What Shapes Civilian Beliefs about Violent Events? Experimental Evidence from Pakistan

Daniel Silverman

Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2019, vol. 63, issue 6, 1460-1487

Abstract: Why do civilians in warzones often hold widely divergent beliefs about what is happening in the fighting? While there is a burgeoning literature on the micro-dynamics of armed conflict, variation in civilians’ factual beliefs has received scant attention. Yet such beliefs are critical, as they form the basis for wartime opinion and action. I argue that—particularly for civilians outside the direct “line of fire†—this variation comes not chiefly from an event’s empirical nature, but from civilians’ prior political orientations in the dispute. In order to investigate these dynamics, I fielded a survey experiment in Pakistan in which I manipulated the features of a reported counterinsurgent air strike and then measured civilians’ ensuing beliefs about it. The results show that these beliefs are most driven by the perpetrator’s identity and civilians’ own preexisting attachments. While actual casualty levels matter too, these findings suggest that civilians’ beliefs about conflict events are often deeply biased in nature.

Keywords: asymmetric conflict; belief structure; civilian casualties; civil wars; counterterrorism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022002718791676 (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:jocore:v:63:y:2019:i:6:p:1460-1487

DOI: 10.1177/0022002718791676

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Conflict Resolution from Peace Science Society (International)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().