Civilian Targets Research Articles

When cyberwar struck its first civilian target

Andy Greenberg’s book Sandworm is trenchant on the mounting capacity of malware to wreak havoc. Brian Nussbaum reviews. Andy Greenberg’s book Sandworm is trenchant on the mounting capacity of malware to wreak havoc. Brian Nussbaum reviews.

Terrorist attacks and Europeans’ attitudes towards immigrants: An experimental approach

AbstractOver the past several years an increasing number of terrorist attacks committed in the name of Islam and targeting civilians have taken place in many Western democracies, calling for more research on the impact of these exogenous events on citizens’ attitudes towards immigrants. Using a quasi‐experimental design, this study examines the short‐term effect of the Paris attacks of the night of 13 November 2015 on the attitudes towards European Union (EU) and non‐EU immigrants across 28 EU countries. Employing Eurobarometer 84.3 survey data collected in 28 European countries between 7 and 17 November 2015, the design allows the testing of individual attitudes before and after the Paris attacks and the spillover effects of this event in all European countries. It is found that the Paris attacks had a significant negative effect on attitudes towards immigrants, especially among educated and left‐wing individuals. Moreover, the negative effect was stronger in countries where the national political‐ideological climate was more positive towards immigrants. These findings are explained by theorising that first emotional reactions to the attack are the results of coping mechanisms whereby individuals are confronted with disconfirmation/confirmation of their previous beliefs: individuals who experience stronger stereotype disconfirmation are the most negatively affected by the terrorist attack. Overall, the study holds important implications for understanding the short‐term impact of terrorist attacks on public attitudes towards immigrants.

Deploying to Protect: The Effect of Military Peacekeeping Deployments on Violence Against Civilians

ABSTRACTDo UN peacekeeping forces protect civilians from harm in post-war environments? Current evidence suggests that the answer to this question is yes. But extant research mostly examines this relationship at the country-level and consequently has logical difficulty tracing decreases in civilian fatalities to actual peacekeeper activities. We would have more confidence in the ability of peacekeepers to limit harm and protect non-combatants if the reduction in violence occurred locally where blue helmets were positioned. Using original geocoded data of yearly UN deployments in four Sub-Saharan African conflicts (Sudan, South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Ivory Coast), we find that peacekeeping units get locally deployed to violent post-war areas and they reduce the level of civilian harm almost immediately. But, in areas without violent clashes between government forces and rebels, we find peacekeeping units more responsive to civilian targeting by rebels, which indicates a reluctance among peacekeepers to confront government forces that target civilians. While host nation consent is crucial for the success of a peacekeeping mission, the findings from this study caution against nurturing illiberal regimes by failing to check government atrocities. The failure to confront government abuse can jeopardize long-term peace and reconciliation.

Conceptualizing Rebel Legitimacy

Contemporary conflict studies frequently cite increased “legitimacy” as a key mechanism linking rebel actor to a variety of outcomes, including civilian targeting, recruitment practices, and war end. This article advances a conceptualization of legitimacy as a dynamic process of triangulation among rebels, their potential local constituents, and the international community. Rebels derive or lose legitimacy from the local population, but also from external audiences, which have played in increasing role in supporting peace processes. We explore conceptually a myriad of ways that rebels work to create and maintain legitimacy in the context of ongoing conflict, identifying the target audiences of these tactics. These are illustrated with a set of cases of rebel actor in Indonesia.

‘A Secret, Melodramatic Sort of Conspiracy’: The Disreputable Legacies of Fenian Violence in Nineteenth-Century London

‘A secret, melodramatic sort of conspiracy’: The disreputable legacies of Fenian violence in nineteenth-century London. This essay assesses the cultural and historical legacy of the ‘Dynamite war’, a campaign waged predominantly in London by Irish-American Republicans organised under the banners of Clan-na-Gael and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa’s Skirmishers from 1881 to 1885. The war was, and, to a degree, remains, a contentious event in Irish history principally because its instigators were willing to use extreme violence against civilian targets, and so demonstrated a disposition to transgress codes of martial honour which had previously been regarded as largely sacrosanct. While the history of the campaign, the degree to which it was innovative in its methods as a precursor for urban terrorism, and the manner in which the war has been represented in popular culture and literature have been the subjects of compelling recent research, the extent to which the campaign has been understood within the context of Irish London and its problematic status within narratives of nineteenth-century Irish political insurgency more broadly have been less fully considered. This paper considers these aspects in greater detail, highlighting the disreputable status of the campaign and, subsequently, the manner in which allusions to it are often deeply embedded in Irish literary and cultural texts. The essay concludes with a discussion of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), a work which uses fictionalised autobiography to locate the war in the wider history of nineteenth-century Irish nationalism. In so doing Joyce acknowledges the ethical complexity of the campaign in a manner which becomes both an intervention in historiography and an experiment in literary aesthetics.

Investigation and implementation of the fractal properties of electric load on civilian objects in order to efficiently predict and control electrical consumption

We have investigated the process of constructing the charts of electrical load, as well as electricity consumption, of many-storied apartment houses in a city's neighborhood, taking into consideration the fractal structure and the existence of a long-term dependence, inherent to self-affine stochastic processes. The results from studying daily, weekly, monthly, yearly charts have shown the presence of fractal properties and the existence of short-term and long-term memory. This makes it possible, in order to efficiently predict and control power consumption, to apply a fractal analysis, which establishes the dependence of future values on retrospective information. Feature of the current study is determining a critical value for the Hurst exponent, approaching which leads to that the system loses stability and enters an unstable state under which the parameters are changing rapidly. The Hurst exponent can be transformed into fractal dimensionality, which is a measure for the complexity of a load chart. In the theory of fractal sets and fractal geometry, of significant importance are the self-similar and fractal sets. By using the specified properties of the fractal, this study has proven the existence of a fractal principle in the formation of the dynamics of electrical load on civilian targets using the example of power consumption by many-storied apartment houses within a city's neighborhood. The calculation of the Hurst exponent has made it possible to determine that the series is persistent and suitable for adequate prediction and efficient energy consumption management. The relevance of the current research is predetermined by the application of a fractal analysis to electricity consumption pattern particularly by civilian objects, since the scientific literature analyzes and predicts the processes that form electric load structure on energy systems, at industrial enterprises

Terrorist Threats on the Economic System and Combating Financing Terrorist Organizations

Abstract The complexity of the current economic development environment in Europe, as a result of the extremist-terrorist phenomenon, coupled with the accentuation of the economic and technological differences among the world’s states, has generated and continues to generate new risks and threats to the communities of people. The attack on civilian targets in Europe, by members of criminal groups has resulted in casualties within human communities. Because some terrorist-extremist organizations are criminal groups that have a specific organization, logistics, specific training and education systems that cannot work without having material and financial resources. As a result, one of the most effective ways to fight the threat of terrorist organizations is to combat terrorism financing.

How do civilians attribute blame for state indiscriminate violence?

State indiscriminate violence against civilians has been viewed as counterproductive for the government. This conclusion hinges on the assumption that indiscriminate violence aggrieves civilians against the government even when the rebels provoke the state by using civilians as human shields. An alternative view suggests that civilians recognize if the rebels exploit them as human shields and blame the rebels if such provocation occurs. We ask: do civilians evaluate all state indiscriminate violence in the same way or do they think of state indiscriminate violence differently when it is provoked by insurgents? Accounting for the covariate differences between individuals with and without personal experience of warfare in the survey data from postwar Ukraine, we find that personal exposure to violence shapes one’s blame attribution for provoked state attacks on civilians. Individuals unexposed to violence tend to take into account whether the government was provoked by the rebels. By contrast, individuals with personal experience of warfare tend to blame the government for indiscriminate attacks regardless of rebel provocation. This finding has implications for counterinsurgency scholarship and policy. It is likely that the difference between unexposed and exposed to violence civilians emerges in geographically isolated conflicts. If so, targeting of civilians may have different effects on the escalation of insurgency in geographically concentrated as opposed to widespread cases of violence.

Playing dirty to survive: the vulnerability of civilian targets within U.S. military aid recipient states

ABSTRACT U.S. military aid provides recipient governments the fighting capability they require to undermine domestic militant groups, which can undermine groups’ leadership structures and trigger group splintering. In this environment, brutal attacks against non-combatants become an effective mechanism for targeted groups to signal their resolve and outbid competitors. A large-n analysis of U.S. military aid between 1989 -2011 links higher levels of military aid with higher levels of rebel-perpetrated civilian killings, and deaths due to explosive attacks on non-combatant targets. A closer examination of the case of Pakistan sheds further light on the underlying causal mechanisms.

Targeting Decisions and Consequences for Civilians in the Colombian Civil Strife

Although the intentional and indiscriminate targeting of civilians is extremely common in non-international armed conflicts by national armed forces and irregular militias alike, it is now commonly represented that all or nearly all of the international laws of war – including the rule of proportionality – apply with equal vigor and scope to internal conflicts. Yet, these conclusions have little evidentiary foundation. In the absence of specific targeting rules in a treaty relating to non-international armed conflicts, the only source for more detailed guidance under international law would be customary international law. For a practice to become binding international custom, it must be sufficiently longstanding, consistent, and universal. The practice must also be accompanied by the belief that it is mandated by international law (opinio iuris sive necessitatis), as opposed to being merely optional or advisable. Better evidence is needed of whether the laws of war are aligned with state practice in non-international conflicts. In pursuit of this evidence, we have chosen to examine one specific aspect of the laws of war - the doctrine of proportionality. We are engaged in a multinational study of state customary practice of proportionality since 1945. As traditionally understood, proportionality requires military commanders to consider whether striking a given target is “expected to cause incidental loss of life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objections or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.” The study will examine how the principle has played out - specifically, the role it plays in targeting and planning decisions as well as state responses to obvious violations of the rule - in many armed conflicts in many countries. To better understand state practice, we are using a methodology designed to gather empirical information beyond official governmental and NGO publications and news reports. Our goal for the present chapter is to examine state practice in applying this proportionality doctrine in the civil strife between the Colombian government and two armed subversive groups - the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) - from 1982 to present. This vicious and bloody war, waged since 1982 and ongoing today, is notable for the large number of intentional civilian deaths and property damage, but it also involves numerous incidents of allegedly indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks resulting in accidental but avoidable civilian casualties and property damage. In the end, we sought to determine, in part, whether the practice of Colombia in its war with the FARC confirms that proportionality has a customary law meaning either consistent with or divergent from traditional understandings in international conflicts. By examining incidents from this conflict it is at least possible to gain insight into the role that proportionality considerations play in targeting decisions made by the Colombian military.

When Civilians Are Attacked: Gender Equality and Terrorist Targeting

While scholars demonstrate a consistent negative relationship between gender equality and violence, the effect of women’s rights on the quality of terrorism and the type of victims targeted remains unexplored. This article introduces a new model of terrorists’ strategic targeting by examining the trade-off between the ease of a civilian-oriented attack and the negative public reaction these attacks invoke. Within this framework, gender equality increases the costs of civilian targeting by inducing public opinion costs. As gender equality increases, the costs of attacking civilians increase relatively more than government-oriented attacks. Using data on domestic terrorism between 1970 and 2007 and a subnational examination of a randomly implemented gender quota in India, this study demonstrates that as gender equality increases, the ratio of civilian-oriented to government-oriented attacks decreases. Overall, this study refines our understanding of terrorists’ strategic targeting and identifies heterogeneity in the Women, Peace, and Security theory.

Strategies and Tactics in Armed Conflict: How Governments and Foreign Interveners Respond to Insurgent Threats

We introduce a new data set on the strategies and tactics employed by belligerents in 197 internal armed conflicts that occurred between 1945 and 2013. The Strategies and Tactics in Armed Conflict (STAC) data set provides scholars with a rich new source of information to facilitate investigations of how regimes and their foreign supporters have responded to insurgent threats and the effects of actors’ force employment choices on a wide variety of intra- and postconflict outcomes. In addition to seventeen novel variables that measure the strategies and tactics employed by governments and intervening states, the STAC data set contains independently coded measures of many variables that overlap with existing data sets—a feature that facilitates the replication of existing studies and robustness checks on the results of new studies. We demonstrate the utility of the STAC data with an analysis of the impact of rebel mobilization on the basis of ethnicity on the propensity of governments to employ forced resettlement, civilian protection, civilian welfare projects, and civilian targeting to counter the insurgent threat.

Efficiency of blast walls for protection of soft targets

Abstract The recent trend of terrorist attacks on civilian targets, including transportation systems, resulted in efforts to harden and strengthen these objects which previously were not designed to cope with this kind of threat. The blast mitigation strategies traditionally used in industrial facilities may provide an additional safety. One such solution is a blast wall that could be used for facade systems or for protection of muster areas and evacuation routes of metro and train stations or airports. This paper deals with the assessment of the blast response of protection walls. The typical types of blast walls commonly used in practice in industrial sector are described. The behavior of blast walls is characterized using simple analytical approach and finite element modelling. The advantages and limitations related to each of these characterization techniques are discussed compared with findings of other authors. Furthermore, a parametric study is performed through extrapolation of numerical models. Two common types of panels with both fixed and pinned boundary conditions are subjected to directly defined pressure loads. Their responses are compared in order to evaluate the effects on the primary steelwork. Possible benefits deriving from typological and geometrical modifications of the local element are also presented. Particular emphasis is given to the importance of the estimation of the reaction forces, displacements and energy dissipation.

An Analysis of the Saudi-led coalition's Attack on Yemen on the Basis of the International Criminal Court

The Saudi-led coalition's Attack to Yemen killed and wounded thousands of people, many of whom were women and children. Numerous civilian targets, such as hospitals and schools were bombed and destroyed in these attacks, which resulted in famine, malnutrit...

Civilian Targeting as Interaction Ritual: Evidence from Insurgent Groups in Cross-National Perspective

Abstract Why do some insurgent groups target civilians, while others show more restraint? Whereas the majority of the literature on this topic has focused on strategic relations with civilians, in this paper the authors emphasize the role of internal group processes in influencing civilian targeting. Specifically, they argue that insurgent groups sanction violence against civilians as a means of socializing recruits that enter without preexisting ties and commitments, as is likely the case with forced recruits. The authors frame such socialization as an interaction ritual in order to understand how violence can play a role in transforming identities and building shared norms in this process. Using data drawn from two existing sources, they employ a number of statistical procedures. The authors test the extent to which forced recruitment leads to a higher number of civilian casualties for the rebel group in question – an important focus for scholars focusing on unit cohesion. Results from this analysis confirm theoretical expectations that low levels of cohesion are related to higher counts of civilian casualties.

End of the cycle: assessing ETA’s strategies of terrorism

ABSTRACTIn May 2018, the Basque insurgent group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) officially disbanded after a 60-year struggle. This inquiry assesses ETA’s violent campaigns using recent conceptual and theoretical advancements from the field of terrorism studies. Three conclusions concerning the group’s strategies of terrorism are advanced. First, ETA regularly targeted civilians to achieve goals other than coercing the Government of Spain; these objectives included outbidding rival separatist groups and spoiling negotiation processes. Second, ETA’s most rapid period of organizational growth occurred as the result of an aggressive terrorist campaign, demonstrating that civilian targeting can serve as a stimulus to rebel group recruitment. Finally, while terrorism did not advance ETA’s primary political objective of creating an independent Basque state, it did enable the group to assume a leading position within the radical Basque separatist movement, helping extend ETA’s lifespan and making the group an embedded actor within the contentious political processes surrounding the question of Basque self-determination. Collectively, these conclusions support recent theoretical findings arguing that non-state terrorism often enables insurgent groups to prolong their lifespans while paradoxically making it more difficult for them to advance their long-term political objectives.

The Impact of Suicide Attacks on Voting Behavior: The Case of November 2015 Early Elections

Terror aims to disrupt peace and security of countries. Suicide attacks, a form of terrorism is carried out in many parts of the world today. These attacks aiming at destroying countries and citizens, and targeting civilians or state institutions, have been the current agenda in Turkey with cases such as Suruc Attack and Ankara Railway Station Attack following the June 7, 2015, elections and the Syrian Civil War. These attacks, which deeply affect the citizens and harm the country, can also have an impacton political behaviors such as social practices. Individuals, as voters, may vote under the influence of political and social events. In this study, effects of suicide attacks in Turkey on voting behavior were demonstrated by means of a reception analysis on the example of the Ankara Train Station Attack (October 10, 2015). In this way, how suicide attacks in Turkey reflected on voting behavior concerning the November 1, 2015, Early Elections was analyzed. The ethnographic method was used in the study. As the conclusion of the study,the individuals were observed to be aware of the fact that the real purpose of terrorism was to scare and harm. The participants supported the government in case of the suicide attacks and other terrorist attacks. The majority of the participants believed thatthe suicide attack, whichtook place in the train station intersection in Ankara,would have no effect on the behaviors of the voters for the Early Elections of November 1, 2015.

Obstruction and intimidation of peacekeepers: How armed actors undermine civilian protection efforts

While recent research focuses on why conflict parties attack peacekeepers, little attention has been given to other types of resistance against peacekeeping missions, such as intimidation and obstruction. It is argued in this article that one reason why peacekeepers are obstructed and intimidated is that armed actors that target civilians want to maintain the operational space to carry out attacks against civilians and want to prevent peacekeepers from monitoring human rights violations. A spatially and temporally disaggregated analysis on resistance against peacekeepers in Darfur between January 2008 and April 2009 indeed suggests that the intimidation and obstruction of peacekeepers is more likely to take place in areas with higher levels of violence against civilians. The findings hold when taking into account the non-random occurrence of violence against civilians through matching the data. Finally, anecdotal evidence from other sites of armed conflict than Darfur suggests that resistance against peacekeepers in these cases is also likely to be related to the targeting of civilians. This suggest that in order to be effective in protecting civilians, peace missions should not only be robust as highlighted in previous research, but peace missions should also develop an effective strategy to deal with armed groups that try to prevent peacekeepers from fulfilling their mandate.

Humanitarian Evacuations in Violence and Armed Conflict

17 June 2016 1. Introduction 355 2. Purpose 356 3. Rationale 357 4. Balancing a protection tool and a last resort 357 5. Evidence-based decision making 357 6. Minimum standards 358 7. Key operational and protection considerations 360 8. Conclusion 363 Annex I: Checklist for planning and implementing humanitarian evacuations 364 Annex II: Visualization tools 370 Persons of concern1 to UNHCR often suffer disproportionally in contemporary conflicts.2 This suffering is due to the scope and brutality of the violence – which can be indiscriminate or, in many cases, deliberately target these populations. The targeting of civilians has led to both widespread and multiple displacements, as well as at the opposite end of the spectrum, severe restrictions on the freedom of movement of civilians as well as siege as a tactic of war. In such a context, humanitarian actors regularly confront dilemmas in determining how best to respond to the assistance and protection needs of populations at extreme risk, stranded in hard to reach areas, enclaves and besieged areas. A response to these dilemmas can be humanitarian evacuations, under certain circumstances.

Protection Through Presence: UN Peacekeeping and the Costs of Targeting Civilians

AbstractAre UN peacekeepers effective in protecting civilians from violence? Existing studies examine this issue at the country level, thereby making it difficult to isolate the effect of peacekeepers and to assess the actual mechanism at work. We provide the first comprehensive evaluation of UN peacekeeping success in protecting civilians at the subnational level. We argue that peacekeepers through their sizable local presence can increase the political and military costs for warring actors to engage in civilian targeting. Since peacekeepers’ access to civilian populations rests on government consent, peacekeepers will primarily be effective in imposing these costs on rebel groups, but less so for government actors. To test these conjectures we combine new monthly data on the location of peacekeepers with data on the location and timing of civilian killings in Africa. Our findings suggest that local peacekeeping presence enhances the effectiveness of civilian protection against rebel abuse, but that UN peacekeeping struggles to protect civilians from government forces.