How Do Civilians Attribute Blame for State Indiscriminate Violence?

Abstract

Avoiding indiscriminate violence against civilians has been one of the pillars of US counterinsurgency policy. Most analysts agree that indiscriminate violence against civilians makes noncombatants more likely to facilitate the insurgency. An alternative view suggests that indiscriminate violence reinstates a collective action problem for the rebels, because civilians blame insurgents for provoking the government and exploiting them as human shields. Therefore, this paper addresses the following question: do civilians evaluate all indiscriminate violence in the same way or do they think of indiscriminate violence differently when it is provoked by insurgents? We evaluate this proposition against survey data from post-war eastern Ukraine. When compared to a national random sample of Ukraine’s population that was unaffected by warfare directly, we find that civilians who experienced indiscriminate violence first-hand are more likely to blame the government regardless of insurgents’ actions. We discuss the implications of our findings for counterinsurgency scholarship and policy.