Blowback or overblown? Why civilians under threat support invasive foreign intervention

Austin J Knuppe
Additional contact information
Austin J Knuppe: Department of Political Science, Utah State University

Journal of Peace Research, 2022, vol. 59, issue 4, 478-494

Abstract: How do military tactics shape civilian support for foreign intervention? Critics contend that invasive tactics undermine popular support by alienating the civilian population. Counterexamples suggest that civilians will support invasive tactics when foreign counterinsurgents are willing and able to mitigate a proximate threat. I reconcile these divergent findings by arguing that civilian support is a function of threat perception based on three interacting heuristics: social identity, combatant targeting, and territorial control. To evaluate my theory, I enumerate a survey among Iraqi residents in Baghdad during the anti-ISIS campaign. Respondents preferred more invasive tactics when foreign counterinsurgents assisted the most effective local members of the anti-ISIS coalition. Across sectarian divides, however, respondents uniformly opposed the deployment of foreign troops. These findings suggest that in regime-controlled communities, civilians will support counterinsurgents who are invasive enough to mitigate insurgent threats, but not too invasive as to undermine local autonomy.

Keywords: civilian support; counterinsurgency; foreign intervention; Iraq; ISIS (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00223433211044059 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:joupea:v:59:y:2022:i:4:p:478-494

DOI: 10.1177/00223433211044059

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Peace Research from Peace Research Institute Oslo
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().