Geographic determinants of indiscriminate violence in civil wars

Abstract

What determines the type of violence used by military actors in civil wars? Drawing on Kalyvas’s “information problem” and Boulding’s “loss of strength gradient”, this paper proposes a simple model of how the violence becomes more indiscriminate as a function of distance from the actors’ power centers. The proposed mechanism is a growing inability of the actors to distinguish between collaborators of the adversary and innocent bystanders. Tested on the conflict event level for 11 cases of insurgency, the results indicate that a simple distance-decay mechanism can explain the occurrence of indiscriminate violence to a large extent.