Punish or tolerate? State capacity, military oversight, and wartime sexual violence

How does government oversight of the military affect the occurrence of wartime sexual violence? This paper highlights the role of civil-military relations and state capacity in the occurrence of sexual violence. Building on research that examines wartime sexual violence in the principal-agent framework, we propose a game-theoretic model in which the military deploys wartime sexual violence based on its expectation of government oversight. We describe an equilibrium where monitoring is an informative signal of the government's capacity to carry out the punishment. The government monitors strategically and may choose to remain "strategically ignorant" of the military's conduct. Since government oversight is an informative signal of punishment, the military abstains from wartime sexual violence when oversight is high. We examine the empirical implications of the model using data on sexual violence, military oversight, and state capacity and find support for the hypotheses generated by the model.