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“Kill Them All—Old and Young, Girls and Women and Little Children” 1: An Examination of the Organizational Choice of TargetingCivilians

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2015

Victor Asal ,
Mitchell Brown  and
Marcus Schulzke
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Abstract

What factors make it more likely that non-state organizations will targetcivilians as a political strategy? This study examines targeting civiliansas a tactical and normative choice, and hypothesizes that the targeting ofcivilians (compared to the general use of violence) is a function of theideological make-up of organizations, organization weakness and staterepression. Other factors related to organizational capability will not havea differential impact on the likelihood that an organization will targetcivilians for violence. This article uses data from the Minorities at RiskOrganizational Behavior database to examine these issues with respect toethno-political organizations. It argues that the typical analytic focus ongeneral violence obscures understanding of the factors that lead totargeting civilians. It finds that targeting civilians—while similar in somerespects to the use of general violence—is different, particularly withrespect to organizational ideology.

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Type
Original Articles
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 3 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 589 - 607
Copyright
© The European Political Science Association 2015 

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Footnotes

1

Ezekiel 9:5–7.

*

Victor Asal is Associate Professor of Political Science, RockefellerCollege, University at Albany, SUNY, 135 Western Ave, Albany, NY 12203(email: vasal@albany.edu). MitchellBrown is Associate Professor of Political Science, 7080 Haley Center,Auburn University, AL 36849 (email: brown11@auburn.edu). Marcus Schulzke is a Research Fellowat the School of Politics and International Studies, 13.14 SocialSciences Building, University of Leeds LS2 9JT (M.B.Schulzke@Leeds.ac.uk). Support forthis research was provided by the Department of Homeland Securitythrough the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism andResponses to Terrorism. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions orrecommendations in this document are those of the authors and do notnecessarily reflect views of the Department of Homeland Security. Themost recent version of this article was presented at the Third AnnualConference on Terrorism and Policy, sponsored by the Center for GlobalCollective Action at the University of Texas, Dallas, 20–21 May 2010.We would like to thank the reviewers of this manuscript for theirhelpful suggestions.

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