What Determines Military Legitimacy? Evidence from the Battle of Mosul in Iraq

Benjamin Krick (), Jonathan Petkun () and Mara Revkin ()
Additional contact information
Benjamin Krick: Ph.D. Student, Duke University Department of Political Science
Jonathan Petkun: Associate Professor, Duke University School of Law
Mara Revkin: Associate Professor, Duke University School of Law and Department of Political Science

No 402, HiCN Working Papers from Households in Conflict Network

Abstract: The legitimacy of armed forces in the eyes of civilians is widely recognized as crucial for the success of counterinsurgency. However, the micro-determinants of "military legitimacy" are poorly understood. We argue that perceptions of military legitimacy are shaped by two key dimensions of warfare: just cause and just conduct. Leveraging variation during the battle to liberate the Iraqi city of Mosul from the Islamic State, we evaluate our theory with an iterative mixed-methods design combining household survey data, satellite imagery, and interviews. Civilians living in neighborhoods where counterinsurgents' tactics and strategies reflected less concern for civilian protection view counterinsurgent forces as less legitimate than civilians elsewhere. These results persist after conditioning for personal experiences with 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.

Keywords: Natural Experiments; Iraq; Legitimacy; Civilian Harm; Counterinsurgency; Civil Wars (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 65 pages
Date: 2023-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hicn.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/HiCN-WP-402-2.pdf (application/pdf)

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:hic:wpaper:402

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in HiCN Working Papers from Households in Conflict Network
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tilman Brück () and () and () and ().