Dominant theories of mass violence hold that strategic concerns in civil war drive the deliberate targeting of civilians. However, the causal mechanisms that link strategic objectives to large-scale violence against civilians remain underspecified, and as such the causal logics that underpin each remain blurred. In this article, we identify and explicate four plausible mechanisms that explain why armed groups would target, for strategic purposes, civilians in war. We then turn to the peak period of violence during the Guatemalan armed conflict to assess which mechanisms were most prevalent. Specifically, we leverage unique archival data: 359 pages of military files from Operation Sofía, a month-long counterinsurgent campaign waged in the northwestern Ixil region. Through process tracing of real-time internal communications, we find that state actors most commonly described the civilian population as loyal to rebel forces; violence against civilians was a means to weaken the insurgency. Troops on the ground also depicted the Ixil population as ‘winnable’, which suggests that security forces used violence in this period to shape civilian behavior. These findings are most consistent with the idea that mass violence in this case and period was a coercive instrument to defeat insurgents by punishing civilians for collaboration. The evidence from this period is less consistent with a logic of genocide, in which the purpose of violence would be to destroy ‘unwinnable’ civilian groups. Our analysis illustrates how a mechanism-centered approach based on process tracing of conflict archives can help uncover logics underlying civilian killing.

The US food retailing industry continues to concentrate and consolidate. Power in the agriculture, food, and nutrition system has shifted from producers to processors, and is now shifting to retailers. Currently, only eight food-retailing corporations control the majority of food sales in the United States. Expanding on previous research by Lyson and Raymer (2000, Agriculture and Human Values 17: 199-208), this paper examines the characteristics of the boards of directors of the leading food retailing corporations and the indirect interlocks that bind the food retailers into a corporate community.

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The relationship between war and state formation is a central topic in the social sciences. While scholarship on interstate war posits that conflict triggers extractive processes that build the state, research findings on the effects of intrastate war are more mixed, often suggesting that civil war inhibits extraction and induces state decay. This study, however, posits that the negative relationship between civil war and revenue extraction is not underpinned by institutional destruction but by the wartime introduction of undermining rules that structure behavior in ways that subvert taxation. To illustrate this claim, it traces the evolution of undermining rules within the customs administration at the height of the Guatemalan armed conflict. As the perceived escalation of the insurgent threat created institutional ambiguity, newly empowered political-military elites implemented alternative procedures for capturing customs revenues, which systematically undermined the state's extractive capacity. Comparing this case with one of reinforcing rules that bolster extraction, I posit that the broad or narrow nature of the rule-making coalition explains divergent paths of wartime institutional development. Overall, this study uncovers the inner workings of the counterinsurgent state and illustrates how civil war dynamics induce processes of institutional change that can have long-term effects on state performance.

The coexistence of predatory informal rules alongside formal democratic institutions is a defining, if pernicious, feature of Latin America’s political landscape. How do such rules remain so resilient in the face of bureaucratic reforms? This article explicates the mechanisms underlying the persistence of such rules and challenges conventional explanations through process-tracing analysis in one arena: Guatemala’s customs administration. During Guatemala’s period of armed conflict and military rule, military intelligence officers introduced a powerful customs fraud scheme that endured for more than 20 years, despite state reforms. Its survival is best attributed to the ability of the distributional coalition underwriting the predatory rules to capture new political and economic spaces facilitated by political party and market reforms. This illustrates that distributional approaches to institutional change must attend to how those with a stake in the status quo may continue to uphold perverse institutional arrangements on the margins of state power.