ABSTRACT
This chapter asks two questions. First, does civilian victimization in interstate wars help belligerents achieve their aims? Second, under what conditions does targeting civilians increase or decrease the likelihood that belligerents achieve their goals? In this chapter, theoretical work juxtaposes hypotheses emerging from the literature on the causes of victimization and the literature on its effectiveness. The empirical analysis presented improves on existing studies by looking at the overall effectiveness of all types of victimization strategies and by addressing the non-random selection processes that could potentially bias our findings. The chapter also provides a disaggregated analysis that evaluates the effectiveness of the coercive and eliminationist forms of victimization separately because we believe pooling the two may mask interesting differences in efficacy between them. Finally, it considers the possibility that the efficacy of civilian victimization is contingent on the regime type of the target state.
