terminated” (Carr 2002, 12). The leading scholar of strategic bombing agrees, arguing that
punishment strategies aimed at an adversary’s civilian population rarely extract meaningful
concessions (Pape 1996). Similarly, blockades and economic sanctions—which rely on civilian
hunger rather than military engagements to defeat an adversary—are also thought to have scant
potential as an alternative to military force (Pape 1997). If civilian victimization so rarely pays
dividends, why has it been—and why does it remain—a fixture of warfare?
Despite the prevalence and deadliness of wartime victimization of noncombatants in the
past and present, we lack both reliable data and compelling theories. Figures on civilian
casualties in most wars before the 20
th
century can only be guessed at; nobody bothered (or was
able) to keep track. Few studies have systematically attempted to gather data specifically on the
killing of civilians in wars. Most collections track instances of genocide or politicide—attempts
to destroy all or part of an ethnic or political group—or mass killing—the murder of at least
50,000 civilians—without regard to the context in which these killing episodes occur (Rummel
1998; Harff 2003; Valentino 2004). Other studies restrict their attention to explaining violence
in a particular class of conflicts, such as guerrilla wars or asymmetric conflicts (Kalyvas 1999,
2004; Arreguin-Toft 2001; Merom 2003; Valentino, Huth, and Balch-Lindsay 2004). Genocide
clearly occurs during war, but it is not the only motive for killing civilians, nor is it clear that
eliminating entire groups (or large portions thereof) is a particularly important motive for civilian
victimization. Further, while insurgency and counterinsurgency plays a role in many instances
of civilian victimization, the targeting of noncombatants also occurs in conventional wars.
This paper seeks to understand why states kill enemy noncombatants in wars with other
states, most of which are not guerrilla wars or genocidal in character. Two explanations can be
distilled from the existing literature. Some authors, for example, hold authoritarian states
primarily responsible for wartime victimization of noncombatants since these regimes lack any
2
Convention