Killing Civilians to Signal Resolve:
Rebel Strategies in Intrastate Conflicts
Lisa Hultman
Department of Peace and Conflict Research
Uppsala University
lisa.## email not listed ##
Paper prepared for the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Washington
D.C., 1-4 September 2005. Work in progress, please do not cite.
Abstract
This paper deals with the question why rebels groups in intrastate conflicts choose
to kill civilians, despite both domestic and international audience costs. From a
bargaining perspective, I argue that rebels that are losing on the battlefield may
target civilians in order to signal their resolve to the government, in trying to gain
concessions. Since it is assumed to be a costly action, the rebels thereby inform the
government that they are extreme enough to continue fighting for their cause even
though not militarily strong enough, and that continued fighting therefore will be
costly. A further implication of the argument is that conflict duration should have
negative effects on rebel violence against civilians, since the expected effect of
violence as a signal decreases over time. The study is based on a dataset with
monthly observations over rebel killings of civilians in all intrastate armed conflicts
from January 2002 to December 2004. The hypotheses are tested using a zero-
inflated negative binomial regression model, and the empirical results support the
theoretical argument.
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