The Commander’s Dilemma

This chapter discusses the Commander's Dilemma framework that motivated the study of Salvadoran armed groups, examining literature from sociology, social psychology, and economics to understand why restraint is rare, and when it can succeed. This theoretical approach rests on four claims. First, to succeed, commanders must increase combatants' predispositions to violence. Yet—second—both training and combat durably increase combatants' predispositions to violence in general, not only their predisposition to perpetrate ordered killings of enemy soldiers. Third, commanders wish to avoid violence that appears likely to threaten the group's, or the commander's, survival, including some unordered violence against civilians. This imperative conflicts with the necessity to increase violent predispositions. These conflicting imperatives are referred to as the Commander's Dilemma. Fourth, purely extrinsic incentives are not sufficient to halt unordered violence in irregular war, because so many violence-causing factors are present in most conflict contexts. Violence is, in a word, overdetermined.