Who Takes the Blame? The Strategic Effects of Collateral Damage

Abstract

Can civilians caught in civil wars reward and punish armed actors for their behavior? If so, do armed actors reap strategic benefits from treating civilians well and pay for treating them poorly? Using precise geo-coded data on violence in Iraq from 2004 through 2009, we show that both sides are punished for the collateral damage they inflict. Coalition killings of civilians predict higher levels of insurgent violence and insurgent killings predict less violence in subsequent periods. This symmetric reaction is tempered by preexisting political preferences; the anti-insurgent reaction is not present in Sunni areas, where the insurgency was most popular, and the anti-Coalition reaction is not present in mixed areas. Our findings have strong policy implications, provide support for the argument that information civilians share with government forces and their allies is a key constraint on insurgent violence, and suggest theories of intrastate violence must account for civilian agency."When the Americans fire back, they don't hit the people who are attacking them, only the civilians. This is why Iraqis hate the Americans so much. This is why we love the mujahedeen." 1 -Osama Ali 24-year-old Iraqi "If it is accepted that the problem of defeating the enemy consists very largely of finding him, it is easy to recognize the paramount importance of good information." 2 -Gen. Sir Frank Kitson (Ret.) Commander-in-Chief UK Land Forces W hy does violence against civilians in civil war sometimes attract civilians to the insurgents' camp and in other cases repel them? Studies

Geographic determinants of indiscriminate violence in civil wars

“…Calling in an airstrike against a suspected enemy position might very well result in civilian casualties that go unnoticed, for example. As a result, a related study on civilian casualties in Iraq relied on external casualty counts (Condra and Shapiro, 2012). Another problem with SIGACT is that it is not a complete data collection of all conflict events: the activities of non-US ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) troops or other arms branches, such as the US Air Force, are only sporadically recorded.…”

“…SIGACT files are referenced in time and space, indicate the specific type of incident, and record casualties and the initiator of the event. These data have been used in a responsible manner for basic research in other recent publications (Braithwaite and Johnson, 2012;Carpenter et al, 2013;Condra and Shapiro, 2012;Linke et al, 2012;O'Loughlin et al, 2010;Schutte and Donnay, 2014;Weidmann, 2014;Zammit-Mangion et al, 2012). The SIGACT data provide all necessary information for testing the proposed hypothesis.…”

“…While this distinction has been made before (see Mason and Krane, 1989), Kalyvas's (2006) widely cited study brought increased scholarly attention to the study of violence in civil wars, resulting in numerous publications (e.g. Condra and Shapiro, 2012;Downes, 2007;Lyall, 2009;Lyall and Wilson;.…”

The Rule of Law in the Fight against Terrorism

“…Note that we can think of the executive in our model as a Madisonian representative; that is, the executive's utility in equation (3) is such that the executive cares about terrorism prevention, the public good, and about reelection. 17 Proposition 4 suggests that even in such a rather ideal situation for executive discretion, the objective of terrorism prevention is better achieved if there are some legal limitations on executive power.…”

“…19 However, even when citizens want a readjustment in the balance between security and liberty, Proposition 2 and 5 suggest that it is not necessarily security-beneficial if the executive itself decides on the scope of governmental power. 17 In the Appendix (in the section where we provide a micro-foundation for the reelection rule), we model the representative citizen as having the same preference for the benefits and costs of terrorism prevention as the executive, which indicates that Proposition 4 can be obtained in a set up where the executive and the representative citizen have the same utility from terrorism prevention.…”