Oxford Events, the new replacement for OxTalks, will launch on 16th March. From now until the launch of Oxford Events, new events cannot be published or edited on OxTalks while all existing records are migrated to the new platform. The existing OxTalks site will remain available to view during this period.
From 16th, Oxford Events will launch on a new website: events.ox.ac.uk, and event submissions will resume. You will need a Halo login to submit events. Full details are available on the Staff Gateway.
In a civil conflict, how does one actor’s choice to victimize civilians affect the chance that other actors do the same? In this paper, we first derive implications about the strategic interdependence of victimization choices from the most prominent existing theories of violence against civilians in civil war. We show that these theories lead to distinct conclusions about whether one group’s choice to victimize civilians has a positive, negative, or zero effect on whether other groups do so. This suggests that empirical evidence about strategic interdependence can be used to discern among these competing bodies of theory. To uncover such evidence, we analyze municipality-level data from the civil conflict in Colombia. We structurally estimate a formal model of the strategic interaction between the conflict actors: the left-wing guerrilla groups (FARC and ELN) as well as the right-wing paramilitaries. We find that there are strategic complementarities, which is consistent with theories of victimization as a means of forcing civilian cooperation or of signaling a group’s strength.
