normative or institutional restraints on their power (Rummel 1994, 1995; Merom 2003;
Valentino et al., 2004). Liberal democracies—governed by liberal norms protecting the rights of
innocent civilians, and checks on the power of executive and military power—wage war in a
more humane fashion. Other analysts attribute attacks on civilians to a “clash of civilizations”:
racist stereotypes or views of the enemy as barbaric and lacking in humanity, which permit or
even oblige the use of uncivilized methods against the adversary (Dower 1986; Salter 2002).
This paper has two goals. First, it attempts to improve our database for testing
hypotheses of civilian victimization by compiling data on four different indicators of
noncombatant suffering in interstate wars in the last two hundred years: the employment by
states of military strategies that purposefully target enemy civilians; mass killing (50,000 or more
killed); raw numbers of noncombatants killed by each belligerent; and a transformation of these
figures into an ordinal variable. While the data—particularly for the two variables on actual
numbers killed—is incomplete (and will probably always remain so) and somewhat skewed by a
few very large observations, it is nonetheless capable of yielding suggestive results regarding the
correlates of civilian victimization.
Second, the paper proposes a new theory of civilian victimization and tests it
quantitatively against alternative explanations based on regime type and the identity of the
opponent controlling for several other important factors. I argue that noncombatants are most
likely to be targeted—and high numbers of civilian casualties likely to result—when wars
become costly, protracted wars of attrition, on the one hand, or when states bent on conquering
enemy territory view the population as presenting a threat to their secure control of that land.
Wars of attrition, characterized by static, trench warfare, sieges, or guerrilla resistance by one
side tend to devour manpower and take a long time to prosecute to completion. The temptation
to strike at an adversary’s civilian population in these circumstances in order to lower its morale
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Convention