Seeking Safety: Civilian Decision-Making During Violence in India

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Abstract

How do people confronting violence decide whether to respond aggressively or passively, whether to evade threats or to adapt to them? This paper uses interviews and oral history testimony from Indian Sikh civilians who survived violence during the Punjab Crisis and the 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms to explore how civilians make strategic decisions when they are trying to survive violence. The paper develops and tests situational appraisal theory, an individual-level theory of decision-making to explain why similar people pursue different strategies during political violence in 1980s and 1990s India. I argue that an individual’s appraisals of control and predictability amidst violence shape their preferences for different strategies. I test the theory with original interviews, plus a combination of computer vision analysis, text analysis, and qualitative analysis of a large oral history archive to examine decisions made by Indian civilians facing insurgent and pogrom violence in different environments in North India. I find that “high” control appraisals lead people to address threats by approaching them while “low” control promotes evasive behavior. Further, finding threats predictable promotes more conservative survival strategies while finding violence unpredictable encourages drastic action.

Author

• Aidan Milliff, Massachusetts Institute of Technology