Civilian Targets Research Articles

Does punishment work? Selection effects in air power theory

Air power theory initially proposed that punitive attacks against civilian targets could force enemies to surrender. The current literature, however, has largely concluded that conventional bombing is ineffective as punishment. I argue that this is the result of a selection effect. By focusing only on high-profile bombing campaigns, the theory has drawn its conclusions from cases where punishment is likely to fail. This contrasts with deterrence theory, which has analyzed diplomacy in the shadow of nuclear punishment. Air power theory should follow this model by examining how the threat of bombing has influenced diplomacy and broader patterns of international politics.

Evaluations of Violence at the Polls: Civilian Victimization and Support for Perpetrators after War

Following armed conflict, voters must often evaluate candidates who have allegedly committed violence against civilians. What kinds of alleged perpetrators are voters more willing to support and why? I argue that people appraise candidates’ alleged involvement in violence by considering how their participation reflects competence and integrity. This article relies on the theory of dyadic morality to build a framework for civilian judgements about perpetrator integrity. The article also argues that the most salient form of competence in the context of civilian targeting is security competence. A conjoint survey in Colombia featuring hypothetical former combatants running for office indicates, in line with my argument, that attributes associated with integrity affect respondent preferences. Respondents are more supportive of candidates who violate less strict norms, have less agency, and have less clear causal links to the victims. More unexpectedly, attributes associated with security competence are less important than broader indicators of competence.

Rights in the Balance

Professor Walen’s book rejects the familiar argument of “double effect,” namely the doctrine that an action that knowingly causes the death of another person cannot be justified merely by its good consequences but only by its good intentions. Professor Walen offers a rival argument. He proposes that we rethink the killing of non-combatants in war on the basis of a theory of “the mechanics of claims” so that the intentional killing of civilians may be occasionally permissible. Such targeting of civilians may be justified, according to the book’s argument, by the aim of eliminating the threat that these civilians may pose—innocently or not—to other persons. In these circumstances, it will not only be permissible, but it would also be a matter of right to kill civilians, which would be derived from a balancing of “claims.” The argument is impressively made but is ultimately unconvincing. All the decisive questions appear to be matters of a balance of “goodness.” The “mechanics of claims” organizes a structure of welfare values that ultimately work as a proxy for act-utilitarianism. As a result, the argument is open to well-known objections regarding justice and the separateness of persons.

Kettles of Hawks: Public Opinion on the Nuclear Taboo and Noncombatant Immunity in the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Israel

Recent scholarship has established that a majority of Americans will support the use of nuclear weapons and violate the principle of noncombatant immunity when American lives are on the line. Some scholars contend, however, that these hawkish American attitudes are an outlier and that other Western democratic publics have more fully internalized the nuclear taboo, as well as the prohibition on deliberately killing civilians. To investigate cross-national attitudes on these important norms, we conducted a survey experiment of American, British, French, and Israeli citizens. We find that American attitudes are not exceptional. Rather, Israeli respondents display the most hawkish preferences; French and American citizens are roughly equally hawkish; and the British public is consistently the least supportive of nuclear use or targeting civilians. Categorical prohibitions—against nuclear use and targeting civilians—do little to shape public opinion in these four countries. Instead, public opinion in each state follows the same consequentialist logic: a majority or near majority of respondents are willing to support using nuclear weapons when they are more effective than conventional options, but support declines when collateral civilian deaths rise. Respondents’ preferences for compatriots over foreign civilians and respondents’ retributiveness help explain individual-level variation in attitudes.

Methodology for measuring the seismic effects generated by quarry blasting works

Exploitation of useful mineral substances by surface works is an important branch of mining activity. For rocks of low strength or weak aggregation, the method of extraction by mechanical means (excavators of various types, draglines) is successfully applied, but for rocks of medium and high strength, aggregated with or without cracks, or other geological anomalies, the method of extraction generalized exploitation is that by drilling-blasting, using explosives appropriate to the field conditions and correlated according to the technical possibilities and the geometry of the work. One of the major disadvantages to the technologies where drillingblasting works are applied is the generation of seismic waves, which will propagate after the detonation of the charges. In the common situation, where in the area of operation are civilian or industrial targets, that need to be protected, it is important to monitor these effects by performing seismic measurements and then processing the data to adjust the blasting technique in order to reduce these seismic waves in intensity, but while maintaining adequate performance parameters. The paper presents the methodology based on technical-scientific principles for performing these measurements, applied to surface exploitation.

Opportunistic Repression: Civilian Targeting by the State in Response to COVID-19

Abstract Across the globe, states have attempted to contain COVID-19 by restricting movement, closing schools and businesses, and banning large gatherings. Such measures have expanded the degree of sanctioned state intervention into civilians' lives. But existing theories of preventive and responsive repression cannot explain why some countries experienced surges in repression after states in Africa initiated COVID-19-related lockdowns. While responsive repression occurs when states quell protests or riots, “opportunistic repression” arises when states use crises to suppress the political opposition. An examination of the relationship between COVID-19 shutdown policies and state violence against civilians in Africa tests this theory of opportunistic repression. Findings reveal a large and statistically significant relationship between shutdowns and repression, which holds after conditioning for the spread and lethality of the disease within-country and over time. A subnational case study of repression in Uganda provides evidence that the increase in repression appears to be concentrated in opposition areas that showed less support for Yoweri Museveni in the 2016 elections. Opportunistic repression provides a better explanation than theories of preventive or responsive repression for why Uganda experienced a surge in repression in 2020 and in what areas. The results have implications for theories of repression, authoritarian survival, the politics of emergency, and security.

Triggers of Escalations in Violence Against Civilians by Non-State Actors in Africa

ABSTRACT Although past research has addressed why civilians are targeted, we know less about why non-state actors escalate violence against civilians at particular times. This article seeks to identify the events that trigger spikes in violence against civilians committed by non-state actors. We employ an innovative method to identify twenty-four such escalations in Africa committed by twenty different non-state groups between 1989 and 2015. Rigorous case studies reveal three major types of triggers, including situations in which (1) groups lose relative power, (2) groups gain relative power, and (3) opponents attack civilians. Specifically, we find that opponent military advances—which results in a relative loss of power for the non-state actor—are the most common trigger. More broadly, 75 percent of all escalations are tied to a group’s relative loss in power. These results improve understandings of civilian targeting by non-state actors and may inform efforts to forecast such violence before it occurs.

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.

MMFF: Multi-manifold feature fusion based neural networks for target recognition in complex-valued SAR imagery

In this paper, we propose a novel multi-manifold feature fusion (MMFF) based deep learning framework for automatic target recognition (ATR) in complex-valued synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. The conventional real-valued convolutional neural networks (CNN) usually ignore the intrinsic geometry structure of complex numbers, and the existing complex- and manifold-valued CNNs are not in accordance with the multimodality of SAR images. Founded on parallel manifold convolution branches for magnitude and phase data, the proposed MMFF model takes both the underlying geometry and the multimodal information of complex-valued SAR data into consideration, to learn manifold features of military and civilian targets for recognition tasks. Besides, we investigate manifold-valued layers such as activation function and batch normalization to leverage the MMFF architecture as well as the multimodal data. We validate our methods on two public SAR datasets in single- and dual-polarization, and achieve obviously better classification performance with less model parameters, compared with previously proposed real-, complex- and manifold-valued baselines.

Tying the Hands of Militants: Civilian Targeting and Societal Pressures in the Provisional IRA and Palestinian Hamas

AbstractWhile social pressures have long been a theme in the targeting scholarship, this article develops and evaluates a theory for how social forces affect militant groups’ tactical choices to target civilians. It first identifies a class of groups that exhibit community ties, which occur when a group operates in proximity to a referent society that is geographically concentrated and comprised of dense social networks. Through observable indicators of endorsement and condemnation to their tactics, groups gain information and are subjected to normative pressures from community members, which constrain their leaders’ willingness to harm civilians. The argument is evaluated through within-case process tracing in qualitative case studies of the Provisional IRA during the Troubles and Palestinian Hamas in the 1990s. The findings demonstrate that both groups modified their tactics in conformity with social pressures, even when it was costly and contrary to their ideology, strategic, and organizational goals.

Development of a CNS-permeable reactivator for nerve agent exposure: an iterative, multi-disciplinary approach

Nerve agents have experienced a resurgence in recent times with their use against civilian targets during the attacks in Syria (2012), the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in the United Kingdom (2018) and Alexei Navalny in Russia (2020), strongly renewing the importance of antidote development against these lethal substances. The current standard treatment against their effects relies on the use of small molecule-based oximes that can efficiently restore acetylcholinesterase (AChE) activity. Despite their efficacy in reactivating AChE, the action of drugs like 2-pralidoxime (2-PAM) is primarily limited to the peripheral nervous system (PNS) and, thus, provides no significant protection to the central nervous system (CNS). This lack of action in the CNS stems from their ionic nature that, on one end makes them very powerful reactivators and on the other renders them ineffective at crossing the Blood Brain Barrier (BBB) to reach the CNS. In this report, we describe the use of an iterative approach composed of parallel chemical and in silico syntheses, computational modeling, and a battery of detailed in vitro and in vivo assays that resulted in the identification of a promising, novel CNS-permeable oxime reactivator. Additional experiments to determine acute and chronic toxicity are ongoing.

The Ubiquity of Terror: Politically Motivated Killing of Civilians

Despite ongoing debate, most definitions of terrorism agree that it involves violence against civilians by state or non-state actors intended to send a broader message to an audience well beyond the victims. The targeting of civilians to achieve a political or other goal is widely considered to differentiate terrorism from other forms of political violence. But as this article shows, many other forms of political violence against civilians by both state and non-state actors also hold communicative intent, including hate crimes, riots, group violence during and after conflicts and mass killing and genocide. Despite this, these forms of violence are rarely classified as terrorism. I contend that the concept of terrorism fails to differentiate between many forms of political violence. This article contends that the frequency with which militant actors (both state and non-state) use violence against civilians to intimidate and influence a broader audience means that the term terrorism should be abandoned in favor of a less emotive and selectively applied term. I propose the term Politically Motivated Killing of Civilians.

Pathways to Violence in Civil Wars: Combatant Socialization and the Drivers of Participation in Civilian Targeting

AbstractRecent research has drawn attention to the role of socialization in shaping the behaviors of rebel combatants during civil wars. In particular, scholars have highlighted how vertical and horizontal socialization dynamics can bring combatants to engage in a range of wartime practices, including the use of violence against civilians. This article synthesizes existing theories of combatant socialization and combines them into an integrated framework, which casts the focus on individual pathways toward civilian targeting and specifies the underlying sociopsychological mechanisms through which socializing influences motivate participation in violence. Specifically, the article charts five key pathways that operate through different mechanisms and that are based upon varying degrees of internalization regarding the legitimacy of civilian targeting. In each case, I also identify a number of unit-level factors that are likely to make a given pathway particularly prevalent among combatants. The article then illustrates how these pathways map onto the actual experiences of civil war combatants by examining the drivers of individual participation in violence against civilians among low-ranking members of the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone. The case study evidence highlights the equifinal nature of violence perpetration during civil wars, shedding light on the different social needs, influences, sanctions, and constraints that may motivate involvement in violence. By analyzing rebel behavior through the prism of perpetrator studies, this article thus seeks to establish the civil war literature on firmer theoretical grounds, providing a synthetic account of the individual experiences, motives, and trajectories that are often left unaddressed in this body of research.

Effect of 6-DOF Oscillation of Ship Target on SAR Imaging

Ship targets are high-value military and civilian targets with broad application prospects. However, the precise focusing of ships is still a difficult issue because of their complicated six-degree-of-freedom motions on the sea surface. This paper focused on investigating the effect of ship six-degree-of-freedom oscillation on Synthetic Aperture Radar imaging. Firstly, based on the six-degree-of-freedom motions, the accurate range models for ship linear oscillation and angular oscillation were built, and the superiority was verified by comparing them with the models described in published literature. Secondly, we used the Taylor formula and Bessel function to expand the phase error introduced by ship oscillation, then their effects on imaging were further analyzed. Finally, based on the measured ship attitude data, we generated the semi-physical echoes of the oscillatory ship to validate the analysis throughout this article. Based on the proposed range model, we also made some tentative on the phase compensation method by fitting ship attitude angles with multiple sinusoidal functions.

Consistency of Civil-Military Relations in the Israel Defense Forces: The Defensive Mode in Cyber

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has four battle threats, where cyber is equitable to conventional (state), subconventional (nonstate), and nonconventional. An escalation in one could lead to an overall escalation in all. In the political areas and, by extension, in civil-military relations (CMR), the IDF has a defensive mode as routine, while an offensive mode is manifest rarely in emergencies and war. The IDF is engaged in a total war in a defensive mode yet a limited war in the offensive mode as Israel’s adversaries do not share the same policies with regular cyber and terror attacks against civilian, government, and military targets. There is consistency in all four threats. Fencing, active defense, and preventive and preemptive strikes dominate.

Autonomous Weapons and the Responsibility Gap in light of the Mens Rea of the War Crime of Attacking Civilians in the ICC Statute

Abstract Within the broader context of the problems raised by the interaction between humans and machines in weaponry and targeting, this paper deals with the specific issue of the mens rea required to establish responsibility for the war crime of indiscriminate attacks, in the context of attacks performed with semi-autonomous weapons or with the support of artificial intelligence (AI) in targeting decision-making. The author presents the difficulties that are determined by the interaction between humans and machines, and highlights that an interpretation that would allow for risk-taking mental elements such as dolus eventualis and recklessness in the framework of the war crime of attacking civilians would be better able to capture the criminality of the conduct of the person who knowingly accepts the risk of killing civilians as part of an AI-powered attack where the result of hitting the civilian target is one of the possible outcomes. However, the article indicates that this construction can be employed only in specific circumstances, since in most scenarios even these lowered mens rea requirements would not be met. In most human-machine teaming scenarios, lower types of intent such as dolus eventualis would still be insufficient for the ascription of criminal responsibility for such indiscriminate attacks against civilians. This is because of the specific risks posed by the integration of autonomy in the targeting process and the resulting changes to the cognitive environment in which human agents operate, which significantly affect specific components of mens rea standards.

Manipulating uncertainty: cybersecurity politics in Egypt

AbstractCybersecurity, defined as the prevention and mitigation of malicious interference with digital devices and networks, is a key area of contest for digitalized politics, especially in uncertain and turbulent situations. Nowhere is this more starkly illustrated than in states such as Egypt, where the period since the January 2011 revolution has seen several changes of government and the subsequent consolidation of executive power, increasingly strict limits on free speech, and extensive violence by Islamist groups against the state and civilian targets and by the state against protesters and dissidents. How, then, are cybersecurity policies, practices, and technologies deployed and contested in uncertain political environments? The article argues that cybersecurity provides a way for the Egyptian government and opposition activists to “manipulate uncertainty” to their advantage. Each side uses cybersecurity policies, practices, and technologies to restrict their adversary’s scope for action, seeking to make the other more predictable while retaining or increasing their own freedom of action. In addition to providing extensive empirical data on cybersecurity developments in Egypt, the article makes two theoretical contributions. First, it shows how political struggles between state and opposition movements assimilate the influential language and content of cybersecurity, generating distinct cybersecurity politics. Second, it highlights the role of uncertainty as a driver—among others—of cycles of innovation and response in contentious politics, including those that center on cybersecurity.

Civilian targeting in African conflicts: A poor actor’s game that spreads through space

Armed conflict actors frequently target civilian populations. Thus, an improved understanding of such behaviour could pave the way to reducing it. We use the Civilian Targeting Index (CTI) and a broad array of geo-referenced data to investigate the spatio-temporal and economic dynamics of civilian targeting by conflict actors in Africa. Two main insights are generated. First, the civilian targeting behaviour of African non-state conflict actors is strongly influenced by the behaviour of other proximate actors. In particular, non-state actors tend to increase their civilian targeting after nearby non-state actors have done so. Possible mechanisms to explain such spatial spillovers include emulation and retaliation. Second, a negative relationship between economic activity and civilian targeting exists and applies to both state and non-state actors. In addition, CTIs of non-state actors tend to increase with population density, the geographical spread of their conflict activity and conflict duration. State actors have higher average CTIs than non-state actors do, but the gap between the two actor types tends to close during long-duration conflicts.

Irregular Ecologies

Cameroon, since 2016, has been witnessing what is now commonly referred to as the Anglophone Crisis (or the Ambazonia War) that has kept economic and social activities in the Anglophone Regions of Cameroon at bay with serious socio-economic implications on the local communities and the economic tissue of the regions. This paper explores the socio-economic challenges faced by the North West and South West Regions of Cameroon through the provision of a comprehensive analysis of the trends and economic implications of Anglophone Crisis. Moreover, the nature of conflicts has changed, with traditional civil wars giving way to non-state-based conflicts, including the targeting of civilians through terrorist attacks. The paper recommends that Cameroon, with the help of her partners, should focus on limiting the loss of human and physical capital by protecting social and development spending.

Violence Against Civilians During Armed Conflict: Moving Beyond the Macro- and Micro-Level Divide

Early research on wartime violence against civilians highlighted a distinction between macro- and micro-level approaches. Macro-level approaches, grounded in the international relations subfield, focus on variation across countries or conflicts, while micro-level approaches, more influenced by the comparative politics subfield, focus on variation within countries or conflicts. However, some of the recent research on civilian targeting does not fit neatly into this dichotomy—such as research comparing subnational units or armed groups across conflicts or research relying on geo-referenced event data for multiple conflicts. We review the literature and advocate moving beyond the language of the micro- and macro-level divide, instead focusing on the determinants of violence against civilians at five different levels of analysis: international, domestic, subnational, organizational, and individual. While acknowledging significant advances in the field, we argue for continued research aimed at developing a more integrated theoretical understanding of the multiple actors and interactive social processes driving violence against civilians.