Regulating Militias

• Author: Jessica A. Stanton
• Published date: 01 August 2015
• Date: 01 August 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0022002715576751
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Regulating Militias:

Governments, Militias,

and Civilian Targeting

in Civil War

Jessica A. Stanton

1

Abstract

In nearly two-thirds of civil wars since 1989, governments have received support in

their counterinsurgency operations from militias. Many scholars predict higher levels

of violence in conflicts involving pro-government militias because governments are

either unable or unwilling to control militias. This article challenges this view, arguing

that governments can and do often control militia behavior in civil war. Govern-

ments make strategic decisions about whether to use violence against civilians,

encouraging both regular military forces and militia forces to target civilians or

restraining regular military forces and militia forces from attacking civilians. In some

cases, however, government and militia behavior differs. When a militia recruits its

members from the same constituency as the insurgents, the militia is less likely to

target civilians, as doing so would mean attacking their own community. Statistical

analyses, using new data on pro-government militia violence in civil wars from 1989

to 2010, support these arguments.

Keywords

civil wars, civilian casualties, internal armed conflict, human rights, conflict

1

Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Jessica A. Stanton, Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, 208 South 37th Street, 214

Stiteler Hall, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.

Email: jstan@sas.upenn.edu

Journal of Conflict Resolution

2015, Vol. 59(5) 899-923

ªThe Author(s) 2015

Reprints and permission:

sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0022002715576751

jcr.sagepub.com

In late December 2003, Sudanese military forces working with Janjaweed militias

attacked several villages near Murnei in the Darfur region of Sudan. Sudanese armed

forces first fired on the villages from helicopters; the air attacks were then followed

by ground attacks, in which military and Janjaweed forces acted together, burning

the villages and killing more than 100 civilians (Amnesty International 2004a;

Human Rights Watch 2004a). This incident was not an isolated event; Janjaweed

militia forces, in collaboration with Sudanese military forces, committed severe

atrocities against civilians in the context of counterinsurgency operations throughout

the conflict in Darfur. Cases such as this raise questions about the consequences of

militia involvement in civil wars. Do pro-government militias commonly engage in

violence against civilians? How much does militia behavior vary across cases of

civil war? Why might some militias, such as the Janjaweed in Sudan, engage in

severe forms of violence against civilians, while other militias do not?

A growing literature has begun to examine the dynamics of civil war violence,

looking in particular at violence against civilians. This literature has focused primar-

ily on the behavior of governments and rebel groups. Yet civil wars are often more

complex, involving more than just one single government fighting against one single

rebel group (Jentzsch, Kalyvas, and Schubiger 2015). This article explores one

aspect of this complexity, that is, the role that pro-government militias play in civil

war violence.

1

Throughout the article, I use the term militia to refer to armed groups

operating in support of the government but outside of the government’s regular

police or military forces.

2

As the introduction to this special issue points out, existing research on militias

has primarily taken the form of case studies of militia involvement in specific civil

wars (Kowalewski 1992; Campbell and Brenner 2000; Romero 2003; Staniland

2012), and missing from existing research is a systematic examination of patterns

of militia violence across conflicts (Jentzsch, Kalyvas, and Schubiger 2015).

3

This

article seeks to fill this gap by examining pro-government militia violence against

civilians in all civil wars from 1989 to 2010, looking, in particular, at the relationship

between militia violence against civilians and government violence against civilians.

The focus of the article is thus on the consequences of militia involvement in civil

war, rather than its causes.

One of the commonly cited negative consequences of using militias is the

potential loss of government control over the use of violence within its territory

(Mitchell, Carey, and Butler 2014). Because militias operate outside of the regular

command structure of government security forces, governments may be unable to

control militia violence. Or, as some have argued, governments may intentionally

avoid exerting control over militias, allowing militias to use any tactics necessary

to combat the insurgency and thus outsourcing the most brutal tasks of counterin-

surgency. Governments can therefore reap the benefits of a harsh counterinsur-

gency campaign, while denying responsibility for this violence (Campbell 2000;

Campbell and Brenner 2000; Mitchell, Carey, and Butler 2014; Carey, Colaresi,

and Mitchell 2015).

900 Journal of Conflict Resolution 59(5)