Tying the Hands of Militants: Civilian Targeting and Societal Pressures in the Provisional IRA and Palestinian Hamas

Abstract

While social pressures have long been a theme in the targeting scholarship, this article develops and evaluates a theory for how social forces affect militant groups’ tactical choices to target civilians. It first identifies a class of groups that exhibit community ties, which occur when a group operates in proximity to a referent society that is geographically concentrated and comprised of dense social networks. Through observable indicators of endorsement and condemnation to their tactics, groups gain information and are subjected to normative pressures from community members, which constrain their leaders’ willingness to harm civilians. The argument is evaluated through within-case process tracing in qualitative case studies of the Provisional IRA during the Troubles and Palestinian Hamas in the 1990s. The findings demonstrate that both groups modified their tactics in conformity with social pressures, even when it was costly and contrary to their ideology, strategic, and organizational goals.