Draining the Sea by Filling the Graves: Investigating the Effectiveness of Indiscriminate Violence as a Counterinsurgency Strategy
It is commonly believed in the literature on insurgency and counterinsurgency that to be effective in undermining civilian support for guerrillas, violence against noncombatants must be selective or risk alienating the population. Yet cases exist where governments have defeated insurgencies by wielding indiscriminate violence against noncombatants. This paper explores the conditions under which such violence can be effective through a case study of British counterinsurgency strategy in the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). I find that the smaller the size of the underlying population supporting the insurgents, and the smaller and more constricted the geographic area, the more effective indiscriminate civilian victimization is likely to be. Moreover, when civilian loyalties are not very flexible, selective violence is unlikely to deter people from supporting the rebels and indiscriminate force is sometimes required to make it impossible for people to provide support. Is killing civilians an effective strategy for achieving political or military goals? Under what circumstances might it be more or less effective? Sustained, systematic violence against noncombatants is a regular feature of warfare. One study found that states use ‘barbarism’–‘the systematic violation of the laws of war in pursuit of a military or political objective’ – in about 20 per cent of asymmetric conflicts, wars in which one side is significantly more powerful that its opponent. A second study found that belligerents in interstate wars employ ‘civilian victimization’– ‘a wartime strategy that targets and kills (or attempts to kill) noncombatants’ –one-third of the time, while a third discovered that states killed more than 50,000 noncombatants in 21 per cent of all wars after 1945. Although several works have appeared that help illuminate the causes of this violence, few studies have systematically investigated and evaluated the effectiveness of civilian victimization as a military strategy. The literature on the effectiveness of punishing civilians in conventional wars largely condemns strategies that target noncombatants as not having much utility for winning wars or eliciting concessions from adversaries. Robert Pape, for example, argues that punishment – a coercive strategy that inflicts pain on an adversary’s civilian population in order to persuade the enemy to take (or refrain from taking) a certain action – hardly ever elicits concessions in strategic bombing campaigns. Pape also examined economic sanctions, a weaker form of punishment, and found that these were similarly ineffective, accounting for success in only a handful of 120 cases after 1945. Other authors condemn civilian victimization more broadly,