Violence Against Civilians in Civil Wars: Looting or Terror?
| Author | ANKE HOEFFLER,JEAN-PAUL AZAM |
| Published date | 01 July 2002 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343302039004006 |
| Date | 01 July 2002 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
461
Introduction
In the words of an Oxfam official, ‘conspicu-
ous atrocity against civilians is used effectively
to kill some, terrorize the rest to flee, and
undermine the sense of society which could
help to build peace again. This is a purpose-
ful targeting of the enemy’s “social capital”’
© 2002 Journal of Peace Research,
vol. 39, no. 4, 2002, pp. 461–485
Sage Publications (London, Thousand Oaks,
CA and New Delhi)
[0022-3433(200207)39:4; 461–485; 025824]
Violence Against Civilians in Civil Wars:
Looting or Terror?*
JEAN-PAUL AZAM
ARQADE, IDEI, University of Toulouse, Institut Universitaire de France,
and Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford
ANKE HOEFFLER
St Antony’s College and Centre for the Study of African Economies, University
of Oxford, and International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO)
This article analyses the motives of violence against civilians during internal wars. It is suggested that
soldiers may terrorize civilians because they need the loot to augment their resources while the rest of
the time is engaged in fighting proper. An alternative hypothesis suggests that terrorizing the civilian
population plays a direct military role. The displacement of large fractions of the civilian population
reduces the fighting efficiency of the enemy, as they cannot hide as easily and obtain less support. These
two alternative hypotheses are investigated in a simple two-stage game-theoretic model. At stage 1, the
government and the rebels simultaneously decide on the level of forces engaged in violence against civil-
ians before they choose the level of forces that they engage in the fighting proper at stage 2. There are
two types of sub-game perfect equilibria in this model: there is a pure fighting equilibrium in which
no violence against civilians takes place and a pure terror equilibrium. In the latter equilibrium, it is
shown that terror substitutes for fighting if the government can afford it. Predictions of the model are
tested using African refugee data. In accordance with the theoretical model, the refugee population dis-
plays strong positive serial correlation, and after controlling for war, overseas development assistance
has a positive impact on the outflow of refugees. Thus, the results support the hypothesis that violence
against civilians is motivated by military objectives and suggest that donor funding to governments at
war should be cut if the protection of civilians is regarded as more important than the fate of the
fighters.
* We wish to thank, without implicating, Corinne Perthuis,
from the UNHCR office in Paris for a very useful dis-
cussion, as well as Béla Hovy from the same institution for
assistance with the data. This article has been presented at
the WIDER–UNU conference ‘Why Some Countries
Avoid Conflict While Others Fail: The Impact of Public
Expenditures’ in Helsinki, Finland, 20–21 October 2000,
as well as at an ARQADE–IDEI seminar in Toulouse, where
it has benefited from the comments of many participants,
whom we wish to thank without implicating. We also
thank Paul Collier for a useful discussion, with the same
caveat. We gratefully acknowledge funding from WIDER
as well as additional funding for Jean-Paul Azam’s visits to
Oxford by the Institut Universitaire de France. Anke Hoef-
fler’s research for this article was partially funded by the
Research Council of Norway (NFR). The dataset and a
detailed description of the data sources can be
obtained from Anke Hoeffler’s website,
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ball0144/.
Correspondence: azam@univ-tlse1.fr.
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(Cairns, 1997: 17). While the same author
states that ‘estimates of the proportion of
civilians among all those now being killed
range upwards from 84 percent’, the former
quotation contains a hypothesis that is inves-
tigated with the tools of modern economics
in the present article, namely, that violence
against civilians is used as a military tactic,
and is not just a by-product of the normal
course of war. Later in this book, he also
claims that ‘attacks on civilians by their
governments have been part of the “counter-
insurgency” tactics of colonial and indepen-
dent rulers for much of this century’ (Cairns,
1997: 26). However, this hypothesis is not
clearly distinguished in this book from
another, rather close one: ‘modern conflict
. . . challenges the very distinction between
war and peace . . . The forces of both govern-
ment and opposition . . . blend into illicit
business and organised crime’ (Cairns, 1997:
5). Whereas the first quotation above points
out the tactical aims pursued through
violence against civilians, the latter views it as
an input in the pursuit of gainful activity by
violent means, which in times of civil conflict
will take the form of looting. Bayart, Ellis &
Hibou (1999) concur with this diagnosis,
emphasizing how governments are often
more interested in the illicit enrichment of
the ruling elite than in the quest for the public
good. Reno (1998) presents a detailed analy-
sis of several cases of civil wars where the
looting dimension is evidently the dominant
determinant of the rebellion. His analyses of
the wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Congo-
Zaire have done a lot to bring home the
expression ‘warlord politics’ in the standard
academic vocabulary about conflicts, and to
put the illegal exploitation of diamonds by
rebellion leaders, among other primary
resources, under special scrutiny. Charles
Taylor in Liberia and Laurent-Désiré Kabila
in Congo-Zaire are convincingly depicted in
this book as shrewd entrepreneurs who set
up their rebel organizations as profitable
businesses, challenging rulers engaged in the
gainful exploitation of their own countries.
In the theoretical literature, Grossman
(1999) models both the government and the
rebels as ‘alternative kleptocrats’, viewing the
appropriation of wealth as the ultimate goal
of a revolution, the takeover of state power
being only a means to this end. Collier
(2000) goes one step further and describes
the rebellion organization as a going concern,
suggesting that the declared political goals,
like the overthrow of the incumbent ruler,
might be of secondary importance, while
greed is the true engine of the rebellion.
Azam (2002) analyses a theoretical model of
looting, where a share of the time of the
soldiers is used for looting the enemy, in
order to grab additional resources and com-
plement the soldiers’ pay with the loot, while
the rest of their time is engaged in fighting
proper, with some distant political goal. The
inefficiency involved in reciprocal looting
between two contending groups is brought
out by this model, where more looting by
one side provides an incentive for the other
side to step up its looting effort, by reducing
the opportunity cost of hiring soldiers. In
this model, violence against civilians is a
natural fall-out of the looting activity.
The present article aims at investigating
the alternative hypothesis described above,
namely, that terrorizing the civilian popu-
lation plays a military role. For the sake of the
argument, the latter hypothesis is analysed
here in a model without looting, while
looting and terror are probably both present
in the real-world civil conflicts. Treating
them separately allows us to derive clearly
their different implications. A theoretical
model is first presented, in order to bring out
some testable predictions of the terror
hypothesis that run counter to the ones
derived from the looting model. In the latter,
violence against civilians is a substitute for
deficient finance, so that bringing in
additional funds would induce the armies to
journal of PEACE RESEARCH volume 39 / number 4 / july 2002
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