A theory of targeted and indiscriminate state violence in networks
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00223433221096983 |
| Author | Daniel R Thomas |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Regular Articles |
A theory of targeted and indiscriminate
state violence in networks
Daniel R Thomas
Columbia University in the City of New York, USA
Abstract
Theories explaining why states choose to use targeted or indiscriminate violence against civilians hinge on the state’s
capacity to gain information about who to target and its ability to do enough damage to prevent defection to the
rebel’s side. In contrast to these theories, I show that the choice of strategy depends on the characteristics of the
community experiencing the violence, not the state employing it. This article argues that even when states can target
certain civilians, they may choose to employ indiscriminate violence owing to the characteristics of the civilians’ social
network structure. The state’s optimal strategy of violence is driven by two factors: the degree distribution of civilians’
social networks and the correlation between citizens’ motivation to leave a network and citizens’ value to other nodes
in the network. When the degree distribution is uniform, and motivation and value are positively correlated,
indiscriminate violence is more often preferred.
Keywords
repression, social networks, state violence
Introduction
The use of indiscriminate violence by states is surprising
because it can cause mobilization in favor of insurgents,
but states employ it anyway (Mason & Krane, 1989;
Goodwin, 2001; Kalyvas, 2006). Figure 1 shows that
states continuously use violence against civilians, and
that a large proportion of this violence is indirect in
the form of air strikes, shelling and chemical weapons.
The use of indiscriminate violence varies by time
and location, provoking the question of under what
conditions states prefer this strategy. Existing argu-
ments focus on the state’s capacity to effectively use
violence, the role of limited information (Kalyvas,
2006), and the inability of a rebel group to protect
civilians (Zhukov, 2014), but predict that indiscrimi-
nate violence should be used rarely or only when con-
flicts end quickly, and generally view indiscriminate
violence as a second-best option for the state. I offer a
theory suggesting that indiscriminate violence can be
the state’s preferred strategy even when it can engage in
targeted violence, conditional on the visible character-
istics of the structure of civilians’ social networks.
I study a formal social network model of violence and
displacement in order to understand the choice of the
state to use targeted or indiscriminate violence against a
community of civilians in order to remove them from a
territory. I focus on the effects of network structure
because social networks play an important role in deter-
mining the effects of repression and violence strategies
on behavior (Siegel, 2011). Violence necessarily has
impacts beyond its direct victims because it reshapes
social structures through the removal of network mem-
bers. I analyze the effects of the change in network struc-
ture in response to violence directly and examine how
they determine the strategic behavior of the state.
The theory captures a setting in which a state has
chosen a particular village or city to forcibly remove the
Corresponding author:
daniel.thomas@columbia.edu
Journal of Peace Research
2023, Vol. 60(5) 777–791
ªThe Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/00223433221096983
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