Shanahan_ Anti civilian violence_psychology and society 2011

2015

The incidence of violence against civilians in the context of civil war has been used within the popular press to frame contemporary armed conflicts, and the rebel groups who engage in them, as brutal, anarchic and senseless. A recent article in Foreign Policy Magazine designated modern civil wars in Africa ‘un-wars ’ and the author, Jeffrey Gettleman, went on to state; “Even if you could coax these men out of their jungle lairs and get them to the negotiating table, there is very little to offer them. They don't want ministries or tracts of land to govern. Their armies are often traumatized children, with experience and skills (if you can call them that) totally unsuited for civilian life. All they want is cash, guns, and a license to rampage. And they've already got all three. How do you negotiate with that?”

Forum of EthnoGeoPolitics Vol.3 No.2, Autumn 2015, pp.9-25, 2015

What brutalises rebels? What makes them cruel, or makes them do things that we consider cruel and immoral? That is a primary question—which can be put to all kinds of armed actors—of my research on rebels and rebellion, i.e. the “violent opposition to the ruler, government regime[,] or state for any personal, collective or ideological purpose” (Ten Dam 2015a: 6 (quote), 15). Arguably, rebels or insurgents are the most important and dominant kind of armed non-state actors. After all, without rebels, no rebellions. The question of brutalisation i.e. increasing resort to violence that violates local and/or international norms—that I hold are ultimately based on conscience, empathy and honour (Ten Dam 2014: 8-9)—is of prime importance to the field of conflict studies in general and to the “emerging multidisciplinary field” of ethnogeopolitics (Rezvani 2013: 4) in particular.1 Apparently, most conflicts are internal, insurgent, ethnic and separatist in nature, and one wishes to prevent or curtail the suffering involved.

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.

Forum of EthnoGeoPolitics, 2017

What brutalises rebels? What makes them cruel, or makes them do things that we consider cruel and immoral? That is a primary question of my research on rebels and rebellion, i.e. the “violent opposition to the ruler, government regime[,] or state for any personal, collective or ideological purpose” (Ten Dam 2015a: 6 (quote),15). Arguably, rebels or insurgents are the most important and dominant kind of armed non-state actors. After all, without rebels, no rebellions. The question of brutalisation—which can be put to all kinds of armed actors—is of prime importance to the field of conflict studies in general and to the “emerging multidisciplinary field” of ethnogeopolitics (Rezvani 2013a: 4) in particular. NB: This article is an updated, expanded and improved version of the article by the same author that appeared in the Autumn 2015 issue of this journal titled ‘Looking at Conflict Patterns: Declining Frequencies yet Persistent Brutalities in both Ethnic and Non-Ethnic Conflicts’ (Vol 3. No.2, pp.9-23), partially in response to the two Critical Responses i.e. open peer-reviews in the same issue (Ibid, pp.24-25).

2019

Research Question: Does the embedding of actors in a conflict cause an escalation in indiscriminate violence against civilians? In this thesis, I explore the different strategic positions, which actor(s) adopted during the decade-long Nepalese conflict (1996-2006). Firstly, I demonstrate who the actors of the conflict are, and establish why it is important to rethink the way actor(s) in a conflict are categorised. Secondly, I establish how the identified actors, are not static, but uncover how actors can adopt three strategic positions (i.e., embeddedness, fixed, and temporarily-deployed). I then present the theoretical framework; I developed for this thesis, entitled the Concept of Embeddedness. The Concept of Embeddedness addresses the conditions in which civilians experience indiscriminate violence during conflicts. I show how the strategic movement and positioning of actors within conflict zones renders civilians “piggies-in-the-middle,” as they are wedged between embedded actor...

Empire's Violent End

This chapter pursues a microdynamics approach to political violence. 1 Essential to its argument are two elements, which might at first glance seem contradictory: variation and comparability. The challenge is to explain why civilian populations faced greater levels of repression and violence in some places and not others (the variation element) while at the same time tracing similar patterns in mul tiple colonial conflicts (the comparability element). To do so, we explore local experiences of insurgent action and consequent repression by imperial security forces. Evidence is drawn from selected territories in late colonial Southeast Asia and Africa. The final years of empire breakdown in Dutch-occupied Indonesia, French Indochina, and British Malaya are considered alongside the French-ruled African territories of Madagascar and Algeria, where clashes between insurgents and security forces produced opposite outcomes: a rapid collapse of rebellion in Madagascar and its eventual triumph in Algeria. We concentrate on rural com munities subjected to organized violence as insurgencies triggered counterinsur gencies by colonial security forces and their local auxiliaries. Our concern is not so much with differences in political outcome between territories. Rather, our approach demonstrates that strategies of colonial violence against civilian popu lations reveal comparable microdynamic patterns across empires. Three core themes are addressed. The first looks beyond the analytical preoc cupation with asymmetries in decolonization conflicts by focusing on the local grievances that give rise to outbreaks of ostensibly anticolonial violence. Asym metric conflict, and the question inherent to it-how the weak defeat the strongare familiar to scholars of violent decolonization, and of counterinsurgencies

Economics of Governance, 2006

Violence against civilians is the mainstay of modern warfare, and claims 84% of the war-related casualties. Looting and terror are the two main reasons why the soldiers victimize the civilians from the other side. However, examples have been found (Congo, Sierra Leone,...) where the guerilla and the incumbent army abuse the civilians from their own side. The present paper offers a potential explanation for this phenomenon, based on strategic looting. It argues that this behavior helps drawing a line between thugs and legitimate rebels.

Perspectives on Politics

Journal of Strategic Security