Mobilization Capacity and Violence Against Local Leaders: Anticlerical Violence During the Spanish Civil War

Abstract

Research on civilian victimization usually treats all civilians as a unitary group. But not all civilians are the same, nor are they killed for the same reasons. This study highlights a form of wartime civilian victimization that is little understood, even if pervasive across conflicts: violence against local leaders. We argue that this category of civilians are pre-emptively targeted because of their potential to mobilize support. Local leaders with greater mobilization capacity are more likely to be killed. We test this argument using original data on clergy killings during the Spanish Civil War. Results show that clerics were more likely to be killed in municipalities where their capacity for mobilizing people against the Republic was higher, making themselves a potential threat to local armed actors. This study highlights the need to disaggregate the category of civilians, which has suffered from conceptual and empirical overaggregation.