COMPETING PERSPECTIVES ON CIVILIAN VICTIMIZATION
This section first summarizes the theories of civilian victimization tested in the quantitative
analysis—the democratic peace, clash of civilizations, and wars of attrition/territorial annexation.
It then discusses the variables used to test these explanations as well as the control variables.
LIBERAL DEMOCRACY
Several scholars have applied ideas derived from liberal and institutional versions of democratic
peace theory to argue that democracies should be less likely to target civilians or kill large
numbers of them in wartime. While there is as yet no consensus on the causal mechanism,
explanations tend to fall into two camps. According to the first group, democratic institutions
constrain leaders from abusing noncombatants. R.J. Rummel’s formulation remains the most
influential: “The more power a government has, the more it can act arbitrarily according to the
whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign
and domestic subjects. The more constrained the power of governments, the more power is
diffused, checked, and balanced, the less it will aggress on others and commit democide”
(Rummel 1994, 1-2).
The second group emphasizes norms of appropriate behavior that flow from democratic
or liberal theory. One group contends that democratic norms are the key: “If democratic values
promote tolerance, nonviolence, and respect for legal constraints, then democracies should wage
their wars more humanely than other forms of government” (Valentino, Huth, and Balch-Lindsay
2004, 382). A second view, however, maintains that norms of nonviolence and respect for
innocent life have their origins in liberal rather than democratic theory, which forbids violating
the rights of others or treating them as means to an end (Fischer 2000, 15) and applies even to the
citizens of autocracies and/or enemy states in wartime (Doyle 1997, 287, n. 81). Michael Doyle,
for example, contends that restraints vis-à-vis civilians have their origin within liberal thought,
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Convention