Do States Delegate Shameful Violence to Militias? Patterns of Sexual Violence in Recent Armed Conflicts

• Author: Dara Kay Cohen,Ragnhild Nordås
• DOI: 10.1177/0022002715576748
• Published date: 01 August 2015
• Date: 01 August 2015
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Do States Delegate

Shameful Violence to

Militias? Patterns of

Sexual Violence in

Recent Armed Conflicts

Dara Kay Cohen

1

and Ragnhild Norda

˚s

2

Abstract

Existing research maintains that governments delegate extreme, gratuitous, or

excessively brutal violence to militias. However, analyzing all militias in armed

conflicts from 1989 to 2009, we find that this argument does not account for the

observed patterns of sexual violence, a form of violence that should be especially

likely to be delegated by governments. Instead, we find that states commit sexual

violence as a complement to—rather than a substitute for—violence perpetrated by

militias. Rather than the logic of delegation, we argue that two characteristics of

militia groups increase the probability of perpetrating sexual violence. First, we find

that militias that have recruited children are associated with higher levels of sexual

violence. This lends support to a socialization hypothesis, in which sexual violence

may be used as a tool for building group cohesion. Second, we find that militias that

were trained by states are associated with higher levels of sexual violence, which

provides evidence for sexual violence as a ‘‘practice’’ of armed groups. These two

complementary results suggest that militia-perpetrated sexual violence follows a

different logic and is neither the result of delegation nor, perhaps, indiscipline.

Keywords

conflict, militias, sexual violence, child soldiers

1

John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

2

Peace Research Institute Oslo, PRIO, Oslo, Norway

Corresponding Author:

Ragnhild Norda

˚s, Peace Research Institute Oslo, PRIO, PO Box 9229 Grønland, NO-0134 Oslo, Norway.

Email: ragnhild@prio.no

Journal of Conflict Resolution

2015, Vol. 59(5) 877-898

ªThe Author(s) 2015

Reprints and permission:

sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0022002715576748

jcr.sagepub.com

Why do some pro-government militias (PGMs) perpetrate terrible sexual abuse

against civilians, while others mostly refrain from such violence? Militias are an

important but understudied actor of the repressive apparatus of states. Conventional

wisdom dictates that militias are often tasked with perpetrating the worst abuses

against civilian populations, and recent research has found a suggestive relationship

between the existence of militias and high levels of some forms of state repression

(Mitchell, Carey, and Butler 2014).

1

Scholars have argued that states delegate the

perpetration of atrocities to militias to avoid being held accountable for acts that vio-

late the laws of war, such as the intentional targeting of civilians, and to escape being

associated with especially brutal or shameful violence (e.g., Ron 2002; Alvarez

2006). In this article, we examine patterns in the perpetration of sexual violence

by states and PGMs.

2

Building on the previous arguments, sexual violence—as one

of the most widely condemned forms of wartime violence—should be especially

likely to be delegated by states to militia groups in order to allow states to maintain

plausible deniability for ordering, or at the very least, for permitting, such atrocities.

Using a new data set that containsdetailed information on the reported sexual vio-

lence by all states and PGMs engaged in armed conflicts between 1989 and 2009

(Cohen and Norda

˚s 2014), there is scant evidence that states are delegating the task

of perpetrating sexual violence to militia groups. Instead, the data show that states

commit sexual violence as a complement to—rather than a substitute for—violence

perpetrated by militias.

3

In addition, a temporal analysis reveals that in the years fol-

lowing the first reports of militias perpetrating sexual violence, states are reported to

commit higher levelsof sexual violence. The findings strongly contradict the delega-

tion logic, which would instead predict that states should be less likely to perpetrate

sexual violence once a militia has begun to perpetrate violations.

We argue that the principal–agent framework employed by much of the existing

literature is too narrow and does not account for the most important factors that pre-

dict militia violence. Instead of a delegation logic, we analyze the organizational

characteristics of armed groups to explain the wide variation in the level of

militia-perpetrated sexual violence.

4

Specifically, we find that militias that recruit

children are associated with a higher reported prevalence of sexual violence. We also

find that militias that have received training from states are reported to commit

higher levels of sexual violence than groups that have not received such training.

We interpret these results as supportive of two distinct but complementary argu-

ments about why militias use sexual violence: first, that armed groups that have low

internal social cohesion may be more likely to perpetrate sexual violence (Cohen

2013), and second, that sexual violence in armed conflict can spread among and

between armed actors as a ‘‘practice,’’ or violence that is tolerated rather than

ordered, in contrast to opportunistic or strategic behavior (Wood 2012).

Through exploring patterns in the perpetration of violence, we shed light on ques-

tions of relevance to both scholars and policymakers especially the issue of whether

states appear to be outsourcing violence. The lack of evidence for the delegation

argument lends credence to recent arguments that sexual violence is not typically

878 Journal of Conflict Resolution 59(5)