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Abstract
Is inflicting civilian casualties counterproductive to effective counterinsurgency operations? Political scientists and military theorists have recently converged around the view that protecting the population is the most important task of effective counterinsurgency. To be effective, counterinsurgents must earn the trust and provide for the welfare of threatened civilian populations. The use of force tends to be inimical to these goals; inflicting civilian casualties, intentionally or as collateral damage, is counterproductive.
These inferences are premature. Scholars have conducted almost no empirical research on these questions, and the evidence supporting the idea that killing civilians is a losing strategy is scant. Drawing on a new database of 168 counterinsurgency campaigns fought between 1800 and 1999, as well as case studies of the United States-Philippine War (1899-1902), the Vietnam War (1959-1975), and the Darfur conflict (2002-present), this dissertation investigates the effect of civilian casualties empirically and analytically.
The data yield two unexpected findings. First, inflicting civilian casualties is not inherently counterproductive; on the contrary, the evidence strongly suggests that killing civilians can significantly increase governments’ chances of defeating insurgencies. Second, however, killing civilians has diminishing military returns: Incumbents who killed massive numbers of civilians were much less likely to defeat insurgencies than incumbents who inflicted lower levels of civilian casualties.
These findings support an alternative theory that explains why (1) targeting civilians as part of a “strategy of coercion” is effective; and (2) killing massive numbers of civilians as part of a “strategy of annihilation” is not. In-depth case study analyses assess the fit of the theory’s causal mechanisms to observed patterns of civilian victimization in the U.S.-Philippine, Vietnam, and Darfur wars. Taken together, the quantitative and qualitative evidence challenges the dominant opinion that killing civilians is necessarily counterproductive, as well as the less-common opposing view that annihilating an insurgency’s entire potential support base is effective.
