4. PARTISANS AND POPULATIONS: THE PLACE OF CIVILIANS IN WAR,ALGERIA (1954–62)

Carl Schmitt's influential text The Theory of the Partisan (1963) serves in this article to read the history of civilians in modern warfare, examining the case of Algeria (1954–62). Schmitt's argument that the partisan leads to a dangerous conceptual blurring in war, confusing soldier and civilian, friend and enemy, reveals important questions about the war, questions that are otherwise invisible in conventional readings of the archives. Notably it places in relief the figure of the “population,” a way that the French military conceptualized Algerian civilians and their place on the battlefield. The article argues that the population, as constituted in military theory, needs to be understood as the partisan's partner in contributing to the normlessness of violence. This offers both a new reading of the war in Algeria and the violence suffered by civilians, as well as a correction to Schmitt's politically one‐sided explanation of the problem of normlessness and modern warfare. Whereas Schmitt's revolutionary partisan is a figure of the left, the notion of the population originated among counter‐revolutionary French officers who rethought war in an effort to stop decolonization and reshape their own society along military lines. For them Algerian civilians served as a primary weapon against the National Liberation Front (FLN) by breaking up the nationalists’ claim to lead a single, undivided, and sovereign Algerian people. In effect, the notion of the population made Algerian civilians appear as potential enemies to the FLN, blurring the nationalists’ own understanding of the political configuration of the war, directly exposing civilians to its violence.     

Why insurgents kill civilians in capital cities: A disaggregated analysis of mechanisms and trends

Research into the causes of violence against civilians has increased significantly in recent years, yet the mechanisms governing spatial patterns of victimization remain poorly understood. My investigation explores if and why one specific locality, capital cities, experiences a higher frequency of violence against civilians perpetrated by armed insurgent organizations. I argue that the political value associated with capitals allows these groups to asymmetrically impose higher costs on the regime by targeting civilians in these localities. I lay out and validate three specific mechanisms to explain this pattern: elite coercion, popular intimidation, and international persuasion. In the first scenario insurgents aim to influence domestic elites directly. In the second, they aim is to affect domestic civilians’ resolve. In the third, they seek to influence international audiences. Using new geolocated global atrocities data for the years 1996–2009, I evaluate this linkage by employing different methodological approaches and accounting for potential reporting biases. Finally, I show that ethnic and secessionist wars are more likely to experience atrocities in the capital compared with other conflicts. The findings illustrate potential benefits from explaining the temporal and spatial variation in violence by insurgents, with a focus on strategic conditions and power asymmetries.     

The 1913 Ottoman Military Campaign in Eastern Thrace: A Prelude to Genocide?

This article argues that the leadership of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) experimented with methods of mass expulsion for the first time during the Balkan Wars in 1912–1913. The success of these methods of mass violence contributed to their renewed application in World War I. Much has been written about the crimes committed against civilians by Serbian, Bulgarian and Greek armies in this period, but little about the Ottoman operations in Eastern Thrace in 1913. Neither European nor Turkish historiography has examined the issue closely, partly because the Ottoman campaign in Eastern Thrace was very short and of relatively little military significance, and partly because historians interested in the study of violence in the late Ottoman Empire have devoted their attention to the Armenian genocide, which began less than two years after the recapture of Thrace. And yet, it is during this brief period, from July to September 1913, that the Unionist leadership of the Ottoman Empire developed a very specific, new and systematic form of violence that would later be used against other Christian populations, including the Armenians. In this context, the 1913 Ottoman campaign is worth examining closely not just as an important aspect of the Balkan Wars, but also as a prelude to practices that would later be tragically used on a wider scale during World War I and World War II.     

The consequences of internal displacement on civil war violence: Evidence from Syria

How do flows of internally displaced persons (IDPs) affect wartime violence? We argue that government and rebel forces respond to IDP flows in different ways, which condition where and when they employ violence. State responses are driven by the need to identify insurgents and their civilian supporters, and depend on how much information they have about where IDPs are coming from and where they are seeking to resettle. Rebel responses are driven by their need to monitor and control civilian movements, which leads to more violence against civilians in transit areas heavily trafficked by IDPs. Drawing on novel subnational data from Syria, we employ social network analysis to examine migration flow characteristics beyond aggregate IDP inflows and outflows. We find that the greater the local clustering of IDP flows – i.e., the less complex and diverse displacement movements are – the more pro-government combatants are able to detect IDPs’ origins and destinations, and the higher the number of civilian killings. Transit locations, meanwhile, become epicenters of rebel violence against civilians. While scholars have found that more information about civilian behavior causes combatants to employ more selective violence, our results suggest that more information about displacement prompts more collective violence from governments. The findings also indicate that governments respond to IDP flows after movement, whereas rebels respond to IDP flows during movement. This underscores the importance of focusing on how armed groups respond to displacement flows in order to better understand the consequences of population movements in wartime.     

Between Horror and Obscene Beauty: The Passion of Photojournalism during the War on Drugs in Mexico (2006–2012)

This article examines a group of photographs bearing a strong violent content that were published in print and digital media as part of the coverage of the ‘war against drugs’ in Mexico: an armed conflict initiated by the central government in December 2006. This military action was the first step in a process of militarization affecting several states, in which an attempt was made to dismantle territorial pacts between cartels, to control the illegal traffic in drugs and, supposedly, to put an end to the use and production of drugs among the population. This war gave rise to one of the bloodiest episodes of contemporary Mexico in which drug cartels reproduced and invented new methods of torture that were used not only upon the gunmen of rival cartels but also on a significant number of civilians. In the coverage of these events, not all photojournalists reacted to this upsurge in violence in a ‘sensationalist’ manner; several set out to produce images from unusual points of view. In particular, I shall analyze how certain images represent violence in a tense relationship with artistic iconography, upsetting parameters of horror and beauty in the public sphere.     

‘Barbarity more suited to Savages’: British soldiers’ views of Spanish and Portuguese violence during the Peninsular War, 1808–1814

This article explores British soldiers’ reactions to the violence that Iberian soldiers, guerrillas and civilians perpetrated against wounded French soldiers and prisoners of war during the Peninsular War. Whilst they saw this violence as retaliatory, and sympathized with the suffering of the occupied, British soldiers were shocked, disturbed and outraged, often leading them to self-identify with their very enemy — the French. On one level, this violence was seen as a fundamental violation of customary rules of war. Yet further, in British minds it revealed a deeper Iberian culture of violence and way of war, which set the Iberian peoples apart from ‘civilized’ nations.     

Risk and Private Military Work

Abstract: To date geography has paid scant attention to private military contracting. Other disciplines have studied the topic, but their work is state‐centric. In this paper I examine private military contracting through a geoeconomic lens and make four arguments. First, the heightened security risks of the contemporary era cannot be explained solely as a result of states’ decision to cede their monopolies over the means of violence. We must also examine the private military firms that have created new monopolies and the strategies they use to manage and distribute risk. Second, the industry has increased risk in the world system by offloading security risks onto their employees. This “responsibility over rights” management model provides inadequate human rights training and battlefield adjudication procedures for contractors and civilians alike. Third, the geography of private military work does not always conform to the global division of labor between north and south. Instead, private military work creates a class of work that cuts across social and geographic divides. Finally, while activists should encourage states to regulate the industry, they should also push it to reform employment practices since private military firms are increasingly global in scope.     

Look who perpetrates violence and where: Explaining variation in forced migration

Are the causes of refugee and IDPs flows the same? While existing studies examine the causes of displacement in general, there is limited research on different determinants of internal and external displacement. Factors might have varying impacts on the decision to move within the country and flee abroad. Here, I argue the effect of violence on displacement as a function of perpetrator and geography (i.e., how spread it is). Increases in government violence increase the number of refugees because to escape government violence, people may have to cross an international border as governments are generally effective everywhere within their borders. On the other hand, rebel group activities are limited to a certain area and by leaving the conflict zone, civilians can be free from rebel violence. However, the spread of violence determines the decision to flee. If it is limited to a small region, people can escape from that area within the country and rebel violence increases the number of IDPs. If it is widespread, civilians may not have many opportunities within the country and have to move abroad. Therefore, the effect of rebel violence on internal displacement follows a reverse U-shape. The analysis of refugee and IDPs flows between 1989 and 2017 supports the main arguments and the results are robust to different model specifications and additional checks. This study highlights the importance of distinguishing the causes of internal and external displacement.     

The changing nature of Jemaah Islamiyah

Of all the Islamic terrorist organisations known to be operating in Southeast Asia, Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) is probably the best known. But when attempting to combat it and its violence against civilians, security forces need to be aware of its current nature. This article seeks to show from the history of JI that it is a constantly changing, complex and highly flexible organisation; that while its roots lie deep in Indonesian history, it recruits from and adapts to the other countries in which it is operative. Consequently, JI seems to be a different organisation depending on the country from which it is viewed. The article shows that security forces need to be fully aware of both its Protean character and its history if effective measures are to be taken against it.     

The Failure of Restored British Rule in Revolutionary Charleston,South Carolina

The two-year occupation of Charleston, South Carolina, during the American Revolution demonstrates that umbrages suffered under military rule played a significant role in turning civilians in the 13 colonies against the British Empire. Despite British attempts to encourage loyalty by giving loyalists a say in government, stabilising the economy and guaranteeing the safety of slave property, Charleston's occupation regime failed to win local hearts and minds due to inconsistent and arbitrary policies, conflicts between military and civilian authorities and the unwillingness of imperial officials to restore full civil government to the province. As a result, South Carolinians lost faith in Charleston's restored royal administration long before British defeat on the battlefield secured American independence.     

Why protect civilians? Innocence,immunity and enmity in war

The issue of civilians in war has risen to new heights in international political consciousness in recent years. The principle of civilian protection has been at once the justification for war and the main guide to the conduct of such wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan ands most recently in Iraq. The so-called new wars of the 1990s have seen a consistent pattern of massive civilian atrocity and the new policies of massive global terrorism are similarly intent on civilian attack. It remains to be seen how well those pursuing the war against terror will hold to the civilian ethic. In truth, the idea of the civilian is a deeply contested one and has more usually been rejected than embraced by those who pursue war, political violence and terror. The simple power of the idea itself and the humanitarian sentiment that accompanies it to produce the notion of 'innocent civilians' cannot be relied upon to make a reality of civilian protection. Instead, the case for civilian identity and civilian protection must be determinedly and continuously argued in war. This means recognizing the main sources of political, passionate and practical objection to the civilian idea and taking them on one by one as they arise. Repeatedly arguing the case for civilian rights must be at the very heart of political, military, humanitarian and religious endeavour. Arguments of prudence and self-interest must be made alongside much deeper and more difficult moral arguments about people's innocence, their identity and their relationship to war. Holding fast to the civilian ethic in the face of terror and war requires significant moral argument and moral leadership from politicians, military commanders and ordinary people alike.     

Violation of the Laws and Customs of War on the Russian Front in the First World War

This article examines wartime efforts by the Russian civil and military authorities to shape public opinion, both at home and abroad, through investigating and publicizing enemy atrocities committed against Russians. An extraordinary investigative commission established in 1915, along the lines of Britain’s Bryce Commission, looked into alleged atrocities against soldiers and civilians as well as crimes against property; chronicled its findings; and publicized them on a wide scale. The ample funding and breadth of this undertaking challenges perceptions of the Tsarist authorities as unable to appreciate the importance of public opinion, even if the results were not always as intended.     

General Roatta's war against the partisans in Yugoslavia: 1942

During General Mario Roatta's tenure as commander of the Italian 2nd Army in Yugoslavia, he faced a mounting Communist insurgency. To defeat the partisan forces of Tito, he resorted to proactive politics and a strategy of counter-insurgency. Owing to Italian military weakness and his army's lack of training in guerrilla warfare, Roatta was not averse to enlisting the services of Orthodox Serbs in Croatia, who the previous year had asked for Italian protection after a fearful massacre had been unleashed against them by Mussolini's handpicked ruler in Zagreb, the Croatian Usta?a leader Ante Paveli?. Against the wishes of the Fascist government in Rome, Roatta armed Serbs (called ?etniks) because they agreed to assist the Italian legions in fighting the partisans, their common ideological foe. But as Yugoslavia descended into civil war – one triggered by the Axis invasion – Roatta paid a price for his freelance pro-Serb politicking by alienating Zagreb, irritating the Germans, and dismaying his superiors in Rome. Italian policy was reduced to a tug-of-war between the Fascist empire-builders surrounding Mussolini and the military command in Yugoslavia, and Roatta became enmeshed in a cobweb of intrigues involving Croats, ?etniks and Germans. Apart from political manoeuvring, Roatta, in the ineluctable necessity of defeating the partisans, devised a detailed strategy of counter-insurgency. On 1 March 1942, he circulated a pamphlet entitled ‘3C’ among his commanders that spelled out military reform and draconian measures to intimidate the Slav populations into silence by means of summary executions, hostage-taking, reprisals, internments and the burning of houses and villages. By his reckoning, military necessity knew no choice, and law required only lip service. Roatta's merciless suppression of partisan insurgency was not mitigated by his having saved the lives of both Serbs and Jews from the persecution of Italy's allies Germany and Croatia. Under his watch, the 2nd Army's record of violence against the Yugoslav population easily matched the German. Tantamount to a declaration of war on civilians, Roatta's ‘3C’ pamphlet involved him in war crimes.     

"WHEN THE GREAT PLANES CAME AND MADE ASHES OF OUR CITY …"1: TOWARDS AN ORAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE DISASTERS OF WAR.

This paper reconstructs a view of armed violence from the personal testimony of civilians who survived massive bombing of their neighborhoods. A majority of raid victims are “ordinary” civilians, primarily women, children, and the elderly. In World War II the most destructive city-wrecking campaigns were directed against the “morale” of these civilians. Their concerns and experience receive little consideration in the literature of air war, yet huge wartime and postwar surveys recorded first hand testimonies of those in heavily bombed cities in Germany, Japan and England. Women's words are given priority: they represent the majority of able-bodied persons under the bombs, and bear witness to the human ecology of violent experience: the disruptions of everyday life; the worlds of blackout and underground; the losses of home places and urban culture. They testify as well to the uneven social and spatial distribution of harm within cities, where death, damage and homelessness overwhelmingly affected working class and inner city areas. The paper also suggests that personal testimony should be recovered and incorporated into studies of neglected and disadvantaged people in “oral geography.” Some of the radical departures and methodological rethinking involved are considered in a final section.     

Detecting hidden violence: The spatial distribution of excess mortality in Rwanda

Existing sub-national studies on the geography of armed conflict mainly focus on observed battle events. Other dimensions of the conflict cycle, including battle events that remain undetected in news reports, one-sided violence against civilians and the indirect death toll, have gone largely unstudied due to lack of systematic data. This article demonstrates how these different dimensions of a conflict cycle can be detected and how their relative importance can be assessed. The basic tools include population census data, principal component analysis and spatial analysis. When applied to the Rwandan case, the method reveals high excess mortality from the civil war, genocide, (counter)insurgency and the refugee crisis. Hidden violence is detected by presenting the first quantitative evidence to date of high excess mortality in Gisenyi, the northwestern province which was the location of (counter)insurgency and served as a corridor for more than a million refugees. The spatial regression analysis indicates that both the refugee crisis and (counter)insurgency contributed to a high death toll in Gisenyi. This latter finding is important because it provides empirical weight in support of contentious qualitative reports by various human rights groups.     

The Changing Geography of Violence in Russia's North Caucasus, 1999-2011: Regional Trends and Local Dynamics in Dagestan,Ingushetia, and Kabardino-Balkaria

Three U.S. geographers analyze the temporal and spatial trends of 17,438 violent events in Russia's North Caucasus region from August 1999 to July 2011, demonstrating that the diffusion of conflict away from Chechnya intensified during the period 2007-2011, as levels of violence rose in neighboring republics. An increasing number of casualties are civilians in Dagestan, Ingushetia, and Kabardino-Balkaria, the three republics that are the focus of the paper. Employing multiple methods of spatial pattern analysis and geographically sensitive regression models, the authors examine the spatial fragmentation of violence from the perspective of rebel groups operating in the three republics. The analysis documents how the incidence of violence varies dramatically over space (i.e., reflecting the influence of urbanization, strategic location, and physical geographic factors such as elevation and extent of forest cover). Although violence in the North Caucasus region as a whole has declined in absolute terms over the past four years, the authors show how new geographies of violence are developing in the region, underscoring the emergence of republic-based insurgent operations against the various organs of the Russian state. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: H560, H770, O180. 9 figures, 3 tables, 1 appendix, 103 references:     

The Battle of Saipan in Japanese Civilian Memoirs: Non-combatants,Soldiers and the Complexities of Surrender

In Japan, ‘Saipan’ refers both to a nearby tropical holiday, and to the site of a battle that annihilated Japanese troops, embroiled the large population of Japanese residents on the island and ultimately spelled the end of the Japanese empire, now within the reach of bombers. In other places, and particularly amongst the Allies, Saipan conjures up images of civilians jumping to their death rather than facing capture, leading to simplistic assessments about fanaticism being rife across all sections of Japanese society; to a focus on suicide that overshadows the true extent of the battle’s collateral damage; and to largely unexamined statements about military exploitation of civilians and the murder of civilians in extremis. This article uses the memoirs of civilian survivors of the battle to reflect on the civilian experience of the battle of Saipan, relationships between Japanese combatants and non-combatants during the fighting, and the complexities of surrender.     

Field of Fire: Evidence for Wartime Conflict in a 17th-Century Cottier Settlement in County Meath,Ireland

Abstract

Much of conflict archaeology is focused on battlefields and the material culture of military troops, but what about civilians caught up in warzones? Can archaeology contribute to our understanding of how such people fared during troublous times, and the manner in which political and social turmoil affected them?

By considering the recently excavated, late 16th–17th century A.D. settlement of 'Cleglin', this article will examine the evidence for wartime conflict: whether poor inhabitants were subject to violence such as armed raids and the razing of buildings; whether they were forced to abandon their homes for any extended period; and whether there is evidence for the occupation or billeting of soldiers, or for the enrolment of male inhabitants in militias. A more comprehensive—and historically accurate—conflict archaeology should not just scrutinize the evidence for overt violence, or it risks excluding non-combatants from such historical endeavour (except, perhaps, as hapless victims). Instead the material culture of certain related events associated with warfare—market price fluctuations, famine, plague—needs also to be considered. At Killegland, scrutiny of household economies yielded some of the most profound and intriguing data: relating to wartime economy and risk-averse behaviour in agricultural practice.     

Rape as a Weapon of War(riors): The Militarisation of Sexual Violence in the United States, 1990–2000

This article uses a transnational feminist lens to examine how accusations of sexual violence were mobilised by the United States (US) government to justify military intervention at the same time that the US military failed to address sexual violence perpetrated by and against its own service members. Drawing upon an archive of civilian representations ranging from the New York Times to G.I. Jane, the author explores US interventions in the Persian Gulf, Haiti and the former Yugoslavia alongside sexual assaults committed by servicemen at the Tailhook Convention, on Okinawa and at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. This article draws connections between feminism and neo‐imperialism, between Cold War and War on Terror ideologies, and between rape as a weapon of war and rape during times of ‘peace’ in order to better understand the relationships between sexual politics and geopolitics at the end of the twentieth century.     

Just War or Ethical Peace? Moral Discourses of Strategic Violence After 9/11

Against the commonly held view that morality implies a critique or restraint of strategic violence, this article analyses a range of moral discourses that have been deployed to support the war on terror, including its extension to Iraq. It analyses the ambiguity between legal and extra-legal responses in Bush administration rhetoric and policy, and critically surveys the humanitarian costs–in civilian life, instability and suffering–sustained during the military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
This article places just war theory, in particular, under extended critical scrutiny, and finds its formalized system of moral rules and concepts–particularly civilian immunity and proportionality–deeply flawed in the light of actual US war-fighting strategies. By insisting on the acceptability of unintentional killing (as opposed to an alternative concept such as avoidable harm) just war theory may actually expose civilians to mortal danger and liberate war rather than morally restrain it. In the light of the flaws of current moral discourses on strategy, the article concludes by developing 'ethical peace' as an alternative conceptual framework that seeks to create a genuinely universal moral community in which it is never, in principle, legitimate to secure one group of citizens by placing others in moral danger.