How do external territorial threats affect mass killing?
| Author | Mi Hwa Hong,Nam Kyu Kim |
| Published date | 01 July 2019 |
| Date | 01 July 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0022343318821707 |
| Subject Matter | Regular Articles |
How do external territorial threats
affect mass killing?
Mi Hwa Hong
Department of Political Science & International Relations, Kookmin University
Nam Kyu Kim
Department of Political Science & Diplomacy, Sungkyunkwan University
Abstract
The current scholarship on mass killing demonstrates that genocide and other forms of mass murder are usually
policy responses to threats, emphasizing armed conflict and political upheaval, such as revolution, as important causal
factors. However, scholars have so far had little to say about the relationship between a country’s external threat
environment and mass killing. We argue that a country’s external security environment, particul arly when its
neighbors pose threats to its territorial integrity, is a critical and understudied factor shaping a leader’s decision to
employ mass killing. External territorial threats can produce domestic in-group/out-group dynamics, heightening
fears that some domestic groups may be supporting or colluding with the enemy. Yet, given the availability of
alternative policies and the enormous costs of mass killing, territorial threats alone do not suffice to explain why a
state chooses mass killing over other types of violent or nonviolent strategies. Only when leaders are committed to
exclusionary ideologies, are territorial threats more likely to catalyze hatred and fear of domestic out-groups,
increasing a leader’s willingness to direct massive violence against them. Such leaders are more likely to frame
domestic out-groups as inherently threatening and as enemies to be eliminated. Our empirical analysis reveals that
a country’s territorial threat, measured by either territorial rivalries or territorial claims, is associated with a greater
likelihood of mass killing onset only when leaders hold exclusionary ideologies.
Keywords
genocide, human rights, ideology, mass killing, war
What motivates leaders to perpetrate organized massive
violence against unarmed civilians? Following mass mur-
ders like the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and the
Rwandan genocide in the 20th century, numerous stud-
ies have attempted to answer this question. Early quali-
tative studies on genocide and other types of mass
violence focus on structural conditions, such as deep
intergroup divisions (e.g. Fein, 1984), difficult social
conditions (e.g. Staub, 1989), and authoritarian regimes
(e.g. Rummel, 1995). More recent studies instead
emphasize leaders’ political and strategic motives for
using mass killing as a means to seize or maintain polit-
ical power (e.g. Harff, 2003; Shaw, 2003; Valentino,
2004; Valentino, Huth & Balch-Lindsay, 2004). Valen-
tino (2014: 96) observes that ‘much of the scholarship
on political violence produced in the past 20 years has
focused on demonstrating how the motives of political
elites can interact with certain environments to create
incentives for violence’. Current scholarship demon-
strates that genocide and other forms of mass murder
usually constitute leaders’ policy responses to threats;
these studies emphasize that armed conflict and political
upheaval, such as revolutions, serve as a proximate trigger
of mass killing (e.g. Bulutgil, 2015; Harff, 2003; Mid-
larsky, 2005; Straus, 2015).
However, researchers have had comparatively little to
say about the relationship between a country’s external
threat environment and mass killing. They tend to
Corresponding author:
namkkim1@gmail.com
Journal of Peace Research
2019, Vol. 56(4) 529–544
ªThe Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0022343318821707
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equate threat with armed conflict or war. The exclusive
focus on wars may fail to capture a broad range of dif-
ferent interstate relationships (Goertz, Diehl & Balas,
2016). The absence of war does not necessarily indicate
peaceful relationships, since many different levels of
threat and hostility can underlie the absence of overt
violence. In addition, sporadic conflict events, such as
militarized disputes or wars, may not be sufficient to
capture sustained external threats. External threats, short
of direct military confrontations, significantly shape the
domestic balance of power and the interactions between
domestic groups. Thus, it is necessary to distinguish
external threats from wars and separately examine their
effect on mass killing.
In this article, we argue that a country’s external secu-
rity environment, particularly in regard to threats posed
by neighbors to its territorial integrity or its territorial
ambition to expand its territory, is a critical and under-
studied background condition for mass killing. The ever-
growing literature on international relations establishes
that of several conflict issues, including territory, policy,
and regime, territorial issues are the most salient to indi-
viduals and the state, making states more likely to be
belligerent when the homeland is threatened (Gibler,
2012; Hensel et al., 2008; Vasquez, 2009). Several stud-
ies also demonstrate that external territorial threats pro-
duce distinctive outcomes in domestic politics: territorial
threats promote state centralization and militarization
and discourage democratization (Gibler, 2012), increase
the likelihood of state repression (Wright, 2014),
increase political intolerance (Hutchison & Gibler,
2007), and create the conditions for a military regime
to emerge (Kim, 2018a).
We apply this insight to the study of mass killing and
examine the potential influence of external territorial
threats and aggression on mass killing. Consistent with
the studies on war and mass killing, we argue that terri-
torial disputes, serious and salient to the public, can
engender in-group/out-group dynamics at home in
which ruling elites cast certain domestic groups as threa-
tening enemies who may support or collude with the
enemy (Midlarsky, 2005; Tir & Jasinski, 2008; Wright,
2014). Elites seek to impose internal unity, silence oppo-
sitional groups, and extract resources from domestic
audiences, all of which may increase the likelihood of
mass killing (Bak, Rider & Chavez, 2017; Uzonyi,
2018). Yet territorial threats alone cannot sufficiently
explain why a state chooses mass killing over other alter-
native strategies, given the extremely high cost of mass
killing. Security threats must be transformed into group
hatred and fear because genocide and politicide seek to
destroy a targeted social group. Ideology plays a critical
mediating role in driving domestic in-group/out-group
dynamics by constructing social categories and connect-
ing threats to social identity (Semelin, 2013; Straus,
2015; Weitz, 2003). When a leader holds an exclusion-
ary ideology, defined as a belief system ‘that identifies
some overriding purpose or principle that justifies efforts
to restrict, persecute, or eliminate certain categories of
people’ (Harff, 2003: 63), that leader is more likely to
frame out-groups as inherently threatening enemies to be
eliminated. Accordingly, we hypothesize that territorial
threats, in conjunction with exclusionary ideologies, are
more likely to catalyze domestic hatred and fear of out-
groups, increasing a leader’s willingness to direct massive
violence against them.
To assess the effects of territorial threats on mass kill-
ing, we conduct a series of statistical tests using time-series
cross-national data on genocide and politicide from 1955
to 2010. Empirical analysis provides strong and robust
support for our hypothesis. Specifically, we find that ter-
ritorial threats, measured by territorial rivalries or territor-
ial claims, are associated with a greater likelihood of mass
killing onset, but only when leaders hold exclusionary
ideologies.Similarly, exclusionary ideologies are associated
with an increased risk of genocide and/or politicide onsets
when a country experiences an ongoing territorial rivalry
or claim. The results remain when we additionally control
for indicators of internal and interstate wars, as well as
when we restrict the analysis to country-years under acute
political upheaval, such as civil wars and revolutions. Con-
trarily, little evidence suggests that non-territorial security
threats significantly interact with exclusionary ideologies
in predicting mass killing onset, which indicates that not
all external threats are equally salient. Taken together,
these results show that the confluence of territorial threats
and exclusionary ideologies significantly increases the like-
lihood of mass killing onset.
While a recently published paper by Uzonyi (2018)
similarly argues that interstate rivalry increases the like-
lihood of mass killing, our argument is distinct from his
argument; we emphasize that not all external threats are
equally salient and that external threats do not by
themselves lead to the onset of mass killing, requiring
ideological frameworks as we have discussed above.
Empirically, like other existing studies, Uzonyi (2018)
fails to model dynamics in mass killing and examine mass
killing incidence, which tends to produce substantial bias
(Esteban, Morelli & Rohner, 2015; McGrath, 2015).
This article explicitly accounts for the dynamics by
focusing on a mass killing onset and coding ongoing
mass killings as missing.
530 journal of PEACE RESEARCH 56(4)
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