@article{1c9b5bbcc92b4a5cbc862967298b45bb,
title = "The Effect of Civilian Casualties on Wartime Informing: Evidence from the Iraq War",
abstract = "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.",
keywords = "asymmetric conflict, civil wars, civilian casualties, conflict management",
author = "Andrew Shaver and Shapiro, {Jacob N.}",
note = "Funding Information: We thank Eli Berman, Michael Callen, David Carter, Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, Joe Felter, Frank Gunter, Solomon Hsiang, Christoph Mikulaschek, Arman Rezaee and the anonymous reviewers and editors of the JCR for comments for comments on this article. We are also grateful for the feedback provided by participants of the American Economic Association?s Annual Meeting; the London School of Economic and Political Science?s Political Science and Political Economy Group; Stanford University?s International Relations/CISAC Fellows? Policy Workshop; and the National Bureau of Economic Research?s 2015 Summer Institute Conference on the Economics of National Security. We are especially grateful to Alicia Chen, Benjamin Crisman, Jamie Hansen-Lewis and Landin Smith for their contributions to this project. For research assistance, we recognize and thank Zainab Khan and Sarah Yein Ku. Numerous officials were extremely generous with their time in helping us secure the authorized release of the tips data and providing rich context for understanding how the tip lines worked in Iraq. The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: We acknowledge support from AFOSR grant #FA9550-09-1-0314. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} The Author(s) 2021.",
year = "2021",
month = aug,
doi = "10.1177/0022002721991627",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "65",
pages = "1337--1377",
journal = "Journal of Conflict Resolution",
issn = "0022-0027",
publisher = "SAGE Publications Inc.",
number = "7-8",
}