Why They Die: Civilian Devastation in Violent Conflict

Introduction

Introduction “Then cry ‘havoc’ and let slip the dogs of war.” —William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar “Why did we become blind? I don’t know. . . . I think we are blind, Blind but seeing Blind people who can see, but do not see.” —José Saramago, Blindness After all the parades, the patriotic tributes, and the media portrayals that enshrine familiar virtues while maligning foreign vices, it is the weakest participants of armed con›ict who bear its greatest burden. No matter how you look at it, by any reasonable measure it is clear that civilians suffer most in large-scale violent con›icts. Violence against the innocent is not a secondary or passing consequence of war—it is deeply embedded in the character and evolution of today’s hostilities. Hatred against the enemy can quickly convert to attacks on noncombatants. Women and children are often targeted. In all too many armed con›icts raging across the globe, brutality to civilians caught up in the hostilities does not “just happen .” It is not merely occasional, nor is it circumstantial to some larger set of events. In such con›icts, the deep structures of existing enmity between the groups involved dictate how the participants treat civilians. Notions of the militant enemy’s evil nature drive con›ict protagonists to believe that their cause is just, that security at home is threatened, and that certain sacri‹ces will have to be made. The infectious rage that wartime rhetoric often evokes in the “good people” at home also seeps into their sentiments, ideas, impressions, and images about the civilian Other. The feelings of euphoria and purity that are evoked in the rhetoric of war often have a powerful yet frequently implicit impact on the ways in which civilians are characterized. The con›ict spiral between protagonist groups is intensi‹ed by ideas about what civilians living in the enemy camp do, who they are, and how they should be treated in war’s tumult.As a protagonist group becomes obsessed with the militants’ evil, members often castigate the enemy’s civilian compatriots. In times of armed con›ict, whole societies may slip into collective modes of denial of the differences between an enemy combatant and an enemy civilian. The international community has failed to protect the innocents, in part by missing their plight altogether; studies of war often neglect the fact that civilians are situated centrally in the nature of armed con›ict, and as in past centuries, the least powerful participants in armed con›ict suffer most. In times of war, civilians tend to live strange lives. They can be uprooted from their homes, removed from their guardianship of their land, and treated like refugees in their own country. From the perspective of martial forces, civilians should have no power to affect war’s outcome. Warfare is not “theirs” to win or lose. Civilians are neither allies nor enemies , neither political leaders of the opposing forces nor their subordinates . From the perspective of international law, warfare is primarily an enterprise of combatants, for combatants, and with complicity of the combatants’ political institutions. And the exclusion of civilians from military decision making magni‹es civilians’ powerlessness. Their cries in the face of impending doom are dismissed by combatants as signs of their“irrationality ,” in contrast to the professional demeanor of trained soldiers. In spite of being objecti‹ed by martial forces engaged in combat, civilians are witnesses to a side of war often buried by military leaders. Politicians and military leaders predominantly view civilians as powerless—and must continue to perceive them in this way so that their devastation can be cast as inevitable. Thus, those civilians living in the path of protagonist military forces are objecti‹ed as impediments to the real business of war. Their political status as citizens is undercut by the military-political “realities of war” that seem to necessitate their demise. In this work, we seek to explain why they die.We launch this inquiry by bringing a novel perspective to the analysis of violent con›ict.We ‹nd dualistic models of con›ict inadequate for our purpose because such models fail to give primacy of place (or, indeed, any place) to the category of civilians . Probing beyond the binary framing of con›icts as existing solely between militant groups, we focus our analysis on the formative constructions of and between the two Others—militants and nonmilitants—from the perspective of the ingroup. Our ‹ndings reveal that in times of protracted...