A Licence to Kill? Ideology and civilian victimisation in Northern Ireland

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