Angels in Hell? Civilians’ Competition for Survival during the Korean War

• In Event: Targeting Civilians and Leaders in War

Abstract

How far will civilians go to ensure their own survival during violent conflict? An implicit assumption in the civilian victimisation scholarship is that civilians have angelic nature. However, we argue that civilians can become embroiled in a fierce competition to survive, strategically killing other civilians in indirect and direct ways. Indirectly, civilians can provide information and resources to combatants for other civilians’ victimisation. This happens most likely when displaced people, in times of competition for scarcity, arrive in new areas: natives will denounce aliens to defend local resources. Moreover, we elaborate a complementary argument on direct actions: competing for their lives, civilians can directly kill other civilians. As the enemy’s occupation of a territory becomes imminent, civilians who had collaborated with the retreating armed forces are incentivised to kill potential informants. By selectively eliminating civilians who not only support the enemy but could identify the collaborators, civilians who had sided with the retreating armed actor could pre-emptively remove foreseeable threats to their lives. To evaluate our arguments, we examine the first four months of the Korean War. In this short period of time, the vast majority of South Korea’s territory changed hands twice: after almost three months of North Korean occupation, most of the territory was recovered by UN and South Korean troops in a successful counteroffensive. Interestingly, numerous civilian-to-civilian killings happened during this counteroffensive. In most cases, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was uninvolved in the killings; instead, it was left-leaning civilians who organised the selective elimination of right-leaning civilians. Using a novel spatial dataset on civilian victimisation, we examine whether such civilian-to-civilian killings were driven by competitions for survival between political (right/left) and territorial (native/displaced) cleavages.

Authors

• Seunghoon Chae, University of Leeds

• wukki kim, Korea Military Academy

• Andrea Ruggeri, Università degli Studi di Milano