Rebel attacks on civilians constitute one of the gravest threats to human security in contemporary armed conflicts. But why do rebel groups kill civilians? The dissertation approaches this question from a strategic perspective, trying to understand when and why rebel groups are likely to target civilians as a conflict strategy. It combines quantitative studies using global data on rebel group violence with a case study of the civil war in Mozambique. The overall argument is that rebel groups target civilians as a way of improving their bargaining position in the war relative to the government. The dissertation consists of an introduction, which situates the study in a wider context, and four papers that all deal with different aspects of the overall research question. Paper I introduces new data on one-sided violence against civilians, presenting trends over time and comparing types of actors and conflicts. Paper II argues that democratic governments are particularly vulnerable to rebel attacks on civilians, since they are dependent on the population. Corroborating this claim, statistical evidence shows that rebels indeed kill more civilians when fighting a democratic government. Paper III argues that rebels target civilians more when losing on the battlefield, as a method of raising the costs for the government to continue fighting. A statistical analysis employing monthly data on battle outcomes and rebel violence, supports this argument. Paper IV takes a closer look at the case of Mozambique, arguing that the rebel group Renamo used large-scale violence in areas dominated by government constituents as a means for hurting the government. Taken together, these findings suggest that violence against civilians should be understood as a strategy, rather than a consequence, of war.

Scholars have in the recent decades actively been searching for answers for why actors of war sometimes choose - and other times choose not - to direct violence against civilians. However, their focus has been largely on one-sided violence during wartime, and much less on post-conflict occurrences. This study aims to fill this research gap by examine in what way wartime livels of casualties affect post-conflict levels of one-sided violence. A total of 164 conflict episodes and their post-conflict periods between 1989 and 2016 show that there is a significant positive correlation between wartime one-sided violence intensity and post-conflict one-sided violence intensity. A similar correlation is not found between battle-related deaths and post-conflict one-sided violence, although the result shows that rebel groups are more prone to direct violence against civilians after high levels of wartime battle-related deaths than after low levels.

The internationalisation of conflicts has made the study of the effects of external support a prominent subfield within peace and conflict studies. How supporting states affect conflict strategies and changes the conflict dynamic has been the prime concern of this thesis. I have argued that when a government actor is supported by an external state with high soft power, in the form of political and economic capital, the government is less inclined to use one-sided violence as a conflict strategy. By using the principal- agent theory as a model to explain the relationship between the supporter and the supported state, I have found support for my argument. The government of the Central African Republic has conducted low levels of one-sided violence when supported by the soft power France. The government of South Sudan, on the other hand, has conducted high levels of one-sided violence when supported by the non-soft power Uganda. By coming to this conclusion, this paper has introduced soft power as an important concept in peace and conflict studies while also helping to elucidate the role of external supporters in conflict strategies. Future research should develop on the findings in this thesis by controlling for other possible explanations to why one-sided violence decreases depending on the characteristics of the support and include a greater number of cases.

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.

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