The Empire Strikes Back: Ethnicity, Terrain, and Indiscriminate Violence in Counterinsurgencies * David Siroky, Arizona State University Valery Dzutsati, Arizona State University Objective. The literature on indiscriminate violence has emphasized how information shapes state capacity and determines whether and where the government employs collective targeting. This article investigates the conditions that influence the government’s ability to obtain intelligence in counterinsurgencies. Specifically, it suggests that the government is more likely to use indiscriminate violence in areas characterized by indigenous ethnic homogeneity and forested terrain. These features increase the cost of acquiring information about the insurgents, and reduce state capacity, thereby increasing the likelihood of indiscriminate violence. Method. We examine district-level data on the Russian government’s use of indiscriminate violence and disaggregated data on ethnicity and terrain across the North Caucasus from 2000 to 2011. Results. The results indicate that ethnically homogeneous and forested areas are significantly more likely targets of indiscriminate violence, and that the effect of ethnicity is markedly stronger when the district is densely forested. Conclusion. This finding expands on previous studies by testing the observable implications of theories linking information to indiscriminate violence, and by providing new micro-level evidence for important human and physical constraints on counterinsurgencies. On December 29 and 30, 2013, unknown Islamic insurgents from the North Caucasus blew up a trolleybus and the main train station in Volgograd, Russia, killing about three dozen people. The attacks were immediately linked to the Winter 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi (Souleimanov, 2014; Dzutsev, 2014), but were merely the most recent in a long- standing “sons of the soil” conflict between the Kremlin and the North Caucasus, where the Russian army has used its entire repertoire of conventional arms to fight the insurgency for the past 20 years (Evangelista, 2002; Gammer, 2006; Souleimanov, 2007). Needless to say, the consequences for civilians caught in the cross-fire have been deadly (Cherkasov, 2001). The war has also been counterproductive, since it has hardened the divide between ethnic Russians and indigenous groups in the North Caucasus, and has expanded the scope of the problem, spreading violence from Chechnya to other republics throughout the North Caucasus: Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, and elsewhere. Numerous interna- tional human rights organization have condemned Russia for its use of indiscriminate violence, including artillery and air strikes on populated places, as well as for the use of extrajudicial killings (Bjorken, 2000; HRW, 2006; ICG, 2014). The Russian government and its armed forces have repeatedly tried to subdue the insurgency, sometimes selectively targeting individual leaders, but often indiscriminately and without apparent regard for ∗ Direct correspondence to David Siroky, School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State University, PO Box 873902, Tempe, AZ 85287-3902 〈david.siroky@asu.edu〉. SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY C  2015 by the Southwestern Social Science Association DOI: 10.1111/ssqu.12192