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State violence against civilians is a cause of immense human suffering in many countries around the globe. Between 2017 and 2018 an estimated 700,000 Rohingya were displaced from Myanmar to refugee camps in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, in one of the most recent waves of violence against them. A fact-finding mission sent by the UN Human Rights Council concluded that the human rights violations in Kachin, Rakhine, and Shan States were “shocking for their horrifying nature and ubiquity” and identified “the Myanmar security forces, particularly the military,” as the principal perpetrators.1 In the armed conflict that has ravaged Syria since 2011, many thousands of civilians have died as a result of persistent state violence, often inflicted by unguided barrel bombs dropped in large numbers, and frequently hitting markets, hospitals, and schools.2 The UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide expressed grave concern about noncombatants in areas under attack by the government, given that “government offensives in areas controlled by armed opposition groups in Syria have been carried out with little regard for the lives of civilians.”3 Over the course of the civil war in Guatemala from the early 1960s to the mid 1990s, most of the state's victims were civilians, and most of those were of indigenous origin.4 In 1999, the Commission for Historical Clarification concluded that over 80 percent of the 200,000 war victims were Mayan, and that state forces and affiliated paramilitary groups were responsible for more than 90 percent of all documented violations.5 Other high-profile examples of large-scale state violence against civilians include the internal armed conflicts in Chechnya, Sri Lanka, and Sudan. In short, large-scale state violence against civilians remains a horrifyingly common feature around the globe. Between 1955 and 2005 alone, ninety campaigns of state-led mass killings with 1,000 victims or more have been identified, the overwhelming majority conducted in the context of political instability, such as civil wars.6
Evidence from several studies suggests that the likelihood of state-led mass killings of civilians increases dramatically in times of internal conflict, when state actors deliberately target not only rebels but also members of their alleged civilian constituency, or fail to effectively distinguish between the two.7 Yet the consequences of this type of violence...