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During World War I, civilians became a target of the war machine. Air raids transformed the lives of those not involved in active combat and blurred the lines between the home front and the war front. This paper argues that the experience of air raids in World War I was comparable to the combat stress at the Western Front. The author bases her argument on contemporary publications in medical journals, measures taken by British authorities to prevent air-raid shock, and contemporary case records. The narratives of air-raid shock – similarly to those of shell-shocked soldiers – reflect the feelings of terror and loss of control, and demonstrate the profound effect these experiences could have on individuals' mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does wartime violence affect public attitudes toward the government in the long run? In this paper, we examine whether violence against civilians during the Korean War continues to influence people’s attitudes toward the South Korean government more than half a century later. We find that wartime violence has clear long-term attitudinal effects. Using a difference-in-differences analysis that compares the cohorts born before and after the war, the findings indicate that people who experienced violence in their childhood (0–5 years) are less supportive of the South Korean government, especially the administration and the military, compared with those born in the same areas during the 5 years after the war. We argue that the gap between pre- and post-war cohorts is generated by the long-lasting trauma of wartime violence and the social stigma imposed on violence victims after the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large literature has emerged in political science that studies the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This article summarizes the lessons learned from this literature, both theoretical and practical. To put this emerging knowledge base into perspective, we review findings along two dimensions of conflict: factors influencing whether states or substate groups enter into conflict in the first place and variables affecting the intensity of fighting at particular times and places once war has started. We then discuss the external validity issues entailed in learning about contemporary wars and insurgencies from research focused on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars during the period of US involvement. We close by summarizing the uniquely rich qualitative and quantitative data on these wars (both publicly available and what likely exists but has not been released) and outline potential avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we use Israel/Palestine as a case study to examine the politics of human shielding, while focusing on the epistemic and political operations through which the deployment of the legal category of human shield legitimizes the use of lethal force. After offering a concise genealogy of human shields in international law, we examine the way Israel used the concept in the 2014 Gaza war by analyzing a series of infographics spread by the IDF on social media. Exposing the connection between the re-signification of space and the constitution of a civilian as a shield, we maintain that the infographics are part of a broader apparatus of discrimination deployed by Israel to frame its violence post hoc in order to claim that this violence was utilized in accordance with international law. We conclude by arguing that the relatively recent appearance of human shields highlights the manifestation of a contemporary political antinomy: human shields have to continue to be considered protected civilians, but since they are considered an integral part of the hostilities they are transformed into killable subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States government's inability to view the conflict with the Taliban through the lens of the bargaining model of war was a fundamental element of its failure in Afghanistan. This problem was reinforced by a dysfunctional civil–military relations shaped by Samuel Huntington's theory of objective control, resulting in the military pursuing campaigns of attrition that fit its organizational preferences but did not advance civilian political goals. These issues are evident in three different moments during the War in Afghanistan where the U.S. failed to seize an opportunity that could have changed the result of the conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping on conflict has received a sustained amount of attention in the empirical literature. The advent of new data on UN peacekeeping and new temporal units of analysis have enabled researchers to expand the frontiers of peacekeeping research and undertake a more nuanced examination of peacekeeping effectiveness. In this special section, a series of articles examine how UN peacekeeping affects different types of violence within conflicts and leads to different types of peaceful outcomes. Factors such as the cultural affinity between peacekeepers and local communities, the size of peacekeeping operations and the specific composition of UN forces are shown to be important variables associated with lower levels of casualties and violence and also a higher likelihood of mediation and timely peaceful settlements in civil wars. In the aggregate, these articles suggest that robust peacekeeping is associated with better outcomes in many stages of conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During a civil war, does external intelligence assistance reduce violence perpetrated by the recipient government against civilians? I contend that intelligence assistance reduces violence against civilians by facilitating identification problems and adopting a "winning-hearts-and-minds strategy," which enhances the recipient government's legitimacy and intelligence potential. Enhanced intelligence capability solves the recipient government's identification problems. I examined this logic using a dataset on external support and one-sided violence between 1990 and 2008. The empirical findings show that external intelligence assistance reduces the recipient government's violence against civilians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research examines when and why women join rebel groups as combatants. However, we are only beginning to understand how their presence affects rebel group behaviour and conflict dynamics more generally. I address this gap by analysing how women's participation influences two dimensions of rebel behaviour: their relationship to civilians and their fighting performance. I argue that a greater number of female rebels decreases civilian victimization, but also reduces rebel combat performance. I test these propositions using time-varying district-level data from the Nepalese civil war. The results support both expectations. These findings increase our understanding of the effects of women's participation in civil war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do some communities overtly declare their opposition to violent groups, while others disguise it by engaging in seemingly unrelated activities? Why do some communities manifest their dissent using nonviolent methods instead of organizing violence of their own? I argue that ideational factors are crucial to answering these questions: normative commitments can restrict civilian contention to nonviolent forms of action, while exposure to oppositional ideologies can push civilians toward more confrontational forms of noncooperation with armed groups. Furthermore, I contend that the role of political entrepreneurs activating and mobilizing this ideational content is crucial for it to shape contention. I support this argument with a wealth of microlevel evidence collected in various warzones in Colombia, analyzed within a purposively designed comparative structure. My findings support the growing conflict scholarship that stresses that ideology matters in war, but extends its application beyond armed actors' behavior to that of civilian communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the effects of terrorism mostly focuses on the coercive effects of violence on the macrolevel, while other effects like provocation, particularly on the microlevel, do not receive the same attention. In this article, we seek to address previous omissions. We argue that terrorism can provoke ordinary people into a violent reaction. By reducing perceived security and creating a desire for revenge terrorism may lead civilians to attack uninvolved members of the terrorists' constituency. Using geo-referenced data on terrorism (Global Terrorism Database) and violent riots (Social Conflict Analysis Database), we assess with a matched wake analysis if the treatment of terrorist violence against civilians causes an increase in violent behavior. The results of our analyses show that terrorism significantly increases violent riots. We thus conclude that terrorism can not only provoke governments but also civilians into an overreaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Police abuse of African Americans was an immediate trigger for the urban uprisings of the 1960s, and civilian review of police actions became a central tenet of civil rights liberalism. The failure of Philadelphia's Police Advisory Board (PAB), the nation's first independent civilian review board (1958), to meliorate police–community tensions suggests the limitations of civil rights liberalism: an inability to confront the role of police as "dirty workers," who performed the unacknowledged but widely demanded function of maintaining racial hierarchy in the postwar city. Working-class African Americans, the most frequent victims of police brutality, came to see civilian review as a charade and rejected the limited vision of civil rights liberals. The PAB's failure shows that police reform is impossible without a broader commitment to overturning racial hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the lack of an effective, coherent and progressive EU grand strategy that is able to streamline efforts and produce collective goods, both at home and in the world, is culpable for the EU's gradual decline until 2030. The lack of European-wide strategic thinking creates the conditions for an existential crisis of the EU. The EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy/Common Security and Defence Policy is the most striking example: it fails to manage the EU27 expectations, build up sufficient military and civilian capabilities, deliver tangible results and, consequently, lacks credibility. This has repercussions for the EU's level of ambition. Until 2030, more and more states drop out of EU initiatives and search for alternative fora to make their voices heard in international politics. The powerlessness of the EU also weakens its most important allies: the United States and NATO. This creates a power vacuum to be filled by more ambitious players, such as China or Russia, which seek to diffuse their view of global (dis)order. To avoid this future, we argue that the EU should (1) embrace an alternative vision of power, (2) strengthen the legitimacy of its internal and external policymaking and (3) engage strategically in global affairs on the basis of a firm commitment to NATO-EU cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What sustains commitment to rebel fighting during civil war? Using original survey data from the ongoing conflict in Syria, we examine whether self-ascribed rebel fighters, former fighters, civilians, and refugees can be clearly differentiated based on commitment to rebellion. We ask whether such groups are better characterized as a broadly holistic fighting community or a heterogeneous mix of actors with different levels of support for violence. Using a well-balanced sample of over 300 active and former rebel fighters, civilians from within the conflict zone, and externally displaced refugees, we observe that fighting commitment is greater among active combatants compared to other cohorts. To understand why, we examine underexplored psychological mechanisms and find that individuals with higher risk tolerance, optimism bias, and identity fusion with rebel forces display greater dedication to fighting. We discuss the implications of our results for understanding who participates in civil war violence and why. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is increasing awareness that sexual violence is distinct from other aspects of civilian victimization in civil wars. Few studies have examined the independent impact of such violence on responses to civil wars as compared to "traditional" forms of violence. This article explores whether reports of high levels of rape and sexual violence increase the probability of United Nations (UN) attention to conflicts and calls to action. In so doing, we combine original data on UN Security Council (UNSC) resolutions with data on sexual violence in armed conflict and estimate the impact of sexual violence on UN attention to all civil wars from 1990 to 2009. We show that the effects of sexual violence on the number and level of UNSC resolutions are significant even when controlling for other important determinants of UN action. These findings have important implications for understanding how the UN has expanded its view on protecting civilians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce a new data set on the strategies and tactics employed by belligerents in 197 internal armed conflicts that occurred between 1945 and 2013. The Strategies and Tactics in Armed Conflict (STAC) data set provides scholars with a rich new source of information to facilitate investigations of how regimes and their foreign supporters have responded to insurgent threats and the effects of actors' force employment choices on a wide variety of intra- and postconflict outcomes. In addition to seventeen novel variables that measure the strategies and tactics employed by governments and intervening states, the STAC data set contains independently coded measures of many variables that overlap with existing data sets—a feature that facilitates the replication of existing studies and robustness checks on the results of new studies. We demonstrate the utility of the STAC data with an analysis of the impact of rebel mobilization on the basis of ethnicity on the propensity of governments to employ forced resettlement, civilian protection, civilian welfare projects, and civilian targeting to counter the insurgent threat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the impact of foreign troop support on combatant-perpetrated sexual violence against civilians? We hypothesize that biased troop support increases the risk of sexual violence by the subordinate party both as a consequence of strategic considerations and as a product of a situation increasingly conducive to opportunistic behavior. Time-series cross-section analyses of all civil wars during 1989–2012 are largely supportive of our expectation. Rebel groups are more likely to perpetrate sexual violence the more troop support the state receives. Likewise, state forces are more prone to commit sexual violence the more they are challenged by troops supporting the rebel group(s). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do civilians in warzones often hold widely divergent beliefs about what is happening in the fighting? While there is a burgeoning literature on the micro-dynamics of armed conflict, variation in civilians' factual beliefs has received scant attention. Yet such beliefs are critical, as they form the basis for wartime opinion and action. I argue that—particularly for civilians outside the direct "line of fire"—this variation comes not chiefly from an event's empirical nature, but from civilians' prior political orientations in the dispute. In order to investigate these dynamics, I fielded a survey experiment in Pakistan in which I manipulated the features of a reported counterinsurgent air strike and then measured civilians' ensuing beliefs about it. The results show that these beliefs are most driven by the perpetrator's identity and civilians' own preexisting attachments. While actual casualty levels matter too, these findings suggest that civilians' beliefs about conflict events are often deeply biased in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies adopting the collective vulnerability approach have shown that condemnation of war atrocities is grounded in communal experiences of victimization and is strongest in locations where victimization was spread across ethnic boundaries. Based on a representative survey conducted in 2006 (N = 2,012) across the former Yugoslavia, we find a similar pattern for acceptance of collective guilt. While personal victimization does not have a significant impact, the acceptance of guilt is strongest in more war-affected regions. Moreover, the results show the importance of the type of communal-level victimization: acceptance of guilt is lowest in regions marked by asymmetric violence and highest in regions marked by symmetric violence. Our findings suggest that collective victimization should not be treated as a uniform phenomenon and challenge the assumption that rejection of in-group guilt is an inevitable outcome of collective victimization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Insurgency and counterinsurgency are widely described as "population-centric warfare": a competition between military actors over civilian loyalties. Drawing on a high-resolution conflict event data set and a new approach for analyzing reactive behavior in space and time, this article answers the question of how civilian cooperation and defection are systematically driven by incumbent and insurgent violence. Theoretically, the study contributes to resolving a dispute between proponents of deterrence- and alienation-based approaches to population-centric warfare. Empirically, this analysis improves upon the mixed results from previous micro-studies in favor of an integrated picture: indiscriminate violence has almost no effect on collaboration with the adversary in its immediate spatiotemporal vicinity. At larger levels of aggregation, however, a clear reactive pattern of collaboration with the adversary becomes visible which is in line with alienation-based reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I study civilians' cooperation with an armed group in an irregular war. In the model, civilians differ in their valuation of siding with the armed group and make cooperation decisions without knowing others' motivations or cooperation choices. I find that a superior military force is not sufficient to bring high cooperation and that full cooperation can only be attained if military power is complemented by expectations of punishment for helping the enemy. The model challenges the idea that random violence aimed at punishing enemy cooperators is used when selectivity is difficult to implement, and it shows that indiscriminate reprisals induce lower levels of cooperation, even when enemy cooperators are less likely to be punished with selective methods. Finally, I find that communities that have a highly centralized process of decision making are expected to give their support to only one group of combatants and to be exposed to less violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the civilian constituencies of rebel groups affect their use of violence against civilians. While past research has acknowledged the importance of rebel constituencies, they are primarily seen as only having an indirect effect on rebel behavior. In this study, I conceptualize rebel constituencies as central political opportunity structures for rebel groups providing incentives and imposing restraints on their use of strategic violence and the violent behavior of individual rebel fighters. In particular, I hypothesize that a constituency overlap between rebels and the government of a state acts as a restraint making large-scale violence against civilians less likely. In contrast, high levels of constituency fractionalization and polarization induce strategic violence and predatory behavior, increasing the chances of large-scale civilian victimization. I conduct a statistical analysis of rebel one-sided violence in sub-Saharan Africa using newly collected data on rebel constituencies to test these hypotheses. The results only provide limited empirical support for the hypothesized relationship between constituency overlap and rebel violence against civilians. There is clear empirical evidence, however, that heavily fractionalized and polarized rebel constituencies are associated with higher levels of violence against civilians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Up until about 2000, most of the work on gender and international relations (IR) was nonpositivist in nature. Since 2000, there has been a burst of positivist gender/IR scholarship, much of it quantitative. This work has addressed several important areas in IR, including terrorism, interstate war, human rights, civil war, violence against civilians, public opinion, international norms, globalization, and others. Much of this work has developed new data, advanced theory, and employed rigorous empirical methods. This article surveys this positivist scholarship. It discusses how positivist and nonpositivist gender/IR work complement each other. This article makes recommendations about directions for future scholarship on gender and IR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the logic of balancing and bandwagoning in civil war using an epidemic model of popular support dynamics. It says that civilians are better off balancing when civilian strategy is communicated to combatants, and punishment can be avoided only when civilian strategy is readily observable. It stresses that violence in civil war can occur in equilibrium, inflicting great costs on civilian.

This article distinguishes between ‘‘direct’’ and ‘‘indirect’’ violence during civil wars. These two types differ in their forms of production: while indirect violence is unilaterally perpetrated by an armed group, direct violence is jointly produced by an armed group and civilians, and it hinges on local collaboration. These differences have consequences for the spatial variation of each of these types: in conventional civil wars, indirect violence is hypothesized to be positively associated with levels of prewar support for the enemy group; in contrast, direct violence is hypothesized to increase with the level of political parity between factions in a locality. The predictions are tested with a novel dataset of 1,710 municipalities in Catalonia and Aragon during the Spanish civil war (1936—1939). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article describes the structure of the Swiss militia armed forces and its preconditions. It explores in what ways the Swiss militia, which is founded on the principle of citizens in uniform, was affected by the changes in values that took place in Western societies from the 1960s and 1970s onwards as well as by the new security–political situation arising in the aftermath of the cold war. There is strong evidence that the concept of the citizen in uniform has clearly lost relevance. Voluntary commitment to society and a sense of duty as a citizen are no longer the main reasons for the involvement in the military. Instead, it is a question of individual cost-benefit analysis. Thus, the concept of the citizen in uniform may not only change for the individual soldier, but it may also be perceived differently by society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article extends the formal logic of Stathis Kalyvas’ theory of selective violence to account for three political actors with asymmetric capabilities. In contrast to Kalyvas’ theory, the authors’ computer simulation suggests that (1) selective violence by the stronger actor will be concentrated in areas where weaker actors exercise control; (2) the relative level of selective violence used by weaker actors will be lower because of a reduced capacity to induce civilian collaboration; and (3) areas of parity among the three actors will exhibit low levels of selective violence perpetrated primarily by the strongest actor. Results from a logistic regression, using empirical data on Israel and two rival Palestinian factions from 2006 to 2008, are consistent with these predictions: Israel was more likely to use selective violence in areas largely controlled by Palestinian factions; zones of incomplete Israeli control were not prone to selective violence; and zones of mixed control witnessed moderate levels of selective violence, mainly by Israel. Nonetheless, Palestinian violence remained consistent with Kalyvas’ predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since 1989, international efforts to end protracted conflicts have included sustained investments in the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) of combatants. Yet while policy analysts have debated the factors that contribute to successful DDR programs and scholars have reasoned about the macro conditions that facilitate successful peace building, little is known about the factors that account for successful reintegration at the micro level. Using a new dataset of ex-combatants in Sierra Leone, this article analyzes the individual-level determinants of demobilization and reintegration. Past participation in an abusive military faction is the strongest predictor of difficulty in achieving social reintegration. On economic and political reintegration, we find that wealthier and more educated combatants face greater difficulties. ldeologues, men, and younger fighters are the most likely to retain strong ties to their factions. Most important, we find little evidence at the micro level that internationally funded programs facilitate demobilization and reintegration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]