Do UN peace operations lead to more terrorism? Repertoires of rebel violence and third-party interventions (original) (raw)
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Existing research suggests that extreme ideologies and foreign support, respectively , make rebel groups particularly violent against civilians. However, scholars have paid less attention to the interplay of group ideology and external support in producing varying levels of violence. In this paper, we examine whether certain political goals of armed groups such as the transformation of society versus the preservation of the pre-existing order, may encourage militant groups in civil conflicts to exercise restraint, curtailing their indiscriminate violence against civilians, despite the access to external state support. We draw on crosscountry data for 1989–2013 from UCDP and EACD as well as other sources to test the hypotheses. We find that when revolutionary groups receive support they are less likely to engage in civilian targeting than their conservative counterparts. Our findings remain robust to the disaggregation of foreign support into military and non-military. Our findings speak to debates in the wider literature on political violence and external support in civil conflicts, and contribute to human rights and mediation efforts of third parties in ongoing civil conflicts.
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This article examines the effect of foreign military intervention on rebel governance in terms of disaggregated human security. Case studies reveal that, on the one hand, a 'thirst for legitimacy' influenced by military intervention has led rebel groups to engage in internal and external diplomatic activities. Moreover, their efforts to develop fundamental rebel governance structures have had clearly positive effects on human security. On the other hand, when repelled from a territory by military interventions, rebel groups have attempted to control their remaining territories through the imposition of fear, which can devastate human security in rebel-held areas.
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A great deal of violence in civil wars is informed by the logic of terrorism: violence tends to be used by political actors against civilians in order to shape their political behavior. I focus on indiscriminate violence in the context of civil war: this is a type of violence that selects its victims on the basis of their membership in some group and irrespective of their individual actions. Extensive empirical evidence suggests that indiscriminate violence in civil war is informed by the logic of terrorism. I argue that under certain conditions, that tend to be quite common, such violence is counter productive. I specify these conditions and address the following paradox: why do we sometimes observe instances of indiscriminate violence evenunder conditions that make this strategy counterproductive? I review four possible reasons: truncated data, ignorance, cost, and institutional constraints. I argue that indiscriminate violence emerges because it is much cheaper than its main alternative – selective violence. It is more likely under a steep imbalance of power between the competing actors, and where and when resources and information are low; however, most political actors eventually switch to selective violence. Thus, given a balance of power between competing actors, indiscriminate violence is more likely at early rather than late stages of the conflict. Overall, the paper suggests that even extreme forms of violence are used strategically.
Do Good Borders Make Good Rebels? Foreign Territorial Control and Civilian Casualties
What is the effect of the location of rebel-held territory on civilian casualties? We argue that insurgencies with domestic territorial are strongly incentivized to cultivate mutually beneficial relations with civilians living in their territory and limit their violence against them, while insurgencies with foreign territorial control lack these behavioral constraints and may victimize civilians to gain compliance and extract resources. We test this hypothesis in two ways: a quantitative analysis of all insurgencies from 1989-2003 followed by a multi-methods case study that leverages the exogenous acquisition of foreign territory by the Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK) after the 1991 establishment of the northern Iraq No-Fly Zone. Our results strongly support our hypothesis. These findings shed light on potential broader patterns of civilian victimization by insurgents, and the conditions under which insurgents may strive to limit civilian casualties and provide governance.
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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 ...
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Previous studies of internal armed conflict outcomes have found evidence that rebel-biased military intervention increases the likelihood of rebel victory, but little indication that pro-government interventions improve the odds of government victory. Our argument, grounded in a theory of the utility and limitations of military force in civil wars, anticipates that armed intervention increases the probability of victory for the supported side only when that belligerent's primary challenge is a lack of conventional war-fighting capacity. Empirical analyses of internal armed conflicts from 1945 to 2010 support these expectations. Direct interventions in support of opposition movements have substantively large, robust effects on conflict outcomes. In contrast, government-biased interventions are only effective in increasing the odds of an outcome favorable to the government when the fighting capacity of rebel forces matches or exceeds that of the state.
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Armed Forces & Society, 2023
How does the withdrawal of troops after a military intervention supporting the government affect the number of rebel groups in the long term? This study argues that the withdrawal of foreign support for the government affects the number of rebels by directly provoking a nationalist backlash in the short term and threatening government legitimacy in the long term. Whether or not nationalism is provoked and whether legitimacy is enhanced or eroded depend on whether or not it was a humanitarian intervention. If rebels win, the intervention withdrawals also indirectly affect the number of rebel groups in the long term through the militias’ presence. Using interrupted time-series estimates between 1961 and 2005, this study found that humanitarian intervention withdrawals decrease the number of rebel groups in the long term, whereas nonhumanitarian intervention withdrawals promote the growth of militias and increase the number of rebel groups.
An umbrella of legitimacy: Rebel faction size and external military intervention
International Political Science Review, 2017
How may the legitimacy of rebel groups shape the decisions of third-party states to support insurgencies militarily? In aiming to better understand how the (group-level) attributes of insurgencies motivate interventions on their behalf, we argue that the size of rebel forces serves as a proxy for a revolution’s perceived legitimacy within the international community. Specifically, we maintain that the larger the insurgency, the greater the insurgency’s perceived legitimacy and, thus, the more likely intervention on its behalf becomes. This analysis challenges previous studies that have confined the causal salience of faction size to relative capabilities or strength, and it also underscores the controversial policy implications of this finding.
Terrorism, Insurgency, State Repression, and Cycles of Violence
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Over the last half century, violent conflicts between ethno-religious organizations and states have shaped the political and economic development context in developing countries. However, global empirical evidence on the dynamic and strategic underpinnings of these phenomena is lacking. Here, we investigate the dynamic violent relationships between the organizations that represent minorities at risk and the governments in Middle-Eastern and North African countries. Our estimates of dynamic panel datamodels of discrete strategic responses reveal dampened cycles of violence between states and insurgent politico-ethnic organizations due to violent mutual responses. However, such cycles are absent when the organizations target civilians instead, which is more likely after an insurgency spell. Finally, we provide an original game-theoretical interpretative framework for our results, which allows us to identify, on average and under sensible restrictions, the Stag Hunt game as an appropri...