Costly victories? : The dynamics of territorial control and insurgent violence against civilians within civil war

Abstract: Limited systematic research has investigated how conflict events shape the spatial-temporal variation of insurgent violence against civilians. Although previous research has investigated how degrees of territorial control relate to general levels of violence against civilians, it remains largely an open question how the dynamics within territorial control determine violence against civilians by insurgents. This study aims to address this gap by hypothesizing that (1) insurgents become more likely to commit fatal violence against civilians, and (2) kill more civilians in contested areas when they lose territorial control. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset (ACLED) was used along with Peace Research Institute Oslo’s (PRIO) GRID Dataset to create a novel data frame of all territorially contested area-weeks on the African continent between 1997 and 2017 (n = 3035). Contrary to theoretical expectations, logistic regressions indicate a lower risk of insurgent violence against civilians in contested areas following an insurgent territorial loss than following a break-even. Zero-inflated negative binomial regressions moreover tentatively indicate that insurgents kill more civilians following territorial wins in the short-term, and following territorial loss in the long-term. These results suggest that proactive counterinsurgency campaigns are in the interest of civilians in civil war.