Kristine Eck

One-Sided Violence against Civilians in War: Insights from New Fatality Data

This article presents new data on the direct and deliberate killings of civilians, called one-sided violence, in intrastate armed conflicts, 1989—2004. These data contribute to the present state of quantitative research on violence against civilians in three important respects: the data provide actual estimates of civilians killed, the data are collected annually and the data are provided for both governments and rebel groups. Using these data, general trends and patterns are presented, showing that the post-Cold War era is characterized by periods of fairly low-scale violence punctuated by occasional sharp increases in violence against civilians. Furthermore, rebels tend to be more violent on the whole, while governments commit relatively little violence except in those few years which see mass killings. The article then examines some factors that have been found to predict genocide and evaluates how they correlate with one-sided violence as conceptualized here. A U-shaped correlation between regime type and one-sided violence is identified: while autocratic governments undertake higher levels of one-sided violence than other regime types, rebels are more violent in democratic countries.

Introducing the UCDP Non-State Conflict Dataset

This article extends the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) by presenting new global data on non-state conflict, or armed conflict between two groups, neither of which is the state. The dataset includes conflicts between rebel groups and other organized militias, and thus serves as a complement to existing datasets on armed conflict which have either ignored this kind of violence or aggregated it into civil war. The dataset also includes cases of fighting between supporters of different political parties as well as cases of communal conflict, that is, conflict between two social groups, usually identified along ethnic or religious lines. This thus extends UCDP’s conflict data collection to facilitate the study of topics like rebel fractionalization, paramilitary involvement in conflict violence, and communal or ethnic conflict. In the article, we present a background to the data collection and provide descriptive statistics for the period 1989–2008 and then illustrate how the data can be used with the case of Somalia. These data move beyond state-centric conceptions of collective violence to facilitate research into the causes and consequences of group violence which occurs without state participation.

Repression by Proxy

Why do regimes delegate authority over a territory to nonstate militias, in effect voluntarily sacrificing their monopoly over the use of violence? This article argues that two factors increase the probability of states delegating control to a proxy militia, namely, military purges and armed conflict. Military purges disrupt intelligence-gathering structures and the organizational capacity of the military. To counteract this disruption, military leaders subcontract the task of control and repression to allied militias that have the local intelligence skills necessary to manage the civilian population. This argument is conditioned by whether the state faces an armed insurgency in a given region since intelligence, control, and repression are needed most where the state is being challenged. This hypothesis is tested on unique data for all subnational regions within Myanmar during the period 1962 to 2010 and finds that proxy militias are more likely to be raised in conflict areas after military purges.

Coercion in Rebel Recruitment

Previous research on rebel recruitment has focused on the economic and social incentives groups used as enticements but has overlooked the question of why many armed groups recruit using coercion. The puzzle is why coercion occurs despite its alienating civilian populations and being costly in terms of organizational and military effectiveness. I suggest that recruitment is a dynamic process and that groups are likely to shift recruitment strategies depending on the exigencies of the conflict. In particular, the exposure of the group to military and economic shocks accompanied by shortened time horizons should lead to increasingly coercive recruitment. Whether forced recruitment is a durable solution for a group in the long run is likely to be contingent upon the groups ability to induce a high level of compliance from the individual at a low cost. Further, in order to circumvent costs vis-à-vis the civilian population, the group must be able to restrict defection to the government and the out-migration of the civilian population. Three narratives from Nepal, Ethiopia, and Sierra Leone are provided both to illustrate the arguments and to probe the scope conditions. The article concludes that understanding why and when rebel groups use forced recruitment has vital security implications for the countries in which armed conflict takes place.

The law of the land : Communal conflict and legal authority

Common notions about the source of communal land conflict in Africa have long explained it as growing out of conditions of environmental scarcity. This article argues instead that the institutional structure of the legal system is central to understanding which countries are prone to experience communal land conflict. When competing customary and modern jurisdictions coexist in countries inhabited by mixed identity groups, the conflicting sources of legal authority lead to insecurity about which source of law will prevail. Because the source of law is contested, conflict parties cannot trust the legal system to predictably adjudicate disputes, which encourages the use of extrajudicial vigilante measures. Using new data on communal violence in West Africa, this argument is examined for the period 1990–2009. The results show that in countries where competing jurisdictions exist, communal land conflict is 200–350% more likely. These findings suggest that researchers should consider the role of legal institutions and processes in relation to social unrest and collective violence.

The origins of policing institutions: Legacies of colonial insurgency

This article examines the impact of colonial-era armed conflict on contemporary institutions. It argues that when British colonial administrators were faced with armed insurrection they responded with institutional reform of the police, and that the legacy of these reforms lives on today. Violent opposition prompted the British colonial administration to expand entrance opportunities for local inhabitants in order to collect intelligence needed to prosecute a counterinsurgency campaign. This investment in human capital and institutional reform remained when the colonial power departed; as a result, countries which experienced colonial-era conflict have more efficient policing structures today. I demonstrate how this worked in practice during the Malayan Emergency, 1948–60. Archival data from Malaysia show that local inhabitants were recruited into the police force in greater numbers and were provided with training which they would not have received had there been no insurgency. This process was consolidated and reproduced upon independence in path-dependent ways. To expand the empirical domain, I statistically explore new archival data collected from the UK National Archives on police financing across colonial territories. The results show that armed insurgency during the colonial era is associated with higher percentages of police expenditure during the colonial era and higher perceived levels of contemporary policing capacity.

Chasing Causation: Observational Equivalence in the Study of Civil War

This article draws attention to the problem of observational equivalence in the study of civil war, or when an observed outcome can be generated through multiple processes. In particular, both cross-national and subnational research has found a correlation between poverty and armed conflict, but little has been done to test the causal mechanisms which could drive this finding. Empirically, this article addresses this gap by investigating five arguments which could explain the finding that economic deprivation is correlated with conflict in Nepal. The empirics provide no support for the conventional explanations of grievance or opportunity costs, but instead suggest that measures of poverty proxy areas with weak security apparatuses and that rebel strategy is predicated on deliberately targeting such areas. The results also indicate that researchers should be careful not to conflate the process of recruitment with the production of violence. These results illustrate the importance of testing causal mechanisms when observational equivalence may be present.