Civil War Violence Research Articles

Do Experiences with Civil War Affect the Acceptance of the Use of Violence After War Ends? The Case of Post-War Nepal

ABSTRACT What are the effects of civil war violence on individual attitudes regarding the acceptability of the use of violence in politics after civil wars end? Using data from Nepal, we test several hypotheses about the relationship between the exposure to civil war violence and the acceptability of the use of violence for a variety of political goals after civil wars end (namely noble political causes, equal rights, and electoral advantage). Overall, we find that individuals more exposed to civil war violence are less likely to embrace the use of violence than the individuals who were less exposed to civil war violence.

Humanitarianism as a tool of statecraft: contested authority, sovereign violence, and humanity in the Syrian civil war.

This research explores the dynamics of interaction between the sovereign state and international humanitarian organisations in alleviating human suffering in the Syrian civil war. Considering civil wars as a rupture in sovereignty, its focus is on the practices of the sovereign state within its social context and the resulting implications for aid organisations. I argue that the Syrian regime has employed state violence, in tandem with administrative and bureaucratic impediments, to reassert its sovereign authority in humanitarian decision-making processes. This exercise of sovereign power is intertwined with the actions of aid organisations, thereby reshaping power dynamics among the state, aid organisations, and vulnerable populations. Through a qualitative method, I show that the deployment of state violence concomitantly pushes aid organisations, specifically the United Nations, towards enforcing the state sovereignty defined by the regime. As an effect of assertive sovereignty, interpretations of humanitarian principles and practices are continuously negotiated and constructed differently by aid organisations, even though they share a common overarching goal.

“It Wasn’t Because of Human Rights:” Exploring the Limited Use of Landmines by Colombian Paramilitary Groups

What explains the choice of means and methods of warfare by armed groups? Conversely, why would some groups choose not to use certain weapons? Beyond the legitimacy- and reputation-based explanations common in existing literature, this article highlights the role of tactical utility, inherent costs, and normative biases of specific means and methods in shaping these decisions. Through a combination of congruence analysis and comparative methods, the article examines why the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), while employing a wide range of brutal forms of violence, generally avoided using landmines, contrasting this restraint with the behavior of other Colombian armed groups. Although the lack of tactical utility seems to be the primary driver of the non-use of landmines, the costs and stigma associated with using mines influence how the AUC perceived their utility. The findings underscore the importance of context-specific factors in the decision-making processes of non-state armed groups and contribute to broader discussions on the disaggregation of violence in civil wars.

Connecting the dots – poverty, marginality, and the production of aggression and violence in post-war Sierra Leone

ABSTRACT A good collection of existing literature provides limited reflection on classifying post-conflict countries as being ‘peaceful’. This is especially so, as the period following the end of a civil war is normally characterised, as a period of ‘peace’, thereby equating peace to the silence of the guns. Such an understanding of what constitutes peace in post-conflict settings is problematic. This is because, societies in transition, are usually plagued with a plethora of challenges, with the legacies of war normally shaping the resurgence of violence in other forms. Additionally, complex transitions of violence and aggression, which reflect the socio-economic and political gyrations of a society redefining itself, and reconstructing its values are seen in most post-conflict contexts. Thus, using the case of Sierra Leone, this paper argues that some post-conflict settings experience negative peace, and diverse forms of violence that usually render communities unsafe, insecure and not peaceful. Thus, boxing societies in a bracket of being peaceful, because of the end of a violent civil war, limits what peace means in a specific contextual sense. It even undermines the potential for a broader approach towards understanding how the emerging forms of violence and aggression could be addressed.

Foreign Sponsorship of Armed Groups and Civil War

Abstracts Under what conditions do armed groups escalate their campaigns to civil war? Existing research suggests foreign states’ material support is critical to explaining armed groups' conduct during civil war and, thereby, war intensification, duration, and outcomes. Thus far, little attention has been paid to understanding whether and how foreign support influences whether armed groups fight civil wars in the first place, largely due to data limitations. Armed group-level datasets have included only those already engaged in significant civil war violence, which introduces selection bias that precludes investigating factors that influence which groups fight civil wars. Leveraging the new Armed Groups Dataset (AGD), which measures characteristics of armed groups engaged in lower-level violence, we conduct a preliminary empirical investigation into the explanatory role of foreign sponsorship in group-level variation in civil war. While foreign sponsorship and civil war are correlated, there is little evidence that sponsorship has substantial independent explanatory value in predicting civil war. Rather, the evidence is consistent with claims that armed groups’ organizational characteristics account for both access to foreign sponsorship and, independently, their likelihood of escalating civil war.

Levels of Analysis and Variation in Civil War Violence and Restraint: Ideology and Contestation in Nicaragua

Levels of Analysis and Variation in Civil War Violence and Restraint: Ideology and Contestation in Nicaragua

Living in Yesterday’s Terror: The Impact of Civil War Violence on the Post-War Election in South Korea

Living in Yesterday’s Terror: The Impact of Civil War Violence on the Post-War Election in South Korea

Violence and Democracy

Abstract The relationship between violence and democracy is an enduring theme in political science. We know that civil war, revolution, and state repression are much less likely under democratic rule, but how do we get from such violence to democracy? We draw upon Sarah Zukerman Daly's book, Violent Victors: Why Bloodstained Parties Win Postwar Elections, to explore these questions. Daly addresses the enigma of belligerent parties, often marred by heinous atrocities, emerging victorious in postwar elections. She shows how such violent victors triumph by playing on their capacity to provide security. We broaden out from Daly's focus on postwar democratization to consider the prospects for democracy in the wake of state repression and revolution. Our review finds that voters may be less forgiving of violent state repression compared with civil war violence; political parties emerging from civil wars and state repression face cognate yet distinct challenges; and social revolutionary violence poses more serious and durable threats to democratization than violence from civil wars and state repression. These findings underscore the need for a wider research agenda that investigates the diverse forms of social and political violence and their implications for democracy.

Premigratory experiences with Civil War violence and social trust

AbstractDo experiences with civil war violence affect an individual's level of social trust? The literature on this topic suggests that being a victim of violence or being involved in violence has a profound effect on an individual's political behavior in the new host country. However, what has not been explored is how experiences with civil war and violence impact levels of social trust among immigrants. Building on prior research on premigratory experience and literature on experience with violence, we intend to determine if the premigratory experiences with violence in an immigrant's country of origin affect whether social trust is increased or decreased in an immigrant's country of residence. We investigate this question using the National Latino and Asian American Study. We find that immigrants who had experienced civil war as unarmed civilians and were persecuted due to their political beliefs were less likely to acculturate to the host country. Participation in combat also tended to reduce acculturation but did not affect social trust.

"Low down Rebels": Gendered Rebellion and Gendered Violence in Kentucky's Long Civil War

"Low down Rebels": Gendered Rebellion and Gendered Violence in Kentucky's Long Civil War

Civil war violence and competing legitimacy claims: Evidence from district level courts cases in Nepal

Internal armed conflict is the ultimate instantiation of two actors – the state and a non-state group – challenging the legitimacy of one another. The state primarily responds violently to those who challenge, either violently or non-violently, its legitimacy. To what extent does the violent suppression of rebel activity erode state legitimacy? How does the potential for the use of violence by non-state armed groups and the offer of parallel governance erode state legitimacy? This research develops an argument specific to contested territories where both sides cannot offer model governance but use violence for opposing reasons, namely the rebel group to delegitimize the state and the state to regain its monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Because the use of violence from either side creates a demand for judicial remedies, I conceptualize the degree of legitimacy in terms of the utilization of the state court system in the face of increased violence by the state or non-state armed groups. In line with theoretical expectations, empirical analyses of criminal and civil cases filed in Nepal's district courts during the Maoist insurgency suggest a statistically significant negative impact of the rebel use of violence and their offer of alternative governance on state legitimacy. Similarly, the state's use of violence had a negative and significantly detrimental effect on state legitimacy.

Introducing digital health information systems in post-conflict Mozambique: a historical perspective

ABSTRACT The institutional dynamics around digital Health Information Systems implementations are subject to influences from the technological artefacts themselves or contextual conditions from the setting. These not always obvious and easily visible, appearing intrinsically hidden, may only be made perceptible through analysing patterns across a historical timeframe. Recognizing history’s potential, both as a tool and a means for enabling this analysis, we seek to build a situated understanding of the technology adoption and institutionalization processes, valuable to support future implementation efforts. This analysis is conducted as a historical study based on implementing a digital platform for public health management in Mozambique, a low- and middle-income country recovering from the aftermath of colonial rule and violent civil war. While the overall study spans twenty years since 2000, this paper focuses on the first seven years to identify institutional contradictions and how these shaped the adoption and evolution of digitally based systems processes.

The Evolution of Civil Wars Research: From Civil War to Political Violence

ABSTRACT In this reflection I argue that the last 25 years have seen three broad ‘waves’ of work on civil conflict, broadly understood. The first responded to the civil wars and ethnic conflicts of the 1990s, while the second expanded dramatically to take on a variety of questions around violence and organisation in civil wars. The current wave is moving the field towards a broader study of political violence writ large, rather than civil wars per se. I situate the evolution of my own work within this broader trajectory, in particular its engagement with both the second and third waves.

Pro-Syrian Regime Versus Anti Regime Outlets: A Comparative Critical Discourse Analysis

The Syrian conflict that erupted in 2011 became a global crisis and attracted the international social media attention, leading to the engagement of international superpowers. Based on the assumption that social media discourse is not neutral and impacted by social, political, and economic contexts [1], this paper employs van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach to investigate the role of social media discourse in protracting the Syrian conflict. It analyzes two main local, anti-, and pro-regime, social media outlets’ posts, and tweets to expose their discursive strategies and embedded ideologies. This article exposes the manipulation practices on the discoursal and linguistic level. It conducts a complex analysis to uncover hidden messages and manipulation techniques that has been delivered and utilized by conflicting parties in Syria, influencing people’s minds, increasing their polarity, altering the Syrian revolution’s conception, and protracting the tragedy. The findings indicate that social media discourse vis-à-vis the Syrian context is biased. Syrian conflicting parties, especially pro-regimes outlets, manipulate discourse with the aim of influencing people’s understandings and beliefs and hence actions. Anti-government actors are always stereotyped as foreign backed, extremists, and terrorists. International outlets, impacted by the local outlets, have contributed to altering the perception of the Syrian conflict, from a popular social movement to a violent civil war.

Punching before the Bell Rings: United Nations Signaling and Pre-Deployment Violence in Civil Wars

AbstractIn the post-Cold War era, United Nations (UN) peacekeeping has been an effective civil conflict mitigation tool. On the path to peacekeeping, the UN Security Council often signals its growing likelihood to deploy an operation by passing resolutions addressing the conflict. How do these signals affect violence levels in a pre-operation environment? We posit that conflict actors have incentives to improve their relative positions through violence as the UN signals its likelihood to intervene. Using a new dataset that links UNSC resolutions to active civil wars from 1989 to 2014, we find that resolution passage is significantly related to an increase in combatant use of anti-civilian violence. Additionally, as the signal strengthens with the passage of a greater number of resolutions, violence increases. Thus, although deployed peacekeeping operations may effectively protect non-combatants, the process leading to deployment can produce a dangerous environment for civilians.

The Hudson River Valley Loyalists in British North America: Connection, Community, and Continuity

The American Revolutionary War brought tremendous pain and suffering to Loyalists in New York's Hudson River Valley. They endured violence, persecution, and dislocation. When the war ended, thousands of Loyalists chose to leave their homes for a new life in British North America (Canada). As a civil war, the Revolution attempted to dissolve existing community bonds. But the Hudson Valley Loyalists show that many relationships endured despite the conflict, and that instead these social webs remained central to how they found their way in the postwar British Empire. They settled near one another in exile, assisted each other when applying for postwar compensation, shared similar political philosophies in provincial politics, maintained contact with family in New York, and even intermarried. Individual relationships and community were central to how the Hudson Valley Loyalists rebuilt their lives after a violent civil war. In exile, they created a social web consisting of Loyalists, their children, American citizens, and Late Loyalists, that bound them for several generations.

What’s Past is Prologue: Civil War Violence and Post-War Criminal Homicides

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the connection between civil war violence and post-war criminal homicides. This paper finds that past civil war violence intensity and presence of armed groups in a community increases the level of criminal homicides three, five, and ten years later. These findings are based on our statistical regression analysis of subnational data from 1,100 municipalities in Colombia drawn from Registro Único de Víctimas, Colombian National Police, Colombian National Administrative Department of Statistics, Colombian National Department of Planning, and Centre for Memory and History.

The Age of Counter-revolution: States and Revolutions in the Middle East

The Age of Counter-revolution: States and Revolutions in the Middle East

Liberalism and the Law in Late Imperial Russia

Liberalism and the Law in Late Imperial Russia Daniel Beer David Feest, Ordnung schaffen: Bäuerliche Selbstverwaltung und Obrigkeit im ausgehenden Zarenreich (1834–1889) (Making Order: Peasant Self-Administration and the Authorities in Late Tsarist Russia). 358 pp. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2018. ISBN-13 978-3447107228. €49.90. Stefan B. Kirmse, The Lawful Empire: Legal Change and Cultural Diversity in Late Tsarist Russia. 341 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. ISBN-13 978-1108499439. $105.00. Vanessa Rampton, Liberal Ideas in Tsarist Russia: From Catherine the Great to the Russian Revolution. 229 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. ISBN-13 978-1108483735. $105.00. No less than by revolution, Russian history is haunted by the specter of roads not taken. Historians of late imperial Russia might seek to avoid teleological shadows cast by 1917, but the denouement of revolutionary collapse and violent civil war inevitably looms on the horizon of all attempts to explain what became of the Great Reforms. Why did the 1860s apparently fail to deliver the promise, cherished by Russian liberals, of a law-bound, constitutional order underpinned by individual rights and representative government, which would integrate the peasantry and the non-Russians into a cohesive and stable society and withstand the dislocations of rapid modernization and ultimately of World War I? And what did liberals themselves make of the opportunities afforded to them during the turbulent decades before 1917? Were they the hapless victims of historical forces beyond their control or the authors of their own political failure? Taken together, David Feest's Ordnung schaffen, Stefan B. Kirmse's [End Page 412] The Lawful Empire, and Vanessa Rampton's Liberal Ideas in Tsarist Russia offer a series of fresh yet interlocking perspectives on the prospects for social and political stability and constitutionalism in late imperial Russia. ________ Feest's Ordnung schaffen traces the impact of attempts by governmental and landowning elites to modernize the Russian countryside by removing practices they saw as "contradictory and irrational" (2). Central to this endeavor was the production of new forms of knowledge about peasant society that would facilitate the integration of the peasantry into the wider administration and economy of the empire. Feest scrutinizes the interplay among peasants, landowners, and state officials in Riazan Province from the 1830s to the 1890s. Tapping an impressive range of regional archives, legal publications, and administrative reports, he paints a somber picture of how the bid to break down intermediary barriers between the peasantry and the state, and to rationalize rural life, failed in the decades that spanned the emancipation of the serfs. At the heart of Feest's account lies the ambiguous nature of the peasant commune itself: part institution of self-governance; part adjunct of state power. While some historians have argued that the village communes remained fundamentally autonomous and resistant to state-led change, others have emphasized that they did acquire the characteristics of state institutions, not least in the ways they were recognized as legal bodies.1 Ordnung schaffen challenges the implied binary posited by these views of the commune and argues for the need to acknowledge that both characteristics and roles of the village commune "existed in parallel, competing with each other or assuming different forms of symbiosis" (34). The result was that the commune in both the pre- and (especially) post-emancipation era was a highly ambiguous institution into which different actors—state officials, landowners, and the peasantry themselves—all inscribed their [End Page 413] own agendas. These agendas conflicted because they were premised on incommensurate ideas of rationality; reformers strove for universal standards and a statistical "capture" of information that would facilitate policy-making. The peasantry, by contrast, prized local knowledge and was wary of emissaries from the central government instructing them how to manage their affairs—and with good reason. Feest argues that elite visions of the peasantry were shot through with fixed assumptions about the peasant commune that paid scant regard to the highly diverse manifestations of the institution. Even within Riazan Province, which Feest takes as a case study broadly representative of European Russia, the communes differed enormously, from the heavily forested regions to the north of the River Oka in which the peasants lived...

Making sense of violence in semi-technologized conventional civil war: Evidence from nineteenth-century Japan

While existing studies highlight features of violence in conventional civil wars, they overlook how war technology is linked to the tactics of armed forces. To shed light on the understudied phenomenon of semi-technologized regular forces in a civil war, this article explores why and how violence is executed by such forces. To do so, we examine patterns of violence in the Boshin War that took place in Japan between 1868 and 1869. Our analyses of novel geocoded event data demonstrate that violent incidents occurred in strategically important locations but in ways that differed from conventional and guerrilla wars. Armed forces were unable to operate as technologically sophisticated forces do in modern conventional civil war due to limited logistics capabilities. Avoiding encounters in less accessible areas, the forces tended to fight in and contest areas that allowed them to establish relationships with local civilians. Additionally, violence against civilians was more likely to occur on the front lines where armed forces and civilians interacted because the former relied on the latter to convey provisions, arms, and ammunition. Unlike in conventional civil wars, military battles and one-sided violence were not unrelated to each other. With these findings, we address temporal, regional, and typological biases in civil war studies. Si bien los estudios existentes enfatizan las características de la violencia en las guerras civiles convencionales, estos estudios pasan por alto cómo se vincula la tecnología de guerra con las tácticas de las fuerzas armadas. Este artículo analiza, con el fin de arrojar luz sobre el poco estudiado fenómeno de las fuerzas regulares «semi-tecnologizadas» en una guerra civil, por qué y de qué manera estas fuerzas ejercen esta violencia. Para ello, estudiamos los patrones de violencia en la Guerra Boshin que tuvo lugar en Japón entre 1868 y 1869. Los análisis que realizamos de nuevos datos de eventos geocodificados demuestran que los incidentes violentos tuvieron lugar en lugares estratégicamente importantes, pero de maneras que diferían de las guerras convencionales y de las guerras de guerrillas. Las fuerzas armadas no pudieron operar de la misma manera que lo harían las fuerzas tecnológicamente sofisticadas en la guerra civil convencional moderna debido a las limitadas capacidades logísticas. Las fuerzas armadas evitaban encuentros en áreas menos accesibles y tendían a luchar y a disputar áreas que les permitieran establecer relaciones con civiles locales. Además, era más probable que la violencia contra civiles tuviera lugar en las líneas del frente donde las fuerzas armadas y los civiles interactuaban debido a que las fuerzas armadas dependían de los civiles para transportar provisiones, armas y municiones. En contraposición a las guerras civiles convencionales, las batallas militares y la violencia unilateral no eran independientes una de la otra. Con estas conclusiones, abordamos los sesgos temporales, regionales y tipológicos en los estudios de la guerra civil. Bien que les études actuelles mettent en évidence les caractéristiques de la violence lors des guerres civiles traditionnelles, elles omettent la relation entre la technologie et les tactiques militaires. Pour expliquer ce phénomène sous-étudié, notre article analyse pourquoi et comment les forces traditionnelles semi-technologisées ont recours à la violence dans une guerre civile. Pour ce faire, nous étudions des schémas de violence au cours de la guerre de Boshin qui a sévi au Japon de 1868 à 1869. Nos analyses de données géocodées inédites sur cet événement montrent que des incidents violents ont eu lieu dans des lieux stratégiques, mais pas de la même façon que dans les guerres traditionnelles ou guérillas. La limitation de leurs capacités logistiques empêchait les forces armées d’intervenir comme elles l’auraient fait si elles bénéficiaient de technologies sophistiquées dans des guerres civiles traditionnelles modernes. Elles évitaient les rencontres dans les zones aux accès limités, préférant se battre pour le contrôle d’espaces qui leur permettaient d’établir des relations avec la population locale. En outre, les violences contre les populations civiles survenaient plus souvent sur le front, lors des interactions avec les forces armées en quête de provisions, d’armes et de munitions. À la différence des guerres civiles traditionnelles, il existait des liens entre les batailles militaires et la violence unilatérale. Grâce à nos observations, nous étudions les biais temporels, régionaux et typologiques des études sur les guerres civiles.