Recent research has drawn attention to the role of socialization in shaping the behaviors of rebel combatants during civil wars. In particular, scholars have highlighted how vertical and horizontal socialization dynamics can bring combatants to engage in a range of wartime practices, including the use of violence against civilians. This article synthesizes existing theories of combatant socialization and combines them into an integrated framework, which casts the focus on individual pathways toward civilian targeting and specifies the underlying sociopsychological mechanisms through which socializing influences motivate participation in violence. Specifically, the article charts five key pathways that operate through different mechanisms and that are based upon varying degrees of internalization regarding the legitimacy of civilian targeting. In each case, I also identify a number of unit-level factors that are likely to make a given pathway particularly prevalent among combatants. The article then illustrates how these pathways map onto the actual experiences of civil war combatants by examining the drivers of individual participation in violence against civilians among low-ranking members of the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone. The case study evidence highlights the equifinal nature of violence perpetration during civil wars, shedding light on the different social needs, influences, sanctions, and constraints that may motivate involvement in violence. By analyzing rebel behavior through the prism of perpetrator studies, this article thus seeks to establish the civil war literature on firmer theoretical grounds, providing a synthetic account of the individual experiences, motives, and trajectories that are often left unaddressed in this body of research.

中文翻译：

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内战暴力的途径：战斗社会化和参与平民瞄准的驱动因素

最近的研究引起了人们对社会化在内战期间塑造叛军战斗人员行为的作用的关注。特别是，学者们强调了纵向和横向社会化动态如何使战斗人员参与一系列战时实践，包括对平民使用暴力。本文综合了现有的战斗员社会化理论，并将它们组合成一个综合框架，将重点放在针对平民的个人途径上，并详细说明社会化影响激发参与暴力的潜在社会心理机制。具体而言，本文描绘了通过不同机制运作的五种关键途径，这些途径基于对平民目标合法性的不同程度的内化。在每种情况下，我还确定了一些可能使特定途径在战斗人员中特别普遍的单位层面因素。然后，本文通过研究塞拉利昂革命联合阵线低级别成员中个人参与暴力侵害平民的驱动因素，说明这些途径如何映射到内战战斗人员的实际经历。案例研究证据突出了内战期间暴力行为的平等性质，揭示了可能激发参与暴力的不同社会需求、影响、制裁和约束。通过从犯罪者研究的角度分析叛乱行为，本文试图在更坚实的理论基础上建立内战文献，提供对个人经历的综合描述，