Wpo 72-4 05 Costalli Logic of Vulnerability 679-718.Indd

THE LOGIC OF VULNERABILITY . AND CIVILIAN VICTIMIZATION Shifting Front Lines in Italy (1943–1945) By STEFANO COSTALLI, FRANCESCO NICCOLÒ MORO, and ANDREA RUGGERI https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms ABSTRACT What causes civilian victimization in conventional civil wars and in conventional wars that experience insurgencies? The authors argue that a key driver of civilian victimization is the vulnerability of the incumbent forces, specifically when the conflict’s front line is shifting. Vulnerability is a function of informational and logistical challenges: when the front line is moving, incumbents face increased informational uncertainty and unstable supply chains that augment their vulnerability. Thus, incumbents will increase the use of civilian victimization in response to a scarcity of high-quality information on the location and identity of insurgents, to limit possible information leaks, and to contain supply disruption and logistics support to adversaries. The authors support their argument using matched difference-in-differences analyses of original subnational data on Nazi-Fascist violence in World War II Italy (1943–1945) and qualitative evidence. INTRODUCTION N early October 1943, German forces in southern Italy were rapidly , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at Iwithdrawing toward the Gustav Line, a defensive position north of Naples. On the night of October 13th, near the town of Caiazzo, a small group of German soldiers noticed flares being set off from a country house close to their tactical command. Shortly after, a young German lieutenant ordered the troops to shoot twenty-two civilians, including 26 Sep 2021 at 00:01:48 women and children, on the conjecture that they attempted to pro- , on vide information about the location of the German command center to advancing English troops.1 This episode of civilian victimization is far from unique in World War II Italy. According to the most accurate historical research, Nazi-Fascist forces killed 9,977 civilians throughout 2 University of Athens Italy. Some of the most brutal massacres, such as those at Sant’Anna . 1 Klinkhammer 1993, 43. 2 Data are from the website, Atlante delle Stragi Nazis e Fasciste in Italia, as of April 2016. Avail- able at www.straginazifasciste.it, accessed July 24, 2020. Nazi forces were mostly composed of Wehr- macht and Schutzstaffel (SS), which conducted the bulk of military operations and civilian victimization. Fascist forces comprised a more heterogenous set of groups, including official forces of the Re- World Politics 72, no. 4 (October 2020) 679–718 Copyright © 2020 Trustees of Princeton University doi: 10.1017/S004388712000012X https://www.cambridge.org/core https://doi.org/10.1017/S004388712000012X Downloaded from 680 WORLD POLITICS di Stazzema and Marzabotto, were committed by German troops as they withdrew toward northern Italy after breaking the Gustav Line . and before the new Gothic Line was established across the Apennines between Florence and Bologna, starting in the late summer of 1944. In Poland, on the eastern front line of World War II, “the Germans would kill civilians after taking new territories. They would also kill civilians after losing ground. If they took casualties at all, they would blame whoever was at hand: men in the first instance, but also women, and children.”3 The Korean War, the second deadliest conflict since 1945,4 also featured high levels of civilian victimization in moments of pressure on or movement of the front line: “As usual in most wars, when https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms the atmosphere at the front was relaxed, communist prisoners were per- fectly properly used and sent to the camps in the rear. But at periods of special stress or fear, especially in the first six months of the war, many UN soldiers shot down enemy prisoners—or even Korean civilians— with barely a moment’s scruple.”5 In the recent war against ISIS in Iraq, the dynamics of civilian victimization can also be linked to the retreat of the front line. During the Battle of Mosul, from October 2016 to July 2017, ISIS killed many civilians while they were retreating from the front line under pressure by Iraqi and US forces. According to some accounts, spikes in civilian victimization were linked to concerns that escaping civilians could leak information to anti-ISIS alliance forces, facilitating the alliance’s advancement.6 , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at What explains the spatial and temporal variation in civilian victimization by conventional armies? Violence against civilians in civil wars has been explained by territorial control,7 knowledge of previous polit- ical identities,8 and internal organization of forces,9 and also as a function of resource scarcity10 or desperation.11 The use of indiscriminate 26 Sep 2021 at 00:01:48 violence against civilians has also been an important issue in studies on , on counterinsurgency.12 But limited attention has been given to the inter- action between macrotrends in hostilities, such as conventional armies’ pubblica Sociale Italiana (the puppet regime installed by the Nazis in September 1943) in the North, and local militias. Fascist forces were largely operating as agents of the Nazis. In this article, we use the term Nazi-Fascist to describe the agency of both. University of Athens . 3 Snyder 2011, 121. 4 Lacina and Gleditsch 2005, 154. 5 Hastings 2010, 329. 6 Kesling 2016; Prickett 2017. 7 Kalyvas 2006. 8 Herreros and Criado 2009; Balcells 2017. 9 Humphreys and Weinstein 2006; Mitchell 2004. 10 Wood 2014; Zhukov 2017. 11 Downes 2008. 12 Kocher, Pepinsky, and Kalyvas 2011; Lyall and Wilson 2009. https://www.cambridge.org/core https://doi.org/10.1017/S004388712000012X Downloaded from LOGIC OF VULNERABILITY 681 frontline movements, and local patterns of civilian victimization. Fur- thermore, most theories of civilian victimization tend to be static. The . examples outlined above suggest that shifting front lines can influence the propensity of conventional armies to kill civilians when they are also facing a local insurgency. This article demonstrates how an incumbent force13 fighting a conventional war varies the use of violence against civilians as a tool of counterinsurgency according to the movement or stability of front lines. We argue that incumbent forces will respond to increased vulnerability due to changes in the overall pattern of conventional war by inten- sifying violence against civilians. When armed forces are on the move, https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms the front line is under pressure. Moving forces face significant challenges in protecting their communication and supply lines, thus in- creasing the incentive to deter and retaliate against a civilian population that may provide vital information to their enemies. Conversely, when stable conventional front lines are (re)established, the vulnerability of the incumbent troops to irregular warfare decreases, and we expect an incumbent to reduce its use of civilian victimization. This article in- troduces the logic of vulnerability, which is based on changes and disrup- tions to the flow of information and logistical supply at the front line, to explain the variation in civilian victimization by conventional forces. The scope of our argument applies to conventional wars that experience the presence of an insurgency operating against at least one of the , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at contending parties. The examination of conflicts in different time periods and regions suggest that our argument is relevant for all conventional forces that, while fighting a conventional army, advance or retreat through areas inhabited by aggrieved populations. Because the logic of vulnerabil- 26 Sep 2021 at 00:01:48 ity is particularly salient for conventional forces that rely on long sup- , on ply lines, such as armies operating abroad, the incumbents engaging in civilian victimization can be the regular forces of an invading state. Examples include several World War II theaters, such as the German invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) and its invasion of University of Athens the Balkans, during which German troops faced Yugoslav partisan re- . sistance that also assumed a conventional nature.14 Furthermore, these patterns can be extended to other wars, such as the Korean War (1950– 1953),15 the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), and the more recent Eritrean- 13 For definition of incumbent, see Kalyvas 2006. 14 Shepherd 2012. 15 Hastings 2010. https://www.cambridge.org/core https://doi.org/10.1017/S004388712000012X Downloaded from 682 WORLD POLITICS Ethiopian War (1998–2000).16 Our theory also applies to conventional civil wars, which are marked by direct military confrontation, well- . defined front lines, and armed columns.17 In these conflicts, “there is a clear distinction between offensive and defensive actions.”18 Exam- ples include the American Civil War (1861–1865), the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), and the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992–1995). Noticeably, “high levels of external support or external intervention in favor of the rebel side may turn an irregular war into a conventional one,”19 leading to an overlap of conventional and internationalized civil war. Such was the case, for instance, during the late phase of the Viet- nam War. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms We test our hypotheses by studying the violence perpetrated by Ger- man and Fascist forces in Italy during World War II. Italy is a particularly appropriate case to evaluate our theory because the conventional warfare between German and Allied forces clearly alternated between moments of extreme mobility of the front line and periods of prolonged stability. Moreover, the Italian case provides exceptionally fine-grained data on timing, geography, and perpetrators and victims of violence, which we use to construct two original georeferenced data sets at different levels of analysis. To begin, we test the links between conventional operations, incumbents’ vulnerability, and civilian victimization by performing matched difference-in-differences (DD) analyses with data from throughout Italy.

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