Article

Armed Forces & Society

2016, Vol. 42(1) 26-50
ª The Author(s) 2014
The Differentiation Reprints and permission:
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of Security Forces DOI: 10.1177/0095327X14559515
afs.sagepub.com

and the Onset

of Genocidal Violence
Ulrich Pilster1, Tobias Böhmelt1,2, and Atsushi Tago3

Abstract
Which factors drive the onset of genocidal violence? While the previous literature
identified several important influences, states’ military capabilities for conducting
mass-killings and the structure of their security forces have received surprisingly lit-
tle attention so far. The authors take this shortcoming as a motivation for their
research. A theoretical framework is developed, which argues that more differen-
tiated security forces, that is, forces that are composed of a higher number of inde-
pendent paramilitary and military organizations, are likely to act as a restraint factor
in the process leading to state-sponsored mass-killings. Quantitative analyses sup-
port the argument for a sample of state-failure years for 1971–2003, and it is also
shown that considering a state’s security force structure improves our ability to
forecast genocides.

Keywords
civil–military relations, counterinsurgency, genocide, security force structure

1
University of Essex, Colchester, UK
2
ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
3
Kobe University, Kobe, Japan

Corresponding Author:
Tobias Böhmelt, Department of Government, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4
3SQ, UK.
Email: tbohmelt@essex.ac.uk

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Pilster et al. 27

Introduction
Does the way in which states organize their security forces affect the outbreak of
genocidal violence? In this article, we seek to demonstrate that more differentiated
security forces, that is, forces that are comprised of a higher number of different
law-enforcement paramilitary and regular military organizations, act as a factor of
restraint in the process leading to state-sponsored mass-killings. We treat mass-
killings as a strategy of collective targeting that aims at destroying an insurgency’s
organizational infrastructure by eliminating those segments of a country’s popula-
tion, which may form the insurgency’s support base. Genocide is thus typically
employed as a means of last resort by those states that face an insurgent threat suffi-
ciently severe to threaten the leadership’s political survival or a country’s territorial
integrity. Strong insurgencies arise when the armed opposition faces weak local
police forces in its early stages, and armed forces using indiscriminate violence in
its later stages. More differentiated security forces, in turn, offer political leaders
a selection of coercive instruments that may overcome the weakness of both local
police and armed forces. Having more differentiated security forces may therefore
prevent a situation in which a country’s political and military leadership considers
the collective targeting of civilians as the last remaining means.
A review of the literature on the onset of genocide reveals that states’ military
structures have received little attention so far.1 Krain, for instance, explains the onset
of genocides by the concentration of political power, war involvement, extra-
constitutional changes, decolonization, and ethnic fractionalization.2 Similarly,
Harff3 focuses on regime type, ruling elites’ ideological orientation and their ethni-
city, political upheaval, prior genocides, and trade openness as predictors for the
onset of state-sponsored mass-killings during state-failure years, which ‘‘pertain
to abrupt change[s] in the political community caused by the formation of a state
or regime through violent conflict, redrawing of state boundaries, or defeat in inter-
national war.’’4 Other studies, for example, Rummel,5 Valentino, Huth, and Balch-
Lindsay,6 and Wayman and Tago,7 also offer important insights into the drivers of
genocidal violence, but all this work neglects governments’ security forces and their
structure. Yet, given the importance of security force structure for the means of
violence, this shortcoming is somewhat puzzling. For instance, force structure is a
crucial element of force employment, which directly affects how military organiza-
tions perform.8 Evidently, this may also affect how military organizations fight
interstate and intrastate wars, and thus whether genocidal violence is employed as
means to an end.
To the best of our knowledge, Colaresi and Carey9 provide the only exception
here. They demonstrate that larger security forces are more likely to lead to mass-
killings during state-failure years (i.e., those countries that have suffered political
upheaval) when countries are governed by unconstrained executives, while they
decrease the risk of genocides when failed states have institutionalized constraints
on the decision-making powers of chief executives. We believe that Colaresi and

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28 Armed Forces & Society 42(1)

Carey’s work constitutes an important step forward for a better understanding of the
impact of military characteristics on mass-killings. That said, it seems that another
key aspect of the structure of a state’s security forces, their differentiation, has so far
not received sufficient scholarly attention in the study of genocide.
By seeking to thoroughly address our research question theoretically and empiri-
cally, we also make a variety of broader contributions to the literature on repertoires
of violence in human conflict. First, we add to a growing body of research that
demonstrates how aspects of a country’s security force structure determine the
amount and type of violence, which these security organizations can generate.10
Security forces’ organizational features such as patterns of discipline, recruitment,
or leadership have mainly been used previously to explain opportunistic violence
by ordinary combatants. This body of literature has often been contrasted with a sec-
ond strand of research that emphasizes that violence is strategically employed by
political and military leaders.11 We combine these two strands and build a theory
based on how the organizational features of armed groups determine the strategic
choices of political leaders. Second, regime insecurity resulting from insurgencies
has been suggested as a central cause of genocidal violence.12 This literature, how-
ever, largely neglects an insight made by Morris Janowitz more than three decades
ago: Janowitz hypothesized that the differentiation of security forces, in the form of
an expansion of paramilitary organizations, is one of the central factors behind
regime consolidation in developing countries.13 As a result, we examine whether this
applies to the case of genocidal violence in failed states.
The article proceeds as follows: the next sections develop our theoretical argu-
ment contending that states with more differentiated regular security forces, that
is, forces that are composed of a higher number of different law-enforcement para-
military and regular military organizations, have a lower risk of engaging in geno-
cidal violence. We contend that differentiated security forces act as a factor of
restraint in the process leading to state-sponsored mass-killings. After the theoretical
considerations, we outline our research design, which is followed by the empirical
test of our argument. The quantitative analysis, using data of a sample of state-
failure years between 1971 and 2003, supports our claims and also shows that con-
sidering a state’s security force structure improves our ability to forecast the onset of
state-sponsored mass-killings. The final section concludes with a comprehensive
discussion of our findings, policy implications, and avenues for further research.

Theoretical Framework: Does Security Force Structure

Impose a Restraint on Genocidal Violence?
Key Concepts and Assumptions
Also in line with the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime
of Genocide, we define genocides as ‘‘the promotion, execution, and/or implied con-
sent of sustained policies by governing elites or their agents [ . . . ] that are intended

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Pilster et al. 29

to destroy, in whole or part, a communal, political, or politicized ethnic group.’’14

Genocide thus constitutes a strategy of collective targeting, that is, the systematic
usage of group-level identifiers, such as neighborhood or ethnicity, as a proxy for
whether an individual is associated with an insurgency.15 Note, however, that we
distinguish between collective targeting and indiscriminate violence. Like strategies
of collective targeting, counterinsurgents resorting to indiscriminate violence do not
take into account individual-level information in deciding whom to target. However,
contrary to a strategy of collective targeting, indiscriminate violence does not
involve the systematic usage of group-level identifiers to target and eliminate an
insurgency’s suspected support base.16
Regarding our core explanatory factor, we understand the structure of a country’s
security forces to be more differentiated if they comprise a higher number of differ-
ent law-enforcement regular military and paramilitary organizations. In this context,
we understand paramilitary forces as ‘‘forces whose training, organization, equip-
ment and control suggest they may be used to support or replace regular military
forces.’’17 This mirrors what Janowitz18 labels as ‘‘militarized police units, domi-
ciled in part in barracks, equipped with light military weapons and military vehicles,
and organized under the central government.’’19
Our study is based on four theoretical assumptions. First, genocides evolve out of
an armed conflict between a government and a rebel group. This assumption is jus-
tified by the fact that most genocides in the post–World War II era occurred in the
context of civil wars or intrastate armed conflicts where governments sought to
destroy the political or ethnic group/groups that formed the rebels’ support base
in the civilian population.20
Second, governments deliberately choose mass-killings as highly costly military
strategies of last resort after other counterinsurgency approaches have failed.21 Put
differently, our theoretical framework assumes that the government’s security forces
are typically the perpetrators of genocide in the context of a deliberate campaign of
‘‘collective targeting.’’ The sheer scale of the killing in genocides necessitates delib-
erate governmental and military planning.22
Third, insurgencies crucially depend on a civilian infrastructure to subject and
organize the population. This civilian infrastructure serves to gather the supplies
(food, money, shelter, etc.) and intelligence (especially on the movement of the usu-
ally militarily superior government forces) needed for sustaining the insurgency’s
military effort. Effective offensive government counterinsurgency operations thus
destroy the infrastructure that allows insurgencies to organize the population in
support of their military effort. Effective defensive counterinsurgency operations
prevent the rebels from enhancing their influence by increasing the authorities’
penetration of local communities, usually through programs of ‘‘nation building’’
and the establishment and training of local defensive forces.23
Fourth, the differentiation of security forces results in some military and parami-
litary organizations specializing in domestic security functions rather than con-
verging toward practices of conventional warfare practiced by regular armies. For

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30 Armed Forces & Society 42(1)

example, political leaders deliberately differentiated their security forces beyond

regular armies in the 1960s and 1970s by creating various paramilitary organizations
with the ‘‘continuous task of policing the potentially disruptive groupings of resis-
tance or opposition to the central regime—regional, religious, or ethnic minorities
who feel excluded from the existing political arrangement.’’24 Moreover, organiza-
tions within a differentiated security force structure also have incentives to focus on
domestic security functions in order to maintain their institutional independence.25

India as a Typical Case

India appears as a typical case for our theory26 and is therefore used to illustrate the
plausibility of the causal mechanisms we suggest. Although commonly not under-
stood as a failed state, India has indeed seen sudden changes in its political commu-
nity very much in relation to violent conflict.27 Specifically, India faced episodes of
state failure throughout its history with a myriad of insurgent threats that could have
given rise to genocidal violence. Various tribal and separatist insurgencies in its
Northeastern states have persisted since the 1950s. Besides, the insurgent threat
multiplied in the 1980s and affected strategically central states, with the Indian gov-
ernment confronting the Sikh insurgency in Punjab (1984–1994) as well as an
Islamist-separatist insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir (since 1989). The Indian gov-
ernment has also faced various Maoist insurgent groups, often commonly referred to
as the Naxalite movement. Despite occasionally very heavy-handed counterinsur-
gency approaches, however, the Indian security forces have not engaged in the kind
of large-scale mass-killings of civilians employed as a counterinsurgency strategy in
most other South-Asian countries.28
As we argue in the following, one reason behind this is likely to be that the Indian
security force structure is strongly differentiated, that is, composed of a high number
of different paramilitary and regular military organizations. In fact, India has
invested in the continuous expansion of multiple paramilitary security forces specia-
lizing in various domestic security and counterinsurgency functions since the 1950s.
At the federal level, these paramilitary forces nowadays include more than 1.2 mil-
lion personnel organized, among others, into the Central Reserve Police Force
(CPRF; 229,699 personnel in 2011), the Border Security Force (BSF; 208,422 per-
sonnel), the Central Industrial Security Force (94,347 personnel), and the elite
National Security Guard (NSG; 7,500 personnel), all under the control of the
Ministry of Home Affairs, as well as the Assam Rifles (ARs; 63,883 personnel), and
Rashtriya Rifles (RRs; 65,000 personnel) under the control of the Ministry of
Defense.

Weak Local Police and Proto-insurgencies

The beginning of rebellions usually involves numerous criminal and political activ-
ities at the local level in order to create the civilian infrastructure necessary for a

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Pilster et al. 31

sustained armed struggle. It is at this stage that the local police would be the best-
suited institution to use its intimate knowledge of the communities in their jurisdic-
tion to employ law enforcement measures against aspiring insurgencies.29
Nevertheless, local police forces in many underdeveloped nations, including
failed states that we focus on empirically below, are usually unable to quell these
‘‘proto-insurgencies.’’ They often do not have access to those ethnically or socially
marginalized sections of the population that are most likely to support an insurgent
movement.30 Local Indian constables in the 1980s have been described as ‘‘the
object of public hostility because of [ . . . ] corruption and communal bias;’’ more-
over, local police forces may also directly collude with the insurgents, as was the
case in the Indian state of Punjab in the 1980s, where parts of the Sikh-dominated
local police actively sided with Sikh rebels.31 Finally, local police forces often lack
the necessary numbers, equipment, or training to enforce the law and to mass suffi-
cient firepower for confronting insurgents once these begin to maneuver in
strength.32 For instance, the overall strength of the police force in strongly
insurgency-affected Indian states such as Bihar can go down to 60.7 police personnel
per 100,000 inhabitants, which is only about one-quarter of the UN-recommended
strength.33 In a related vain, local police forces in Mumbai, India’s most populous
and prosperous city, had to respond to the 2008 Islamist terrorist attacks with plastic
protectors, World War II era helmets, and 1950s bolt-action rifles.34

Armed Forces, Indiscriminate Violence, and Genocide

When governments become aware of the failure of their local police forces and of
the potency of rebel organizations, they often call in the national armed forces for
a direct military solution to the insurgency. However, most armed forces are
geared toward conventional warfare and, hence, ill-suited for the requirements
of counterinsurgency.35 First, the emphasis on mobility in conventional warfare
has frequently resulted in the creation of large mechanized forces in most countries
around the world.36 These specific forces’ logistical requirements are unsuitable
for the establishment of a permanent presence in local communities, which is
nonetheless necessary to acquire the intelligence needed to identify the insur-
gency’s clandestine civilian infrastructure37 or to engage in longer term programs
of ‘‘nation building.’’ Second, conventional armies aim at maximizing the impact
of their firepower against an enemy concealed in the terrain.38 Intelligence require-
ments are consequently driven by a counterforce focus rather than considering the
more population-centric information (e.g., data on local social, ethnic, religious, or
economic affairs), which would be necessary to target the insurgency’s organiza-
tion or to build up reliable local self-defense units.39 Finally, military force struc-
tures based on conventional warfare are typically reflected in assignment policies
of rotating personnel to various parts of the country.40 This, however, is counter-
productive for developing the local intelligence necessary to identify insurgents
intermingled with the civilian population.

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32 Armed Forces & Society 42(1)

As a result, armed forces, which are called in for achieving a direct military solu-
tion to an insurgency, often tend to apply indiscriminate violence against civilians.41
This may be due to an accidental effect of the application of conventional counter-
force measures.42 Indiscriminate violence may also come about opportunistically as
a result of a breakdown of military discipline. Lower-level soldiers could inflict
harm on civilians for their own private benefit and against the military leadership’s
explicit strategic interests. Prolonged deployments of soldiers among potentially
hostile civilians lead to the latter being regarded as ‘‘low-status opponents, who tend
to elicit contempt and disgust.’’43 Although counterexamples do exist, regular sol-
diers in counterinsurgency campaigns may then translate their emotional frustrations
about an enemy indistinguishable from the civilian population into indiscriminate
violence.44
Indiscriminate violence will very likely not degrade and may instead strengthen
an insurgency: according to Leites and Wolff, ‘‘as long as the [insurgents’ civilian]
organization remains intact, the rate of regeneration of [the rebels’] armed forces
[ . . . ] tends towards unity, even for large damage and short time periods.’’45 On
one hand, it may create incentives for the civilian population to join the insurgents
if these are able to provide protection from the armed forces’ indiscriminate vio-
lence in their own base areas or sanctuaries.46 On the other hand, it is particularly
an experience of indiscriminate violence that can also instill a sense of defiance in
the affected civilian population, with the moral outrage about the governments’
actions legitimizing violence and creating further incentives to contribute to the
insurgency.47
Hence, the political and military leadership that decided to deploy armed forces to
militarily defeat an insurgency in the first place is likely to realize at some point that
its actions have been either ineffective or outright counterproductive. The responsi-
ble leaders may then increasingly perceive themselves to be in a domain of losses,
justifying ‘‘brute force realpolitik’’ measures such as mass-killings to ensure their
political survival or the territorial integrity of their country.48 Ultimately, although
counter examples do exist, a country’s leadership may see it as the only remaining
response to escalate and systematize the armed forces’ indiscriminate violence to the
level of the collective targeting and mass-killings. This entails government forces
attempting to destroy the insurgency’s organizational infrastructure by targeting
entire segments of the population suspected to potentially form the insurgency’s sup-
port base.49

Differentiated Security Forces and a Lower Risk of Genocide

Against this background, we argue that leaders in countries with a more differen-
tiated structure of security forces, that is, various military or paramilitary organi-
zations in addition to local police forces and the national army, are less likely to
come into a situation where they see the mass-killing of noncombatants as the last
available option to destroy an insurgency’s organizational infrastructure. In fact,

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Pilster et al. 33

we claim that more differentiated security forces can tackle the weaknesses of both
the local police and the national armed forces.
On one hand, security forces structured along paramilitary lines are designed to
overcome the problems local police units usually face in massing sufficient fire-
power against insurgents. The Indian BSFs’ personnel, for example, are fully
trained for combat operations and can operate as a light-infantry unit under army
command in wartime, for example, it participated in combat operations during the
Indian–Pakistani war of 1971.50 In a similar vein, Indian counterinsurgency efforts
also often see parts of the local police force being turned into paramilitary organi-
zations. The provision of training and heavier weaponry through the Indian Army
and the NSG, for instance, turned the Punjab Police into ‘‘an aggressive and mobile
force willing and able to engage the militants,’’ resulting in ‘‘higher militant casu-
alties and greater restrictions on their movements.’’51 Finally, the fact that India’s
paramilitary and armed forces are organized at the federal level prevents them
from facing the same problems of community bias or collusion with local criminals
and insurgents as local police forces do. Minority communities in various Indian
states, such as Muslims in Uttar Pradesh, Hindus in Punjab, or Sikhs in Haryana,
welcomed the intervention of federal paramilitary forces for this very reason in the
past.52
On the other hand, independent paramilitary and military organizations besides
the army can also develop different force structures and routines to better target the
insurgency’s civilian infrastructure and avoid the application of indiscriminate and
genocidal violence. Indian BSF personnel, for instance, while fully prepared for ser-
ving as light-infantry units, are also trained in various law enforcement procedures.53
Likewise, the Indian Army’s RR adopted their assignment policies to their counter-
insurgency duties, in that ‘‘while RR troops rotate in and out of a unit, the battalions
themselves [ . . . ] are permanently deployed in their areas of operation [ . . . ], which
provides them with a continuity and familiarity with an area that is sorely missed by
regular army units.’’54 The RRs are also specifically trained for prolonged deploy-
ments among civilian populations in Jammu and Kashmir in order to avoid break-
downs of discipline and opportunistic violence. Finally, the NSG was created
under the Ministry of Home Affairs in the 1980s as a reaction to the Indian Army’s
botched attempt to clear the Golden Temple in the state of Punjab of Sikh insurgents,
which resulted in several hundreds to thousands of civilian deaths. The NSG’s equip-
ment and training have specifically focused on selectively applying violence (even
in the form of unarmed combat), rather than the massive application of firepower
against an enemy concealed in the terrain.55
Eventually, our argument suggests that the political and military leadership in
those countries that are disposed of differentiated coercive instruments may avoid
calling in conventionally oriented armed forces against an insurgency in the first
place or the escalation of indiscriminate violence to the level of mass-killings by
complementing the army’s firepower with organizations more adept at (selectively)
targeting an insurgency’s civilian infrastructure. Our theoretical argument then gives

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34 Armed Forces & Society 42(1)

rise to the following hypothesis: countries with a more differentiated security force
structure have a lower risk of engaging in genocidal violence.

Research Design
Data Structure and Dependent Variable
In order to test our hypothesis, we rely on Colaresi and Carey’s version of Harff’s
data on the onset of genocidal violence in state-failure years from 1955 to 2003.56
Following Harff, ‘‘state failures pertain to abrupt change[s] in the political commu-
nity caused by the formation of a state or regime through violent conflict, redrawing
of state boundaries, or defeat in international war.’’57 Identical to our approach, these
data define genocide as an ‘‘event that leads to the promotion, execution, and/or
implied consent of sustained policies by governing elites or their agents—or, in the
case of civil war, either of the contending authorities—that are intended to destroy,
in whole or part, a communal, political, or politicized ethnic group.’’58 The final data
employ the failed state-year as the unit of analysis and include twenty-three onsets of
genocide between 1971 and 2003 (the time period is determined by the limited data
availability for our core explanatory variable).59

The Structure of the Security Forces

We restrict our theoretical and empirical focus to those official security forces of a
state that constitute ground-combat compatible security organizations. This includes
army and marine troops as well as paramilitary forces ‘‘whose training, organization,
equipment, and control suggest they may be used to support or replace military
forces.’’17 Our definition excludes navy or air force units as well as local police for-
mations, that is, ‘‘full-time, uniformed police, domiciled in their homes, without mil-
itary weapons.’’60
For operationalizing this structure of the security forces and their degree of differ-
entiation, we follow Pilster and Böhmelt who developed a measure for the effective
number of ground-combat compatible organizations.61 This variable incorporates
information on both the number of regular military and paramilitary organizations and
their respective size.62 For that purpose, Pilster and Böhmelt, first, identified all
ground-combat compatible military organizations of a country. They then gathered
information on the personnel in each of these organizations, focusing on regulars and
active reserves, but excluding standing reserve forces. Afterward, the structure of a
country’s security forces is calculated via the effective number of ground-combat
compatible regular military and paramilitary organizations:
1
Structure of the Security Forces ¼ P 2 ;
sjit
j

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Pilster et al. 35

where sjit is the personnel share of the ground-combat compatible military or para-
military organizations j in country i in year t. A value of 1 consequently stands for
only one effective ground-combat military organization, while higher values signify
that various military and paramilitary organizations do exist. In our empirical anal-
ysis, we use Pilster and Böhmelt’s extended data until 2003 and lag the variable by
one year.

Control Variables
We also consider several covariates that are identified as likely determinants for the
onset of genocidal violence in previous studies. Here, we largely follow Colaresi and
Carey.63 First, there is the Strength of the Security Forces, which has been originally
employed by Colaresi and Carey, but is distinct from our core measure Structure of
the Security Forces. The former captures the number of governmental paramilitary
and military personnel divided by the natural log of population. Consequently,
higher values of this variable pertain to more military personal per capita, which,
as indicated, is distinct from our variable of interest, though. We impute missing val-
ues of this item in 2003 with data from 2002 and consider it as a control in our model.
Second, we also include Executive Constraints that measures ‘‘the extent of insti-
tutionalized constraints on the decision-making powers of chief executives, whether
individuals or collectives.’’64 Following Colaresi and Carey,65 we use a dichoto-
mous indicator, where the value of 0 pertains to an unconstrained executive and the
value of 1 signifies a constrained executive. We also include a multiplicative term of
this item and the previous variable in order to capture the interactive nature Colaresi
and Carey argue for.
Third, government behavior patterns toward genocide might have changed sub-
stantially since the end of the Cold War. While Finnemore66 discusses the theme
more broadly from an interventionist perspective, it can be derived that third parties
are much more willing to intervene in countries due to humanitarian reasons—and
not solely due to realpolitik any longer.67 This might decrease states’ incentives to rely
on genocidal violence ex ante. We control for this possibility via a binary variable
receiving the value of 1 for the post-1989 period.
Fourth, Bueno de Mesquita and Siverson demonstrate that losing wars can dele-
gitimize a state and necessitate increased repression.68 This, in turn, might increase
the risk of genocide. Colaresi and Carey further emphasize that ‘‘[t]he loss might
also embolden opposition, which would increase the threat to the regime.’’69 We
incorporate a binary item (War Loser) having a value of 1 if a country lost a war
in the previous year (0 otherwise).
Fifth, ethnic cleavages may be instrumentalized for support for genocidal plans of
a government. For instance, ethnic-group divisions may relate to any predisposition
to genocide and a state’s security forces are unlikely to engage in genocide in the
absence of significant popular support. Moreover, in many case of genocide, groups
from the offending ethnic segment engage in genocidal behavior alongside security

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36 Armed Forces & Society 42(1)

forces.70 Finally, ethnic minorities are frequently accused for economic and social
problems, making these groups vulnerable of violent governments.71 We use the eth-
nic fractionalization variable from Colaresi and Carey’s data to control for this
possibility.
Sixth, Harff argues that the more links a country has to the world economy, the
lower the likelihood of genocide.72 Put differently, states that have extensive trade
ties to other countries are less at risk of genocide than those at the periphery. Accord-
ingly, we take the natural log of a country’s total trade (exports plus imports) to
quantify these ties. The data on trade have been compiled by Gleditsch.73
Seventh, controlling for population (log) ensures that the security force measure
is not a proxy for population size. The logic is simple here: larger countries may be
more likely to commit genocides because fewer members of the international com-
munity will be able to stop them. As in the case of the trade variable, we take the data
from Gleditsch.
Eight, we include the democracy score of a country to test whether executive con-
straints only have an indirect effect on genocide, that is, through other democratic
institutions.74 If this was the case, the roots of accountability and stability may lie
somewhere else in the constellation of democratic institutions, but not explicitly
in the constraints of the executive as operationalized earlier. The data come from the
Polity IV project.75
Ninth, Colaresi and Carey consider the magnitude of the previous fifteen years of
genocide. This variable is a moving average measure that Harff found to be a signif-
icant predictor of political mass-killings. The data have been originally compiled by
Harff.76
Finally, we consider the count variable State Failure Years, that is, the time since
the beginning of state failure. The propensity of state failures to erupt into genocides
is likely to follow a potentially nonlinear trend as a state failure unfolds. We, there-
fore, also include the square term of this variable in our analyses. Note that these
measures additionally control for any temporal dependencies. Table 1 summarizes
the descriptive statistics of our variables discussed so far.

Empirical Results
Probit Models
We start our empirical analysis with three multivariate probit regression models. To
this end, first, we focus on our core explanatory item and exclude all controls apart
from the variables for temporal correction. We then include the Cold War dummy
and those controls that are employed as core explanatory factors in Colaresi and
Carey. Third, the final model estimation considers all discussed explanatory factors
as drivers of the onset of genocidal violence. Instead of probit coefficients, we pres-
ent simulated first difference estimates.77 A first difference is the change in the prob-
ability that Genocidal Violence ¼ 1 associated with a change from the minimum to

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Pilster et al. 37

Table 1. Descriptive Statistics of Variables.

Variable Type N Mean SD Min Max

Genocide onset Dependent 735 0.04 0.19 0 1

Structure of the security forces Core 636 1.84 0.70 1 4.44
Executive constraints Control 730 0.55 0.50 0 1
Strength of the security forces Control 696 19.64 34.77 0 280.02
Executive constraint  Strength Control 696 14.91 35.12 0 280.02
security force
Cold War Control 735 0.54 0.50 0 1
War loser Control 735 0.01 0.07 0 1
Ethnic fractionalization Control 722 0.50 0.28 0.01 0.90
Total trade (ln) Control 732 8.02 1.90 3.48 13.17
Population (ln) Control 729 10.57 2.68 6.09 20.77
Democracy Control 735 9.60 6.18 0 20
Previous magnitude Control 735 2.32 2.34 4.61 5.08
State-failure years Control 735 13.08 9.70 1 45
State-failure years2 Control 735 265.21 350.78 1 2025

Note: Operationalization, data sources, and scales of all variables are described in the main text. N pertains
to the number of observations, mean signifies the micrometer of the values divided by the number of val-
ues, SD stands for standard deviation, min is the minimum value of a variable, while max pertains to its
maximum value.

the maximum value of a variable in question while holding all other covariates at
their median. Table 2 presents our findings.
Before coming to our main explanatory variable, we discuss the control covari-
ates in models 2 and 3. First, the significance level and direction of the estimate
of the interaction between Strength of the Security Forces and Executive Constraints
are largely in line with Colaresi and Carey: larger security forces decrease the like-
lihood of genocide onset, given that executive constraints do exist. Second, Cold
War is essentially the only control covariate that exerts a substantive impact on
the onset of genocidal violence. In line with our expectations, the probability of the
occurrence of a genocide decreases by eight percentage points with the end of the
Cold War. The remaining control variables are statistically insignificant, making
it unlikely that they exert a crucial influence on genocides. This corresponds to the
findings in Colaresi and Carey.
With regard to our theoretical argument and, hence, the core explanatory vari-
able, Table 2 confirms that the more differentiated the structure of the security forces
in a state, the less likely is the onset of genocidal violence. The results in Table 2 are
statistically significant and highlight that the risk of genocidal violence generally
decreases on average by about five percentage points when moving from the mini-
mum toward the maximum of Structure of the Security Forces. This finding holds
over a wide range of model specifications; adding or suppressing terms from any
model does not affect its substance.

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38 Armed Forces & Society 42(1)

Table 2. Probit Model Regression Results for the Impact of Structure of the Security Forces on
the Onset of Genocidal Violence (Dependent Variable), 1971–2003.

I 2 3

Structure of the security forces 0.061** 0.040** 0.043**

[0.105; 0.023] [0.100; 0.005] [0.100; 0.006]
Executive constraints 0.013 0.021*
[0.013; 0.043] [0.000; 0.052]
Strength of the security forces 0.769** 0.694
[0.100; 0.990] [0.000; 0.991]
Executive constraints  Strength 0.034*** 0.034**
security force [0.077; 0.008] [0.077; 0.009]
Cold War 0.078*** 0.082**
[0.154; 0.021] [0.163; 0.022]
War loser 0.258
[0.008; 0.771]
Ethnic fractionalization 0.024
[0.085; 0.019]
Total trade (ln) 0.013
[0.109; 0.092]
Population (ln) 0.071
[0.054; 0.262]
Democracy 0.058
[0.153; 0.005]
Previous magnitude 0.037
[0.176; 0.038]
State failure years 0.034 0.115 0.205
[0.141; 0.442] [0.072; 0.689] [0.126; 0.953]
State failure years2 0.058 0.089 0.068
[0.102; 0.641] [0.110; 0.818] [0.123; 0.831]
N 636 630 629
Log pseudolikelihood 100.54 84.12 81.59
Wald w2 14.13 33.53 59.96
Prob > w2 0.00 0.00 0.00
Note: Table entries are first difference estimates (Pr(y ¼ 1)) when moving from the minimum to the max-
imum of an explanatory variable in question; 90 percent confidence intervals in brackets; estimates are
based on simulations (N ¼ 1,000 of simulated parameters); robust standard errors clustered on country,
but omitted from table due to space limitations; constant included in each model, but also omitted from
presentation.
*Significant at 10 percent. **Significant at 5 percent. ***Significant at 1 percent (two-tailed).

Extending the Scope: In-sample and Out-of-sample Predictions

Although Table 2 emphasizes a strong, robust, and significant impact of Structure of
the Security Forces on the onset of genocides, several scholars argue that drawing
inferences from statistical significant results might be misleading to the extent
that they tell us little about the predictive power of a covariate or an entire model.78

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Pilster et al. 39

1.00
0.75
True Positive Rate

0.50
0.25

Total Area under Curve = 0.8221

0.00

0.00 0.25 0.50 0.75 1.00

False Positive Rate

Figure 1. In-sample prediction: area under receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curve
for full sample (model 3). Plot shows in-sample predictive power for model 3 in the form
of a ROC plot. Models with more predictive power have a higher true-positives rate at the
expense of a lower false-positive rate (cases of genocidal violence our model would predict
although they did not happen). The area under ROC curve (total area under curve [AUC])
statistic theoretically varies between 0.5 (no predictive power) and 1.0 (perfect predictive
power).

In order to address this point, we try to assess the ability of our full model and our
core explanatory variable to actually predict genocidal violence. To this end, we use
in-sample and out-of-sample prediction techniques.79
Figure 1 sheds light on the actual in-sample predictive power of model 3. Here,
we show a Receiver Operator Characteristic (ROC) graph that plots true positives
(cases of genocidal violence our model predicts correctly) against false positives
(cases of genocidal violence our model would predict although they did not happen).
Generally, models with more predictive power generate ‘‘‘true positives at the
expense of fewer false positives.’’80 As a result, a perfectly predictive model would
correctly classify all actual cases of genocidal violence and never generate false
positives. While we can reject the notion that our model perfectly predicts geno-
cides, it does have a higher predicted probability for a randomly chosen positive
event than for a randomly chosen nonevent. This is mirrored by the area under ROC
curve (AUC) statistic, which theoretically varies between 0.5 (no predictive power)
and 1.0 (perfect predictive power). The highest predictive power is given by the full
model (model 3: 0.82).

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40 Armed Forces & Society 42(1)

That being said, the question remains whether this conclusion holds when
employing the harder test of an out-of-sample prediction. Moreover, demonstrating
that an entire model or its alternative specifications perform above the AUC level of
0.5 does not allow drawing firm conclusions on the predictive power of a single cov-
ariate therein. We thus use a fourfold cross-validation quasi-experimental setup that
was repeated ten times as an out-of-sample prediction exercise.81 In short, cross-
validation relies on dividing existing data into subsets, using random assignment
of the cases to the different sets. All except one of the subsets are then pooled
together and routinely estimated by applying the preferred model specification. The
remaining subset, called the ‘‘test set,’’82 subsequently serves to assess the predictive
power of the model (as measured by the AUC statistic) estimated on the pooled sub-
sets—in our case, either the full model or a model that omits Structure of the Security
Forces from the estimation. In order to employ a fourfold cross-validation exercise
that we repeated ten times for these two scenarios, we randomly divided our sample
into four equally sized subsets, pooled three in order to ‘‘train the model’’ (i.e., to
estimate the coefficients and parameters of interest), and kept one as the test set.
After this exercise, we assessed the out-of-sample predictive power of the full model
and a model that omits Structure of the Security Forces from the estimation. We
repeated this procedure four times for ten different partitions of the sample for each
scenario (either the full model or a model that omits Structure of the Security Forces
from the estimation). Finally, we calculated the average AUC across the ten
repetitions.
Figure 2 depicts our findings in this context. As one would expect, the predictive
power either of the full model or the constrained model where we discard our core
explanatory item decreases as compared to the in-sample prediction value from
earlier (0.82). Nevertheless, the power of the full model remains reasonably high
(AUC ¼ 0.71; left panel). More importantly, the average AUC of the estimations
without Structure of the Security Forces is at 0.65, which is considerably lower than
the AUC of the out-of-sample prediction for the full model. This holds even in com-
parison to the unreported values of the other explanatory variables. Hence, the pre-
dictive power of Structure of the Security Forces is given (even) when conducting
the out-of-sample prediction.

Robustness Checks
We conducted several checks to ensure that our results are not undermined by viola-
tions of the model assumptions or driven by particularities of the data. First, we cal-
culated the variance inflation factors for the explanatory variables of the multivariate
models 2 and 3 in order to examine in how far multicollinearity influences the
precision of our estimates. The estimates show, however, that our core explanatory
variable is largely not collinear with other items.
Second, Clarke demonstrates that the inclusion of control variables may actually
increase the bias instead of decreasing it. In addition, some of the controls, especially

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Pilster et al. 41

0.80 0.80
Total Area under Curve

Total Area under Curve

0.76 0.76

0.72 0.72

0.68 0.68

0.64 0.64

0.60 0.60
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Cycle Run - Full Sample Cycle Run - Structure of the Security Forces

Figure 2. Out of sample prediction: four-way cross-validation exercise. Left panel pertains to
estimates of area under receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curve (area under curve
[AUC]) statistics for full sample (model 3); right panel pertains to estimates of AUC for model
that omits the item Structure of the Security Forces; four-way cross-validation estimates for each
round (cycle run: N ¼ 10 different random partitions of the data) are shown by dots; dashed
horizontal line signifies mean estimate AUC over all four-way cross-validations that were
repeated for ten different random partitions of the data.

the variable Strength of the Security Forces, might undercut the substance of Struc-
ture of the Security Forces.83 However, model 1 does not include the controls and
the core result remains virtually unchanged.
Third, as outlined previously, we imputed the values of Colaresi and Carey’s
Strength of the Security Forces in 2003 in order to address a missing data problem.
The underlying assumption for this approach is that the values of this variable (but
no other variable as we have data for these) remained unchanged since 2002. In order
to deal with potential concerns in this regard, we estimated all models again for the
time period 1971–2002, thus omitting the imputed values of 2003. Nevertheless, this
does also not affect our findings.
Fourth, Table 1 demonstrates that a rare-event process generates genocides. More
specifically, only 4 percent of the 735 observations actually see the onset of geno-
cidal violence. By following King and Zeng,84 we corrected the intercept estimate
via a rare-events logistic regression model. Similarly to our above-mentioned probit
models, though, the findings show that Structure of the Security Forces still exerts a
substantial negative impact on genocides.
Fifth, one might object to the onset variable we took from Colaresi and Carey that
its definition of genocidal violence might be too narrow, thus omitting other
instances that saw state-sponsored mass-killing, but are omitted from our analysis.
Ulfelder and Valentino85 define genocide in a broader sense, that is, ‘‘as any event
in which the actions of state agents result in the intentional death of at least 1,000

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42 Armed Forces & Society 42(1)

Table 3. Heckman Probit Selection Model Regression Results for the Impact of Structure
of the Security Forces on the Onset of Genocidal Violence (Dependent Variable in Genocide
Outcome Equation), 1971–2003.

4 5

Genocide outcome equation

Structure of the security forces 0.241 (0.143)* 0.296 (0.155)*
Executive constraints 0.004 (0.270) 0.575 (0.365)
Strength of the security forces 0.015 (0.005)*** 0.008 (0.006)
Executive constraints  strength security force 0.036 (0.012)*** 0.038 (0.016)**
Cold War 0.618 (0.268)**
War loser 1.068 (0.825)
Ethnic fractionalization 0.441 (0.378)
Total trade (ln) 0.007 (0.117)
Population (ln) 0.064 (0.055)
Democracy 0.034 (0.024)
Previous magnitude 0.095 (0.058)*
Constant 1.302 (0.381)*** 1.852 (0.666)***
State failure equation
Executive constraints 3.377 (0.428)*** 0.014 (0.110)
Cold War 0.053 (0.088)
War loser 0.724 (0.364)** 1.019 (0.566)*
Ethnic fractionalization 1.105 (0.401)*** 0.408 (0.159)***
Total trade (ln) 0.722 (0.125)*** 0.218 (0.055)***
Population (ln) 0.823 (0.147)*** 0.330 (0.053)***
Democracy 0.294 (0.029)***
Constant 7.953 (1.434)*** 2.411 (0.534)***
N 4,329 4,329
Log pseudolikelihood 714.38 739.27
r 0.183 0.531***

Note: For the selection equation in both models, the dependent variable is I for state failure, 0 for no state
failure. Table entries are coefficients; robust standard errors clustered on country in parentheses; vari-
ables for temporal correction included in first equation (model 4) and both equations (model 5), but
omitted from table; r parameter signifies correlation between two equations’ errors.
*Significant at 10 percent. **Significant at 5 percent. ***Significant at 1 percent (two-tailed).

non-combatants from a discrete group in a period of sustained violence.’’ Against

this background, we substituted our previous dependent variable with those data and
reestimated our models again. Nevertheless, Structure of the Security Forces gener-
ally remains negatively signed and significant at conventional levels.
Finally, Colaresi and Carey also estimate a probit-type Heckman selection
model86 in order to address a possible bias stemming from the fact that state failures
are unlikely to be a random set. Hence, exclusively focusing on such a specific non-
random sample of a larger unknown population may either underestimate or exag-
gerate our results. We, therefore, replicated the Heckman model in Colaresi and
Carey (model 4 in Table 3) and estimated a slightly different specification (model

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Pilster et al. 43

5 in Table 3), while including our core explanatory variable. Note that the underlying
sample for both models is no longer the state-failure year, but a country-year, that is,
we now consider all states in the international system in 1971–2003. In addition, the
dependent variable in the outcome equation is the onset of genocidal violence (the
dependent variable we used in Table 2), while the dependent variable in the selection
equation captures whether state failure occurred (1) or not (0). As demonstrated in
Table 3, the results are essentially unaffected by this change in the research design.
Specifically, our core variable Structure of the Security Forces still exerts a statisti-
cally significant and negative impact on the risk of genocidal violence. Also note
that we are able to accurately model the first stage of state-failure onset, given the
various statistically significant estimates for the explanatory variables in the selec-
tion equation. Finally, our estimate for the r parameter is positive in model 4, but
negative in model 5, and only significant in the latter estimation. Given model 5, this
may suggest that unobserved features that increase the likelihood of selection (i.e.,
state failure) also increase the probability of genocide onset; however, we cannot
claim with confidence that selection is an issue beyond our sample in light of the
findings in model 4 (i.e., the insignificant r parameter estimate). Due to this, we
focused on the regular probit models as presented in Table 2.

Conclusion
This article has sought to demonstrate that the structure of a country’s security forces is
likely to have an impact on the risk of genocidal violence. We developed a theory argu-
ing that the structure of the security forces, if composed of a higher number of indepen-
dent paramilitary and regular military organizations, can act as a factor of restraint in the
process leading to state-sponsored mass-killings. The robust empirical support for our
theory not only strengthens the claim that a country’s security force structure has indeed
been an overlooked factor but also increases our confidence in that it is a crucial expla-
natory factor for predicting and forecasting the onset of genocides.
From a scholarly perspective, our research builds on the literature on the determi-
nants and forecasting of genocides87 and provides one of the first theoretical frame-
works on the relationship between genocidal violence and a state’s security force
structure. We thus contribute to the research on security-force structures,88 civil–
military relations,89 and counterinsurgency.90 Our theoretical argument and empiri-
cal tests also support Janowitz’s seminal argument of how the differentiation of a
state’s security forces contributes to regime security and consolidation.91
This article may furthermore have some practical implications. For example, over
the past decade, the international community has been engaged in various efforts to
build new security forces ‘‘from the scratch’’ in places such as Afghanistan or Iraq92
and to reform existing security forces.93 Take the case of Afghanistan, where there
have been intense discussions of the pros and cons of the creation of national police
forces along paramilitary lines in addition to the national armed forces and local
police.94 Knowing in advance what implications the structure of the security forces

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44 Armed Forces & Society 42(1)

might have in these contexts is arguably of crucial importance. The impact of a

country’s security force structure on the onset of genocidal violence is certainly not
an exception here. Moreover, our theoretical argument may also have indirect impli-
cations for the discussion on how to best reform Western armed forces, so that they
can attain more flexibility in counterinsurgency campaigns when switching between
tasks of policing and the classical application of violence.95
Having said that, many questions still remain and our research also opens up new
avenues for further research. There has been a long-standing argument in the literature
on whether the differentiation of security forces primarily serves as a tool to improve
counterinsurgency capabilities (as argued in this article) or whether it is more aimed at
counterbalancing and the leader’s protection against coups.96 Both mechanisms seem
to be at work in the real world, raising the question of which considerations dominate
under what kind of conditions.97 Based on this article and recent work by Böhmelt and
Pilster,98 one possible suggestion for future research may be that a higher number of
military and paramilitary organizations only serve as a coup-proofing device up to the
point of the creation of about two equally strong organizations. This is, for instance,
the case in Saudi Arabia, where the royal family’s fear of a coup led to the creation of a
National Guard, roughly equally sized and equipped as the regular army. Differentia-
tion of the security forces beyond this point, in turn, may mainly serve to create secu-
rity forces more capable of assuming domestic security functions.
Ultimately, more work seems necessary that examines a country’s security force
structure as both the cause and the effect in international relations, comparative, and
domestic politics.

Acknowledgment
We thank Neil Mitchell, three anonymous reviewers, and the journal’s editor, Patricia
M. Shields, for helpful suggestions that improved this article.

Authors’ Note
A version of this article has been presented at the Conference ‘‘Advancing the Scientific Study
of Conflict and Cooperation: Alternative Perspectives from the UK and Japan’’ (University of
Essex, UK, March 20-21, 2012).

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: the authors gratefully acknowledge financial support for the research
of this article by the Suntory Foundation and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

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Pilster et al. 45

Notes
1. Scott Strauss, ‘‘Retreating from the Brink: Theorizing Mass Violence and the Dynamics
of Restraint,’’ Perspectives on Politics 10, 2 (2012): 343-62. Note that we use the terms
genocide, politicide, and (state-sponsored) mass-killing interchangeably.
2. Matthew Krain, ‘‘State-sponsored Mass Murder: The Onset and Severity of Genocides
and Politicides,’’ Journal of Conflict Resolution 41, 3 (1997): 331-60.
3. Barbara Harff, ‘‘No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust? Assessing Risks of Genocide
and Political Mass Murder since 1955,’’ American Political Science Review 91, 1 (2003):
57-73.
4. Ibid.
5. Rudolph Rummel, Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder since 1900
(Munster, Germany: Lit Verlag, 1998).
6. Benjamin Valentino, Paul Huth, and Dylan Balch-Lindsay, ‘‘‘Draining the Sea:’ Mass-
killing and Guerrilla Warfare,’’ International Organization 58, 2 (2004): 375-407.
7. Frank Wayman and Atsushi Tago, ‘‘Explaining the Onset of Mass-killing, 1949-87,’’
Journal of Peace Research 47, 1 (2010): 3-13.
8. Jason Lyall and Isaiah Wilson, ‘‘Rage against the Machines: Explaining Outcomes in
Counterinsurgency Wars,’’ International Organization 63, 1 (2009): 67-106.
9. Michael Colaresi and Sabine Carey, ‘‘To Kill or to Protect—Security Forces, Domestic
Institutions, and Genocide,’’ Journal of Conflict Resolution 52, 1 (2008): 39-67.
10. Stephen P. Cohen, The Pakistan Army (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984);
Ivan Arreguin-Toft, ‘‘How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict,’’
International Security 26, 1 (2001): 93-128; Lyall and Wilson, ‘‘Rage against the
Machines,’’ 2009; Todd S. Sechser and Elizabeth N. Saunders, ‘‘The Army You Have:
The Determinants of Military Mechanization, 1979-2001,’’ International Studies Quar-
terly 54, 2 (2010): 481-511; Jeffrey A. Friedman, ‘‘Manpower and Counterinsurgency:
Empirical Foundations for Theory and Doctrine,’’ Security Studies 20, 4 (2011): 556-91.
11. Devorah Manekin, ‘‘Violence against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure on Opportunistic Violence,’’ Comparative Political
Studies 46, 10 (2013): 1277-1300.
12. Manus M. Midlarsky, The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
13. Morris Janowitz, Military Institutions and Coercion in the Developing Nations (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1977).
14. Harff, ‘‘No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust?’’ 58.
15. Abbey Steele, ‘‘Seeking Safety: Displacement and Targeting in Civil Wars,’’ Journal of
Peace Research 46, 3 (2009): 419-30.
16. Note that our differentiation of collective targeting and indiscriminate violence, adopted
from Steele, ‘‘Seeking Safety,’’ 2009, differs from Kalyvas’s original definition of the
term. See Stathis N. Kalyvas and Matthew N. Kocher, ‘‘How Free Is Free-riding in Civil
Wars? Violence, Insurgency, and the Collective Action Problem,’’ World Politics 59, 2
(2007): 187ff.

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46 Armed Forces & Society 42(1)

17. International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), The Military Balance (London, UK:
International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2012).
18. Janowitz, Military Institutions and Coercion in the Developing Nations, 28.
19. This treatment of paramilitary forces excludes local defense units (which are usually only
active on a part-time basis) and militias (which are only informally or semiofficially tied
to the political leadership). See Sabine Carey, Neil Mitchell, and Will Lowe, ‘‘States, the
Security Sector, and the Monopoly of Violence—A New Database on Pro-Government
Militias,’’ Journal of Peace Research 50, 2 (2013): 249-58.
20. Krain, ‘‘State-sponsored Mass Murder,’’ 1997; Benjamin Valentino, Final Solutions:
Mass-killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2004); Valentino, Huth, and Balch-Lindsay, ‘‘‘Draining the Sea’,’’ 2004.
21. Scott Strauss, ‘‘‘Destroy Them to Save Us:’ Theories of Genocide and the Logics of
Political Violence,’’ Terrorism and Political Violence 24, 4 (2012): 544-60; Benjamin
Valentino, ‘‘Final Solution: The Causes of Mass-killing and Genocide,’’ Security Studies
9, 3 (2000): 1-59.
22. Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2006).
23. Roger Trinquier, Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency (New York:
Frederick A. Praeger, 1964), 63-64; David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory
and Practice (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 1964), 50; Valentino, ‘‘Final
Solution: The Causes of Mass-killing and Genocide,’’ 47-48; Arreguin-Toft, ‘‘How the
Weak Win Wars,’’ 103-104; Elizabeth J. Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil
War in El Salvador (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 122-124;
Valentino, Huth, and Balch-Lindsay, ‘‘‘Draining the Sea’,’’ 383-384. Note that rebels
mainly dependent on economic resources (e.g., by access to natural resource wealth or
a foreign sponsor) depend significantly less on the civilian population for their survival
and may hence not be fully covered by our theoretical argument. See Jeremy Weinstein,
Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2007).
24. Janowitz, Military Institutions and Coercion in the Developing Nations, 45.
25. Deborah D. Avant, ‘‘The Institutional Sources of Military Doctrine: Hegemons in Periph-
eral Wars,’’ International Studies Quarterly 37, 4 (1993): 409-30.
26. Jason Seawright and John Gerring, ‘‘Case Selection Techniques in Case Study Research:
A Menu of Qualitative and Quantitative Options,’’ Political Research Quarterly 61, 2
(2008): 299f.
27. Harff, ‘‘No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust?’’ 58.
28. Harff, ‘‘No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust?’’ 2003, codes the following genocides and
politicides in South Asia between 1970 and 2003: Afghanistan, 1978-1992; Pakistan, 1971 and
1973-1977; Burma, 1978; and Sri Lanka, 1989–1990. Similar to India, most of these countries
faced a whole range of battle fronts and opponents despite the perhaps common perspective
that genocide seems to be more likely in the case of being directed at a ‘‘united enemy.’’
29. Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare, 1964; Daniel Byman, Understanding Proto-
insurgencies (RAND Counterinsurgency Study Paper 3. Santa Monica, CA: RAND

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Pilster et al. 47

Corporation, 2007); Jospeh Celeski, Policing and Law Enforcement in COIN—The Thick
Blue Line (Hurlburt Field, FL: Joint Special Operations University, 2009).
30. Celeski, Policing and Law Enforcement in COIN, 2009; P. K. Mallick, ‘‘Role of the
Armed Forces in Internal Security: Time for Review,’’ Center for Land Warfare Studies
Journal 1, 2 (2007): 68-90.
31. Douglas C. Makeig, ‘‘Aid-to-civil:’’ Indian Army and Paramilitary Involvement in Domestic
Peacekeeping (Washington, DC: Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, 1984), 16.
32. Celeski, Policing and Law Enforcement in COIN, 5-6.
33. Jennifer L. Oetken, ‘‘Counterinsurgency against Naxalites in India,’’ in India and Coun-
terinsurgency: Lessons Learned, ed. Sumit Ganguly and David P. Fidler (London, UK:
Routledge, 2009), 147; Mallick, ‘‘Role of the Armed Forces in Internal Security,’’ 82.
34. Angel Rabasa et al., The Lessons of Mumbai (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation,
2009), 10-11.
35. Celeski, Policing and Law Enforcement in COIN, 2009; Theo Farrell, ‘‘World Culture
and Military Power,’’ Security Studies 14, 3 (2005): 448-88.
36. John J. Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1983).
37. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 2006; Lyall and Wilson, ‘‘Rage against the
Machines,’’ 2009.
38. Stephen Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
39. Michael T. Flynn, Matt Pottinger, and Paul D. Batchelor, Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for
Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan (Washington, DC: Center for a New Amer-
ican Security, 2010).
40. Morris Janowitz, The Military in the Political Development of New Nations: An Essay in
Comparative Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).
41. Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf, Jr., Rebellion and Authority: An Analytic Essay on
Insurgent Conflicts (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1970); Jason Lyall, ‘‘Does
Indiscriminate Violence Incite Insurgent Attacks? Evidence from Chechnya,’’ Journal of
Conflict Resolution 53, 3 (2009): 331-62; Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War,
2006; Arreguin-Toft, ‘‘How the Weak Win Wars,’’ 2001.
42. Lyall, ‘‘Does Indiscriminate Violence Incite Insurgent Attacks?’’ 342-344.
43. Manekin, ‘‘Violence against Civilians in the Second Intifada,’’ 1278; Macartan
Humphreys and Jeremy Weinstein, ‘‘Handling and Manhandling Civilians in Civil War,’’
American Political Science Review 100, 3 (2006): 429-47.
44. Leites and Wolf, Rebellion and Authority, 90-92.
45. Leites and Wolf, Rebellion and Authority, 90ff; Edward N. Muller and Erich Weede, ‘‘Cross-
national Variation in Political Violence: A Rational Action Approach,’’ Journal of Conflict
Resolution 34, 4 (1990): 624-51; Arreguin-Toft, ‘‘How the Weak Win Wars,’’ 2001.
46. T. David Mason and Dale A. Krane, ‘‘The Political Economy of Death Squads: Toward a
Theory of the Impact of State-sanctioned Terror,’’ International Studies Quarterly 33, 2
(1989): 175-98; Kalyvas and Kocher, ‘‘How Free Is Free-riding in Civil Wars?’’ 2007;
Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 2006; Matthew Kocher, Tom Pepinsky, and

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Stathis N. Kalyvas, ‘‘Aerial Bombing and Counterinsurgency in the Vietnam War,’’

American Journal of Political Science 55, 2 (2011): 201-18.
47. Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador, 2003.
48. Midlarsky, The Killing Trap, 2005.
49. Valentino, ‘‘Final Solution: The Causes of Mass-Killing and Genocide,’’ 2000; Valen-
tino, Huth, and Balch-Lindsay, ‘‘‘Draining the Sea’,’’ 2004; Strauss, ‘‘Retreating from the
Brink,’’ 2012.
50. Makeig, Aid-to-civil, 80.
51. C. Christine Fair, ‘‘Lessons from India’s Experience in the Punjab, 1979-1993,’’ in India
and Counterinsurgency: Lessons Learned, ed. Sumit Ganguly and David P. Fidler (Lon-
don, UK: Routledge, 2009), 114; Ved Marwah, ‘‘India’s Counterinsurgency Campaign in
Punjab,’’ in India and Counterinsurgency: Lessons Learned, ed. Sumit Ganguly and
David P. Fidler (London, UK: Routledge, 2009), 101.
52. Makeig, Aid-to-civil, 24-25.
53. Ibid, 80.
54. Rajesh Rajagopalan, ‘‘Innovations in Counterinsurgency: The Indian Army’s Rashtriya
Rifles,’’ Contemporary South Asia 13, 1 (2004): 32-33.
55. Jerrold F. Elkin and Andrew W. Ritezel, ‘‘Military Role Expansion in India,’’ Armed
Forces & Society 11, 4 (1985): 489-504; Marwah, ‘‘India’s Counterinsurgency Campaign
in Punjab,’’ 98-99.
56. Harff, ‘‘No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust?’’ 2003; Colaresi and Carey, ‘‘To Kill or
to Protect,’’ 2008.
57. Harff, ‘‘No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust?’’ 58.
58. Ibid.
59. Note again that we focus only on those countries that have suffered political upheaval,
that is, state failures. The inferences and findings from our analyses given subsequently
are thus conditional on this. For a similar approach, see Harff, ‘‘No Lessons Learned from
the Holocaust?’’ 2003; Colaresi and Carey, ‘‘To Kill or to Protect,’’ 2008; we return to
this selection issue in the robustness section, though.
60. Janowitz, Military Institutions and Coercion in the Developing Nations, 29.
61. Ulrich Pilster and Tobias Böhmelt, ‘‘Coup-proofing and Military Effectiveness in Inter-
state Wars, 1967-99,’’ Conflict Management and Peace Science 28, 4 (2011): 331-50;
Ulrich Pilster and Tobias Böhmelt, ‘‘Do Democracies Engage Less in Coup-proofing?
On the Relationship between Regime Type and Civil-military Relations,’’ Foreign Policy
Analysis 8, 4 (2012): 355-72.
62. Ibid. Pilster and Böhmelt argue that both kinds of information should be incorporated: a
country that has a presidential guard of, for example, 1,000 men, in addition to an army of
99,000 troops should not receive the same value as a country that possesses two equally
sized military organizations of 50,000 men each.
63. Colaresi and Carey, ‘‘To Kill or to Protect,’’ 2008.
64. Monty Marshall and Keith Jaggers, POLITY IV Project: Political Regime Characteristics and
Transitions, 1800-2002. Dataset User’s Manuel (College Park: University of Maryland,
2013).

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Pilster et al. 49

65. Colaresi and Carey, ‘‘To Kill or to Protect,’’ 48.

66. Martha Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use of
Force (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 173-174.
67. Patrick M. Regan, ‘‘Third-party Interventions and the Duration of Intrastate Conflicts,’’
Journal of Conflict Resolution 46, 1 (2002): 55-73.
68. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Randolph Siverson, ‘‘War and the Survival of Political
Leaders: A Comparative Study of Regime Types and Political Accountability,’’ Ameri-
can Political Science Review 89, 4 (1995): 841-55.
69. Colaresi and Carey, ‘‘To Kill or to Protect,’’ 50.
70. We thank an anonymous reviewer for highlighting this.
71. Colaresi and Carey, ‘‘To Kill or to Protect,’’ 49.
72. Harff, ‘‘No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust?’’ 2003.
73. Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, ‘‘Expanded Trade and GDP Data,’’ Journal of Conflict Reso-
lution 46, 5 (2002): 712-24.
74. Colaresi and Carey, ‘‘To Kill or to Protect,’’ 50.
75. Marshall and Jaggers, POLITY IV Project, 2013.
76. Harff, ‘‘No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust?’’ 2003.
77. Gary King, Michael Tomz, and Jason Wittenberg, ‘‘Making the Most of Statistical Anal-
yses: Improving Interpretation and Presentation,’’ American Journal of Political Science
44, 2 (2000): 347-61.
78. Michael Ward, Brian Greenhill, and Kristin Bakke, ‘‘The Perils of Policy by p-value:
Predicting Civil Conflicts,’’ Journal of Peace Research 47, 4 (2010): 363-75.
79. Ibid.
80. Ibid.
81. The exact procedure for this cross-validation is described in Ward, Greenhill, and Bakke,
‘‘The Perils of Policy by p-value,’’ 2010, and can be replicated with our data files.
82. Ward, Greenhill, and Bakke, ‘‘The Perils of Policy by p-value,’’ 370.
83. Kevin Clarke, ‘‘The Phantom Menace: Omitted Variable Bias in Econometric Research,’’
Conflict Management and Peace Science 22, 4 (2005): 341-52.
84. Gary King and Langche Zeng, ‘‘Logistic Regression in Rare Events Data,’’ Political
Analysis 9, 2 (2001): 137-63.
85. Jay Ulfelder and Benjamin Valentino, Assessing Risks of State-sponsored Mass Killing
(Unpublished Manuscript, 2008).
86. James Heckman, ‘‘Sample Selection Bias as a Specification Error,’’ Econometrica 47,
1 (1970): 153-61; Wynand Van de Ven and Bernard Van Praag, ‘‘The Demand for
Deductibles in Private Health Insurance,’’ Journal of Econometrics 17, 2 (1981):
229-52.
87. Scott Strauss, ‘‘Political Science and Genocide,’’ in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide
Studies, ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press,
2010), 163-81.
88. For example, Sechser and Saunders, ‘‘The Army You Have,’’ 2010.
89. Paul Staniland, ‘‘Explaining Civil-military Relations in Complex Political Environments:
India and Pakistan in Comparative Perspective,’’ Security Studies 17, 2 (2008): 322-62;

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Jonathan M. Powell, ‘‘Determinants of the Attempting and Outcome of Coups d’état,’’

Journal of Conflict Resolution 56, 6 (2012): 1017-40.
90. Lyall and Wilson, ‘‘Rage against the Machines,’’ 2009.
91. Janowitz, Military Institutions and Coercion in the Developing Nations, 1977.
92. International Crisis Group, A Force in Fragments: Reconstituting the Afghan National Army
(Asia Report N 190, 2010); Anthony H. Cordesman, Iraqi Security Forces: A Strategy for Suc-
cess (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2006), http://www.cri
sisgroup.org/~/media/files/asia/south-asia/afghanistan/190%20a%20force%20in%20fragm
ents%20-%20reconstituting%20the%20afghan%20national%20army.ashx
93. Hans Born and Albrecht Schnabel, Security Sector Reform in Challenging Environments
(Geneva, Switzerland: Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, 2009).
94. Antonio Giustozzi and Mohammad Isaqzadeh, Afghanistan’s Paramilitary Policing in
Context—The Risks of Expediency (Kabul: Afghanistan Analysts Network, 2011).
95. Cornelius Friesendorf, Christopher Dase, and Thomas Müller, ‘‘Flexible Sicherheit-
skräfte für Auslandseinsätze: Afghanistan und die Grenze deutscher Sicherheitspolitik,’’
Hessische Stiftung Friedens und Konfliktforschung Report Nr. 1 (2013): 1-40.
96. Jonathan M. Powell, Coups and Conflict: A Coup-proofing Paradox (PhD diss., Univer-
sity of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 2012); Janowitz, Military Institutions and Coercion in
the Developing Nations, 1977.
97. Jonathan M. Powell, Leader Survival Strategies and the Onset of Civil Conflict: A Coup-
proofing Paradox (Unpublished Manuscript, 2014), http://www.jonathanmpowell.com/
uploads/2/9/9/2/2992308/coup_proofing_paradox_feb_2014.pdf
98. Tobias Böhmelt and Ulrich Pilster, ‘‘The Impact of Institutional Coup-proofing on Coup
Attempts and Coup Outcomes,’’ International Interactions, (2014). doi: 10.1080/03050629.
2014.906411

Author Biographies
Ulrich Pilster, PhD, is a research fellow at the Department of Government at the
University of Essex, UK. His main research and teaching interests are military and
security issues broadly defined, military alliances, international security organiza-
tions, and quantitative methods.
Tobias Böhmelt, PhD, is a lecturer at the Department of Government at the Univer-
sity of Essex, UK. He is also a research associate of the Center for Comparative and
International Studies (CIS) as well as the Institute for Environmental Decisions (IED),
which are based at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland. His main research and teaching inter-
ests are the quantitative analysis of conflict and cooperation, environmental politics,
international mediation, military effectiveness, and social network analysis.
Atsushi Tago, PhD, University of Tokyo, is an associate professor at Kobe Univer-
sity, Japan. In his research and teaching, he focuses on multilateralism in US security
policy and collective legitimization of the use of force.

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