An Enemy We Will Not Tolerate: The Politics of Punishment Attacks and Policing

Abstract

The prevailing wisdom in the political science literature holds that insurgent groups serve their own interests most effectively when they use selective violence against suspected collaborators hidden amongst their constituents. By targeting those that are believed to be disloyal, the insurgents demonstrate their own lethal efficiency while simultaneously undermining promises made by the government to protect those that prove willing to provide intelligence on local insurgent activity. However, insurgents have also demonstrated a tendency to use selective violence in order to establish their own systems of law enforcement to deal with common criminals, such as thieves and vandals. These acts of rough justice serve as part of the insurgent group's overall strategy to build institutions of governance to replace those provided by the state, although they are unlikely to serve as effective deterrents to collaboration and often appear to have the opposite effect. Vigilante actions draw on the same pool of relatively scarce resources — manpower, money, vehicles and the like — that insurgents must also rely on in their pursuit of victory over government forces on the battlefield. As a result, the institution-building and war-fighting goals of insurgent groups are often in tension with each other. This paper offers a formal model to explain how insurgents resolve this tension in the context of their competition with the state to become the dominant providers of law enforcement. Hypotheses are derived from the model and evidence is presented from a variety of intrastate conflicts to justify the core assumptions of the model and demonstrate the plausibility of the hypotheses.