Casualties and Support for Violent Conflict in Civil Wars

摘要

The casualty effect is a widely studied explanation of public support for war in the context of overseas military operations, yet work on the effect of casualties on support for intrastate war is scant. This paper examines the impact of local casualties on support for using military action as a conflict resolution method for intrastate war, using data from two public opinion surveys, collected in Turkey in the absence and presence of large-scale violence, and an original dataset for the local casualties. We find that local-level casualties on average increase the support for military action in ethnic wars.