Ideology and state terror
| Date | 01 March 2018 |
| Author | Adam Scharpf |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343317748346 |
| Published date | 01 March 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Regular Articles |
Ideology and state terror: How officer beliefs
shaped repression during Argentina’s
‘Dirty War’
Adam Scharpf
Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences, University of Mannheim
Abstract
How does ideology influence state terror? Studies on state repression have looked at the leaders’ decisionmaking to
explain how much violence states use against internal enemies. However, government leaders usually rely on their
security forces to produce violence. I argue that distinct ideological beliefs within the military apparatus produce
different levels of repression even if leaders are determined to terrorize the population. I expect officers who share the
ideology of their leader to willingly execute the government’s repressive program, while officers who do not share the
leader’s convictions refuse to terrorize civilians. I study these dynamics in the case of Argentina’s Dirty War (1975–
81) during which the government tasked its ideologically divided army with a nationwide terror campaign. Combin-
ing qualitative and quantitative data from historical sources, I identify the ideological beliefs and repressive behavior
of military commanders. Consistent with my expectation, I find that loyal nationalist officers in the infantry, artillery,
and communications branch of the army perpetrated significantly more violence than liberal cavalry officers who
rejected the junta’s terror program. The results demons trate that ideological beliefs within the state’s security
apparatus can lead to violent outcomes that deviate from government orders.
Keywords
Argentina, ideology, military, officers, state repression
The First World War was a confrontation
between armies, the Second was between
nations, and the Third is between ideologies.
—Argentine General Leopoldo F. Galtieri
1
Introduction
How does ideology influence the intensity of state terror?
Government leaders play a crucial role in the production
of war and violence (Chiozza & Goemans, 2011;
Horowitz, Stam & Ellis, 2015). Consequently, studies
on repression have looked at the leaders’ decisionmaking
to explain the extent of violence states use against inter-
nal enemies (e.g. Kim, forthcoming; Midlarsky, 2005;
Valentino, 2004; Weitz, 2015). However, government
leaders usually rely on their security forces to produce
violence. Like their superiors, security agents have ideo-
logical beliefs which might resonate with or contradict
the leader’s convictions and influence their willingness to
implement terror campaigns (e.g. Brehm & Gates, 1999;
Gutie
´rrez Sanı
´n & Wood, 2014).
I argue that distinct ideological beliefs within the
state’s military apparatus produce different levels of
repression even if leaders are determined to terrorize the
population. Officers who share their leader’s ideology are
likely to identify the same threat, agree with the violent
plan to overcome it, and willingly execute the govern-
ment’s terror program. Officers who do not share the
government’s mindset are more likely to disagree with
the cause of the threat and reject the government’s order.
Corresponding author:
adam.scharpf@uni-mannheim.de
1
La Prensa, 3 November 1981, quoted in CONADEP (1986: 443).
Journal of Peace Research
2018, Vol. 55(2) 206–221
ªThe Author(s) 2018
Reprints and permission:
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DOI: 10.1177/0022343317748346
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I expect that these officers are ultimately less likely to
victimize broad segments of the civilian population.
To assess how ideologies within the military contrib-
ute to subnational variation in repression, I draw on
Argentina’s Dirty War (1975–81). Figure 1 shows that
despite the junta’s plan to broadly terrorize the Argentine
population, repression varied substantively across areas.
I propose that this pattern was influenced by the diver-
ging ideological convictions within the Argentine army.
Nationalist officers saw the country at the center of a
communist world conspiracy and concurred with the
junta’s plan to violently reorganize society. Liberal
officers opposed claims of a communist invasion and
advocated the selective use of repression.
Argentina’s Dirty War offers a unique setup to trace
the influence of ideological convictions within the mili-
tary on state repression. To overcome challenges in the
identification of political attitudes, this study exploits the
segmentation of ideological beliefs between the branches
of the Argentine army. I draw on a multitude of original
historical sources to collect information on the historic
deployment of army units and career records of officers.
I then link these data to information on repression that
occurred under each officer’s command.
The results show that violence was significantly higher
in areas controlled by nationalist officers of the infantry,
artillery, and communications branch that shared the jun-
ta’s convictions than in areas controlled by liberal cavalry
officers who disagreed with the government’s terror cam-
paign. This finding is robust to a variety of statistical tests.
Qualitative and quantitative information suggests that the
finding does not result from the officers’ strategic deploy-
ments or from differences in rebel resistance.
The study offers three contributions to the litera-
ture on state repression. First, the theoretical argument
and empirical results add to an emerging research
program on ideology and violence in civil wars (e.g.
Balcells & Kalyvas, 2015; Gutie
´rrez Sanı
´n&Wood,
2014; Oppenheim et al., 2015). The literature on state
repression has analyzed how structural conditions and
the decisions of political leaders influence state vio-
lence (e.g. Fariss, 2014; Harff, 2003; Valentino,
2004). Recent studies have turned to security organi-
zations to show how agents within these organizations
influence repression (e.g. Greitens, 2016; Hassan,
2017). Continuing this line of research, this article
offers systematic micro-level evidence on the nexus
between private ideological beliefs and violence perpe-
trated by military commanders.
Second, the study contributes to a burgeoning litera-
ture that utilizes archival information to gain a deeper
understanding of the micro-dynamics of political conflict
(e.g. Kalyvas, 2006; McLauchlin, 2015; Sullivan, 2014).
Following best practice approaches, it triangulates pri-
mary and secondary sources to create a comprehensive
database on the characteristics and behavior of military
officers (Balcells & Sullivan, 2018). Supplementary evi-
dence gained through expert interviews and question-
naires corroborates the plausibility of the proposed
mechanism including the segmentation of ideological
beliefs across different army branches.
Finally, the article adds to the historical understand-
ing of Argentina’s Dirty War. In contrast to the common
focus on the wrongdoing of junta generals (e.g. Fontana,
1987; Pion-Berlin & Lopez, 1991), it offers a
Figure 1. Spatial variation in repression during Argentina’s
Dirty War, 1975–81
Map visualizes disappearances and executions in areas of the military
grid system. To avoid inaccurate shading due to imprecise border data
for areas in the South, only municipalities with commands are
colored.
Scharpf 207
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