Joseph Young

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at American University

This special issue is dedicated to Will H. Moore’s enduring influence on peace science research and the community of peace science scholars. The five pieces in this special issue exemplify Will’s dedication to the development of rigorous concepts and theories that generate testable hypotheses about political violence and are evaluated using novel,...

Many scholars of contentious politics claim there is no such thing as a group that uses only one tactic, yet scholars, pundits, and the public routinely use single-minded terms like protestors, dissidents, and terrorists. Other scholars and research programs suggest that some groups are specialists who tend to stick to a single tactic to achieve th...

Why are some locations more attractive targets for transnational terrorism than others? Remarkably little is known about the local-level conditions and attributes that determine precisely where transnational terror attacks occur within targeted countries. To date, quantitative terrorism research identifies country- or region-level correlates of ter...

How do conciliatory and coercive counterinsurgency tactics affect militant group violence against civilians? Scholars of civil war increasingly seek to understand intentional civilian targeting, often referred to as terrorism. Extant research emphasizes group weakness, or general state attributes such as regime type. We focus on terrorism as violen...

Since 9/11, entertainment media has focused on depictions of terrorism and counterterrorism. How do dramatic depictions of counterterrorism practices—specifically torture—affect public opinion and policy? Using a mixed within-subjects and between-subjects experimental design, we examine how framing affects support for torture. Participants (n = 150...

Why do some people go abroad to engage in other people’s wars? Some studies attempt to discern why individuals choose to fight in distant lands (Malet, 2013) or seek to count how many do so (Hegghammer, 2013). The term foreign fighter has been used nearly exclusively in recent research to describe transnational fighters who join with Islamist organ...

During autumn 2011, Occupy Wall Street protests began rapidly emerging at college and university campuses across the United States. Many of these student groups developed an agenda based on localized issues at their particular college. Still, nearly all Occupy student protests also followed the common goal of bringing change to a system plagued wit...

This study builds on prior cross-national criminological literature by using disaggregated measures of democracy, notably rule of law, to examine the influence key components of democracy have on homicide rates. To assess this relationship, the current study uses two measures of rule of law: (a) a measurement of an independent judiciary; (b) a meas...

Is studying terrorism like studying homicide? We explore the difficulties with examining and defining both concepts. Beyond some of the research challenges, we empirically test whether similar factors predict the occurrence of each outcome. Using a similar set of covariates, we find more similarities in predicting the two violent phenomena than dif...

In the conceptual literature on terrorism, there is no shortage of answers to the question: “What is terrorism?” Indeed, the terrorism literature has been heavily criticized for a deluge of definitions. And yet the booming quantitative terrorism literature generally examines a narrow set of “what is terrorism?”: how country-level factors explain va...

What factors drive politically motivated cyberattacks? Our research focuses on one particular kind of cyberattack: politically motivated, distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS). We argue that denial-of-service attacks are a particular form of a larger category of political contention that is more similar to nonviolent than violent activism. W...

Since the shock of Abu Ghraib, scholars and policymakers have engaged in vigorous debate over both the efficacy and morality of torture. Research on torture has focused on a wide range of attitudes about torture, the use of torture, what constitutes torture, why torture persists, and the efficacy of using torture. These studies have generally exami...

Conventional wisdom suggests that dissident groups use terrorism when they face an overwhelmingly more powerful state, yet attacks in developing countries have predominated in the post-Cold War era, suggesting that terrorism is an increasingly weak state phenomenon. Cross-national studies of terrorism find mixed results for how common measures of s...

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Conventional wisdom holds that terrorism is committed for strategic reasons as a form of costly signaling to an audience. However, since over half of terrorist attacks are not credibly claimed, conventional wisdom does not explain many acts of terrorism. This article suggests that there are four lies about terrorism that can be incorporated in a ra...

Conventional wisdom suggests that reports of terrorism should be sparse in dictatorships, both because such violence is unlikely to result in policy change and because it is difficult to get reliable information on attacks. Yet, there is variance in the number of terrorist attacks reported in autocracies. Why? We argue that differences in the audie...

The prevailing scholarly wisdom is that weak states, or resource-poor states, are the most prone to civil war. Yet many weak states never experience civil war. Why then are some weak states prone to civil war while others are not? The author offers a theory that explains how dissidents and states interact to jointly produce civil war. In sum, state...

Why do some protest movements in Latin America succeed in rolling back privatizations while others fail? This article argues that protests against privatizations have tended to succeed under two conditions. First, privatization's opponents form linkages (or “brokerage”) across multiple sectors of society. Broad coalitions are more likely to achieve...

Why does a dissident group go through phases of violence and nonviolence? Many studies of states and dissidents examine related issues by focusing on structural or rarely changing factors. In contrast, some more recent work focuses on dynamic interaction of participants. We suggest forecasting state–dissident interaction using insights from this dy...

The last thirty years have seen an enormous increase not only in the exonerations of innocent defendants but also academic scholarship on erroneous convictions. This literature has identified a number of common factors that appear frequently in erroneous conviction cases, including forensic error, prosecutorial misconduct, false confessions, and ey...

We examine and test the logic that outbidding among insurgent groups results in more suicide terrorism specifically and more terrorism of any type, which has become a popular argument in recent years. A global analysis of terrorism from 1970–2004 provides scant support for the notion that outbidding increases suicide terrorism. An extension of the...

Asal, Victor et al. (2012) Killing Civilians or Holding Territory? How to Think about Terrorism. International Studies Review, doi:10.1111/j.1468‐2486.2012.01127.x

Michael G. Findley and Joseph K. Young examine India and Peru, two of the most terrorist-affected countries to understand terrorism. In India, most of the violent events occur in the civil war zones, such as Jammu and Kashmir. Punjab also has many events associated with Sikh militants. In an action-based approach, all of these events count as terro...

Why are some terrorist organizations more likely to be targets of transnational counterterrorist operations? Previous work has identified characteristics of the environment or country involved to explain variation in targeting. We focus on characteristics of the violent organization to explain this variation. Using cross-national data on terrorist...

Although uniquely positioned to provide insight into the nature and dynamics of terrorism, overall the field of criminology has seen few empirically focused analyses of this form of political violence. This article seeks to add to the understanding of terror through an exploration of how general levels of violence within a given soci-ety influence...

Does foreign aid reduce terrorism? We examine whether foreign aid decreases terrorism by analyzing whether aid targeted toward certain sectors is more effective than others. We use the most comprehensive databases on foreign aid and transnational terrorism—AidData and ITERATE—to provide a series of statistical tests. Our results show that foreign a...

Using a database of recent articles published in prominent political science journals, we show the rapid increase in terrorism research. Given this increased awareness and attention, we identify several problems that still plague the study of political terrorism including definitional problems that lack empirical tests, not distinguishing among dif...

What explains the variation in terrorism within and across political regimes? We contend that terrorism is most likely to occur in contexts in which governments cannot credibly restrain themselves from abusing their power in the future. We consider a specific institutional arrangement, whether a state has an independent judiciary, and hypothesize t...

While research on who and why individuals engage in terrorism has moved a long way since psychopathological and psychoanalytical approaches dominated, there remain gaps and shortcomings in our knowledge and approaches to understanding who is likely to engage in this form of political violence. Conventional wisdom posits that terrorists are typicall...

Democratic regimes have been linked to terrorism for contending reasons, with some scholars claiming democracy increases terrorism and others claiming it decreases terror. Corroborating evidence has been used for both relationships leading to the following puzzle: why do some democratic regimes seem to foster terrorism while others do not? We offer...

What is the relationship between civil war and terrorism? Recent attempts to unpack the similarities between these types of political violence have either focused on creating actor-based categories (terrorists vs. insurgents) and elucidating the different reasons for being one or the other or comparing and contrasting each to discern whether they h...

Political science is diverse in its methods, theories, and substantive interests. A quick perusal of our flagship journals reveals just how heterogeneous we are, with articles ranging from mathematical treatments of theoretical problems to textual exegesis of Plato, and qualitative studies of single countries standing in contrast to quantitative an...

Civil war combatants use terrorism frequently, yet we understand little about terrorism’s effects on war resolution. It is assumed that the primary combatants to a war hold a veto over resolution, but less attention has been devoted to whether the use of terrorism can derail peace agreements. We contend that even terrorism, a generally low intensit...

In armed internal conflict, violence against civilians is frequent. For insurgent groups, so-called terrorist acts are an important part of conflict with the state and yet there are numerous unanswered questions about the role and uses of terrorism during these conflicts. This paper examines the causes of terrorism in the context of a larger strugg...

The empirical terrorism literature has largely overlooked interstate relations when evaluating predictors of international terrorist attacks, opting to focus on state, group, or individual-level factors to explain patterns of terrorism using analytical methods that are limited to either the origin or target of the attack. In this piece we argue tha...

Oil and other natural resources are linked to many bad outcomes, such as civil war, autocracy, and lack of economic development. Using a state-centered framework for revenue extraction, we identify why oil should also be linked to another bad thing–repression. We argue that where states do not rely on their citizenry for generating revenue, they ar...

Using a database of recent articles published in prominent political science journals, we show the rapid increase in terrorism research. Given this increased awareness and attention, we identify several problems that still plague the study of political terrorism including definitional problems that lack empirical tests, not distinguishing among dif...

What explains the variation in terrorism within and across political regimes? We contend that terrorism is most likely to occur in contexts in which governments cannot credibly restrain themselves from abusing their power in the future. We consider a specific institutional arrangement, whether a state has an independent judiciary, and hypothesize t...

While a large literature explores the effect that regime type has on personal integrity rights violations, few studies have explored a state-centric approach to understanding these violations. I develop an argument that focuses on the leaders of the state and the incentives that they have to protect or violate rights. Moving beyond the democracy-au...

We present two simulations designed to convey the strategic nature of terrorism and counterterrorism. The first is a simulated hostage crisis, designed primarily to illustrate the concepts of credible commitment and costly signaling. The second explores high-level decision-making of both a terrorist group and the state, and is designed to highlight...

Leftists seem to be on the rise in Latin America, but it is unclear to what extent this impacts policy. Thus, a crucial question hangs over this apparent “shift” in regional preferences: does the left have any real options to offer? Or in Latin America in an age of globalization, “what's left for the left?” The contending perspectives are compared,...

The prevailing wisdom among scholars of civil war is that weak states, or resource-poor states, are the most prone to this form of political violence. Yet, a large portion of resource poor states never experience civil war. What can account for why resource-poor states, like El Salvador, are prone to civil war while resource-poor states, such as Bh...

From as early as the Roman Empire to the present day, governments have grappled with how best to respond to political violence from organized insurgent groups. In response to insurgent groups, some governments have emphasized a direct military response or what is often called ‘attrition’. Other states have stressed a softer, political strategy or w...

Why do some counterinsurgency campaigns pacify while others stoke insurgency? This question is salient in present day Iraq. One of the primary tactics Americans are using to diffuse the Iraqi insurgency is direct military strikes to reduce the capabilities of insurgents. Using large scale detentions and military operations, the US has attempted to...

One of the most important debates in the field of international relations is over the effect of regime type on militarized conflict. This debate, however, has rarely extended to how regime type influences other aspects of foreign policy. Using a computer simulated intergroup prisoner's dilemma, we investigate whether democratic decisionmaking group...

International negotiations can be modeled as a two-level process that involves competing interests within and between groups. This modified simulation of the classic prisoner's dilemma introduces students to the negotiation process and challenges them to consider how different decision structures can affect outcomes. Students fill both leadership a...

Which actions by governments stoke or pacify an insurgency? Scholarly research on the topic has often been relegated to the study of this question at the country level, comparing across large units and rarely looking inside the state. Our research focuses on the primary actors in a contest for authority within a state: the government, dissidents, a...

Abstract will be provided by author.