Killing Of Civilians Research Articles

Varieties of civil war and mass killing

Why do some civil wars feature the mass killing of civilians while others do not? Recent research answers this question by adopting a ‘varieties of civil war’ approach that distinguishes between guerrilla and conventional civil wars. One particularly influential claim is that guerrilla wars feature more civilian victimization because mass killing is an attractive strategy for states attempting to eliminate the civilian support base of an insurgency. In this article, I suggest that there are two reasons to question this ‘draining the sea’ argument. First, the logic of ‘hearts and minds’ during guerrilla wars implies that protecting civilians – not killing them – is the key to success during counterinsurgency. Second, unpacking the nature of fighting in conventional wars gives compelling reasons to think that they could be particularly deadly for civilians caught in the war’s path. After deriving competing predictions on the relationship between civil war type and mass killing, I offer an empirical test by pairing a recently released dataset on the ‘technology of rebellion’ featured in civil wars with a more nuanced dataset of mass killing than those used in several previous studies. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, I find that mass killing onset is more likely to occur during conventional wars than during guerrilla wars.

The Lesser Evil Dilemma for Sparing Civilians

The rule I call ‘Civilian Immunity’ – the rule that prohibits targeting civilians in war – is the heart of the accepted jus in bello code. It prohibits targeting (viz., intentionally killing) civilians in a wide variety of war circumstances. Seth Lazar's brilliant book, Sparing Civilians, attempts to defend Civilian Immunity. In this essay I show, first, that his ‘Risky-Killing based argument’ fails to provide civilians with the robust protection Sparing Civilians promises. I argue, secondly, that the moral framework that Sparing Civilians employs, a moral framework that centralizes the Deontological Clause (stating that one's intentional killing is worse than enabling others to kill), leaves the immunity of civilians against Leaders unexplained.

Memory politics in contemporary Ukraine: Reflections from the postcolonial perspective

Reporting from the events of the so-called ‘Euro-revolution’ in Ukraine 2013–2014, the Western media were prompt to point out the excessive use of national symbols, including those connected with the memory of the Ukrainian nationalist organizations ‘OUN’ and ‘UPA’, which for some periods of time had cooperated with Nazi Germany and were involved in the killing of civilians. By using a postcolonial perspective, the article aims to explain this phenomenon, as well as a number of other elements of the politics of memory in contemporary Ukraine, such as the so-called ‘Decommunization Laws’ adopted in 2015. Special attention is paid to Frantz Fanon’s idea of ‘anticolonial nationalism’ and Homi Bhabha’s idea of hybridity and their realization in Ukraine.

Persuasion and Predation: The Effects of U.S. Military Aid and International Development Aid on Civilian Killings

ABSTRACTPowerful states frequently employ foreign aid to pursue international security objectives. Yet aid's effectiveness will be undermined if it exacerbates the effects of conflict on civilians within recipient states. This article investigates how international development aid and U.S. military aid influence recipient governments' incentives and ability to target civilians. U.S. military aid has a persuasion effect on state actors, which decreases a recipient state's incentives and necessity to target civilians. Development aid flows, however, trigger a predation effect in some environments, exacerbating civilian targeting. An analysis of aid flows in 135 countries on civilian killings between 1989–2011 provides support for both the persuasion and predation effects associated with aid.

More than words? “Genocide,” Holocaust analogies, and public opinion in the United States

ABSTRACTIn recent years, most instances of humanitarian crises involving the large-scale killing of civilians have sparked debates regarding whether the event qualifies as genocide or can be justifiably compared to the Holocaust. These seemingly semantic arguments arise because both sides in the naming debate believe that the use of the word genocide or analogies to the Holocaust exert a powerful framing effect on public opinion and, ultimately, important policy decisions. Yet, virtually no evidence exists to demonstrate whether these words do, in fact, wield such power. In this article, we attempt to shed light on this question utilizing a controlled survey experiment conducted on a representative sample of American citizens. By systematically varying the terms used to describe a violent conflict, we isolate the effect of these terms on Americans' perceptions of the event. We find little evidence to support the consensus that the mere use of the word genocide or the Holocaust analogy exerts a powerful influence over public opinion. Labeling a violent event “genocide” or equating it explicitly to the Holocaust does not induce the public to become significantly more supportive of intervention, nor does it significantly alter moral judgments about the victims or the perpetrators.

White Sovereignty (…), Black Life Politics: “The N****r They Couldn't Kill”

The subtitle of this article comes from an interview with Denzel Washington in which he recalls rejecting the lead role in a movie about a man convicted of raping a white woman and facing a death sentence that could not be carried out because the executioners had trouble killing him. The N-phrase can be read as reinscribing a post–civil rights archive of repetition in the police killings of black civilians and the racial policing of black populations in a “white citizenship democracy” as previously suggested by Fredrick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and W. E. B. DuBois. It argues that the racial policing of black populations underlines a democratic-racial social order constituted by and accountable to a white citizenship. Its logic of white sovereignty is increasingly revealed by black protests attached to the signifier BlackLivesMatter, which can be read in part as black life politics.

Distinction and the Ethics of Violence: On the Legal Construction of Liminal Subjects and Spaces

AbstractThis paper interrogates the relationship among visibility, distinction, international humanitarian law and ethics in contemporary theatres of violence. After introducing the notions of “civilianization of armed conflict” and “battlespaces”, we briefly discuss the evisceration of one of international humanitarian law's axiomatic figures: the civilian. We show how liberal militaries have created an apparatus of distinction that expands that which is perceptible by subjecting big data to algorithmic analysis, combining the traditional humanist lens with a post‐humanist one. The apparatus functions before, during, and after the fray not only as an operational technology that directs the fighting or as a discursive mechanism responsible for producing the legal and ethical interpretation of hostilities, but also as a force that produces liminal subjects. Focusing on two legal figures—“enemies killed in action” and “human shields”—we show how the apparatus helps justify killing civilians and targeting civilian spaces during war.

Compliance vs. constraints: A theory of rebel targeting in civil war

This article offers a theory of rebel targeting in civil war. Rebels face two logics of targeting: the logic of compliance in areas where they are fighting for territory, and the logic of legitimacy in areas where they remain clandestine. The first boosts civilian targeting because rebels use it as a way to discipline local populations. The second moderates it because unqualified civilian killings could prompt rebels’ supporters to turn against the group and easily help bring down its clandestine structures. In order to avoid this backlash, rebels focus on attacking ‘legitimate’ targets such as security forces and authorities. This supporters’ constraint is mitigated when the state heavily represses the rebels’ constituency – which increases supporters’ appetite for indiscriminate retaliation – and when the rebels can rely on independent funding – which reduces rebels’ dependence on supporters’ help. I test the argument with detailed information about rebel presence and political violence in Peru from 1980 to 1995. The results support that civilian victimization is driven by rebel strength, since the more control the rebels hold, the more civilians are targeted. Thus, when Shining Path was forced to operate clandestinely on a permanent basis, it carried out more actions against hard targets, so as to remain a legitimate force within its urban support base.

The patterns of violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Security, geography and the killing of civilians during the war of the 1990s

The patterns of violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina : Security, geography and the killing of civilians during the war of the 1990s

The New Christian Zionism: Fresh Perspectives on Israel & the Land ed. by Gerald R. McDermott

Reviewed by: The New Christian Zionism: Fresh Perspectives on Israel & the Land ed. by Gerald R. McDermott Mark Mattes The New Christian Zionism: Fresh Perspectives on Israel & the Land. Edited by Gerald R. McDermott. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2016. 349 pp. With the exception of Lutherans influenced by Johann August Bengel (1687–1752) or by North American premillennialist Lutherans, such as Joseph Augustus Seiss (1823–1904) or Conrad Emil Lindberg (1852–1930), the role of Israel, both people and land, in [End Page 241] relation to God's overall economy of salvation, has not played a major role in Lutheran thinking. In contrast, traditional "Christian Zionism," enshrined in the Scofield Reference Bible, was advocated by many North American fundamentalists. In that view, although the return of Jews to their ancient homeland is a fulfillment of biblical prophecy, Israel and the church run on different tracks, with the church escaping God's wrath in the "Great Tribulation" but not Israel. Countering that view, traditional Lutheranism has tended to be "supercessionist," that is, that the church has supplanted Israel in God's economy of salvation. This book, edited by an Evangelical Anglican who for decades taught at Roanoke College and is now at Beeson Divinity School, takes a different track. The essayists here eschew dispensationalist premillennialism with its project of charting the end times. However, unlike the supercessionist position, they see Israel as having a crucial place in God's plan of salvation for the world (12). For these thinkers, God's promises made to the Jews are "irrevocable" (Rom. 11:2). This does not mean that the nation of Israel cannot be criticized. Instead, it indicates that the destiny of the church is intertwined with that of Israel since Jesus did not come to destroy the law but to fulfill it. Thereby the covenant with Israel "abides" (27). Agreeing with dispensationalists that the return of the Jews to Palestine is a fulfillment of prophecy, these writers see in the contemporary state of Israel a merely provisional and "proleptic" fulfillment of the promise of a whole new world (27). Decisive for these essayists is Romans 9–11, which they interpret Paul to say that the church has not supplanted the place of the Jewish people but that the Jews remain as God's "chosen people" (42). McDermott traces non-dispensationalist Zionism as a minority report in the ancient church but which came to fruition among Puritans, particularly Jonathan Edwards (64). Several scholars––Craig Blaising, Joel Willitts, Mark Kinzer, and David Rudolph––indicate that not all references to "the land" in the New Testament can be spiritualized, since they specify God's commitment to Israel's vocation which is rooted in the land promised to Abraham and his descendants. Mark Tooley narrates the history of attitudes about Israel among mainline Protestants, who early in the early twentieth century supported a nation [End Page 242] state of Israel but more recently (since the 1970s) have critiqued Israel since Israel is no longer seen as an underdog and the Palestinians are perceived as oppressed (217). Lutheran ethicist Robert Benne notes that Reinhold Niebuhr's support for a Jewish homeland was based not on biblical prophecy but instead on secular and liberal views. Benne himself goes further than Niebuhr and offers a theological justification for Christian support of Israel: God's covenant with Israel abides and that justifies Jews returning to "the land" (245). Robert Nicholson points out that in the 1967 war Israel pushed Jordan and Egypt "out of the original Mandate for Palestine, dislodging them from their own illegal occupation of Palestinian Arabs" (269). Shadi Khalloul, an Israeli Maronite Christian, highlights the benefits even for minorities of living in Israel. "When there are reports of Israeli killings of Palestinian civilians during war (which are rarely if ever intentional), thousands of Jewish people in Israel protest against the government. … but when a bus with Jews is blown up by Palestinian terrorists, Arabs often dance in the streets or name their children or parks after suicide bombers, and honor the murderers as martyrs" (295). Darrell Bock emphasizes that Gentile inclusion does not entail Jewish exclusion (311). Finally, Gerald McDermott notes that both Jews and Christians worship...

Notes for the Next un Secretary-General

The United Nations faces an existential crisis. The norms that bind and ‘safeguard humanity’ are currently under threat. The deliberate bombing of hospitals and the indiscriminate killing of civilians has become almost routine in Syria and several other conflicts. Numerous governments and murderous non-state actors (like isis or Boko Haram) are defying international humanitarian and human rights law. This article argues that the solution to the current global exigency and a central challenge facing the next Secretary-General is to achieve an equilibrium shift away from crisis response and towards conflict prevention. This is especially true with regard to preventing mass atrocity crimes (genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing). Historically, no single issue has done more to tarnish the reputation of the un than the failure to halt atrocities. Under a committed Secretary-General, the un has unique capacity to prevent these crimes.

A Critic on the Anti-Terrorism Laws in India

Terrorism have been mainly used as a weapon against government that involves pre-meditated attacks with arms, ammunition and explosives against the civilians of India. The problem of terrorism becomes insoluble when individuals acting under a committed terrorist organization are willing to be killed while killing civilians in an indiscriminate manner. This article demonstrates the menace of terrorism in India, critically reviews the anti-terrorism laws and the shortcomings thereto.

Eliminative Killing and the Targeting of Noncombatants Comments on Seth Lazar's Sparing Civilians

At the heart of Seth Lazar’s arguments in support of what he calls Moral Distinction — “In war, with rare exceptions, killing noncombatants is worse than killing combatants” — is his treatment of eliminative and opportunistic killing. He adopts the standard line, that eliminative killing is easier to justify than opportunistic killing. And he acknowledges that there are various circumstances in which one might be able to justify killing noncombatants on eliminative grounds. Nonetheless, he claims that “intentionally killing civilians is more opportunistic than intentionally killing soldiers.” I argue that his argument in favor of this claim rests on two mistakes. First, he misunderstands the nature of deontic justification. He mistakenly uses a kind of “factor analysis” — looking to how much of the overall reason for an action various reasons might provide — to capture the wrong-making power of opportunistic killing; and he mistakenly thinks that acting on mixed motives is more difficult to justify than acting on purely morally appropriate motives. Second, he mistakenly treats eliminative killing as the moral equivalent of killing as a side effect. These mistakes need not impugn other parts of his defense of Moral Distinction. But it takes the heart out of his defense of it, putting a much greater burden on the other parts of his argument.

Ratner, Steven R. The Thin Justice of International Law: A Moral Reckoning of the Law of Nations.New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. 496. $85.00 (cloth).

Ratner, Steven R. <i>The Thin Justice of International Law: A Moral Reckoning of the Law of Nations</i>.New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. 496. $85.00 (cloth).

Визуализация политического медиапространства

Media space is a part of social space covered by means of mass communication. Social environment, saturated with visual images, gradually turns into visual space, and if controlled by visual mass media, it turns into visual media space. Visualization is, on the one hand, a tool for orientation in the world, and on the other hand, it is a means of representing the world, in other dimensions and projections. The media space, rich with political content, turns into a political media space, formed mainly by political stakeholders to influence the target segment − for example, the electoral audience. The media space produces the most effective political impact on people. This, in particular, explains the emergence of mass society, which is dominated by the average perception of the familiar world of images, which saturated the world. Today, a strong system of mass communications exists, which affects human behavior. If earlier, less rigid stratification dominated in society, the blurring of its boundaries shows the development of “mass man” society. In this society, elite gets less recognizable as it is mixed with the crowd. Political competition and one-sidedness, poor information culture of those who produce visual content seriously distort the media space environment. Therefore, visual informaiton that is associated with aggression, violence, killings of civilians by Ukrainian military in the southeastern Ukraine, dominates on TV screen. Visualization of media space by various means, described in this article, can become a powerful tool of political influence.

Moral Character or Character of War? American Public Opinion on the Targeting of Civilians in Times of War

Since the end of the Vietnam War, the United States has refrained from the widespread, intentional targeting of civilian populations in times of war. Public opinion polls seem to reflect a marked decline in American support for targeting foreign civilians since that time. Drawing on original public opinion surveys, as well as other historical material, this essay explores several explanations for these changes. Although there is some evidence that the public's views about the morality of civilian targeting have shifted, I argue that two other explanations also play an important role in the changes in the conduct of American wars. First, a mounting skepticism, especially within the U.S. military, about the efficacy of killing civilians, has undercut the primary motivation to even consider such tactics. Indeed, many U.S. military leaders now perceive that killing adversary civilians in large numbers – intentionally or unintentionally – usually backfires, making the adversary fight harder or driving more civilians to join or support the adversary's forces. Second, due to the lower stakes, and especially the dramatically lower fatality rates suffered by American troops in recent wars, the temptation to attempt to end wars quickly with a “death blow” against adversary cities has become less potent. Under certain conditions, however, a majority of Americans would still support today the kind of population bombing last practiced during World War II.

Hollywood's Changing Takes on Terrorism: Re-viewing John Huston's We Were Strangers (1949)

Scholarship on the cinematic representation of terrorism has grown increasingly sophisticated recently, deepening the debate about the mass media's relationship to political violence. This article contributes to this debate by taking a long view of Hollywood's treatment of terrorism and by examining, in particular, how US filmmakers' definition of terrorism has varied significantly from the early twentieth century through to the present day. The article focuses on a neglected film about Cuban terrorism made during the post-Second World War Red Scare, John Huston's We Were Strangers. Huston's thriller was the first Hollywood production that not only depicted terrorists as heroes but also appeared to justify the killing of innocent civilians for political purposes. By detailing the production of We Were Strangers, the article gives an insight into the obstacles that US filmmakers have typically met when touching on the subject of terrorism – obstacles that, in the case of We Were Strangers, helped hobble the film aesthetically and politically. By analysing the reception of We Were Strangers, the article points to the risks in jumping to conclusions about the impact that screen images of terrorism have had – or might now have – on critical and public opinion.

The Moral Limits of Proportionality in War

Given the limit on civilian casualties imposed by the rule of proportionality, some observers have asked whether the “good guys” can win with the current law and morality of war in place. Contrary to the lawyers, philosophers, and military practitioners who have sought to liberalize the standard of acceptable civilian casualties in war, this paper argues that the most promising attempts to morally justify more harm to civilians than harm averted ultimately fail. The paper focuses on two central arguments for a more liberal proportionality standard: (i) that defending forces who put civilians in harm’s way relieve the moral responsibility of attacking forces for civilian deaths, and (ii) that associative duties justify more killing of enemy civilians to save our compatriots. The first argument fails because it erroneously assumes that a party’s moral responsibility is diminished when more than one party is causally responsible for the same wrong. While liability may be diminished for civil harms when accidents occur, morality, like criminal law, does not recognize diminished responsibility when fundamental moral obligations are at stake. The second argument also rests on dubious assumptions. The special obligations that arise from associative relations cannot trump our general obligations not to harm others or establish claim rights that are wronged when we fail to privilege the lives of our associates over the lives of others. Our special obligations are generally limited precisely at the point where they would begin to do direct harm to nonthreatening others. Whether we are considering conventional war, counterterrorism, or human shields, proportionality’s excessiveness standard represents the maximal approach to justifiable civilian deaths in armed conflict.

Czy zbrodnia wołyńsko-galicyjska 1943–1945 była ludobójstwem? Spór o kwalifikację prawną „antypolskiej akcji” UPA

The anti-Polish purges carried out by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists-Bandera (OUN-B) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which are known in Polish history as the massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, claimed the lives of about 100,000 people. These purges were among the bloodiest episodes in Poland’s twentieth-century history and among the major mass killings of civilians during World War II. Moreover, they were committed by an irregular partisan formation. In terms of scale, the massacres in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia can be compared to the mass pacification of Belarusian villages by German police formations and the massacres of Serbs by Croatian nationalists.Historical research indicates that, regardless of whether the objective of the OUN and the UPA was to exterminate or ‘only’ to expel the Poles, implementation of their plan must have assumed the killing of the Polish population, or at least part of it, in the disputed areas. Therefore, further research conducted in Poland confirmed the conviction about the genocidal nature of the UPA’s activities. Jędrzej Giertych was probably the first Pole to use the term ‘genocide’ in this context. He used it in the London-based literary weekly ‘Wiadomości’ [News] in 1951. In the second half of the 1990s, this opinion became dominant among scholars dealing with the issues in question. Similar conclusions were reached by prosecutors of the Institute of National Remembrance. It seems that their evaluation could not be different in the light of the definition of genocide specified in Article 118 of the Polish Criminal Code.Polish scholars argue, however, whether the term ‘genocide’ should be used in reference to all of the activities conducted by the OUN and UPA in the years 1939–1947, or only those conducted in the period from 9 February 1943 to 18 May 1945, known as the anti-Polish action (mass murders). They also argue whether the UPA’s actions were typical genocide, or should be considered as a specific example of cruel genocide (genocidum atrox) due to their ferocity. Some scholars are inclined to recognize the UPA’s ‘anti-Polish campaign’ as ethnic cleansing rather than genocide, but the scale of the crimes against the Polish population seems to undermine this opinion.The author suggests that the massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia should be recognized as ‘genocidal ethnic cleansing’, or ‘ethnic cleansing that meets the definition of genocide’, as the terms indicate that from the very beginning perpetrators committed ethnic cleansing in the regions with intent to conduct mass murder of civilians.

Black and blue: Exploring racial bias and law enforcement in the killings of unarmed black male civilians.

In late 2014, a series of highly publicized police killings of unarmed Black male civilians in the United States prompted large-scale social turmoil. In the current review, we dissect the psychological antecedents of these killings and explain how the nature of police work may attract officers with distinct characteristics that may make them especially well-primed for negative interactions with Black male civilians. We use media reports to contextualize the precipitating events of the social unrest as we ground our explanations in theory and empirical research from social psychology and industrial and organizational (I/O) psychology. To isolate some of the key mechanisms at play, we disentangle racial bias (e.g., stereotyping processes) from common characteristics of law enforcement agents (e.g., social dominance orientation), while also addressing the interaction between racial bias and policing. By separating the moving parts of the phenomenon, we provide a more fine-grained analysis of the factors that may have contributed to the killings. In doing so, we endeavor to more effectively identify and develop solutions to eradicate excessive use of force during interactions between "Black" (unarmed Black male civilians) and "Blue" (law enforcement).