stanley.pdf
Elite Politics, Military Extortion,
and Civil War in EI Salvador
Temple University Press
Philadelphia
Temple University Press, Philadelphia 19122
Copyright © 1996 by Temple University All rights reserved
Published 1996 Printed in the United States of America
8 The paper used in this book meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-c.
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI 239.48-1984
Text design by Betty Palmer McDaniel
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stanley, William Deane, 1958- The protection racket state: elite politics, military extortion, and civil war in
El Salvador I William Stanley. p. em.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 1-5663')-391-4 (c1 : elk. paper). - ISBN 1-56639"'392-2 (pb : alk. paper) 1. State-sponsored terrorism-e-El Salvador-c-History-c-aoth century. 2. Death squads-
El Salvador c-History-caoth century. 3. Political persecution-e-El Salvadorc-History-c aoth century. +El Salvador-Politics and govcmment-c-zoth century. 1. Title.
Hv6433·S2S73 1996 972.8405-dc2o 95-2°998
CONTB\lTS
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction
Chapter One. Self-Defense, Class Oppression, and Extortion: Alternative Views of State Violence 11
Chapter Two. Antecedents: The Matanza and the Establishment of Military Rule 41
Chapter Three. The Failure oflnstitutional Military Rule 69
ChapterFour. Experiments in StateTerrorism: Repression and Polarization under CarlosRomero 107
Chapter Five. The Reformist Coup and the First Revolutionary Governing Junta 133
Chapter Six. Descent into Mass Murder 178
Chapter Seven. Breaking the Protection Racket: From War to Peace 218
Conclusion 256
Appendix A 267
Appendix B 271
Appendix C 273
Abbreviations and Acronyms 275
Notes 281
References 307
Index 319
'i'l\TO
~ ANTECEDENTS: THE MJlTJlNlA AND
THE ESTABUSHMENT
Of MIUTARY RULE
Late on the night of 22123 January '932, several thousand indigenous and mes tizo peasants in the western part of EI Salvador attacked towns, police posts, and military barracks. Armed primarily with machetes but in some areas hav ing a significantnumber of rifles, the insurgents tookoverseveral towns,over whelmed isolated police posts, and indulged in looting, arson, and, in a few places, rape and murder. Most of the violence was directed against symbols of local oppression - the wealthy and their homes, mayors, and municipal of fices (Ching '995, 3'). The rebels killed about 35 civilians and local police. Five Customs Police were killed in the attack on Sonsonate, and the National Police lost a total of 10 in Sonsonate and Santa Tecla. Nine National Guards men were killed and 10 wounded, and the regular army lost between 20 and 40 soldiers (Anderson '97', '36).1
In response, National Guard and army forces from Ahuachapan, Son sonate, Santa Ana, and San Salvador marched on the towns taken by the rebels and systematically defeated the insurgents. The better-armed government forces made quick work of the rebels, suppressing the last rebel band in Tacuba in just three days. With the military threat eliminated, government troops, with the National Guard playing the most prominent role, proceeded to massacre anyone in the western part of the country whom they suspected of having participated in the revolt. In practice, suspects included anyone who looked "Indian," dressed like a peasant, or carried a machete (as almost all rural workers do). Suspects were executed en masse by firing squads and truck mounted machine guns. In many cases, people in the rebellious zones were told to report to neighboring National Guard barracks to receive safe-conduct passes. When they arrived, they were seized and executed. According to the account of Miguel Marrnol (a Salvadoran communist who survived four bul let wounds from a firing squad):
42 I Chapter TWO
From the barracks at Ahuachapan a stream of blood flowed, as if it were water, orthe urine of horses. [Later] a lieutenant who wasin service there would recall, crying, that the peasants who were being shot in groups in the patio would sing "Corazon Santo, Til Reinaras" (Sacred Heart, You Will Reign, a Catholic hymn) and that in the pools of blood he and the soldiers in the firing squad had seen, clear as can be, the image of Christ and had refused to go on killing and protested to their superiors. The protest was made in such adamant terms that the Commander of the gar rison ordered a temporary halt to the massacre. (McClintock 1985a,114)
Corpses were piled in mass graves, in sulphur pits, and in the drainage ditches along the roads. Pigs fed on the human remains. In one case a church wall collapsed from having absorbed so many volleys from firing squads and machine guns (McClintock '985a, 112-13). Though the exact extent of the car nage is unknown, in part because the government destroyed virtually all doc uments that could provide clues, at least eight to ten thousand were killed (An derson '97', 135). Other observers who conducted interviews in the area of the massacres put the number at around twenty-five thousand (Montes '987, '9'). The higher estimates would be equivalent to 2 percent ofEI Salvador's popu lation at the time, and in the communities where the rebellions took place, up to two-thirds of the local population was eliminated (Paige 1994,2). What ever the number, the matanza ("slaughter") created enough fear that it effec tively eliminated distinctive indigenous dress, languages, and other cultural expressions from western EI Salvador. People were still afraid to talk about it 40 years laterwhen investigators attempted to conduct interviews in the area, and the population of the western region has proven reluctant to participate in opposition politics to the present day (Paige '994, 2).
The matanza was not confined to the rural west, though certainly it was most intense there. Large numbers of executions are reported to have been carriedout in San Salvador and other cities, as government forcesrounded up virtually anyone they suspected of being a leftist. The urban executions were so numerous that "the chiefof the department of sanitation feared a major epi demic would result from the slowly decomposing bodies. By the end ofJanu ary the number of deaths had risen to the point where burial became im practical, and the chiefof operations ordered the incineration of bodies. Night after night San Salvador was disturbed by the rumble of military trucks carry ing the captured into the city, and bursts of machine-gun fire as 'justice' was hurriedly rendered.'" According to Salvadoran military historian Colonel Gregorio Bustamente Maceo, "Every night trucks went full of victims from the Direcci6n General de Policfa to the banks of the Rio Acelhuate where the victims were shot out of hand and buried anonymously in great ditches" (Me Clintock 1985a,14). McClintock reports that "sometimes the killings in the
Antecedents I 43
cities were entirelyarbitrary. Severalaccounts tell the story of a group of about 100 anti-Communist craftsmen who presented themselves at the garrison in San Salvador to offer their services as volunteers. They were invited in and then shot dead in the courtyard of the barracks" (1985a, 114)' Such broadly ran dom killing was hardly necessary to break the back of the communist move ment, since the government had a nearly complete list of Communist Party members, who had registered by party affiliation (many against their own bet ter judgment) in order to vote in the early January municipal and legislative elections (Ching '995)' Nonetheless, the killing went on for several weeks, un til essentially all plausible targets had been exhausted.
The Matanza and the Consolidation 01 Military RUle
The rebellion and government massacre of '932 took place in the broader con text of what Everett Alan Wilson (1970) has called the "crisis of national inte gration" in EI Salvador. The post-World War I period had seen rapid socio economic transformations. The coffee industry expanded vigorously during these years, displacing thousands of peasants from what little land had re mained available, and finishing the work of the Liberal land reforms of the 1880s.These abolished the community lands (eiidos) generally used for sub sistence crops in favor of the private ownershipmore conducive to exportcrop production. In fact, the extreme concentration ofland ownership that is gen erally associated with El Salvador mostly came into being after the First World War. Whereas much ofEI Salvador's coffee had been produced by relatively small farmers prior to that war, by the '930S 60 percent of coffee production was controlled by 500 of the country's 10,000 producers (Paige '994, 4)'
One of the primary mechanisms for land consolidation in EI Salvador, as elsewhere, was the control by a relatively few powerful families of production financing and mortgages. Small producers faced usurious interest rates and needed only one bad year to lose their properties. Asgrowing numbers of peas ants lost their lands and had to seek wage labor, rural wages fell precipitously. In the mid-iqaos, EI Salvador's wages were among the highest in Central America; by decade's end, they were among the lowest. Thousands migrated out of the coffee zones to other parts of the country and, particularly, to the larger towns,where they swelled the ranks of artisans and construction and do mestic workers. At the same time, the wealthiest of the coffee growers were achieving extraordinary fortunes. The reformist newspaper Patria editorial ized that "EI Salvador is becoming a monster with the head of a lion and the tail of a mouse" (Wilson '970, '30).
Despite the growing wealth of the coffee sector, it is questionable to char acterize EI Salvador as having a national "oligarchy" during this period. The upper classes as a whole were a very diverse group, including established
114 f Chapter Two
landed families from the 18005, immigrants, and urban professionals, mer chants, and bankers. Not all of the prominent families were involved in cof fee production, as some very large holdings continued to produce indigo and other crops. The coffee sector itself was divided between producers and processors. During the 19205, coffee processingand exporting hadbecome in creasingly concentrated in a few hands, resulting in a growing schism even within the coffee industry (Wilson '970, '32-34). Non-coffee elites, members of the older landed families, tended to predominate within the state (Wilson '970,62).
Before the late '920S, members of El Salvador's agrarian elite tended to be regionalized.Even the very wealthyremainedon theirproperties, seldom trav eled to the national capital (a difficult journey at best and nearly impossible from some locales during the six-month rainy season), and focused their so cial and limited political activities at the local level. Only a relatively small proportion of the national coffee elite belonged to the highest-status social club in the capital, the Casino Salvadoreno: the rest belonged to local clubs in their own provinces (Wilson '970, 56-65, '35-36). This geographic frag mentation began to change once government investments in an east-west rail road link, combined with asphalted roads in some parts of the country, im proved transportation and contributed to the formation of a national elite. Increasing numbers of prominent coffee producers found they could live in the capital city, San Salvador, and still control their plantations. They built ever more opulent homes in the capital, began to take a serious interest in na tional affairs, and in '929 formed the Asociacion Cafctalera (Coffee Growers' Association) to institutionalize and defend their interests (Wilson '970, '39).
Although the coffee industry was beginning to produce a coherent national social elite, this group had not yet begun to consolidate itselfas a political elite. Only a handful of families participated actively in national politics. The Melendez-Quinonez clan provided three consecutive presidents in the early part of the twentieth century, but the legitimacy of their elected regimes among the upper classes and the small emerging middle class ('9'3-'927) gradually eroded during the 1920S, just as Salvadoran society was becoming more strati fied. As early as '9'7, President Alfonso Quinonez sought to broaden his polit ical base by creating a labor organization called the Liga Roja (Red League). Subsequent governments sporadically opened greater space for trade guild or ganizing, which led to the formation of a series oflabor federations, primarily among artisans. The governments' decision to permit such organizing was probably rooted in a corporatist impulse: they sought to recruit "auxiliary classes" to supplement their thin political bases, while keeping them from be cominga potential base of opposition (Guido Vejar '980a, 68). The Melendez Quinonez governments also sought to diversify the economic base of El Sal vador through a varietyof state initiatives to promote and subsidize new exports,
Antecedents I 45
develop industrial products, and experiment with new crops, such as cotton. A substantial loan secured from U.S. sources in '922 increased the liquidity of the state and the relative weight of public spending in the economy.
The successor of the Melendez-Quinonez line, President Pfo Romero Bosque ('927-3')' opened the political system significantly. He exiled his pre decessor to gain greater autonomy from the established political families, car ried out an anticorruption purge of the government, unmuzzled the press, canceled the 13-year state of siege, reinstated constitutional rights, restored university autonomy, and declared an amnesty that allowed most political ex iles of the past administrations to return (Elam '989, '36). He also tried to im prove public administration and earned the support of teachers and civil ser vants by ending the practices of payment with vouchers (agiatismo) and forced "savings." New laws favored the interests of clerical workers and professionals, both public and private, and increased the self-confidence and aspirations of these members of the small but growing middle class. In the municipal elec tions of '929, political parties representing the emerging middle class did well
(Wilson '970, '97)' In the more tolerant atmosphere of Romero Bosque's administration, the
Communist Party made advances and managed to gain control of important labor federations. But Romero Bosque, like his predecessors, eventually cracked down on the popular movements. Between August and September 1930, the security forces rounded up over 600 peasants in Sonsonate alone (An derson '97', 40). In December '930, the National Police killed eight people at a demonstration in Santa Ana (Parkman '988, ,8), and between November '930 and February '93' around ',200 activists were jailed (Dunkerly '985, 22). The repression, however, did not effectively counteract the cumulative effect of presidential efforts to secure political legitimacy through tolerance of lower class mobilization. A broad popular movement had formed by the end of the '920S. After the worldwide crash of '929, this movement, though internally di vided, became a challenge to the socioeconomic status quo-a challenge that the conservative upper classes were not organized politically to counteract.
When Romero Bosque decided to hold genuinely competitive municipal elections in '929, followed by a free and fair presidential contest in '93', the nation's social elite was not well enough organized to take part. Despite a growing recognition that EI Salvador needed a strong state and that it would matter who controlled that state, no single political party existed to represent upper-class interests (Astilla Carmelo '976, 3')' The several candidates who ran, supported by various hastily assembled parties, competed with one an other for a relatively limited conservative electorate and lost. The victor in the '93' presidential elections, Arturo Araujo, though himself a wealthy landowner, positioned himself politically as a social reformer whose Labor Party drew support from a broad cross-section of the increasingly organized
48 I Chapter Two
middle and lower classes. His campaign platform promised better economic conditions for the poor, and some of his campaigners promised land reform, pledges that garnered Araujo considerable support and that he made no effort to contradict.Araujo won 47 percent of the vote, against29percent for the can didate of the old official party and '5 percent for a traditional liberal candidate. Although Araujo had to repay opposition deputies' campaign debts before the legislature would confirm his election by plurality, his victory was nonetheless a clear signal that the private sector elite was, despite its wealth, ill-prepared for the political forces unleashed by the '920S (Astilla Carmela '976, 35).
One sourceof divisionwithin the social elite, of course,wasthe impactof the depression. As world coffee prices fell, growers became increasingly dependent upon and vulnerable to the decisions of a handful of banks, while bankers be came increasingly cautiousin providing productioncreditsandaggressive about foreclosing on delinquent mortgages. The handful of processors and exporters who controlled most of the trade insulated themselves to some extent from the consequences of falling prices,passing on lowerpricesto producers and main taining a profit margin for themselves (Guido Vejar '980a, 65-80). While the full effects of the depression on the coffee industry had not yet been felt by the election of '93', it is likely that material disputes among the wealthy impeded their ability to organize politically against the popular forces and those members of the elite, like Araujo, willing to mobilize those forces for political ends.
The power of the popular forces became abruptly apparent during Araujo's first days in office, when a massivedemonstration of peasants demanded thathe fulfill his campaign promises of land redistribution. The Salvadoran Commu nist Party (PCS), which had gained considerable strength among workers, peas ants, and students, sawAraujo's reformism as an obstacle to their revolutionary agenda (Paige '994, '7-,8), and the party exploited popular disappointment with his failures to deliverimmediatelyon promisedreforms. Havingused the vocal and mobilized popular sectors to gain office, Araujo subsequently depended on the National Guard and National Police to keep him there.
It is difficult to gauge Araujo's sincerity. He had an unusual background for a Salvadoran landowner, having studied engineering in London and worked there as an engineer, during which time he roomed with a union shop stew ard who belonged to the Labour Party. Upon his return to El Salvador, he dis tinguished himself as an unusually generous employer and became publicly identified with pro-labor causes. He was friendly with Alberto Masferrer, a dis tinguished writer, publisher, and editorialist, whose philosophy of the "vital minimum" argued on normative and practical grounds against the impover ishment of workers and peasants that had taken place during the '920S. Mas ferrer's newspaper, Patria, had gone so far as to call for a reversal of the liberal land policies of the late 1800s and a return to the ejido system, LInder which communal lands provided for the subsistence needs of the rural poor (Wilson
Antecedents , 47
1970, "7-18). Masferrer endorsed Araujo's candidacy and was initially sup portiveof his administration, as were other members of the reformist elite.
Yet Araujo's ability to implement reforms was limited. The depression had reduced the value of exports and thus the amount of revenue available to the government. Moreover, the government's ability to administer what little money it had was crippled by the decision of technocrats from previous regimes to abandon Araujo in protest against his reformist intentions (Park man 1988, 18).Araujo dismissed many of those who were still willing to serve in order to make room for political appointees, who then proceeded to treat the state like a treasure chest. The extensive corruptionof his administration, and his lavish spending on parties at the Presidential Palace, led many ob servers to see Araujo as an opportunist and demagogue.
Government salaries were soon in arrears, and Araujo gave the militaryno priority over civilians in the government. It is a measure of either his remain ing idealism orhis political naivete that Araujo refusedto favor the army, even though he depended on the military to remain in office. His vice president was Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez, an army general, who had briefly campaigned for president on a reformist/populist platform before throwing his support to Araujo. Martinez' presence on the ticket had helped to ensure the loyalty of the armed forces during the tumultuous election and the postelec tion haggling in the legislature." Martinez had considerable support within the armedforces and wasable to deliver theirsupportto Araujo, at least in the first few months of his administration. Perhaps in an effort to enhance Martinez'ability to deliver military loyalty,Araujo made him minister of Waf
as well as vice president, creating a dangerous situation in which the com mander of the armedforces wasalso the constitutional heir to the presidency.
According to McClintock (1985a, 103), Martinez was Araujo's "sole sup porter in the Army high command." The U.S. military attache said of Araujo in April 1931, "In most of the difficulties which have arisen he has relied on the Vice-President, General Maximillian [sic] Martinez" (McClintock 1985a, 106). Araujo's dependence on Martinez was exacerbated when his govern ment announced its intention to seek a new foreign loan. Past loans had led to the regulation of Salvadoran national finances by a U.S. fiscal agent. The new foreign loan proposal triggered fears of more dramatic foreign interven tion and anger over the expected misuse of the funds through corruption and extravagance." The state employees whose lot had improved under Romero Bosque were sure that new debt would lead to a return to the IOUs and de facto payroll taxes of the past. Opponents of the proposed loans organized demonstrations, which turnedinto riotsin San Salvador and Santa Ana. These were put down with force (Parkman 1988, 18).
Many of Araujo's decisions seem surprising in light of his increasing de pendence on the military. First, he refuseda reasonable requestthat military
48 I Chapter Two
salaries be equalized across provinces of the country. Then he ordered all of ficers who were in professional schools or other nonmilitary educational pro grams either to withdraw from them or leave the military (Grieb '97', 21-22). These actions sharpened the already intense dissatisfaction stemming from late pay, government corruption, and increasing disorder.
On 2 December 1931, revolt took place in several army barracks in and around the capital city. The conspirators were a heterogeneous group of younger officers who had organized their movement during the previous month. Army forces attacked the Presidential Palace, where they met tough re sistance from the police on duty there. In the confusion, Araujo escaped to his private home, then on to the National Palace in the center of town, where he attempted to rally the forces that remained loyal. Unfortunately for him, the National Guard at that point cast its lot with the go/pistas, leaving the loyal cav alry and police hopelessly outnumbered. Araujo then set out for the western part of the country, hoping to organize a counterattack with loyal soldiers there. Before leaving the city, he made a final telephone call to the Artillery barracks, the headquarters of the conspirators, and found himself talking with General Martinez, who claimed that he was a "prisoner." Araujo left San Salvador still wondering why a "prisoner" was answering the phone (Anderson '97,,60-6,).
Martinez and the Military in 1931
The Salvadoran military at the time of the coup was not a particularly im pressive institution. There hadbeen some efforts atprofessionalization during the first three decades of the century, and Salvadoran forces were generally viewed as the best trained and organized in Central America. It was, nonethe less, a rudimentary force, comprising three main elements: the army, the Na tional Guard, and the National Police. All together the three forces numbered only 3,500 men. Individual units were very small: for instance, the First In fantry regiment based in the capital city, which was an important player in the coup, included only 120men. Of the three forces, the National Guard, mod eled on the Spanish Civil Guard, was the most "elite" in the sense that its troopers were paid three times as much as army soldiers and were far more likely to reenlist, whereas army troops were generally conscripts who served only one tour. The National Police were also more likely to be careerists rather than conscripts, but they were more lightly armed than the National Guard. The differences between the army and the security forces would become clear during the course of the '930 peasant rebellion, when army officers had to dis arm their troops to prevent them from siding with the Communists.
Of the forces, the National Guard was the most closely aligned with major coffee growers. The Guard, formed in '9'2, had served particularly to enforce the '907 Agrarian Code (Ley Agraria), which prohibited trade union organ i-
Antecedents I 49
zation among rural workers. It also took on various administrative functions helpful to local landowners, such as keeping lists of names and descriptions of agricultural employees, aswell as law enforcement tasks such asarresting peo ple for gathering firewood, picking berries, or otherwise harvesting any fooel without the landowners' written permission. Local Guard units were often given supplemental salaries and other perquisitesbylandowners,makingtheir relationship essentially a mercenary one.
Despite cordial relations with elites at the local level, it was by no means a foregone conclusion that Martfnez and the military would remain in control of the state. Some elements of the private sector elite were "disconcerted" by Martinez' bid for power (Salazar Valiente '98" 92), in part because of his pos turing as a populist during the 1931 presidential campaign. Martinez was, in addition, from humble and mestizo origins, in contrast to the largely white, wealthy criollos who had governed EI Salvador in the past. He was also known for holding unusual religious views, having published several books on theos ophy and the occult prior to assuming the vice presidency in '931.
Some of Martinez' nationalistic policies, though they later proved beneficial to the stability of the economy, were initially greeted with skepticism by wealthy coffee growers. In one case, "the president was forced to suffer through a rough meeting with representatives of the cafetalera, led by Francisco Duenas, the greatest of the coffee barons. These men demanded repeal ofAraujo's monetary decrees of October prohibiting the shipment of gold abroad, on the grounds that the bankers were using the tight money situation as an excuse for not making loans to the coffee growers. But Martinez refused" (Anderson 1971, 90)' Martinez' policies ultimately favored coffee producers at the expense of bankers, as we shall see, but the concern of the Cafetalera is understandable insofar as the military had not yet established itself as a corporate political actor. (Although two military officers had run for the presidency in '931, Martinez himself and Antonio Claramount, they were not "candidates militates but rather militares candidates" [Wilson '970, 200]). The upper classes had little reason at the out set to have faith in Martinez' vision and policy-making skills.
Another question mark hovering over the future of a Martinez-led govern ment was the extent of U.S. opposition to him. U.S. foreign policy at the time required denial of recognition to any individual taking power as the result of a coup d'etat. Senior levels of the State Department intended to apply diplo matic pressures, in keeping with U.S. support for the '923 Washington Treaties, under which Central American nations had agreed to discourage re volts by denying recognition to governments seizing power through force. Though not a signatory to the treaties, Washington had supported these terms to encourage stability in the region. Up until '931, any government in the re gion thatthe United States refused to recognize fell. Moreover, because of the crisis in EI Salvador's public finances and the likely need for renegotiation of
50 I Chapter Two
debt payments, "the position taken by the United States meant, literally, the death sentence for the new government" (Astilla Carmela '976, 50).
Washington's position was quickly undermined, however, by the incompe tence or willfulness of its minister in EI Salvador, Charles Curtis.' Curtis ap parently favored Martinez' taking power after the coup, in large part because he distrusted the junior officers on the "Military Directorate," whom he char acterized as "little more than half witted" and "utterly irresponsible youths," having "no capacity and no fixed plan beyond getting rid of the present gov ernment" (quoted in Grieb '97', 155). Curtis' hostility to the Directorate con tinued after Martinez was named as provisional president, because he be lieved that the young officers had retained Martinez as a figurehead merely to satisfy domestic and foreign opinion, while continuing to exercise power themselves (Grieb '97', '55).
Despite explicit and repeated instructions to make the U.S. Policy clear to both the directorate and Martinez, Curtis focused unsuccessfully on getting the Directorate to resign and neglected to send the signal that the U.S. would not recognize Martinez. In fact, he recommended recognition to the State Department.
Curtis' actions succeeded only in buying Martinez some time, as Washing ton quickly sent a special envoy, Jefferson Caffery, to evaluate the situation. Caffery found that the "better elements" (that is, the upper classes) were now supporting Martinez, "as for the moment he offers a stable government and they very much fear that any change in the situation might bring renewed dis turbances." He advised applying pressure to oust Martinez before it was too late and replacing him with a provisional junta (Grieb 197', 160). When this proved ineffectual, Caffery pressured the younger officers of the Directorate to ask Martinez to resign in favor of Colonel Jose Asencio Menendez, who had been at sea at the time of the coup and was thus recognizable according to U.S. policy. But events intervened: "justas Martinez' replacement appeared immi nent, a series of so-called 'communist-uprisings' swept the country" (Grieb '971,,62). The rebellion had an immediate political effect. On the second day of the uprising, the Military Directorate, which U.S. diplomats had been try ing to coax into replacing Martinez, instead transferred full executive power to him (Elam 1968, 31). For its part, the United States abandoned its efforts to oust him, since removing him would jeopardize the unity of the military.
The Politics 01 the Matanza
11,e government had ample advance warning of the rebellion. During '93' Communist-organized demonstrators and the security forces had engaged in increasingly frequent and violent clashes. Dozens of demonstrators were killed, yet the peasants' militancy seemed undaunted. General Jose Tomas
Antecedents I 51
Calderon (grandfather of President Armando Calderon Sol) reported to Martinez on the "ostentatious disrespect and lack of fear of authority" on the part of demonstrators and recommended reinforcements for the garrison in Sonsonate (Anderson 1971, 76). The Communist Party also viewed the com bativeness of peasants in the western part of the country with alarm. In corre spondence sent to the Com intern in Moscow, pes officials complained that western peasants were moving too fast, demanding that the party participate in the January 1932 municipal and legislative elections. The party had only the beginnings of an organizational structure in the west, and feared that partici pating in elections would accomplish nothing while exposing the party's mem bership to repression. Pressured by peasants who wanted representation at the local level, the party reluctantly agreed (Ching 1995)' When the government committed blatant fraud in the elections, and when Communist protests were met with violence, the party's Central Committee issued orders for the forma tion of a Revolutionary Military Committee to prepare for armed action.
As with participation in the elections, the decision to rebel went against the better judgment of most party leaders. One PCS official wrote to the Com intern that "we can't stop the revolutionary wave ... the masses have a thirst for blood and are under the illusion that with their machetes they are ready to carry out a movement of this kind" (Ching 1995, 30). The party knew they lacked the weapons, training, and organizational structure to defeat the gov ernment. Yet faced with the intense militancy of the classes they claimed to represent, they perceived no choice but to provide some leadership and coor dination for the explosion that was about to come (Ching 1995, 3'). First, though, they made a final effort to avoid armed conflict by sending a delega tion to meet with the president. Refused an audience with Martinez, they warned his senior aides, "The peasants will win with their machetes the rights you are denying them." The war minister replied, "You have machetes; we have machine guns" (Anderson 1971, 85-92).
By this point, the military had collected, through informants, detailed in formation regarding the preparations for revolt. The Communists' planning was so slipshod that the military had little to worry about. There was, essen tially, no military plan. The rebels simply hoped to overwhelm the military with sheer numbers, ignoring the difference in weaponry. Most rebels would be armed only with sticks and machetes. The only significant number ofrifles available to them were ones cached in the west by Araujo loyalists planning to invade EI Salvador from Guatemala, though they hoped to receive additional arms from sympathizers in military barracks.
The government dealt a crippling blow to the movement by capturing the party's top leadership just a few days before the revolt. The Ubico government in Guatemala captured Juan Pablo Wainwright, who had been preparing to lead the forces from Guatemala. Shortly thereafter, on 18 January, the National
52 I Chapter Two
Police captured Augustin Farabundo Marti, the de facto head of the party, along with two of his key lieutenants, Alfonso Luna and Mario Zapata. Prior to his capture, Marti had issued orders for the revolt to take place on thc 22 January, and the uprising went ahead, despite the arrest of the leadership and Commu nist supporters within the military. In the words of a Comintem report on the disaster, "The CC (Central Committee of the PCS) was effectively non functional during the insurrection. (There was no) CC to direct the masses ... no central leadership, no national command, justa series ofloeal insurrections" (quoted in Ching 1985, 31). As Miguel Marmo] remarked, "We did it too late, like assholes, we did it after the enemy had begun his repression and delivered devastating blows to our leadership apparatus, to the basic military nucleuses, putting us totally on the defensive" (quoted in Paige 1994, 20).
The "military nucleuses" towhich Marmo} referred were conspiracies among the soldiers in several army barracks to rise up in support of the rebellion. The Communist Party had circulated pamphlets in military barracks arguing:
Above all, the soldier is a worker or a peasant whom the rich exploit in factories, shops and fields. When he is still a youth he is taken to the bar racks where he is forced to bear arms in defense of the wealth which he has produced for the rich as a worker or peasant.
The discontent which the soldier feels in the barracks from the op pression by which he lives is the result of the fact that a soldier, enduring the lies of chiefs and officers, feels that they are his enemies, because these same chiefs and officers belong to the same class which exploited him in the factories, shops and fields. (Elam 1968, 38)
The next circular was even more direct: "COMRADE SOLDIERS: Don't fire a single shot at the revolutionary workers and peasants. Kill the chiefs and offi cers. Place yourselves under the orders of the Comrade Soldiers who have been named Red Comrades by this Central Committee" (Elam 1968,39). The conspirators in the army were uncovered when enlisted men reported suspi cious activities to their superiors. The discovery of these plots precipitated a state of siege in 6 of the 14departments (Elam 1968, 39). An entire company of the First Cavalry was executed by firing squad. There were similar execu tions in the First Infantry Regiment and the air force. The U.S. legation re ported atthe time that nearly half ofthe soldiers in the regular army were "dis missed" in January 1932- On 16 January, a week before the rebellion, officers disarmed, arrested, and shot many members of the Sixth Regiment of Ma chinegunners (McClintock 1985a, "9). Though easily suppressed, these re bellions reduced the effective numbers of the military and may have con tributed to the determination of the officer corps to use extreme measures, since the Communists had committed the sin of carrying "the class struggle into the heart of the armed forces" (Rouquie 1987, 247).
Anlecedents I 53
The extent to which the government wasprepared in advance forthe revolt has led many observers, bothal the time and since, to suspect that Martinez de liberately let the revolt go forward in order to make a dramatic show of putting it down. Mario Salazar Valiente wrote that "the martinista government pre meditatedly permitted the communists' plans to go forward" (1981, 92). Ander son found a widely held belief "among informed persons in EI Salvador" that Martinez actually sought to provoke the insurrection in order to gain legiti macy in the eyes of the social elite and the United States. According to this view, the announcement of Januaryelections in which the Communists were invited to participate, and the subsequent exclusion of the Communists from effectivecompetition in the areas most prone to insurrection, were part of a di abolical scheme to provoke a reaction. Some historians arguethat in the weeks prior to the rebellion, Martinez gave the Communist leadership more freedom of movement in the hope that they would successfully catalyze a revolt (Guido Vejar 1980a, 2{).There are even reports of direct incitement to rebellion: the Salvadoran historian Mauricio de Ia Selva wrote that Martinez sent "army re cruits back to their home villages to spread the word that the acting president wantedreforms, butthe richwould not allow them unlessa carnpesino demon stration changed their minds" (cited in Anderson 1971, 85).
On balance, the evidence of premeditation is incomplete. Despite good in telligence on the rebels' plans, Martinez failed to redeploy greater forces to the west (in fact, small National Guard units were removed from towns that were likely targets of the rebellion, rather than being reinforced). This suggests that,at a minimum, Martinez wasconfident of the military's ability to handle the situation: he could afford, in military terms, to let the rebellion go forward. Whateverdegree of premeditation was involved, the military's success in sup pressing the rebellion, and the slaughter that followed, were extraordinarily beneficial to Martinez' political position, both domestically and in relation to the United States.
The evidence is compelling that the extent of the slaughter was dictated by political calculations rather than internal security. The intensity of the violence, the random selection of victims, and the prolongation of the slaughter until therewereno more targets (oruntil coffee growers became concerned thatthere would be no one to harvest the crop [Wilson '970, 267]) are most consistent with an effort to demonstrate the usefulness of the armed forces to the social elite and foreign observers. Extreme repression helped create an impression of extreme danger. The U.S. minister in Guatemala in '932 declared that the uprising had been "greatly exaggerated and used for political ends" (quoted in Anderson 197', 150). A member of the U.S. legation at the time wrote, "The de facto regime is undoubtedly keeping up the fear of communism for practical reasons in order to make it appear that General Martinez is indispensable and cannot step aside at the present time" (quoted in McClintock 1985a,121).
54 I Chapter Two
The prolonged, random violence is also consistent, of course, with a deci sion to prevent future rebellions by exacting a horrible price for this one. Such an explanation,however,presumesthatMartinez wasthinking far into the fu ture in the midst of a very fluid political situation in which his tenure in office was highly uncertain. Though his actions had the effect of preventing further revolts for decades, it seems more plausible that Martinez was acting in ac cordancewith his short-term political interests, which werebestservedby con vincing the social elite and the United States that they needed him.
The Salvadoran social elite was easily convinced. The 1932 rebellion ful filled their worst nightmare-a mass revolt by the "Indians" whom they had oppressed, and depended upon, for so long (Anderson 1971, 17). Prominent coffee growers had been expecting trouble for some time: Wilson quotes the coffee magnate James Hill as saying, "Bolshevism? ... It's drifting in. The working people hold meetings on Sundays and get very excited. They say, 'We dig the holes for the trees, we clean the weeds, we prune the trees, we pick the coffee. Who earns the money then? .. .'Yes, there will be trouble one of these days" (1970, 136-37). Yet, remarkably, the upper classes did virtually nothing to prepare themselves before the rebellion. Members of the elite in the west ern part of the country made virtually no effort to arm themselves or to take refuge. Though a civilian Guardia Cfvica was formed once the rebellion be gan, this was a military initiative rather than a civilian one. The unreliable Civicos played almost no role in the fighting or the massacre, but were con signed, instead, to manning posts in secure towns while the National Guard (and, in the cities, the National Police) did the dirty work.
Documents released by the government after the rebellion began helped reinforce the upper classes' fear and willingness to support the military and Martinez. Among these were the orders that Farabundo Martf himself sup posedly sent on 16 January, which instructed the rebels to use against the bour geoisie "the most opportune means, that is to say: shoot immediately or kill them in some other way without delay.... Do away with all of them, saving only the lives of the children" (quoted in Anderson 1971, 92-93). The upper classes' fears gave Martinez an opportunity to extract resources from them: he set up a Council on Public Order, which included representatives of fivelead ing families, to coordinate the collection of funds, ostensibly to strengthen se curity arrangements and pay the troops. The council collected about U.S. $200,000 for the campaign against "the Indians," though a Canadian naval commander who observed its activities, V.G. Brodeur, noted, "Just how much of this sum eventually found its way into the soldiers' pockets is a doubtful point" (quoted in McClintock 1985a,119).
The political consequences of the upper classes' gratitude to Martinez were almost immediate. "Under pressure of the emergency," Parkman reports, "the National Legislative Assembly on February 5, 1932, elected him constitu-
Antecedents I 55
tional president to finish Araujo's term, and leading liberals joined his gov ernment. Having established bimself with the oligarchy and much of the urban population as their savior from the horrors of Communist revolution, he launched his career as El Salvador's last, and perhaps greatest, caudillo"
(1988,20).
International Legitimacy
Even though Washington had been moving away from military intervention in the region and was on the verge of removing the Marines from Nicaragua, it would not have been unreasonable on Martinez' part to suspect that the United States (or other powers) might intervene, especially since the State De partment in Washington took a dim view of him. In reaction to the 22 Janu ary rebellion, U.S and Canadian warships rushed to Salvadoran waters and of fered to land troops if needed (Anderson '97', 129-30; Grieb '97', 163). Understandably, Salvadoran officers were not keen on permitting a Yankee military intervention in view of the unsavory history of such actions in Hon duras, Nicaragua, Santo Domingo, and Haiti. They made a point of demon strating that they had the situation well in hand. General Jose Tomas Calderon sent a message to the captains of four ships anchored off Aeajutla that the Communists "had been totally beaten and dispersed" and would be "entirely exterminated." He reported on 29 January that "already +800 of them have been liquidated." According to one account:
Commander Brodeur went ashore to pay his respects to the General, and to "verify ... in a general way" the report of +800 killings. On shore, he was enthusiastically embraced by General Calderon, invited to lunch in Sonsonate the next day, and to "witness a few executions." The com manding officers of the Canadian ships Sheena and Vancouver accom panied General Calderon and an aide to Sonsonate, and "given an ex ceedingly good lunch ... they were shown five Indians who were about to be shot, but did not witness the actual execution as this was thought to be inadvisable." (McClintock '985<1, 116)
Calderon came to regret his announcement of the 4,800 "liquidated" Com munists, as this received prominent and not entirely favorable treatment in the international press. He subsequently clarified that by "liquidated" he had meant "broken and dislocated" (Anderson 1971, 130). In view of other evi dence, however, and his clear intent to dissuade the U.S. forces from landing, it is likely that he meant what he said the first time.
Anderson concludes that in committing the matanza, "Martinez may have been trying to pose before world opinion, especially that of the United States, as the champion of anticommunism" (1971, 134). U.S. attitudes toward
58 I ChaplerTwO
Martinez indeed shifted markedly following the matanza. Although the State Department continued until 1934to hold that he could not be recognized, the tone ofD.S. communications with his government changed, and the United States halted active measures to unseat him. The State Department sent the following message to U.S. Charge William J. McCafferty: "You will of course make it clear that the Department as it has already stated is not (repeat not) motivated by any unfriendliness against General Martinez for whom it has great regard" (Grieb 1971, 165). McCafferty's communications began to reflect a new tone of moderation, referring regularly to the "efficiency" of the new government. Once Martinez was officially "elected" to office, the United States found a means of recognizing him.
His success in preventing U.S. intervention further reinforced Martinez' credentials with the Salvadoran civilianelite andcontributed an additional di mension to subsequent right-wing political ideology. EI Salvador had always enjoyed greater economic independence from the United States than its neighbors. With the matanza, El Salvador became one of the few countries in Central America and the Caribbean to survive a major internal upheaval without suffering U.S. military intervention. This independence became a point of nationalist pride and a source of friction between civilian rightistsand the military when, in the 1980s, the Salvadoran military aligned itself closely with the United States at the expense of upper-class interests.
The Prolection Rackel
During the crisis of 1931-32, it was unclear whether the military or some re constituted regime of the social elite would end up governing El Salvador. The political disunity of the upper classes, combined with the high level of popular mobilization, presented an opportunity for Martinez and the military to expand their political power. Yet both the Salvadoran upper classes and the U.S. government were skeptical about Martinez. The 1932 rebellion gavc him the opportunity to establish his political legitimacy through mass murder of opposition peasants and workers. Neither domestic political forces nor the in ternational community (aside from negative news coverage) provided any sig nificant incentives for restraint. In fact, the riskof invasion by U.s. forces pro vided an incentive for a conspicuous demonstration of will and capacity to maintain order, regardless of the human cost. Clearly, the upper classes, with their fears of rebellion and their general interest in a frightened, unorganized, and low-cost workforce, favored harsh measures. To the extent that Martinez hoped to win their acceptance, he had good reason to deliver the kind of co ercion that they would prefer.
But Martfnez was not simply an instrument of landowners. He was in a po sition to manipulate elite perceptions of threat through the kinds of measures
Antecedents I 57
he chose to use in retaliation againstpopularunrest.s This enabled him to es tablish, on a national scale, a protection racket under which he offered to de fend them from a threat that he either provoked or made to seem greater than it was. Moreover, he was able to extend this racket to influence U.S. policy makers, who shared the Salvadoran social elite's concerns about the purported Communist threat and were thus manipulated into recognizing Martinezde spite official policy to the contrary.
Although Martinez was a personal caudillo, he represented the military as an institution. Thus his increased control over the statesignified, from the be ginning, an expanded and enduring role for the armed forces in the politics of the nation. "By dealing successfully, if brutally, with the question of disor der," Elam observes, "Hernandez Martinez had acquired the right to advance the process of militarization" (1968,45). According to Ruben Zamora, milita rizationmeant not only "a hypertrophic development of the repressive appa ratus of the state, but also a constant shift in our political life, lasting until the present. This act [the repression of 1932] has been the base upon which there has taken place the development of an increasingly autonomous state, which has not only grown quantitatively and qualitatively, but has also developed a greater capacity to act politically" (1976, 5,8, emphasis in original).
The durability of the events of '932 as a basis for militarism resulted in part from the nature of the rebellion and the lessons that elites learned from it. As Jeffery Paige points out, "The fact that EI Salvador's only experience with so cial reform and popular mobilization ended in insurrection led bysectarian followers ofthe Communist International profoundly influenced popular and elite attitudes toward reform and social change" (1994, 22). From the point of view of the elite, reformists had created political space for opposition, and the result was a Communist-led rebellion. Thus most wealthy Salvadorans learned from the events of '93' and '932 that reformism and organized oppo sition opened the door to revolution. The political implication of this was that the only way to prevent revolution was to deny any political space for either elite-led reformism or popular mobilization. The perceived need for political exclusion madethe upperclassesmore willing to leave governingin the hands of the armed forces, reversing their tendency of the late '920S toward greater participation in national political affairs. It also provided historical precedent that justified, in the eyes of the Salvadoran upper classes, a self-serving politi cal dogma of resolute opposition to anysocioeconomic reforms.
Overthe next50years, the elite sometimes found thatsupport formilitarism contradicted their own opposition to reforms, particularly when military lead ers sought to attract greater popular legitimacy or promote development mod els different from the laissez [aire liberalism the social elite preferred. Work ing through allies within the military, the elite ended the Martinez regime, blocked political openings and economic reforms in the '960s and '970S,and
58 I Chapter Two
contributed to a policy of mass murder by the armed forces in the late 1970S and early 1980s.
From Violont Rise toNonviolent fait The Martinez Regime
Often characterized as little more than a reinstatement of "oligarchic" rule, the Martinez regime was actually a considerable departure from previous regimes in EI Salvador, marked by elaboration and strengthening of the in ternal security apparatus, state intervention in the economy, an expanded ad ministrative role for the armed forces, and personalism. The first three devel opments proved to be lasting; the personalism of Martinez' rule became his undoing. His struggle to remain in office catalyzed elite opposition, and his response to that opposition-populism and repression against the elite-di rectly undermined the basis for his rule, which was his ability and willingness to protect the privileged and suppress the rebellious poor.
Shortly after the matanza, Martinez established new mechanisms of state control throughout the country, but with particular impact in rural areas. The most important of these was the requirement that all persons carry an identifi cation booklet known as a ceduladevecindad, a type of internal passport that en abled authorities to more closely track the travelsand places of residence of rural citizens. These measures, combined with laws outlawing the Communist Party and prohibiting publication of all doctrines deemed "anarchic and contrary to public, social and economic order," helped to institutionalize the security state established initially through the terror of the maianza (Gordon 1989,66).
The essential role of the "protection racket" in legitimating the Martinez regime came to the surface whenever a serious challenge arose to his position. During the brief provisional presidency of Colonel Menendez, which pro vided the formal discontinuity in power that allowed Martinez' "election" and recognition by the United States, the security forces miraculously uncovered a new "Communist conspiracy," strengthening the enthusiasm with which the Salvadoran elite and the United States welcomed back the "savior" (Park man 1988,151). Asboth elite and mass resistance to a fourth Martinez term be gan to grow in 1943, an opposition pamphlet "accused Martinez of pinning the 'Communist' label on the campesino uprising of 1932 and perpetrating the massacre to secure his own position, asserting that he was plotting another 'Communist revolt' for the same purpose" (Parkman 1988, 49)' Even after Martinez' resignation in May 1944, student organizers of the civic strike that had brought him down caught members of Martinez' secret police attempt ing to provoke a group of peasants into looting stores in San Salvador, pre sumably to create a pretext for the dictator's return (Parkman 1988, 88).
When the protection racket was in full force, however, Martinez had an un precedented freedom to maneuver in state economic policy. While the
Antecedents I 59
Melendez-Quinonez governments had talked about state economic measures and carried out a few small experiments, Martinez acted boldly to protect the country's coffee industry, in the process not only violating the laissez [aire norms of most of the country's elite but expropriating the assets of Salvadoran and foreign creditors. Shortly after taking office, Martinez decreed the Ley Moratoria, which suspended the payment of all domestic private debts, re duced the interest payments on them by 40 percent, and prevented further foreclosures of mortgages on land (Anderson 1971, 149). Given the depression conditions faced by many coffee producers, this measure, though obviously harmful to the bankers in the short run, preempted the foreclosure of hun dreds of coffee properties, including many small to medium-sized farms, and thus prevented massive additional concentration afland. In 1934. Martinez es tablished the Banco Central de Reserva (Central Reserve Bank) and took away the rightofthe private banks to issue theirown papermoney. In the same year, he established the Banco Hipotecario (Mortgage Bank), which was charged with providing production credits for commercial agriculture. Not surpris ingly, these measures were greeted with caution and even opposition by members of the liberal economic elite because they expanded the economic role of the state. By the mid-iojos, however, their utility for the coffee econ omy as a whole was recognized, and Martinez won the "unqualified support" of the civilian elite (Elam 1968, 57). Even after the worst effects of the de pression were past, Martinez continued to expand the role of the state: The new constitution of 1939"forthe first time gave the state the exclusive right to regulate the coining of money, mail, telegraph and telephone services, and ra dio broadcasting, and increased the number of enterprises that might be op erated as state monopolies" (Parkman 1988, 21).
Several of Martinez' ventures, including the Banco Hipotecario, were part nerships of the state and the economic elite. The Compania Salvadorefia de Cafe (Salvadoran Coffee Company), established in 1942, attempted to stabi lize prices and make production loans. In the late 1930S, the Banco Hipote cario branched out into marketing and warehousing activities for crops and handicrafts.
Martinez' interventions broke the dominance of the private banking sector in production financing. Moreover, the main civilian partners in the Banco Hipotecario were major coffee and cattle producers themselves, rather than fi nanciers. The Asociaci6n Cafetalera (Coffee Growers' Association) and the Asociaci6n Ganadera (Cattle Producers' Association) between them owned 95 percent of the stock in the Banco Hipotecario (75 percent was held by the Asociaci6n Cafetalera alone) (Parkman 1988, 37). In the process of establish ing these quasi-statal financial institutions, Martinez intertwined state and pri vate interests. While these banks served private interests and supported the key productive sectors of the economy, they also served the personal interests of
80 I Chapter Two
state officials. The Banco Hipotecario, for instance, played a prominent role in mortgage lending to military officers (Gordon 1989,72).
Guido Vejar (1980a)depicts the Martinez regime as an expression of the re stored dominance of the coffee growers, but the sequence of events suggests that Martinez' policies made the growers' recovery and relative advance pos sible. The state under Martinez, in other words, exerted considerable initia tive of its own. Martinez chose actions that were in the interest of, though of ten initially opposed by, the coffee growers. Combined with the protection he offered, his policies transformed the growers into key supporters of his gov ernment for almost a decade.
Martfnez was similarly assertive in dealing with foreign creditors. In 1932, he defaulted on EI Salvador's obligations to U.S. creditors under the '922 loan agreement, canceled numerous contracts with U.S. corporations, and nation alized the utility companies, many of which were foreign-owned (Astilla Carmelo 1976, 61-62; Wilson '970, 256). His confrontation of U.S. creditors proved to be well-timed: the new Roosevelt administration preferred to avoid unseemly interventions and therefore did little more than provide its good of fices to help the New York bankers renegotiate payment schedules for bond holders. A first agreement on rescheduling (struck in July 1932) provided for EI Salvador to pay between '5 and 20 percent of customs revenue, rather than the 70 to 100 percent of the original agreement. Martinez later suspended even this reduced rate of payment, and negotiated a new agreement in May '933 that lasted until '935. One more suspension of payments (1936) achieved a still lower interest rate (AstillaCarmelo 1976, u6-18).
Aside from the fun of testing U.S. resolve, brinkmanship toward U.S. cred itors gave Martinez considerably more public revenue to work with, and he devoted much of it to programs for the poor. In '932 he created the Fondo de Mejoramiento Social (Social Betterment Fund) and an agency to administer it, the Junta de Defensa Social (Social Defense Board). Mejoramiento Social was used to transfer a limited amount of land to landless peasants: "Great es tateswere turned into Haciendas Nacionales and divided up. Roads were run between the small parcels, so that they could not be reunited" (Anderson '97', 150). Relatively few people (less than 2 percent of the peasantry) benefited fromthe reforms, and the new farms were not economically successful. Large scale growers complained about the deterioration of formerly productive plan tations, but the reforms went largely unchallenged, especially in comparison with the growers' strenuous reaction in 1976when PresidentArturo Armando Molina attempted smaller-scale land reform. In the mid-iqgos, coffee pro ducers were still beholden to Martinez for the '932 crackdown and for eco nomic policies that were helping them to weather the depression. They were therefore unwilling to challenge him, even when his social policies cut di rectly against elite ownership ofland.
Antecedents I 81
This willingness to give Martinez the benefit of the doubt disappeared dur ing the latter part of his period in office. When he sought a third term as pres ident in 1939,many of his cabinet officials resigned.' All were below the level of minister, but they were the highest-ranking civilians in the government, since military officers controlled most ministries. The civilians had been an important source of technical and administrative competence for Martinez' regime, and their participation in his government had signaled the support of the economic elite. Their departure left Martinez surrounded by military ad visers, incompetent civilians, and yes men, and vulnerable to the sort of ad ministrative collapse that had undermined his predecessor, Araujo.
The main reason for the resignations was constitutional. As Parkman puts it, "Alternation in office was one principle of the Constitution of 1886 that had been consistently honored in practice, and Martinez' assault on it threat ened to do away with "the last vestiges" of EI Salvador's liberal institutions and traditions" (1988, 30).8 In addition, Martinez' economic nationalism and bias toward the coffee producers was impeding the development of new in dustries, particularly cotton. In response to increased international demand during World War ll, entrepreneurs had begun growing cotton along the coastal littoral-with considerable success, except that import restrictions made it difficult to obtain the machinery and chemicals needed for more ef ficient production. Cotton growers began to organize among the professional staff of the Banco Hipotecario and played an important role in galvanizing opposition to Martinez (Gordon 1989, 75).
As elite support dried up, Martinez turned increasingly to a popular base. Beginning in 1942, he tolerated rudimentary forms oflabor organizing, and in 1943 tried to make the cause of labor and land reform his own, harking back to the themes of his 1931 campaign for the presidency. "His speeches to the weekly Pro-Patria assemblies in early 1943 attacked the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, while expounding on the virtues of coopera tives and Mejoramiento Social's land distribution program" (Parkman 1988, 35). This strategy of seeking broad popular support as elite support dried up was parallel to the strategies used by the Melendez-Quinonez and Romero Bosque governments before him, as well as the military governments of the 19605 and 197os. Martinez' flirtations with pro-labor politics were not entirely successful: the concrete benefits were meager, and workers remembered the events of 1932. His efforts to find popular support, however, did galvanize elite opposition. Members of the upper class became concerned that Martinez might proceed with social security legislation, a minimum wage, and, worst of all, reforms to the tax system that might make it effective in collecting rev enues from the rich. They were also concerned that Martinez' initiative to create industries under the umbrella of Mejoramiento Social might generate unwanted competition for existing firms (Parkman 1988, 35-36).
62 I ChaptePTwo
These fears were well founded in the sense that Martinez did move aggres sively to wrestmore money and more political power from the agrarian elite. In '943 he fixed cotton and coffee prices, raised taxes on cotton and coffee, and passed laws that allowed the state to interfere in the management of the cattle and coffee associations. Since these associations controlled the Banco Hipotecario, controlling them would allow Martinez to take over the bank and its resources, even though the bank's funds had originally come from largely private sources. Opponents suspected that he intended to make the bank a pa tronage machine forhis Pro-Patria Party.
To understand the nature of the Martinez regime, it is crucial to follow the sequence of itsunraveling.The economic elite's initial objections to Martinez did not stem from his policies, but from a perception that he had worn out his legitimacy by trying to perpetuate his own power. Particularly within the mid dle classes,opposition stemmed mainly from his repressiveness and flontingof even minimal standards of constitutionality. U.S. Vice Consul H. Gardner Ainsworth noted thatthe middle classeshad "almost no directeconomic griev ances against the government" (quoted in Parkman '988, 55). Martinez had insertedan economic dimension into his conflict with the elites bydirectlyas saulting their core interests. He triedto rallythe military to him with populist talk, telling officers that the "capitalists were against him" and that "all his plans for social betterment and economic improvement-including higher pay for the Army- [were] being blocked by the selfish and uncooperative atti tude of the wealthy class" (quoted in Parkman '988, 52).At the same time, he attempted to shore up the protection racket by reporting to the oligarchy that he had discovered a majorCommunist conspiracyto exploit any openly con tested elections. His ability to pose as a protector, however, clashed with his need to control elite-led political opposition. He took to arresting members of the elite, and by 11 January some 40 were in custody (Parkman 1988, 53).
On 25 January 1944, the Constituent Assembly revised the Constitution to give itself the power to elect the president, and proceeded to do so. This had been expected. What was not anticipated was a series of laws that allowed Martinez to establish a monopoly of any "services that may be beneficial to the community and which the laws may determine" (Parkman '988, 54). These laws basically gave Martinez the power to nationalize or socialize any aspect of the economy, and theygalvanized opposition to Martinez among the upper classes. U.S. Vice Consul Overton Ellis polled the leading 24families in the countryand found that20 of them were anti-Martfnez, 2 supported him, and a abstained from expressing an opinion (Parkman '988, 57).
The core of opposition to Martfnezwas an organization called Salvadoran Democratic Action, created in '941by many of the officials who had resigned from Martinez' government. Forced underground after only two public ral lies, it became "thegeneral staffof a conspiracy to frustrate Martinez' fourth-
Antecedents I 83
term aspirations" (Parkman 1988,42).The moving spiritof the conspiracy was a coffee grower named Agustfn Alfaro Moran, former auditor general in Martinez' government, founder of the Compania Salvadorefia de Cafe, and president of the Asociacion Cafetalera. Alfaro Moran dearly represented the sentiments of the coffee producers: these elites were flirting with the idea of governing the country.
The upper-class conspirators had middle-class allies, particularly among professionals, whose political ideas and expectations had been heavily influ enced by Allied wartime propaganda about democracy and self-determination. A charismatic physician named Arturo Romeroemerged as a champion of re form and attracted additional middle- and even lower-class support. He was known, among other things, for his generosity in treating indigent patients. The movement as a whole, however, depended on upper-class bankers, mer chants, and the coffee elite for leadership and financial support. U.S. consular official Overton Ellis reported that the Alvarez family, which owned the world's largest coffee mill, wasa keysupporter, aswas the most prominent cit izen in Santa Ana, Francisco Alfaro (Parkman '988, 44).
Meanwhile, a parallel conspiracy developed within the military. Army offi cers'reasons to oppose Martinezhad little to do with his conflicts with the up per classes. The main grievance stemmed from his favoritism toward the se curity forces-the National Guard and National Police-over the regular army. The security forces had always received much better pay, but after '937 Martinez allocated them a growing percentage of the budget, and they re ceived new weapons. Promotions too tended to favor officers in the security forces (McClintock '985a, '27-28)9 Within the army, promotions were based not on merit, but rather on personal loyalty to the dictator. During the '940S, Martinez replacedcommanders of internally strategic posts with officers who had risen up through the ranks, removing those who had been trained in the academy or abroad. His personal secret police constantly surveilled officers, and he created a civilian militia using membersof his Pro-Patria Party, a move that violated the military's monopoly on armed force. These grievances cut across the ranks (Elam '968, 108-9), but most of the conspirators were younger,academy-trained regular army officers. A high proportion were lieu tenants; most were in theirtwenties, Parkman reports. One informant told her that 70 to 80 percent of the army supported the revolt ('988, 58).
The civilian and military committees joined forces in early 1944, and on 2
April they struck while Martinez wasout of the capital. Two army brigades in San Salvador and the Second Brigade in Santa Ana rebelled. However, the First Artillery barracks (called EI Zapote), the National Police, and the National Guard held out against the rebels, who prematurely announced over the na tional airwaves boththeiranticipated victory andwhich unitshadrefused to join the revolt. Hearing on the radio that the security forces' barracks had held,
G4 I Chaple~ Two
Martinez managed to work his way, apparently without resistance, to the Na tional Police headquarters. The rebels were soon defeated, with considerable casualties. En route from Santa Ana to the capital, a convoy of army troops (and probably armed civilians) were ambushed by the security forces, who killed 53 and wounded '34 (McClintock 1985a, '30; Parkman 1988, 60).
The execution of 10 alleged conspirators chilled many Salvadorans and led ultimately to Martinez' downfall. Twenty other officers were sentenced to death in absentia, along with nine civilians from the Democratic Action cornmittee.I? Dr. Romero was captured, wounded, and taken to a hospital in San Salvador, where he remained under a death sentence. Popular revulsion against the sentences provided Martinez' elite opponents with the opportu nity they had been looking for. Democratic Action called a general strike that was so complete that the dictator left office one week after the strike be gan.
Though clearly a popular action, the unprecedented effectiveness of the huelgade brazos catdos ("strike offallen arms") depended in large part on sup port from the elite. The strike was led by students from the university, most of them from elite or middle-class families, with organizational and financial as sistance from businesses, banks. and wealthy citizens. Individual businesses and families contributed as much as 5,000 colones (U.S. $2,500). Business owners and bankers paid workers, taxi drivers, and bus driversto cooperate and provided some with safe houses to protect them from reprisals during the strike.
Organizers attempted to avoid large demonstrations, which might give Martinez a pretext to use violence. In the end, however, a number of large demonstrations took place, and Martinez showed restraint. His regime, if not the state itself, was in grave danger; yet despite his imprisonments and execu tions, he did not use widespread violence as he had in 1932.
The explanation for his passivity is that mass killing could no longer serve to legitimate his government before the economic elite. They were, after all, paying people to participate in the strike. Repressing demonstrators would not have made them feel better protected; moreover, since they were playing an important role in mobilizing popular opposition, there was, at least for the mo ment, relatively little risk that the movement would go beyond the immediate goal of ousting Martinez. The dictator was therefore no longer in a position to manipulate the perception of threat; on the contrary, his increased use of re pression against members of the elite in the months leading up to the strike, including the police shooting of a youth from a wealthy family, had made Martinez himself a threat. When secret police agents failed to provoke the looting that might justify a crackdown, Martinez found that he had run out of leverage. His only choices were to violently attack the social elite or to leave office. He chose to go.
Antecedents f 85
1944-1948: The Transitien IeInslllUlienal Rule
Before he left the country in 1944, Martinez managed to impose an officer of unswerving personal loyalty, General Andres 1. Menendez, as his successor. Surprisingly, instead of attempting to establish martinismo sin tvlaritnez. Menendez announced his intention to hold free elections and even permit ted the civilian liberals who had mobilized against Martinez to reorganize Democratic Action into a new political party, the Democratic Union Party (PUD). He also tolerated the formation of a National Workers' Union (UNT), which quickly enrolled 50,000 members. Surviving cadres of the clandestine Communist Party were the top and mid-level leadership (Elam 1968,76; Gor don 1989, 75).
The electoral campaign got under way during june and july 1944. The PUD quickly established an overwhelming popular advantage, in part be cause its presidential candidate, Arturo Romero, was widely viewed as a hero of the confrontation with Martinez. Opposing the PUD was a reincarnation of the old Martinista party, Pro-Patria, renamed the Unification Social Dem ocratic Party (PUSD), whose candidate was the hardline General Salvador Castaneda Castro. PUSD had the support of sectors of the armed forces that were hostile toward Romero.
While the popular PUD and the military's PUSD campaigned against each other,the economic elite of the country was in politicaldisarray. Some planters and members of the financial elite belonged to the PUD; others supported the military. Two splinter parties, the Salvadoran Agrarian Party and the Social Re publican Front, had elite support. Both put forward candidates who were divi sive and transparently self-serving, and garnered little support. The relatively low quality of the economic elite's electoral effort and candidates reflects the fact that, despite their distaste for Martinez, they had grown accustomed to working through the military rather than competing directly for political power. They lacked the political will to build a unified party and compete against the more radical agenda of the PUD. This failure made a democratic outcome unlikelyand a return to military intervention almost inevitable.
From june through October, popular mobilization shaped the political cam paign.Mass demonstrations forcedthe Assembly to reverse a decision to make an old-guard Martinista the first designate of interim President Menendez. The assembly then renounced Martinez' 1939 constitution and reinstated that of 1886, which provided greater confidence in future elections. Meanwhile, whatever commitment mayhave existed within the officer corps to observe the results of the coming election quickly eroded. Arturo Romero's PUD joined forces with members of Democratic Action and the UNT labor federation to form the United Democratic Front (FUD), creating in the process a mass based political party in which the PCS was known to have considerable
SS I Chapter Two
influence (Gordon 1989, 75-76). The FUD laid out an ambitious agenda, in cluding a"completeeconomic andsocial overhaul of the country" (Elam 1968, 82). The liberal press in San Salvador joined in attacking the military as anti democratic, corrupt, and abusive. Faced with the prospect of handing over governmentto a groupof civilianswho "had no record of respect or sympathy for the entire concept of armed institutions" (Elam 1968, 93), the divided mil itary began to reunify in opposition to the elections and the civilian liberals, leading to attacks on Romero and his followers, searches, insults, arrests, and occasienal shootings throughout the country (79). The various factions of the social elite did not trouble themselves to reunify: they stood back and let the military deal with the situation.
Military opposition to the electoral process eventually took the form of a bloodless coup d'etat against Menendez, led by the director of the police, Colonel Osmfn Aguirre y Salinas.Aguirre had been the director of police in the early years of the Martinez administration and had been one of the prin cipal architects of the matanza. Not surprisingly, he justified his coup in the language of the protection racket: "The seriousness of the moment in which I have acted has not escaped me; a man aware of his responsibilities. Anar chical ferment has kept the country in constant peril during the last few days, seriously threatening the institutional life of the Republic. The Salvadoran familyhasbeen dividedbya Hood of passionand we men of conscience could not help but be alarmed by the proximity of chaos" (quoted in Elam 1968,97),
Aguirre delivered the protection expected of him. The evening of the coup, leaders of the PUD, Democratic Action, and the UNT were arrested and slated for deportation. In the next week, hundreds of liberal opponents were jailed.The university was closed down by its own adminstrators; and the two main liberal newspapers in the countryalso succumbed to pressure to close.
Aguirre appears to have been opposedby the commercial and financialsec tors of the elite. As businesses and banks throughout the country closed fol lowing the coup, the military took over and informed employees that they would be dismissed if they did not show up for work (Elam 1968, 99). Using such means, Aguirre headed off the kind of general strike that brought down Martinez.
Meanwhile, FUD leaders who had been deported to Guatemala formed a governmentin exile and received international recognition.An invasionforce of some 2,000 FUD militants, withsome support from juniorand mid-ranking army officers included Oscar Osorio, who was to become president in 1950.
Like the Communist insurrection of 1932, the force was"untrained and undis ciplined," and depended on the success of a series of planned uprisings in army barracks (Gordon 1989, 76). When support failed to materialize from within the army, the invasion force was quickly overwhelmed by Aguirre's forces. Four hundred and fifty of the rebels were killed, as were 150 govern-
Antecedents I 67
ment soldiers (Elam 1968,103). Though demonstrations still occurred, the de feat of the FUD invasion removed the last serious opposition to the military. The high command could once again claim to have saved the country from communism and chaos.
On 4 January 1945, military rule was confirmed with the essentially un contested election of General Salvador Castaneda Castro as president. De spite efforts to sideline Aguirre and other factional competitors within the mil itary, Castaneda did not succeed in reestablishing a personalistic regime comparable to that ofMartfnez. In fact, his policies created the conditions for his removal only three years later bya movement of "progressive" officers who sought to renovate military rule, carry out substantial reforms, and govern on an institutional, not personalistic, basis.
The threat posed by the PUD and FUD during 1944 had caused the mili tar)' to pull together across generations, professional backgrounds, and ide ologies. The brutality and conservatism of the Castaneda government, how ever, and the absence of an immediate threat to the military as an institution, weakened once again the glue that had temporarily held the various factions together. With the basic principle of military governance firmly established, junior and middle-ranking army officers with internal, institutional grievances and a more populist socioeconomic philosophy decided to put the Martinis/a old guard out to pasture.
Their project was facilitated by the fact that, despite his repressiveness to ward the civilian community, Castaneda did not attempt to build a system of personal control within the military as had Martinez. He allowed, in effect, a political aperture within the military institution. He also enhanced the relative power of the regular army by bringing the National Police under the control of the Defense Ministry, rather than the Ministry of Interior (Elam 1968, 123-24). Castaneda committed the error of simultaneously providing junior of ficers with an easier context within which to organize and giving them reasons to act against him. He decreed a new law that regulated the number of officers at each rank; its impact was strongly in favor of existing senior officers, leading to the expectation that many junior officers would be dismissed. He then pro ceeded to send reformist junior officers out of the country for training.
In December 1948 Castaneda took extraconstitutional steps to prolong his term by two years, triggering a coup against him organized by a group of army majors. Once in control, the go/pis/as held a meeting of the entire officer corps in which three officers and two civilians were chosen for a Revolution ary Governing Council. The vote was held without regard to rank, with each officer having an equal vote, which favored the more numerous junior offi cers. The new council forced the retirement of all officers above the rank of lieutenant colonel, effectively eliminating all of the officers with close ties to Martinez. They then appointed a cahinet made up of middle-class civilian
88 I Chapter Two
professionals. The council promptly abrogated all inconvenient constitutional provisions but promised to hold elections for a Constituent Assembly and a new government in 1950.
The "Revolution of 1948" sought to establish a new model of military rule based on regularly held elections, expanded social services, and increased state intervention in the economy, particularly in the form of investment and support for industrialization. By expanding state intervention, they hoped to shift productive resources out of agriculture into industry and commerce, re ducing over time the economic and political preeminence of the agrarian elite and softening the acute distributional inequities in Salvadoran society. By involving the entire officer corps in decisions, they sought to ensure that the role of the military in politics would be an institutional commitment, rather than the project ofa single individual such as Martinez. Yet during the 30 years of institutional military rule inaugurated in 1948, the military never escaped the narrow confines of the protection racket he had established. Like Martinez, post-1948 military presidents failed to build a genuine base of mass political support. What independence they did demonstrate on political or so cioeconomic issues triggered elite opposition, usually in the form of conspir acy with conservative factions of the armed forces. Military presidents repeat edly found that staying in office required them to retreat from major reforms and demonstrate their usefulness through repression. The resulting model of rule, despite its reformist and corporatist pretensions, ultimately collapsed into what Enrique Baloyra (1982) has called "reactionary despotism," setting the stage for revolutionary war.
Noles f 288
In the 1980$ a series of edited volumes focused on internal violence bystates: Stohl and Lopez 1984, 1986; Lopezand Stohl 1989; Bushnell et al. 1991. 1110[0 were also a few books: McClintock 19853, 1985b; Moreira Alves 1985; Pion-Berlin 1989; and Rum mel 1990, 1991, 1992, 19943, 1994b; and some articles and papers: Banks 1986; Bollen 1986; Goldstein 1986; Mitchell and McCormick 1988; Mason and Krane 1989; and Lauria Santiago 1991.
3. Protest and Internal War are variable names and thus capitalized in the original. + Some versions of this argument, including that of O'Donnell (1978), adopt the
structural view that the state will defend the capitalist order, but not necessarily the in terests of capitalists. Inother words, the state may carry out policies that hurt entire sec tors of the capitalist classes, but will use coercion as necessary to prevent challenges to capitalism as a system.
5. Baloyra adapted the term "reactionary despotism" from Giner (1979). 6. Some believe that land privatization affected indigenous communities in
Guatemala. Pdrez-Brignoli argues, correctly, that the Mayan communities in the high lands were little affected by these changes in land tenure, though they were affected by subsequent vagrancy laws and other labor-coercive measures (1989, 84-85).
7. Corporatism is a form of government in which political participation is chan neled through a limited number of official parties and organizations, rather than through the plethora of independent parties and interest groupings characteristic of pluralism. Exclusionary corporatist regimes differ from pure authoritarian regimes in that there are at least the forms of popular consultation and incorporation, though these may be so tightly controlled from above as to be effectively meaningless. Inclu sionary corporatist regimes differ from populist regimes in that the latter generally Jack formal, state-sponsored mechanisms of interest mediation such as official unions or party structures. Although Stepan is writing specifically about corporatism, his dis tinction between inclusionary and exclusionary strategies can be applied to any non democratic regime.
8. Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman, for instance, argue that from a realist point of view, with full information states should never go to war (1992, 60).
9. Other factors that can affect the ability of a leadership group to take power in clude how well known it is, whether it is seen as having international support, and whether it has good access to military or organizational resources.
10. Although the Argentine, Uruguayan, and Salvadoran states have literally har bored organized crime activity against wealthy citizens such as kidnapping for ransom, theft, and killing for hire, there is a broader analogy to be drawn about the political re lationship between the state and civilian economic elites.
Chapter Two
L The urban police force at this time was called the Policfa de Linea. The name was later changed to Policfa Nacional, though the institution remained continuous un til it was replaced by a civilian force in 1994- For simplicity, I have used the term Na tional Police throughout.
2. Kenneth Grieb (1971,42-43). This description is based on interviews with Robert Gregg, then a resident of San Salvador.
284 I Noles
l Hernandez Martinez is always referred to in Salvadoran histories as Martinez, contrary to the usual emphasis on the paternal surname in Spanish. According to Grieb (1971, 153), the American minister in San Salvador was sufficiently uncertain of the military's attitude toward the 1931 elections that he requested that a warship be held in readiness in Panama for hasty deployment to El Salvador should a revolt take place.
4- Under the provisions of the 192210311, E1 Salvadorretained control of itsown cus toms houses, though the U.S. fiscal representative, William Renwick, was empowered to allocate a substantial share of the revenues to bondholders abroad. Renwick made his presence as benign as possible through his tact, low profile, and evident love and respect for the country. Nonetheless, his role raised questions about Salvadoran sovereignty, and it was widely expected that the next loan could involve direct foreign control of cus toms houses or other heavy-handed fiscal intervention (Astilla Carmelo 1976, 27).
5. Secretary of State Henry Stimson "was very disappointed with the way his Min ister had acted during the emergency.... Curtis had served as American Minister in Santo Domingo, where, according to Stimson, 'he had done badly.' His tenure in EI Salvador was disappointing as well, prompting Stimson to write in his diary that 'It only shows that when you have a man who isn't quite lip to snuff, the lightning is sure to strike wherever you put him" (Asti11a Carmela 1976,45),
6. Some observers have argued that Martinez' belief in the transmigration of souls made him less concerned than most leaders about taking human lives, but I would ar gue that these views merely facilitated what he already had powerful political incen tives to do.
7. These included Alfonso Rochac, auditor of the Treasury, Margarita Gonzalez Guerrero, chiefof the legal staffof the Treasury; Manuel Lopez Harrison, undersecretary of public works; Hermogenes Alvarado, undersecretary of government; David Rosales, undersecretary of public instruction; Max Patricio Brannon, undersecretary of finance; and Agustin Alfaro Moran, auditor general of the Republic (Parkman 1988, 30-31).
8. Even though the Melendez-Quinonez families had controlled the presidency for three terms, no individual had served more than one consecutive term, thus ob serving the constitutional prohibition on continuismc.
9. By the 1970S it was common for academy-trained army officers to serve for a time in the security forces. Many security forces officers, however, were promoted from the ranks and served only in the security forces. In the 1930S and 1940s,the forces were even more separate.
10. Castro Moran (1989, 177-78). Mariano Castro Moran, then a lieutenant, was among those sentenced.
Chapter Three
1. One of the three, Fabio Castillo, later ran for president as the candidate of the Renovating Action Party (PAR) after it had been taken over by the Communists.
2. Foco guerrillero refers to the model of revolutionary struggle that was successful in Cuba-cnamely, usc of military action, rather than mass organizing, to destabilize and ultimately overthrow a vulnerable regime. For this brief period, the PCS focused its energies on developing a military capability rather than expanding on its traditional union organizing activities.
thies.pdf
War, Rivalry, and State Building in Latin America Author(s): Cameron G. Thies Reviewed work(s): Source: American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 49, No. 3 (Jul., 2005), pp. 451-465 Published by: Midwest Political Science Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3647725 . Accessed: 17/09/2012 11:57
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War, Rivalry, and State Building in Latin America
Cameron G. Thies Louisiana State University
Scholars of Latin America have recently begun to apply the bellicist approach to state building to the region, the central claim
of which is that wars are a great stimulus to centralizing state power and building institutional capacity. This article argues that current applications of these models of state building are too narrowly specified to be of much use in Latin America or elsewhere in the developing world. Replacing the focus on interstate war with the more general phenomenon of interstate
rivalry, alongside the consideration of intrastate rivals, allows us to account for the impact of both external and internal
forces on the development of the state. I demonstrate the utility of this approach through several cross-sectional time-series analyses that provide evidence that external and internal rivals affect the Latin American state in a manner consistent with the general nature of bellicist theory.
cholars have recently begun to apply the bellicist approach to state building to Latin America. The central claim of this approach is that wars are a
great stimulus to centralizing state power and building institutional capacity (Centeno 1997, 2002; L6pez-Alves 2000, 2001). However, the manner in which the approach has been applied may be too literal. Since Latin Ameri- can state building occurred in a different historical con- text than the early modern European experience upon which bellicist or predatory theory is based, the literal application has often been used as a foil to argue for competing explanations for the relatively weak states that populate the region today. I will argue that current appli- cations of Tilly's (1975, 1985, 1992) model of state build- ing are too narrowly specified to be of much use in Latin America or elsewhere in the developing world. When properly specified, these models are applicable to Latin America.
I begin by reviewing the qualitative findings on the relationship between war and state building in Latin America. The scant scholarship on this area generally finds that the bellicist approach developed by scholars like Tilly is a useful grand theory "mirror" to hold up to the reality of Latin America (Centeno and L6pez-Alves 2001). The literature finds that war was not a stimulus to state build- ing in the region, but rather than completely rejecting the bellicist approach, scholars have explained why war did not operate in Latin America as it did in early modern
Europe. The comparative case study method or narra- tive analysis is employed to show how war failed due to a number of factors peculiar to Latin America as a region and particular to states within that region. The common argument is that internal violence overwhelmed the Latin American state in the absence of countervailing pressure that would typically be supplied by the fear of external vio- lence. Further, the preoccupation with the "enemy within" also prevented states from engaging in external violence. As a result, Latin American states are relatively weak en- tities that exist in a precarious position relative to both domestic society and other states in a region characterized
by a violent peace. However, when the almost exclusive focus on exter-
nal war is replaced with the more general phenomenon of interstate rivalry, and intrastate rivals are included si-
multaneously in the model, we can account for both the
impact of external and internal forces on the develop- ment of the state. Interstate rivals, whether operational- ized as "enduring" or "strategic" rivals, have a positive effect on the state's extractive capacity. Intrastate rivals, on the other hand, have the expected negative effect on state building. It is also clear that a variety of other im-
portant factors, such as the frequent recourse to external debt have had significant effects on the state's ability to extract from society. The conclusion is that a more gen- eralized version of the bellicist approach to state building is applicable to Latin America. The same types of basic
Cameron G. Thies is assistant professor of political science, Louisiana State University, 240 Stubbs Hall, Baton Rouge, LA 70803-5433 ([email protected]). I would like to thank Moises Arce, Paul Hensel, Doug Lemke, Andrew Schlewitz, and the anonymous reviewers and editors of AJPS for their helpful comments.
American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 49, No. 3, July 2005, Pp. 451-465
?2005 by the Midwest Political Science Association ISSN 0092-5853
451
452 CAMERON G. THIES
forces operate in the region today as were in action
during the period of early modern European state forma- tion. However, the results of the state building process are not exactly the same, as Latin American states have clearly not attained the capacity and durability of their European counterparts.
Bellicist Approaches to State Building in Latin America
Latin Americanists are not the first to look at the im-
pact of interstate war and a threatening security environ- ment on the modern developing state. Cohen, Brown, and
Organski (1981), Kirby and Ward (1991), Jaggers (1992), Stubbs (1999), and Bates (2001) all highlight the strik-
ing similarities that contemporary developing states share with their early modern European counterparts, includ-
ing the impact of war and external threats on state build-
ing efforts. Others argue that the lack of external threats and war have led to relatively weak states (Desch 1996; Herbst 1990, 1996/97, 2000; Lustick 1997), but the logic is the same-strong external threats, including but not limited to war, produce states with stronger institutional
capacities to extract from society. The logic of the bellicist approach is most clearly ar-
ticulated by Tilly (1985, 182) who maintains that rulers
engage in four activities in the process of building the state. The first activity is war making through which ri- vals located outside of the territory they are attempting to control are neutralized or eliminated. The second ac-
tivity is state making, which involves the elimination or
pacification of potential rivals to their rule from within their territorial base. The third activity is the protection of those actors that support their rule. Finally, in order to accomplish the other activities, the state must engage in the extraction of resources from the population they are attempting to control. Tilly (1985, 180) argued that of these activities, war making was the main stimulus to increases in the level of taxation and debt, hence it has become the main focus for scholars attempting to apply this model outside of Europe.
As Centeno notes, "on the most basic level, the func- tions of a state include the provision and administration of public goods and the control of both internal and ex- ternal violence" (2002, 2), which seems to place his work on the Latin American state squarely within the bellicist tradition. However, as he later makes clear, he does not view the state as an independent actor, which severs the theoretical tie to Tilly's work and others in the predatory theory tradition (e.g., Levy 1981; North 1981). According to Centeno,
states are not actors in and of themselves. They are shells-potentially powerful shells-but nev- ertheless hollow at the core. The machine of the state needs a "driver" able to use the stimulus pro- vided by war to expand its reach and power. With- out such a driver, whether it be state personnel, a dominant class, or even a charismatic individ- ual, the political and military shell of the state has no direction. Without this direction, wars do not
present opportunities for growth, but are mere challenges to survival. (2002, 166)
Centeno believes that wars only make states when a polit- ically or militarily dominant institution and a social class are united in the view that war is the best way to main- tain their position and privilege. Centeno (2002, 142) ar-
gues that geographical, social, and racial divisions in Latin America prevented the emergence of a unified, centralized state able to take advantage of the stimulus provided by war. While Latin American elites shared a common fear of the "enemy below"-nonwhite subalterns, they were di- vided among themselves as liberals versus conservatives, and criollos versus peninsulares, among other cleavages. Ultimately, these divisions meant that the state "was never able to impose the internal unity required for the extrac- tion process, even in the face of military threats" (Centeno 2002, 138-39). The existence of "rival claimants" to au- thority among elites also diminished the state's ability to maintain a monopoly over the use of violence, resulting in an "almost predatory quality" of life in many countries because the state was unable to provide protection to its citizens (Centeno 2002, 7-8).
Centeno (2002, 46) argues that internal conflict con- tinues to reflect both the absence of international com- petitors and the lack of centralization of power domes- tically. He suggests that it is possible that higher levels of external conflict might have served to mitigate inter- nal divisions, yet there were just too few wars in Latin America that occurred at the wrong time to have this type of impact. Centeno (2002, 9) supports this position by demonstrating that Latin America has participated in relatively few interstate wars since the early nineteenth
century compared to the rest of the world. Further, the borders of Latin American countries have remained rela-
tively stable, and no state has disappeared due to conquest. Finally, while civil wars were sometimes defined territo- rially, they typically revolved around competing claims to the state (Centeno 2002, 128). The combination of high levels of internal violence and low levels of external vio- lence produced a "violent form of peace" (Centeno 2002, 35). This finding is consistent with previous work on re- gional order in Latin America that characterizes it as a
WAR, RIVALRY AND STATE BUILDING 453
"violent peace" (Mares 2001) or "zone of negative peace" (Kacowicz 1998).
The problem with the bellicist model, according to Centeno, is that Latin American states have fought "lim- ited" as opposed to "total" wars (2002, 20-23). Limited wars are short in duration, encompass a small geographic area, occur between states over frontier or economic is- sues, are fought by professional as opposed to conscripted soldiers, and tend to have little impact on the average cit- izen. The net result is that these wars do not require the
large-scale mobilization of society, nor do they have the usual effect on government's ability to extract from it. Total war, on the other hand, enhances the state's ability to extract resources, enables the state to centralize power, shifts loyalties and emotional attachments to the state that represents the nation, and transforms the "subject" into a "citizen." Latin America's experience with limited wars has produced states built on "blood and debt" as opposed to "blood and iron."
Andreski (1980) offers a complementary analysis of the relationship between the external and internal uses of
military force. In fact, he argues there is a fundamental in-
compatibility between internal and external uses of force, such that increased frequency of the internal use of force diminishes the capability of the military to wage war exter-
nally. The frequent deployment of the military to dispense with rival claimants to centralized rule in Latin America
may have limited the military's ability to properly pros- ecute interstate wars. This is because time, equipment, and organization directed toward the pursuit of internal rivals detract from the pursuit of external rivals. More im-
portantly, the coercive use of the military within the state detracts from national solidarity and public readiness to
support the military and the state more generally through either symbolic or material means. Andreski's analysis also points toward the deleterious effect that simultane- ous deployment of forces both internally and externally must have on the state. The logical result is equivalent to Centeno's argument that internal rivals overwhelmed the state and prevented it from augmenting its extractive ca-
pacity to more properly prosecute external wars. L6pez-Alves (2000, 2001) similarly argues that hold-
ing Latin America up to the "mirror" ofTilly's (1992) work provides a useful lens through which to view the region's experience, though it does not capture a complete under- standing. In his judgment, Latin America (like Europe) falls under Tilly's capitalized coercion model, in which the state used both coercion and capital to centralize their control.
On both shores, states spent money in recon- structing the economy, buying the loyalty of local
lords and army officers, establishing bureaucra- cies (including a system of taxation), and trying to secure the support of the economic elite. Part of the state budget also went to placate local revolts, and, on occasion, smaller sums were distributed among the populace. (L6pez-Alves 2001, 160)
The difference is that Latin American states did not rely on a central army to subdue the upper classes or enforce taxation, instead relying on foreign loans and customs duties for revenue and suffering the ill effects of internal political rivals. Rouquie (1987) offers a sim- ilar argument yet he rejects the application of the cap- italized coercion model to Latin America because the region's economies were so externally oriented and pene- trated. L6pez-Alves (2001, 164-70) also stresses the effect of guerrilla warfare in delaying the consolidation of the state, and generally diminishing the state's extractive ca- pacity as the government often used tax exemptions to
placate local and regional rebellions. Overall, Centeno's conclusion "that while war may have played a significant role in the development of some European states, its ex-
planatory power wanes on crossing the Atlantic" (2002, 20) seems to represent the dominant view of the region.
Current scholarship thus starts with the bellicist ap- proach inspired by Tilly's work on Europe, draws some lessons from it, then moves on to explanations grounded in regional experience. However, the approach adopted in this article is to begin with Tilly's work, but enhance its
generalizability outside of the European experience. After all, states are states, no matter what time period or geo- graphical region they inhabit. States clearly vary in their institutional capacity, but that does not mean that they are incomparable, simply that some underlying factors are likely responsible for that variation. In our search for a general approach to state building, we can begin with
Tilly's contention that the state must engage in war mak-
ing to deal with external rivals and state making to deal with internal rivals.
As Centeno notes, "it is not necessarily war itself, but the threat of war that often produces the positive state- building consequences" (2002, 266). This language sug- gests that external threats in the form of interstate rivals
may produce a similar effect on the state as actual war. In- terstate rivalries contain varying levels of threat, and the threat is of extended duration, which may act to similarly empower the state to extract from society. But how do the
political processes of war and rivalry affect the general state-building process?
Historical institutionalism has previously afforded
analytical leverage in understanding the effects of these
types of political processes on state building (e.g., Ertman
454 CAMERON G. THIES
1997; Waldner 1999) and has frequently been employed in the Latin American context to analyze the path-dependent nature of state institutions (e.g., Collier and Collier 1991; Mahoney 2001). Historical institutionalists argue that in- stitutional arrangements tend toward stability until they are disrupted by some political or economic shock (Thies 2001 la). Stability is the result of institutional arrangements that privilege certain agents, such as political, societal, or
military elites, who work to perpetuate their role, status, and benefits. Change is "sticky" and episodic due to the vested interests of such agents and the costs of uncertainty stemming from adopting alternate institutional arrange- ments. In fact, change is only likely to occur during infre-
quent shocks to the institution known as critical junctures. In the study of state-building efforts, wars are generally thought to disrupt the existing institutional equilibrium surrounding the state's ability to extract tax revenues from
society. Wars produce a "displacement effect" or "ratchet effect" that moves the accepted amount of extraction to a new and higher equilibrium point resulting in an ex-
pansion of the state's fiscal and administrative apparatus (Campbell 1993; Peacock and Wiseman 1961; Rasler and
Thompson 1985; Russett 1970).' However, if Centeno's argument is correct, then the
limited wars fought in the Latin American context did not
produce the familiar ratchet effect on tax revenues by dis-
rupting the institutional equilibrium. Instead, the ratchet effect was evident only in the effect war had on rising levels of public debt. The literature on the ratchet effect
suggests that when domestic political and economic con- ditions make it difficult or impossible to enhance tax rev- enues, states will turn to debt for the resources they need to prosecute and pay for war. Tilly's well-known conclu- sion that "war, state apparatus, taxation, and borrowing advanced in tight cadence" (1985, 180) in early modern
Europe is incomplete in the Latin American experience according to Centeno's argument. While war might have
produced increased borrowing, it did not have a similar effect on taxation and the development of an effective state fiscal apparatus.
Interstate rivalries, on the other hand, may represent more of a "slow-moving causal process" (Pierson 2003). Historical institutionalism is also attuned to large-scale,
lengthy, social processes that are relatively slow moving in nature. While the impact of critical junctures on policy legacies maybe dramatic in the short-term with long-term consequences, slow-moving processes may have more of an incremental impact on institutions. As Pierson and
Skocpol (2002) note, it may simply take awhile for these
types of processes to add up to anything or even be no- ticed by scholars who are used to studying events and
processes that unfold rapidly. The causal factors that pro- duce incremental change may often be present for some time before a particular threshold is reached that produces change (Baumgartner and Jones 1993; Goldstone 1991). This is one of the reasons that determining the starting point for interstate rivalries has proven somewhat contro- versial (Bennett 1998; Thompson 1995). The conditions that produce a rivalry are often present before decision makers are aware that they are engaged in one.
Thies (2001b) has explored the causal factors that
produced, maintained, and terminated the Argentine- Chilean rivalry through an in-depth case study employ- ing process tracing. He finds that academic and military elites in both states created a form of territorial nation- alism that took hold to produce the rivalry only after the
Argentine state consolidated territorially in the 1860s, de-
spite the fact that the discourse predated the conclusion of this process. This type of nationalism was promulgated by the popular press into a mainstay of public opinion, taught in the educational system, reinforced by military planning, and barely constrained by periods of democ-
racy (if at all). While Argentina and Chile did not go to war, the military establishments in both countries were in- strumental in maintaining a high level of perceived threat
among the population for nearly a century. This type of
"protection racket" in Tilly's (1985) terms was used to
justify increased extraction and military expenditures in the two countries. Similar domestic processes elsewhere in Latin American may have enabled rulers to incremen-
tally adjust their revenue extraction upward over longer periods of time due to the threat posed by rivalries (Ames 1987). In addition to the frequent recourse to debt, the
protection racket created by the ongoing threat of an in- terstate rivalry may have been a rational adaptation to the inability to dramatically increase the tax burden during wartime.
External rivals should not be considered without con-
sidering internal rivals as well, since both are important to Tilly's model and predatory theory in general (Thies 2004). While Centeno and L6pez-Alves suggest that in- ternal rivals overwhelmed the Latin American state, both
suggest that these rivals were able to do so in the context of a lack of external rivals. Therefore, Centeno and L6pez- Alves's work does fit within a generalized version ofTilly's
1A variety of explanations for the ratchet effect have been proposed in this literature (see Campbell 1993 for a review). First, the state may be able to increase the tax burden in a war context because cit- izens prefer greater protection to foreign domination. Second, the threat of disinvestment by owners of capital in the face of higher tax rates may also diminish during wartime, as owners of capital benefit directly and indirectly from the infusion of increased government spending into the economy. Third, rulers may simply increase the tax burden during wartime to ensure their survival, regardless of the impact on citizens or investors.
WAR, RIVALRY AND STATE BUILDING 455
model. We should therefore simultaneously assess the ef- fects of both external and internal rivals on the extractive
capacity of the state. External rivals should allow the state to augment its extractive capacity, while internal rivals should have the opposite effect in Latin America.
Data and Method
The current scholarship on the connection between war and state building in Latin America focuses primarily on South America. Centeno (2002) examines Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Mexico, which this article also selects as cases for the sake of comparability.2 However, I conduct a large-N, statistical analysis, as opposed to the qualitative (and sometimes small-N) analyses of Centeno and L6pez-Alvez. Centeno states that "there is little ques- tion that we may speak of a probabilistic connection be- tween war and state development" (2002, 19), seemingly suggesting that statistical analysis of this relationship is
appropriate. Yet, Centeno (2002, 116; footnote 37) also states that he studiously avoided statistical analysis be- cause the data would provide deceptive cross-national
comparisons and coding particular years for war would be too subjective. In fact, Centeno cautions against grafting "the kind of modeling borrowed from mainstream social science onto comparative historical studies. Finding a sin-
gle path through historical evidence is nearly impossible" (2002, 278). Historical institutionalists are rather eclectic in this regard, with some scholars creating general mod- els (Collier and Collier 1991; Mahoney 2001) and others
emphasizing the unintended or unanticipated aspects of
history (Pierson 1996). However, all scholars would agree that macrosocial structures and processes are complicated phenomenon to understand and explain, hence we should exercise appropriate caution when interpreting any type of evidence for our theoretical propositions. This article
suggests that qualitative and quantitative approaches can
provide complementary evidence on the state building process in Latin America.
The economic data used here comes from the Oxford Latin American Economic History Database housed at the Latin American Centre at Oxford Univer-
sity, which is an updated version of Thorp (1998).3 It is the most comprehensive source of economic data on Latin America available for the entire twentieth century (1900- 2000). Unfortunately, comprehensive, reliable data for the nineteenth century, which would have allowed for a more
comprehensive study of state building, is not available. We should bear in mind when interpreting the evidence that these states are further along in their consolidation in the
period under study than Tilly's early modern European states. However, given that state building is an ongoing process, the period under study is still likely to shed light on the factors that affect state building efforts.
The dependent variable of interest is the tax ratio, which is the state's tax revenue as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP). The tax ratio is the standard measure of the state's extractive capacity (e.g., Campbell 1993; Centeno 2002; Fauvelle-Aymar 1999). Taxes and the bureaucracies that support regularized extraction are the stuff out of which the modern state is built. Organski and
Kugler argue "taxes are exact indicators of governmental presence" (1980, 74). The inability to extract tax revenue from society is a key indication of the state's incapacity to obtain and maintain national unity, legitimacy, and control.
I first test Centeno's arguments about the effects of interstate war and civil war on state building efforts. Al-
though he makes it clear that he thinks the coding of wars is too subjective to provide meaningful cross-national com-
parisons, Centeno (2002, 44-46) actually generates his own lists of interstate wars and civil wars, which I use to test his argument. Centeno's classifications of interstate war and civil war are similar, though not identical, to the Correlates of War classifications (see Tables 1 and 2). Given the general expectation that a "ratchet effect" on tax revenues is the result of a political shock like war, I
allow interstate and civil wars to have a 10-year impact on tax revenues following convention in the literature (e.g., Goertz and Diehl 1995). Coding interstate wars solely for the wartime years is likely to miss the impact this type of shock would have on state institutional arrangements sur-
rounding extraction. Following Andreski's (1980) logic, I also include a variable to test for the interaction of inter- state and civil wars. If Andreski is correct, internal rivals
2Centeno (2002, 1; footnote 1) excludes Central America for sev- eral reasons: it is geographically separate from the other countries under study; only so many countries can be studied in a particular scholarly endeavor; and these countries may represent an exception to his arguments. However, these reasons may simply serve to high- light selection bias in the choice of cases. For example, Mexico is not geographically united with the rest of these South American coun- tries, yet it is included. Certainly, as the number of cases increases, the tractability of a comparative case study approach declines, yet this suggests that a large-N, statistical analysis may be warranted. Finally, excluding cases because they may not conform to one's a priori theoretical expectations is problematic. L6pez-Alvez (2000, 7-14) restricts his analysis to five Latin American states, but for stronger theoretical and methodological reasons. I restrict the cur- rent analysis to Centeno's 11 cases in order to conduct a fair as- sessment of his work; however, future research should examine the Central American cases.
3The data can be accessed at the following web site: http://oxlad.qeh. ox.ac.uk/index.php.
456 CAMERON G. THIES
TABLE 1 Latin American Interstate Wars in the Twentieth Century
War States Dates Centeno COW
World War I Brazil 1917-1918 Yes No Chaco War Bolivia, Paraguay 1932-1935 Yes Yes Leticia Colombia, Peru 1932-1933 Yes No World War II Brazil 1944-1945 Yes Yes Border Dispute Ecuador, Peru 1941 Yes No Korean War Colombia 1951-1953 No Yes Border Dispute Ecuador, Peru 1981 Yes No
Falklands War Argentina 1982 Yes Yes Border Dispute Ecuador, Peru 1995 Yes No
Source: Centeno (2002, 44) and Correlates of War Project.
might take advantage of the inability of the state to effec-
tively deploy military force both internally and externally, leading to a decline in the tax ratio. Unlike Central Amer-
ica, there are no cases of third-party state intervention in South American civil wars in this time period.
TABLE 2 Latin American Civil Wars in the Twentieth Century
State Dates Centeno COW
Mexico "Indian 1880-1900 Yes No
Campaigns" Colombia "Thousand 1899-1903 Yes Yes
Days" Venezuela 1898-1900 Yes No Venezuela 1901-1903 No Yes Secession of Panama 1903 Yes No
(Colombia) Uruguay 1904 Yes Yes Mexican Revolution 1910-1920 Yes Yes Ecuador 1911-1912 Yes No
Paraguay 1911-1912 Yes Yes Ecuador 1922-1925 Yes No Mexico 1923-1924 No Yes Mexico "Cristero 1926-1930 Yes Yes
Rebellion" Brazil 1932 No Yes
Paraguay 1947 Yes Yes Colombia "La Violencia" 1948-1962 Yes Yes Bolivia Revolution 1952 Yes Yes
Argentina Anti-Peron 1955 Yes Yes Chile 1973 No Yes Peru "El Sendero" 1982-1992 Yes Yes Colombia 1984-Present Yes Yes
Source: Centeno (2002, 45-46) and Correlates of War Project.
I also examine the impact of interstate rivalries on state building, which may present more of a long-term, slow-moving effect on state institutions. Diehl and Go- ertz conceptualize enduring rivalry as "a relationship be- tween two states in which both use, with some regular- ity, military threats and force as well as one in which both sides formulate foreign policy in military terms"
(2000, 4). These types of rivalry involve a variety of mili- tarized activities, including both the threat and actual use of force deployed to resolve foreign policy disputes over extended periods of time. Operationally, an enduring ri-
valry is a dyad that experiences at least six MIDs within a time period of at least 20 years. Diehl and Goertz (2000, 44-45) also classify two other types of rivalry, including proto-rivalry (at least three MIDs in less than 20 years), and isolated rivalry (two or fewer MIDs in less than 11
years).4 The Latin American enduring and proto rivalries for the twentieth century are found in Table 3 alongside the other conceptualizations of interstate rivalry tested here.
Thompson's (2001) alternative measure of interstate
rivalry, known as strategic rivalry, is included as a com-
parison to the Diehl and Goertz measure of enduring rivalry. Strategic rivalries are conceived as situations in which states view each other as "(a) competitors, (b) the source of actual or latent threats that pose some possibil- ity of becoming militarized, and (c) enemies" (Thompson 2001, 560). Thompson's operationalization of the concept also differs greatly from the Diehl and Goertz measure, since there is no reliance on the MID data to mark the be-
ginning and ending of a rivalry, nor on absolute numbers of MIDs required to establish a rivalry's existence. Instead,
4I have updated the Diehl and Goertz (2000) classifications of these types of rivalry through 2000 based on the newly released MID 3.0 data (Ghosn and Palmer 2003).
WAR, RIVALRY, AND STATE BUILDING 457
TABLE 3 Latin American External Rivalries in the Twentieth Century
Dyad Enduring Proto Strategic Interstate I Interstate II
Argentina-Brazil 1817-1985
Argentina-Chile 1873-1909 1843-1991 1873-1984 1897-1984
Argentina-Chile 1952-1984
Argentina-Germany 1939-1945
Argentina-UK 1976-1983 1965-present Bolivia-Chile 1836-present 1857-1904 1927-1938
Bolivia-Paraguay 1918-1938 1887-1938 1886-1938
Bolivia-Peru 1825-1932
Brazil-Germany 1942-1945 Brazil-UK 1849-1965 Chile-Peru 1911-1921 1832-1929 1871-1929
Chile-Peru 1976-1977 Colombia-Ecuador 1831-1919
Colombia-Germany 1943-1944
Colombia-Nicaragua 1979-1992 Colombia-Peru 1899-1913 1824-1935 1899-1934 Colombia-Venezuela 1982-2000 1831-present Ecuador-Peru 1891-1955 1830-1998 1891-present 1911-present Ecuador-Peru 1977-1998 Ecuador-USA 1952-1981 1972-present
Mexico-Germany 1939-1942 Mexico-USA 1911-1920 1836-1923 1859-1927
Peru-USA 1955-1992 1992-present
Uruguay-Germany 1939-1945
Venezuela-Guyana 1966-1982 1966-present Venezuela-Trinidad 1996-1999
Source: Diehl and Goertz (2000) and Thompson (2001, 570-73).
Thompson relies on the perceptions of foreign policy makers in the affected states as reported by historians.
Given the controversy in the literature about when to date the start of a rivalry, I also employ two other
operationalizations of the rivalry concept that affect the start of the rivalry as a check on the robustness of my results. MID-based approached to rivalry, such as Diehl and Goertz's enduring rivalries, are frequently criticized because the beginning and ending dates of the rivalry are
only known by the researcher retroactively. However, as
Thompson (1995, 2001) has argued, if decision makers are making policy choices based on a rivalry, then it is
important that they realize they are participating in a ri-
valry. Thompson (2001) developed his aforementioned measure of strategic rivalry precisely to address this prob- lem. Bennett pursued another approach to improve the
dating of MID-based approaches to rivalry based on the issues under contention. Bennett's (1996, 1997a) first op- erationalization of rivalry, which Thompson (2001) refers
to as "Interstate I rivalry," requires a pair of states to
engage in at least five MIDs during a period of at least
25 years concerning the same issue under contention. Bennett's (1997b, 1998) second operationalization of ri-
valry, "Interstate II rivalry," requires six MIDs within a
20-year period with no more than a 15 year gap between
disputes. In both operationalizations, the starting and
ending dates for the rivalry are not necessarily the same
as in the Diehl and Goertz "enduring" rivalry measure
despite the same reliance on MIDs. This article will test the effects of these kinds of inter-
state rivalries as measures of significant external threat.
Given that interstate rivalries, regardless of their opera- tional definition, are by their nature militarized compe- titions that extend over long periods of time, we should
expect to see increased extractive activity on the part of
the state to deal with them. However, proto-rivalries and
isolated rivalries from the Diehl and Goertz approach
may lack the level of sustained severity that would cause
458 CAMERON G. THIES
the state to augment its extractive capacity. In fact, given Centeno's arguments about limited war, we might even
expect that sporadic conflict events might not have any significant effects on state fiscal policy, or even a negative effect.
The control variables are standard fare for predictions of the tax ratio (e.g., Cheibub 1998; Fauvelle-Aymar 1999; Webber and Wildavsky 1986). They include a measure of democracy, which is based on the polity2 score from
Polity IV, which varies from +10 (most democratic) to -10 (most autocratic). The polity2 score is increased by 10 points and then divided in half so that the compos- ite score varies between 0 and 10 as in the original vari- ables on which it is based. Predatory theory based on the
European experience generally predicts a negative rela-
tionship between democracy and the tax ratio, although some studies have found a positive relationship in the de-
veloping world, and perhaps not surprisingly, previous empirical studies find mixed evidence for the effect of
democracy on extraction (e.g., Cheibub 1998). I include a measure of external debt as a percentage of
GDP. This measure includes the total of public, publicly guaranteed, and private nonguaranteed long-term exter- nal debt, including the use of IMF credit, and short-term debt, that is owed to nonresidents. Centeno is quite clear that he believes Latin American states avoided increased extraction in part because of the readily available foreign sources of funding, hence his book title Blood and Debt. The resort to external debt by developing states is often viewed as one of the reasons that Tilly's model may not
generalize outside of early modern Europe. I include the measure of external debt to control for this alternative to increased domestic extraction.
The logarithm of GDP per capita in dollars is used as a measure of national wealth and economic develop- ment. States with higher levels of wealth and development should have the ability to extract a larger portion of the national income, as well as a larger initial pool of resources to consider for extractive purposes. The logarithm of in-
flation measured as the annual percentage change in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is typically expected to be negatively associated with tax revenues. However, Latin America has had an unfortunately long experience with high and even hyperinflation. These levels of inflation were often the result of the state's desire to placate labor, allowing wages to rise to meet previous price increases, thus creating a vicious circle whereby inflation begat in- flation. At the same time, states continued to provide sub- sidies in transportation and food, in addition to more ex- pensive ventures launched under the import-substitution industrialization programs popular between the 1920s and the 1980s. Thus, the state continued to need enhanced
revenues during periods of rising inflation. Inflation and extraction (along with other means of securing revenues, such as debt) are expected to be positively related in this situation. Trade openness (the total of exports plus im-
ports divided by GDP) is expected to be positively related to tax revenues as international trade is often thought to be relatively easy to tax as it enters or leaves through a limited number of ports.
I also include a measure of the sectoral composition of domestic product: agriculture as a percentage of GDP. This sector of the economy is often included as an in- dicator of the transaction costs associated with taxation,
along with per capita GDP, trade openness, and mining as a percentage of GDP (e.g., Cheibub 1998). This article in- cludes all of these factors except mining, since the Oxford data does not include a separate variable for this sector of the economy. The transaction cost argument is that it is relatively easier to tax the modern sectors of the econ-
omy, as opposed to the traditional sectors like agriculture. Therefore, agriculture is expected to be negatively related to the tax ratio.
A time-trend variable is included to capture the vari- ation in the tax ratio across time throughout the region. This variable is also a surrogate for age, since all of these states emerged from the colonial period at approximately the same time. Presumably, as states age, they should be- come better at extracting from society, although at some
point the relationship reverses in mature democracies as
groups bargain through institutionalized political chan- nels to reduce their share of the tax burden (Jackman 1993). In the Latin American states, I expect a positive relationship between time (age) and the tax ratio. I es- timate the following pooled cross-sectional time-series with panel-corrected standard errors (PCSEs; Beck and Katz 1995).
Analysis
I test Centeno's basic propositions about the relative im- pact of interstate and civil war on state building in Latin America in the model found in Table 4. I first employ Cen- teno's measures of interstate and civil war in the model on the left-hand side of the table. As Centeno suggests, interstate war does not have a significant effect on extrac- tion, even allowing for a 10-year impact on the tax ratio. The sign on this variable is negative, which does seem to correspond to Centeno's general understanding that if anything, the few wars that were fought at the wrong time (in his view) might have actually undermined the state building process. Civil wars, on the other hand, have a significant, negative effect on extraction, which is exactly
WAR, RIVALRY AND STATE BUILDING 459
TABLE 4 The Effect of Interstate and Civil War on the Tax Ratio in Latin America
Independent Variable Coefficient PCSE Coefficient PCSE
Centeno Interstate War -.0777 .6624 Centeno Civil War -2.6418*** .5637 Centeno Interstate x Civil -2.4289* 1.2602 COW Interstate War -4.4734*** 1.3889 COW Civil War -2.6360*** .4999 COW Interstate x Civil 6.5303*** 1.5658
Democracy .2124* .0959 .2279** .0911
External Debt -11.2135*** 2.1763 -8.2430*** 2.1610
GDP per capita 1.8593*** .5432 1.6366*** .5284
Inflation .2611*** .0540 .2563*** .0503
Trade Openness 14.4286 8.3202 8.6642 7.7740
Agriculture -21.9131*** 3.4295 -23.7643*** 3.1945
Time-trend .1011*** .0174 .0814*** .0184
Constant -2.5987 3.5218 .4379 3.2446
N 653 653
Adj. R2 .5093 .5131
Wald X 2 556.06*** 614.70***
Note: All significance tests are two-tailed: *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001.
what Centeno argues. Civil wars waged by a variety of in- ternal rivals to the state have reduced the state's ability to
unify, centralize, and extract from its society. Consistent with Andreski's argument, states involved in both inter- nal and external wars as measured by the interaction term find their extraction rates hampered significantly as well.
Substituting the COW measures of interstate and civil war provides an interesting twist in the model on the right- hand side of Table 4. The COW interstate war variable is
negative and significant, as is the civil war measure. The COW measure suggests that not only was war an impor- tant political shock, but its effects were in the opposite direction expected by a literal application of predatory theory derived from the European experience. However, the negative impact of interstate and civil wars is entirely consistent with Centeno's argument. The twist is the pos- itive and significant interaction term. According to the COW measures, states experiencing both internal and ex- ternal conflict were better able to extract from society. This finding actually fits with predatory or bellicist the-
ory, which would expect a state under siege from within and without to find a way to enhance its extractive capac- ity from groups willing to support its continued rule.
However, upon closer inspection of the data, one finds only one case in either model of an interaction be- tween interstate and civil war, hence our confidence in the generalizability of this finding is diminished. In the model using Centeno's measures, Peru experiences two
interstate wars with Ecuador while experiencing a long- running civil war with El Sendero Luminoso, which re- sulted in a decline in the tax ratio. In the model using the COW measures, Colombia experiences the Korean War at the same time as it experiences La Violencia, which re- sulted in a positive effect on the tax ratio. While Centeno and COW both agree on the coding of the civil wars in these cases, Centeno does not recognize Colombia's par- ticipation in the Korean War and the COW project does not recognize Peru's 1981 and 1995 conflicts with Ecuador as wars. Centeno's caution about the subjective nature of
coding wars is dramatically illustrated by these two mod- els, in which the interactive terms depended solely upon one case in each instance. Dropping the interactive term has no significant effect on either model. Overall, the re- sults conform closely to Centeno's argument that inter- state and civil war worked to depress the state's extractive
capacity in Latin America in contradiction to the literal
application of bellicist or predatory theory. The control variables have their expected effects in
both models. Democracy has a positive and significant impact on the tax ratio. States that have attained higher levels of democracy in the developing world may possess a greater degree of legitimacy, thus their tax ratios are somewhat higher than their autocratic neighbors. Higher external debt ratios reduce the reliance on extraction as expected by Centeno's argument that Latin America states were built on "blood and debt." External sources of
460 CAMERON G. THIES
funding are a definite alternative to taxation in the Latin American context. Inflation exerts a small, significant, positive effect on the tax ratio as expected given Latin America's history of inflation proneness. The variables associated with the transaction cost argument about tax collection also exert their expected effects, though the trade openness variable just misses statistical significance at the .05 level. However, it likely passes the substantive
significance test. The time-trend variable also indicates that Latin
American states have on average slowly augmented their
ability to extract from society at a rate of approximately one percent of GDP every 10 years. This finding should make clear that state building is a long process, and one that is never truly complete. One of the misunderstand-
ings of those who apply the bellicist approach to the de-
veloping world is the idea that state building is completed when the state is consolidated. However, the initial, ten- uous consolidation of centralized rule over a territory and population marks the beginning, not the end of state
building. The more generalized version of the bellicist approach
is found in the models presented in Table 5. Two separate models are presented, one representing Diehl and Goertz's (2000) approach to enduring rivalries on the left-hand side of the table and the other representing Thompson's (2001) approach to strategic rivalries on the right-hand side. In both cases, the exclusive focus on interstate war is replaced by the notion of an interstate rivalry that may provide a stimulus to extraction over the long-term. These
types of external rivals are also assessed alongside the in- ternal rivals represented by Centeno's civil war measure. Centeno's (2002, 61-66) classification of civil wars is com-
prised of regional rebellions, ideological battles, caudillo wars, race/ethnic wars, and revolutions. These are exactly the types of political and ethnic rivals that early mod- ern European rulers had to pacify, neutralize, and bargain with in order to continue their rule.5
In the first model, enduring and proto-rivalries are
significantly and positively related to the tax ratio, while isolated rivalries have a significant, negative impact. In the second model, strategic rivalries exert a significant, pos- itive influence on extraction as well. In both models, the interaction terms representing situations in which states are involved in both internal and external rivalry are all sig- nificant and negative. The coefficients on the interaction
terms are also quite large compared to their component variables. Whether the state is engaged in an enduring, proto- or strategic rivalry, all of these long-term processes have negative consequences for extraction when the state is simultaneously involved in internal conflict, consistent with Andreski's (1980) argument. The Centeno measure of civil war is negative, but loses significance in this model, as the interaction terms capture most of its variation.6 All of the control variables are similar in size, sign, and signif- icance to the original war models found in Table 4. These
findings are interesting for a number of reasons. Most importantly, the results demonstrate that the
more generalized bellicist model is clearly applicable to Latin America. Long-term, threatening interstate rela-
tionships, in the form of enduring, proto-, or strategic ri-
valry prompt increased extraction on the part of the state. This finding replicates Thies' (2004) previous work on ri-
valry's impact on state building in the developing world as applied to sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and the Middle East and North Africa. However, I expand the geographi- cal scope of the argument by including Latin America, as well as the temporal scope by examining the entire twen- tieth century. Future research should incorporate Latin American states into the larger pool of developing states in order to compare the relative impact of war and rivalry on state building efforts across the globe.
As the interactive terms from the original war mod- els presented in Table 4 illustrate, substantive decisions about coding can produce contradictory statistical effects. Given the disagreement over the most appropriate way to date rivalries in MID-based approaches, I have included Bennett's Interstate I and II rivalries as a check on the robustness of the findings stemming from the enduring and strategic rivalry measures. The results presented in Table 6 are very robust. Both additional measures of in- terstate rivalry have positive and significant effects on the tax ratio. The Centeno civil war measure is negative and
significantly related to the tax ratio. The interaction of interstate rivalry and civil war is also negative and signif- icant. The control variables are all similar in size, sign, and significance to the models presented in Table 5. As a result, we can be confident that external rivalries exert a
significant effect on the state's extractive capacity, regard- less of the coding decisions made by researchers.
As a final check on the robustness of these results, I recode the COW-based measures of enduring rivalry
5Thies (2004) employed data on ethnic wars, revolutionary wars, disruptive regime transitions, and genocides/politicides from Gurr et al.'s (1997) State Failure Task Force as indicators of internal rivals to the state. However, the state failure data only covers the post-1950 era. Centeno's (2002) classification of civilwars is a reasonable proxy for the types of "rival claimants" to power required for this analysis.
6The correlations between the Centeno measure of civil war and the interaction term for enduring rivalry is .49 and proto-rivalry is .38. The correlation between the Centeno measure of civil war and the interaction term for strategic rivalry is .73. A visual inspection of Tables 1 and 2 confirms that most of the Latin American civil wars occur in the context of external rivalries.
WAR, RIVALRY,
AND STATE BUILDING 461
TABLE 5 The Effect of Enduring and Strategic Rivalries on the Tax Ratio in Latin America
Independent Variable Coefficient PCSE Coefficient PCSE
Enduring Rivalry 2.1979*** .3730
Enduring x Civil -6.3762*** 1.1833 Proto Rivalry 4.5999*** .9234 Proto x Civil -6.3323*** 1.3690 Isolated Rivalry -1.6540** .6793
Strategic Rivalry 1.9223*** .4023
Strategic x Civil -4.1324*** 1.3660 Centeno Civil War -.3336 .4894 -.0014 1.0108
Democracy .1647 .0884 .1789 .0954 External Debt -15.5281*** 2.6244 -13.0496*** 2.3899 GDP per capita 1.5406*** .4651 2.5797*** .6049 Inflation .3900*** .0577 .2649*** .0510 Trade Openness 17.3384* 7.9138 10.8389 8.2823
Agriculture -25.2786*** 3.5496 -19.7460*** 3.4911 Time-trend .0931"** .0157 .1092*** .0172 Constant -.1369 3.3834 -9.1412* 4.1641
N 653 653
Adj. R2 .5729 .5187 Wald X2 515.00*** 531.72***
Note: All significance tests are two-tailed: *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001.
TABLE 6 The Effect of Interstate I and II Rivalries on the Tax Ratio in Latin America
Independent Variable Coefficient PCSE Coefficient PCSE
Interstate I Rivalry 1.0055** .3628 Interstate I x Civil -4.0041*** 1.1345 Interstate II Rivalry 1.0225** .3464 Interstate II x Civil -4.0657*** 1.1239 Centeno Civil War - 1.6109*** .4798 -1.5413*** .4742
Democracy .1979* .0938 .1872* .0938 External Debt -11.3175*** 2.2054 -11.4733*** 2.2194 GDP per capita 1.7504*** .5399 2.0239*** .5362 Inflation .2744*** .0559 .2703*** .0554 Trade Openness 14.6059 8.3713 16.0999 8.5776
Agriculture -23.8680*** 3.6340 -22.8569*** 3.6416 Time-trend .1040*** .0167 .1094*** .0169 Constant -2.0732 3.5142 -4.4144 3.5578
N 653 653
Adj. R2 .5160 .5159 Wald X 2 567.03*** 587.46***
Note: All significance tests are two-tailed: *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001.
462 CAMERON G. THIES
TABLE 7 The Effect of the Severity and Hostility of Rivalries on the Tax Ratio in Latin America
Independent Variable Coefficient PCSE Coefficient PCSE
Enduring Rivalry Severity .1027 .4656
Enduring Rivalry Hostility .2953* .1343 Civil War Severity -.4440*** .0750 -.4358*** .0757
Democracy .2075* .0941 .2186* .0950 External Debt -9.7626*** 1.9723 -9.6792*** 1.9584 GDP per capita 1.8878*** .5542 1.8292*** .5507 Inflation .2056*** .0941 .1995*** .0495 Trade Openness 15.5057 8.0726 16.3445* 8.1799
Agriculture -22.5666*** 3.5836 -23.0434*** 3.6370
Time-trend .1051*** .0167 .1046*** .0163
Constant -3.0911 3.5860 -2.7772 3.5950
N 653 653
Adj. R2 .4946 .4972 Wald x 2 587.54*** 596.23***
Note: All significance tests are two-tailed: *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001
and civil war for severity and hostility. All of the afore- mentioned measures of external and internal rivalry have assumed a constant threat level, while we know that the threat level present in these long-term processes varies. The severity of enduring rivalries and civil wars is based on the COW fatality measure, which scales the number of deaths between 0 and 6.7 Enduring rivalries are also coded for their hostility level, which ranges from 1 to 5.8 Rather than using the highest level of hostilities under- taken by either state, which is often used in the analysis of dyads, each rival state is coded for the highest action they take individually. This avoids the problem of overstating the overall hostility level of a dyadic dispute (e.g., Diehl and Hensel 1994), while also accounting for the hostility exhibited by each individual state and its potential impact on extraction.
Taking the severity of a rivalry into consideration, one finds a positive, though insignificant relationship to the tax ratio in the model on the left-hand side of Table 7. Considering a rivalry's hostility level, on the other hand, one finds a positive and significant relationship to
the tax ratio in the model on the right-hand side. This set of findings is particularly important to the more gen- eral version of bellicist theory presented here. What they suggest is that the Latin American state is indeed running a protection racket. Many displays and uses of force in Latin America involve no fatalities, yet the state is able extract more from its society by maintaining a long-term hostile relationship than it does when that relationship incurs actual fatalities. The actual severity of the rivalry is insignificant, while the hostility displayed by the state is important to extraction. This finding is consistent with Thies' (2001b) analysis of the Argentine-Chilean rivalry, in which the militaries exaggerated the threat posed by their rivals to justify their role, status, and benefits through enhanced extraction and expenditures. Finally, in both models, the increased severity of civil wars has the ex- pected impact of a decreased effect on extraction. Battles between the central government and internal rivals over control of the state are not a stimulus to extractive efforts, particularly when large numbers of citizens perish in the process.
Conclusion
The evidence provided here both challenges and supports the bellicist approach to state building in Latin America. On the one hand, a literal application of Tilly's dictum that "states make wars and wars make states" is not supported by the data. Centeno and L6pez-Alves provide qualitative
7The coding is 0 = no fatalities, 1 = 1-25 deaths, 2 = 26-100 deaths, 3 = 101-250 deaths, 4 = 251-500 deaths, 5 = 501-999 deaths, 6 = more than 999 deaths. The precise numbers of fatalities for all of the MIDs encapsulated within the enduring rivalries are not available, though the 0-6 coding is assigned. The COW measure of civil war fatalities is coded using the same scale, although actual fatality estimates are available.
8Hostility levels are coded as 1 = no militarized action, 2 = threat to use force, 3 = display of force, 4 = use of force, and 5 = war.
WAR, RIVALRY, AND STATE BUILDING 463
analyses that demonstrate interstate wars did not enhance the extractive capacity of the state, which is supported by the quantitative analysis presented in this article. How- ever, I argue that Tilly's model should be generalized for an appropriate application to the developing world. Tilly's model places the state at the center of a balancing act be- tween encroaching external and internal rivals. When the narrow focus on war is expanded to consider interstate rivalry, we begin to see the true impact of external threats on state-building efforts. External rivals, regardless of the operational measure employed, have significant, positive effects on the state's extractive capacity. The evidence pro- vided here suggests that these long-term, slow-moving processes represent a protection racket organized by the rulers of the state to maintain themselves in power. Given the history of military dictatorship, it seems appropriate to conclude that the Latin American state was indeed a predator, albeit one that fed more slowly on society, over longer periods of time, than its early modern European counterparts.
Internal rivals, as measured by the variety of rival claimants seeking power through civil wars, operate ex- actly as the qualitative analyses suggest. Internal rivals re- duce the state's extractive capacity, whether through the damage they cause to the economy's productive capac- ity, the bargaining they conduct with the state to reduce their share of the tax burden, or their temporary occupa- tion of territory that places productive wealth beyond the state's grasp. Consistent with Andreski's (1980) argument, states that simultaneously experienced both internal and external rivalries suffered a reduction in their extractive capacity, perhaps as a result of the inefficient or incom- patible use of force both at home and abroad. However, I demonstrate that internal rivals did not completely over- whelm the state as Centeno has suggested. External and internal rivals placed competing pressures on the state's ability to mobilize society for extractive purposes.
The argument that Latin American states often turned to external debt in lieu of increased extraction at home is also supported by the quantitative analysis. Gen- erally, critics of the application of Tillyesque models to the developing world point to two differences between early modern Europe and the present: the lack of interstate war and the ability to borrow on the world market. I have al- ready dealt with the former, but it is true that developing states often take on external debt instead of taxing their domestic populace. However, they do not borrow to the complete exclusion of taxing. The results of this article would amend Centeno's thesis to focus on blood, debt, and taxes.
Centeno also attempts to deal with the problem of regional order. His conclusion resonates across the litera-
ture as other scholars, such as Mares (2001) and Kacow- icz (1998) recognize the existence of a violent or negative peace in the region. Their diagnosis is much the same- high levels of internal violence combined with low levels of external violence produce a "violent form of peace." Kacowicz and Mares both recognize that there is a con- siderable amount of interstate conflict in the region, yet it is generally not allowed to spiral out of control into full-scale warfare. The conceptual focus on interstate and intrastate rivalries allows us to consider how these pres- sures affect both the strength of the state at home and the resulting effects for the region. While external rivalries may prompt increased extraction, they may not do so at a level commensurate with war. The dramatic impact of a political shock like war did not translate into increased ex- traction in Latin America, yet the longer-term incremental addition to extractive capacity may have been a rational adaptation by rulers to their circumstances. The notion of a protection racket seems to fit these states well. The states of the region perhaps failed to achieve the capac- ity and durability of their European counterparts because while the internal pressures they face are just as strong as their predecessors experienced, the external pressures are not.
Latin American states, much like their newer coun-
terparts in Africa and Asia, are left negotiating an inter- national system where the same basic forces are at work
today that were operating in early modern Europe, how- ever, the results of these competing pressures are not ex- actly the same. State building will be marked by contin- ued attempts to control internal violence, defend against threats of external violence, and provide public goods for the citizenry through whatever means are available. Blood, debt, and taxes are dependably recurrent aspects of the long and painful process of building the modern state.
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- Article Contents
- p. 451
- p. 452
- p. 453
- p. 454
- p. 455
- p. 456
- p. 457
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- Issue Table of Contents
- American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 49, No. 3 (Jul., 2005), pp. 451-688
- Front Matter
- War, Rivalry, and State Building in Latin America [pp. 451-465]
- Milton's Case for a Free Commonwealth [pp. 466-478]
- Congressional Politics of International Financial Rescues [pp. 479-496]
- Patterns of Disagreement in Democratic Politics: Comparing Germany, Japan, and the United States [pp. 497-514]
- The Quality of Terror [pp. 515-530]
- Manufactured Responsiveness: The Impact of State Electoral Laws on Unified Party Control of the Presidency and House of Representatives, 1840-1940 [pp. 531-549]
- Voting Weights and Formateur Advantages in the Formation of Coalition Governments [pp. 550-563]
- Do Economic Sanctions Destabilize Country Leaders? [pp. 564-576]
- News vs. Entertainment: How Increasing Media Choice Widens Gaps in Political Knowledge and Turnout [pp. 577-592]
- Threat, Anxiety, and Support of Antiterrorism Policies [pp. 593-608]
- The Strategic Sources of Foreign Policy Substitution [pp. 609-624]
- The Effects of Capital Mobility, Trade Openness, and Democracy on Social Spending in Latin America, 1980-1999 [pp. 625-641]
- To Run or Not to Run for Office: Explaining Nascent Political Ambition [pp. 642-659]
- Political Trust, Ideology, and Public Support for Government Spending [pp. 660-671]
- Old Times There Are Not Forgotten: Race and Partisan Realignment in the Contemporary South [pp. 672-688]
- Back Matter
tilly.pdf
Bringing the State Back In
Edited by
PETER B. EVANS, Brown University
DIETRICH RUESCHEMEYER, Brown University
THEDA SKOCPOL, Harvard University
.....~ ..... CAMBRIDGE ::: UNIVERSITY PRESS
Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 lRP 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia
© Cambridge University Press 1985
First published 1985 Reprinted 1986 (twice), 1987, 1989, 1990,1992,1993,1994
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Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Main entry under title: Bringing the state back in. 1. Policy sciences - Address, essays, lectires. 2. State, The - Adresses, essays, lectures. 1. Evans, Peter 5., 1944- . II. Rueschemeyer, Dietrich. lIt Skocpol, Theda. H97.B733 1985 361.6'1 85-4703
ISBN 0-521-31313-9 paperback
5. War Making and State Making as Organized Crime
Charles Tilly
Warning
If protection rackets represent organized crime at its smoothest, then war making and state making - quintessential protection rackets with the ad vantage of legitimacy - qualify as our largest examples of organized crime. Without branding all generals and statesmen as murderers or thieves, I want to urge the value of that analogy. At least for the European experi ence of the past few centuries, a portrait of war makers and state makers as coercive and self-seeking entrepreneurs bears a far greater resemblance to the facts than do its chief alternatives: the idea of a social contract, the idea of an open market in which operators of armies and states offer ser vices to willing consumers, the idea of a society whose shared norms and expectations call forth a certain kind of government.
The reflections that follow merely illustrate the analogy of war making and state making with organized crime from a few hundred years of Eu ropean experience and offer tentative arguments concerning principles of change and variation underlying the experience. My reflections grow from contemporary concerns: worries about the increasing destructiveness of war, the expanding role of great powers as suppliers of arms and military organization to poor countries, and the growing importance of military rule in those same countries. They spring from the hope that the European experience, properly understood, will help us to grasp what is happening today, perhaps even to do something about it.
The Third World of the twentieth century does not greatly resemble Eu rope of the sixteenth or seventeenth century. In no simple sense can we read the future of Third World countries from the pasts of European coun tries. Yet a thoughtful exploration of European experience will serve us well. It will show us that coercive exploitation played a large part in the creation of the European states. It will show us that popular resistanc~ to
170 Charles Tilly
coercive exploitation forced would-be power holders to concede protection and constraints on their own action. It will therefore help us to eliminate faulty implicit comparisons between today's Third World and yesterday's Europe. That clarification will make it easier to understand exactly how today's world is different and what we therefore have to explain. It may even help us to explain the current looming presence of military organiza tion and action throughout the world. Although that result would delight me, I do not promise anything so grand.
This essay, then, concerns the place of organized means of violenCe in the growth and change of those peculiar forms of government We call na tional states: relatively centralized, differentiated organizations the officials of which more or less successfully claim control over the chief concentrated means of violence within a population inhabiting a large, contiguous ter ritory. The argument grows from historical work on the formation of na tional states in Western Europe, especially on the growth of the French state from 1600 onward. But it takes several deliberate steps away from that work, wheels, and stares hard at it from theoretical ground. The ar gument brings with it few illustrations and no evidence worthy of the name.
Just as one repacks a hastily filled rucksack after a few days on the trail - throwing out the waste, putting things in order of importance, and bal ancing the load - I have repacked my theoretical baggage for the climb to come; the real test of the new packing arrives only with the next stretch of the trail. The trimmed-down argument stresseS the interdependence of war making and state making and the analogy between both of thOse processes and what, when less successful and smaller in scale, we call organized crime. War makes states, I shall claim. Banditry, piracy, gangland rivalry, policing, and war making all belong on the same continuum - that I shall claim as well. For the historically limited period in which national states were becoming the dominant organizations in Western countries, I shall also claim that mercantile capitalism and state making reinforced each other.
Double-Edged Protection
In contemporary American parlance, the word "protection" sounds two contrasting tones. One is comforting, the other ominous. With one tone, "protection" calls up images of the shelter against danger provided by a powerful friend, a large insurance policy, or a sturdy roof. With the other, it evokes the racket in which a local strong man forCes merchants to pay tribute in order to avoid damage - damage the strong man himself threat ens to deliver. The difference, to be sure, is a matler of degree: A hell-and damnation priest is likely to collect contributions from his parishioners only to the extent that they believe his predi~tions of brimstone for infidels; our neighborhood mobster may actually be, as he claims to be, a brothel's best guarantee of operation free of police interference.
Which image the word "protection" brings to mind depends mainly on our assessment of the reality and externality of the threat. Someone who
War Making and State Making as Organized Crime 171
produces both the danger and, at a price, the shield against it is a racketeer. Someone who provides a needed shield but has little control OVer the dan ger's appearance qualifies as a legitimate protector, especially if his price is no higher than his competitors'. Someone who supplies reliable, low-priced shielding both from local racketeers and from outside marauders makes the best offer of all.
Apologists for particular governments and for government in general commonly argue, precisely, that they offer protection from local and exter nal violence. They claim that the prices they charge barely COVer the costs of protection. They call people who complain about the price of protection "anarchists," "subversives," or both at once. But consider the definition of a racketeer as someone who creates a threat and then charges for its reduc tion. Governments' provision of protection, by this standard, often quali fies as racketeering. To the extent that the threats against which a given government protects its citizens are imaginary or are consequences of its own activities, the government has organized a protection racket. Since governments themselves commonly simulate, stimulate, or even fabricate threats of external war and since the repressive and extractive activities of governments often constitute the largest current threats to the livelihoods of their own citizens, many governments operate in essentially the same ways as racketeers. There is, of course, a difference: Racketeers, by the conventional definition, Operate without the sanctity of governments.
How do racketeer governments themselves acquire authority? As a ques tion of fact and of ethics, that is one of the oldest conundrums of political analysiS. Back to Machiavelli and Hobbes, nevertheless, political observers have recognized that, whatever else they do, governments organize and, wherever possible, monopolize violence. It matters little whether we take violence in a narrow sense, such as damage to persons and objects, or in a broad sense, such as violation of people's desires and interests; by either criterion, governments stand out from other organizations by their ten dency to monopolize the concentrated means of violence. The distinction between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" force, furthermore, makes no dif ference to the fact. If we take legitimacy to depend on conformity to an abstract principle or on the assent of the governed (or both at once), these conditions may serve to justify, perhaps even to explain, the tendency to monopolize force; they do not contradict the fact.
In any case, Arthur Stinchcombe's agreeably cynical treatment of legiti macy serves the purposes of political analysis much more efficiently. Le gitimacy, according to Stinchcombe, depends rather little on abstract prin ciple or assent of the governed: "The person over whom power is exercised is not usually as important as other power-holders.'" Legitimacy is the proba bility that other authorities will act to confirm the decisions of a given au thority. Other authorities, I would add, are much more likely to confirm the decisions of a challenged authority that controls substantial force; not only fear of retaliation, but also desire to maintain a stable environment recommend that general rule. The rule underscores the importance of the
172 Charles Tilly
authority's monopoly of force. A tendency to monopolize the means of violence makes a government's claim to provide protection, in either the comforting or the ominous sense of the word, more credible and more difficult to resist.
Frank recognitioJ:! of the central place of force in governmental activity does not require us to believe that governmental authority rests "only" or "ultimately" on the threat of violence. Nor does it entail the assumption that a government's only service is protection. Even when a government's use of force imposes a large cost, some people may well decide that the government's other services outbalance the costs of acceding to its monop oly of violence. Recognition of the centrality of force opens the way to an understanding of the growth and change of governmental forms.
Here is a preview of the most general argument: Power holders' pursuit of war involved them willy-nilly in the extraction of resources for war mak ing from the populations over which they had control and in the promo tion of capital accumulation by those who could help them borrow and buy. War making, extraction, and capital accumulation interacted to shape European state making. Power holders did not undertake those three mo mentous activities with the intention of creating national states - central ized, differentiated, autonomous, extensive political organizations. Nor did they ordinarily foresee that national states would emerge from war mak ing, extraction, and capital accumulation.
Instead, the people who controlled European states and states in the making warred in order to check or overcome their competitors and thus to enjoy the advantages of power within a secure or expanding territory. To make more effective war, they attempted to locate more capital. In the short run, they might acquire that capital by conquest, by selling off their assets, or by coercing or dispossessing accumulators of capital. In the long run, the quest inevitably involved them in establishing regular access to capitalists who could supply and arrange credit and in imposing one form of regular taxation or another on the people and activities within their spheres of control.
As the process continued, state makers developed a durable interest in promoting the accumulation of capital, sometimes in the guise of direct return to their own enterprises. Variations in the difficulty of collecting taxes, in the expense of the particular kind of armed force adopted, in the amount of war making required to hold off competitors, and so on resulted in the principal variations in the forms of European states. It all began with the effort to monopolize the means of violence within a delimited territory adjacent to a power holder's base.
Violence and Government
What distinguished the violence produced by states from the violence de livered by anyone else? In the long run, enough to make the division be-
War Making and State Making as Organized Crime 173
tween "legitimate" and "illegitimate" force credible. Eventually, the per sonnel of states purveyed violence on a larger scale, more effectively, more efficiently, with wider assent from their subject populations, and with readier collaboration from neighboring authorities than did the personnel of other organizations. But it took a long time for that series of distinctions to becomeestablished. Early in thestate-makingprocess, many parties shared the right to use violence, the practice of using it routinely to accomplish their ends, or both at once. The continuum ran from bandits and pirates to kings via tax collectors, regional power holders, and professional soldiers.
The uncertain, elastic line between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" vio lence appeared in the upper reaches of power. Early in the state-making process, many parties shared the right to use violence, its actual employ ment, or both at once. The long love-hate affair between aspiring state makers and pirates or bandits illustrates the division. "Behind piracy on the seas acted cities and city-states," writes Fernand Braudel of the six teenth century. "Behind banditry, that terrestrial piracy, appeared the con tinual aid of lords."2 In times of war, indeed, the managers of full-fledged states often commissioned privateers, hired sometime bandits to raid their enemies, and encouraged their regular troops to take booty. In royal ser vice, soldiers and sailors were often expected to provide for themselves by preying on the civilian population: commandeering, raping, looting, tak ing prizes. When demobilized, they commonly continued the same prac tices, but without the same royal protection; demobilized ships became pirate vessels, demobilized troops bandits.
It also worked the other way: A king's best source of armed supporters was sometimes the world of outlaws. Robin Hood's conversion to royal archer may be a myth, but the myth records a practice. The distinctions between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" users of violence came clear only very slowly, in the process during which the state's armed forces became relatively unified and permanent.
Up to that point, as Braudel says, maritime cities and terrestrial lords commonly offered protection, or. even sponsorship, to freebooters. Many lords who did not pretend to be kings, furthermore, successfully claimed the right to levy troops and maintain their own armed retainers. Without calling on some of those lords to bring their armies with them, no king could fight a war; yet the same armed lords constituted the king's rivals and opponents, his enemies' potential allies. For that reason, before the seventeenth century, regencies for child sovereigns reliably produced civil wars. For the same reason, disarming the great stood high on the agenda of every would-be state maker.
The Tudors, for example, accomplished that agenda through most of England. "The greatest triumph of the Tudors," writes Lawrence Stone,
was the ultimately successful assertion of a royal monopoly of violence both public and private, an achievement which profoundly altered not only the nature of poli-
174 Charles Tilly
tics but also the quality of daily life. There occurred a change in English habits that can only be compared with the further step taken in the nineteenth centuryr when the growth of a police force finally consolidated the monopoly and made it effective in the greatest cities and the smallest villages. 3
Tudor demilitarization of the great lords entailed four complementary cam paigns: eliminating their great personal bands of armed retainers, razing their fortresses, taming their habitual resort to violence for the settlement of disputes, and e1iscouraging the cooperation of their dependents and ten ants. In the Marches of England and Scotland, the task was more delicate, for the Percys and Dacres, who kept armies and castles along the border, threatened the Crown but also provided a buffer against Scottish invaders. Yet they, too, eventually fell into line.
In France, Richelieu began the great e1isarmament in the 1620s. With Richelieu's advice, Louis XIII systematically destroyed the castles of the great rebel lords, Protestant and Catholic, against whom his forces battled incessantly. He began to condemn dueling, the carrying of lethal weapons, and the maintenance of private armies. By the later 1620s, Richelieu was declaring the royal monopoly of force as doctrine. The doctrine took an other half-century to become effective:
Once more the conflicts of the Fronde had witnessed armies assembled by the "grands." Only the last of the regencies, the one after the death of Louis XIV, did not lead to armed uprisings. By that time Richelieu's principle had become a reality. Likewise in the Empire after the Thirty Years' War only the territorial princes had the right of levying troops and of maintaining fortresses.... Everywhere the raz ing of castles, the high cost of artillery, the attraction of courtllfe, and the ensuing domestication of the nobility had it~ share in this development.4
By the later eighteenth century, through most of Europe, monarchs con trolled permanent, professional military forces that rivaled those of their neighbors and far exceeded any other organized armed force within their own territories. The state's monopoly of large-scale violence was turning from theory to reality.
The elimination of local rivals, however, posed a serious problem. Be yond the scale of a small city-state, no monarch could govern a population with his armed force alone, nor could any monarch afford to create a professional staff large and strong enough to reach from him to the ordi nary citizen. Before quite recently, no European government approached the completeness of articulation from top to bottom achieved by imperial China. Even the Roman Empire did not come close. In one way or another, every European government before the French Revolution relied on ineli reet rule via local magnates. The magnates collaborated with the govern ment without becoming officials in any strong sense of the term, had some access to government-backed force, and exercised wide discretion within their own territories: junkers, justices ofthe peace, lords. Yet the same magnates were potential rivals, possible allies of a rebellious people.
War Making and State Making as Organized Crime 175
Eventually, European governments reduced their reliance on indirect rule by means of two expensive but effective strategies: (a) extending their of ficialdom to the local community and (b) encouraging the creation of police forces that were subordinate to the government rather than to individual patrons, distinct from war-making forces, and therefore less useful as the tools of dissident magnates. In between, however, the builders of national power all played a mixed strategy: eliminating, subjugating, dividing, con quering, cajoling, buying as the occasions presented themselves. The buy ing manifested itself in exemptions from taxation, creations of honorific offices, the establishment of claims on the national treasury, and a variety of other devices that made a magnate's welfare dependent on the mainte nance of the existing structure of power. In the long run, it all came down to massive pacification and monopolization of the means of coercion.
Protection as Business
In retrospect, the pacification, cooptation, or elimination of fractious rivals to the sovereign seems an awesome, noble, prescient enterprise, destined to bring peace to a people; yet it followed almost ineluctably from the logic of expanding power. If a power holder was to gain from the provision of protection, his competitors had to yieid. As economic historian Frederic Lane put it twenty-five years ago, governments are in the business of sell ing protection ... whether people want it or not. Lane argued that the very activity of producing and controlling violence favored monopoly, be cause competition within that realm generally raised costs, instead of low ering them. The production of violence, he suggested, enjoyed large econ omies of scale.
Working from there, Lane distinguished between (a) the monopoly profit, or tribute, coming to owners of the means of producing violence as a result of the difference between production costs and the price exacted from "customers" and (b) the protection rent accruing to those customers - for example, merchants - who drew effective protection against outside com petitors. Lane, a superbly attentive historian of Venice, aHowed specifi cally for the case of a government that generates protection rents for its merchants by deliberately attacking their competitors. In their adaptation of Lane's scheme, furthermore, Edward Ames and Richard Rapp substi tute the apt word "extortion" for Lane's "tribute." In this model. preda tion, coercion, piracy, banditry, and racketeering share a home with their upright cousins in responsible government.
This is how Lane's model worked: If a prince could create a sufficient armed force to hold off his and his subjects' external enemies and to keep the subjects in line for 50 megapounds but was able to extract 75 mega pounds in taxes from those subjects for that purpose, he gained a tribute of (75 - 50 = ) 25 megapounds. If the lO-pound share of those taxes paid by one of the prince's merchant-subjects gave him assured access to world
176 Charles Tilly
markets at less than the IS-pound shares paid by the merchant's foreign competitors to their princes, the merchant aiso gained a protection rent of (15-10=) 5 pounds by virtue of his prince's greater efficiency. That rea soning differs only in degree and in scale from the reasoning of violence wielding criminals and their clients. Labor racketeering (in which, for ex ample, a ship owner holds off trouble from longshoremen by means of a timely payment to the local union boss) works on exactly the same princi ple: The union boss receives tribute for his no-strike pressure on the long shoremen, while the ship owner avoids the strikes and slowdowns long' shoremen impose on his competitors.
Lane pointed out the different behavior we might expect of the managers of a protection-providing government owned by
1. Citizens in general 2. A single self-interested monarch 3. The managers themselves
If citizens in general exercised effective ownership of the government - 0 distant ideal! - we might expect the managers to minirrUze protection costs and tribute, thus maxirrUzing protection rent. A single self-interested mon arch, in contrast, would maxirrUze tribute, set costs so as to accomplish that maximization of tribute, and belndifferent to the level of protection rent. If the managers owned the government, they would tend to keep costs high by maxirrUzing their own wages, to maxirrUze tribute over and above those costs by exacting a high price from their subjects, and likewise to be indifferent to the level of protection rent. The first model approximates a Jeffersonian democracy, the second a petty despotism, and the third a mil itary junta.
Lane did not discuss the obvious fourth category of owner: a dominant class. If he had, his scheme would have yielded interesting empirical cri teria for evaluating claims that a given government was "relatively auton omous" or strictly subordinate to the interests of a dominant class. Pre sumably, a subordinate government would tend to maximize monopoly profits - returns to the dominant class resulting from the difference be tween the costs of protection and the price received for it - as well as tuning protection rents nicely to the economic interests of the dominant class. An autonomous government, in contrast, would tend to maximize managers' wages and its own size as well and would be indifferent to pro tection rents. Lane's analysis immediately suggests fresh propositions and ways of testing them.
Lane also speculated that the logic of the situation produced four succes sive stages in the general history of capitalism:
1. A period of anarchy and plunder 2. A stage in which tribute takers attracted customers and established
their monopolies by struggling to create exclusive, substantial states
War Making and State Making as Organized Crime 177
3. A stage in which merchants and landlords began to gain more from protection rents than governors did from tribute
4. A period (fairly recent) in which technological changes surpassed protection rents as sources of profit for entrepreneurs
In their new economic history of the Western world, Douglass North and Robert Paul Thomas make stages 2 and 3 - those in which state makers created their monopolies of force and established property rights that per mitted individuals to capture much of the return from their own growth generating innovations - the pivotal moment for sustained economic growth. Protection, at this point, overwhelms tribute. If we recognize that the pro tected property rights were mainly those of capital and that the develop ment of capitalism also facilitated the accumulation of the wherewithal to operate massive states, that extension of Lane's analysis provides a good deal of insight into the coincidence of war making, state making, and cap ital accumulation.
Unfortunately, Lane did not take full advantage of his own insight. Wanting to contain his analysis neatly within the neoclassical theory of industrial organization, Lane cramped his treatment of protection: treating all taxpayers as "customers" for the "service" provided by protection-man ufacturing governments, brushing aside the objections to the idea of a forced sale by insisting that the "customer" always had the choice of not paying and taking the consequences of nonpayment, minimizing the problems of divisibility created by the public-goods character of protection, and delib erately neglecting the distinction between the costs of prodUcing the means of violence in general and the costs of giving "customers" protection by means of that violence. Lane's ideas suffocate inside the neoclassical box and breathe easily outside it. Nevertheless, inside or outside, they prop erly draw the economic analysis of government back to the chief activities that real governments have carried on historically: war, repression, protec tion, adjudication.
More recently, Richard Bean has applied a similar logic to the rise of European national states between 1400 and 1600. He appeals to economies of scale in the production of effective force, counteracted by diseconomies of scale in command and control. He then claims that the improvement of artillery in the fifteenth century (cannon made small medieval forts much more vulnerable to an organized force) shifted the curve of economies and diseconomies to make larger armies, standing armies, and centralized gov ernments advantageous to their masters. Hence, according to Bean, mili tary innovation promoted the creation of large, expensive, well-armed na tional states.
History Talks
Bean's summary does not stand up to historical scrutiny. As a matter of practice, the shift to infantry-backed artillery sieges of fortified cities oc-
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curred only during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Artillery did improve during the fifteenth century, but the invention of new fortifica tions, especially the trace italienne, rapidly countered the advantage of artil lery. The arrival of effective artillery came too late to have caused the in crease in the viable size of states. (However, the increased cost of fortifications to defend against artillery did give an advantage to states enjoying larger fiscal bases.)
Nor is it obvious that changes in land war had the sweeping influence Bean attributes to them. The increasing decisiveness of naval warfare, whiCh occurred simultaneously, could well have shifted the military advantage to small maritime powers such as the Dutch Republic. Furthermore, although many city-states and other microscopic entities disappeared into larger po litical units before 1600, such events as the fractionation of the Habsburg Empire and such facts as the persistence of large but loosely knit Poland and Russia render ambiguous the claim of a significant increase in geo graphic scale. In short, both Bean's proposed explanation and his state ment of what must be explained raise historical doubts.
Stripped of its technological determinism, nevertheless, Bean's logic pro vides a useful complement to Lane's, for different military formats do cost substantially different amounts to produce and do provide substantially different ranges of control over opponents, domestic and foreign. After 1400 the European pursuit of larger, more permanent, and more costly varieties of military organization did, in fact, drive spectacular increases in princely budgets, taxes, and staffs. After 1500 or so, princes who managed to create the costly varieties of military organization were, indeed, able to conquer new chunks of territory.
The word "territory" should not mislead us. Until the eighteenth cen tury, the greatest powers were maritime states, and naval warfare re mained crucial to international position. Consider Fernand Braudel's roll call of successive hegemonic powers within the capitalist world: Venice and its empire, Genoa and its empire, Antwerp-Spain, Amsterdam-Hol land, London-England, New York-the United States. Although Branden burg-Prussia offers a partial exception, only in our own time have such essentially landbound states as Russia and China achieved preponderant positions in the world's system of states. Naval warfare was by no means the only reason for that bias toward the sea. Before the later nineteenth century, land transportation was so expensive everywhere in Europe that no country could afford to supply a large army or a big city with grain and other heavy goods without having efficient water transport. Rulers fed ma jor inland centers suCh as Berlin and Madrid oniy at great effort and at considerable cost to their hinterlands. The exceptional efficiency of water ways in the Netherlands undoubtedly gave the Dutch great advantages at peace and at war.
Access to water mattered in another important way. Those metropolises on Braudel's list were all major ports, great centers of commerce, and out-
War Making and Slale Making as Organized Crime 179
standing mobilizers of capital. Both the trade and the capital served the purposes of ambitious rulers. Bya circuitous route, that observation brings uS back to the arguments of Lane and Bean. Considering that both of them wrote as economic historians, the greatest weakness in their analyses comes as a surprise: Both of them understate the importance of capital accumu lation to military expansion. As Jan de Vries says of the period after 1600:
Looking back, one cannot help but be struck by the seemingly symbiotic relation ship existing between the state, military power, and the private economy's effi ciency in the age of absolutism. Behind every successful dynasty stood an array of opulent banking families. Access to such bourgeois resources proved crucial to the princes' state-building and centralizing policies. Princes also needed direct access to agricultural resources, which could be mobilized only when agricultural produc tivity grew and an effective administrative and military power existed to enforce the princes' claims. But the lines of causation also ran in the opposite direction. Suc cessful state-building and empire-building activities plus the associated tendency toward concentration of urban population and government expenditure, offered the private economy unique and invaluable opportunities to capture economies of scale. These economies of scale occasionally affected industrial production but were most significant in the development of trade and finance. In addition, the sheer pressure of cental government taxation did as much as any other economic force to channel peasant production into the market and thereby augment the opportuni ties for trade creation and economic specialization.s
Nor does the "symbiotic relationship" hold only for the period after 1600. For the precocious case of France, we need only consider the increase in royal expenditures and revenues from 1515 to 1785. Although the rates of growth in both regards accelerated appropriately after 1600, they also rose substantially during the sixteenth century. After 1550, the internal Wars of Religion checked the work of international expansion that Francis I had begun earlier in the century, but from the 1620s onward Louis XIII and Louis XIV (aided and abetted, to be sure, by Richelieu, Mazarin, Colbert, and other state-making wizards) resumed the task with a vengeance. "As always/' comments V. G. Kiernan, "war had every political recommenda tion and every financial drawback."6
Borrowing and then paying interest on the debt accounts for much of the discrepancy between the two curves. Great capitalists played crucial parts on both sides of the transaction: as the principal sources of royal credit, especially in the short term, and as the most important contractors in the risky but lucrative business of collecting royal taxes. For this reason, it is worth noticing that
for practical purposes the national debt began in the reign of Francis 1. Following the loss of Milan, the key to northern Italy, on September 15, 1522, Francis I bor rowed 200,000 francs . .. at 12.5 percent from the merchants of Paris, to intensify the war against Charles V. Administered by the city government, this loan inau gurated the famous series of bonds based on revenues from the capital and known as rentes sur I'H6tei de Ville. 7
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(The government's failure to pay those rentes, incidentally, helped align the Parisian bourgeoisie against the Crown during the Fronde, some twelve decades later.) By 1595, the national debt had risen to 300 million francs; despite governmental bankTuptcies, currency manipulations, and the monumental rise in taxes, by Louis XIV's death in 1715 war-induced bor rowing had inflated the total to about 3 billion francs, the equivalent of about eighteen years in royal revenues. 8 War, state apparatus, taxation, and borrowing advanced in tight cadence.
Although France was precocious, it was by no means alone. "Even more than in the case of France," reports the ever-useful Earl J. Hamilton,
the national debt of England originated and has grown during major wars. Except for an insignificant carry-over from the Stuarts~ the debt began in 1689 with the reign of William and Mary. In the words of Adam Smith, "it was in the war which began in 1688, and was concluded by the treaty of Ryswick in 1697, that the foun dation of the present enormous debt of Great Britain was first Iaid."9
Hamilton, it is true, goes on to quote the mercantilist Charles Davenant, who complained in 1698 that the high interest rates promoted by govern ment borrowing were cramping English trade. Davenant's complaint sug gests, however, that England was already entering Frederic Lane's third stage of state-capital relations, when merchants and landowners receive more of the surplus than do the suppliers of protection.
Until the sixteenth century, the English expected their kings to live on revenues from their own property and to levy taxes only for war. G. R. Elton marks the great innovation at Thomas Cromwell's drafting of Henry VlII's subsidy bills for 1534 and 1540: "1540 was very careful to continue the real innovation of 1534, namely that extraordinary contributions could be levied for reasons other than war."lD After that point as before, how ever, war making provided the main stimulus to increases in the level of taxation as well as of debt. Rarely did debt and taxes recede. What A. T. Peacock and J. Wiseman call a "displacement effect" (and others some times call a "ratchet effect") occurred: When public revenues and expen ditures rose abruptly during war, they set a new, higher floor beneath which peacetime revenues and expenditures did not sink. During the Na poleonic Wars, British taxes rose from 15 to 24 percent of national income and to almost three times the French level of taxation.11
True, Britain had the double advantage of relying less on expensive land forces than its Continental rivals and of drawing more of its tax revenues from customs and excise - taxes that were, despite evasion, significantly cheaper to collect than land taxes, property taxes, and poll taxes. Never theless, in England as wen as elsewhere, both debt and taxes rose enor mously from the seventeenth century onward. They rose mainly as a func tion of the increasing cost of war making.
War Making and Slale Making as Organized Crime 181
What Do States Do?
As should now· be clear, Lane's analysis of protection fails to distinguish among several different uses of state-controlled violence. Under the gen eral heading of organized violence, the agents of states characteristically carry on four different activities:
1. War making: Eliminating or neutralizing their own rivals outside the territories in which they have clear and continuous priority as wielders of force
2. State making: Eliminating or neutralizing their rivals inside those territories
3. Protection: Eliminating or neutralizing the enemies of their clients 4. Extraction: Acquiring the means of carrying out the first three ac-
tivities - war making, state making, and protection
The third item corresponds to protection as analyzed by Lane, but the other three also involve the application of force. They overlap incompletely and to various degrees; for example, war making against the commercial rivals of the local bourgeoisie delivers protection to that bourgeoisie. To the ex tent that a population is divided into enemy classes and the state extends its favors partially to one class or another, state making actually reduces the protection given some classes.
War making, state making, protection, and extraction each take a num ber of forms. Extraction, for instance, ranges from outright plunder to reg war tribute to bureaucratized taxation. Yet all four depend on the state's tendency to monopolize the concentrated means of coercion. From the per spectives of those who dominate the state, each of them - if carried on effectively - generally reinforces the others. Thus, a state that successfully eradicates its internal rivals strengthens its ability to extract resources, to wage war, and to protect its chief supporters. In the earlier European ex perience, broadly speaking, those supporters were typically landlords, armed retainers of the monarch, and churchmen.
Each of the major uses of violence produced characteristic forms of or ganization. War making yielded armies, navies, and supporting services. State making produced durable instruments of surveillance and control within the territory. Protection relied on the organization of war making and state making but added to it an apparatus by which the protected called forth the protection that was their due, notably through courts and representative assemblies. Extraction brought fiscal and accounting struc tures into being. The organization and deployment of violence themselves account for much of the characteristic structure of European states.
The general rule seems to have operated like this: The more costly the activity, all other things being equal, the greater was the organizational residue. To the extent, for example, that a given government invested in large standing armies - a very costly, if effective, means of war making -
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the bureaucracy created to service the army was likely to become bulky. Furthermore, a government building a standing army while controlling a small population was likely to incur greater costs, and therefore to build a bulkier structure, than a government within a populous country. Branden burg-Prussia was the classic case of high cost for available resources. The Prussian effort to build an army matching those of its larger Continental neighbors created an immense structure; it militarized and bureaucratized much of German social life.
In the case of extraction, the smaller the pool of resources and the less commercialized the economy, other things being equal, the more difficult was the work of extracting resources to sustain war and other governmen tal activities; hence, the more extensive was the fiscal apparatus. England illustrated the corollary of that proposition, with a relatively large and Com mercialized pool of resources drawn on by a relatively small fiscal appa ratus. As Gabriel Ardant has argued, the choice of fiscal strategy probably made an additional difference. On the whole, taxes on land were expen sive to collect as compared with taxes on trade, especially large flows of trade past easily controlled checkpoints. Its position astride the entrance to the Baltic gave Denmark an extraordinary opportunity to profit from cus toms revenues.
With respect to state making (in the narrow sense of eliminating or neu tralizing the local rivals of the people who controlled the state), a territory populated by great landlords or by distinct religious groups generally im posed larger costs on a conqueror than one of fragmented power or ho mogeneous culture. This time, fragmented and homogeneous Sweden, with its relatively small but effective apparatus of control, illustrates the corol lary.
Finally, the cost of protection (in the sense of eliminating or neutralizing the enemies of the state makers' clients) mounted with the range over which that protection extended. Portugal's effort to bar the Mediterranean to its merchants' competitors in the spice trade provides a textbook case of an unsuccessful protection effort that nonetheless built up a massive struc ture.
Thus, the sheer size of the government varied directly with the effort devoted to extraction, state making, protection, and, especially, war mak ing but inversely with the commercialization of the economy and the ex tent of the resource base. What is more, the relative bulk of different fea tures of the government varied with the cost/resource ratios of extraction, state making, protection, and war making. In Spain we see hypertrophy of Court and courts as the outcome of centuries of effort at subduing internal enemies, whereas in Holland we are amazed to see how small a fiscal ap paratus grows up with high taxes within a rich, commercialiZed economy.
Clearly, war making, extraction, state making, and protection were in terdependent. Speaking very, very generally, the classic European state making experience followed this causal pattern:
War Making and State Making as Organized Crime 183
~ + War Making .. Extraction
protLionX StaJMaking
t t In an idealized sequence, a great lord made war so effectively as to become dominant in a substantial territory, but that war making led to increased extraction of the means of war - men, arms, food, lodging, transportation, supplies, andlor the money to buy them - from the population within that territory. The building up of war-making capacity likewise increased the capacity to extract. The very activity of extraction, if successful, entailed the elimination, neutralization, or cooptation of the great lord's local rivals; thus, it led to state making. As a by-product, it created organization in the form of tax-collection agencies, police forces, courts, exchequers, account keepers; thus it again led to state making. To a lesser extent, war making likewise led to state making through the expansion of military organization itself, as a standing army, war industries, supporting bureaucracies, and (rather later) schools grew up within the state apparatus. All of these struc tures checked potential rivals and opponents. In the course of making war, extracting resources, and building up the state apparatus, the managers of states formed alliances with specific social classes. The members of those classes loaned resources, provided technical services, or helped ensure the compliance of the rest of the population, all in return for a measure of protection against their own rivals and enemies. As a result of these mul tiple strategic choices, a distinctive state apparatus grew up within each major section of Europe.
How States Formed
This analysis, if correct, has two strong implications for the development of national states. First, popular resistance to war making and state making made a difference. When ordinary people resisted vigorously, authorities made concessions: guarantees of rights, representative institutions, courts of appeal. Those concessions, in their turn, constrained the later paths of war making and state making. To be sure, alliances with fragments of the ruling class greatly increased the effects of popular action; the broad mo bilization of gentry against Charles I helped give the English Revolution of 1640 a far greater impact on political institutions than did any of the mul tiple rebellions during the Tudor era.
Second, the relative balance among war making, protection, extraction, and state making significantly affected the organization of the states that
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emerged from the four activities. To the extent that war making went on with relatively little extraction, protection, and state making, for example, military forces ended up playing a larger and more autonomous part in national politics. Spain is perhaps the best European example. To the ex tent that protection, as in Venice or Holland, prevailed over war making, extraction, and state making, oligarchies of the protected classes tended to dominate subsequent national politics. From the relative predominance of state making sprang the disproportionate elaboration of policing and sur veillance; the Papal States illustrate that extreme. Before the twentieth cen tury, the range of viable imbalances was fairly small. Any state that failed to put considerable effort into war making was likely to disappear. As the twentieth century wore on, however, it became increasingly common for one state to lend, give, or sell war-making means to another; in those cases, the recipient state could put a disproportionate effort into extraction, pro tection, and/or state making and yet survive. In our own time, clients of the United States and the Soviet Union provide numerous examples.
This simplified model, however, neglects the external relations that shaped every national state. Early in the process, the distinction between "inter nal" and "external" remained as unclear as the distinction between state power and the power accruing to lords allied with the state. Later, three interlocking influences connecte.d any given national state to the European network of states. First, there were the flows of resources in the form of loans and supplies, especially loans and supplies devoted to war making. Second, there was the competition among states for hegemony in disputed territories, which stimulated war making and temporarily erased the dis tinctions among war making, state making, and extraction. Third, there was the intermittent creation of coalitions of states that temporarily com bined their efforts to force a given state into a certain form and position within the international network. The war-making coalition is one exam ple, but the peace-making coalition played an even more crucial part: From 1648, if not before, at the ends of wars all effective European states co alesced temporarily to bargain over the boundaries and rulers of the recent belligerents. From that point on, periods of major reorganization of the European state system came in spurts, at the settlement of widespread wars. From each large war, in general, emerged fewer national states than had entered it.
War as International Relations
In these circumstances, war became the normal condition of the interna tional system of states and the normal means of defending or enhancing a position within the system. Why war? No simple answer will do; war as a potent means served more than one end. But surely part of the answer goes back to the central mechanisms of state making: The very logic by which a local lord extended or defended the perimeter within which he
War Making and State Making as Organized Crime 185
monopolized the means of violence, and thereby increased his return from tribute, continued on a larger scale into the logic of war. Early in the pro cess, external and internal rivals overlapped to a large degree. Only the establishment of large perimeters of control within which great lords had checked their rivals sharpened the line between internal and external. George Modelski sums up the competitive logic cogently:
Global power ... strengthened those states that attained it relatively to all other political and other organizations. What is more, other states competing in the global power game developed similar organizational forms and similar hardiness: they too became nation-states - in a defensive reaction, because forced to take issue with or to confront a global power, as France confronted Spain and later Britain, or in imi tation of its obvious success and effectiveness, as Germany followed the example of Britain in Weltmacht, or as earlier Peter the Great had rebuilt Russia on Dutch precepts and examples. Thus not only Portugal, the Netherlands, Britain and the United States became nation-states, but also Spain, France, Germany, Russia and Japan. The short, and the most parsimonious, answer to the question of why these succeeded where "most of the European efforts to build states failed" is that they were either global powers or successfully fought with or against them.12
This logic of internationai state making acts out on a large scale the logic of local aggrandizement. The external complements the internal.
If we allow that fragile distinction between "internal" and "external" state-making processes, then we might schemalize the history of European state making as three stages: (a) The differential success of some power holders in "external" struggles establishes the difference between an "in ternal" and an "external" arena for the deployment of force; (b) "external" competition generates "internal" state making; (e) "external" compacts among states influence the form and locus of particular states ever more powerfully. In this perspective, state-certifying organizations such as the League of Nations and the United Nations simply extended the European based process to the world as a whole. Whether forced or voluntary, bloody or peaceful, decolonization simply completed that process by which exist ing states leagued to create new ones.
The extension of the Europe-based state-making process to the rest of the world, however, did not result in the creation of states in the strict European image. Broadly speaking, internal struggles such as the checking of great regional lords and the imposition of taxation on peasant villages produced important organizational features of European states: the relative subordination of military power to civilian control, the extensive bureau cracy of fiscal surveillance, the representation of wronged interests via pe tition and parliament. On the whole, states elsewhere developed differ ently. The most telling feature of that difference appears in military organization. European states built up their military apparatuses through sustained struggles with their subject populations and by means of se lective extension of protection to different classes within those popula-
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tions. The agreements on protection constrained the rulers themselves, making them vulnerable to courts, to assemblies, to withdrawals of credit, services 1 and expertise.
To a larger degree, states that have come into being recently through decolonization or through reallocations of territory by dominant states have acquired their military organization from outside, without the same inter nal forging of mutual constraints between rulers and ruled. To the extent that outside states continue to supply military goods and expertise in re turn for commodities, military alliance or both, the new states harbor pow erful, unconstrained organizations that easily overshadow all other orga nizations within their territories. To the extent that outside states guarantee their boundaries, the managers of those military organizations exercise ex traordinary power within them. The advantages of military power become enormous, the incentives to seize power over the state as a whole by means of that advantage very strong. Despite the great place that war making occupied in the making of European states, the old national states of Eu rope almost never experienced the great disproportion between military organization and all other forms of organization that seems the fate of client states throughout the contemporary world. A century ago, Europeans might have congratulated themselves on the spread of civil government through out the world. In our own time,the analogy between war making and state making, on the one hand, and organized crime, on the other, is becoming tragically apt.
Notes
1. Arthur L. Stinchcombe, Constructing Social Theories (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), p. 150; italics in the original.
2. Fernand Braudel, La Medilerranee el Ie monde medilerraneen ti l'<poque de Philippe II (Paris: Armand Colin, 1966), vol. 2, pp. 88-89.
3. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of Ihe Arislocracy (Oxford: Oarendon Press, 1965), p. 200.
4. Dietrich Gerhard, Old Europe: A Siudy of Conlinuity, 1000-1800 (New York: Ac ademic Press, 1981), pp. 124-25.
5. Jan de Vries, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
6. V. G. Kiernan, Slate and Sociely in Europe, 1550-1650 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 104. For French finances, see Alain Guery, uLes Finances de la Monarchie Franc;aise sous YAncien Regime:' Annoles Economies, Societes, Civilisations 33 (1978), p.227.
7. Earl J. Hamilton, "Origin and Growth of the National Debt in France and En- gland," in Siudi in onore di Gino Luzzalo (Milan: Giuffre, 1950), vol. 2, p. 254.
8. Ibid., pp. 247, 249. 9. Ibid., p. 254.
10. G. R. Elton, "Taxation for War and Peace in Early-Tudor England," in War and Economic Development: Essays in Memory ofDavid Joslin, ed. J. M. Winter (Cam bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 42.
War Making and State Making as Organized Crime 187
11. Peter Mathias, The Transformation of England: Essays in the Economic and Social History of England in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 122.
12. George Modeiski, "The Long Cycle of Globai Politics and the Nation State," Comparative Studies in Society and History 20 (1978): 231.
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Wood(2006).pdf
Variation in Sexual Violence during War
ELISABETH JEAN WOOD
Sexual violence during war varies in extent and takes distinct forms. In some con- flicts, sexual violence is widespread, yet in other conflicts—including some cases of ethnic conflict—it is quite limited. In some conflicts, sexual violence takes the form of sexual slavery; in others, torture in detention. I document this variation, particularly its absence in some conflicts and on the part of some groups. In the conclusion, I explore the relationship between strategic choices on the part of armed group leadership, the norms of combatants, dynamics within small units, and the effectiveness of military discipline.
Keywords: sexual violence; rape; political violence; human rights; war
While sexual violence occurs in all wars, it occurs to varying extent and takes distinct forms. During the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the sexual abuse of Bosnian Muslim women by Bosnian Serb forces was so systematic and wide- spread that it comprised a crime against humanity under international law. In Rwanda, the widespread rape of Tutsi women comprised a form of genocide, according to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
Yet sexual violence in some conflicts is remarkably limited, despite wide- spread violence against civilians. Sexual violence is relatively limited even in some cases of ethnic conflict that include the forced movement of ethnic popu- lations; the conflicts in Israel/Palestine and Sri Lanka are examples. Some
307
I am grateful for research support from the Yale Center for International and Area Studies and the Santa Fe Institute, and for research assistance from Margaret Alexander, Laia Balcells, Karisa Cloward, Kade Finnoff, Amelia Hoover, Michele Leiby, Amara Levy-Moore, Meghan Lynch, Abbey Steele, and Tim Taylor. I also thank the many people who commented on earlier versions, particularly Jeffrey Burds, Christian Davenport, Magali Sarfatti Larson, David Plotke, and Jeremy Weinstein.
POLITICS & SOCIETY, Vol. 34 No. 3, September 2006 307-341 DOI: 10.1177/0032329206290426 © 2006 Sage Publications
armed groups engage in relatively little sexual violence; Sendero Luminoso was deemed responsible for more than half the deaths and disappearances reported to the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission but for only a tenth of the (few) reported cases of rape.
In some conflicts, sexual violence takes the form of sexual slavery, whereby women are abducted to serve as servants and sexual partners of combatants for extended periods; in others, it takes the form of torture in detention. In some wars, women belonging to particular groups are targeted; in others, the violence is indis- criminate. In some wars, only women and girls are targeted; in others, men are as well. Some acts of wartime sexual violence are committed by individuals; many are committed by groups. Some acts occur in private settings; others are public, in front of family or community members. In some conflicts, the pattern of sexual violence is symmetric, with all parties to the war engaging in sexual violence to roughly the same extent; in other conflicts, it is very asymmetric.
Some simple hypotheses do not explain the puzzling variation in the extent and form of sexual violence in war: sexual violence varies in prevalence and form across civil wars as well as inter-state wars, across ethnic wars as well as non-ethnic, and across secessionist conflicts. The variation has not been ade- quately explained in the literature, much of which focuses on single cases rather than comparison across cases.1
Focusing on sexual violence against civilians by combatants, I first show that sexual violence indeed varies in extent and form across several war settings. I focus in particular on the absence of sexual violence in some conflicts and on the part of some groups. I then discuss the methodological challenges to advanc- ing our understanding of this variation and show that, despite these challenges, the subject merits further comparative analysis because sufficiently large varia- tion occurs across well-documented cases. Distinguishing between distinct pat- terns of sexual violence, I then assess the extent to which the arguments advanced in the literature (often implicitly) explain the variation. In the conclu- sion, I focus on the relationship between strategic choices on the part of armed group leadership, the norms of combatants, dynamics within small units, and the effectiveness of military discipline, and suggest some promising explanatory hypotheses.
VARIATIONS IN WARTIME SEXUAL VIOLENCE: SELECTED CASES
Following the definition used by recent international war crimes tribunals,2 by rape I mean the coerced (under physical force or threat of physical force against the victim or a third person) penetration of the anus or vagina by the penis or another object, or of the mouth by the penis. Thus rape can occur against men as well as women. Sexual violence is a broader category that includes rape, coerced undressing, and non-penetrating sexual assault such as sexual mutilation. The
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sexual humiliation and abuse inflicted on prisoners by U.S. troops at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and other prisons is thus a form of sexual violence.3
In this section, I describe the pattern of sexual violence in several wars, including inter-state as well as civil wars, ethnic as well as non-ethnic conflicts, and wars where sexual violence was very prevalent and where it was not. I begin by discussing the patterns of sexual violence during World War II.
World War II
As the Soviet army moved westward onto German territory in early 1945, large numbers of women were raped.4 While the earlier Soviet offensives in Romania and Hungary had seen widespread rape of civilian women (particu- larly after the siege of Budapest), the practice intensified as the army moved into East Prussia and Silesia. Although women of various ethnicities were raped in the course of looting villages and cities, German women were particularly tar- geted. In German villages in East Prussia, “it was not untypical for Soviet troops to rape every female over the age of twelve or thirteen.”5 As the Soviet army occupied Berlin in late April and early May 1945, thousands of women and girls were raped, often by several men in sequence, often in front of family or neigh- borhood, sometimes on more than one occasion. Soldiers sometimes detained a girl or woman for some days in her home or elsewhere and subjected her to repeated rape. Even after occupation became more institutionalized, Soviet sol- diers continued to rape girls and women. Sexual violence gradually subsided as occupation authorities realized the harm being done to the Soviet postwar polit- ical project and gradually instituted stronger rules against fraternization in gen- eral and rape in particular.
The pattern of sexual violence during the Soviet offensive varied in different settings. Naimark notes the contrast between the “exemplary” behavior of Soviet troops in Bulgaria and the generally better behavior toward Polish and other Slavs, with the looting and rape that occurred in Germany and Hungary, both non-Slavic groups.6 However, sexual violence in Berlin and Budapest sug- gests as well another pattern: in European history there appears to be a pattern of rape (and looting) following prolonged sieges as a form of punishment for holding out rather than surrendering.7 Moreover, throughout the offensive, frontline troops were less prone to rape than troops that came through later.8
During the occupation, women and girls were more vulnerable in border towns, naval centers, and transportation centers than elsewhere. Local variations also emerged as some commanders enforced the regulations and others did not.9
This is a relatively well-documented case: historians draw on a wide range of sources including Soviet military and secret police reports, military reports, wartime memoirs and diaries, and German hospital and police records (many women did report the incidents). Even in this case, however, the frequency of
ELISABETH JEAN WOOD 309
rape—even in Berlin itself—is difficult to establish.10 The best estimate appears to come from the two main Berlin hospitals: staff members estimated the number of rape victims as between 95,000 and 130,000.11 Taking 100,000 as a rough estimate of the number of victims and 1,500,000 as the number of women in Berlin at the time implies a prevalence (victims/female population) of roughly 6 percent.12
As the Soviet army moved westward toward Germany, propaganda posted and distributed along the way as well as official military orders encouraged sol- diers to take revenge on and punish Germans broadly speaking, not just soldiers. On the eve of the offensive into Poland, the orders to the First Belorussian Front included, “Woe to the land of the murders. We will get our terrible revenge for everything.” On the eve of crossing into East Prussia, the orders included,
[O]n German soil there is only one master—the Soviet soldier, that he is both the judge and the punisher for the torments of his fathers and mothers, for the destroyed cities and villages . . . remember your friends are not there, there is the next of kin of the killers and oppressors.13
Soldiers were instructed not to forget the violence wrought by the German mil- itary against both family and country. Naimark documents the tolerance of sex- ual violence against civilians on the part of the Soviet command structure, from field officers to Stalin himself, who responded to complaints from East Prussia with “We lecture our soldiers too much. Let them have some initiative,” and to those from German socialists with “In every family there is a black sheep. . . . I will not allow anyone to drag the reputation of the Red Army in the mud.”14
Did the Soviet troops engage in such widespread sexual violence in retalia- tion for sexual violence by German troops? The extent of sexual violence by German troops occupying Eastern Europe is not well documented; it appears to have been widespread in some areas.15 According to Wendy Jo Gertjejanssen,16
German soldiers raped girls and women of various ethnicities, including Jews, despite regulations against sexual relations with non-German women.17 Much sexual violence appears to have taken the form of forced prostitution as many girls and women were forced to serve in military brothels in cities and field camps. While some volunteered to serve in the brothels as a way to survive in the dire circumstances of the occupation, others were forced to serve under threat of death or internment. Gertjejanssen estimates that at least 50,000 women and girls served in military brothels throughout the Reich.18 German military authorities also organized brothels in labor and concentration camps, which were visited by favored prisoners, guards, and occasionally officers. Some girls and women were forced to serve in these brothels; others, when offered the choice of internment or service in the brothels, chose the latter. The scale of sexual violence in the camps (aside from the sexual humiliation of
310 POLITICS & SOCIETY
forced undressing and the violence against homosexuals, which often took the form of medical experiments) appears to have been limited, as the number of women in the brothels appears to be a small fraction of the number interned in the camps.19
Massive sexual violence also occurred in the Pacific theater. The “rape of Nanking,” the widespread violence by Japanese soldiers in the environs of the Chinese city of Nanjing for eight weeks beginning December 13, 1937, included extensive sexual violence. According to Iris Chang, 20,000 to 80,000 women and girls were raped and then executed, that is, 8 to 32 percent of the approximately 250,000 female civilians present in the city at the time of the takeover.20 Among them were pre-pubescent girls, pregnant and elderly women, and Buddhist nuns; most were summarily executed afterward. Sexual violence in Nanjing also included various forms of sexual abuse of men, including rape, the forcing of men to have intercourse with family members or the dead, and the forcing of celibate men to have intercourse.
One result of the negative international publicity in the wake of the violence in Nanjing was the widespread implementation of the so-called “comfort women” system of military-organized brothels that accompanied Japanese forces.21
According to a 1993 study by the Japanese government that included a review of wartime archives and interviews with both military personnel and former “comfort women,” more than 200,000 women from across East and Southeast Asia were recruited by force and deception to serve as on-call prostitutes sub- ject to immediate violence if they resisted. In establishing the “comfort sta- tions,” Japanese officials sought
to prevent anti-Japanese sentiments from fermenting [sic] as a result of rapes and other unlawful acts by Japanese military personnel against local residents in the areas occupied by the then Japanese military, the need to prevent loss of troop strength by venereal and other diseases, and the need to prevent espionage.22
Most of the comfort women were between fourteen and eighteen years old, and most were Korean. According to the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Sexual Slavery by Japan,23 perhaps a third of them died in the course of the war.
Bosnia-Herzegovina
Sexual slavery was also a prominent form of sexual violence in the conflict in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. According to a European Union investigation, approximately 20,000 girls and women suffered rape in 1992 in Bosnia-Herzegovina alone, many of them while held in detention facilities of various types.24 According to the UN Commission of Experts to investigate vio- lence in the former Yugoslavia, the “vast majority of the victims are Bosnian
ELISABETH JEAN WOOD 311
Muslims and the great majority of the alleged perpetrators are Bosnian Serbs.”25
The history of violence in the district of Foça illustrates a common pattern in this conflict.26 Before the conflict began, Muslims comprised 58 percent of the residents.27 From March to September 1992, Muslim girls and women were sub- jected to rape in the forests, in their homes, in detention centers, and in private flats. Of the sixty-three cases of rape and sexual assault in Foça compiled by the commission, about 55 percent took place in detention centers, including the local high school, a gym, and the workers’ barracks of a hydroelectric plant under construction. In such centers, members of the various Bosnian Serb forces walked in, chose from among the girls and women there, and raped them either on the premises or in nearby flats. Many of the women and girls endured gang rapes, repeated over days or weeks.28
The most authoritative investigation of sexual violence in the former Yugoslavia was carried out by a UN commission.29 The commission drew on two sources of evidence. The first was their analysis of tens of thousands of alle- gations contained in documents from a wide variety of sources from which the commission distilled 1,100 reported cases of rape and sexual assault (elimi- nating duplicate and unspecific allegations), including 800 identifiable victims, 700 named alleged perpetrators with another 750 identifiable, and 162 deten- tion sites.30 Representatives of the commission also carried out interviews with 223 people who were victims of or witnesses to sexual violence in Bosnia- Herzegovina.31
The commission identified several distinct patterns of sexual violence: (1) by individuals and small groups in conjunction with looting and intimidation of the targeted group; (2) in conjunction with fighting, often including the public rape of selected women in front of the assembled population after the takeover of a village; (3) against some women and girls held in detention or collection centers for refugees; (4) in sites for the purpose of rape and assault where all women were assaulted frequently, apparently for the purpose of forced impregnation (women were told that was the case, and pregnant women were sometimes held past the point when an abortion was possible); and (5) in detention sites for the purpose of providing sex. Sexual violence against men of various ethnicities (castration, being forced to perform fellatio or to have intercourse in front of guards), while much less frequent than that against women, also occurred in camps and detention centers (examples given include camps run by Serbs, Muslims, and Croats).
Among the characteristics stressed by the commission were an emphasis on shame and humiliation (many assaults occurred in front of family or in public), the targeting of young girls and virgins along with educated and prominent female community members, and sexual assault with objects. Moreover,
In both custodial and noncustodial settings, many victims report that the alleged perpe- trators stated that they were ordered to rape and sexually assault the victims, or that they
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were doing it so that the victims and their families would never want to return to the area. Also, every reported case occurred in conjunction with an effort to displace the civilian population of a targeted ethnic group from a given region.32
For example, the commission interviewed nineteen women from Kotor Varos, of whom six had been raped, most gang-raped by guards in a sawmill, which had served as a temporary collection center. One woman was told by a rapist that he wanted to try a Muslim woman and that she should be honored; a second woman was told that he would make “Cetnik babies” in Muslim and Croat women; a third woman was told by a rapist that he had been ordered to do so.33
The commission concluded that while some cases were the result of the actions of individuals or small groups acting without orders, “many more cases seem to be part of an overall pattern. These patterns strongly suggest that a sys- tematic rape and sexual assault policy exists, but this remains to be proved.”34 In drawing this conclusion, the commission relied on the fact that a majority of the cases (600 of the 1,100) occurred against people in detention, that similar pat- terns of sexual violence occurred in non-contiguous areas, and that sexual vio- lence was often simultaneous with military action or activity to displace certain civilian populations.
While not explicitly stated in the report, the inference is clear that the com- mission believed it probable that a policy of systematic ethnic cleansing includ- ing rape existed on the part of the Bosnian Serb forces.35 Direct evidence that Bosnian Serb and possibly Serbian forces planned a campaign of sexual vio- lence as part of the ethnic cleansing of Serbian areas of the former Yugoslavia is lacking, but may emerge as the various trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia continue.
Sri Lanka
Like Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sri Lanka is also a case of a secessionist ethnic conflict, but in Sri Lanka the level of sexual violence appears to be dramatically less. It has generally been wielded by government forces against women associ- ated with the insurgency. Police, soldiers, or security forces occasionally subject displaced Tamil women and girls to various forms of sexual assault, including gang rape and rape with foreign objects, after their arrest or detention at check- points on the grounds that they or family members are suspected members of the Tamil insurgency.36 I could not find estimates of the prevalence of sexual vio- lence in this case, but it does not appear to be either widespread or systematic.37
Sexual violence against Tamil women by government forces is one reason girls and women volunteer to fight with the insurgents.38 I am not aware of any alle- gations of sexual violence by insurgent combatants against civilians, despite their frequent targeting of civilians with other forms of violence, including their
ELISABETH JEAN WOOD 313
deployment of suicide bombers and forcing non-Tamil populations to leave areas of their control. Despite the frequent recruitment by force of girls as combatants, the group does not appear to engage in sexual abuse within its own ranks.39
Israel/Palestine
In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, also an ethnic conflict characterized by the increasing separation of ethnically defined populations, sexual violence appears to be extremely limited. While the forced movement of Palestinians out of some areas in 1948 was accompanied by a few documented cases of rape,40 at present neither Israelis nor Palestinians carry out sexual assaults despite the killing of Israeli civilians by Palestinian groups and of Palestinian civilians by Israeli security forces. In December 2003, I asked representatives of three human rights organizations (two Israeli and one Palestinian) whether they believed sexual assault was occurring but was not reported, or was not in fact taking place. They independently and unanimously stated that they received information for almost no cases of sexual assault and that they believed they would hear of it occurring as they did receive reports of lesser instances of sexual harassment (for example, during pat-down searches at checkpoints). It could be the case that the intensive international monitoring of the conflict deters the practice of sexual violence, but both sides do not appear much deterred in their other practices by their frequent condemnation by international actors.
Sierra Leone
Sexual violence during the war in Sierra Leone, in contrast to Bosnia- Herzegovina, did not involve explicit ethnic targeting.41 According to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Sierra Leone, sexual violence was carried out “indiscriminately on women of all ages, of every ethnic group and from all social classes.”42 Some women suffered rape by members of several armed groups. The commission noted two particular patterns: armed groups targeted young women and girls and also those girls and women associated with other armed groups. Young women and girls were targeted particularly because they were presumed to be virgins; female rebels occasionally checked the virginity of detained young women.43 Less frequently, older women also suffered sexual assault, including post-menopausal women for whom it broke a particular cul- tural taboo against sexual activity among this group. On occasion, rebels broke other taboos as well, forcing male family members to rape female family mem- bers or to watch them dance naked or be raped by others.44
Sexual violence was widespread among those internally displaced by the war, which comprised approximately a quarter of the population by 2001. According to a survey of 991 internally displaced women carried out by Physicians for
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Human Rights, 9 percent of the respondents had suffered sexual assault during the ten years of the war.45 Of the respondents who were sexually assaulted, 89 percent reported being raped and 33 percent reported being gang-raped.46 Of the human rights abuses suffered by household members, 40 percent were alleged to have been carried out by the rebel group Revolutionary United Front (RUF), 34 percent by unknown groups, 16 percent by unspecified rebels, and 4 percent by mixed groups.47
Sexual violence in Sierra Leone was also extremely brutal.48 Gang rapes often took the form of very young victims enduring gang rapes, with rebel com- batants lining up to take turns. Many of those who suffered sexual assault did so on multiple occasions. The extreme violence with which girls and women were raped often resulted in severe initial bleeding; tears in the vagina, anus, and sur- rounding tissue; long-term bleeding and incontinence; and sometimes death.49
A particular form of sexual violence in Sierra Leone was the detention of girls and women, often for long periods of time, as slaves serving and sexually servicing a rebel camp or a particular rebel.50 In some cases, they underwent forced marriage with a particular person. Of the internally displaced women who suffered sexual assault, 33 percent of the respondents were abducted, 15 percent were forced to serve initial as sexual slaves, and 9 percent were forced to marry a captor.51 Escape was reportedly very difficult, and attempts were severely punished. At war’s end, some “wives” were not willing or able to leave their spouses.52
The Commission found
that all of the armed factions, in particular the RUF and the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council, embarked on a systematic and deliberate strategy to rape women and girls, espe- cially those between the ages of ten and 18 years of age, with the intention of sowing terror amongst the population, violating women and girls and breaking down every norm and custom of traditional society.53
However, the commission did not analyze patterns of sexual violence in detail and therefore makes a less compelling case for sexual violence as a systematic strategy than that advanced by the commission on the former Yugoslavia, which laid out specific patterns not easily accounted for except by such a strategy.
U.S. Troops in Vietnam
In contrast to the absence of ethnic targeting in Sierra Leone, US troops carried out an unknown number of ethnically targeted acts of sexual violence during the Vietnam War. The best documented is that which occurred in March 1968, when nine helicopters dropped soldiers of Charlie Company near the hamlet My Lai.54 By the end of the day, 128 to 500 civilians had been executed. Approximately twenty girls and women were raped, some by groups of soldiers,
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and then murdered. The orders for the operation, according to the Peers Report, an internal investigation of the subsequent cover-up, included the destruction of all infrastructure and food; soldiers claimed they understood the order to include the elimination of all residents, civilian or not.
To my knowledge there has not been a scholarly study of sexual violence during the Vietnam War and many documents remain classified. The massacre at My Lai only became public knowledge because of the insistence of two heli- copter pilots, one who witnessed the killings and another who flew over the area a few days later. The publication in Life magazine of photographs of victims also undermined the feasibility of the initial cover-up efforts. However, it is well documented that another platoon, the Tiger Force of the 101st Airborne, also carried out acts of sexual violence, mutilation, and execution of civilians over a seven-month period in the same province the year before the events at My Lai. According to an investigative report published in 2003,55 the first incidents were sexual abuse of both male and female prisoners held by the platoon. The vio- lence dramatically increased after two members of the Tiger Force were killed and many wounded in an ambush.
Much of the literature on My Lai attributes the violence against civilians to poor leadership and morale. Despite their many differences (Charlie Company was an ordinary “grunt” unit, while the Tiger Force was an elite one), both fac- tors may have played a role in Tiger Force violence as well. Setting aside the difficulty of empirically establishing issues of leadership and morale without tautologically inferring their absence by the presence of violence, whether poor morale comprises an adequate explanation is difficult to judge in the absence of studies of other U.S. military units that also engaged in sexual violence and studies of those that did not.
El Salvador
Sexual violence during the civil war in El Salvador, a non-ethnic conflict pit- ting a leftist insurgency against an authoritarian government, was one-sided, and very low in comparison to Bosnia-Herzegovina and Sierra Leone. Government soldiers and security forces occasionally engaged in sexual violence, including gang and multiple rapes, against some suspected insurgent supporters (includ- ing some men) detained in both official and secret detention sites. There are also isolated reports of government forces carrying out sexual violence while on operations early in the war. For example, according to Mark Danner, some of the nearly 1,000 people killed by the Salvadoran military at El Mozote in 1981 were raped.56 And two of the four U.S. churchwomen detained and killed by National Guardsmen in 1980 were raped. The final report of the UN-sponsored Truth Commission mentions only one incident of rape, carried out by government forces in a village in eastern El Salvador in 1981.57 However, the unpublished
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annex to the commission’s report discussed sexual violence in some detail.58
Sexual violence (alone or in conjunction with some other abuse) comprised 4 percent of human rights violations reported to the commission. The majority of incidents reported took place in the first few years of the war; all were reported to have been carried out by state forces or agents. Sexual violence appears gen- erally to have varied over time with other forms of violence against civilians, steeply decreasing after 1983 in response to the U.S. conditioning its military aid to the government on improved human rights performance. No incidents of sexual violence in the annex were attributed to the insurgent force. In the human rights and ethnographic literature analyzing the conflict, there are very few reports of sexual violence by insurgent forces.59 Sexual violence in the Salvadoran con- flict was thus asymmetric, distinctly low compared to other cases, and declined over the years of the war.
Peru
Sexual violence appears to have been relatively infrequent in the Peruvian conflict, comprising about 2 percent of the human rights violations reported to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Aggregate sexual violence against civilians in Peru’s civil war generally co-varied with other forms of violence against civilians: the frequency of different forms of violence varies similarly across time and space, according to the data compiled by the commission.60 As with other forms of violence, sexual violence was concentrated in the indige- nous highlands of Peru. However, the pattern of responsibility for sexual vio- lence diverged sharply from the pattern for other forms of violence, according to commission data. While Sendero Luminoso, the Maoist insurgent group, was responsible for more than half of the reported deaths and disappearances, they were responsible for only 11 percent of the (few) reported cases of reported rape.61 In contrast, state agents were responsible for about a third of the deaths and disappearances but about 85 percent of the reported rapes.
Summary of Observed Patterns
Sexual violence in these cases appears to vary substantially in prevalence; in form; in who is targeted (all women, girls and men as well as women, or par- ticular persons, perhaps members of an ethnic out-group); in whether it is exer- cised by combatants from a single party or more generally; whether it is pursued as a strategy of war; where it occurs (in detention, at home, or in public); in duration; whether it is carried out by a single perpetrator or by a group; whether victims are killed afterward; and whether its incidence varies with other forms of violence against civilians or occurs in a distinct pattern. In some wars, armed groups “mirror” the use of sexual violence by committing their own; in other
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wars, such tit-for-tat retaliation does not occur. In some conflicts, sexual vio- lence increases over time; in others, it declines.
The type of war (at the broadest level) does not explain the variation even among these few cases. Sexual violence varies in prevalence and form among civil wars as well as inter-state wars, among ethnic wars as well as non-ethnic, among genocides and ethnic-cleansing cases, and among secessionist conflicts.
CHALLENGES TO DOCUMENTING WARTIME SEXUAL VIOLENCE
Before continuing, however, a preemptive concern must be addressed. Perhaps the variation described above is merely an artifact of inadequate knowl- edge about the empirical patterns present in each case. The reported variation may reflect different intensities of domestic and international monitoring of conflicts rather than different prevalence rates: violence in some regions appears to garner more international attention than others.
Even in peacetime and even in countries with well-developed infrastructure and liberal norms, the methodological challenges to gathering data concerning sexual violence are serious. For example, what counts legally as “rape” varies significantly among U.S. states depending on whether it is narrowly defined as forced penetration of the vagina by a penis or more broadly to include anal pen- etration and vaginal penetration by other objects, and whether rape requires forcible compulsion or merely lack of consent.62 The definitional ambiguity is still greater across societies; for example, societies differ in whether rape is con- sidered possible between husband and wife. In some cultures, coerced vaginal penetration may be socially condoned in particular situations, with the result that an incident that would count as rape in other societies would not be con- sidered as such.63
Whether persons who have suffered some form of sexual violence are will- ing to report it, whether to health workers, to police, to ethnographers, or in sur- veys, also varies substantially across societies. One reason that many do not do so, even in societies with liberal sexual norms, is that they feel shame and fear stigmatization. In most societies, male victims of sexual violence appear to be particularly reluctant to report it. And in societies where abortion is illegal, female victims of rape who abort may be particularly reluctant to report rape.
These challenges are, of course, compounded during war when surveys are generally absent, police and health services are disrupted, and families and social groups are displaced and dispersed. The fear of reprisal for reporting sexual violence is likely greater in war settings, particularly if the perpetrator or his group is still present. Increased political polarization may intensify partisan bias in the reporting of human rights violations—even by non-partisan organizations—as violence and displacement may isolate some populations from services and inten- sify the counting of incidents in others. The destruction of rural infrastructure
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may reinforce urban bias. International organizations that document human rights violations tend to have limited resources and as a result focus their investiga- tions on particular cases. And because many of the physical injuries sustained during sexual assault are to soft tissue, sexual violence does not always leave an observable trace in the long-run forensic record. As a result, the exhumation of massacre sites may not document sexual violence unless it took the form of mutilation or dismemberment, or other tissue damage likely to remain evident for many years.
However, the disruption of war may also increase reporting. Sexual violence in the context of political conflict may be more likely to be reported as the stigma felt by its victims may be less, and displacement from home communi- ties may loosen traditional norms and lessen the likelihood of reprisal. Health services may be more available, not less, to populations that fled to urban areas or in some refugee camps, compared to their place of origin.64 Human rights groups, women’s organizations, and medical service groups may emerge or command more resources in wartime, enabling the compiling of reports and pat- terns and facilitating investigation by international commissions and human rights groups. Perhaps due to the strengthening of international norms against sexual violence during war, recent truth commissions tend to document sexual violence more carefully than earlier commissions.
Another challenge to analyzing variation in wartime sexual violence is the fact that levels of sexual violence vary across countries in peacetime, making more difficult the interpretation of the wartime variation. Evidence for peace- time variation comes from studies that draw on two very different methodolo- gies. The United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) uses crime victimization surveys in many countries to compile cross- national data on rates of sexual assault. In developing country capital cities, five-year prevalence rates in the mid-1990s for sexual assault varied between 0.83 percent, the average for the three cities at the low end (Manila, Gaborone, and La Paz), and 6.60 percent for the three cities at the high end (Rio de Janeiro, Tirana, and Buenos Aires), about eight times as high.65 In industrialized coun- tries, estimated annual rates of sexual assault also vary, between 0.13 at the low end (the annual average for Japan, Ireland, and Scotland) and 1.03 at the high end (for Sweden, Finland, and England), with the high rate again about eight times as high as the low rates.66
Evidence for cross-cultural differences in the social regulation of sexual aggression also comes from analysis of ethnographic reports of practices in band and tribal societies before significant contact with modern societies.67 In her analysis of a subset of ninety-five societies of a standard sample of such soci- eties, Peggy Sanday found that the rate of rape of women differed significantly: in nearly half of the sample rape was rare or absent, while in about a fifth of them, rape was moderately to highly frequent against women of that or other societies
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or it was an accepted way to punish women or occurred as part of ceremonies.68
(Sanday is not precise about what counts as moderately to highly frequent.) The significant correlates of rape among these societies were war, inter-personal violence (excluding rape), and ideologies of male dominance (women exercise little power or authority and do not participate in political decision making).
Working with a different sample of thirty-five societies (randomly drawn), Patricia Rozee classified as rape patterns of sexual intercourse in which a woman would be punished or harmed if she refused to participate, and distin- guished between normative rape (rape that occurs in circumstances condoned by that society) and non-normative rape (rape in situations not condoned).69 Based on her examination of 200 ethnographic sources, Rozee found that non-normative rape occurred in 63 percent of the societies.70 She also argued that the preva- lence and form of normative rape varied among societies: marital rape occurred in 40 percent, exchange rape (in which women or girls are lent or given to guests or brothers, perhaps in the course of gambling or negotiations) in 71 percent, punitive rape (generally for transgressing gender norms) in 14 percent, ceremo- nial rape (such as ritual defloration) in 49 percent, and status rape (such as the right of chiefs to women) in 29 percent.71
Despite these empirical challenges, the variation in sexual violence is suffi- ciently well documented across enough wars and armed groups to suggest that it is real and not solely an artifact of bias in reporting and observation or a reflection of variation in peacetime levels. The variation in frequency among conflicts and among groups within a conflict appears to be large, with well-documented cases at both ends of the frequency spectrum. At the high end of the variation are some of the best documented cases, for example, Serbian forces in Bosnia- Herzegovina, for which it is also difficult to imagine a significantly lower rate given the numerous and mutually corroborating reports from dozens of investi- gations. And at the low end of the spectrum, it is difficult to imagine a high rate of sexual violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict going unreported, given the density of non-governmental human rights organizations and the intensity of international scrutiny of both parties’ behavior. Not only does the prevalence vary significantly, but the particular pattern of sexual violence does as well, which gives additional analytical traction. Finally, for some of the cases (World War II and Bosnia-Herzegovina, for example) it is evident that sexual violence was much more prevalent during the war than before. And in cases where it is unclear whether it was more prevalent during peacetime, the form of sexual violence changed during war, as in the case of sexual slavery in Sierra Leone.
EXPLAINING VARIATION IN WARTIME SEXUAL VIOLENCE
To address the central puzzle—why the frequency and form of sexual vio- lence vary across conflicts and across groups in a given conflict—it is helpful
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to consider a prior question as well, namely, why sexual violence is often higher in wartime than in peacetime. The following framework will help orga- nize potential explanations for variation in wartime sexual violence. First, indi- viduals in peacetime differ in their interest in sexual violence, with some so interested in sexual gratification that they use violence to attain it, others asso- ciating sexual gratification with domination and perhaps violence, others seek- ing to engage in sexual violence as a form of control and power, and still others not interested at all in sexual violence. The expression of sexual aggression by individuals is regulated by a variety of social mechanisms that differ among countries, and often among within-country groups, with the result that the peacetime rate of sexual violence differs among countries and groups (as dis- cussed above). (Societies vary, of course, in the extent to which their regula- tory mechanisms in fact constrain illegitimate aggression.) Second, these regulatory mechanisms are often weaker during war, resulting in higher levels of sexual violence as the opportunity and/or incentive to engage in sexual vio- lence increases. Third, the extent to which these regulatory mechanisms break down (and opportunity and incentive increase) varies across conflicts and groups. In some cases, regulation of sexual violence may be replaced by pro- motion of sexual violence as a strategy of war. In other cases, armed groups enforce effective sanctions against their combatants engaging in sexual vio- lence, potentially even leading to reduced levels of sexual violence compared to peacetime levels.
Opportunity
War sometimes increases the opportunity for sexual violence. There are sev- eral possible reasons. Wars tend to be fought by armed young men in groups far from the normal social controls of their village or neighborhood. In these cir- cumstances, sexual aggression is less regulated (the costs are lower) with the result that higher levels of sexual violence occur. Social controls may also be weaker among displaced civilians, particularly if communities are not displaced together. The dependence of some armed factions on the looting of civilian assets for combatant supplies may increase opportunity: entry into individuals’ homes to seize food (and often liquor) is an opportunity for sexual violence.
Data to systematically test the hypothesis that sexual violence increases dur- ing war is limited. Neil Mitchell and Tali Gluch found that sexual violence was predicted by the presence of war in a statistical analysis that correlated a mea- sure of sexual violence and the presence or absence of armed conflict.72
However, their finding was based on data for only one year and relied on a crude coding of limited human rights sources, principally U.S. State Department human rights reports. More adequate longitudinal data does not exist except for particular cases.73 Evidence that rates of sexual violence by U.S. troops in Europe
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increased during World War II comes from a study by Madeline Morris using data on “founded investigations” (meaning reported crimes that were not dis- missed as unfounded by investigators) from the FBI and US military services.74
She found that the rates of rape by male U.S. military personnel during war were three to four times higher than the rate by male civilians of the same age (in con- trast, military rates during peacetime were significantly lower than civilian rates). The increase in rape rates occurred as U.S. troops moved quickly through France in August and September 1944 and Germany in March and April 1945.75
Her interpretation is (in part) based on opportunity: such “breakout” periods are the relevant period of study, she argues, because it is then that soldiers have significant contact with civilians, as opposed to periods of intense fighting.
It should be noted that opportunity arguments differ in the implied perpe- trators of sexual violence. Some versions of the argument appear to assume that given the opportunity, all men will rape for sexual gratification. For example, evolutionary psychologists Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer argue that men inherit a genetically transmitted propensity for rape, which was selected for because men with poor chances of reproductive success would have a better chance of reproducing if they raped vulnerable females than if they did not.76 However, there are several reasons to doubt this claim.77 For at least for the 100,000 or so years of (biologically modern) human history, it seems likely that the expected fitness gains to rape were offset by the cost, including lethal punishment by group members related to the victim. Adultery is a principal cause of homicide of males in some hunter-gatherer societies;78
the penalty for rape is presumably at least as severe. (However, an inherited propensity for rape of female outsiders would not be as vulnerable to the lethal punishment objection.) A universal male propensity for rape based on reproductive success does not easily account for the raping of girls under reproductive age (20 to 30 percent of rape victims in the United States)79 and elderly women, the excessive violence of many rapes, or the prevalence of gang rape.80 In any case, modern biology views genes as expressed only if environmental conditions are propitious, so the mapping from genotype to phenotype is much weaker than this theory presumes. Other versions of the opportunity argument assume merely that with an increase in opportunity men with a propensity to rape will do so more frequently or that more men (but not necessarily all) will rape.81
If sexual violence should vary with opportunity, as this reasoning suggests, there are two additional implications. The first is that if we assume a narrow notion of opportunity as access to civilians, such that opportunity for sexual vio- lence against a civilian is also an opportunity to rob or kill that civilian, then sexual violence by that group should vary with other forms of violence. Groups that supply themselves by looting civilian homes have more opportunity for various forms of violence than groups that do not. The second is that sexual
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violence should not be targeted toward members of particular groups (unless opportunity varies systematically with groups).
However, these predicted patterns based on opportunity as access to civilians are not sustained by the cases considered here. Co-variation in forms of violence sometimes occurs, but is often not the case: some armed factions such as the Sri Lankan and Peruvian insurgencies appear to strictly limit sexual violence but carry out other violence against civilians. Opportunity more broadly understood depends on armed group strategy as well as access to civilians. If an armed group strongly punishes combatants who engage in sexual violence, the oppor- tunity to do so is less as the likely costs exceed the benefits. Opportunity broadly speaking also depends on the norms and practices of small units: if some mem- bers of a particular small group frequently carry out sexual violence, the social costs of sexual violence for other members may be lowered by conformity effects, with the result that individuals not particularly inclined to sexual vio- lence may participate out of concern for his or her status within the group (a process similar to sexual violence on the part of some youth gangs).
Moreover, in many conflicts, armed groups do not target all women with rape, but women (and sometimes men and children) of particular ethnicities or other social characteristics.82 While some sexual violence seems to be oppor- tunistic (as in the rape of British and French as well as German women by U.S. troops in World War II), in other conflicts it is highly targeted, for example, on women of a particular ethnicity or ideology, as in Bosnia-Herzegovina where Serbs directed sexual violence exclusively at Bosnian Muslims and Croatians. It does not seem likely that differences in opportunity narrowly understood account for such ethnic targeting in societies where populations were very mixed before the war.
Incentive
A distinct approach is that war leads to an increase of sexual violence because wartime experience increases the incentive to engage in sexual vio- lence, not merely the opportunity to do so.
It is sometimes proposed that wartime increase in sexual violence is rooted in biology: wartime sexual violence is higher because of a putative link between the aggression necessary for combat and male sex drive (via testosterone). But the relationship between aggression, testosterone, and sexual drive is complex and, to the extent that it is understood, what we know gives little support for this proposal. Research in this area is difficult because testosterone levels in males vary over the course of the day, some findings in animals do not generalize to humans, social processes affect testosterone levels as well as vice versa, and the design of experimental studies is often inadequate.83 The salient findings to date appear to be the following.
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Testosterone appears to affect aggression in three ways. Before birth, high testosterone levels in fetuses with both an X and Y chromosome cause fetuses to become male and also organize the brain in a distinct way. Second, testos- terone levels vary among males (and also over the lifespan of each) and there is evidence of a positive but weak relationship between aggression and testos- terone levels among normal men. (One careful analysis of thirty-five studies of the relationship found an average correlation of 0.08 between testosterone levels and observed aggression.)84 Third, the relationship is apparently recipro- cal: in male (but not female) individuals, testosterone levels increase in antici- pation of physical competition such as sports and status contests such as chess games.85 Afterward, the winner’s level tends to remain high but the loser’s decreases. And the response to challenges to status appears to depend on cul- ture: male experimental subjects from the U.S. South exhibited increased testos- terone after being insulted, but males from the North did not.86
Thus an armed group might be particularly aggressive if its members had high testosterone levels or if combat had effects similar to physical competition and status contests, particularly among the winners. For aggression to take a sexual form, it would seem either that members of the armed group must also feel increased sexual desire or that they hold cultural beliefs rendering sexual violence a favored form of aggression even in the absence of desire (e.g., sexual attacks with weapons rather than the penis). Focusing on the former for now, the relationship between testosterone, sexual desire, and sexual activity appears to exhibit a threshold effect: if testosterone is below the threshold, an increase in testosterone has no effect on desire or activity.87 Above the threshold, in normal men an increase in testosterone increases sexual desire and to some extent sex- ual activity, which depends on social norms, status, and structure as well as on desire.88 Among convicted sex offenders, high testosterone levels were associ- ated with more violent attacks and also with higher rates of recidivism (but only among those who did not complete an intensive treatment program).89
The fact that armed groups often engage in sexual violence during or after a successful engagement (for example, after the fall of a besieged city or in the course of forcing a civilian population to flee) might seem consistent with the proposed relationship between competition, increased testosterone, and engage- ment in sexual violence. And given that much sexual violence takes the form of rape of women by men using erect penises, it seems reasonable to suppose that sexual desire plays some role in sexual violence. But, not surprisingly, the pro- posed argument on its own cannot easily explain the observed variation in sex- ual violence, as it would presume (if it were true) significantly higher levels of testosterone in male combatants fighting for armed groups that engage exten- sively in sexual violence for no articulated reason. The burgeoning literature on the role of social processes in mediating the relationship between testosterone and aggression suggests that an explanation for the observed variation in sexual
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violence may lie in variation among armed groups in the social processes that regulate aggression. I return to this below.
A very different explanation for increased incentive for sexual violence in wartime begins with an understanding of peacetime gender relations as patriar- chal, in which women’s inferior social status is maintained by the state and other institutions and by violence, including sexual violence.90 In wartime, the enforcement of gender relations by the state and other institutions tends to break down as their presence in war zones is weaker; in their absence, men resort more frequently to violence to enforce gender roles. The argument is similar to that often given to the rise in lynching after the Civil War in the U.S. South: with the outlawing of slavery, violence such as lynching of African Americans increased. Cynthia Enloe advanced a variation of this argument: sexual violence increases during war because gender roles become more polarized.91
Arguments based on patriarchal social relations imply that sexual violence should be more prevalent in wars in which traditional gender norms are more dis- rupted. In many civil wars, gender roles become less polarized because village hierarchies break down as the population disperses and women take on tasks nor- mally carried out by men. It does not appear to be the case that sexual violence is higher when traditional norms are more disrupted. Contrary to the patriarchal thesis, in some conflicts patriarchal relations are so disrupted that there are sig- nificant numbers of female combatants in insurgent factions. Rather than the pre- dicted high rates of sexual violence, rates appear to have been very low in two such cases, the insurgencies in El Salvador and Sri Lanka. And women some- times participate in sexual violence as in Rwanda, where women sometimes incited men to rape, and in Iraq, Guantánamo, and Afghanistan, where U.S. ser- vicewomen played key roles in the sexual humiliation of prisoners.
Moreover, neither of these two explanations appears to account for the explicit targeting of certain people for sexual violence. A victory-driven increase in testosterone does not explain why enemy women and sometimes men, rather than women of one’s own group, are often singled out for sexual violence. And based on the second argument, we would expect that women who broke tradi- tional gender roles would be particularly targeted, but that does not appear to be the case.
One reason often advanced for sexual violence based on increased wartime incentives that does account for targeting of enemy civilians is that of revenge. During war, combatants target enemy civilians with violence in revenge for the violence suffered by themselves, their family, or community members. However, why revenge takes the form of sexual violence rather than other vio- lence should also be addressed. Sexual violence is sometimes said to occur in retaliation for sexual violence previously suffered (or rumored to suffer) by co-ethnics, but as our cases showed, sexual violence is often exercised by only one party to the war.
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Joshua Goldstein advances an argument for increased sexual violence during war that also accounts for the targeting of enemy women and men, and with specifically sexual violence.92 He argues that in order to persuade men to fight and endure all the terrors and hardships of war, societies need members willing to stand fast under fire. An extremely common way in which that is accom- plished relies on the development of sharp distinctions between genders: to become men, boys must become warriors. Societies’ need for warriors therefore results in universal rituals of manhood that include tests of physical courage, endurance, strength, self-control, and obedience. The gendered formation of soldiers thus rests on particular ideas about manhood: leaders persuade soldiers that to be a real man is to assert a militaristic masculinity. One result of such practices is that soldiers then represent domination of the enemy in a gendered way, leading to the use of specifically sexual violence against enemy women and, occasionally, against enemy men who are dominated through male rape and castration.93
Goldstein also argues that it is loyalty to the small unit, not the army or the nation, that enables men to fight under the terrifying conditions of war; the bonding among members of the unit is therefore essential and usually takes gen- dered forms, reinforcing the militaristic masculinity advanced by military train- ing. In her analysis of violence by the U.S. military, Morris similarly emphasizes the particular practices of the primary groups to which soldiers belong. A pri- mary group is a small number of people who share a common ideology and among whom personal, affective bonding takes place; other bonds are under- mined through initiation rituals.94 The sexual and gender norms imparted to recruits in their primary groups are “inadvertently comprised largely of the sort associated with rape propensity,” such as an understanding of masculinity as dominance, aggressiveness, and risk taking; adversarial sexual beliefs (both sexes manipulate and exploit the other); promiscuity; and general hostility toward women (including erroneous beliefs about rape, such as that women enjoy it).95 After documenting particular practices in the U.S. military in support of her argument, she reasons, like Goldstein, that this pattern is shared among military organizations generally.
This argument emphasizing norms of militarized masculinity that rely on gendered representations of domination of the enemy accounts both for the tar- geting of enemy women and men and for the use of specifically sexual violence. Together with their emphasis on the importance of the bonding between men of the same unit, this might also account for gang rapes in wartime (as a form of male bonding among primary groups).
However, if the militarized masculinity argument is to explain variation in wartime sexual violence, it would have to be the case that armies promote dif- ferent notions of masculinity, with the armies that emphasize more militaristic notions of manhood responsible for higher levels of sexual violence. I am not
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aware of systematic comparisons of military training, norms, and practices across armed groups, but the variation in sexual violence among state militaries appears significantly greater than the variation in their training, which appears surprisingly similar; nor does training appear to vary much among insurgent groups. Moreover, there are obvious exceptions to the claimed relationship: the Salvadoran insurgency, one of the two most militarily effective guerrilla armies in Latin America, had little record of sexual violence despite their highly mili- tarized notion of masculinity.
Perhaps variation in sexual violence is better addressed by variation in mili- tary discipline than training and socialization. I return to this issue below.
Sexual Violence as Instrumental for the Group
In the previous explanations for sexual violence based on increased opportu- nity and incentive, sexual violence occurred for reasons of individual gratifica- tion or as a by-product of necessary training. In contrast, in some conflicts sexual violence is promoted or tolerated by (at least local) leaders of some armed groups as an effective means toward its goals. Such instrumental sexual violence may serve as a reward for participation. Or it may be tolerated as a form of small-unit solidarity promoting bonding of its members. Or it may be seen as a form of terror or punishment, as in Berlin and Nanjing, despite its undermining of military effectiveness. In Rwanda, pre-war propaganda deni- grating and sexualizing Tutsi women created a climate in which mass sexual violence appeared to be an appropriate form of retribution for long-standing grievances.96 Or it may be pursued as a form of torture as in the Latin American instances discussed above and in detention sites in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo, where US forces use sexual humiliation to “soften up” suspects for interrogation. In some cases, an armed group engages in sexual violence against civilian members of its own community, or its own combatants, as when such targets are suspected of collaborating with the enemy. However, the most prevalent form of selective violence against collaborators in civil wars is homi- cide, particularly in certain zones of war in which an army is in control but not dominant.97 Why some armies deploy sexual violence to control and punish col- laborators while others do not remains unexplained. The most notorious instru- mental use of widespread sexual violence against civilians occurs (sometimes) as part of “ethnic cleansing,” in which violence is used against entire popula- tions to force their movement from particular regions claimed as the homeland, and as part of some genocides.
The conditions for such instrumental promotion of sexual violence are not well specified in the literature. Several authors suggest that sexual violence is an effective form of wartime violence in particular cultural settings. For example, sexual violence may be an effective form of ethnic cleansing or genocidal violence,
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destroying the social fabric of a society, when used against groups that understand sexual violence against a woman as a violation of the family’s honor as well as hers, and as humiliation of her male relatives.98 Cynthia Enloe suggests a more refined hypothesis along the same lines:
if military strategists . . . imagine that women provide the backbone of the enemy’s cul- ture, if they define women chiefly as breeders, if they define women as men’s property and as the symbols of men’s honor, if they imagine that residential communities rely on women’s work—if any or all of these beliefs about society’s proper gendered division of labor are held by war-waging policy makers—they will be tempted to devise an overall military operation that includes their male soldiers’ sexual assault of women.99
Enloe makes a similar argument concerning sexual torture of suspected insur- gents. It is especially likely, she reasons, when the regime is preoccupied with national security, a majority of civilians understand security as military security; security apparatuses are dominated by masculinist males; the definitions of honor, loyalty, and treason are derived from misogynous military and police cultures; men seen as threats are also seen as vulnerable through their roles as fathers, lovers, and husbands; and some local women are publicly visible as opposition leaders.100
These proposed conditions for the instrumental promotion of sexual violence are hypotheses generated by cases in which instrumental sexual violence occurred and have not been confirmed by careful empirical testing across cases. They appear to predict more sexual violence than is in fact observed: masculin- ist notions of honor are present in many societies that do not see massive sexual violence during conflict, as in El Salvador and Israel/Palestine. In addition, most instrumentalist accounts do not adequately address two issues important for the approach. The first is whether sexual violence as a strategy originated at the top of the command structure or at some lower level (and then may have diffused to other sites or groups). The second is whether the organization has a command and control structure sufficient to enforce a strategy of sexual violence if pro- moted by top leaders. Goals may diverge widely between leaders of an armed group and individual members,101 resulting in a potential gap between measures advocated at the top and priorities among small units on the ground.
Sanctions against Sexual Violence
The effectiveness of an armed group’s command and control structure is also important for the opposite pattern, the effective prohibition of sexual violence by the group’s leaders. Even if leaders were persuaded of the military effective- ness of sexual violence against particular groups, they might decide to prohibit it for normative, strategic, or practical considerations. For example, if an orga- nization aspires to govern the civilian population, leaders will probably attempt
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to restrain combatants’ engagement in sexual violence against those civilians for fear of undermining support for the coming revolution.
Similarly, if an armed group is dependent on civilians, leaders will probably attempt to restrain sexual violence. Jeremy Weinstein holds that an insurgent army whose military capacity depends on the voluntary and ongoing provision of intel- ligence and other services by civilians will only attract highly committed insur- gents and is likely to limit its use of coercion and violence. In contrast, he asserts, armies that attract opportunistic not idealistic recruits, as when members have easy access to resources such as abundant, lootable natural resources, are less likely to constrain their use of violence against civilians.102 These considerations should extend to sexual violence: armies that do not depend on civilian populations will not limit their use of sexual violence. However, the Colombian leftist insurgent groups appear not to follow this pattern: despite their reliance on revenues from coca paste and kidnapping, they engage in relatively little sexual violence.103
Reasons for prohibiting sexual violence may reflect normative concerns as well as practical constraints. Revolutionary groups seeking to carry out a social revolution see themselves as the disciplined bearers of a new, more just, social order for all citizens; sexual violence may conflict with their self-image. For example, the norms and practices of liberation theology informed many of the practices and values of the Salvadoran insurgency;104 it is difficult to imagine the organization embracing liberation theology while violating one of Catholicism’s central norms, the sanctity of womanhood. Similar normative considerations may account for the restraint of the Colombian insurgents. A norm against sex- ual violence may take a distinct form: in some conflicts, sexual violence across ethnic boundaries may be understood by leaders or combatants as polluting the instigator rather than humiliating the victim and the social group.
New social norms against the use of particular forms of violence and in favor of others may also be actively cultivated by an armed group as a matter of strat- egy or principle. The Salvadoran insurgency attempted to shape individual long- ings for revenge toward a more general aspiration for justice because revenge seeking by individuals would undermine insurgent discipline and obedience.105
Despite systematic celebration of martyrdom in pursuit of victory, the insur- gency did not endorse suicide missions and explicitly prohibited sexual vio- lence. The Sri Lankan insurgents, in contrast, carry out suicide bombing and, arguably, shape desires for revenge toward that end, yet also do not engage in sexual violence toward civilians despite their practice of ethnic cleansing.
Dependence on international allies may also constrain sexual violence if those allies have normative concerns about such violence. Even if neither the armed group nor its sponsor is itself normatively concerned, it may seek to avoid criticism by international human rights organizations.
These examples suggest that armed groups may promote selected forms of violence and form able soldiers without tolerating sexual violence. An army for
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whom females comprise a high fraction of combatants may be particularly con- strained in its use of sexual violence. This is suggested by the empirical pattern that female-intensive insurgencies in El Salvador, Sri Lanka, Peru, and Colombia appear to carry out less sexual violence. However, the mechanism is not clear, and these insurgencies share other characteristics as well, such as an unusual degree of internal discipline.
Whether an armed group effectively enforces particular sanctions and norms decided on by leaders generally depends on the group’s military discipline. In particular, prohibition of sexual violence based on practical constraints raises two issues. The first is whether the constraint operates directly on combatants as well as leaders. If soldiers do not themselves feel the direct causal pinch of the constraint, whether the constraint in fact constrains then depends on the degree of discipline within the organization. Many armies probably prohibit sexual violence yet do not in fact discipline soldiers who commit it. The second issue is methodological: independent evidence for the existence of constraints may be difficult to establish beyond the non-observation of the type of violence supposedly constrained. However, if combatants themselves have individual internalized norms against sexual violence or if small units share such a norm, small units may effectively enforce the norm without relying on the hierarchi- cal discipline of the armed group.
CONCLUSION
The literature on sexual violence during war has yet to provide an adequate explanation for its variation across wars and armed groups. While many authors have distinguished between opportunistic and strategic sexual violence, the empirical pattern of variation is wider, including wars where sexual violence is remarkably low on the part of one or more parties to the conflict. In the light of comparative analysis, we do not adequately understand the conditions under which armed groups provide effective sanctions against their combatants engag- ing in sexual violence or those under which groups effectively promote its strate- gic use. In concluding, I identify the contributions of this article, suggest some possible patterns amid the variation, and outline a broader research agenda.
Before proceeding, I should note explicitly that I have used a rhetorical device throughout the paper: I assumed a single, deterministic, causal path to a particu- lar level or form of sexual violence such that a single instance that contradicted that path led to its rejection. It is likely that a range of causal mechanisms interact to create the variation in sexual violence and that a probabilistic rather than deter- ministic approach is necessary to account for the overall pattern of variation.
The first contribution of the article is its emphasis on the neglected category of armed groups that do not engage in sexual violence, widening the variation that needs to be explained.
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A second contribution is the idea that addressing the puzzle of variation in sexual violence requires three levels of analysis, that of the armed group (an insurgent group or a national military), the small unit in which combatants have face-to-face relations, and the individual.106 An initial distinction is whether the armed group provides effective incentives that promote sexual violence or sanc- tions that prohibit it. If there are no effective sanctions either promoting or dis- couraging sexual violence (either because the armed group does not have an explicit policy or because there is no effective enforcement of that policy), the degree of sexual violence engaged in by combatants depends on whether the group has access to civilians (as when it loots kitchens and fields for food) or not, whether small units have norms prohibiting or endorsing sexual violence, and whether individuals have such norms.
Strategic sexual violence appears to occur when an armed group believes it to be an effective form of terror against or punishment of a targeted group. While strategic sexual violence may not be explicitly ordered, it is (at least) tol- erated; if any punishment occurs it is symbolic and limited, clearly for external consumption rather than deterrence. Such violence appears to take two broad forms. The first is sexual torture and/or humiliation of persons detained by an armed group (as in the treatment of persons detained by state agents in El Salvador and by U.S. forces in Iraq and Guantánamo). The second is wide- spread sexual violence against a targeted group, which frequently takes the form of gang (and often public) rape, tends to occur in a variety of settings, and usu- ally occurs over extended periods of time. The latter form appears during some but not all ethnic conflicts; many but not all groups engaged in the forced move- ment of ethnically defined populations perpetuate it.
The extent of opportunistic sexual violence depends on the absence of sanc- tions and norms (on the part of the armed group, the small unit, or the individ- ual) that effectively prohibit it and on proximity to potential victims. Where individual and small-unit norms prohibit sexual violence, perhaps on the grounds that it is polluting to the perpetrator, sexual violence will not occur even if a unit has ready access to civilians and even if the armed group does not pun- ish those who engage in it.
Under what conditions armed groups, small units, and individuals develop sanctions and norms that effectively endorse or constrain combatants’ engage- ment in sexual violence is, of course, key to explaining the observed variation. While an adequate explanation is beyond the scope of this paper, some obser- vations and hypotheses do arise from the analysis.
Hypothesis 1. Where insurgent groups depend on the provision of support (sup- plies, intelligence) from civilians and aspire to govern those civilians, they do not engage in sexual violence against those civilians if they have a reason- ably effective command structure. Suggestive evidence: Leftist insurgencies
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in Latin America, which typically have intensive socialization processes and effective command structures, do not engage in sexual violence.
Hypothesis 2. Where the norms (either condemning or approving sexual vio- lence) held by individual combatants and small units are the same and are also endorsed by the armed group’s leadership, sexual violence by that group will be either very low or very high, respectively. Such alignment of norms may have a complementary rather than a merely additive effect: each norm’s effect is strengthened by the presence of the same norm at the other levels. Specifically, where armed groups reinforce cultural taboos against sexual contact with the potential target populations, sexual violence against that population will be low. And in the absence of such cultural taboos, where armed groups promote a policy of sexual violence against a population, vio- lence will be high. Suggestive evidence: There was relatively little sexual vio- lence (apart from sexual humiliation) in the labor and concentration camps of Nazi Germany. And the high marriage rate among ethnic groups before the conflicts in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda, according to this hypothesis, facilitated the widespread sexual violence during the conflicts.
Hypothesis 3. States confronting an armed threat will tolerate (and possibly promote) a degree of sexual violence against suspected insurgent supporters during detention, constrained by the degree of accountability of state agents to civilian authorities and those authorities’ beliefs about the acceptability of sexual violence. Suggestive evidence: State forces engaged in sexual torture against detainees suspected of support for insurgent groups in El Salvador, Peru, and Argentina. And Jennifer Green found that state forces engaged in collective rape in twenty-three of the thirty cases of widespread sexual vio- lence that she identified.107
Hypothesis 4. To the extent that military forces in democracies are more accountable for their practices to civilian authorities, sexual violence will depend on the norms and tactics of civilian leaders, who may endorse some types of sexual violence while effectively sanctioning others. Suggestive evi- dence: Democracies rarely engage in widespread sexual violence and gener- ally punish rape for personal gratification, but limited sexual violence in the form of sexual humiliation against persons in detention by U.S. forces is an ongoing practice reflecting its effective endorsement by civilian leaders.
Hypothesis 5. If an armed group prohibits sexual violence against a particular population, the less effective the military discipline of the group, the more likely it is to engage in sexual violence (unless combatants hold particularly strong norms against it). Thus ill-disciplined militias, ill-trained armies of conscripts, poorly trained military police, and little supervised service troops are more likely to engage in sexual violence than elite frontline troops (in the absence of a policy promoting sexual violence).
Hypotheses 6. Armed groups with a high proportion of female combatants engage less in sexual violence. I am uncertain why this seems to be the case in Sri Lanka, El Salvador, Peru, and Colombia, among others. (The excep- tion is U.S. forces, where women in the military police and military intelligence
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participated in sexual violence against detainees.) The presence of female combatants may disrupt the dynamics of bonding in small units, may dis- place patriarchal role models that support sexual violence, may constrain sexual violence for fear that the enemy could target fellow soldiers in kind, or may put in motion some other mechanism.
However, the documented variation in patterns of sexual violence raises questions that far exceed these hypotheses. To what extent is sexual violence accounted for by a breakdown in command-and-control structure and morale versus a change in norms on the part of combatants? What accounts for the emergence of an organizational structure strong enough to enforce strategic decision by the leadership? How and why do small-unit norms evolve that enable sexual violence by its members? In what conditions do military victory, on the one hand, and military stalemate, on the other, contribute to sexual vio- lence? To what extent do international norms and law constrain the practice of sexual violence? Why are men targeted in some settings but not in others?
In particular, what accounts for the distinct forms of sexual violence? To what extent does the form of sexual violence reflect the type of war in which it occurs, with public gang rape tending to occur during ethnic cleansing, sexual torture in states confronting threats, and so on?
More broadly, the following avenues of research may contribute to address- ing the overall puzzle of variation in sexual violence.
First, more research is needed to better document variation in the patterns of sexual violence across conflicts, including those analyzed here, and to assess whether the hypotheses above make sense in light of more cases. In particular, because the cases were chosen for their variation in sexual violence, additional research is needed to estimate the relative frequency of occurrence of different patterns in the actual universe of cases.108
Second, efforts to gather data on the extent and form of sexual violence should include cases where it appears to have been relatively infrequent. Such research on “negative cases” of groups or conflicts where sexual violence does not occur (or occurs at low levels) should illuminate cases where it does. Of par- ticular interest are those conflicts where one party does not “mirror” the use of sexual violence by another party to the war and conflicts where sexual violence seems anomalously low in the light of high rates in similar conflicts. This arti- cle suggests a key distinction among such negative cases: whether sexual vio- lence does not occur due to effective sanctions against it, individual norms against it, or small-unit norms against it, or because the group has little access to civilians. In particular, a comparison of the working of ideological and reli- gious or other cultural mores against sexual violence might shed light on the character of many insurgencies. However, establishing the operative force of such mores poses a particular methodological challenge, namely, how to establish
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the causal force of a stated norm or sanction independently of the observed pres- ence or absence of sexual violence.
Such research requires access to detailed local sources, which is not always possible during or in the aftermath of war. However, wars differ in the avail- ability of such records and the possibility of extended local field research.109
Fortunately, it is precisely such negative cases for which local research may be possible. Colombia may be a case of particular interest, for it appears that sex- ual violence was fairly frequent during the period of civil violence termed la Violencia (1948-1958), but has not been a significant element in the repertoire of violence of the insurgent groups today.110
Third, to explore the force of potential causal processes, within-case contrasts should be explored as the simplest way to control for many otherwise confound- ing variables. This approach is already proving very rich for the study of violence and participation in civil war, including in Greece,111 Rwanda,112 Peru,113 and El Salvador.114 Ideally, one could compare patterns of sexual (and other) violence not just between factions and over time, but across subunits of the armed factions, thereby clarifying the causal force of factors at different levels.115 The extent to which sexual violence varies with other forms of violence should also be analyzed as a way to identify particular strategies and norms of violence. A particularly interesting case would be that of U.S. forces in Vietnam, assuming that documents exist that report unit behavior and that they are or could be declassified. Comparing patterns of sexual violence in different colonies of the same empire would also be an illuminating variation on this research design.
Fourth, the small-group dynamics that lead to unit norms promoting or con- straining the occurrence of sexual violence appear a promising avenue of research. Relevant factors include recruitment of individuals who endorse the group norm and conformity to the norm once the individual is a member of the group. For example, there may be systematic differences between armed groups that rely on mercenaries, career professionals, and conscripts. In particular, the extent to which military training practices differ among armies in the degree of brutalization of recruits and in the activities to build bonds between members of the small units could be a fruitful avenue for further exploration. Comparison to small-group dynamics in other settings where group sexual violence sometimes occurs, such as fraternities, urban gangs, and sports teams, may prove fruitful.
A fifth, related, issue that would be very illuminating is the study of perpe- trators of wartime sexual violence. Although such research would be difficult to carry out, for human subjects concerns as well as practical reasons, it may not be impossible. Scott Straus was able to interview a particular subset of perpe- trators of the Rwandan genocide, those who had been convicted, had confessed, and had been sentenced.116
A sixth avenue of research would focus more explicitly on dynamic interac- tive mechanisms. For example, patterns of sexual violence might be fruitfully
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analyzed with a model based on positive feedback mechanisms that amplify small initial differences between groups, units, or sites and result in large dif- ferences in the prevalence and form of sexual violence. Such models may illu- minate the diffusion of decentralized norms that condone sexual violence, for example. One such mechanism is escalating revenge: if a member of one party commits sexual violence against a member of another group, a member of the other may retaliate in ways leading to a spiral of sexual violence. Or epidemio- logical models might be productive, in which if some members of a small group commit sexual violence, other members of that small group may do so as well; once that small group does, neighboring units may join in, leading to wide- spread sexual violence by that party to the war. In both cases the dynamic processes explaining the escalation or dampening of violence will be character- ized by tipping points such that seemingly small differences in the causes of vio- lence would account for large differences in the consequences.
The ongoing brutality in Darfur reminds us that sexual violence remains a horrifying aspect of war. Understanding the determinants of its variation may help to define policies better able to curtail this savage form of violence that tar- gets the most vulnerable civilians, often with the intention to ruin them for life.
NOTES
1. This paper joins other recent works that analyze variation in wartime sexual vio- lence but focuses on a wider range of variation. See Lisa Boswell Sharlach, “Sexual Violence as Political Terror” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Davis, 2001); J. Robert Lilly and Pam Marshall, “Rape in Wartime,” in The Encyclopedia of Criminology and Deviant Behavior, ed. Clifton D. Bryant (London: Brunner-Routledge, 2000), 318-22; and Mia Bloom, “War and the Politics of Rape: Ethnic Versus Non-ethnic Conflicts,” unpublished manuscript.
2. See UNESCO, Contemporary Forms of Slavery: Systematic Rape, Sexual Slavery and Slavery-like Practices during Armed Conflict, E/CN.4/Sub.2/1998/13 (New York: United Nations, 1998); and Human Rights Watch, “We’ll Kill You if You Cry”: Sexual Violence in the Sierra Leone Conflict (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2003).
3. Sexual violence differs from the broader category of gender violence in that the latter category includes violence that occurs because of the victim’s gender without the kinds of sexual contact included in sexual violence.
4. Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany. A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949 (Boston: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 69-140.
5. Ibid., 72; see also 74. 6. Ibid., 106-7. 7. Lilly and Marshall, “Rape in Wartime.” 8. Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2002), 300, 326, 413. 9. Naimark, The Russians in Germany, 88-90.
10. The records of women requesting abortions confirm a high prevalence of rape in Berlin. While abortion was technically illegal, authorities suspended the law in the case of rape by foreigners; permission was granted to nearly all cases in the district whose records were analyzed by Atina Grossman. See Atina Grossman, “A Question of Silence:
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The Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers,” in West Germany under Construction: Politics, Society, and Culture in the Adenauer Era, ed. Robert G. Moeller (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 33-51.
11. Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945, 410. 12. The incidence of rape (incidents/population) would be much higher than the
prevalence (victims/population) given the pattern of gang rapes and multiple incidents suffered by the same person.
13. Quoted in Naimark, The Russians in Germany, 72. 14. Ibid., 71. 15. Jeffrey Burds, personal communication, December 3, 2006. 16. Wendy Jo Gertjejanssen, “Victims, Heroes, Survivors: Sexual Violence on the
Eastern Front during World War II” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 2004). 17. Jonathan C. Friedman, Speaking the Unspeakable: Essays on Sexuality, Gender,
and Holocaust Survivor Memory (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2002), ch. 2. The German military treated rape of civilians by German soldiers on the eastern front much more leniently than on the western front, where military courts imposed sig- nificantly more severe punishment. See Birgit Beck, “Rape: The Military Trials of Sexual Crimes Committed by Soldiers in the Wehrmach, 1939-1944,” in Home/Front: The Military, War and Gender in 20th Century Germany, ed. Karen Hagerman and Stefanie Schuler-Springorum (New York: Berg, 2002), 255-73.
18. Gertjejanssen, Victims, Heroes, Survivors, 220. 19. Based on Gertjejanssen’s description of the camp brothels, I estimate the number
of women in camp brothels to have been between 1,000 and 10,000. 20. Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New
York: Penguin, 1997). Chang draws on a wide range of documents, including the diaries and reports of international observers who remained in Nanjing throughout the violence, as well as some interviews. It is not clear how Chang arrives at this estimate.
21. Joshua A. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 367. The system was begun in 1932 but expanded extensively in the aftermath of the violence in Nanjing.
22. Japanese Cabinet Councillors’ Office on External Affairs, “On the Issue of Wartime ‘Comfort Women,’” cited in UNESCO, Contemporary Forms of Slavery, appendix, 9(a). The precise number of women forced to serve as military sexual slaves is not well documented, as the Japanese destroyed much of the documentation in 1945.
23. Cited in Chung Hyun-Kyung, “‘Your Comfort versus My Death’: Korean Comfort Women,” in War’s Dirty Secret: Rape, Prostitution, and Other Crimes against Women, ed. Anne Llewellyn Barstow (Cleveland, Ohio: Pilgrim Press, 2000), 17-19.
24. Cited in Goldstein, War and Gender, 363; and Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 140. Twenty thousand girls and women comprise 2.1 percent of female Muslims in pre-war Bosnia-Herzegovina of all ages. The UN Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights initially made a lower estimate of 11,900 rapes, based on 119 pregnancies resulting from rape that were aborted in six major medical centers (the rapporteur assumed a rate of pregnancy after rape of about 1 percent); cited in Todd Salzman, “Rape Camps, Forced Impregnation, and Ethnic Cleansing,” in Barstow, ed., War’s Dirty Secret, 76. However, as Salzman points out, on the one hand many women were raped more than once and others had no access to medical facilities and induced abortion themselves, abandoned the child, or kept the child. On the other hand, many
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pregnant women who sought abortions did not indicate that pregnancy originated in rape. On balance, Salzman argues that the number of pregnancies was likely significantly higher than 119, and he concurs with the 20,000 estimate (Salzman, “Rape Camps,” 76-77, 63).
25. United Nations Security Council (UNSC), “Rape and Sexual Assault,” in Final Report of the United Nations Commission of Experts Established Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 780 (1992), S/1994/674/Add.2, vol. V (New York: United Nations, 1994), annex IX.I.C.
26. This history of Foça draws on UNSC, “Rape and Sexual Assault”; and Joanne Barkan, “As Old as War Itself: Rape in Foça,” Dissent (Winter 2002): 60-66.
27. UNSC, “Rape and Sexual Assault,” annex IX.2.A.20. 28. Eight men from Foça were indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the
former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on sixty-two counts of sexual assault and rape as crimes against humanity and grave breaches and violations of the laws and customs of war (see Barkan, “As Old as War Itself,” 65). The three who were tried received sentences of twenty-eight, twenty, and twelve years.
29. UNSC, “Rape and Sexual Assault,” esp. annex IX. 30. Ibid., annex IX.I.A. 31. Ibid., annex IX.A. 32. Ibid., annex IX.I.C. 33. Ibid., annex IX.A III.A.2. 34. Ibid., annex IX, “Conclusions.” 35. Of course, one reason the ethnic violence in the former Yugoslavia seemed trou-
bling to many observers was the fact of significant intermarriage before the war: from 1981 to 1991, 18.6 percent of new marriages in Bosnia-Herzegovina were inter-ethnic (1991 census figures cited in Enloe, Maneuvers, 142).
36. See Amnesty International, “Sri Lanka: Torture in Custody,” 1999, http://www .amnestyusa.org/countries/sri_lanka/reports.do; and United Nations Development Fund for Women, “Gender Profile of the Conflict in Sri Lanka,” rev. October 31, 2005, http://www.womenwarpeace.org/sri_lanka/sri_lanka.htm.
37. Amnesty International documented sexual violence by government forces against eleven women between 1999 and 2001. See Amnesty International, “Sri Lanka: Rape in Custody,” 2002, http://www.amnestyusa.org/countries/sri_lanka/reports.do.
38. Miranda Alison, “Cogs in a Wheel? Women in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam,” Civil Wars 6, no. 4 (2003): 34-54.
39. Human Rights Watch, Living in Fear: Child Soldiers and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, vol. 16, no. 13 (C) (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2004); and United Nations Development Fund for Women, “Gender Profile.”
40. Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
41. In the testimonies compiled by Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights, victims reported perpetrators wanting sex with a virgin, wanting a new wife, wanting to send a message to the government, and so on, but do not report perpetrators stating a wish to have sex with or to punish a person of particular ethnicity or religion. See Human Rights Watch, We’ll Kill You if You Cry; and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), War-Related Sexual Violence in Sierra Leone (Boston: PHR, 2002).
42. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Sierra Leone, Final Report, 2005, http://trcsierraleone.org/drwebsite/publish/index.shtml, ch. 3b, para. 282.
43. Human Rights Watch, We’ll Kill You if You Cry.
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44. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Sierra Leone, Final Report, paras. 292-96; and Human Rights Watch, We’ll Kill You if You Cry, 35-42.
45. Lynn L. Amowitz, Chen Reis, Kristina Hare Lyons, Beth Vann, Binta Mansaray, Adyinka M. Akinsulure-Smith, Louise Taylor, and Vincent Iacopino, “Prevalence of War-Related Sexual Violence and Other Human Rights Abuses among Internally Displaced Persons in Sierra Leone,” Journal of the American Medical Association 287, no. 4 (2002): 513-21. The survey design combined systematic random sampling and cluster sampling in four locales representing 91 percent of the internally displaced pop- ulation. The estimated prevalence rate appears to be several times higher than the peacetime rate (the estimated lifetime prevalence of non-war-related sexual violence is 9.0 percent; Amowitz et al., “Prevalence of War-Related Sexual Violence,” 518).
46. Ibid., table 3. 47. Ibid., table 2. 48. Human Rights Watch, We’ll Kill You if You Cry. 49. See Physicians for Human Rights, War-Related Sexual Violence in Sierra Leone,
ch. 4; and Human Rights Watch, We’ll Kill You if You Cry, ch. V. According to Physicians for Human Rights, girls and women who undergo female genital cutting are at increased risk for genital trauma and related complications after rape (War-Related Sexual Violence, 49). Human Rights Watch reports that 90 percent of females in Sierra Leone undergo female genital cutting (We’ll Kill You if You Cry, 24).
50. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Sierra Leone, Final Report, ch. 3b, 299-311.
51. Amowitz et al., “Prevalence of War-Related Sexual Violence,” table 3. 52. Forced marriages in the sense of marriages of girls without their consent, often at
a very young age, was common in Sierra Leone before the war but required permission of the girl’s family (Human Rights Watch, We’ll Kill You if You Cry, 17, 23-24).
53. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Sierra Leone, Final Report, para. 298. 54. This summary of events at My Lai draws on Michael Bilton, Four Hours in My
Lai (New York: Penguin, 1992); Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will (New York: Bantam, 1975); Seymour M. Hersh, My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath (New York: Random House, 1970); Herbert C. Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton, Crimes of Obedience (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989); William R. Peers, The My Lai Inquiry (New York: Norton, 1979); and James Olson, My Lai: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Bedford, 1998).
55. Mitch Weiss, “Rogue GIs Unleashed Wave of Terror in Central Highlands,” Toledo (Ohio) Blade, October 22, 2003.
56. Mark Danner, The Massacre at El Mozote (New York: Vintage, 1994). 57. Truth Commission for El Salvador, “From Madness to Hope: The 12 Year War in
El Salvador. Report of the Truth Commission for El Salvador,” reprinted in The United Nations and El Salvador, 1990-1995, United Nations Blue Books Series, vol. IV (New York: United Nations, 1993).
58. Truth Commission for El Salvador, “From Madness to Hope,” unpublished annex (Tomo II: 8-10, 15).
59. Elisabeth Jean Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ch. 4.
60. See the various maps and graphs compiled in Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Peru, Final Report (2003), http://www.cverdad.org.pe/ingles/ifinal/index.php, Statistical Annex.
61. In her analysis of testimonies to the commission, Michele Leiby found that Sendero Luminoso was responsible for nearly 20 percent of reported cases of sexual violence. Her
338 POLITICS & SOCIETY
finding is based on a wider definition of sexual violence and her coding of reported instances of homicides, torture, or other human rights violations as also sexual violence if they included sexual violence. See Michele L. Leiby, “Sexual Violence as a Strategic Weapon of War: Latin America,” unpublished manuscript.
62. Ethel Tobach and Rachel Reed, “Understanding Rape,” in Evolution Gender and Rape, ed. Cheryl Brown Travis (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), tables 5.1 and 5.2.
63. Patricia D. Rozee, “Forbidden or Forgiven? Rape in Cross-Cultural Perspective,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 17 (1993): 499-514. For example, in some societies, sexual access to women is granted to guests, brothers, or other associates of the husband (and the women are beaten or killed if they refuse). And in some societies, female trans- gression of social norms (such as women seeing ceremonial artifacts strictly reserved for males) is punished by rape, sometimes group rape in a public place.
64. Even if all females who were pregnant as a result of rape reported the incident to health authorities and were in fact pregnant as a result of rape, that would not be enough to infer the incidence of rape given the fact that multiple rapes appear to be frequent in wartime settings.
65. World Health Organization, “Sexual Violence,” in World Report on Violence and Health (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2002), table 6.1, 151. For developing coun- tries, the data is compiled from face-to-face surveys in the capital city; there is apparently no correction for possible rural-urban differences other than for variation in household size. Given the challenges to compiling comparable sexual violence data, I average across the lowest and highest three cities.
66. J. N. van Kesteren, P. Mayhew, and P. Nieuwbeerta, Criminal Victimization in Seventeen Industrialised Countries: Key Findings from the 2000 International Crime Victims Survey (The Hague: Ministry of Justice, Research and Documentation Center [WODC], 2000), app. 4, table 6, 188-89. For industrialized countries, the surveys are national samples and done by phone (with the exception of Malta). The high reported rates in Sweden and Finland probably reflect high rates of binge alcoholism, with attendant vio- lence, or higher rates of reporting sexual assault, and a more inclusive definition of “assault.”
67. See Rozee, “Forbidden or Forgiven?” 504. 68. Peggy Sanday, “Socio-cultural Context of Rape: Cross Cultural Study,” Journal
of Social Issues 37, no. 4 (1981): 27. 69. Rozee, “Forbidden or Forgiven?” 70. Ibid., table 1. 71. Ibid., table 1. 72. Neil Mitchell and Tali Gluch, “The Principals and Agents of Political Violence
and the Strategic and Private Benefits of Rape” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, September 2004).
73. The United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute’s (INICRI) crime victimization data for most developing countries goes back only to 1996 or 1997 (and in a few cases to 1992), and only a few countries with recent civil wars are included. Of the cases discussed above, El Salvador, Sri Lanka, Israel, and Sierra Leone are not included; while a survey was carried out in Yugoslavia in 1996, it is difficult to see its relevance for Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992.
74. Madeline Morris, “By Force of Arms: Rape, War, and Military Culture,” Duke Law Journal 45, no. 4 (1996): 651-781.
75. Ibid. 76. Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer, The Natural History of Rape: Biological Basis
of Social Coercion (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002). 77. See the essays in Brown Travis, Evolution Gender and Rape.
ELISABETH JEAN WOOD 339
78. Richard Borshay Lee, The Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
79. Mary P. Koss, “Evolutionary Models of Why Men Rape: Acknowledging the Complexities,” in Brown Travis, Evolution Gender and Rape, 191-205.
80. Jerry A. Coyne, “Of Vice and Men: A Case Study in Evolutionary Psychology,” in Brown Travis, Evolution Gender and Rape, 171-89. However, see Jonathan A. Gottschall and Tiffani A. Gottschall, “Are Per-Incident Rape-Pregnancy Rates Higher than Per-Incident Consensual Pregnancy Rates?” Human Nature 14, no. 1 (2003): 1-20, for a discussion of the possibility that a conditional rape strategy that accounts for such targeting objections could have evolved.
81. For example, Mitchell and Gluch, in “Principals and Agents,” argue that the principal- agent problem confronting armies is the tendency of combatants to seek to engage in more sexual violence than the leadership deems optimal.
82. Inger Skjelsbaek, “Sexual Violence and War: Mapping out a Complex Relationship,” European Journal of International Relations 7, no. 2 (2001): 218.
83. Allan Mazur and Alan Booth, “Testosterone and Dominance in Men,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (1998): 353-97.
84. John Archer, Nicola Graham-Kevan, and Michelle Davies, “Testosterone and Aggression: A Reanalysis of Book, Starzyk, and Quinsey’s 2001 Study,” Aggression and Violent Behavior 10 (2005): 241-61.
85. Mazur and Booth, “Testosterone and Dominance.” 86. Richard E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen, Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence
in the South (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996). 87. Mazur and Booth, “Testosterone and Dominance.” 88. Theodore D. Kemper, Social Structure and Testosterone (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 1990); and Theodore D. Kemper, “Fantasy, Females, Sexuality and Testosterone,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (1998): 378-79; and Jeremy Freese, Jui-Chung Allen Li, and Lisa D. Wade, “The Potential Relevances of Biology to Social Inquiry,” Annual Review of Sociology 29 (2003): 233-56.
89. Lea H. Studer, A. Scott Aylwin, and John R. Reddon, “Testosterone, Sexual Offense Recidivism and Treatment Effect among Adult Male Sex Offenders,” Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment 17, no. 2 (2005): 171-81.
90. Versions of the argument can be found in many feminist works; the classic work is Brownmiller, Against Our Will.
91. Cynthia Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? The Militarization of Women’s Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
92. Goldstein, War and Gender, 253-300. 93. Ibid., 356-60. 94. Morris, “By Force of Arms,” 692. 95. Ibid., 707, 701-6. There appears to be significant consensus among researchers
about the factors at the individual level that are associated with increased likelihood to suffer sexual violence or to perpetrate sexual violence in peacetime. In addition to Morris’s summary, see World Health Organization, “Sexual Violence,” ch. 6.
96. Lisa Sharlach, “Gender and Genocide in Rwanda: Women as Agents and Objects of Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 1, no. 3 (1999): 387-99.
97. Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
98. Lisa Sharlach, “Rape as Genocide: Bangladesh, the former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda,” New Political Science 22, no. 1 (2000): 89-102; and Bloom, “War and the Politics of Rape.”
340 POLITICS & SOCIETY
99. Enloe, Maneuvers, 134. 100. Ibid., 124. 101. Stathis Kalyvas, “The Ontology of ‘Political Violence’: Action and Identity in
Civil Wars,” Perspectives on Politics 1, no. 3 (2003): 475-94. 102. Jeremy Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 103. Human Rights Watch, You’ll Learn Not to Cry: Child Combatants in Colombia
(New York: Human Rights Watch, 2003), 10. 104. Kalvyas, “The Ontology of ‘Political Violence.’” 105. Wood, Insurgent Collective Action. 106. See Amelia Hoover, “Disaggregating Violence during Armed Conflict: Why and
How,” unpublished manuscript, for an analysis of how different repertoires of violence can be understood via principal agent models in which elites (the principals) have dis- tinct preferences than do combatants (the agents) for different types of violence.
107. Jennifer L. Green, “Uncovering Collective Rape: A Comparative Study of Political Sexual Violence,” International Journal of Sociology 34, no. 1 (2004): 97-116.
108. Green, in “Uncovering Collective Rape,” takes a distinct approach, identifying cases of collective rape via online searches of the New York Times archive. The strength of this approach is that she has tentative findings about the correlates of collective rape; the weakness is the reliance on a single source and the difficulty in coding relative preva- lence of rape based on that source.
109. Elisabeth Jean Wood, “The Ethical Challenges of Field Research in Conflict Zones,” Qualitative Sociology 29, no. 3 (2006).
110. Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín, personal communication, July 2005. 111. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence. 112. Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, forthcoming). 113. Weinstein, Inside Rebellion. 114. Wood, Insurgent Collective Action. 115. Macartan Humphreys and Jeremy Weinstein intend to carry out such a disag-
gregated analysis of patterns of violence in the Sierra Leone conflict, drawing on a sur- vey they carried out with ex-combatants to document (among other things) patterns of command-and-control and discipline among particular units. However, as yet they do not have adequately disaggregated data on human rights violations. If such data becomes available, they will be able to test how well unit discipline predicts sexual and other vio- lence. See Macartan Humphreys and Jeremy Weinstein, “Handling and Manhandling Civilians in Civil War: Determinants of the Strategies of Armed Factions,” unpublished paper, 2004.
116. Straus, The Order of Genocide.
Elisabeth Jean Wood ([email protected]) is professor of political science at Yale University and research professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the author of Forging Democracy from Below: Insurgent Transitions in South Africa and El Salvador (Cambridge University Press, 2000), and Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
ELISABETH JEAN WOOD 341
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