Strategic Victimization
In a civil conflict, how does one actor's choice to victimize civilians affect the chance that other actors do the same? In this paper, we first derive implications about the strategic interdependence of victimization choices from the most prominent existing theories of violence against civilians in civil war. We show that these theories lead to distinct conclusions about whether one group's choice to victimize civilians has a positive, negative, or zero effect on whether other groups do so.