🔎 What This Paper Looks At

Violence against civilians is often treated as a single category, but civilians differ in ways that shape why they are targeted. This paper focuses on violence against local leaders — a widespread yet understudied form of wartime victimization — and argues that local leaders are preemptively targeted because of their potential to mobilize support.

🗂️ Evidence From New Data on Clergy Killings

• Original data on clergy killings during the Spanish Civil War are used to test the argument.
• Analysis leverages variation across municipalities to link clerical killings to the clerics’ capacity to mobilize people against the Republic.

📈 Key Findings

• Clerics were more likely to be killed in municipalities where their capacity for mobilizing people against the Republic was higher.
• Greater mobilization capacity made local leaders potential threats to local armed actors, increasing the likelihood of preemptive violence.

⚖️ Why This Matters

These findings show that treating all civilians as a single group obscures important variation in victimization. Conceptual and empirical overaggregation of civilians masks the distinct logic behind attacks on local leaders, underscoring the need to disaggregate victim categories in studies of wartime violence.