Civilian Harm and Military Legitimacy in War
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2023
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Abstract
The legitimacy of armed forces in the eyes of civilians is increasingly recognized as crucial not only for battlefield effectiveness but also for conflict resolution and peace building. However, the concept of “military legitimacy” remains under-theorized and its determinants poorly understood. We argue that perceptions of military legitimacy are shaped by two key dimensions of warfare: just cause and just conduct. Leveraging naturally occurring variation during one of the deadliest urban battles in recent history—the multinational campaign to defeat the Islamic State in Mosul, Iraq—we evaluate our theory using a mixed-methods design that combines original survey data, satellite imagery, and interviews. Civilians living in neighborhoods where armed forces were less careful to protect civilians view those forces as less legitimate than civilians elsewhere. Surprisingly, these results persist after conditioning on personal experiences of harm, suggesting that perceptions are influenced not only by victimization—consistent with previous studies—but also by beliefs about the morality of armed forces’ conduct and the cause for which they are fighting.
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Petkun, Jonathan, Mara Redlich Revkin and Benjamin Krick (2023). Civilian Harm and Military Legitimacy in War. International Organization, 79(2). pp. 332–357. 10.1017/S0020818325000098 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/33066.
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Jonathan B Petkun
Jon Petkun is an economist and a legal scholar. His academic interests include public economics, civil procedure, judicial and court administration, and access to justice. Broadly, he is interested in the legal and economic organization of large public institutions, especially federal and state courts and the U.S. military.
Petkun joined the Duke Law faculty in 2022 after serving as a Senior Liman Research Affiliate at Yale Law School. He previously clerked for judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut.
Petkun received his Ph.D. in economics in 2020 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his J.D. in 2019 from Yale Law School. During law school, he represented veterans in civil litigation and legislative advocacy as a member of Yale’s Veterans Legal Services Clinic. Petkun received his B.A. in 2007 from Swarthmore College.
Petkun is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and a veteran of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Mara Revkin
Mara Redlich Revkin joined the Duke Law faculty in 2022 from the Georgetown University Law Center, where she was a fellow at the Center on National Security and the Law. Her primary research and teaching interests are in armed conflict, peace-building, transitional justice, migration, policing, and property with a regional focus on the Middle East and Africa. She has a secondary appointment in the Department of Political Science.
Professor Revkin holds a J.D. from Yale Law School (2016) and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University (2019) where her dissertation examined the Islamic State's governance of civilians in Iraq and Syria. She uses qualitative and quantitative empirical methods including surveys, experiments, interviews, and archival research, and has conducted field research in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and South Sudan. In addition to her academic research, she has worked with and advised United Nations agencies and other humanitarian organizations on the design of evidence-based programs and policies that aim to strengthen rule of law and the protection of human rights, support peaceful reconciliation after conflict, and mitigate the root causes of political violence and extremism.
Professor Revkin's work has been published or is forthcoming in The Journal of Politics, The American Journal of Political Science, The Yale Law Journal, The American Journal of Comparative Law, The Journal of Conflict Resolution, The Journal of Global Security Studies, World Development, The Yale Journal of International Law, The Harvard National Security Journal, The Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Foreign Affairs, and The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Law. Her research has been funded by the U.S. Institute of Peace, Innovations for Poverty Action, the National Science Foundation, and the Folke Bernadotte Academy, among others.
Before entering academia, she was the Assistant Director of the Atlantic Council's Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, a Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Middle East Program), a Critical Language Scholar in Jordan (Arabic), and a Fulbright Fellow in Oman. She holds a B.A. in Political Science with minors in Arabic and Anthropology from Swarthmore College.
Benjamin Krick
I study topics at the nexus of International Relations and Comparative Politics. My research explores state transitions from political instability, with a focus on forced migration and authoritarian nostalgia, particularly in the Middle East. I rely on causal inference methods, integrating original data with fieldwork and qualitative interviews. I hold a MS in Political Science from the University of Utah and a BA in Middle East Studies/Arabic from the University of Arkansas.
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