Journal
JOURNAL OF CONFLICT RESOLUTION
Volume 53, Issue 3, Pages 331-362Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC
DOI: 10.1177/0022002708330881
Keywords
civil war; indiscriminate violence; insurgent attacks; matching; Chechnya
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Does a state's use of indiscriminate violence incite insurgent attacks? To date, most existing theories and empirical studies have concluded that such violence is highly counterproductive because it creates new grievances while forcing victims to seek security, if not safety, in rebel arms. This proposition is tested using Russian artillery fire in Chechnya (2000 to 2005) to estimate indiscriminate violence's effect on subsequent patterns of insurgent attacks across matched pairs of similar shelled and nonshelled villages. The findings are counterintuitive. Shelled villages experience a 24 percent reduction in posttreatment mean insurgent attacks relative to control villages. In addition, commonly cited triggers for insurgent retaliation, including the lethality and destructiveness of indiscriminate violence, are either negatively correlated with insurgent attacks or statistically insignificant.
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