The Logic of Violence in Civil War
Encyclopedia
The Logic of Violence in Civil War is a book which challenges the conventional view of violence in civil wars as irrational. The main argument is that violence only emerges in those disputed territories, and it is generally driven not by the conflict itself, but by previous rancors and enmities among the population.
The author, Stathis N. Kalyvas (born 1964), is a political scientist known for his analysis of the dynamics of polarization and civil war
, ethnic and non-ethnic violence
, and the formation of cleavage
s and identities
. He has also researched party politics
and political institutions
in Europe
. He is a professor at Yale University
.
, we have collected a frightening register of a good amount of extremely violent events in the context of civil wars. And such apparent massive irrational behaviour among combatants and civilians (a sort of unexpected Hobbesian disease
) has been widely examined by the literature. Mainly using anecdotal accounts
or cleavage
-based analyses, previous works tried to insert violence as a phenomenon directly derived from the (military) logic of civil war, but they overlooked the fact that several manifestations of violence can be exogenous to that logic. In fact, civil war can be an exogenous
shock onto some societies
that can activate their invisible networks of grievance
s and feud
s among their individuals. Here it is the relevance of that off-the-path work.
Kalyvas’ book is focused in explaining this sort of violence common in civil wars, namely violence that is significant by its number of victims, its ‘barbarism
’ (or brutality) and the fact that both victims and executioners have had a peaceful performance in their past interaction (i.e. neighbours). The research is tried to be confined inside that kind of violence, in civil wars, and the work principally provides an explanation to the spatial variance of that dependent variable. Temporal approaches are suggested, but not deeply developed in comparative terms.
As civil wars are frequently battled by means of some sort of irregular warfare
by one or both contenders, Kalyvas embodies his explanation in the constraints of irregular wars
, namely the ability of competitors to hide themselves behind civilian population, and the uncertainty
around who is an enemy and who is neutral in such environment. Enemies can be hidden among the apparently supporters of a community. And contenders can only deal in an efficient way with such informational problems exercising violence against previously selected defectors. The efficient way of doing so is waiting for spontaneous civilian informers, and this is more critical in highly competed areas, where powers are balanced and, consequently, sovereignty
is fragmented. On the other hand, the probability of denunciations grows with the level of control that one side has in a given area. The more the control they have, the less the risks of retaliation by the other side informers have to face, but also the less the probability of real defection shifting to the other side and, subsequently, the less the credibility of those numerous and spontaneous informers. Political actors do not search for violence as the first-best option to prevent both shifts and defection
s, because they generally prefer selective, limited violence (that reduces the probability of shifts and defections by deterrence
) to arbitrary, massive violence (that increases the likelihood of those outcomes).
The mechanism follows a tree iterating game
where political actors decide if they want to use violence, depending on the degree of control over that territory, but they confront an “identification problem”. Then, individuals decide if the benefits of denunciation (old feuds and grievances) are higher than the risks of doing so, given the level of control of the own side in the territory. A group of institutions to make denunciation easier and more anonymous are required to increase the likelihood of that event, but they perform worse in rural areas, where denouncers are more visible. So, if denunciation and violence take place, victim’s kin can retaliate or not, depending on the risk
s of doing so given the level of control of the own side in that given territory. When that level is balanced for both sides, the equilibria can be indiscriminate violence or not violence at all, due to mutual deterrence .
This approach to violence as a jointly process, where violence only takes place when civilian
s and political powers cooperate given their interests and cost-benefits calculi, lets the author to develop a model that predicts on one hand the likelihood of violence in a given area; on the other, it clarifies the moral hazard
problem political contenders confront because the abundance of informers is inversely proportional to their usefulness, as we saw above. And, to sum up, that parsimonious model surprise readers because it is able to predict levels (variation) of violence from a micro approach.
of that model, the author collected regional data of the Greek Civil War
, and next to two thirds of violence variation is successfully predicted by the model. And additionally, to test its validity outside the Greek sample, the model is successfully confronted with a large variety of historical and anecdotal accounts about civil wars around the world.
Those findings, both theoretical and empirical, have several significant implications. One of them is that violence in any civil war is a function of civilians’ previous feuds among them and the distribution and degree of control of the contenders over the territory in conflict. The former is given before the war, but it only takes the shape of violence jointly to the latter, namely when sovereignty is fragmented by competing powers.
These findings also explain why contenders will prefer to use selective to indiscriminate violence, and when the latter will take place. The behavioural microfoundations established in the game-theoretical model, and the principal-agent dilemmas the players confront constantly, let to this work to provide an answer to violent outcomes based on incentives and rational behaviour, instead of on gut reactions and irrational impulses.
), non-unitary players (adding some proxy of ‘internal cohesion
’ to the apparatus of both contenders, since soldiers or militias are at the same time agents of one power and individuals with their own private feuds, grievances and family to defend; and they can commit violence or avoid it even when the rational strategy of the unitary contender is the opposite). Additionally, since the temporal dynamics of the civil war are just roughly outlined, one can ask if frontiers between the five defined categories of controlled areas would be blurred depending on the kind of military strategies that take place. Mutual blitzkrieg
s and positional wars in a vast, underpopulated territory can make very difficult for players to know the real degree of control that both powers have in any given territory, especially in those considered as “3” in Kalyvas’ categorization (see figure). In other words, trench wars tend to create stable areas, and thus, concentrated violence in disputed regions. Conversely, military strategies that rely in quick movements and constant interchange of lands tend to spread violence across the territory.
around the strength of causality lines (especially a pair of successfully tested potential endogeneity
sources), selection bias
es, explanatory limits and ways to generalize its conclusions.
All this makes this book hard to criticise in methodological
terms, but at least one can point out some areas not deeply covered by this explanation. First those referred to conceptual doubts: how to distinguish between such variety of different kinds of violence, especially public versus private violence, since it is indirectly induced in the model (mainly via denunciations)?, or those doubts cited above referred to the features of the war (level of conventionality of the armies
, goals that they follow, use of adscriptive discourse and signals), or a more complete explanation for shifts.
Secondly, there are no solid competing explanations for the failed predictions of that parsimonious model. The only reasonable way to increase the level of success predictions is adding complexity to the model, looking for additional independent variables, but perhaps this would rest attractiveness and academic efficiency to that contribution.
And, to finish, perhaps the work can integrate better in the model some significant variables such as elite
s’ manipulation to shape populations’ own belief
s and interests; as well as those strategies of ‘reputational
attacks’, in which contenders pretend to act as their enemies while they commit acts of extreme violence against civilians, confusing the perception
s among population.
The author, Stathis N. Kalyvas (born 1964), is a political scientist known for his analysis of the dynamics of polarization and civil war
Civil war
A civil war is a war between organized groups within the same nation state or republic, or, less commonly, between two countries created from a formerly-united nation state....
, ethnic and non-ethnic violence
Violence
Violence is the use of physical force to apply a state to others contrary to their wishes. violence, while often a stand-alone issue, is often the culmination of other kinds of conflict, e.g...
, and the formation of cleavage
Cleavage (politics)
Cleavage in political science is a concept used in voting analysis and is the division of voters into voting blocs.The preliminary assumption is that voters don’t come in predefined groups of pros and cons for or against a certain subject. Ballot analysis assumes that voters opt for a certain...
s and identities
Identity (social science)
Identity is a term used to describe a person's conception and expression of their individuality or group affiliations . The term is used more specifically in psychology and sociology, and is given a great deal of attention in social psychology...
. He has also researched party politics
Political party
A political party is a political organization that typically seeks to influence government policy, usually by nominating their own candidates and trying to seat them in political office. Parties participate in electoral campaigns, educational outreach or protest actions...
and political institutions
Institution
An institution is any structure or mechanism of social order and cooperation governing the behavior of a set of individuals within a given human community...
in Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
. He is a professor at Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
.
The Logic Behind Violence in Civil Wars
Since at least the French revolutionFrench Revolution
The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...
, we have collected a frightening register of a good amount of extremely violent events in the context of civil wars. And such apparent massive irrational behaviour among combatants and civilians (a sort of unexpected Hobbesian disease
Bellum omnium contra omnes
Bellum omnium contra omnes, a Latin phrase meaning "the war of all against all," is the description that Thomas Hobbes gives to human existence in the state of nature thought experiment that he conducts in De Cive and Leviathan ....
) has been widely examined by the literature. Mainly using anecdotal accounts
Anecdotal evidence
The expression anecdotal evidence refers to evidence from anecdotes. Because of the small sample, there is a larger chance that it may be true but unreliable due to cherry-picked or otherwise unrepresentative of typical cases....
or cleavage
Cleavage
Cleavage may refer to:*Cleavage , partial exposure of the separation between a woman's breasts.**Cleavage enhancement, methods of making a person's breast cleavage look more substantial than it really is....
-based analyses, previous works tried to insert violence as a phenomenon directly derived from the (military) logic of civil war, but they overlooked the fact that several manifestations of violence can be exogenous to that logic. In fact, civil war can be an exogenous
Exogenous
Exogenous refers to an action or object coming from outside a system. It is the opposite of endogenous, something generated from within the system....
shock onto some societies
Society
A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations...
that can activate their invisible networks of grievance
Grievance
A grievance is a wrong or hardship suffered, which is the grounds of a complaint.-History and politics:A grievance may arise from injustice or tyranny, and be cause for rebellion or revolution....
s and feud
Feud
A feud , referred to in more extreme cases as a blood feud, vendetta, faida, or private war, is a long-running argument or fight between parties—often groups of people, especially families or clans. Feuds begin because one party perceives itself to have been attacked, insulted or wronged by another...
s among their individuals. Here it is the relevance of that off-the-path work.
Kalyvas’ book is focused in explaining this sort of violence common in civil wars, namely violence that is significant by its number of victims, its ‘barbarism
Barbarian
Barbarian and savage are terms used to refer to a person who is perceived to be uncivilized. The word is often used either in a general reference to a member of a nation or ethnos, typically a tribal society as seen by an urban civilization either viewed as inferior, or admired as a noble savage...
’ (or brutality) and the fact that both victims and executioners have had a peaceful performance in their past interaction (i.e. neighbours). The research is tried to be confined inside that kind of violence, in civil wars, and the work principally provides an explanation to the spatial variance of that dependent variable. Temporal approaches are suggested, but not deeply developed in comparative terms.
As civil wars are frequently battled by means of some sort of irregular warfare
Irregular warfare
Irregular warfare is warfare in which one or more combatants are irregular military rather than regular forces. Guerrilla warfare is a form of irregular warfare, and so is asymmetric warfare....
by one or both contenders, Kalyvas embodies his explanation in the constraints of irregular wars
Guerrilla warfare
Guerrilla warfare is a form of irregular warfare and refers to conflicts in which a small group of combatants including, but not limited to, armed civilians use military tactics, such as ambushes, sabotage, raids, the element of surprise, and extraordinary mobility to harass a larger and...
, namely the ability of competitors to hide themselves behind civilian population, and the uncertainty
Uncertainty
Uncertainty is a term used in subtly different ways in a number of fields, including physics, philosophy, statistics, economics, finance, insurance, psychology, sociology, engineering, and information science...
around who is an enemy and who is neutral in such environment. Enemies can be hidden among the apparently supporters of a community. And contenders can only deal in an efficient way with such informational problems exercising violence against previously selected defectors. The efficient way of doing so is waiting for spontaneous civilian informers, and this is more critical in highly competed areas, where powers are balanced and, consequently, sovereignty
Sovereignty
Sovereignty is the quality of having supreme, independent authority over a geographic area, such as a territory. It can be found in a power to rule and make law that rests on a political fact for which no purely legal explanation can be provided...
is fragmented. On the other hand, the probability of denunciations grows with the level of control that one side has in a given area. The more the control they have, the less the risks of retaliation by the other side informers have to face, but also the less the probability of real defection shifting to the other side and, subsequently, the less the credibility of those numerous and spontaneous informers. Political actors do not search for violence as the first-best option to prevent both shifts and defection
Defection
In politics, a defector is a person who gives up allegiance to one state or political entity in exchange for allegiance to another. More broadly, it involves abandoning a person, cause or doctrine to whom or to which one is bound by some tie, as of allegiance or duty.This term is also applied,...
s, because they generally prefer selective, limited violence (that reduces the probability of shifts and defections by deterrence
Deterrence (psychological)
Deterrence is a theory from behavioral psychology about preventing or controlling actions or behavior through fear of punishment or retribution...
) to arbitrary, massive violence (that increases the likelihood of those outcomes).
Sequential game
In game theory, a sequential game is a game where one player chooses his action before the others choose theirs. Importantly, the later players must have some information of the first's choice, otherwise the difference in time would have no strategic effect...
where political actors decide if they want to use violence, depending on the degree of control over that territory, but they confront an “identification problem”. Then, individuals decide if the benefits of denunciation (old feuds and grievances) are higher than the risks of doing so, given the level of control of the own side in the territory. A group of institutions to make denunciation easier and more anonymous are required to increase the likelihood of that event, but they perform worse in rural areas, where denouncers are more visible. So, if denunciation and violence take place, victim’s kin can retaliate or not, depending on the risk
Risk
Risk is the potential that a chosen action or activity will lead to a loss . The notion implies that a choice having an influence on the outcome exists . Potential losses themselves may also be called "risks"...
s of doing so given the level of control of the own side in that given territory. When that level is balanced for both sides, the equilibria can be indiscriminate violence or not violence at all, due to mutual deterrence .
This approach to violence as a jointly process, where violence only takes place when civilian
Civilian
A civilian under international humanitarian law is a person who is not a member of his or her country's armed forces or other militia. Civilians are distinct from combatants. They are afforded a degree of legal protection from the effects of war and military occupation...
s and political powers cooperate given their interests and cost-benefits calculi, lets the author to develop a model that predicts on one hand the likelihood of violence in a given area; on the other, it clarifies the moral hazard
Moral hazard
In economic theory, moral hazard refers to a situation in which a party makes a decision about how much risk to take, while another party bears the costs if things go badly, and the party insulated from risk behaves differently from how it would if it were fully exposed to the risk.Moral hazard...
problem political contenders confront because the abundance of informers is inversely proportional to their usefulness, as we saw above. And, to sum up, that parsimonious model surprise readers because it is able to predict levels (variation) of violence from a micro approach.
The Evidence
To run a convincing empirical testExperiment
An experiment is a methodical procedure carried out with the goal of verifying, falsifying, or establishing the validity of a hypothesis. Experiments vary greatly in their goal and scale, but always rely on repeatable procedure and logical analysis of the results...
of that model, the author collected regional data of the Greek Civil War
Greek Civil War
The Greek Civil War was fought from 1946 to 1949 between the Greek governmental army, backed by the United Kingdom and United States, and the Democratic Army of Greece , the military branch of the Greek Communist Party , backed by Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Albania...
, and next to two thirds of violence variation is successfully predicted by the model. And additionally, to test its validity outside the Greek sample, the model is successfully confronted with a large variety of historical and anecdotal accounts about civil wars around the world.
Those findings, both theoretical and empirical, have several significant implications. One of them is that violence in any civil war is a function of civilians’ previous feuds among them and the distribution and degree of control of the contenders over the territory in conflict. The former is given before the war, but it only takes the shape of violence jointly to the latter, namely when sovereignty is fragmented by competing powers.
These findings also explain why contenders will prefer to use selective to indiscriminate violence, and when the latter will take place. The behavioural microfoundations established in the game-theoretical model, and the principal-agent dilemmas the players confront constantly, let to this work to provide an answer to violent outcomes based on incentives and rational behaviour, instead of on gut reactions and irrational impulses.
Open Extensions
Leaving apart those implications, the argument of the manuscript arises some questions that are partially answered by the author, specifically if the model is applicable both to ethnic and non-ethnic violence during civil wars, or if the model is efficient predicting the sort and intensity of violence when some complexity is added, namely more than two players (i.e. Colombian conflictColombian Armed Conflict
The Colombian armed conflict or Colombian Civil War are terms that are employed to refer to the current asymmetric low-intensity armed conflict in Colombia that has existed since approximately 1964 or 1966, between the Colombian government and peasant guerrillas such as the Revolutionary Armed...
), non-unitary players (adding some proxy of ‘internal cohesion
Cohesion
Cohesion may refer to:* Cohesion , the intermolecular attraction between like-molecules* Cohesion , a measure of how well the lines of source code within a module work together...
’ to the apparatus of both contenders, since soldiers or militias are at the same time agents of one power and individuals with their own private feuds, grievances and family to defend; and they can commit violence or avoid it even when the rational strategy of the unitary contender is the opposite). Additionally, since the temporal dynamics of the civil war are just roughly outlined, one can ask if frontiers between the five defined categories of controlled areas would be blurred depending on the kind of military strategies that take place. Mutual blitzkrieg
Blitzkrieg
For other uses of the word, see: Blitzkrieg Blitzkrieg is an anglicized word describing all-motorised force concentration of tanks, infantry, artillery, combat engineers and air power, concentrating overwhelming force at high speed to break through enemy lines, and, once the lines are broken,...
s and positional wars in a vast, underpopulated territory can make very difficult for players to know the real degree of control that both powers have in any given territory, especially in those considered as “3” in Kalyvas’ categorization (see figure). In other words, trench wars tend to create stable areas, and thus, concentrated violence in disputed regions. Conversely, military strategies that rely in quick movements and constant interchange of lands tend to spread violence across the territory.
General Review
Despite these minor considerations and opened questions, the work is a fruitful approach to violence in civil war. It unusually deals with violence as dependent variable, and it explains variance according to the degree of control that both contenders have over the territory, and how it conditions the behaviour of civilians and authorities. Combining a large variety of social sciences’ tools, from historical accounts to rational choice models, this work also provides a self-assessmentSelf-assessment
In social psychology, self-assessment is the process of looking at oneself in order to assess aspects that are important to one's identity. It is one of the motives that drive self-evaluation, along with self-verification and self-enhancement...
around the strength of causality lines (especially a pair of successfully tested potential endogeneity
Endogeneity (economics)
In an econometric model, a parameter or variable is said to be endogenous when there is a correlation between the parameter or variable and the error term. Endogeneity can arise as a result of measurement error, autoregression with autocorrelated errors, simultaneity, omitted variables, and sample...
sources), selection bias
Selection bias
Selection bias is a statistical bias in which there is an error in choosing the individuals or groups to take part in a scientific study. It is sometimes referred to as the selection effect. The term "selection bias" most often refers to the distortion of a statistical analysis, resulting from the...
es, explanatory limits and ways to generalize its conclusions.
All this makes this book hard to criticise in methodological
Methodology
Methodology is generally a guideline for solving a problem, with specificcomponents such as phases, tasks, methods, techniques and tools . It can be defined also as follows:...
terms, but at least one can point out some areas not deeply covered by this explanation. First those referred to conceptual doubts: how to distinguish between such variety of different kinds of violence, especially public versus private violence, since it is indirectly induced in the model (mainly via denunciations)?, or those doubts cited above referred to the features of the war (level of conventionality of the armies
Conventional warfare
Conventional warfare is a form of warfare conducted byusing conventional military weapons and battlefield tactics between two or more states in open confrontation. The forces on each side are well-defined, and fight using weapons that primarily target the opposing army...
, goals that they follow, use of adscriptive discourse and signals), or a more complete explanation for shifts.
Secondly, there are no solid competing explanations for the failed predictions of that parsimonious model. The only reasonable way to increase the level of success predictions is adding complexity to the model, looking for additional independent variables, but perhaps this would rest attractiveness and academic efficiency to that contribution.
And, to finish, perhaps the work can integrate better in the model some significant variables such as elite
Elite
Elite refers to an exceptional or privileged group that wields considerable power within its sphere of influence...
s’ manipulation to shape populations’ own belief
Belief
Belief is the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true.-Belief, knowledge and epistemology:The terms belief and knowledge are used differently in philosophy....
s and interests; as well as those strategies of ‘reputational
Reputation
Reputation of a social entity is an opinion about that entity, typically a result of social evaluation on a set of criteria...
attacks’, in which contenders pretend to act as their enemies while they commit acts of extreme violence against civilians, confusing the perception
Perception
Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs...
s among population.
Related references
- Ron E. Hassner, "To Halve and to Hold: Conflicts Over Sacred Space and the Problem of Indivisibility," Security Studies, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Summer 2003), pp. 1–33.
- Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (2006) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-85409-1. Preview at Google Books.
- Stathis Kalyvas, The Absence of Suicide Missions (2005). In Diego Gambetta(ed.), Making Sense of Suicide Missions.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 209-232.
- Stathis Kalyvas, Warfare in Civil Wars (2005) in Isabelle Duyvesteyn and Jan Angstrom (eds.), Rethinking the Nature of War. Abingdton: Frank Cass, 88-108.
- Stathis Kalyvas, The Urban Bias in Research on Civil Wars (2004) in Security Studies 13:3, 1-31.
- Stathis Kalyvas, The Paradox of Terrorism in Civil Wars (2004) in Journal of Ethics 8:1, 97-138.
- Stathis Kalyvas, The Ontology of "Political Violence:" Action and Identity in Civil Wars (2003) in Perspectives on Politics 1:3, 475-494.
- Stathis Kalyvas, "New" and "Old" Civil Wars: A Valid Distinction? (2001) in World Politics 54:1, 99-118.
- Stathis Kalyvas, Leftist Violence During the Occupation (2000) In Mark Mazower After the War was Over: Reconstructing Family, State, and Nation in Greece, 1944-1960. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 142-183.
- Ariel Merari, "Terrorism as a Strategy in Insurgency," Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Winter 1993), pp. 213–251.
- Monica Duffy Toft, The Geography of Ethnic Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), ISBN 0-691-12383-7.
- Monica Duffy Toft, “Issue Indivisibility and Time Horizons as Rationalist Explanations for War,” Security Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1 (January–March, 2006), pp. 34-69.
See also
- List of politics-related topics
- List of civil wars
- Civil Wars