One-Sided Violence Against Civilians in War
| Author | Kristine Eck,Lisa Hultman |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343307075124 |
| Date | 01 March 2007 |
| Published date | 01 March 2007 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
233
Introduction
This article presents new data on violence
against civilians in armed conflicts. Until now,
the global studies available on the topic have
all focused on mass killings or genocide; thus,
there is a clear lack of extensive studies dealing
with the full spectrum of attacks on civilian
populations. Moreover, despite the obvious
policy relevance of studying the behaviour of
non-state actors, previous global studies have
dealt exclusively with government violence.
Against this background, we introduce new
data on the intentional and direct killing of
civilians – termed one-sided violence – collected
by Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP)
for the period 1989–2004. This dataset is
made up of yearly death counts for both
government and rebel actors and includes all
direct and deliberate killings of civilians.
We begin by providing a background to
the previous quantitative work on violence
against civilians, explaining the need for a
new dataset. We then proceed to define the
© 2007 Journal of Peace Research,
vol. 44, no. 2, 2007, pp. 233–246
Sage Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi
and Singapore) http://jpr.sagepub.com
DOI 10.1177/0022343307075124
One-Sided Violence Against Civilians in War:
Insights from New Fatality Data*
KRISTINE ECK & LISA HULTMAN
Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University
This article presents new data on the direct and deliberate killings of civilians, called one-sided vio-
lence, in intrastate armed conflicts, 1989–2004. These data contribute to the present state of quanti-
tative 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 govern-
ments 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.
* We would like to thank Lina Edmark, Hanne Fjelde,
Joakim Kreutz, Frida Möller and Daniel Strandow for pro-
viding coding assistance to UCDP. Stephanie McWhorter
also collaborated with us on the backdating. Data collection
was partially funded by the Human Security Centre at the
University of British Columbia and the Centre for the Study
of Civil War at the International Peace Research Institute,
Oslo (PRIO). The protocols for the automated events data
searches were originally developed by Doug Bond. Mats
Hammarström, Magnus Öberg, Erik Melander, Hanne
Fjelde, Erika Forsberg, Scott Gates, Aysegul Aydin and four
anonymous reviewers provided valuable comments on earlier
versions of the article. We would like to thank everyone
working on the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) –
especially Program Director Peter Wallensteen – for their
assistance; responsibility for this article, however, rests solely
with the authors. The authors are listed in alphabetical order,
and equal co-authorship is implied. The authors can be
reached at kristine.eck@pcr.uu.se or lisa.hultman@pcr.uu.se.
Replication data for this article are available at http://www.
prio.no/jpr/datasets. Annually updated data are available on
the UCDP homepage at http://www.ucdp.uu.se.
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