Rivalry and Revenge: Violence against Civilians in Conventional Civil Wars1

Abstract

Recent research on violence against civilians during wars has emphasized war-related factors (such as territorial control or the characteristics of armed groups) over political ones (such as ideological polarization or prewar political competition). Having distinguished between irregular and conventional civil wars and between direct and indirect violence, I theorize on the determinants of direct violence in conventional civil wars. I introduce a new data set of all 1,062 municipalities of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and I show that the degree of direct violence against civilians at the municipal level goes up where prewar electoral competition between rival political factions approaches parity. I also show that, following the first round of violence, war-related factors gain explanatory relevance. In particular, there is a clear endogenous trend whereby subsequent levels of violence are highly correlated with initial levels of violence. In short, the paper demonstrates that an understanding of the determinants of violence requires a theory combining the effect of political cleavages and wartime dynamics. What explains the variation in levels of violence across time and space during civil wars? Why do armed groups use high levels of violence in some places, but not in neighboring places with similar characteristics? What leads armed groups in conflict to target noncombatants to a greater or lesser degree? This question has been at the forefront of recent research on civil wars. To date, two types of explanations have emerged. A first generation of scholars considered prewar characteristics of countries undergoing civil wars; following Clausewitz (1968) and Schmitt (1976), civil conflicts were seen as the result of existing political cleavages, and violence as the consequence of these divisions. 2 Recent empirical research has pointed instead to security concerns related to warfare, for example the military incentives of armed groups (Kalyvas 2006), the survival incentives of civilians (Valentino, Huth, and Balch-Lindsay 2004; Kalyvas 2006), or the organizational characteristics of the armed groups (Humphreys and Weinstein 2006; Weinstein 2006). These authors, who were in general using more systematic research methods than the previous generation of scholars, have