What drives violence against civilians in civil war? Evidence from Guatemala’s conflict archives
| Author | Rachel A Schwartz,Scott Straus |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343317749272 |
| Published date | 01 March 2018 |
| Date | 01 March 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Regular Articles |
What drives violence against civilians in
civil war? Evidence from Guatemala’s
conflict archives
Rachel A Schwartz & Scott Straus
Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Abstract
Dominant theories of mass violence hold that strategic concerns in civil war drive the deliberate targeting of civilians.
However, the causal mechanisms that link strategic objectives to large-scale violence against civilians remain under-
specified, and as such the causal logics that underpin each remain blurred. In this article, we identify and explicate
four plausible mechanisms that explain why armed groups would target, for strategic purposes, civilians in war. We
then turn to the peak period of violence during the Guatemalan armed conflict to assess which mechanisms were
most prevalent. Specifically, we leverage unique archival data: 359 pages of military files from Operation Sofı
´a, a
month-long counterinsurgent campaign waged in the northwestern Ixil region. Through process tracing of real-time
internal communications, we find that state actors most commonly described the civilian population as loyal to rebel
forces; violence against civilians was a means to weaken the insurgency. Troops on the ground also depicted the Ixil
population as ‘winnable’, which suggests that security forces used violence in this period to shape civilian behavior.
These findings are most consistent with the idea that mass violence in this case and period was a coercive instrument
to defeat insurgents by punishing civilians for collaboration. The evidence from this period is less consistent with a
logic of genocide, in which the purpose of violence would be to destroy ‘unwinnable’ civilian groups. Our analysis
illustrates how a mechanism-centered approach based on process tracing of conflict archives can help uncover logics
underlying civilian killing.
Keywords
civil war, Guatemala, mass violence, process tracing
What drives large-scale killing of civilians? A large
empirical literature finds that mass violence against civi-
lians happens typically in war (Straus, 2015; Valentino,
2014). The dominant theoretical account, in Political
Science and related disciplines, emphasizes that such
mass killing is strategic. In effect, mass violence is a
measure to defeat opponents. Summarizing the consen-
sus, Benjamin Valentino calls such violence ‘war by other
means’ (Valentino, 2014: 94).
There are many questions related to the strategic
approach to mass violence. One is whether such violence
works: do military actors advance their strategic interests
through the use of mass violence or does such violence
backfire, prompting increased resolve and recruitment
for wartime opponents (Souleimanov & Siroky, 2016;
Toft & Zhukov, 2012)? Another line of inquiry con-
cerns the conditions that facilitate large-scale violence,
such as resource endowments, deep social cleavages,
and dependence on local or foreign support (Kuper,
1981; Salehyan, Siroky & Wood, 2014; Weinstein,
2006; Zhukov, 2017).
In this article, we elaborate the causal mechanisms
that explain why perpetrators would consider killing
unarmed civilians as a strategic choice in wartime. We
contend that the theoretical link between military objec-
tives and mass violence remains underspecified within
Corresponding author:
raschwartz4@wisc.edu
Journal of Peace Research
2018, Vol. 55(2) 222–235
ªThe Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0022343317749272
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