Civil War Violence Research Articles

The Electoral Legacies of Civil War Violence: Theory and Evidence from a Maoist-affected State in India

The Electoral Legacies of Civil War Violence: Theory and Evidence from a Maoist-affected State in India

Syria’s frozen conflict and a wave of earthquake-related diplomacy

While the level of violence in the Syrian civil war has declined significantly since the 2013–17 peak and territorial lines of control are largely frozen, humanitarian suffering is at an all-time high. Meanwhile, the conflict’s regional and international political dynamics and alliances are shifting, with the Syrian government using the February 2023 earthquake affecting the north of the country, and related international-relief efforts, as an opportunity to attempt to reconnect diplomatically with other countries in the region.

Grand Narratives: Decolonisation and Its Wars

As political scientist Tarak Barkawi has argued, studying wars of decolonization demands a readiness to decolonize previously Eurocentric approaches to war. To do that, we need first to think about how the study of violent decolonization has evolved over the past generation or so. This brief essay offers a few answers. It focuses on three issues: the recognition of decolonization’s wars, the place of unarmed civilians in such conflicts, and the inter-connection between violent decolonization and civil war.

'I have used up my entire youth in the bush': the Comités de Autodefensa during and after the Peruvian internal armed conflict.

Youngsters participate as combatants at the forefront of armed conflicts around the globe, be it as part of state forces, as members of rebel groups, or as drivers of armed civilian resistance. This contribution explores the social trajectories of (ex-)civil self-defense militia members in Peru who fought alongside the state forces to defeat the Maoist rebels of Shining Path in the 1980 and 1990s. On the one hand, by taking the Peruvian Comités de Autodefensa (CAD) as a somewhat atypical case-study, the article aims to enhance a more nuanced understanding of youth as drivers of and participants in civil war violence which transcends the victim-perpetrator dichotomy. On the other, by analyzing the social trajectories of CAD leaders and members from their youth until the present, it seeks to gain insight into ex-combatants’ claims for recognition, reparation and citizenship in the aftermath of armed conflict. The trajectories of the CAD members demonstrate how the morality of soldiering, steered by ideas about masculinity, militarism and patriotism, gets intertwined with structural societal conditions such as the lack of educational and economic perspectives for youngsters, and the state’s failure to provide protection and security against rebel group violence to those who might need it most. In the aftermath of the conflict, militia service and the corresponding macho warrior identity form a basis of demands for inclusion by an historically marginalized rural population group. The findings on the Peruvian self-defense committees presented in this article have several implications for research and policy in the fields of Transitional Justice and Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration, and open both thematic and conceptual avenues for further research into civilian participation in armed conflicts around the globe.

Queering Gender-Based Violence Scholarship: An Integrated Research Agenda

Abstract Research on armed conflict's gender dynamics has expanded significantly in the past decade. However, research in this field pays little attention to sexual orientation and gender identity. Moreover, where scholarship focused on violence against sexual and gender minority (SGM) individuals during war exists, it is largely divorced from work on gender-based violence (GBV) in conflict-related environments and from sexuality studies. In this article, we integrate these bodies of work and argue for the theoretical expansion of GBV as a conceptual, empirical, and analytic category to study and explain targeted attacks against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and otherwise queer individuals. We suggest two theoretical interventions to better equip existing GBV frameworks to explain violence perpetrated against SGM people. We argue, first, that violence targeting SGM communities is GBV, as sexuality and gender identity are integral components of gender, and second, that analyzing gender dynamics adds to our understanding of when, how, and why targeting SGM individuals composes part of an organization's regulatory “repertoire of violence.” We examine violence in Colombia's civil war as an illustrative application of our approach and we identify future, fruitful research avenues with important policy implications for studying and responding to GBV during war.

Foreign Fighters, Rebel Command Structure, and Civilian Targeting in Civil War

ABSTRACT Recent studies find that the presence of foreign fighters in a rebel organization may increase levels of anti-civilian violence in civil war. But why? Evidence from some cases indicates that foreign fighters may be used intentionally by local rebel commanders to carry out abusive operations against noncombatants. Other cases, however, suggest that foreign fighters possess greater capacity for independent agency in war, stepping outside the chain of command to inflict harm against local noncombatants. We argue that variation in a rebel group’s command structure—specifically, their degree of centralization—offers a point of leverage with which to adjudicate between the generalizability of these competing explanations. We investigate this issue with an analysis of sixty-nine rebel groups active between 1989 and 2015. We find that the effect of foreign fighters on civilian targeting is conditional: foreign fighters are associated with greater levels of anti-civilian violence only when active in groups with centralized command structures. This study contributes to the nascent literature on foreign fighters, offering insight into how these actors step into the command structures of rebel organizations. This study also demonstrates that the abuse of civilians in conflict can be explained effectively based on the characteristics of armed parties.

Civil war and the non‐linearity of time: approaching a Mozambican politics of irreconciliation

AbstractAt least 1 million people died during the Mozambican civil war (1976/7‐92). Unfolding after gaining independence from Portugal (1975) and alongside experiments with Afro‐socialism in the 1980s, the war, despite its brutality, has not been subjected to global templates of reconciliation processes. Thus it comprises a unique case to probe what irreconciliation might mean – both as a political horizon and as an analytical concept. This text juxtaposes ethnographic material from rural, central Mozambique from the late 1990s and early 2000s emphasizing reconciliation with material from the same spaces from the 2010s onwards, where I identify what I term a ‘politics of irreconciliation’. I will make three arguments. First, informed by Hannah Arendt, I approach irreconciliation as fundamentally about the rejection of a world of violence in search of a world shared in common. Second, drawing on recent anthropological theorizing about temporal regimes and chronopolitics, I argue for the salience of a non‐linear understanding of the politics of irreconciliation to grapple with the fact that civil war violence is understood as dangerously uncontained rather than nominally past. Third, within the context of Mozambique, forgiveness and its other, irreconciliation, are not only intimately tied to the temporally past or present; they are also, as I show, produced by a tangible and intense absence of a productive future.

Social sanctions and violent mobilization: lessons from the Crimean Tatar case

ABSTRACT How do social sanctions affect individual participation in civil war violence? Which mechanisms facilitate implementation of social sanctions in times of crises? This study draws on unique in-depth interview data with former ethnic Crimean Tatar combatants in Ukraine to flesh out specific mechanisms that enable social sanctions to function as an effective instrument of violent mobilization, facilitating individual participation in high-risk collective action. Empirical findings demonstrate that in the Crimean Tatar case (non)participation in high-risk collective action had an effect on individuals’ family honor within the community, and on their access to community-distributed public goods, such as jobs and social benefits. The effect of social sanctions on violent mobilization remains particularly strong among traditionalist societies with higher levels of adherence to social norms, local customs, and traditions. The findings reveal that while social sanctions remained effective among rural community residents, their effect was limited on non-community urban settlers.

“Grafting” Hope: The Ethics of Rewriting In Colm Tóibín’s House of Names

Exploring the particularities of rewriting in Irish contemporary fiction through an analysis of Colm Tóibín’s House of Names (2017) within a theoretical framework of narrative ethics, this paper argues that a function of cultural healing is actualized both within the retold story of the Oresteia and in the context of civil war violence to which the novel responds. Drawing on the work of Hanna Meretoja and Dorothy J. Hale, it suggests that a source of potential ethical power is revealed through the reworking of the ancient tragedy using the structures and techniques of the contemporary novel. Traces of differing worldviews or even ways of constructing cognitive and affective complexity determine a constant oscillation between original and rewritten that creates a space of epistemological uncertainty. Valorised through the meta-ethical affect of unverifiability conceptualised by Hale, this effect is also read in light of Meretoja’s understanding of a narrative-bound sense of possibility and the challenges that both contemporary and ancient understandings of hope or catastrophe pose to its ethically valuable expansion.

Psychological Experiences of the Guatemalan Civil War and postwar Violence on a Kaqchikel Community:An Exploratory Qualitative Study

ABSTRACT The Kaqchikel are an indigenous population who experienced political violence during the civil war and postwar conflict in Guatemala because their political ideology was in opposition to the military government. This formative study explored their trauma experiences and coping skills. We used a community member to recruit our small sample (N = 18) through convenience sampling. Participants expressed anxiety, depression, sadness, fear, and distrust stemming from incidents of trauma and violence and the loss of loved ones. Many participants identified family and community members as their major source of support. Positive coping strategies included having a strong religious faith and work ethic that helped them cope with distress. However, some participants resorted to negative coping behaviors such as alcohol abuse or knew of others who did. Our findings provide useful evidence to develop culturally-sensitive mental health services for this specific indigenous community.

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.

Guatemalan Migration to Los Angeles:

The Guatemalan migration to Los Angeles hides behind a violent thirty-year Civil War that lasted from 1960 to 1996; the violent events started after the USA supported a coup against the Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz. The coup marked the beginning of political instability in Guatemala. The instability led to the formation of guerrilla groups seeking to overthrow the military regime; the confrontation by both groups occurred in the highlands of Guatemala, where many of the indigenous villages were decimated, and its populations almost eradicated. As a result, an increased number of indigenous populations started escaping the political violence they faced by guerrilla and military groups and began migrating to Los Angeles. The number of indigenous people arriving in Los Angeles increased dramatically during the 1980s and 1990s; however, these communities continued to face adversities upon arrival in Los Angeles. The indigenous communities had to find ways to maintain their culture alive and settle in Los Angeles. This paper will seek to explore how the civil war in Guatemala led to an increased number of Guatemalans arriving in Los Angeles, focusing on the Mayan Kanjobal community. The paper will also focus on the settlement of the Kanjobales in the West-Lake and Pico-Union region of Southern Los Angeles and the ways their culture was challenged upon arriving at Los Angeles.

Genocide, Politicide, and the Prospects of Democratization since 1900

Why do some autocracies democratize? A country’s violent past has received little attention. We argue that genocide and politicide undermine democratization by binding the elites’ supporters more tightly to the governing power, while cementing in-group/out-group animosities, and helping preserve the elites’ status quo position within the state. We test this argument on a new dataset of government atrocity and democratization since 1900. These novel data allow us to capture many important instances of atrocity missed by others, and thus take a longer look at democratization and violence throughout history. We find that episodes of genocide and politicide are associated with a lower likelihood of democratization in both the short and long run. These effects are larger and more consistent than other common explanations for democratization. They also differ from the effects of non-genocidal civil war violence.

Lisa Hultman, Jacob D. Kathman and Megan Shannon: Peacekeeping in the Midst of War

Are United Nations peacekeeping missions effective at reducing violence incivil wars? Although UN peacekeeping is a notable intervention tool, theinternational community lacks systematic knowledge of how well itmitigates civil war violence. Given that UN peacekeeping is increasinglyused in the midst of war, this is a significant research gap with direct policyrelevance. This book systematically explores if and how the capacity andconstitution of UN peacekeeping missions a!ect the amount of violence incivil conflicts. It argues that peacekeeping e!ectiveness needs to beassessed in relative terms, theorizing that more robust missions areincreasingly capable of addressing combatant incentives for employingviolence. The authors conduct large-n analyses of the number ofcombatants and civilians killed during each month for all civil wars globallyfrom 1992 to 2014, measuring the capacity and constitution of UN missionswith unique data on the number and type of peacekeeping personneldeployed. The analyses reveal that increasing UN military troop and policepersonnel deployed to a conflict significantly reduces violence againstcivilians, and increasing UN military troop personnel significantly mitigatesbattle-related violence. By contrast, smaller missions and missionscomposed of observers are not associated with reduced violence. The bookcomplements the large-n analyses with qualitative explorations ofpeacekeeping mechanisms on violence in Côte d’Ivoire and the DemocraticRepublic of Congo. The authors conclude that while peacekeeping is notwithout detriments, it is an effective tool of violence reduction.

The consequences of internal displacement on civil war violence: Evidence from Syria

How do flows of internally displaced persons (IDPs) affect wartime violence? We argue that government and rebel forces respond to IDP flows in different ways, which condition where and when they employ violence. State responses are driven by the need to identify insurgents and their civilian supporters, and depend on how much information they have about where IDPs are coming from and where they are seeking to resettle. Rebel responses are driven by their need to monitor and control civilian movements, which leads to more violence against civilians in transit areas heavily trafficked by IDPs. Drawing on novel subnational data from Syria, we employ social network analysis to examine migration flow characteristics beyond aggregate IDP inflows and outflows. We find that the greater the local clustering of IDP flows – i.e., the less complex and diverse displacement movements are – the more pro-government combatants are able to detect IDPs’ origins and destinations, and the higher the number of civilian killings. Transit locations, meanwhile, become epicenters of rebel violence against civilians. While scholars have found that more information about civilian behavior causes combatants to employ more selective violence, our results suggest that more information about displacement prompts more collective violence from governments. The findings also indicate that governments respond to IDP flows after movement, whereas rebels respond to IDP flows during movement. This underscores the importance of focusing on how armed groups respond to displacement flows in order to better understand the consequences of population movements in wartime.

Das ilusões do real às verdades da fantasia: configurações da psicologia infantil em A bicicleta que tinha bigodes, de Ondjaki

Pretendemos, no presente artigo, realizar uma leitura de A bicicleta que tinha bigodes (2013), romance infanto-juvenil de Ondjaki. Confrontadas, por um lado, com problemas “externos”, relativos à precária situação socioeconômica do seu país, que, na altura dos eventos narrados na obra em questão, encontrava-se em meio a uma violenta guerra civil, e, por outro, com problemas “internos”, de ordem mais psicológica e afetiva, as crianças imaginadas por Ondjaki conseguem representar a complexa psicologia infantil. É precisamente esse último aspecto que a nossa análise irá privilegiar, ao escolher como chave de leitura a construção psicológica de algumas das personagens principais. Pretendemos, dessa forma, examinar a representação do universo psicológico infantil no referido romance, em especial quando este é confrontado com a psicologia adulta. Para tanto, recorremos, principalmente, ao aparato teórico da psicanálise, mas também nos servimos de algumas considerações de ordem socio-histórica, imprescindíveis para compreensão integral do corpus elencado.

The Geographical Spread of State Executions during the Irish Civil War, 1922–23

AbstractThe state executions of 81 IRA men during the Irish civil war have long been a bitter, almost taboo subject in Irish society. This article provides a geographical perspective on these executions. While the origins of the policy can be traced to elite divisions, the geographical spread of the executions, especially in 1923, reflected the geography of the civil war, and the need to broadcast state power at the local level during its guerrilla phase. The article maps the geographical spread of the executions and analyzes their diffusion in terms of a number of general and Irish-specific theories of civil war violence. Because the civil war originated in elite differences over a treaty, and because the two sides of the conflict had been so personally close at the elite level, historians have tended to explain the executions in terms of elite psychology. Yet while the initial development of the policy reflected the centralization of power by the protreaty elite, in terms of timing, strategic rationale, and location territorial perspectives on civil war explain much more about their diffusion in 1923.

The “logic” of Renamo civil war violence: Trans-border communities and Renamo incursions in Eastern Zimbabwe, 1980s-1992.

This study investigates the dynamics of civil war violence by Renamo forces among trans-border communities in Honde Valley from the early 1980s to 1992 when the Mozambican Civil War ended. In its venture to understand reasons given by ordinary people in Honde Valley for forging relationships with Renamo, this article does not seek to dismiss but to make sense of the violence. The article analyses the targets of violence to determine whether there was a switchfrom indiscriminate to selective violence or vice versa. Through adding another stratum of analysis to this discussion of wartime relationships, this study discusses violence in the context of Renamo’s relations with foreign civilians and Mozambican refugees living in a country whose official international policy was anti-Renamo. It concludes that the relationship between the Honde Valley people and Renamo forces was complicated and sometimes qualified as “being with” Renamo, at times “being with” the Zimbabwe security forces and at yet other times as non-aligned. By examining this dimension of the relationship, this article does not seek to sanitise the acts of banditry, looting and killing by the Renamo units, but to expose currently silenced micro-narratives of the incursions in the Honde Valley.

Lethal Violence in Civil War: Trends and Micro-Dynamics of Violence in the Northern Mali Conflict (2012-2015)

This article discusses the trends and micro-dynamics of violence in northern Mali. Using a mixed research design, we focus on the violence used by jihadist groups during the first phases of the Malian civil war (2012–2015). Integrating research on civil war and terrorism, we distinguish between direct and remote violence. Quantitative analyses show that the involvement of jihadist groups in this conflict had a strong impact on the level and intensity of violence of all warring parties. Qualitative analysis of data collected during field research done in Mali between 2016 and 2017 complements the quantitative work. It enlightens that relational dynamics strongly influence the decision to resort to violence within non-state armed groups, including jihadist ones, while local contexts often explain temporal and geographic variations in violence.

Mobilizing memories: The social conditions of the long-term impact of victimization

Recent research has focused on the legacies of civil war violence on political preferences, finding that wartime victimization decreases support for the perpetrator or its political identity in the long run. However, we know little about the conditions under which this effect takes place. Historical accounts from civil wars suggest that the long-term effect of violence is not homogenous, nor consistent across areas within a single conflict. Addressing this gap, this article explores the effects of wartime victimization on long-term political preferences at the local level, looking at the conditioning effect of the local social context. In particular, I argue that the effect of wartime violence depends on the existence of local networks that create and maintain memories of the violence and capitalize on them for future mobilization. This argument is tested in the context of the Spanish Civil War. I build a novel dataset using archival data, historical secondary sources, and already existing datasets, covering 2,100 municipalities across Spain. In line with the argument, it is found that Francoist wartime victimization during the civil war is linked to an increase in leftist vote share after democracy was restored four decades later, but mainly in those municipalities where clandestine, left-leaning political networks were active after the conflict.