draining the sea’ argument. First, the logic of ‘hearts and minds’ during guerrilla wars implies that protecting civilians – not killing them – is the key to success during counterinsurgency. Second, unpacking the nature of fighting in conventional wars gives compelling reasons to think that they could be particularly deadly for civilians caught in the war’s path. After deriving competing predictions on the relationship between civil war type and mass killing, I offer an empirical test by pairing a recently released dataset on the ‘technology of rebellion’ featured in civil wars with a more nuanced dataset of mass killing than those used in several previous studies. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, I find that mass killing onset is more likely to occur during conventional wars than during guerrilla wars.

Transnational Jihadism & Civil Wars

Daedalus ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 146 (4) ◽  
pp. 59-70
Author(s):  
Martha Crenshaw
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Domestic Terrorism ◽  
Transnational Activism ◽  
Power Centers ◽  
Soviet Invasion ◽  
Competing Power ◽  
Foreign Fighters ◽  
The Relationship

When rebels also employ terrorism, civil wars can become more intractable. Since the 1980s, jihadism, a form of violent transnational activism, has mobilized civil war rebels, outside entrepreneurs, foreign fighters, and organizers of transnational as well as domestic terrorism. These activities are integral to the jihadist trend, representing overlapping and conjoined strands of the same ideological current, which in turn reflects internal division and dissatisfaction within the Arab world and within Islam. Jihadism, however, is neither unitary nor monolithic. It contains competing power centers and divergent ideological orthodoxies. Different jihadist actors emphasize different priorities and strategies. They disagree, for example, on whether the “near” or the “far” enemy should take precedence. The relationship between jihadist terrorism and civil war is far from uniform or constant. This essay traces the trajectory of this evolution, beginning in the 1980s in the context of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Terrorism, Civil War, and Insurgency

2019 ◽  
pp. 347-365
Author(s):  
Jessica A. Stanton
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Domestic Terrorism ◽  
Rebel Groups ◽  
Conceptual Clarity ◽  
Terrorist Groups ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Causes Of Violence ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Relationship

Much of the terrorism occurring worldwide is domestic terrorism carried out by rebel groups fighting in civil wars. However, many are reluctant to categorize domestic insurgencies as terrorist groups or to identify the tactics used by domestic insurgencies as terrorist tactics. Through a survey of the literature addressing the relationship between terrorism and civil war, I contend that research on the dynamics of violence in civil war would benefit from a more standardized definition of the concept of terrorism as well as greater consensus on how the concept of terrorism ought to be used in relation to the concept of civilian targeting. The lack of conceptual clarity in distinguishing between terrorism and civilian targeting makes it difficult to compare research findings, and thus to make progress as a field in our understanding of the causes of violence and its consequences. Despite the challenges associated with making comparisons across studies, this chapter attempts to do precisely this, drawing on research on terrorism as well as research on civilian targeting to develop insights on the causes and consequences of terrorist violence employed in the context of civil war.

Teaching from experience: foreign training and rebel success in civil War

2020 ◽  
pp. 073889422091297
Author(s):  
Eric Keels ◽  
Jay Benson ◽  
Michael Widmeier
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Past Research ◽  
Intrastate Conflicts ◽  
War Outcomes ◽  
Conflict Outcomes ◽  
The Relationship

This paper addresses the relationship between rebel training from external sponsors and civil war outcomes. While past research has examined how foreign support, broadly, shapes the dynamics of civil wars, little attention has been paid to how foreign training of rebel fighters affects civil wars. We theorize that rebels that receive training from formerly successful rebels are more likely to experience favorable conflict outcomes than those with no training or with training from sponsors inexperienced with fighting a civil war. These propositions are tested with a quantitative analysis of all intrastate conflicts from 1975 to 2010, providing support for our hypothesis.

Peasant Nationalism Revisited: The Biography of a Book

1977 ◽  
Vol 72 ◽  
pp. 766-785 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chalmers Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Rural Population ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
Significant Proportion ◽  
Doctoral Dissertation ◽  
Chinese Revolution ◽  
Hearts And Minds

It is now 15 years since Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power was first published and became known as a controversial book. However, when in the autumn of 1960 I began writing my doctoral dissertation in political science at Berkeley, it never once crossed my mind that I was writing something controversial or even publishable. For the previous two years I had been reading Japanese Government archives concerned with the Japanese war in China, 1937–45, archives that had been obtained for the Berkeley libraries by Professor Robert Scalapino from Hatano Ken'ichi, one of Japan's leading specialists on China and a Japanese governmental adviser during the so-called “China Incident.” These archives impressed me with a point that I thought was already widely accepted among scholars interested in the Chinese Revolution – namely, that the Japanese army had created conditions of such savagery in the Chinese countryside that the peasantry in overwhelming numbers had given their allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party as the only true leader of anti-Japanese guerrilla resistance. Because the Communist Party had openly championed resistance to Japan, it had won the “hearts and minds” of a significant proportion of the rural population, an achievement that guaranteed that in the postwar world it could no longer be regarded by the Kuomintang (KMT) as merely a “rebel faction”. When the Nationalists precipitated a civil war with the Communists after Japan's defeat, it was only natural that the mass of the population in the formerly occupied areas supported the Communists, and it was this factor of popular support, as in most other civil wars, that contributed most to the communist victory of 1949.

Terrorism and Civil War: A Spatial and Temporal Approach to a Conceptual Problem

2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael G. Findley ◽  
Joseph K. Young
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Contentious Politics ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Event Data ◽  
Conceptual Problem ◽  
Temporal And Spatial Patterns ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
High Degree ◽  
The Relationship

What is the relationship between civil war and terrorism? Most current research on these topics either explicitly or implicitly separates the two, in spite of compelling reasons to consider them together. In this paper, we examine the extent to which terrorism and civil war overlap and then unpack various temporal and spatial patterns. To accomplish this, we use newly geo-referenced terror event data to offer a global overview of where and when terrorist events happen and whether they occur inside or outside of civil war zones. Furthermore, we conduct an exploratory analysis of six separate cases that have elements of comparability but also occur in unique contexts, which illustrate some of the patterns in terrorism and civil war. The data show a high degree of overlap between terrorism and ongoing civil war and, further, indicate that a substantial amount of terrorism occurs prior to civil wars in Latin America, but yet follows civil war in other regions of the world. While the study of terrorism and of civil war mostly occurs in separate scholarly communities, we argue for more work that incorporates insights from each research program and we offer a possibility for future research by considering how geo-referenced terror and civil war data may be utilized together. More generally, we expect these results to apply to a wide variety of attitudes and behaviors in contentious politics.

Ethnic Defection in Civil War

2008 ◽  
Vol 41 (8) ◽  
pp. 1043-1068 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stathis N. Kalyvas
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Political Actor ◽  
Identity Shift ◽  
Behavioral Expression ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
Constructivist Approaches ◽  
The Relationship

The study of ethnicity is dominated by constructivist approaches, yet empirical studies of civil war have been oblivious to their insights. In this article, the author examines the relationship between ethnic identity and civil war and points to several empirical instances of fluidity in the behavioral expression of ethnic identities within civil war. The author identifies two processes that are consistent with constructivist theorizing: identity shift and ethnic defection. The author provides several empirical illustrations along with a micro-level test of the determinants of ethnic defection. At the micro level, ethnic defection is best predicted by the extent of territorial control exercised by the incumbent political actor and the level of prior insurgent violence. The author also hypothesizes that at the macro level, ethnic defection is a function of the resources available to incumbent actors and conclude by stressing the need to take seriously the endogenous dynamics of civil wars.

Third-party regime type and civil war duration

2021 ◽  
pp. 002234332097581
Author(s):  
Sara Norrevik ◽  
Mehwish Sarwari
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Regime Type ◽  
Selection Effects ◽  
Intrastate Conflicts ◽  
Party Support ◽  
Conflict Outcomes ◽  
The Relationship

Does the regime type of a foreign intervener influence the duration of civil wars? Existing research has shown that third-party support affects the outcome of a conflict. Moreover, studies show that the type of support offered to conflict actors can determine how a war ends. While this research has offered significant implications on conflict dynamics, extant works have overlooked the importance of characteristics of foreign supporters and how their attributes can impact conflict outcomes. Focusing on foreign troop support and quantities, this article examines the relationship between the regime type of a foreign supporter and the outcome of an armed conflict. We argue that regime type of an external troop sponsor can influence war duration based on two dynamics: selection effects and signaling effects. Specifically, troop assistance provided to warring parties by democracies decreases the length of civil wars and increases the likelihood for a one-sided victory for the supported faction. The empirical findings for all intrastate conflicts during the period 1975–2012 provide evidence for our claims that the regime type of an external intervener influences the outcome of a conflict.

Through the prism of Spain. Socio-economic causes of different outcomes of Russian and Spanish civil wars

2017 ◽  
pp. 142-155
Author(s):  
I. Rozinskiy ◽  
N. Rozinskaya
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Russian Civil War ◽  
World War ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Economic Well Being

The article examines the socio-economic causes of the outcome of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1936), which, as opposed to the Russian Civil War, resulted in the victory of the “Whites”. Choice of Spain as the object of comparison with Russia is justified not only by similarity of civil wars occurred in the two countries in the XX century, but also by a large number of common features in their history. Based on statistical data on the changes in economic well-being of different strata of Spanish population during several decades before the civil war, the authors formulate the hypothesis according to which the increase of real incomes of Spaniards engaged in agriculture is “responsible” for their conservative political sympathies. As a result, contrary to the situation in Russia, where the peasantry did not support the Whites, in Spain the peasants’ position predetermined the outcome of the confrontation resulting in the victory of the Spanish analogue of the Whites. According to the authors, the possibility of stable increase of Spanish peasants’ incomes was caused by the nation’s non-involvement in World War I and also by more limited, compared to Russia and some other countries, spending on creation of heavy (primarily military-related) industry in Spain.

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