Ideology matters. The return of this insight to the study of civil war has sparked a new line of literature. Drawing on its insights, I argue that ideology can affect civilian victimisation in two ways. The first is the adoption by armed groups of exclusionary frames that justify the killing of civilians; the second is the need of armed groups for civilian approval – what I call ideological licence – from their home constituencies.Civilian victimisation is expected to peak in places where exclusionary group frames and civilian attitudes are dominant. For the empirical analysis, I turn to The Troubles, the thirty year-long armed conflict between Northern Ireland’s Catholic and Protestant communities. I construct a novel dataset using ideological attitudes, based on a pre-conflict survey among over 1200 respondents across Northern Ireland, and new, detailed casualty data on more than 2700 conflict-related fatalities. Although Catholics were the most lethal side in the conflict, I find that the Protestant community is significantly more likely to kill civilians. This finding is driven by national differences between Catholics and Protestants. Subnational differences in civilian attitudes are found to be less relevant.

The scholarly field on rebel use of sexual violence in armed conflict is divided. While some scholars argue that it principally occurs as a conscious strategy, a weapon of war, others argue that it is primarily a consequence of asymmetrical gender power relations. In this paper it is argued that access to and use of natural resources as means of finance enable rebel actors to commit sexual violence against civilians. As they extract resources from external sources, their accountability to civilians decreases and the use of sexual violence is made more economically viable. To test this, a quantitative analysis of around one hundred rebel actor conflict-episodes was conducted. The results suggest a positive correlation between natural resource financing and sexual violence.