2
INTRODUCTION
This paper investigates the question of why governments sometimes implement military or political strategies
that attack enemy civilians purposefully in war. Contrary to the widespread view that war is always hell,
1
civilian victimization—the systematic, repeated application of intentional or indiscriminate violence against
noncombatants during war—occurred in less than one-third of all interstate wars in the last 200 years, and
only 18 percent of all belligerents who participated in these wars implemented strategies that targeted
civilians.
2
A variety of explanations for civilian victimization have been put forward in the literature. Many
studies focus on the related phenomenon of genocide or politicide, the destruction in whole or in part of a
group defined ethnically or politically.
3
Genocide/politicide, however, mostly occurs inside of a state’s
borders and not always during wartime, although internal or external war involvement can be a catalyst for
such events.
4
Other scholars examine how the dynamics of guerrilla warfare lead belligerents to kill
noncombatants.
5
While these studies are useful, they are necessarily limited because guerrilla conflicts are
only one of several scenarios in which civilians are attacked intentionally. A third school of thought argues
that the identities of the two sides determine the brutality of a conflict between them: two “civilized”
countries observe the laws of war when fighting each other, but a “civilized” state fighting an opponent it
defines as “barbaric” will fight in barbaric fashion.
6
Perhaps the most prominent alternative explanation, however, is the argument that democracies,
because of their extensive domestic institutional constraints and liberal beliefs, are less likely than relatively
unconstrained autocracies to kill civilians in war. Several recent studies of genocide, mass killing, and
counterinsurgency warfare maintain that democratic states engage in brutality against noncombatants less
often than non-democracies.
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I argue that the choice to target civilians in war has little to do with a belligerent’s regime type.
Rather, I contend that states tend to target civilians when the perceived military costs of the war—defined as
the number of military fatalities or length of time it will take to achieve the state’s goals—increase. States
wish to economize on costs, and value the lives of their own people over those of foreigners. Wars tend to
be costly when one of three conditions holds. First, battlefield conditions that favor the defense—such as
military technology, geography, and strategy—increase the expense and duration or warfare. Armed
confrontations under such conditions tend to devolve into protracted wars of attrition, and hence are more
1
William T. Sherman, Memoirs, 2
nd
ed. (New York: 1886), Vol. 2, 126-27.
2
See Alexander B. Downes, Targeting Civilians in War (Ph.D Dissertation in progress, University of Chicago), Chapter 3.
3
Recent works include Barbara Harff, “No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust? Assessing Risks of Genocide and
Political Mass Murder since 1955,” American Political Science Review 97, no. 1 (February 2003): 57-73; Benjamin A.
Valentino, “Final Solutions: The Causes of Mass Killing and Genocide,” Security Studies 9, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 1-59;
Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002); and Matthew
Krain, “State-Sponsored Mass Murder: The Onset and Severity of Genocides and Politicides,” Journal of Conflict Resolution
41, no. 3 (June 1997): 331-60.
4
Harff, “No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust?”; Krain, “State-Sponsored Mass Murder.”
5
Stathis N. Kalyvas, “Wanton and Senseless? The Logic of Massacres in Algeria,” Rationality and Society 11, no. 3 (August
1999): 243-85, and Benjamin A. Valentino, Paul Huth, and Dylan Balch-Lindsay, “‘Draining the Sea:’ Mass Killing,
Genocide, and Guerrilla Warfare” (unpub. ms., August 2001).
6
Gerrit W. Gong, The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 18, 28-29, and Mark
B. Salter, Barbarians and Civilization in International Relations (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 38.
7
Harff, “No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust?”; Valentino, Huth, and Balch-Lindsay, “Draining the Sea;” Michael
J. Engelhardt, “Democracies, Dictatorships and Counterinsurgency: Does Regime Type Really Matter?” Conflict Quarterly
12, no. 3 (Summer 1992): 52-63. See also R.J. Rummel, “Democracy, Power, Genocide, and Mass Murder,” Journal of
Conflict Resolution 39, no. 1 (March 1995): 3-26, and Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
Publishers, 1994), 1-2.
Convention