Military reserves and "war among the civilian population"
In: Défense nationale et sécurité collective. [Englische Ausgabe] : current strategic thinking, Band [63], Heft [12], S. 72-78
ISSN: 1779-3874
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In: Défense nationale et sécurité collective. [Englische Ausgabe] : current strategic thinking, Band [63], Heft [12], S. 72-78
ISSN: 1779-3874
World Affairs Online
In: Défense nationale et sécurité collective. [Französische Ausgabe], Band 63, Heft 12, S. 72-78
ISSN: 1950-3253, 0336-1489
Results from a random sample survey of US Air Force personnel show that 4.6 per cent exhibit alcohol dependence, indicated by symptoms of withdrawal and impaired control over drinking. An additional 9.3 per cent can be identified as nondependent alcohol abusers, indicated by serious adverse effects of drinking (such as arrest, accident, hospitalization, or significant work impairment) or by heavy alcohol consumption (over 150 ml of ethanol daily). Compared with data from supervisors and official records, survey results did not understate alcohol-related problems. Survey reports of alcohol consumption did underestimate alcoholic beverage sales by about 20 per cent, but adjustments for this discrepancy increased the prevalence rate by less than one percentage point. Rates of serious alcohol abuse among representative samples of males in the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and civilian populations were also compared. Although the rates were higher in the military than among civilians, most of the difference was associated with the higher-risk demographic characteristics of military personnel, who are more likely than civilians to be young unmarried males. Results indicate that the rate of alcohol abuse in the military is about the same as in civilian groups with comparable demographic characteristics.
BASE
In: The journal of conflict resolution: journal of the Peace Science Society (International), Band 63, Heft 6, S. 1460-1487
ISSN: 1552-8766
Why do civilians in warzones often hold widely divergent beliefs about what is happening in the fighting? While there is a burgeoning literature on the micro-dynamics of armed conflict, variation in civilians' factual beliefs has received scant attention. Yet such beliefs are critical, as they form the basis for wartime opinion and action. I argue that—particularly for civilians outside the direct "line of fire"—this variation comes not chiefly from an event's empirical nature, but from civilians' prior political orientations in the dispute. In order to investigate these dynamics, I fielded a survey experiment in Pakistan in which I manipulated the features of a reported counterinsurgent air strike and then measured civilians' ensuing beliefs about it. The results show that these beliefs are most driven by the perpetrator's identity and civilians' own preexisting attachments. While actual casualty levels matter too, these findings suggest that civilians' beliefs about conflict events are often deeply biased in nature.
World Affairs Online
In: The journal of conflict resolution: journal of the Peace Science Society (International), Band 61, Heft 8, S. 1595-1625
ISSN: 1552-8766
Insurgency and counterinsurgency are widely described as "population-centric warfare": a competition between military actors over civilian loyalties. Drawing on a high-resolution conflict event data set and a new approach for analyzing reactive behavior in space and time, this article answers the question of how civilian cooperation and defection are systematically driven by incumbent and insurgent violence. Theoretically, the study contributes to resolving a dispute between proponents of deterrence- and alienation-based approaches to population-centric warfare. Empirically, this analysis improves upon the mixed results from previous microstudies in favor of an integrated picture: indiscriminate violence has almost no effect on collaboration with the adversary in its immediate spatiotemporal vicinity. At larger levels of aggregation, however, a clear reactive pattern of collaboration with the adversary becomes visible which is in line with alienation-based reasoning.
World Affairs Online
In: Journal of peace research, Band 56, Heft 4, S. 545-558
ISSN: 1460-3578
State indiscriminate violence against civilians has been viewed as counterproductive for the government. This conclusion hinges on the assumption that indiscriminate violence aggrieves civilians against the government even when the rebels provoke the state by using civilians as human shields. An alternative view suggests that civilians recognize if the rebels exploit them as human shields and blame the rebels if such provocation occurs. We ask: do civilians evaluate all state indiscriminate violence in the same way or do they think of state indiscriminate violence differently when it is provoked by insurgents? Accounting for the covariate differences between individuals with and without personal experience of warfare in the survey data from postwar Ukraine, we find that personal exposure to violence shapes one's blame attribution for provoked state attacks on civilians. Individuals unexposed to violence tend to take into account whether the government was provoked by the rebels. By contrast, individuals with personal experience of warfare tend to blame the government for indiscriminate attacks regardless of rebel provocation. This finding has implications for counterinsurgency scholarship and policy. It is likely that the difference between unexposed and exposed to violence civilians emerges in geographically isolated conflicts. If so, targeting of civilians may have different effects on the escalation of insurgency in geographically concentrated as opposed to widespread cases of violence.
World Affairs Online
In: Z magazine: a political monthly, Band 15, Heft 9, S. 27-32
ISSN: 1056-5507
In: Journal of peace research, Band 57, Heft 2, S. 235-250
ISSN: 1460-3578
Existing research on terrorism as a strategy has largely neglected the apparent differences in what groups target. Whereas some organizations primarily target undefended civilians, others attack mainly official and hard targets. I develop an explanation of terrorist groups' relative target preferences based on how a group's ties to its constituency and specific government repressive strategies either constrain or incentivize terrorist attacks against soft civilian vs. hard/official targets. Specific sources of support and the degree of out-group antagonism in their constituency shape terrorist groups' primary targeting strategy. While groups with transnational support are generally more likely to target primarily undefended civilians, not all groups with local support are restrained. Groups with low out-group antagonism and local civilian support incur high political costs for targeting civilians and focus primarily on official targets. Instead, groups with domestic support but high out-group antagonism have mixed incentives. When facing indiscriminate government repression these groups become more likely to target primarily undefended civilians, because they can justify such a response to their audience, direct attacks against out-group civilians, and radicalize local constituents. Indiscriminate repression, however, does not change the targeting strategy of groups who face high political costs for attacking civilians. I examine the observable implications of the theory in a comparative analysis of terrorist organizations (1995–2007) as well as an over-time analysis of repression and targeting in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict (1987–2004), and find strong support for the theoretical argument.
World Affairs Online
In: Urban policy and research, Band 11, Heft 4, S. 238-243
ISSN: 1476-7244
In: African affairs: the journal of the Royal African Society, Band 103, Heft 411, S. 211-226
ISSN: 0001-9909
World Affairs Online
In: Social work: a journal of the National Association of Social Workers, Band 54, Heft 4, S. 327-339
ISSN: 1545-6846
In: The journal of conflict resolution: journal of the Peace Science Society (International), Band 63, Heft 1, S. 251-281
ISSN: 1552-8766
In contrast to the expansive literature on military casualties and support for war, we know very little about public reactions to foreign civilian casualties. This article, based on representative sample surveys in the United States and Britain, reports four survey experiments weaving information about civilian casualties into vignettes about Western military action. These produce consistent evidence of civilian casualty aversion: where death tolls were higher, support for force was invariably and significantly lower. Casualty effects were moderate in size but robust across our two cases and across different scenarios. They were also strikingly resistant to moderation by other factors manipulated in the experiments, such as the framing of casualties or their religious affiliation. The importance of numbers over even strongly humanizing frames points toward a utilitarian rather than a social psychological model of casualty aversion. Either way, civilian casualties deserve a more prominent place in the literature on public support for war.
World Affairs Online
The relationship between health habits and health status has gained attention in the literature in recent decades. In this report, the health habits of a particular occupational group--the military--are compared with those of the civilian population, and the extent to which the health habits of the military personnel are associated with their health status is examined. Responses to two surveys conducted in 1985 were analyzed by age group, sex, race, and educational level. The comparisons involved six of the seven health habits included in the Alameda study. Military personnel, because they are younger and their lives are more regimented, excel in meeting weight standards for the services and engaging in desirable levels of physical activity. Smoking habits of military personnel were less favorable than those of the civilians. An examination of the health status of the military for the year preceding the survey suggested that some health habits have immediate manifestations, but the impact of others may not be evident until later in life.
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In: The journal of conflict resolution: journal of the Peace Science Society (International), Band 63, Heft 7, S. 1710-1735
ISSN: 1552-8766
How do conciliatory and coercive counterinsurgency tactics affect militant group violence against civilians? Scholars of civil war increasingly seek to understand intentional civilian targeting, often referred to as terrorism. Extant research emphasizes group weakness, or general state attributes such as regime type. We focus on terrorism as violent communication and as a response to government actions. State tactics toward groups, carrots and sticks, should be important for explaining insurgent terror. We test the argument using new data on terrorism by insurgent groups, with many time-varying variables, covering 1998 through 2012. Results suggest government coercion against a group is associated with subsequent terrorism by that group. However, this is only the case for larger insurgent groups, which raises questions about the notion of terrorism as a weapon of the weak. Carrots are often negatively related to group terrorism. Other factors associated with insurgent terrorism include holding territory, ethnic motivation, and social service provision.
World Affairs Online
In: Foreign affairs: an American quarterly review, Band 77, Heft 5, S. 168
ISSN: 2327-7793