There is an interesting review of two books, Targeting Civilians in War by Alexander Downes, and Killing Civilians: Method, Madness and Morality in War by Hugo Slim in the Carnegie Council’s Ethics & International Affairs journal. The reviewer is Helen M. Kinsella. I’ll give just a very small part that I thought was especially interesting, though the full article is good:
Downes decisively proves that one of the essential causal mechanisms of civilian victimization is the desperation to win and to lower the costs — human, financial, or reputational — to one’s side. Significantly, he is able to demonstrate this highly original argument against those who posit that the key variable is the type of domestic regime (for example, democracies versus repressive regimes), identity of combatants (whether the enemy is perceived as barbaric or civilized), or type of military organization. In contrast, Downes decisively demonstrates that desperation to win and to lower costs prompt democracies and nondemocracies alike to victimize civilians, and that cultural or racial differences do not correlate with increased civilian victimization.
… Downes’s argument has an additional dimension. As described above, “desperation to win and to save lives on one’s own side in costly protracted wars of attrition” is one cause of civilian victimization. Notably, this cause has nothing to do with the original aim of armed conflict; that is, civilian suffering and killing is attributable to the sequence of events as the armed conflict proceeds. However, the second cause that Downes finds significant does have to do with the original aim — that is, the “belligerents’ appetite for territorial conquest” (pp. 3–4). In this case, the drive to expel and/or cleanse the indigenous population leads to civilian suffering and killing.
The other author, Hugo Slim, has a somewhat different, but equally thought-provoking point of view. [ link ]
-Julie
