Restitution or Retribution? Detainee Payments and Insurgent Violence

• Author: Christopher W. Blair
• Published date: 01 August 2022
• Date: 01 August 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00220027221080118
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Journal of Conf‌lict Resolution

2022, Vol. 66(7-8) 1356–1392

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00220027221080118

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Restitution or Retribution?

Detainee Payments and

Insurgent Violence

Christopher W. Blair

1



Abstract

Counterinsurgents frequently rely on mass arrests to impede rebel operations, but in

so doing, risk detaining innocent civilians. Wrongful detention can backf‌ire, fueling

insurgent violence by alienating detainees and their kin. Can counterinsurgents mitigate

wrongful detention through targeted compensation? I study this question using project-

level data on US payments to individuals deemed innocent and released from Coalition

custody in Iraq between 2004 and 2008. Leveraging plausibly exogenous variation in the

allocation of detainee release payments, I document a robust, negative association

between counterinsurgent compensation for wrongful detention and insurgent vio-

lence. The violence-reducing effects of detainee release payments were greatest in

Sunni and mixed sectarian areas; for the types of insurgent attacks, most prone to

civilian informing; and when detainee release was complemented by other population-

centric reforms. These results suggest that post-harm mitigation helps shift civilian

perceptions, inducing civilians to share more information with counterinsurgent forces.

Keywords

counterinsurgency, aid, insurgency, post-harm mitigation, Iraq, detention

Introduction

How does detention shape insurgent violence? Both historical and modern coun-

terinsurgents have used mass incarceration to quell rebellion (Benard et al. 2011;

1

Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

Corresponding Author:

Christopher W. Blair, Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.

Email: cwblair@sas.upenn.edu

Khalili 2003;Willardson 2016). But recent evidence also suggests that detention may

exacerbate militancy. As it rose in Iraq and Syria in 2013–14, the Islamic State (IS)

recruited disaffected Sunnis alienated by unfair prosecutions in the Shia-dominated

Iraqi justice system, and swelled its ranks with imprisoned f‌ighters and criminals

freed in a series of jailbreaks as it seized towns and cities (Peritz 2019).

1

Toda y,

prolonged imprisonment of thousands of suspected IS f‌ighters in Kurdish prisons

poses a lingering security challenge.

Mass detention is often a source of violence-inducing grievances. If counterin-

surgents detain innocent individuals, use abusive interrogation tactics, and build

corrupt criminal justice institutions, incarceration may inf‌lame rather than quell re-

bellion. As Staff Major General Khadim Muhammad Faris al-Fahadawi al-Dulaymi, a

deputy commander in the al-Anbar Operations Center, noted of Coalition efforts in

Iraq: “…people saw the Americans trash houses and arrest innocent people, while the

insurgents—the bad guys—were moving about freely…innocent people were attacked

and arrested and humiliated, so people lost conf‌idence in the Coalition forces”

(Montgomery and McWilliams 2009, 264, 266). From this perspective, counterin-

surgent campaigns may benef‌it from efforts to reform detention practices, for example,

by releasing low-risk detainees, punishing abusive guards, increasing procedural

transparency, and providing services in prisons (Meriwether 2018). These measures are

intended to complement broader population-centric efforts to cultivate civilian support

and encourage information-sharing, thereby reducing insurgent violence.

In this paper, I study payments to detainees upon their release from counterinsurgent

custody. Used by French, British, Israeli, Colombian, and American forces, among

others, these payments, known as “detainee release”or “former detainee”payments, are

intended to compensate innocent civilians wrongfully detained in counterinsurgent

operations.

2

On the one hand, some policymakers and commanders view these pay-

ments as counterproductive (Benard et al. 2011, xvii). A survey of US Army and

Marine off‌icers in Iraq found that most did not make detainee release payments (Off‌ice

of the Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction 2012), fearing wrongfully

detained civilians were ripe for insurgent recruitment, so paid release could put cash in

insurgents’hands. As Deputy Commanding General for Detainee Operations

(DCGDO) Douglas M. Stone, who advocated expanding the former detainee payment

system in Iraq in 2007, noted, “As a general rule of thumb, divisions don’t want anyone

let back out”(Bowman 2008).

I argue that detainee release payments signal a counterinsurgent’s intent to mitigate

civilian harm and govern well. As such, former detainee payments can reduce the

alienation wrongfully detained civilians feel, fostering positive civilian perceptions of

counterinsurgent forces (Brooks and Miller 2009). In turn, improved civilian per-

ceptions facilitate information-sharing with counterinsurgents, degrading insurgent

production of violence (Berman, Shapiro and Felter 2011;Kalyvas 2006). This ar-

gument builds on recent evidence suggesting that counterinsurgents can mitigate the

negative impacts of indiscriminate violence and accidental civilian killings by giving

compensatory aid to victims (Lyall 2019;Lyall, Blair and Imai 2013;Silverman 2020).

Blair 1357

After wrongful detention, former detainee payments symbolize the perpetrator’s intent

to abide by the rule of law and behave fairly in relations with civilians. In turn, civilian

perceptions of counterinsurgent forces update positively, constraining rebel production

of violence.

I test this argument using data from the Iraq Reconstruction Management System

(IRMS) (Berman, Shapiro and Felter 2011), which document millions of dollars in US

payments to former detainees during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Paired with granular

data on insurgent violence from the MNF-I SIGACT III database and Iraq Body Count

(IBC) (Condra and Shapiro 2012), these data permit a micro-level test of how

compensation to wrongfully detained civilians affects insurgent violence. Identif‌ication

is facilitated by the fact that whether detainee release payments were made depended on

bureaucratic constraints like the availability of reconstruction funds, and commander-

level idiosyncrasies in the procedures in place at battalion-, brigade-, and division-level

non-theater internment facilities (TIFs).

Several notable results emerge. First, former detainee payments are robustly,

negatively associated with insurgent-initiated attacks on Coalition and Iraqi forces.

This result suggests that fears about low-risk and innocent detainees joining the in-

surgency upon their release from custody are largely unfounded. Any violence-

promoting effect of insurgent recruitment of former detainees is countervailed by a

larger, violence-reducing effect of improved civilian perceptions of fairness in

counterinsurgent detention practices. This f‌inding accords with qualitative evidence

compiled by Task Force 134 (Brooks and Miller 2009), the command responsible for

detainee operations during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Second, the violence-reducing

effects of former detainee payments are greatest in Sunni and mixed sectarian districts,

where the population had more heterogeneous preferences and hence where more

civilians could be swayed by abusive actions like wrongful detentions (Blair 2022;

Condra and Shapiro 2012). Third, the violence-reducing effect of detainee release

payments is driven mostly by reductions in direct f‌ire and improvised explosive device

(IED) attacks. These are the types of insurgent attacks that are more sensitive to civilian

informing (Blair and Wright 2022;Condra and Wright 2019), so this f‌inding suggests

detainee release payments reduce insurgent violence by increasing the f‌low of in-

formation from local civilians to counterinsurgent forces.

The contributions of this paper are threefold. First and most broadly, these results

reinforce the notion that civilian agency in warzones represents an important constraint

on armed actors (Berman, Shapiro and Felter 2011;Kalyvas 2006). Civilian loyalties

shift both in response to violence and abuse and in response to efforts by armed actors to

mitigate the effects of harm. In line with other research (Wood 2003), the evidence

presented here suggests that civilians rationally update their beliefs about combatants.

These results also provide additional support for information-centric theories of

counterinsurgency (Berman, Felter and Shapiro 2018). Former detainee payments can

incentivize civilian information-sharing and disincentivize insurgent collaboration by

shifting local perceptions of counterinsurgent fairness. By compensating wrongfully

detained individuals captured in Coalition operations, counterinsurgents can signal

1358 Journal of Conf‌lict Resolution 66(7-8)