Lisa Hultman

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.

Battle Losses and Rebel Violence: Raising the Costs for Fighting

In many armed conflicts, rebel groups deliberately target civilians. This article examines whether such violence is related to the performance of the rebels on the battlefield. It is proposed that rebel groups who are losing battles target civilians in order to impose extra costs on the government. When rebels attack civilians, the government may incur both political and military costs. Violence against civilians is thus used as an alternative conflict strategy aimed at pressuring the government into concessions. The argument is evaluated by using monthly data for rebel groups involved in armed conflict from January 2002 to December 2004.

United Nations Peacekeeping and Civilian Protection in Civil War

Does United Nations peacekeeping protect civilians in civil war? Civilian protection is a primary purpose of UN peacekeeping, yet there is little systematic evidence for whether peacekeeping prevents civilian deaths. We propose that UN peacekeeping can protect civilians if missions are adequately composed of military troops and police in large numbers. Using unique monthly data on the number and type of UN personnel contributed to peacekeeping operations, along with monthly data on civilian deaths from 1991 to 2008 in armed conflicts in Africa, we find that as the UN commits more military and police forces to a peacekeeping mission, fewer civilians are targeted with violence. The effect is substantial - the analyses show that, on average, deploying several thousand troops and several hundred police dramatically reduces civilian killings. We conclude that although the UN is often criticized for its failures, UN peacekeeping is an effective mechanism of civilian protection.

Beyond Keeping Peace: United Nations Effectiveness in the Midst of Fighting

While United Nations peacekeeping missions were created to keep peace and perform post-conflict activities, since the end of the Cold War peacekeepers are more often deployed to active conflicts. Yet, we know little about their ability to manage ongoing violence. This article provides the first broad empirical examination of UN peacekeeping effectiveness in reducing battlefield violence in civil wars. We analyze how the number of UN peacekeeping personnel deployed influences the amount of battlefield deaths in all civil wars in Africa from 1992 to 2011. The analyses show that increasing numbers of armed military troops are associated with reduced battlefield deaths, while police and observers are not. Considering that the UN is often criticized for ineffectiveness, these results have important implications: if appropriately composed, UN peacekeeping missions reduce violent conflict.

Weakening the Enemy : A Disaggregated Study of Violence against Civilians in Africa

While case-based narratives from civil wars often stress the ethnic dimension of civilian atrocities, cross-national studies have found limited evidence in support of such contentions. Addressing this debate, we argue that warring actors often use ethnic affiliation to identify groups of suspected enemy supporters when individual wartime affiliations are not known. Since warring actors depend on their civilian constituencies for support, collective targeting of the enemy’s co-ethnics becomes a strategy for weakening the enemy’s capacity. Armed actors are thus more likely to engage in civilian abuse in areas where the enemy’s ethnic constituency resides. To examine this argument, we combine new georeferenced event data on violence against civilians in African conflicts, 1989–2009, with spatial data on the location of the warring actors’ ethnic constituencies. The analysis shows that the number of civilians killed by both governments and rebel groups is higher in areas inhabited by the enemy’s ethnic constituency.

UN peace operations and protection of civilians

Protection of civilians is now at the forefront of the responsibilities of the international community. There is a strong international norm that civilian populations should be protected from violence. But how committed is the United Nations to acting in line with this norm? I argue that the UN Security Council (UNSC) has an interest in demonstrating that it takes violence against civilians seriously. Through a broadened security agenda including human security, the legitimacy and the credibility of the UNSC hinges on its ability to act as a guarantor of civilian protection. As a consequence, the UN is more likely to deploy peace operations in conflicts where the warring parties target the civilian population. The argument is supported by a statistical examination of all internal armed conflicts in 1989–2006. The results show that the likelihood of a UN peace operation is higher in conflicts with high levels of violence against civilians, but this effect is mainly visible after 1999. This year marked a shift in the global security agenda and it was also when the UNSC first issued an explicit mandate to protect civilians. Conflicts with high levels of violence against civilians are also more likely to get operations with robust mandates. This suggests that the UNSC is not just paying lip service to the protection norm, but that it actually acts to implement it.

Attacks on Civilians in Civil War : Targeting the Achilles Heel of Democratic Governments

Previous research has indicated that democracy decreases the risk of armed conflict, while increasing the likelihood of terrorist attacks, but we know little about the effect of democracy on violence against civilians in ongoing civil conflicts. This study seeks to fill this empirical gap in the research on democracy and political violence, by examining all rebel groups involved in an armed conflict 1989–2004. Using different measures of democracy, the results demonstrate that rebels target more civilians when facing a democratic (or semi-democratic) government. Democracies are perceived as particularly vulnerable to attacks on the population, since civilians can hold the government accountable for failures to provide security, and this provides incentives for rebels to target civilians. At the same time, the openness of democratic societies provides opportunities for carrying out violent attacks. Thus, the strength of democracy—its accountability and openness—can become an Achilles heel during an internal armed conflict.

United Nations peacekeeping dynamics and the duration of post-civil conflict peace

How do the qualities of United Nations peacekeeping operations (PKOs) influence the duration of peace after civil wars? Recent work shows that UN peacekeeping extends the duration of peace. However, this work has only been able to assess whether the presence or absence of UN missions affects post-conflict peace processes. Such analyses offer little in the way of policy prescriptions for planning and structuring PKOs to effectively pursue their goals. By employing fine-grained data on the personnel composition of PKOs, and generating expectations from rationalist bargaining models of civil war, we argue that the number and type of personnel deployed to a PKO influence the UN’s ability guarantee peace by addressing the information and commitment problems that so often lead to the collapse of post-conflict peace. We analyze how the composition of missions influences the duration of peace, finding that, as the number of UN military troops deployed increases, the chance of civil war recurring decreases. However, other personnel types do not have the same effect. We conclude that the effectiveness of post-conflict peacekeeping lies in the ability of PKOs to alleviate commitment problems through the deployment of military troops that are able to defend the peace.

COIN and civilian collaterals : patterns of violence in Afghanistan, 2004–2009

Theories and counterinsurgency doctrines emphasize the importance of avoiding civilian casualties. Yet, many operations produce large numbers of so-called collateral civilian deaths. I present two competing arguments for when collateral deaths occur. One the one hand, they could be the unintentional result of offensives when trying to maintain force protection; on the other hand, they could be the result of a deliberate choice of relying on indiscriminate violence when pressured on the battlefield. I use new data on violence in Afghanistan 2004–2009, disaggregated by province and month, to examine what type of battlefield dynamics are more likely to produce high levels of collateral civilian casualties. The results show that civilian casualties are particularly high after counterinsurgency forces suffer losses in combat.

Military Offensives in Afghanistan : A Double-Edged Sword

The current counterinsurgency operation in Afghanistan has failed to defeat the insurgency and levels of violence have increased over time. Even though there are several potential factors explaining this development, it prompts the question of how effective the military offensives are at weakening the insurgents and their ability to carry out violent attacks. I propose that targeted killings of insurgents reduce their fighting capacity in the short term, which leads to fewer attacks against government targets as the insurgents shy away from costly combat. However, as a way of adapting to a temporary reduction in capacity, insurgents may instead increase their targeting of the civilian population with the purpose of undermining the legitimacy of the government and the international forces. This potential double effect of military offensives is examined using monthly data on violence in Afghanistan by each province, 2004–2009. The findings provide some support for the contention that killing insurgents can reduce their attacks against government targets, but at the same time risk leading to an increase in attacks against civilian targets. The use of force thus seems to be a double-edged sword in the struggle against the insurgents in the present war in Afghanistan.