Strategic Victimization

• In Event: New Methods for Studying Political Violence

Abstract

In a civil conflict, how does one actor's choice to victimize civilians affect the chance that other actors do the same? There is a vast literature on how violence against civilians affects the nature and outcomes of civil conflict, but this literature has neglected the role of strategic interdependence. In this paper, we first derive implications about the strategic interdependence of victimization choices from the most prominent existing theories of violence against civilians in civil war. We show that these theories lead to distinct conclusions about whether one group's choice to victimize civilians has a positive, negative, or zero effect on whether other groups do so --- meaning that empirical evidence about strategic interdependence can be used to discern among these competing bodies of theory.

To uncover such evidence, we analyze municipality-level data from the civil conflict in Colombia. As traditional statistical methods are ill-suited to identify strategic interdependencies, we structurally estimate a formal model of the strategic interaction between the conflict actors: the left-wing guerrilla groups (FARC and ELN) as well as the right-wing paramilitaries. This approach allows us to identify how each actor's choice to victimize civilians in a particular municipality depends on its expectation of whether others do the same, while accounting for the influence of municipality-level characteristics.

We find that there are strategic complementarities --- i.e., holding fixed all other influences, each group is more likely to victimize civilians the more it expects others to victimize civilians as well. This finding is inconsistent with theories of civilian victimization as the result of an internal control failure, which would imply zero strategic complementarity or substitution between groups' decisions to victimize. It is also inconsistent with theories of civilian victimization as a means of clearing out the local population to loot its resources; these theories would predict that victimization by one group, if successful at depleting the population, would reduce other group's incentives to do the same. The results are most consistent with theories of victimization as a means of forcing civilian cooperation or of signaling a group's strength to improve its negotiating position.

Authors

• Brenton Kenkel, Vanderbilt University

• Miguel R. Rueda, Emory University

• Michael Gibilisco, California Institute of Technology