Alors que le renseignement et l’ONU apparaissent encore comme un oxymore du fait d’une vieille méfiance remontant à la guerre froide et de tentatives clandestines d’instrumentalisation des Nations Unies par ses Etats membres, le renseignement d’intérêt militaire est désormais peu à peu devenu un facteur essentiel d’efficacité opérationnelle des déploiements des Casques bleus. L’analyse de plusieurs cas d’OMP depuis une vingtaine d’années démontre qu’elles sont considérées comme impliquant des missions de renseignement dont l’activité principale est la recherche de l’information par l’observation, en totale conformité avec les principes du maintien de la paix. La multiplication des OMP dans des contextes fortement dégradés et soumis à des menaces asymétriques, rend les OMP dépendantes du renseignement d’intérêt militaire qui est désormais un formidable multiplicateur d’effets et de forces. Ce phénomène induit aussi une augmentation exponentielle des informations recueillies ainsi que la nécessité de mieux les exploiter et les stocker, tant au niveau opératif que stratégique. L’émergence du concept de protection des civils, placé au cœur de chaque mandat d’OMP, rend la détention d’une capacité autonome de renseignement incontournable afin de permettre aux autorités de l’ONU de disposer de l’ensemble des informations pour décider d’agir en toute connaissance de cause. Certes la nature même du renseignement n’est pas compatible avec l’état de multilatéralité car il repose sur une relation de confiance approfondie entre les différents producteurs et consommateurs du renseignement. Acquérir une capacité autonome de recueil et d’analyse nécessite donc de développer un corpus doctrinal adapté aux Nations Unies et de formaliser les actions de renseignement afin de rassurer ses Etats membres. / While Intelligence and the UN still appear as an oxymoron because of an old mistrust that goes back to the Cold war era and secret attempts of instrumentalization of the United Nations by its member States, Military Intelligence has been gradually considered as an essential factor of operational efficiency of peacekeepers deployments. The analysis of former PKOs shows that they are valued as intelligence missions, of which the main activity is the collection through information by observation, in total conformity with peacekeeping principles. The multiplication of the PKOs in strongly deteriorated contexts, and additionally subjected to asymmetric threats, makes PKOs strongly dependent on Military Intelligence, which is henceforth widely considered as a great multiplier of effects and strengths. This phenomenon also leads to an exponential increase of gathered information as well as the necessity of better exploiting them and of storing them, just as well at the operational level, as at the strategic one. The emergence of the concept of protection of the civilians, placed at the core of each and every PKO mandate, makes inescapable the holding of an autonomous Intelligence capacity, in order to allow the senior UN authorities to decide and to act with full awareness. Indeed the nature of Intelligence is hardly compatible with the state of multilateralism, for it relies on a deep relationship of trust between the various producers and consumers of Intelligence. Acquiring an autonomous capacity of collection and analysis thus requires to develop a doctrinal corpus adapted to the United Nations and to formalize the actions of Intelligence in order to reassure its member States

Evacuation is oftentimes the best means to prevent the loss of lives when residents encounter certain hazards, such as hurricanes. Emergency managers and experts make great efforts to increase evacuation compliance but risk area residents may procrastinate even after making the decision to leave, thus complicating response activities. Purpose - This study explores the factors determining evacuees’ mobilization periods, defined here as, the delay time between the decision to evacuate and actual evacuation. The theoretical model that guides this research is built on the protective action decision model (PADM). It captures both the social and psychological factors in the process of transferring risk information to mobilization action. The psychological process of risk communication originates from personalized external information and ends with the formation of risk perception, ultimately influencing evacuees’ mobilizations. Design/methodology/approach – Using structural equation modeling (SEM), the model is tested using survey data collected from Hurricane Rita (2005) evacuees in 2006 (N = 897). The residents of three Texas coastal counties (Harris, Brazoria, and Galveston) are randomly selected and telephone-interviewed. Findings – The findings indicate that mobilizations are affected directly by respondents’ concerns of the threats to their personal lives and costs and dangers on their evacuation trips. The perceptions of evacuees can be related to their exposure, attention, and understanding of the risk information. Research limitations/implications – The results suggest that practitioners pay more attention on the residents’ understanding of different types of risks, their abilities to process the risk information, as well as the means information is delivered. Therefore the public authorities should be more active in protecting evacuees’ properties and assets, as well as encourage evacuees to take closer shelters to avoid potential costs on road. Also the community should be more involved in mobilizing evacuation, as long as social cues can assist evacuees to better comprehend the threat information. Originality/value – This study tests the PADM framework empirically and structurally. It also clarifies the definition of evacuation mobilization using a new operation based on the evacuation groups per household.

Why do some rebel groups perpetrate conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) while others do not? A growing body of research has suggested various explanations, but offers no consensus regarding this puzzling question. At the same time, recent studies have recognized how foreign fighters impact rebel groups’ violence against civilians. Yet, to what extent the presence of foreign fighters could also explain rebel-inflicted CRSV remains unexplored. In this study, I argue that rebel groups with foreign fighters are more likely to perpetrate CRSV than rebel groups without foreign fighters, based on two causal mechanisms. Firstly, foreign fighters pose a risk to the internal cohesion of rebel groups, which is why CRSV is initiated as a socialization tool. Secondly, foreign fighters alleviate the rebel groups dependency on the local civilian community, thereby enabling such violence. The results from logistic regressions, based on a sample of 45 rebel groups between 1989 and 2014, indicate that there is indeed covariation between the presence of foreign fighters and CRSV occurrence. The findings contribute to the ongoing scholarly debate trying to explain variations in CRSV, as well as to the emerging field of foreign fighters' effect on violence against civilians. The results also have relevant policy implications for the international efforts in preventing CRSV.

The aim of this thesis was to investigate whether higher quality troops would perform better in civilian protection within UN-peacekeeping missions. The appropriate method to answer this question was through a Structured Focused Comparison and the most similar system design. The theory suggested that higher quality peacekeepers would be more effective in combating armed groups and directly protecting civilians during civil wars. However, the case comparison did not fully answer the given hypothesis. Instead, it showcased another dilemma that high-quality troops exhibit. These peacekeeping troops seemed reluctant to utilize their high-quality equipment and assets effectively for the mission. Instead, they displayed risk-aversive behaviour and difficulty to cooperate with other troop contributing nations. These findings have important implications for policy making.

United Nations Peacekeeping has proven to be remarkably effective at reducing violence against civilians - without using compellent force. A recent turn towards peace enforcement raises the questions: Does the use of force within a peace enforcement mandate affect the use of violence against civilians by an armed group? If this is the case, by what mechanism does this effect occur? This thesis provides two novel explanations on how the use of force by peacekeepers could affect violence against civilians by the targeted armed group. One predicts decreased- and the other one increased levels of violence. These explanations are tested on the Force Intervention Brigade, which was deployed to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2013. A most similar comparison between the three most powerful armed groups in North Kivu at the time is drawn and examined with the method of structured focussed comparison. The most similar comparison does not reveal a clear correlation. Yet, temporal order as well as anecdotal evidence give tentative support for the main argument of the thesis. It suggests that compellent force against an armed group leads to strengthened deterrence and physical separation, which ultimately results in fewer civilian targeting.

The fragmentation of rebel groups has received extensive attention from scholars and policy-makers alike. Fragmentation has been linked to an increase in civilian deaths, prolonged conflicts, and difficult peace negotiations. Despite the deliberation given to this field, this study argues that rebel governance serves as an explanatory variable that has been overlooked in the literature. This study aims to close this research gap by examining the influence of rebel governance on rebel fragmentation. The thesis suggests that rebel governance intervenes with the opportunity for rebel lieutenants to find the support of networks to create a splinter, and is successful in preventing rebel lieutenants from forming potential splinters. Therefore, it is hypothesized that rebel governance reduces the likelihood of rebel fragmentation. Using data on rebel groups active between 1946-2012, this thesis finds quantitative evidence in support of the hypothesis across all models. Furthermore, support is found that suggests that the more rebel institutions are present, the less likely it is that the rebel group fragments. Additionally, this study employs a survival model of which the results suggest that rebel groups who employ governance take longer to fragment compared to rebel groups without governance.

The intentional killing of civilians by rebel groups is an often observed phenomenon in civil wars. An aspect of civil war that may influence this phenomenon is support by foreign actors to rebel groups. This thesis aims to answer the research question of how external support to rebel groups affects violence against civilians. The theoretical framework used to answer the research question will be built upon two conflicting logics in the current literature. Based on this framework, I argue that the key to explaining how external support affects violence against civilians, lies in the heterogeneity of support and that the various support types can be indexed into two categories, leading to two hypotheses: 1) external support that allows rebels to focus on governance will result in lower levels of rebel one-sided violence, and 2) external support to rebel groups that creates independency from the civilian population results in higher levels of rebel one-sided violence. To test the hypotheses, this thesis uses a quantitative research method and NBRMs using UCDP datasets. The results show that while some types of support align with the expected outcomes, others yield unexpected results, underscoring the importance of considering the varied effects of external support.

Au courant des dernières années, les chercheurs s’intéressant aux guerres civiles ont proposé une multitude de théories pour expliquer pourquoi les groupes rebelles en viennent parfois à cibler les populations civiles. Malgré cette abondance théorique, notre compréhension des processus et des mécanismes menant les combattants de rang inférieur à participer à cette violence demeure, étonnamment, très limitée. Cette carence est en partie due au fait que les travaux existants reposent souvent sur des postulats implicites – et parfois infondés – à propos des combattants se situant au bas de la hiérarchie militaire et qui sont ceux qui mettent en œuvre la violence envers les civils sur le terrain. Ainsi, certaines questions importantes sur les micro-déterminants de la violence au sein des groupes rebelles demeurent, à ce jour, sous-étudiées dans la littérature sur les guerres civiles. Cette thèse pose donc la question suivante : comment les combattants rebelles en viennent-ils à tuer des civils non-armés durant les conflits intra-étatiques? Mobilisant des méthodes mixtes (i.e. analyses statistiques et études de cas) et explorant une variété de cas empiriques, cette thèse puise dans la sociologie et la psychologie pour soutenir que la participation des combattants rebelles à la violence envers les civils peut être comprise comme étant le fruit d’un processus de socialisation. Spécifiquement, la thèse conceptualise cette participation comme découlant des puissants besoins, sanctions, contraintes, influences et incitatifs sociaux auxquels les combattants font face – et qui deviennent souvent prépondérants – durant les guerres civiles. Au fil du temps, ces forces sociales façonnent les dispositions attitudinales et les tendances comportementales des combattants, motivant chez ceux-ci la recherche d’un alignement par rapport aux normes et aux attentes de leurs dirigeants et de leurs pairs. Bien que les trois articles qui forment cette thèse abordent des sujets distincts, ils sont tous informés et unis par ce cadre théorique. Le premier article de la thèse synthétise les théories existantes sur la socialisation des combattants et les incorporent dans un modèle intégré, qui distingue cinq trajectoires pouvant mener ceux-ci à la violence. Ce faisant, l’article spécifie les principaux mécanismes socio- psychologiques au travers desquels les dynamiques de socialisation peuvent encourager la participation à cette violence. Sur cette base, l’article illustre la valeur ajoutée de ce modèle en explorant les trajectoires vers la violence des combattants rebelles durant la guerre civile au Sierra Leone. Le deuxième article explore la manière dont le contexte opérationnel au sein duquel les combattants évoluent peut façonner la nature des influences de socialisation auxquelles ils sont exposés. S’intéressant aux variations entre et au sein des groupes rebelles utilisant des tactiques de guérilla, l’article soutient que le degré « d’intégration opérationnelle » (operational embeddedness) de ces groupes au sein des populations locales influence de manière importante le type de relations que les combattants développent avec les civils. Entamant un dialogue entre les littératures sur la gouvernance rebelle et la socialisation des combattants, cet article mobilise des tests statistiques et une étude de cas qualitative (l’insurrection des Talibans en Afghanistan), mettant en lumière la manière dont l’environnement opérationnel d’un groupe affecte l’essence des dynamiques de socialisation et, par conséquent, le répertoire d’actions des combattants. Le troisième article examine comment les caractéristiques organisationnelles des « new new insurgencies » (NNIs) – tel que définies par Walter – affectent la propension de ces groupes djihadistes transnationaux à cibler les populations civiles. L’article soutient que l’idéologie de plus en plus fratricide des NNIs, le fait que leurs dirigeants ancrent leur autorité dans des sources divines et la présence de combattants étrangers radicalisés au sein de ces groupes créent de puissantes dynamiques de socialisation, qui tendront à motiver une participation accrue à la violence envers les civils. Mobilisant également des analyses quantitatives et une étude de cas qualitative (l’insurrection d’al-Shabaab en Somalie), cet article démontre que les NNIs sont associées à des taux de violence particulièrement élevés par rapport à la fois aux autres types de groupes rebelles, mais aussi aux groupes islamistes antérieurs et non-transnationaux. L’article souligne ainsi l’importance de prendre en considération l’idéologie, l’autorité et les processus de mobilisation transnationaux pour mieux comprendre le comportement rebelle. Ainsi, les trois articles brossent un portrait théorique systématique des processus et des mécanismes au travers desquels les combattants rebelles en viennent à tuer les civils durant les conflits intra-étatiques, plaçant ainsi cette littérature sur une base conceptuelle plus solide. Ce faisant, la thèse met en lumière la considérable diversité des trajectoires, l’inhérente complexité des processus menant à la violence et la fondamentale humanité des combattants rebelles. / Although the civil war literature is replete with theories purporting to explain why rebel groups wield violence against civilians, we still have a surprisingly limited understanding of the processes and mechanisms driving low-ranking combatants to participate in civilian targeting. As I argue in this thesis, this is in part because much of existing research on rebel behavior relies on implicit, unstated, or even unfounded assumptions about the flesh-and-blood individuals who carry out such violence on the ground. Accordingly, a number of fundamental questions about the perpetrators of wartime violence and the micro-level drivers of their behaviors have remained largely under-addressed in the scholarship on civil war violence. This thesis thus asks the following question: how do low-ranking rebel combatants come to kill unarmed civilians during intrastate conflicts? Leveraging mixed methods that combine statistical analyses with case studies and exploring a variety of empirical cases, the thesis draws from the conceptual repertoire of sociology and psychology and contends that violence perpetration can best be understood as a socialization process. Specifically, I conceptualize participation in violence against civilians as deriving from the potent social influences, needs, incentives, sanctions, and constraints that rebel combatants experience – and which often become overriding – in the midst of civil wars. In turn, these powerful social forces progressively shape combatants’ attitudinal dispositions and behavioral tendencies, creating strong pressures for them to seek alignment with the violent norms and expectations of their leaders and peers. While the three articles that form this thesis tackle different topics, they are informed and united by this overarching theoretical approach. In the first article, I synthesize existing theories of combatant socialization and combined them into an integrated framework, which charts five key pathways toward civilian targeting. The article also specifies the main underlying socio-psychological mechanisms through which socializing influences motivate participation in such violence. It then illustrates how these pathways map onto the actual experiences of civil war combatants by examining the drivers of individual participation in violence during the Sierra Leone Civil War. In the second chapter, I explore how the environment in which rebel combatants operate can affect their repertoire of action by shaping the nature of the socializing influences to which they are exposed. Focusing on variations across and within rebel groups waging guerrilla warfare, this article argues that the extent of a group’s operational embeddedness – that is, the degree to which its operational bases are physically integrated within civilian communities – can considerably affect the type of relations that combatants come to nurture with civilians. Bridging the rebel governance and combatant socialization literatures, the article mobilizes cross-national statistical analyses and case study evidence from the Taliban’s insurgency in Afghanistan and finds strong empirical support for these arguments, highlighting the importance of the operational context in shaping socialization dynamics and, consequently, rebel behavior. In the third chapter, I examine whether the organizational characteristics of “new new insurgencies” (NNIs) – as defined by Walter – affect the extent to which these transnational jihadist rebel groups target civilian populations. Specifically, this article argues that the increasingly fratricidal ideology of NNIs, the fact that their leaders anchor their authority claims in divine sources, and the presence of radicalized foreign fighters in their membership base create potent socialization dynamics that are likely to steer combatants toward violence. Using cross-national statistical tests and qualitative evidence from al-Shabaab’s insurgency in Somalia, the article highlights that this new – and increasingly prevalent – breed of insurgents indeed tends to impose a particularly heavy toll on civilian populations, relative to both other types of rebel groups as well as earlier and non-transnational Islamist groups. The article thus emphasizes the need to account for ideology, authority, and membership when studying the determinants of rebel behavior. Together, these three articles thus offer a systematic theoretical account of the processes and mechanisms through which low-ranking rebel combatants come to kill civilians during civil wars, placing debates over the determinants of rebel behavior on a more solid conceptual footing. As a whole, therefore, this thesis advances our understanding of civil war violence by casting the focus on low-ranking combatants and by calling attention to the fundamental diversity of their trajectories, to the inherent complexity of the perpetration process, and to the basic humanity of perpetrators of political violence.

Why do some communities experience more violence against civilians than others? This study argues that civilian communities embracing relationships that bridge salient group divides and norms of non-violence, will commit to actions of protection across those divides, which will in turn limit possibilities for armed actors to commit violence against civilians. On the other hand, communities that do not embrace bridging relationships and instead promote more violent norms, will commit to denunciation of other civilians during war. This will in turn create more opportunities for armed actors to commit violence against civilians. Through interview-based field research I test this theory on two communities in Kosovo. I compare the town of Prizren, largely spared from violence against civilians during the war of 1998-1999, to the town of Gjakova, which experienced higher levels of violence against civilians. The results show support for the theoretical argument. However, I cannot fully account for alternative explanations to the difference in violence. Research on civilian agency during the Kosovo war has been severely lacking, an empirical gap which I aim to partly fill through this research.

A region's evacuation strategy encompasses a variety of areas and needs. Primary among these is the minimization of total evacuation time, represented in models as the clearance time estimate (CTE). A generic testbed simulation network model was developed. An input/output (I/O) analysis was performed to establish a theoretical baseline CTE. Results were compared with simulations; analysis showed that the I/O method underestimated simulated CTE as a function of network size, with a correction factor range of 1.09 to 1.19. A regression model was developed for the generic network. Predictors were total trips, and network size defined as a function of origin-destination distance. Total Trips ranged between 40,000 and 60,000. Holding size constant, R-squared values ranged from 97.1 to 99.3, indicating a high goodness of fit. Holding Total Trips constant, R-squared values ranged from 74.5 to 89.2. Finally, both Total Trips and size were used as predictors; the resulting regression model had an R-squared value of 97.3. This overall model is more useful, since real world situations are not fixed in nature. The overall regression model was compared to a case network. The generic network regression model provided a close CTE approximation; deltas ranged from -4.7% to 8.6%. It was concluded that a generic network can serve as a surrogate for a case network over these ranges. This study developed and evaluated heuristic strategies for evacuation using the generic network. Strategies were compared with a simultaneous departure loading scenario. Six different grouping strategies were evaluated. An initial evaluation was conducted using the generic network, and strategies that showed potential CTE reduction were implemented on the case study network. Analysis indicated that the HF-10 (half-far) grouping for 60k total trips showed potential reduction. A complete simulation was conducted on the case network for all HF scenarios; an ANOVA was run using Dunnett's comparison. Results indicated that the HF grouping with 20% and 30% departure shifts showed potential for CTE reduction. From this it was concluded that the generic network could be used as a testbed for strategies that would show success on a case network.