Civil War Violence Research Articles

‘Realms so barbarous and cruell’: Writing Violence in Early Modern Ireland and England

AbstractIn their tendency to avoid theory and interdisciplinary approaches, anglophone historians have frequently neglected to pay attention to questions of genre, form and narrative in the sources they consult. Such an oversight is unfortunate, for it results in partial readings of those sources, and overlooks the fact that the past itself − even as it is expressed in the most apparently neutral of documents − can never be separable from the telling of it. This essay will begin from the premise of genre to argue that English writings which represented the violence of early modern Ireland and England were significant in revealing the fraught relationship between historical developments and aesthetic representations; if writings on Ireland remained assured and stylistically stable, even when describing the worst of atrocities, the pamphlets, memoirs, or poetry of the English Civil War, decades later, became fragmented as the writing of a more internecine and incomprehensible violence could no longer be contained within traditional formal perimeters. Violence in the 1640s was thus questioned in a way it never had been in Ireland, where the certainty embedded in English writings only conveyed the acceptance of that violence as well. By contrast, language which failed in the face of English Civil War violence was also productive, raising questions that would ultimately influence emerging conceptions of human rights in the face of atrocity.

Territorial contestation and repressive violence in civil war

This study models the structural sources of variation in the use of selective (discriminate) repression within 89 civil wars fought between 1981 and 2005. The severity of repressive violence is modeled as a function of the amount of territory being contested by the insurgents. This idea is operationalized using measures of the location, size, and density of insurgency violence. The analysis finds evidence that the repressive behavior of both governments and rebel groups is linked to conflict geography. Governments violate physical integrity rights more frequently and kill more civilians the greater the overall amount of territory under contestation. Rebels kill more civilians in highly dispersed insurgencies that lack a clear epicenter.

Monsieur Lazhar: the ideal immigrant in the neoliberal Québécois imagination

The ability of Canadian films to bring the immigrant experience to the centre of public debate is certainly impressive. Monsieur Lazhar (2011) depicts the life of one such immigrant without the blemishes of Hollywood's essentialist tropes. The film tells the story of an Algerian exile who physically escapes the violence of civil war in his native land, only to find himself trapped in a new psychological battle zone of a Québec community torn apart by suicide and grief. As a substitute teacher, he ultimately becomes the surrogate cultural guardian and saviour of a cadre of Canadian children. This critique will examine the humanism of lead character Bachir Lazhar, his transformation from a French-speaking Algerian to a displaced francophone exile, and the characteristics that make him an admired and welcomed immigrant by francophone Canadians. Analysed within the context of postcolonial theory and identity politics, this article will expose the collapsing categories of identification which mandate that his valour and magnanimity depend upon negating his own Algerian cultural identity. In short, the more Bachir Lazhar is ‘fetishized’, in other words viewed within the narrow confines of cultural fetishism (ethnic food, tea-drinking habit, and belly dancing), the easier it becomes for the Canadian viewer to embrace him.

Can Civilian Attitudes Predict Civil War Violence?

How do insurgents choose their tactics in civil wars? While most theories of civil war violence marginalize the role of ideology, we argue that the location, type, and lethality of insurgent violence are all shaped by the underlying spatial distribution of civilians' relative support for combatants. Unlike current "hearts and minds" theories, we contend that pro-government attitudes are associated with increased, not reduced, violence, and that these attitudes predict future attacks. A survey experiment in 204 Afghan villages is used to establish a positive association between pro-International Security Assistance Force attitudes and future Taliban attacks. We extend our analysis to 14,606 non-surveyed villages, where our measure of civilian attitudes improves out-of-sample prediction by 20--30% over standard forecasting models. The results are especially strong for Taliban attacks with improvised explosive devices. These findings hold even after adjusting for possible confounders, including past violence, military bases, and aid.

The Dual Function of Violence in Civil Wars: The Case of Colombia

When considering both the economic and military dimensions of civil war it is clear that the violence of belligerents has the dual instrumental function of extracting resources and increasing control. Recently developed datasets of geo-localized violent events–such as the ACLED or the SCAD database–open new pathways for explaining strategic dynamics within conflicts. This article underlines how this task can be achieved through qualitative analyses of patterns in belligerents’ modes of operation and statistical analyses of violent incidents and macro-economic variables.

Sexual violence in Sierra Leone's civil war: 'Virgination', rape, and marriage

Rape and sexual violence loom large in the study of civil war in Africa. Sierra Leone has been one of the most prominent cases for establishing rape as a ‘weapon of war’, yet little is known about how sexual violence was understood by commanders or combatants within the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). Mainstream analyses of armed groups and civil war rarely engage with gender dynamics, despite their centrality to war making, power, and violence; and research that does focus on sexual violence tends to overlook the complex internal dynamics of the groups responsible. This article examines the internal gender dynamics of the RUF from the perspective of male and female members in seeking to understand the perpetration of sexual violence. It shows that both formal and informal laws and power structures existed to regulate gender relations and control sexual behaviour within the group. It identifies four categories of women – non-wives, unprotected wives, protected wives, and senior women – and shows that women's interests and experiences of sexual violence were not homogeneous, but were instead shaped by their status within the group. In this way, sexual violence, examined in social context, provides an entry point for understanding how power, protection, and access to resources are brokered in rebellion.

Beyond redemption: race, violence, and the American South after the Civil War

In the months after the end of the Civil War, there was one word on everyone's lips: redemption. From the fiery language of Radical Republicans calling for a reconstruction of the former Confederacy to the petitions of those individuals who had worked the land as slaves to the white supremacists who would bring an end to Reconstruction in the late 1870s, this crucial concept informed the ways in which many people - both black and white, Northerner and Southerner - imagined the transformation of the American South. Beyond Redemption explores how the violence of a protracted civil war shaped the meaning of freedom and citizenship in the new South. Here, Carole Emberton traces the competing meanings that redemption held for Americans as they tried to come to terms with the war and the changing social landscape. While some imagined redemption from the brutality of slavery and war, others - like the infamous Ku Klux Klan - sought political and racial redemption for their losses through violence. Beyond Redemption merges studies of race and American manhood with an analysis of post - Civil War American politics to offer unconventional and challenging insight into the violence of Reconstruction.

Memory and the Cycle of Violence in José Antonio Labordeta's En el remolino (2007)

Since the end of the twentieth century Spain has witnessed a boom in the production of films and publication of novels and books on the Spanish Civil War as part of a process known as the recovery of historical memory. While this is generally seen in positive terms, there is some disquiet about the potential for harm in too much remembering. This essay argues that it is important not just to remember past violence but to understand the nature of violence, and in particular the violence perpetrated in a civil war. En el remolino (2007) by José Antonio Labordeta is studied in the context of Stathis Kalyvas’ work on civil war violence and Judith Butler's notion of precarious lives as an illustration of both the potential dangers of memory and the need for democratic states to be built on a normative moral code which recognizes the worth of the individual.

Controlling Revolution: Understandings of Violence through the Rural Soviet Courts, 1917–1923

This essay is a study of how Soviet jurists and rural citizens attempted to understand and control illicit social violence during the Civil War and its immediate aftermath in the rural courts. It examines how Soviet leaders, people's courts and criminologists understood the role of the courts in controlling violence and how decisions of local courts actually limited the effects of the violence of revolution and civil war. It underscores the complexity of violence and the need to understand state and peasant attempts to control social violence in an age marked by political, state violence.

Making sense of violence in civil war: challenging academic narratives through political ethnography

This article seeks to assess the role of political ethnography in the study of civil war, and more particularly research which focuses on the micro-dynamics of violence. By focusing on the representations put forward by econometric and structural research about civil war, this article underlines the importance of fieldwork research and political ethnography in deepening and broadening our understanding of violence in civil war. By using the author's personal immersion experience in the conflict zone of the North Caucasus, this article highlights how structural variables, such as political grievances and marginalization, depict an incomplete image of participation in rebellion by focusing on the onset of violence and not on its sustaining factors. This article argues that in order to complete a micro-dynamic turn in the study of violence, one has to theorize the commonalities of life trajectories amongst individuals who decide to rebel against their marginalization by focusing on the role of nonphysical violence in civil wars.

Historical and Cultural Roots in Anil's Ghost

Michael Ondaatje’s Anil's Ghost narrates the forgotten history and cultural root of those who were massacred in the mindless violence of Sri Lankan Civil War, particularly the common and downtrodden people. Presenting the central character, Anil, beyond the mainstream culture, political and social scenarios, Ondaatje confirms his affinity to the unprivileged people. The pain agony of war victims is clearly examined through the reconstruction of skeletons. The suppressed and unidentified past comes into existence which is the best way to renovate native history within the literary text. Ondaatje historicizes those people who exist on the margin of canonical history. With this novel, he gives voice to those who were unheard in the official history, records them in art and literature as Sri Lankan artist, Anand reconstructs statue of Buddha. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/researcher.v1i1.8370 Researcher: A Research Journal of Culture and Society Vol.1(1) 2013

Clan cleansing in Somalia: the ruinous legacy of 1991

Note on Transliteration Introduction Chapter 1. Speaking the Unspeakable: Somali Poets and Novelists on Civil War Violence Chapter 2. Historical Background to the Violence of State Collapse Chapter 3. Clan Cleansing in Mogadishu and Beyond Chapter 4. The Why and How of Clan Cleansing: Political Objectives and Discursive Means Timeline of Major Events Notes Glossary Bibliography Name Index Subject Index Acknowledgments

Catachresis in Côte d’Ivoire: Female Genital Power in Religious Ritual and Political Resistance

Ivoirian women vehemently protest the violence and calamity of civil war by deploying an embodied rhetoric of ritual, appealing to the traditional religious concept of “Female Genital Power”. I propose that their imagistic resistance to the postcolonial state represents a catachresis , with a few interesting twists. Most salient is that what women reinscribe onto the political scene is not as a feature of the imperial culture but the concept-metaphors of indigenous religion, and especially the image of Woman as the source of moral and spiritual power from which proceeds all political, religious, and juridical authority. Whereas the logocentrism of the academy, and postcolonial theory in particular, leads to aporia, ritual remands scholars into the situation of the actual world, where women are actively engaged in self-representation that both defies projected depictions of them and rejects their absence from state conceptions of power.

Protecting civilians in civil war

Can local organizations give civilians the capacity to protect themselves from civil war violence? Civilians have traditionally been considered powerless when facing armed groups but new research suggests organized communities may promote security through nonviolent strategies such as resolving disputes between neighbors and managing relations with macro-armed actors. This article analyzes whether and how these ‘mechanisms’ designed to retain community autonomy functioned in the community-case of the Peasant Worker Association of the Carare River (ATCC) in Colombia. The Carare civilians developed a local institutional process to investigate threats against suspected armed group collaborators to clarify the ‘fog of war’ and reform civilian preferences to participate in the conflict. This process is evaluated in reference to existing hypotheses about violence in civil wars such as the balance of territorial control using qualitative evidence from original field research. A unique within-case database created through focus group sessions with community ‘conciliators’ is used to analyze not only acts of violence, but also threats that were defused. Despite the prevalence of conditions that would predict persistent violence against civilians, the local institution itself proved to be a critical factor for both explaining and limiting levels of violence. The results suggest civilian choices and their consequences did not merely result from the capabilities or choices of armed actors.

Catachresis in Côte d’Ivoire: Female Genital Power in Religious Ritual and Political Resistance

Ivoirian women vehemently protest the violence and calamity of civil war by deploying an embodied rhetoric of ritual, appealing to the traditional religious concept of “Female Genital Power.” I propose that their imagistic resistance to the postcolonial state represents a catachresis, with a few interesting twists. Most salient is that what women reinscribe onto the political scene is not as a feature of the imperial culture but the concept-metaphors of indigenous religion, and especially the image of Woman as the source of moral and spiritual power from which proceeds all political, religious, and juridical authority. Whereas the logocentrism of the academy, and postcolonial theory in particular, leads to aporia, ritual remands scholars into the situation of the actual world, where women are actively engaged in self-representation that both defies projected depictions of them and rejects their absence from state conceptions of power

An Epidemic Model of Violence and Public Support in Civil War

How do civilians respond to violence in civil war, and how do these responses shape combatants’ coercive strategies? Conventional wisdom expects civilian victimization to backfire, as a security-minded public “balances” against the side posing the greatest threat to its livelihood and survival. Yet combatants often expect a terrorized population to do the opposite, “bandwagoning” with those most willing and capable to inflict harm. Using an epidemic model of popular support dynamics, I explore the logic of balancing and bandwagoning in irregular civil war. I argue that when civilian strategy is clearly communicated to combatants, civilians are always better off balancing, and combatants are better off avoiding punishment. When civilian choice is not observed, the balancing equilibrium breaks down and patterns of violence depend on the local balance of power. The model’s results challenge the view that selective violence is most common in areas of incomplete control. Due to uncertainty over civilian behavior, violence in both divided and perfectly controlled areas can occur in equilibrium, inflicting great costs on civilians. I compare these predictions against the historical record of Soviet counterinsurgency in Western Ukraine, using new micro-level data from the declassified archives of the Soviet secret police.

The Long-Run Labor-Market Consequences of Civil War: Evidence from the Shining Path in Peru

This study exploits district-level variation in the timing and intensity of civil war violence to investigate whether early life exposure to civil wars affects labor-market outcomes later in life. In particular, we examine the impacts of armed conflict in Peru, a country that experienced the actions of a tenacious, brutally effective war machine, the Shining Path, between 1980 and 1995. This study finds that the most sensitive period to early life exposure to civil war violence is the first 36 months of life. A 1 standard deviation increase in civil war exposure leads to a 5% fall in adult monthly earnings, 3.5% reduction in the probability of working in formal jobs, and 6% reduction in the probability of working in large firms. Substantial heterogeneity in the earnings impacts emerges when considering variation in the type of civil war violence. Overall, forced disappearances emerge as the most hurtful measure of violence in the long run. Sexual violations disproportionately affected the wages of women, while torture and forced disappearances disproportionately affected the wages of men. Evidence on intervening pathways suggests that short-run health along with schooling and household wealth are important channels in connecting early life exposure to civil war and adult earnings.

Human Rights “Naming & Shaming” and Civil War Violence

AbstractThe aim of this PEPS Letter is to clarify the effects of human rights “Naming and Shaming” by international actors, such as IOs, NGOs and the international media, on the intensity of violence in domestic conflict. The note carries out, evaluates and proposes empirical strategies to study such effects. We find that a classic panel-year data structure is insufficient to disentangle and assess possible mechanisms. Though the UN-labeled attempts to “name and shame” seem to decrease the level of violence, this and other results cannot be defended as robust and coherent in light of likely endogeneity bias. Results based on just lagged explanatory variables differ in the sign and significance of relationships with results based on instrumented-variable estimation. We highlight the value and necessity of collecting and analyzing data that is more disaggregated with respect to time and target levels. Only such further steps will allow full study the role of “naming and shaming” on domestic conflict dynamics.

Ideology and Violence in Civil Wars: Theory and Evidence from Mozambique and Angola

Theories that seek to explain patterns of violence in civil wars frequently pass over the issue of ideology. This paper argues that ideology may shape the use of selective versus indiscriminate violence by an armed group. The role of ideology is examined in the cases of Frelimo in Mozambique and the MPLA in Angola in their countries' wars of independence and civil wars. Using archival and newspaper data, I find that the Marxist–Leninist ideology of Frelimo and the MPLA led initially to their practice of restraint in violence against civilians, and that as elite ideological commitment eroded, this led to a corresponding increase in violence. I also challenge the role played by ideology in Jeremy Weinstein and Macartan Humphreys' group organization theory of civil war violence.

Art in Ancient Ife, Birthplace of the Yoruba

Artists the world over shape knowledge and material into works of unique historical importance. The artists of ancient Ife, ancestral home to the Yoruba and mythic birthplace of gods and humans, clearly were interested in creating works that could be read. Breaking the symbolic code that lies behind the unique meanings of Ife’s ancient sculptures, however, has vexed scholars working on this material for over a century. While much remains to be learned, thanks to a better understanding of the larger corpus of ancient Ife arts and the history of this important southwestern Nigerian center, key aspects of this code can now be discerned. In this article I explore how these arts both inform and are enriched by early Ife history and the leaders who shaped it.1 In addition to core questions of art iconography and symbolism, I also address the potent social, political, religious, and historical import of these works and what they reveal about Ife (Ile-Ife) as an early cosmopolitan center. My analysis moves away from the recent framing of ancient Ife art from the vantage of Yoruba cultural practices collected in Nigeria more broadly, and/or the indiscriminate use of regional and modern Yoruba proverbs, poems, or language idioms to inform this city’s unique 700-year-old sculptural oeuvre.2 Instead I focus on historical and other considerations in metropolitan Ife itself. This shift is an important one because Ife’s history, language, and art forms are notably different than those in the wider Yoruba region and later eras. My approach also differs from recent studies that either ahistorically superimpose contemporary cultural conventions on the reading of ancient works or unilinearly posit art development models concerning form or material differences that lack grounding in Ife archaeological evidence. My aim instead is to reengage these remarkable ancient works alongside diverse evidence on this center’s past and the time frame specific to when these sculptures were made. In this way I bring art and history into direct engagement with each other, enriching both within this process. One of the most important events in ancient Ife history with respect to both the early arts and later era religious and political traditions here was a devastating civil war pitting one group, the supporters of Obatala (referencing today at once a god, a pantheon, and the region’s autochthonous populations) against affiliates of Odudua (an opposing deity, pantheon, and newly arriving dynastic group). The Ikedu oral history text addressing Ife’s history (an annotated kings list transposed from the early Ife dialect; Akinjogbin n.d.) indicates that it was during the reign of Ife’s 46th king—what appears to be two rulers prior to the famous King Obalufon II (listed as Ekenwa in this early king list; Fig. 1)—that this violent civil war broke out. This conflict weakened the city enough so that there was little resistance when a military force under the conqueror Oranmiyan arrived in this historic city. The dispute likely was framed in part around issues of control of Ife’s rich manufacturing resources (glass beads, among these). Conceivably it was one of Ife’s feuding polities that invited this outsider force to come to Ife to help rectify the situation for their side. As Akinjogbin explains (1992:98), Oranmiyan and his cavalry, after gaining control of Ife “... stemmed the ... uprising by siding with the weaker ... of the disunited pre-Oduduwa groups .... [driving Obalufon II] into exile at Ilara3 and became the Ooni.” Eventually, the deposed King Obalufon II with the help of a large segment of Ife’s population was able to defeat this military leader and the latter’s supporters. In Ife today, Odudua is identified in ways that complement Oranmiyan. As Akintitan explains (p.c.):4 “It was Odudua who was the last to come to Ife, a man