What Makes State Leaders Brutal? Examining Grievances and Mass Killing during Civil War

Abstract

What makes state leaders enmeshed in civil war commit mass killings against their own populations? This article explores this question by synthesizing grievances and mass killing. It investigates how factors or contexts that breed or exacerbate grievances can trigger state-sponsored mass killing during civil war. Severe political and economic marginalization and a history of intense armed conflict can engender staunch civilian support for insurgents, which prompts embattled rulers to orchestrate mass killing as a strategy of neutralizing insurgent combatants and warding off future rebellion. To verify this argument, a dataset is constructed that contains information on civil wars from 1945 to 2007 and large-N statistical analyses are conducted. The results corroborate the author's theoretical arguments with respect to political marginalization and history of armed conflict, but not with respect to economic marginalization. The argument and findings suggest that (1) grievances account for mass killing perpetrated by the government during civil war and (2) different sources of grievances have varying effects on mass killing.