How do international borders affect conflict processes? Evidence from the end of Mandate Palestine
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00223433221088324 |
| Author | Richard J McAlexander |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Regular Articles |
How do international borders affect conflict
processes? Evidence from the end
of Mandate Palestine
Richard J McAlexander
Perry World House, University of Pennsylvania
Abstract
Rebels can comply with international law during a conflict by not violating international borders, yet strategic goals
may incentivize rebels to violate these borders. When do international borders affect the spatial and temporal
distribution of rebel activity in a conflict setting? I theorize rebels have an incentive to refrain from violating borders
when doing so will reduce their international legitimacy. When international legitimacy is a less important goal,
rebels will be more likely to violate borders. I test this claim in the context of the 1948 War in Mandate Palestine by
exploiting a quasi-natural experiment in how the 1947 UN partition line was drawn. Using an original dataset on
over 1,000 Palestinian villages from British colonial documents and an atlas of aerial photographs of Palestine, I use a
geographic regression discontinuity design to see how the UN partition line affected the location and timing of
depopulated villages during the war. The results show that villages in areas that the UN assigned to the future Israeli
state as part of the 1947 partition plan were more likely to be conquered before Israel received recognition. These
findings have important implications for understanding where and when rebels target areas and shed new light on
important dynamics of the 1948 War in Palestine.
Keywords
borders, compliance, conflict, international law, Palestine, rebels
Introduction
Howdoincentivestocomplywithinternationallaw
affect rebel behavior within a conflict? Many rebel
groups face incentives to comply with international law
to increase their legitimacy in the eyes of the interna-
tional community. However, compliance is costly. Mil-
itary and strategic incentives pressure rebel groups to
attack civilians and expand their territorial control. Inter-
national law and norms impose costs on this behavior,
which is why rebels that care about legitimacy are less
likely to attack civilians. Existing research has examined
why some rebels comply with international law, and why
some do not. Less is known about how incentives to
comply affect the spatial and temporal distribution of
violence within a conflict. This article argues that the
incentive to comply with international law can affect
where and when rebels select territory for conquest.
Rebels seeking legitimacy will refrain from violating an
international border as a way to signal their commitment
to international law and garner international legitimacy.
I present a theory on how borders and the interna-
tionally recognized right to rule territory can affect where
rebels will target areas for conquest. I argue that rebels
who care about international legitimacy have an incen-
tive to consolidate their rule through violence in territory
where the right to rule is higher – that is, on ‘their’ side of
the border. These rebels will refrain from attacking in
areas where there is less legitimacy as a signal to the
international community that they respect international
law. When the need for international legitimacy is lower,
these restraints become less important to rebel decision-
making. The normative and legal aspect of borders can
restrain the geographic spread of rebel violence. This
Corresponding author:
richardmcalexander@gmail.com
Journal of Peace Research
2023, Vol. 60(5) 823–838
ªThe Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/00223433221088324
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article contributes to our understanding of how the
international system can affect rebel behavior by showing
how incentives for rebels to comply with international
law can vary across space and time within a conflict.
Since borders are ‘bundled treatments’ and can affect
conflict via a wide range of mechanisms, providing sup-
port for my argument requires a case where a border only
matters for normative and legal reasons. Fortunately, the
UN’s involvement in the Palestine Mandate provides
such a case. I test my theory by examining how the
international border drawn by the UN affected rebel
behavior during the 1947–48 war in Mandate Palestine.
In 1947 the UN attempted to prevent a conflict by
partitioning Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab
states. The UN partition line was not implemented. The
UN never sent any troops, material, or international
observers, nor was there a plan to enforce the partition
plan (Khalidi, 1988: 12). I argue that the partition line
still restrained the Israelis because the Israelis sought to
comply with international law as a way to facilitate inter-
national recognition. My results show that the UN par-
tition line affected the course of violence in Palestine
despite being lines on a map drawn in Geneva.
To see the effect of the international border on rebel
behavior, I use a geographic regression discontinuity
design (Keele & Titiunik, 2015). This design compares
geographically proximate villages on either side of the
border. I argue that the partition line constituted a
quasi-natural experiment (Dunning, 2012; Keele &
Titiunik, 2016). The committee in charge of answering
the ‘Palestine Question’ – the United Nations Special
Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) – remained ignor-
ant of many of the relevant facts on the ground and the
characteristics of individual Palestinian villages. This
occurred because the British refused to share the village
census they conducted in 1945, which contained
detailed information on all villages and their population
distribution. This ensured that the partition line was
drawn irrespective of any characteristic of the individual
villages and makes it very likely that villages located
around the border only differed based on which side of
the border they were on. In many ways, the 1948 War is
unique. However, the core dynamics of the Israelis for-
cibly expelling non-coethnics in the process of control-
ling more territory is common to many forms of civil war
(Lichtenheld, 2020). While the UN is no longer in the
habit of drawing lines between populations, examining
the effects of this process in detail highlights important
dynamics of civil wars that may be present in other con-
flicts where rebels seek to control territory and care about
complying with international law.
I use historical data on massacres, exoduses, and occu-
pation dates on over 1,000 villages in Mandate Palestine
during the war to compare villages on either side of the
partition line. Using an atlas compiled from aerial photo-
graphs taken by the British Royal Air Force, I geocoded
nearly every village in Mandate Palestine and computed
its distance to the imagined partition line. In addition, I
used British colonial reports to gather data on the ethnic
composition and agricultural quality of each village.
Analyses of this dataset using a number of methods
shows that villages in the future Jewish State were
(1) more likely to be occupied by Jewish forces before
the Mandate was set to expire (and when Israel formally
declared its independence) and (2) more likely to expe-
rience a forcible expulsion of the Arab population. This
shows that the Israelis refrained from violating the inter-
national border before statehood was achieved but
became more willing to do so after receiving interna -
tional recognition. This is important because it provides
notable intragroup variation in the incentives to comply
with international law.
By showing that the UN’s behavior had a substantial
impact on the course of the conflict, this work engages
with longstanding debates in the International Relations
literature about the role of international organi zations
and more recent work on rebel diplomacy (Coggins,
2015; Huang, 2016). Realist scholars argue that IOs are
merely tools used by powerful states to achieve their goals
(Mearsheimer, 1994). I show how this logic applies to
conflict between rebel groups. While the UN debated
how to solve the Palestine problem, the Israelis engaged
in sustained lobbying efforts. The Palestinian leadership
chose to boycott the UN. The result was a partition plan
that was favorable to the Israelis and disastrous to the
Palestinians. Successful diplomacy by the Israelis, in
turn, provided them with a blueprint for their conduct
during the war. Since the UN had no plans to actually
implement the partition, the Israelis decided to imple-
ment the plan themselves.
1
Rather than secure legitimacy
through public goods provision (Stewart, 2018), the
Israelis lobbied the UN to increase their claim to land
and further their goals.
Historical background on Mandate Palestine
I chose this case to examine the effect of borders on
conflict processes for three reasons. First, the historical
1
For clarity, I refe r to the actors that w ould become the Is raeli
leadership once independ ence was declared as ‘Isra eli’ even when
discussing their actions before 15 May 1948.
824 journal of PEACE RESEARCH 60(5)
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