Jessica A. Stanton’s book is written from a completely different theoretical and methodological perspective than my own book, Economy of Force. Yet I can easily recognize it as an extremely impressive example of American political science: rigorous, logical, impeccably researched, and lucidly expressed. Today, civil war is the most widespread and destructive form of organized violence. Violence and Restraint in Civil War is not a history or theory of civil war, civilians, or international law. Rather, it tests a series of empirical hypotheses concerning civilian targeting in civil wars with original quantitative and qualitative data, much of it painstakingly gathered by the author. In our world of internationalized civil war, the headline conclusions are important and clear. Violence against civilians during civil war is the result of strategic choices by government and rebel-group leaders. The way in which governments and rebel groups calculate the most effective level and form of violence against civilians is influenced by their own and their enemy’s relationships with domestic and international constituencies. Violence is strategic and so is the choice to restrain the level of violence. International actors play a significant role in shaping government and rebel-group incentives to target civilians.

Stanton illustrates her central argument through a quantitative analysis of forms of government and rebel-group violence against civilians in all civil wars from 1989 to 2010. This is supplemented by a series of case studies: the war between the Indonesian government and rebels in both Aceh and East Timor; Turkey and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK); and rebel-group actions in El Salvador, Azerbaijan, and the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. Stanton finds that restraint in targeting civilians is more likely when military and political leaders are responsive to their own public’s demands, when they have an inclusive political system, and when regimes are unstable and thus require domestic and international support. Belligerents are more likely to engage in high-casualty civilian control the greater the civilian support for the opponent; engage in high-casualty cleansing if the opponent relies on a small, geographically concentrated civilian base; and engage in terrorism if their own political system is exclusionary and the enemy is responsive to public demands. Most governments and rebel groups have a strong incentive to present themselves as legitimate international actors eligible for political and economic assistance. For Stanton, an important incentive for restraint is the increasing acceptance of international human rights and humanitarian norms since the end of the Cold War. Violence and Restraint wears its theoretical influences lightly, but it clearly sits within the liberal internationalist tradition.

Stanton is interested not only in the scale of violence deliberately targeted against civilians but also in the strategic choice of its form, including terrorism, interrogations and extrajudicial killings, sexual violence, territorial “cleansing,” scorched-earth campaigns, forced displacement, and genocide. She presents a spectrum of violence in civil war, from restraint and low-casualty violence to high-causality violence. However, the designations are thoroughly normative.

For example, Stanton notes that rather than commit genocide, the Turkish government sought to separate Kurdish fighters from civilian support by forcibly depopulating four thousand Kurdish villages, as well as engaging in extrajudicial executions and torture of thousands of pro-independence political activists. Hence, according to the author, throughout the 1980s and 1990s Turkey engaged in a strategy of low-casualty cleansing and state terrorism. In response to international and domestic criticisms, Turkey later moderated some of its most brutal policies. By the 2000s, “the government calculated that high casualty violence against civilians was not worth the risk of jeopardizing the country’s application or EU membership” (p. 283). Even though the overall number of Kurdish civilians killed by the Turkish state in its “low-casualty” war vastly exceeded those killed by rebels, Stanton describes PKK attacks on Turkish civilians as an example of “high-casualty terrorism.” Clearly such designations are political. The designation of what is high and low casualty is not descriptive but normative. Indeed, as Eyal Weizman's The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza (2011) has shown, the power to moderate violence, to be seen to restrain, can produce its own form of political power and even terror among those purportedly spared.

The author addresses an important dimension of the strategic environment in which belligerents in civil wars weigh the costs of civilian targeting: namely, pressures to comply with international human rights standards. This question is central to the framing of the book in the Introduction and Conclusion, but plays less of a role in the analysis and development of the case studies. Indeed, if international actors are fundamental in shaping government and rebel-group incentives to target civilians, then a greater and more immediate factor is military and other assistance from hegemonic powers—the most powerful international constituency there is. Thus, I would be extremely interested to hear Stanton’s hypotheses concerning the relationship between U.S. military and financial aid to belligerents and the degree of restraint exercised by such belligerents in targeting civilians.

Consider the U.S.-backed Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor (1975–99). Stanton’s powerful account of Indonesia’s high-casualty “cleansing,” the forcible relocation in camps, and the burning of villages and crops recalls near identical U.S. practices in Vietnam and British actions in Malaya and Kenya, which I discuss in my own book. In Chapter 1, “Government Restraint in Indonesia,” Stanton argues that Indonesia’s counterinsurgency strategy, essentially what Geoffrey Robinson has called the “institutionalization of terror” (see Robinson, “Rawan Is as Rawan Does: The Origins of Disorder in New Order Aceh,” Indonesia 66 [October 1998]: 140), was fundamentally transformed after the 1998 fall of General Suharto. The new civilian leadership, in need of different forms of international support during the transition to democracy, had to rein in some of the military’s worst excesses, provide some humanitarian assistance, and reduce torture and detention “without due process” (p. 139). Indonesian elites used the opportunity of transition to acknowledge some past atrocities, reform the military and police, and reduce attacks on civilians. However, as Stanton notes, the Indonesian “military’s financial independence has impeded efforts to implement effective civilian control over the military, helping to explain why . . . incidents of military abuse continued even after the transition to democracy” (p. 143).

Is the role of “international actors” in Indonesia’s counterinsurgency campaign best understood in these terms of Cold War neglect and post–Cold War human rights advocacy? In the book, the role played by international actors during Suharto’s reign is primarily one of omission: “[I]nternational actors . . . did not pressure Suharto to alter his policies in Aceh or East Timor” (p. 131). But as an extremely close ally of the United States, General Suharto was able “to avoid any serious international criticism of his counterinsurgency operations and [thus] … had few incentives to exercise restraint” (p. 125). His most important international constituents were also implicated in the slaughter of almost a third of the East Timorese, as arms suppliers and financiers. Suharto was able to kill with such impunity because he could rely on diplomatic and ideological cover provided by the United States, Britain, and Australia, who were more interested in Indonesia’s resource-rich emerging market. In this sense, the role of international actors in Suharto’s choice to commit crimes against humanity was an act of commission. This is not just a Cold War story: after official military aid was cut off and the transition to democracy had begun, the United States continued to train Indonesian troops implicated in the torture and killing of civilians, as Allan Nairn has shown. The end of the Cold War is not always and everywhere the watershed that it often appears, as Iraqi civilians can also attest. The claim to be complying with international human rights standards is often ideological, too.

Violence and Restraint raises fundamental questions about the strategic choice to target or refrain from targeting civilians in civil war. It also provides a good starting point to think through the many roles of international actors in contemporary and internationalized civil wars. As Stanton writes, “when a government is insulated from both domestic and international pressure, it is extremely difficult to prevent atrocities against civilians or to halt abuses once they have begun” (p. 281). But it is integration, rather than insulation, from the global order of capitalist neoimperialism that can generate, as well as prevent, atrocities against civilians. Not all international constituencies are equally influential, and civil wars are not only “a struggle for political power at the domestic level” (p. 32). The overemphasis on international human rights standards can obscure as much as it reveals about the global military and economic order in which civil wars occur and are sustained.