Joshua Kaiser

The Theory of Legal Cynicism and Sunni Insurgent Violence in Post-Invasion Iraq

We elaborate a cultural framing theory of legal cynicism—previously used to account for neighborhood variation in Chicago homicides—to explain Arab Sunni victimization and insurgent attacks during the U.S. post-invasion occupation of Iraq. Legal cynicism theory has an unrecognized power to explain collective and interpersonal violence in international as well as U.S. settings. We expand on how “double and linked” roles of state and non-state actors can be used to analyze violence against Arab Sunni civilians. Arab Sunnis responded to reports of unnecessary violent attacks by U.S./Coalition soldiers with a legally cynical framing of the U.S./Coalition-led invasion and occupation, the new Shia-dominated Iraqi state, and its military and police. A post-invasion frame amplification of beliefs about state-based illegitimacy, unresponsiveness, and insecurity made it not only possible but predictable that Arab Sunni insurgent attacks would continue against U.S./Coalition forces and transfer to Shia-dominated Iraqi government forces. Violence in Iraq persisted despite U.S. surge efforts to end the Arab Sunni insurgency.

Atrocity victimization and the costs of economic conflict crimes in the battle for Baghdad and Iraq

Economic conflict crimes are defined in this paper as violations of international human rights and humanitarian law, as well as domestic law, associated with military and political conflict and producing significant monetary as well as other forms of suffering for civilians. Criminologists are well positioned by disciplinary emphasis to document and explain military and political violence resulting in economic conflict crimes. Criminal victimization associated with the US-led invasion of Iraq imposed an enormous toll on civilians. Yet there is little attention by criminologists or others to the profound economic costs to Iraqis, whether through lost property, life, or opportunities. We cautiously estimate that the economic losses for households in the city of Baghdad alone were almost US

Correspondence: Assessing the Synergy Thesis in Iraq

100 billion, and more than three times this amount for the entire country, with Sunni groups experiencing significantly greater losses than others. So far as we know, our article presents the first estimates of civilian losses from economic conflict crimes that followed the US-led invasion of Iraq. These losses were widespread and systematic, the hallmarks of crimes against humanity.

The Displaced and Dispossessed of Darfur: Explaining the Sources of a Continuing State-Led Genocide

Americans are inclined to remember their nation’s wars victoriously. “Let it be remembered,” President Barack Obama told the Minneapolis American Legion veterans of the Vietnam War on August 30, 2011, “that you won every major battle of that war.”1 He repeated this message on May 28, 2012, during the commemoration ceremony of the aftieth anniversary of this war at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.2 How soon might we hear talk of winning the major battles in Iraq? Stephen Biddle, Jeffrey Friedman, and Jacob Shapiro (hereafter Biddle et al.) caution that “[t]he decline of violence in Iraq in 2007 does not mean that the war was necessarily a success.”3 Their implication, however, is that the war was not necessarily a failure either. Biddle et al. write that the 2007 drop in violence from 2006 was a “remarkable reversal.” They ask, “What caused this turnaround?” (p. 7). Their answer is that the United States devised a strategy that stopped the violence in Iraq with a “synergistic” combination of the U.S. troop surge and the U.S. subsidized Sunni Awakening that “stood up” the Sons of Iraq (SOI). Correspondence: Assessing the Synergy Thesis in Iraq