Algorithm

Philosophy

Political economy

Sociology

Economics

Political science

Collateral

Government (linguistics)

Collateral damage

Computer science

Linguistics

Development economics

State (computer science)

Insurgency

Criminology

Circumstantial evidence

Spanish Civil War

Politics

Journal of Conflict Resolution

Scholars of civil war and insurgency have long posited that insurgent organizations and their state enemies incur costs for the collateral damage they cause. We provide the first direct quantitative evidence that wartime informing to counterinsurgent forces is affected by civilian victimization. Using newly declassified data on tip flow to Coalition forces in Iraq we find that information flow goes down after government forces inadvertently kill civilians and it goes up when insurgents do so. These results confirm a relationship long posited in the theoretical literature on insurgency but never directly observed, have strong policy implications, and are consistent with a broad range of circumstantial evidence on the topic.

The Effect of Civilian Casualties on Wartime Informing: Evidence from the Iraq War