Killing Of Civilians Research Articles

Permission to Narrate a Pandemic in Palestine

Permission to Narrate a Pandemic in Palestine

THE IMPACT OF THE POST ARAB SPRING ON THE HUMAN RIGHTS IN SYRIA

Purpose: The purpose of the study is to give an analysis of the humanitarian situation and the case of human rights in Syria after the events of the Arab spring. Methodology: This is analytical-descriptive research that has been done through literature review, content analysis, and documentary and case study research. Result: our results suggest that the Syrian government made false concessions designed to end the revolts. The occurrence led to the formation of a rebel group, the Free Syrian Army whose main objective was to oust the authoritarian regime and stop the killing of civilians. This marked the beginning of the blatant violation of human rights as well as the civil war in Syria. The government not only ignited but also took the war to its own people killing, injuring and imprisoning thousands of people. Worse still, thousands of women and young girls still suffer sexual violence during the nightly raids conducted frequently on either opposing camps. Following the massive violations of human rights, almost all economic sectors of Syria have met rock-bottom. Applications: This research can be used for policymakers and the international community to take a further step to aid the Syrian civilians. Novelty/Originality: In our research, we try to target a very much debated topic in the Middle East. Although several articles written about the humanitarian and human rights situation in Syria studies on human rights after the Arab spring is still lacking.

Introducing the Targeted Mass Killing Data Set for the Study and Forecasting of Mass Atrocities

This article describes a new data set for the study of genocide, politicide, and similar atrocities. Existing data sets have facilitated advances in understanding and policy-relevant applications such as forecasting but have been criticized for insufficient transparency, replicability, and for omitting failed or prevented attempts at genocide/politicide. More general data sets of mass civilian killing do not typically enable users to isolate situations in which specific groups are deliberately targeted. The Targeted Mass Killing (TMK) data set identifies 201 TMK episodes, 1946 to 2017, with annualized information on perpetrator intent, severity, targeted groups, and new ordinal and binary indicators of genocide/politicide that can serve as alternatives to existing measures. Users are also able to construct their own indicators based on their research questions or preferred definitions. The article discusses the concept and operationalization of TMK, provides comparisons with other data sets, and highlights some of the strengths and new capabilities of the TMK data.

Don’t Shoot! The Impact of Historical African American Protest on Police Killings of Civilians

There is a long-standing history of protests in response to police killings of African American citizens. However, it remains a largely unanswered question as to whether these protest events have had any impact on subsequent police killings of African American civilians. To answer this question, we turn to the over 700 racial uprisings that occurred in the 1960s and early 1970s that were largely triggered by negative and often violent interactions between the African American community and police. To determine the impact of racial uprisings on police killings of civilians, we conduct an event-study analysis with a robust set of controls. We employ data on civilian deaths by legal intervention by race, county-level uprising occurrence, and county demographic characteristics. We take advantage of variation in the location and timing of a county’s first uprising to determine the impact of uprisings on police killings of civilians. Our identification strategy relies on pre-existing trends in deaths by legal intervention being uncorrelated with the date of the first uprising in a county. The results show that counties saw a marked increase in both non-white and white deaths due to legal intervention in the years immediately following an uprising. This initial increase is substantially larger for non-whites relative to white civilians. Deaths due to legal intervention for non-white and white civilians diverge over the medium-to-long run. Non-white deaths resulting from legal intervention remain elevated after nearly a decade while deaths of whites revert to their pre-existing trend after a handful of years. Additional analysis regarding the impact of uprisings on policing shows that total crime and police employment do not change in a significant manner over the long run, however, officers are more likely to be killed or injured on duty. The results clearly show that historical protest resulted in an increase in civilian deaths by legal intervention regardless of race in the short-run and a seemingly permanent increase in killings of non-white over the medium-to-long run. These results paint a depressing picture in which uprisings represent a structural change in police-civilian relations, adversely affecting white civilians in the short-run and non-white civilians in the short and long-run.

The costs of war: Condolence payments and the politics of killing civilians

AbstractCoalition forces have spent upwards of $50 million on condolence payments to Afghan and Iraqi civilians. These condolence payments were intended as an expression of sympathy rather than an admission of fault, and the programme itself has been criticised for the arbitrary, inconsistent, and low valuation of civilian lives. Rather than focus on the practical problems associated with condolence payments or normative arguments about whether belligerents ought to compensate those harmed, this article will trace the strategic imperatives that underpinned this programme and shaped its development. As coalition forces began to recognise the strategic costs of civilian casualties, they used a variety of tactics to mitigate the effects of civilian casualties on the success of military operations. This article will argue that condolence payments should not be seen as a humanitarian gesture designed to recognise and respond to the suffering of ordinary civilians, but will argue that condolence payments should be viewed as a weapons system aimed at securing specific military goals. As such, this article will argue that condolence payments continued to objectify and devalue the lives of Afghans and Iraqis by treating them as a means to an end rather than an end in themselves.

Civilian killings and disappearances during civil war in El Salvador (1980‒1992)

Background: Debate over the civilian toll of El Salvador’s civil war (1980–1992) raged throughout the conflict and its aftermath. Apologists for the Salvadoran regime claimed no more than 20,000 had died, while some activists placed the toll at 100,000 or more. But no rigorous estimate was available to settle the question, which has returned to prominence because of newly opened war-crimes trials. Objective: Estimate the total number of civilian killings and disappearances in El Salvador during 1980–1992. Methods: We match and merge four lists of reported civilian killings and disappearances, gathered by multiple organizations – approximately 20,000 unique episodes in all. We use log- linear modeling to estimate the number of uncounted cases from patterns of list overlap. To account for uncertainty in model selection, we use Bayesian model averaging over the set of decomposable graphical models. Results: We estimate that there were about 71,629 (60,326, 83,775) civilian killings and disappearances during the conflict, or about 1–2% of El Salvador’s prewar population. Correlations between recorded deaths and estimated deaths are imperfect over both time and space. Conclusions: Unusually, our conservative global estimate is similar to nonstatistical ‘expert guesses.’ However, the estimated distribution of civilian killings and disappearances does not closely track the reported distribution over time or space. Our approach achieves high quality estimates, even in the presence of relatively sparse data. Contribution: This is the first rigorous estimate of civilian killings and disappearances in the Salvadoran civil war. Both the global estimates and estimates for specific spatiotemporal strata will inform ongoing accountability processes.

Misruling the Masses: The Consequences of Cracking Down in Kyrgyzstan

AbstractCan nondemocratic leaders initiate a crackdown against mass protesters and suffer little in the way of political-reputational costs? In conceptualizing a “crackdown” as a government-orchestrated violent restriction of civil society involving the killing of civilians, this article analyzes how the use of force is perceived by ordinary citizens when their government represses a portion of the populace. In analyzing the findings of a 2016 survey that gauges contemporary attitudes toward the overthrow of presidents Askar Akaev (in 2005) and Kurmanbek Bakiev (in 2010), this article argues that Kyrgyzstanis evaluate the Bakiev administration more negatively than they do the Akaev administration because of the former’s resort to forceful measures in attempting to quell mass protesters in April 2010. Such findings imply that nondemocratic leaders who employ force against mass protesters incur significant political-reputational costs, irrespective as to whether the wider public views the mass protests as legitimate or not.

Up in the Air? Examining the Opposing Effects of Air Strikes on Civilian Killing

As the United States engages in air strikes in Syria and in Somalia against hostile groups, the media often calls attention to the civilian casualties that have resulted from these military interventions. In this paper, we explore how air strikes affect civilian killings – as collateral or as strategic political killings by domestic actors. Believing that this effect is conditioned by the presence of non-governmental civil society actors on the ground, we explore how air strikes affect civilian killings by all actors involved in conflicts. Our results suggest that air strikes have two opposing effects: they can decrease intentional killings by government actors, but may cause deaths through collateral themselves. Yet, when air strikes occur in countries where human rights organizations are active, these civilian deaths may be mitigated.

A Ferguson Effect, the Drug Epidemic, Both, or Neither? Explaining the 2015 and 2016 U.S. Homicide Rises by Race and Ethnicity

In 2015 and 2016, U.S. homicide rates rose dramatically amid two historic social phenomena: a police legitimacy crisis related to an alleged “Ferguson effect” and the opioid epidemic. To empirically explain this increase, we compile county-level data on race/ethnic-specific homicides from 2014 to 2016 along with contemporaneous county-level data on police killings of civilians, citizen protests, fatal drug overdoses, structural disadvantage, and other factors. Regression analysis suggests that both police illegitimacy and the drug epidemic contributed to Black and White homicide rises, particularly in structurally disadvantaged counties. However, we find no such association for Hispanic homicide increases.

Violent death in the lives of police officers in Ghana; An evidence-based study

This article examines the recurrent and widespread spate of civilian attacks on police personnel in Ghana. It is an undeniable fact that police actions and inactions has led to civilian injuries and deaths in Ghana. Extensive media reportage on these incidences of police militarization and brutalities has painted the police service, albeit negatively, as an institution acknowledged for inflicting pain, torture, injury and killing of civilians at the least provocation. This perception has broken down police-community relations, which is one of the core mechanisms in crime detection and prevention in modern policing. Violent attacks on police personnel by a section of the Ghanaian public leading to injuries and in some extreme cases death, appears institutionalized.
 As a result, violent attacks on the police is not perceived as an issue, either because of the quietism of the police administration itself, or it could be that the media perceive these unprovoked attacks on the police, as part of the occupational hazards and/or a fitting retribution for the police. In either way, the lives of police officers matter, just as the lives of the citizens they are mandated by law to protect. This study thematically focused on the changing trend of violent deaths in the lives of police officers killed in the line of duty by civilian assailants or criminal elements within the Ghanaian society. The paper argues that violent deaths and injuries caused to police officers have not been given the needed attention due to the ongoing antagonistic relationship between the police administration and the general Ghanaian public.

Rules for rebels: the science of victory in military history

Why do some armed rebellions succeed and others fail? In the popular consciousness and in much International Relations theorizing there is a widespread view against all evidence that terrorism works and that rebels kill civilians because it helps them get what they want. When Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was at the pinnacle of its power, an outpouring of literature lauded the group's strategic genius in using extreme barbarity and well-publicized atrocities to build their legitimacy and their caliphate and defeat their war-weary adversaries. But, as Max Abrahms shows in this well-researched and engagingly argued book, this view could not be further from the truth. Rebels do not succeed by killing civilians. In fact, terrorism—understood as the deliberate killing of civilians—rarely succeeds. We now know that the Islamic State was not led by strategic geniuses but by brutal opportunistic ideologues—its caliphate is collapsing into ruins almost as quickly as it was built, the group having achieved none of the objectives it had set for itself. The same is true of other rebel groups that kill civilians.

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.

UN Troop Deployment and Preventing Violence Against Civilians in Darfur

ABSTRACTDoes the presence of UN peacekeeping force lower civilian fatalities at the local level? If it does, is it because of their coercive military capacity or for other reasons such as their roles in monitoring and reporting violent atrocities? To explore these questions, I study the deployment of peacekeeping units in Darfur and its impact on violence against civilians. Using original geocoded data of UN deployments before and after the intervention, I examine what aspects of such deployments impact one-sided civilian killings by government and rebel groups. Results indicate that deploying UN peacekeepers in an area restrains belligerent from targeting civilians. However, the military capacity of peacekeepers is not a significant predictor of violence against civilians. While their ability to defend themselves is extremely important for peacekeepers, these findings caution against the militarization trend in UN peacekeeping and seek to reshift focus on other substantive aspects of peacekeeping.

US Strikes in Somalia and Targeted Civilian Killings by Al-Shabaab: An Empirical Investigation

Abstract This study investigates the relationship between US strikes targeting Al-Shabaab and civilian victimization using spatially disaggregated data. We find that US strikes make it approximately 5.5 times more likely that civilians are murdered—an effect that is comparable to battles and periods of territorial loss. Disaggregating based on the target of each strike, however, reveals a more nuanced relationship: strikes that destroy Al-Shabaab military assets are associated with more civilian killings, whereas there is some evidence that strikes that kill members significantly reduce this form of violence. This implies an ability of the United States to continue current policy while also minimizing the human costs that directly result from intervention. Notably, however, this would require a policy-shift that avoids destroying Al-Shabaab's war-fighting capabilities, thereby reducing the ability of the United States to undermine the organization's capacity to wage war.

Did de‐policing cause the increase in homicide rates?

Research SummaryWidespread protests and demands for accountability in the wake of broadly publicized police killings of unarmed civilians coincided with the marked upturn in homicide levels, especially in large U.S. cities, in 2015. Many observers, including prominent political figures, claimed that de‐policing caused the homicide rate to rise: Fearing increased legal liability and publicity, the police employed less proactive enforcement and made fewer arrests, producing an increase in homicide levels. We use structural equation modeling to estimate the simultaneous relationship between arrest and homicide rates between 2010 and 2015 in 53 large cities. We find no evidence of an effect of arrest rates on city homicide rates for any offense category for any year in this period, including 2015, the year of the spike in homicide levels.Policy ImplicationsThe results of our analysis reveal that declining rates of arrest did not produce the rise in homicide levels. But arrests, the chief formal reaction to crime, can play an important supporting role in crime prevention. Ample research findings have demonstrated the effectiveness of proactive policing practices, such as targeted patrol, in reducing crime rates. The success of such tactics depends, in turn, on citizens’ belief that criminal offenders face an appreciable risk of arrest. It is equally important, however, that residents of communities that have experienced unwarranted police violence believe that law enforcement is fairly applied. Lack of trust and confidence in the police militates against crime prevention as a co‐production of police and community and may promote violence as a form of self‐help.

PROBLEM OF ISIS’S QUR’ANIC INTERPRETATIONS AND CLAIM OF THE IMPLEMENTATION OF SHARIA LAW

This paper discusses the problem of ISIS’s Qur’anicinterpretations regarding the implementation of sharia law andthe concept of jihad. It is essential to address this topic becausethe self-proclaimed Caliphate have claimed that their barbaricactions such as indiscriminate killing of civilians, plundering,and declaring other Muslims as apostates are based on Qur’anicverses. They also consider these actions as part of the jihad touphold sharia law. This paper argues that there are two mainproblems in ISIS’s Qur’anic interpretations, namely (1) cherrypicking Qur’anic verses that support their causes. According tothe principles of Qur’anic exegesis (ushul al-tafsir), thismethod of interpretation is certainly not justified because it willlead to the partial understanding of the message of the Qur’an;(2) attempting to enforce the sharia law without properunderstanding of the law. As a result, ISIS’s implementation ofsharia goes against the ultimate purposes of the sharia (maqasidal-shari’ah).

LoC: The Line "out" of Control in the Region of Kashmir

LoC:The Line "out" of Control in the Region of Kashmir Ather Zia (bio) In 2013 Reshma Bi, a seventy-year-old Kashmiri woman, was pining for her sons in her native village of Charonda, in the Uri sector of the Indian-administered area of Kashmir. A few years earlier, Reshma's sons had fled to the Pakistan-administered side of Kashmir to escape police persecution because of their alleged role in cross-LOC trafficking. Uri is a garrison town near the Line of Control that separates the two regions of Kashmir under separate Indian and Pakistani control. The erstwhile princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, now divided and under Indian military occupation, stands as a testament to the fraught postcolonial aftermath of the partitioning of India and Pakistan in 1947, which is manifested in the landmark divide, the Line of Control. The LoC is a formal ceasefire line, arbitrated between the newly independent states of India and Pakistan by the UN in 1949,1 which partitions Kashmir into the Pakistan-occupied region, or Azad (Free) Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), and the Indian-occupied territory, known as the State of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). This was meant to be a temporary bifurcation till a plebiscite took place in the region, but instead, India and Pakistan have waged three full-scale wars over Kashmir. Low-intensity warfare remains ongoing at the LoC, which has been called the most dangerous place on earth.2 Currently, in Indian-occupied Kashmir there are about 700,000 Indian troops; with a Kashmiri population of about 5.5 million, that is 1 soldier for every 8 Kashmiris, making Kashmir one of the world's most militarized regions. More than 70,000 people have been reported killed in counterinsurgency operations, more than 8,000 forcibly disappeared, and more than 60,000 subjected to custodial torture.3 In the Indian mainstream discourse particularly, the lack of attention to the unceasing contestations of the bifurcation of Kashmir, its layered history and the complexities of Kashmiri subjectivities, has been a symptom of the shortsighted political analysis of the region.4 The division of Kashmir continues to animate the politics of Kashmiri Muslims as well as the significant Kashmiri minority populations, and it shapes their politics of survival and hopes for independence, as well as fueling the policies of the two adversarial nation-states.5 [End Page 1037] However, in the mainstream Indian discourse, and to a lesser extent in the Pakistani mainstream one, the Kashmir issue generally is framed as a black-and-white one. In India, Kashmir is generally framed through the lens of Pakistan's proxy war, religious terrorism, or a domestic dispute. The poignant details of lives such as Reshma's and other Kashmiris across the contested divide where the LoC stands illuminate the ways it is not a final partition but a symbol of a political promise. Reshma was agonized by separation from her children and one day decided to just walk across the LoC and join her sons permanently, as it would be impossible for her to return the way she had left. For Reshma, this act of crossing the LoC was a personal decision, but it brought the two nuclear nations, India and Pakistan, to the brink of war in 2013. The tenuous ceasefire agreement in 2004 between the Indian and Pakistani armies could not withstand what should have just been a grandmother's routine family visit to her erstwhile-undivided village. Within one week of Reshma's crossing the LoC, the Indian soldiers erected new bunkers to obstruct mobility across the LoC. The Pakistani troops objected to Indian constructions, which violated the ceasefire, and tensions escalated, resulting in killings of soldiers and civilians on both sides. Epistemic Violence of "Border" Talk? In response to this incident, a leading Indian newspaper claimed, "Tit-for-tat actions over a case of border crossing."6 It is significant that the report used the word border for LoC with ease, and even the allegation against Reshma's son was categorized as "cross-border" trafficking rather than a "cross-LOC" issue. The interchangeability of LoC with border is not new but is symbolic of the routine erasure...

The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War by Aaron Sheehan-Dean

Reviewed by: The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War by Aaron Sheehan-Dean Kenneth W. Noe The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War. Aaron Sheehan-Dean. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-0-674-98422-6. 480 pp., cloth, $35.00. Historiographically at least, the Civil War seems to grow bloodier every year. Recent explorations of soldier and civilian deaths have pushed the war's combined butcher bill upward toward perhaps a million lives lost, in a divided nation of about 31 million people. Yet as bad as it was, it could have been much worse. As Aaron Sheehan-Dean points out in his introduction to The Calculus of Violence, more than 20 million people died in China's roughly contemporary civil war. In Mexico's long Caste War of the Yucatan, 35 percent of the population lost their lives. The American Civil War was somehow simultaneously catastrophic and more controlled. Explaining that apparent paradox is at the heart of Sheehan-Dean's project. Acknowledging the war's shocking lethality, Sheehan-Dean maintains that nineteenth-century American moral culture, military tradition, and wartime ideology nonetheless combined to limit the killing from spiraling even further out of control. The Lincoln administration fought the war on the foundational belief that Confederates were still countrymen, an assertion that demanded some circumspection. For their part, the Confederates were eager to look like a modern nation-state. Millions of soldiers thus enlisted in conventional armies with clear chains of command and accountability. They fought battles according to long-recognized rules and rituals that permitted surrender and that largely prevented the killing of civilians and prisoners. Threats of equal retaliation, Sheehan-Dean agrees, often worked to deescalate flashpoints. Confronted with ugly incidents, generals wrote each other letters and debated the fine points of law. Meanwhile, the fighting produced new debates among the two governments that led to thoughtful if sometimes ineffective augmentations of the rules of war. Often political leaders refused to go as far as their power allowed. Occupation produced violence but not the show trials and mass killings that appeared elsewhere. [End Page 405] Rules mattered, even in the breach. Most important of all, Sheehan-Dean concludes, enslaved African Americans deliberately chose to eschew revenge killings on their way to freedom. A different response might well have produced the racial bloodbath whites on both sides feared. Yet despite those parameters, the war was bloody enough. Rejecting the widely accepted notion of a war that proceeded steadily from a "soft" phase in 1861 to "hard war" or "total war" at its end, Sheehan-Dean posits waxing and waning waves of violence and restraint at national, regional, and local levels. Much of the staggering casualty total had to do with numbers and the nature of mid-nineteenth century firepower and tactics, but other cultural forces were at play as well, threatening to knock over the barricades. The mid-nineteenth century was a period of growing jingoism around the world, and the people of the divided United States were not immune to casting themselves as noble victims of oppression and anarchy. Even previously pacifist abolitionists embraced the sword, and everyone justified their sides' actions while condemning the enemy. The Confederacy's fateful decision to support irregular warfare unleashed wave after wave of poorly regulated brutality, often directed at civilians. The Union high command responded with an equally lethal counterinsurgency that created a tragic crossfire. Both sides concluded that the established laws of war allowed them to take hostages, imprison civilians, mistreat prisoners of war, depopulate entire regions, execute guerrillas, and seek to limit greater violence through tit-for-tat killing. Emancipation meanwhile led to murderous white-on-black attacks, especially when Confederate troops encountered African American soldiers in the heat of battle. Threats of retribution from Washington lessened but could not prevent racial atrocities. Both sides embraced mayhem at times, but Sheehan-Dean concludes that Confederate racism engendered more abandon. Sheehan-Dean's learned and measured narrative is grounded in deep research and a thorough understanding of the international and intellectual context. It successfully complicates the familiar linearity of the war's apparent descent into violence. By placing guerrilla...

Just War and Unjust Soldiers: American Public Opinion on the Moral Equality of Combatants

AbstractTraditional just war doctrine holds that political leaders are morally responsible for the decision to initiate war, while individual soldiers should be judged solely by their conduct in war. According to this view, soldiers fighting in an unjust war of aggression and soldiers on the opposing side seeking to defend their country are morally equal as long as each obeys the rules of combat. Revisionist scholars, however, maintain that soldiers who fight for an unjust cause bear at least some responsibility for advancing an immoral end, even if they otherwise fight ethically. This article examines the attitudes of the American public regarding the moral equality of combatants. Utilizing an original survey experiment, we find that the public's moral reasoning is generally more consistent with that of the revisionists than with traditional just war theory. Americans in our study judged soldiers who participate in unjust wars as less ethical than soldiers in just wars, even when their battlefield conduct is identical, and a large proportion supported harsh punishments for soldiers simply for participating in unjust wars. We also find, however, that much of the American public is willing to extend the moral license of just cause significantly further than revisionist scholars advocate: half of the Americans in our survey were willing to allow an unambiguous war crime—a massacre of innocent women and children—to go unpunished when the act was committed by soldiers fighting for a just cause. Our findings suggest that incorporation of revisionist principles into the laws of war would reinforce dangerous moral intuitions encouraging the killing of civilians.

Bugsplat: The Politics of Collateral Damage in Western Armed Conflicts by Bruce Cronin

Reviewed by: Bugsplat: The Politics of Collateral Damage in Western Armed Conflicts by Bruce Cronin Thomas W. Smith (bio) Bruce Cronin, Bugsplat: The Politics of Collateral Damage in Western Armed Conflicts (Oxford University Press, 2018), ISBN 978-0-19-084911-5, 180 pages. First, a word about the title of the book: "Bugsplat" was the unfortunate moniker of a 2003 Pentagon software package designed to model and mitigate collateral damage caused by US airstrikes. If one wanted to telegraph the banality of killing civilians in war, one could not choose a better image than that of an insect plastered on a windshield (that is what a bomb's "probable damage field" resembled). It is hard to say which is more surprising: how acronym-free and bluntly un-Pentagonese the name was; or, in light of the attention showered on civilian protections in recent years, that defense officials would choose such a flippantly dehumanizing title in the first place. True to form, the Pentagon later changed the name of the software to "Fast Assessment Strike Tool—Collateral Damage," or "FAST-CD." "Bugsplat" is, however, the perfect title for Bruce Cronin's primer on collateral damage in modern Western warfare. In several brisk case studies—the Persian Gulf War, NATO/Serbia, Israel/Hezbollah, and the US/Al-Qaeda—Cronin identifies an almost scripted strategy for the conduct of high-tech, low-risk warfare: transfer risk from soldiers to civilians, employ overwhelming force, and seek decisive victory. The means of choice are airpower, drone-launched missiles, and other stand-off weapons that protect the safety of Western soldiers and ensure the detachment of democratic societies back home. Cronin shows that most of these civilian casualties are not accidents or oversights amid the heat of battle, but flow from carefully considered strategies and tactics. This is not the fog of war at all; it is deliberate, normalized violence against civilian populations. These tactics constitute what Cronin calls "reckless endangerment warfare." It is illegal for belligerents to directly target civilians or to show wanton or depraved indifference to their fate, in the case of a mass aerial bombing, for example. Even if attacks on civilians are not technically intended, Cronin argues, they nonetheless occur in predictable [End Page 1020] and preventable ways. Nor are these civilian losses outweighed by military necessity; most attacks fail to secure the "definite military advantage" that customary humanitarian law requires. Even state-of-the-art targeting comes up short. The operational appeal of Bugsplat was its speed in estimating the civilian spillover of airstrikes (five to ten minutes as opposed to a cumbersome process of pre-vetting targets). The ethical appeal of the program was that it would reduce the numbers of civilians killed or maimed. Cronin contends that high-tech targeting systems have failed to live up to the humanitarian hype, instead allowing attackers to expand the target set and penetrate more deeply into civilian areas. His main takeaway is that precision-guided munitions, computerized modelling, and other advanced technologies do "not appear to have had any effect on reducing collateral damage in armed conflicts."1 While Western belligerents point to improvements in targeting and compare themselves favorably to their adversaries, especially in asymmetric wars, detachment from the actual impact of violence on the ground is also a prime mover of reckless warfare. Cold War rhetoric about "strategic rings" and "centers of gravity" has been replaced by the language of "dual-use" infrastructure and "effects-based" strikes against military objects, but also economic, diplomatic, and information targets. The dream is a war with zero same-side casualties. As Cronin notes, drone warfare comes close to smashing all semblance of reciprocity. Strikes on named targets as well as signature strikes based on observed patterns of behavior cause more civilian fatalities than the Pentagon concedes. Though even risk-free tactics exact costs on both sides. Drone operators stationed at consoles, continents away from the violence, are not immune to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and other stressors of war, perhaps because they virtually hover over bomb sites and see the human costs of war up close. Cronin's affirmative argument for "feasible precaution" is less well developed. He wants belligerents to...