Historical Protests and Violence Against Civilians: Evidence from the Korean War

Abstract: How do we explain the geographic variation in violence against civilians during wars? In this paper, I argue that regions that have records protests before the war experience more violence during future armed conflicts. Protests signal the presence of prewar conflict among civilians. I construct an original data set on civilian killings during the Korean War (1950-1953) and utilize data on prewar peasant protests to test the impact of prewar civilian conflict on wartime civilian killings. I find that a region that has more records of peasant protests before the war experience a significantly higher number of civilian killings. I further find that once the conflict matures, the impact of prewar civilian conflict decline, as armed actors and civilians focus more on events that happened immediately before occupation to sort out and punish defectors.