Beyond Coercion: The Politics of Punishment Attacks and Policing Öffentlichkeit
Beaudette, Donald Michael (2013)
Published
Abstract
The prevailing wisdom in the political science literature holds that insurgent groups serve their own interests most effectively when they use selective violence against suspected collaborators hidden amongst their constituents. By targeting those that are believed to be disloyal, the insurgents demonstrate their own lethal efficiency while simultaneously undermining promises made by the government to protect those that prove willing to provide intelligence on local insurgent activity. As a result, selective violence is assumed to have a deterrent effect, frightening would be informers into toeing the insurgent line and ultimately making the insurgent group itself more secure and increasing the likelihood of insurgent victories on the battlefield . While this is a compelling account of why insurgent groups kill suspected collaborators, anecdotal evidence from places as diverse as Northern Ireland and Afghanistan demonstrates that a wide range of insurgent-against-civilian violence does not conform to this paradigm. In addition to killing suspected informers, insurgent groups such as the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) and the Taliban also engage in other types of selective violence against civilians. In particular, these groups have demonstrated a tendency to establish their own systems of law enforcement to deal with common criminals, such as thieves and vandals, in the territories they seek to control. In this capacity, insurgents present the bullet, the stone or the cudgel as alternatives to the prisons, probation boards and parole systems administered by the governments they hope to overthrow. These acts of rough justice serve as part of the insurgent group's overall strategy to build institutions of governance to replace those provided by the state. However, these actions draw on the same pool of relatively scarce resources---manpower, money, vehicles and the like---that insurgents must also rely on in their pursuit of victory of government forces on the battlefield. As a result, the institution building and war-fighting goals of insurgent groups are often in tension with each other. This dissertation seeks to explain how insurgents resolve this tension in the context of their competition with the state to become the dominant providers of law enforcement.
Table of Contents
1 Introduction...1
2 Violence Against Civilians in Wartime...17
3 Punishment Attacks and Policing: A Game Theoretic
Approach...48
4 The People's Police?...76
5 'A Very Peaceful Area'...134
6 'The More the Better, the Sooner the Better'...171
7 'The Land Where All the Bad Things Happened'...201
8 The 'Real' People's Police?...238
9 Conclusion...281
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