Alexander B. Downes

Desperate Times, Desperate Measures: The Causes of Civilian Victimization in War

Despite normative and legal injunctions against targeting civilians in war, as well as doubts regarding the effectiveness of such strategies, belligerents have frequently turned their guns on noncombatants. Two variablesdesperation to win and to save lives on ones own side in protracted wars of attrition, and the intention to conquer and annex enemy territoryexplain this repeated resort to civilian targeting. According to the desperation logic, costly and prolonged wars of attrition cause states to become increasingly anxious to prevail and to reduce their losses. Adopting a policy of civilian victimization permits states to continue the war while managing their losses and hopefully coercing the adversary to quit. In the appetite for conquest model, by contrast, belligerents specifically intend to seize and annex territory. Attackers in this model employ civilian victimization to eliminate enemy civilians, who can threaten the aggressors immediate military position and present a future threat of rebellion. Multivariate analysis of interstate wars between 1816 and 2003 corroborates the importance of these factors,and a case study of the British starvation blockade of Germany in World War I supports the plausibility of the desperation mechanism.

Draining the Sea by Filling the Graves: Investigating the Effectiveness of Indiscriminate Violence as a Counterinsurgency Strategy

It is commonly believed in the literature on insurgency and counterinsurgency that to be effective in undermining civilian support for guerrillas, violence against noncombatants must be selective or risk alienating the population. Yet cases exist where governments have defeated insurgencies by wielding indiscriminate violence against noncombatants. This paper explores the conditions under which such violence can be effective through a case study of British counterinsurgency strategy in the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). I find that the smaller the size of the underlying population supporting the insurgents, and the smaller and more constricted the geographic area, the more effective indiscriminate civilian victimization is likely to be. Moreover, when civilian loyalties are not very flexible, selective violence is unlikely to deter people from supporting the rebels and indiscriminate force is sometimes required to make it impossible for people to provide support. Is killing civilians an effective strategy for achieving political or military goals? Under what circumstances might it be more or less effective? Sustained, systematic violence against noncombatants is a regular feature of warfare. One study found that states use ‘barbarism’–‘the systematic violation of the laws of war in pursuit of a military or political objective’ – in about 20 per cent of asymmetric conflicts, wars in which one side is significantly more powerful that its opponent. A second study found that belligerents in interstate wars employ ‘civilian victimization’– ‘a wartime strategy that targets and kills (or attempts to kill) noncombatants’ –one-third of the time, while a third discovered that states killed more than 50,000 noncombatants in 21 per cent of all wars after 1945. Although several works have appeared that help illuminate the causes of this violence, few studies have systematically investigated and evaluated the effectiveness of civilian victimization as a military strategy. The literature on the effectiveness of punishing civilians in conventional wars largely condemns strategies that target noncombatants as not having much utility for winning wars or eliciting concessions from adversaries. Robert Pape, for example, argues that punishment – a coercive strategy that inflicts pain on an adversary’s civilian population in order to persuade the enemy to take (or refrain from taking) a certain action – hardly ever elicits concessions in strategic bombing campaigns. Pape also examined economic sanctions, a weaker form of punishment, and found that these were similarly ineffective, accounting for success in only a handful of 120 cases after 1945. Other authors condemn civilian victimization more broadly,

How Smart and Tough Are Democracies?: Reassessing Theories of Democratic Victory in War

Proponents of the selection effects argument claim that because democratic leaders run a higher risk of losing office than autocratic leaders if they fail to win wars, they are more careful than their authoritarian counterparts in choosing which wars to initiate. The robust marketplace of ideas in democracies also weeds out self-serving or ill-conceived policies and allows democratic leaders to better estimate the chances of victory. Democracies, according to this logic, tend to pick on weak or vulnerable opponents and thus win a disproportionate number of the wars they start. Both quantitative and qualitative evidence, however, challenges this conclusion. The statistical correlation between democracy and victory is not robust to reasonable alternative choices for analyzing the data. In particular, including draws as a war outcome renders statistically insignificant the finding that democratic initiators and targets are more likely to win. In addition, democratic leaders who initiate wars should be optimistic that they will win, but process tracing of the decision by Lyndon Johnsons administration to escalate the Vietnam War (one of these omitted draws) reveals that top officials knew at the time that escalation promised a costly, protracted stalemate, yet they chose to fight anyway. Moreover, domestic politics, if anything, contributed to Johnsons decision to fight in Vietnam despite the poor odds of victory because he believed that pulling out would spark a backlash and destroy his Great Society legislative program. The results of this combined analysis raise doubts about the democracy and victory thesis, and should prompt interest in other explanatory variables for military effectiveness.

The Problem with Negotiated Settlements to Ethnic Civil Wars

A burgeoning literature has emerged on the utility of negotiated settlements as a method of terminating civil wars. 1 Negotiated settlements comprise less than one quarter of all civil war endings,...

Restraint or Propellant? Democracy and Civilian Fatalities in Interstate Wars

This article investigates the effect of regime type on the number of civilian fatalities that states inflicted in interstate wars between 1900 and 2003. As opposed to several previous studies, the author finds little support for normative arguments positing that democracies kill fewer civilians in war. In fact, the author finds that democracies are significantly more likely than nondemocracies to kill more than fifty thousand noncombatants. Democracies also kill more civilians when they are involved in wars of attrition and kill about as many (and perhaps more) noncombatants than autocracies in such wars. These findings provide qualified support for institutional arguments about democratic accountability. Other implications of the institutional view, however, are not upheld, such as the argument that democracies select easy wars that should result in few civilian casualties because they are won quickly and decisively. Finally, democracies do not appear to kill fewer civilians in more recent wars.

Overt Peace, Covert War?: Covert Intervention and the Democratic Peace

Proponents and critics of the democratic peace have debated the extent to which covert attempts by democracies to overthrow other elected governments are consistent with or contradict democratic peace theory. The existing debate, however, fails to acknowledge that there are multiple democratic peace theories and that inter-democratic covert intervention might have different implications for different arguments. In this article, we first distill hypotheses regarding covert foreign regime change from three theories of democratic peace. Relying primarily on declassified government documents, we then investigate these hypotheses in the context of U.S. covert intervention in Chile (1970–73). The evidence suggests that covert intervention is highly inconsistent with norms and checks-and-balances theories of democratic peace. The evidence is more consistent with selectorate theory, but questions remain because democratic leaders undertook interventions with a low likelihood of success and a high likelihood that failure would be publicized, which would constitute exactly the type of policy failure that democratic executives supposedly avoid.

Another Skirmish in the Battle over Democracies and War

we argued that democra-cies are particularly likely to win their wars. Democratic political institutions provideincentives for elected leaders to launch only short, winnable, low-cost wars, so theymay avoid domestic political threats to their hold on power. Democracies tend to winthe wars they initiate because democratic leaders generally “select” themselves intowinnable wars, and they are more likely to win when they are targeted because their ar-mies aght with better initiative and leadership.Analyzing all interstate wars from 1816 to 1987, we found strong empirical supportfor our theory.

You Can't Always Get What You Want: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Seldom Improves Interstate Relations

States frequently employ overt and covert foreign-imposed regime change (FIRC) to pursue their foreign policy interests. Yet there is little scholarship on the question of whether FIRCs improve relations between the states involved. In fact, most FIRCs either fail to reduce—or increase—the likelihood of militarized disputes between interveners and targets. Fundamentally, FIRC entails a principal-agent problem: foreign-imposed leaders rule over states with interests different from those of the intervener. Whereas the intervening state wants the new leader to pursue policies that reflect its interests, once in power, such leaders are focused on ensuring their political survival, a task that is often undermined by implementing the interveners agenda. Foreign-imposed leaders who carry out the interveners desired policies attract the ire of domestic actors. These domestic opponents can force the regime to reverse course or may even remove it from power in favor of leaders who are hostile to the intervener; in both cases, the result can be renewed conflict with the intervener. Rwandas replacement of Mobutu Sese Seko with Laurent-Désiré Kabila in Zaire illustrates this problem.

Introduction: Modern Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Comparative Perspective

Why do individuals and groups take up arms to wage guerrilla insurgencies? How are insurgent groups organized, and what strategies and tactics do they use? What determines how insurgent groups trea...

Reconsidering the Outcomes of Foreign-Imposed Regime Change

In “You Can’t Always Get What You Want: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Seldom Improves Interstate Relations,” Alexander Downes and Lindsey O’Rourke offer important contributions to the study of how foreign-imposed regime change (FIRC) affects interstate relations. According to Downes and O’Rourke, states should exercise caution when considering whether to pursue covert or overt FIRC, because neither type of regime change improves relations between interveners and targets by reducing the likelihood of their engaging in future conoict and, in many cases, it makes conoict more likely.1 They imply that the emergence of post-FIRC conoicts marks the failure of FIRC in interstate relations. Two theoretical problems arise from Downes and O’Rourke’s oversimpliacation of the purpose of FIRCs. To begin, interveners may have objectives for engaging in FIRCs other than improving interstate relations, such as weakening rivals and thereby advancing their own security—goals that are at least as important as avoiding future conoict. Consider, for example, U.S. covert FIRCs in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989. As John Prados writes, “Afghanistan by itself was of little importance to the United States.”2 The main objective of these FIRCs was to frustrate the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and to prevent the spread of Soviet inouence in the region.3 Indeed, the FIRCs forced the Soviets into a long-lasting and costly stalemate, which contributed to