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Covenants Without the Sword International Law and the Protection of Civilians in Times of War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Benjamin Valentino
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College, benjamin.a.valentino@dartmouth.edu
Paul Huth
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, phuth@gvpt.umd.edu
Sarah Croco
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, croco@umich.edu
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Abstract

Do the international laws of war effectively protect civilian populations from deliberate attack? In a statistical analysis of all interstate wars from 1900 to 2003 the authors find no evidence that signatories of The Hague or Geneva Conventions intentionally kill fewer civilians during war than do nonsignatories. This result holds for democratic signatories and for wars in which both sides are parties to the treaty. Nor do they find evidence that a state's regime type or the existence of ethnic or religious differences between combatants explains the variation in civilian targeting. They find strong support, however, for their theoretical framework, which suggests that combatants seek to kill enemy civilians when they believe that doing so will coerce their adversaries into early surrender or undermine their adversaries' war-related domestic production. The authors find that states fighting wars of attrition or counterinsurgency, states fighting for expansive war aims, and states fighting wars of long duration kill significantly more civilians than states in other kinds of wars.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 2006

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58 In wars involving more than two states, we treat states as part of a coalition when the states coordinate their operations and aims at a broad strategic level but maintain significant autonomy mtactics at the operational level (for example, the allies in the First World War). We treat states as part of a “single state-led coalition” when there is an official unified command structure under the unilateral control of a single state, or when there is other tight control of all major operations by a single state (for example, the U.S.-led coalition in the 1991 Gulf War). In these cases, conflict-level variables such as troops committed and fatalities inflicted/incurred are coded for the coalition as a whole, but state-level attributes and characteristics such as regime type and treaty commitments are coded for the lead state only.

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74 We utilized the following baseline values to calculate the marginal effects: attrition/counterinsurgency strategy = 50 percent; war aims = 0; regime type -4.2 (median); treaty=l (mode); civilizational conflict = 0; duration = 223 days (median); relative capabilities .513 (median); population = 37,943,167 (median).

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76 These findings diverge from those reported by Downes (fn. 29), although most of our other findings are consistent. It is difficult to identify the precise reasons for this discrepancy, however, since Downes employs a completely different data set in his analysis. The differences are too numerous to describe here, but the following examples represent three of the most significant differences. Most notably, Downes uses a dichotomous measure of “civilian victimization,” whereas we utilize a continuous measure of intentional civilian fatalities. Second, our measure of military strategy is also continuous—reflecting the percentage of the war devoted to different battlefield strategies—whereas Downes uses a dichotomous measure. Finally, Downes drops from his analysis combatants that he codes as lacking the ability to kill civilians, whereas we include all combatants and attempt to control for the balance of material capabilities between them. As described above, coding the capability to kill civilians is difficult to assess objectively and vulnerable to possible endogeneity. We believe that each of these choices give us greater confidence in our results.

77 Coding for this variable was based on Huth and Allee (fn. 23).

78 Results not recorded due to space constraints.

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80 Dower (fn. 38).

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