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Please Join the ICAR Community in celebrating the release of:
Why They Die: Civilian Devastation in Violent Conflict
The University of Michigan Press
By
Daniel Rothbart
Karina V. Korostelina
Refreshments will be provided,
Questions and Discussion welcomed.
Abstract
Why are civilian casualties disproportionately higher than those of combatants? Why do militants address their grievances against the enemy by inflicting much greater devastation on civilians than on their stated opponents? To explain why they die, the authors take a novel approach to the study of violent conflict, one that gives due recognition to the centrality of civilians in the enmity relations between combatants. Neither occasional nor merely circumstantial, civilian devastation is systematically embedded in patterns of enmity of the protagonist groups. In many contemporary conflicts, protagonists tend to extend the enemy’s degeneracy to civilians living in the enemy’s land. As a result, whole societies may slip into collective modes of denial of the difference between enemy combatants and their civilian compatriots. The book includes original findings from four case studies of civilian devastation, including the Second Lebanon war of 2006, Iraq War, the genocide in Rwanda, and deportation of Crimean Tartars by the Soviet authorities during World War II.
Probing beyond the binary framing of conflicts as existing solely between militant groups, the authors examine the formative constructions of, and between, the two Others—militants and non-militants in the enemy camp. A common source of civilian devastation in armed conflict is found in the relationship between the militant other and the non-militant members of the enemy population from the perspective of the ingroup combatants. Relying on recent findings in social identity theory, the book presents four causal models that replicate critical elements of the enemy/innocent dynamic, and, in so doing, shed new light on the prevalence and hidden nature of civilian devastation in war.