Opportunities to kill or incentives for restraint? Rebel capabilities, the origins of support, and civilian victimization in civil war

Abstract

During civil conflicts the distribution of power heavily influences belligerents' war strategies, potentially including civilian targeting. Despite the potential relevance to wartime victimization, the relationship between insurgent capabilities and civilian victimization has received limited attention. A complicating factor in assessing this relationship is that power produces countervailing incentives and opportunities for violence. While greater military capabilities present more opportunities for death and destruction, incentives for anti-civilian violence should decline as the range of war strategies available to the group expands. This intuition suggests a tension between the opportunities and incentives to kill that past studies have failed to explicitly address. I help resolve this tension by examining the manner in which the origins of rebel resources condition the relationship between military capabilities and civilian victimization. Where groups rely on local support, violence declines as group capabilities increase. By contrast, when rebels rely on alternative sources of support, greater capabilities produce greater levels of violence. I test these relationships quantitatively using recently constructed data on insurgent resources and one-sided violence against civilians in conflicts occurring between 1989 and 2009.

Intrastate Conflict and Natural Resources: A Question of Geology?

“…Following , some authors suggest that natural resources can both increase conflict severity and encourage cooperation between belligerents in civil conflict. Several studies find no statistically significant relationship between the presence of lootable natural resources and the use of violence against civilians by armed actors (Wood 2010(Wood , 2014). Yet, another camp, spurred by Weinstein's (2005Weinstein's ( , 2007 works argues that the presence of natural resources can lead armed actors to act more violently towards civilians.…”

“…The conceptualization of natural resources I propose may also help to resolve inconsistencies in the empirical record on issues of conflict location and severity. For example, Weinstein (2007) and Wood (2014) have contradictory findings regarding how rebels will treat local populations in contexts of natural resource wealth. I argue that this discrepancy exists as a result of the inability to address this question without accounting for the aspect of natural resource wealth most likely to affect the relationship between local populations and armed actors: the complexity and required expertise, and hence the reliance on local communities, needed to extract natural resources.…”

“…Locals can be conscripted as free labor if the exploitation of the natural resource in the deposit does not require significant human capital. When easy-to-extract natural resources are under their control, armed actors may abuse locals more readily (Wood 2014). The loss of free labor is not of concern to armed actors as reliance on natural resource deposits frees them from needing to treat local populations well.…”

Rebel Justice during Armed Conflict

“…Rebel governance strategies are an important mechanism through which groups can communicate their type to civilians in an attempt to establish authority and build legitimacy to maximize potential civilian support (Förster 2015, 203-4). As Wood (2013, 466) writes “civilians often base their decisions to extend or withhold support on expectations regarding war outcomes and the ability of the group to provide selective benefits.” Because governance strategies carry costs for the rebel group, rebel groups are able to use these approaches to provide information to civilians about the group’s strength and intentions (see Appel and Loyle [2012] for a similar argument regarding state use of transitional justice processes). In this way, rebel use of judicial processes can be conceptualized as part of a strategy to communicate with the broader civilian population, which is an essential component of a rebel group’s recruitment and retention plans as well as critical for their ability to resupply (Gates 2002).…”

A Strategic Logic of Attacking Aid Workers: Evidence from Violence in Afghanistan

“…Some argue that this type of violence is most likely when contestation over territory is high, as belligerents attempt to convince civilians that aiding the other side will be costly (Kalyvas 1999). Others contend that because militarily weak armed groups have difficulty securing voluntary support from civilians, they often resort to coercive violence to obtain resources, leading to increased violence against civilians (Wood 2010(Wood , 2014a(Wood , 2014bWood, Kathman, and Gent 2012).…”