Fellow, SCAS;
Associate Professor, Department of Politics, York University

Hybrid event.
Zoom Webinar: https://uu-se.zoom.us/j/65802739142 External link.

ABSTRACT:
Why do rebel groups and state forces deliberately kill civilians on a mass scale during civil wars, and what explains the timing, variation, and forms of such violence? My study answers these questions through a comparative analysis of four massacre sites in the civil conflict in northern Uganda. I show how political, social, and battlefield conditions converge to enable mass killing and shape the calculations through which armed actors justify, normalise, and execute such violence. Dominant theories of civilian targeting in warfare hold that insurgent and state actors employ mass violence to instil fear, punish perceived disloyalty, or compensate for the limits of conventional military tactics. In the counterinsurgency contexts, states often resort to mass killing as a strategy to sever rebels from their civilian base. Other accounts emphasise ethnic grievances, political exclusion, and regional marginalisation as drivers of civilian targeting. Although these perspectives offer valuable insights into wartime violence, they yield competing explanations and often neglect the causal mechanisms through which mass violence serves strategic ends. By disentangling the logic, timing, and variation of both insurgent and state-led killings, the study advances a more nuanced understanding of civilian targeting in civil war.