Target Civilians Research Articles

Narcissistic Sociopathy in Global Autocratic Leaders: Arrested Development, Obsessive Demand for Power, and the Emergence of Unlawful Hybrid Wars.

There are several reasons why war occurs. The most lethal wars are those caused by 1 man's decisions solely driven by an obsessive need for power. With disregard for International Humanitarian Law and the Geneva Convention, these wars, referred to as hybrid warfare, purposefully target civilians directly resulting in millions of deaths, injuries, mass migration, and other severe global and public health consequences. The purpose of this commentary is to investigate the developmental nature of those decision-makers and the consequences of their acts of aggression both locally and globally. There is a clear relationship between the psychological developments of individuals with narcissistic and psychopathological disorders and the implications of an abnormal progression of these individuals and their obsessive desire for singular leadership, which seriously impacts health-care security and its essential elements provided by international humanitarian law and Geneva Convention. Current double standards of the West allow narcissistic sociopaths and autocratic leaders to neglect international law, especially the so-called international humanitarian law. This double standard must be ceased and replaced by an international investigative system with universal standards, a special tribunal covering hybrid war crimes as well as the crime of aggression, and to prevent future leaders from choosing the same strategies.

Targeting and Public Opinion: An Experimental Analysis in Ukraine

How does targeting in armed conflict affect public opinion in conflict zones? Armed actors choose between targeting militaries and civilians, further choosing whether to target civilians discriminately or indiscriminately. Existing work suggests these choices have important implications for conflict dynamics, in part by influencing public opinion, yet the causal effects of these choices on individual attitudes have not been clearly established. We conduct a survey experiment in the Donbas region of Ukraine, an area that has witnessed years of protracted fighting. We find that reports of civilian targeting robustly reduce approval of both the government and separatist forces. However, we find that the effects of discriminate civilian targeting are not statistically distinguishable from those of indiscriminate civilian targeting. Finally, we find that our respondents generally preferred a restrained, rather than reciprocal, response from actors in this armed conflict. We explain the implications of our findings for theories of wartime violence.

Leviathan’s Architect: Urbicide, Urban Renewal, and the Right to the City in Turkish Kurdistan

Urban warfare exacts a grim toll on city life as combatants target civilians and civilian infrastructure, appropriate space, and try to erase culture and memory. Often, however, it is the post-conflict razing and reconstruction that caps this violent re-ordering of urban life. This article explores securitized development of cities in Southeastern Turkey in the wake of recent armed strife between Kurdish fighters and Turkish security forces. Case studies of Sur/Diyarbakır and Nusaybin show an overlord state leveraging post-war blight to remake society from the ground up. Targeting the physical as well as social contours of cities, Ankara has displaced residents, redirected access and flow, and intensified surveillance and control. The upheaval has been disorienting for residents, but in other ways it has sharpened Kurdish identity and agency. Historical preservation and memory projects, cultural commemorations, and new models of post-war urbanism underscore the right to a city that reflects civil society rather than one that tries to reengineer it in the image of the state.

Committed sponsors: external support overtness and civilian targeting in civil wars

Does the overtness of external support to rebels affect civilian targeting in civil wars? Conflict studies increasingly scrutinize how insurgent sponsorships shape rebels’ behavior. However, the influence of external sponsors’ decisions to publicly acknowledge or deny their support on rebel conduct is largely neglected. This article introduces a new dataset on the overtness of external support to rebels in civil wars between 1989 and 2018. It then assesses whether the overtness of support is correlated with insurgents’ propensity to target civilians. I hypothesize that overtly supported rebels are less likely to target civilians than covertly supported rebels. This hypothesis stems from how supply-side factors—the way state sponsors expectedly act after having allocated their support—impact insurgents’ structure of incentives around relations with non-combatants. Statistical analyses yield strong support for my hypothesis. Moreover, further analyses show that support overtness influences civilian targeting independently from sponsors’ characteristics, such as political regimes or foreign aid reliance. Thus, in addition to the type of material aid insurgents receive, variation in whether support is covert or overt shapes how rebels treat civilians.

When Civilians are Targets: The Fatal Effects of State Sponsored Religiously Motivated Terrorism

ABSTRACT This research investigates the link between ideology and state sponsorship of terrorist and militant groups on the propensity to attack civilian targets. I argue that religiously motivated terrorist and militant groups have a predisposition toward civilian attacks and that states will intentionally sponsor these groups because of their willingness to target civilians. The results find that religiously motivated groups attack civilian targets at higher rates when they have the resources of state sponsorship. As a result, counterterrorism and counterinsurgency measures require multilateral cooperation in hardening targets, eradicating state financing of terrorist groups, and reducing conspicuous Western presence.

Explaining How Human Rights Protections Change After Internal Armed Conflicts

AbstractSocieties emerging from internal armed conflicts display surprising variation in the degree to which governments protect human rights. Employing new data on civilian victimization by both government and rebel forces, we find that the human rights climate of a post-conflict country is not simply a perpetuation of pre-conflict conditions, or the result of repressive regimes remaining in power. Instead, the treatment of civilians during conflict has an independent impact on post-conflict human rights protections (HRP). Analyses of ninety-six post-conflict periods (1960–2015) show that when governments systematically and extensively target civilians during counterinsurgency campaigns, post-conflict human rights conditions decline substantially compared to pre-conflict levels, even accounting for other predictors of human rights violations, including pre-conflict human rights conditions. This holds regardless of who is in power after conflicts end. These findings have implications for theoretical models of repression and conflict cycles, and for practitioners and policymakers aiming to restore and protect human rights after war.

Suicide squad: Boko Haram’s use of the female suicide bomber

Boko Haram first began using the tactic of suicide bombings in 2011 and in 2014 started using female suicide bombers. This research focuses on gender differences in the use of suicide bombers. The data were collected using open sources from June 16, 2011 to June 15, 2018. Using this longitudinal data, trends are described over that 7-year period, focusing on the use of females. A majority of the suicide bombings target civilians in Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, and Niger. More than half of the bombers were women and girls, some as young as 7 years old, and there were more than 60 incidents where the bomber was below the age of 15. More female bombers were used to targets civilians, whereas men were used more often to target government, police, and military targets. Female suicide bombers were used in Cameroon, whereas males were used more often in Nigeria. Additionally, females used suicide belts or vests, whereas men carried out the overwhelming majority of vehicle-borne suicide bombings. In many cases, the use of the women as bombers involved coercion. The unprecedented use of female suicide bombers, particularly young girls, should be a focus of policy moving forward.

Ideology and civilian victimization in Northern Ireland’s civil war

ABSTRACT Why do some groups fighting in civil wars target civilians more than others? We propose an explanation that challenges the current focus on material and organizational factors and instead brings back and emphasizes the role of ideology. We argue that the ideological frameworks of armed groups, whether state or non-state, condition their decisions about targeting, in some cases setting normative constraints on action even if such choice involves higher costs and risks. We examine these hypotheses using a mixed-method approach that combines a statistical analysis of a newly constructed disaggregated data set on all fatalities in Northern Ireland’s conflict between 1969 and 2005 with a comparative historical study of the interaction between key ideologies and the armed groups that adopted them.

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.

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.

'New Wars' with 'Old' Features: ISIS War Between Primitivism and Postmodernism'

In the last two decades, the international peace and security studies have been dominated by a debate over the changes in the contemporary – encouraged by the New War. The New War theory maintains that wars are different from wars with respect to actors, goals, methods of fighting and means of financing. New wars are increasingly fought between state and non-state actors, on identity politics and economic predation, and primarily target civilians rather than military objectives. The historical and empirical accounts, including this article, however do not support the war propositions. This article approaches the Islamic State from the war perspective, and by utilizing academic and field research, as well as governmental and non-governmental and media reports, it argues that the Islamic State cannot be classified as a new as it displays features of both new and old wars.

Service and Advocacy: Matters of Faith?

Service and Advocacy: Matters of Faith?

Understanding Violent Attacks Against Humanitarian Aid Workers

What factors explain attacks on humanitarian aid workers? Most research has either tended to describe trends rather than analyse the reasons underlying attacks, or lacks the empirical evidence to support causal assertions. In moving this agenda forward, we present to our knowledge the first cross-national time-series study that identifies factors related to violent attacks on humanitarian aid workers. Drawing on security, civil conflict, and criminal violence literatures, our theoretical framework explores three groups of potential explanatory factors: dynamics of conflict; the political economic context; and aspects of humanitarian sector operations. Using a global sample at the country-level from 1997-2014, we identify factors related to lethal and non-lethal attacks on humanitarian workers. Our results indicate that the presence and severity of armed conflicts are related to increased attacks on aid workers, but neither conflicts that actively target civilians nor levels of criminal violence increase risks to humanitarian workers. We also find more economically developed and politically stable countries are safer for aid workers, and that the presence of an international military force does not add to aid worker risk.

Hysteresis of targeting civilians in armed conflicts

This article explores warring groups’ intentional targeting behavior against civilians, a strictly prohibited war strategy by international norms. Using dynamic panel regressions run on a comprehensive dataset of contemporary warfare, which covers 22 years (1989-2010), I find that warring actors involved in prolonged armed (15-22 years) conflict target civilians more often than those involved in shorter-duration warfare. Also, for warring groups engaged in prolonged armed conflict, lethal behavior against civilians tends to be intensified if targeting is repeated over time, although this hysteresis effect appears to persist only for one year. It is hypothesized that the mounting war cost of prolonged conflict inclines warring groups toward the presumably cheaper targeting of noncombatant civilians rather than battling combatant military or other armed personnel. [JEL code: F51]

“Kill Them All—Old and Young, Girls and Women and Little Children”: An Examination of the Organizational Choice of Targeting Civilians

What factors make it more likely that non-state organizations will target civilians as a political strategy? This study examines targeting civilians as a tactical and normative choice, and hypothesizes that the targeting of civilians (compared to the general use of violence) is a function of the ideological make-up of organizations, organization weakness and state repression. Other factors related to organizational capability will not have a differential impact on the likelihood that an organization will target civilians for violence. This article uses data from the Minorities at Risk Organizational Behavior database to examine these issues with respect to ethno-political organizations. It argues that the typical analytic focus on general violence obscures understanding of the factors that lead to targeting civilians. It finds that targeting civilians—while similar in some respects to the use of general violence—is different, particularly with respect to organizational ideology.

Global Comparison of Warring Groups in 2002–2007: Fatalities from Targeting Civilians vs. Fighting Battles

BackgroundWarring groups that compete to dominate a civilian population confront contending behavioral options: target civilians or battle the enemy. We aimed to describe degrees to which combatant groups concentrated lethal behavior into intentionally targeting civilians as opposed to engaging in battle with opponents in contemporary armed conflict.Methodology/Principal FindingsWe identified all 226 formally organized state and non-state groups (i.e. actors) that engaged in lethal armed conflict during 2002–2007: 43 state and 183 non-state. We summed civilians killed by an actor's intentional targeting with civilians and combatants killed in battles in which the actor was involved for total fatalities associated with each actor, indicating overall scale of armed conflict. We used a Civilian Targeting Index (CTI), defined as the proportion of total fatalities caused by intentional targeting of civilians, to measure the concentration of lethal behavior into civilian targeting. We report actor-specific findings and four significant trends: 1.) 61% of all 226 actors (95% CI 55% to 67%) refrained from targeting civilians. 2.) Logistic regression showed actors were more likely to have targeted civilians if conflict duration was three or more years rather than one year. 3.) In the 88 actors that targeted civilians, multiple regressions showed an inverse correlation between CTI values and the total number of fatalities. Conflict duration of three or more years was associated with lower CTI values than conflict duration of one year. 4.) When conflict scale and duration were accounted for, state and non-state actors did not differ. We describe civilian targeting by actors in prolonged conflict. We discuss comparable patterns found in nature and interdisciplinary research.Conclusions/SignificanceMost warring groups in 2002–2007 did not target civilians. Warring groups that targeted civilians in small-scale, brief conflict concentrated more lethal behavior into targeting civilians, and less into battles, than groups in larger-scale, longer conflict.

“Face to Face”

the ruthlessness of our attempts be rid of [unconscious impulses] ... might be one reason why illegally occupying armies, who can neither settle nor face their own conscience, become so brutalized--it their own discomfort they are trying erase. --Jacqueline Rose (1) To be in relation with the other face face be unable kill. --Emmanuel Levinas (2) During 1970, hundreds of thousands of United States citizens marched in protest against atrocities committed in Vietnam by U.S. soldiers brutalized by a situation that rendered them victims of their government's projections of fear and terror. In that year, the U.S. bombing of Cambodia and the shooting of protestors on college campuses by the National Guard were further rungs on the ladder of escalation. An earlier rung had been reached with the publication of horrific photographs of Vietnamese burn victims, including children, caused by the U.S. use of napalm, which provoked new forms of artists' dissent in 1967. Then, in late 1969, color images of the My Lai Massacre reproduced in Life magazine regalvanized artists and intellectuals utilize photographs of atrocities and their perpetrators force members of the government and the military face their own consciences and mobilize support for the anti-war movement. Consider, for example, the face of Lieutenant William Galley, leader of the platoon responsible for the killings at My Lai, reprinted as masks be worn on the back of protestors' heads in 1970 and '71. His eyes' blank circles metaphorically represented him as unable look at, see, be face-to-face with the Other in Vietnam. Judith Butler writes that for Emmanuel Levinas, the face is that vocalization of agony that not yet language or no longer language, the one by which we are wakened the precariousness of the Other's life, the one that rouses at once the temptation murder and the interdiction against it. (3) There a constant tension between the fear of undergoing violence and the fear of inflicting violence. The fear of one's own death could be overcome by obliterating the Other, but this might require a need to keep obliterating, especially if there are four hundred men behind him, and they all have families and friends, if not a nation or two behind them. (4) THE KILL TEAM PHOTOGRAPHS In early 2011, photographs of U.S. atrocities in Afghanistan, leaked by investigative journalists and freedom of information organizations, dominated public debates about the war on terror (5) and the nature of effective dissent. Inevitably, these revelations evoked those during the Vietnam War and raised questions about responses by artists, writers, and intellectuals--then and now. In May 1971, the New York Review of Books published a letter from Robert Lowell, poet and dissenter, after President Nixon had effectively pardoned Calley. The relevance of Lowell's letter for 2011 could be grounds for melancholy: His atrocity cleared by the President, public, polls, rank and file of the right and left. ... Our nation looks up heaven, and puts her armies above the law. No stumbling on the downward plunge from Hiroshima. Retribution someone somewhere else and we are young. In a century perhaps no one will widen an eye at massacre, and only scattered corpses express a last histrionic concern for death. (6) At the end of March 2011, Naomi Wolf considered the recent scandal surrounding atrocity photographs taken in early 2010 by U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, which were first published in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel on March 21, 2011. The magazine reported that it had obtained four thousand photographs and videos taken by a self-styled Kill Team, and reproduced three images, digitally blurring the faces of Afghan victims. (7) Between January and May 2010, members of the 5th Stryker Brigade, [2.sup.nd] Infantry Division, conspired target civilians, kill them, and make their deaths appear be those of insurgents. …

The Softest of Targets: A Study on Terrorist Target Selection

What factors may lead a terrorist organization to attack undefended and unaware civilians—or as we style them, “soft targets”? We examine two distinct processes in choosing to attack soft targets: the one-time decision to begin attacking soft targets and the continued use of violence against such targets. Our analysis points to ideology—specifically religion—as the decisive factor in turning to target civilians, while organizational factors such as group size and network centrality are related to the number of incidents perpetrated.

Seeking Safety: Avoiding Displacement and Choosing Destinations in Civil Wars

Despite civil war violence, some civilians stay in their communities. Those who leave choose one of many possible destinations. Drawing on fieldwork in Colombia, this article argues that the way armed groups target civilians explains households' decisions about displacement. When groups of civilians are targeted based on a shared characteristic — `collective' targeting — their best options for avoiding violence differ from those targeted selectively or indiscriminately. This article outlines conditions under which people can stay in contexts of collective targeting, and where they are likely to go if these conditions are not met. A civilian facing collective targeting could move to a rival group's stronghold, cluster with others similarly targeted, or seek anonymity in a city or different region. Community characteristics, such as whether it is urban or rural, as well as macro characteristics of the war, such as whether or not there is an ascriptive cleavage, shape which decisions are relatively safest, which in turn leads to implications for aggregate patterns. For example, clustering together has a perverse effect: even though hiding among others with similar characteristics may reduce an individual's likelihood of suffering direct violence, the community may be more endangered as it is perceived to be affiliated with an armed group. This then leads to a cycle of collective targeting and displacement, which has important implications for the development of warfare. In turn, this cycle and related cleavage formation may have long-term impacts on postwar stability and politics.

Targeting Civilians in War (review)

Reviewed by: Targeting Civilians in War Ethan S. Rafuse Targeting Civilians in War. By Alexander B. Downes. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-8014-4634-4. Illustrations. Notes. Index. Pp. ix, 315. $29.95. The combatant/non-combatant distinction is one of the central concepts around which revolves the notion that there should be principles that impose limits on the use of force in wartime. That this distinction is and has so often been blurred or ignored altogether is a subject that has attracted considerable attention from military leaders, historians, and social scientists. In Targeting Civilians in War, Alexander B. Downes examines the subject through statistical analysis and case studies in which he lays out his argument for questioning theories previously advanced about the willingness of governments to deliberately target civilians in wartime. Specifically, he challenges scholars who have identified regime type (especially those who have argued that democratic governments generally exercise more restraint than non-democratic ones in their treatment of civilians), differences in identity, and organizational concerns as factors in explaining civilian victimization. [End Page 661] Instead, Downes emphasizes two other factors: desperation to win while sparing one's own human and material resources and a desire for territorial conquest. These factors in fact, he argues, make democratic regimes more likely than other types of governments to deliberately target civilians. Like the good political scientist he is, Downes first devotes a couple of chapters to the tasks of defining civilian victimization and presenting a "typology of civilian casualties" that distinguishes between government sanctioned and unsanctioned "intentional", "indiscriminate", and "collateral" civilian targeting. These chapters also lay out other theories on the subject and present statistical analyses (both in the text and using charts) to support Downes's own theses before getting into four historical case studies of instances where belligerents have targeted civilians. These look at the blockades imposed by Great Britain and Imperial Germany during World War I; strategic bombing of the Axis countries during World War II (a perennial favorite subject of students of civilian victimization); the Boer War of 1899-1902; and Israeli treatment of Arab inhabitants of what became the Jewish state during its 1947-49 war for independence. The case studies are very well done. Downes draws upon a respectable range of sources, synthesizing effectively the findings of previous specialized studies on the topics, to provide informative, clearly written, and interesting narratives of events, as well as fairly effective and balanced analysis. In the course of these case studies, he does a solid job of supporting his larger arguments regarding the motives for civilian victimization before presenting a chapter looking at negative cases where civilian victimization did not occur. This chapter points to the wars China has fought since World War II against Korea, India, and Vietnam, the 1982 Falklands War, and the 1991 Persian Gulf War as evidence to support Downes's argument that an ability to settle conflicts quickly restrains governments in their use of violence against civilians. Downes also points to the sanctions imposed on Iraq during the 1990s, which inflicted great suffering on that nation's civilians, as support for his argument that frustration over the failure of traditional conventional strategies to resolve conflicts quickly leads to civilian victimization. While not all readers will be convinced by all of his arguments, Downes deserves great praise for producing a useful, well-researched, strongly argued, and provocative (in the best sense) study of an important topic in military history. These qualities make this study worthy of attention from military historians, civilian strategists, members of the armed forces, and anyone else who has an interest in understanding why the principle of non-combatant immunity has so often fallen by the wayside in modern wars. [End Page 662] Ethan S. Rafuse U.S. Army Command and General Staff College Fort Leavenworth, Kansas Copyright © 2009 The Society for Military History