The Strategic Logic of Ethnoterritorial Competition: Violence against Civilians in Africa's Civil Wars

Abstract

Abstract This article develops and tests a new theory of violence against civilians during civil wars by combining geocoded data on African armed conflicts over the past two decades with a range of other geocoded information. The theory suggests a twofold logic of ethnic targeting aimed to enlarge the territory dominated by one's coethnics in the most effective way. First, rebels and government fighters kill civilians in areas populated in equal shares by their own and their adversary's coethnics because, in such areas, small amounts of violence suffice to tilt the local balance of power in their favor. Second, they target places close to the border between the settlement areas of their own and their adversary's coethnics as this will allow expanding the contiguous area under their control. We do not find empirical support for the three most prominent alternative theories, all of which assume that civilian victimization is independent of the political conflict over which the civil war is fought. Civilians are not more likely to be killed in areas where lootable natural resources can be found, in recently conquered territories where fighters are supposed to eliminate enemy collaborators, or where rebel forces who have established only weak control over their fighters operate.