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Promise and Pitfalls of Terrorism Research
Abstract
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 different types of terrorism, and using the wrong unit of analysis when designing research. After identifying these problems—especially as they relate to the quantitative study of terrorism—we suggest some solutions. We then apply these suggestions to investigate whether changing the definition of terrorism, different types of terrorism, or changing the unit of analysis affects key predictors of terror events cross-nationally. One of our tests consists of varying the unit of observation to include directed dyads, which offers the potential to test some of the many strategic models of terrorism. Our analysis suggests that varying definitions of terrorism, such as military vs. non-military targets, might not be that consequential, whereas different types of terrorism, such as domestic vs. transnational, could be driven by fundamentally different processes. We also conclude that modeling transnational terrorism differently using directed dyads yields new and interesting insights into the process of terrorism.
... Some studies that show the effect of the September 11 terrorist attacks on terrorism use numerical data to demonstrate this effect more thoroughly (i.e., Young & Findley, 2011). In this respect, Young and Findley (2011) state that the number of academic studies published after the September 11 attacks is ten times greater than those published between 1980 and 2001. ...
... Some studies that show the effect of the September 11 terrorist attacks on terrorism use numerical data to demonstrate this effect more thoroughly (i.e., Young & Findley, 2011). In this respect, Young and Findley (2011) state that the number of academic studies published after the September 11 attacks is ten times greater than those published between 1980 and 2001. Similarly, Schmid, Forest, and Lowe (2021) found more than 40.000 books on terrorism on Amazon.com, and the clear majority of these books were published after 2001. ...
... However, it was found that studies on terrorism in Turkey began to increase significantly in 2003, and academic studies peaked in 2017. It is underlined by many academic studies that studies in terrorism literature around the world have increased since 2001 (i.e., Silke & Petersen, 2017;Young & Findley, 2011). In this study, it is seen that the studies in Turkey started to rise in 2001, and in this direction, the study's finding is consistent with the literature. ...
The September 11 terrorist attacks increased the academic community's interest in terrorism. Every year, thousands of academic studies on terrorism are published in various parts of the world. In Turkey, which has been struggling with the problem of terrorism for many years, terrorism is at the forefront of the issues that attract the attention of the academic community. In this context, this study focuses on the interest in terrorism studies in Turkey and the evolution of terrorism studies in Turkey from the past to the present. This study aims to give descriptive information about the Turkish terrorism literature. I first analyzed 994 academic studies with the "Structural Topic Model" (STM) method and determined that the Turkish terrorism literature focused on three main topics. In the second stage, variables such as the number of publications and citations were analyzed to show the change in the literature over the years. As a result of the second analysis, I find that there are three main periods between 1992 and 2022. Finally, I find that articles constitute the majority of the studies in the Turkish terrorism literature. Despite these remarkable findings, the study has some significant limitations. The most important limitation is that only Turkish publications were focused on, and this research did not include English studies written by Turkish scholars.
... The economic, political, and social determinants of terrorism are widely studied (e.g. Young & Findley, 2011;Wilson & Piazza, 2013;Gaibulloev & Sandler, 2018). In this literature, the di↵usion of terrorism refers to a particular aspect, namely spatial links connecting countries to each other, which allow for the possibility that terrorism in one national context is influenced by terrorism in other states. ...
... To mitigate this concern, we control for several relevant country attributes that are both spatially clustered and potentially related to terrorism (e.g. Krieger & Meierrieks, 2011;Young & Findley, 2011;Wilson & Piazza, 2013;Gaibulloev & Sandler, 2018), which allows us to accurately identify a real spatial di↵usion e↵ect -and it is our aim then to see how cultural proximity between migrants and host societies alters this. First, Gaibulloev et al. (2017, 15) recommend controlling for a state's involvement in foreign policy. ...
... We find that whereas larger countries attract more terrorist attacks, and thus Population (ln) is positively and significantly correlated with the incidence of terrorism, higher income is associated to a lower degree of terrorism, as GDP per capita (ln) is negatively signed (e.g. Young & Findley, 2011). Similarly, and consistent with earlier studies, we find that the lagged dependent variable is positive and significant; in other words, terrorism displays temporal dependencies and a higher number of terrorist attacks in the previous year is correlated with more terrorism in the current period. ...
What are the security consequences of population movements? This article seeks to provide a better understanding of when, how, and under what conditions terrorism diffuses across countries via migration flows as a vehicle. We contribute to this debate by studying the influence of migrants’ cultural proximity to the native population of their host country. It is argued that cultural closeness can contain such terrorism diffusion. Similarities in societal norms, customs, or beliefs seem likely to induce trust in the social interactions between migrants and locals. This, in turn, makes it more difficult for terrorist organizations to exploit transnational population movements for radicalization and as a recruitment pool – one of the core mechanisms linking population flows with terrorism. Conversely, migrants from culturally distant societies may find it more challenging to integrate into their new homes. A fertile ground for terrorist organizations for the recruitment of new followers is thereby more likely. Our analyses present consistent evidence that the effect of terrorism diffusing across countries weakens when accounting for cultural closeness between migrants and host societies. This key finding of our research has crucial implications for policy’s and scholars’ understanding of terrorism, the diffusion of terrorism across countries, and the security consequences of population movements.
... As such, how this label is defined and applied is a persistent issue for studies of political violence (see Lizardo 2008;Tilly 2004). Long before the veritable explosion of research on terrorism that followed the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States (see Young and Findley 2011), a review of terrorism scholarship identified more than a hundred different definitions (Schmid and Jongman 1988). In particular, definitions tend to draw distinctions on the basis of actors' aims, the intensity of violence, or the targets of violence, such as whether the targets are civilian or military (Goodwin 2006;Weinberg, Pedahzur, and Hirsch-Hoefler 2004). ...
... In particular, definitions tend to draw distinctions on the basis of actors' aims, the intensity of violence, or the targets of violence, such as whether the targets are civilian or military (Goodwin 2006;Weinberg, Pedahzur, and Hirsch-Hoefler 2004). These efforts to define terrorism are oriented largely toward distinguishing so-called terrorists from other perpetrators of political violence (Goodwin 2006;Young and Findley 2011) and other movement organizations more generally (Beck 2008(Beck , 2015Beck and Schoon 2018;Gunning 2009). Even so, Brannan, Esler, and Strindberg's (2001) observation holds true that "a great number of scholars are studying a phenomenon, the essence of which they have (by now) simply agreed to disagree upon" (p. ...
The authors examine how print news media classify militant groups as terrorist. Drawing on a relational view of news media and contentious politics, the authors develop a theory of repertoires of contention and classification. The authors argue that news media interpret the social standing of actors from the categories implied by the tactics they use and that variation in tactical repertoires explains the variation in classification among different groups and within individual groups over time. Using newly collected annual data on media coverage of 746 groups across 589,779 news articles from 1970 through 2013, statistical analyses support the authors’ argument. Moreover, consistent with scholarship on the evolution of political violence, the authors show that the effects of repertoires are sensitive to historical developments and vary in relation to key events, further supporting a relational repertoire view of the classification of terrorism.
... For example, the US has slowly become a global leader in incarceration rates, moving from 222 prisoners per 100,000 in 1980 to 760 in 2008. 6 We add a battery of control variables to take into account the most important determinants of terrorism [e.g., 19,20,21,37,56,67,65,57,18,25,26]. First, we include information on per-capita GDP and population as wealthier and less populous states are likely to experience significantly less terrorism [43,52]. ...
... In terms of control variables, our results are consistent with recent studies on the economic, political, and social causes of terrorism [e.g., 67,65,57,18,25,26]. The coefficient of Economic Globalization is positive and significant at conventional levels when examining the total level of terrorism or transnational terrorism: a country's economic openness and global integration are thus associated with more terrorist attacks, mostly transnational ones. ...
While policymakers frequently praise the impact of law enforcement for addressing the threat of terrorism, several cases suggest that the imprisonment of terrorists and potential perpetrators may actually lead to (more) radicalization and, ultimately, a higher risk of terrorism. We take systematic stock of the arguments linking terrorism with incarceration and analyze newly collected data on worldwide prison populations. The results from quantitative analysis highlight that an increase in prison population is correlated with a decline in the number of terrorist attacks, in particular its domestic form. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this finding for academic and policy circles.
... Young ve Findley, terörizm alanındaki makaleleri inceledikleri araştırmada, 11 Eylül 2001'den sonra "Journal of Conflict Resolution" dergisinden çıkan makale sayısının 11 Eylül 2001'den önceki döneme oranla yaklaşık 5 kat daha fazla olduğunu ve bu dergide terörle mücadeleye yönelik sonuçlara ulaşan araştırma ve/veya derlemelerin yer aldığını belirtmişlerdir. 26 Lum ve ark., terörle mücadelenin hem disiplinler arası çalışılması gereken bir alan olduğunu hem de etkili bir mücadele stratejisi geliştirilmesi gereken siyasi, ekonomik, sosyal nedenlere bağlı dinamik bir yapı olduğunu ifade etmektedirler. 8 Her ne kadar Lum ve ark. ...
... Lisansüstü tezlerin yanı sıra terörizm ile ilgili üretilen makale sayılarında da 2000'li yılların başından itibaren önemli ölçüde bir artış görülmektedir. 2000'li yıllarda üretilen "Studies in Conflict and Terrorism" ve "Terrorism and Political Violence" dergilerinde çıkan makale sayısı 1980'li yıllarda çıkan makale sayısına oranla yaklaşık 10 kat daha fazladır.26 Terörle ilişkili tezlerin üretildikleri üniversitelere bakıldığında; Kara Harp Okulu Komutanlığı, Polis Akademisi Başkanlığı, Gazi Üniversitesi, İstanbul ...
... 56 However, several others find evidence of a significant relationship between economic conditions and participation in violent organizations. First, Young and Findley (2011) discover that a state's overall level of economic inequality is more likely to be associated with suicide terrorism. Relatedly, a loss of employment opportunities and underemployment may also be predictors of participants' involvement in terrorist organizations. ...
... 62 In cases of barred political access, women could find reprieve in terrorist organizations where they can contribute to making a change even as a violent actor and possibly a suicide bomber. Therefore, we elaborate on Young and Findley's (2011) finding of no relationship between political access and suicide terrorism by probing the relationship between female political access and female suicide terrorism. We argue that more female political access is likely to be associated with lower levels of female suicide attacks. ...
In recent years, an upward trend in terrorist attacks has mirrored an increase in suicide attacks. According to our preliminary analysis, the events of September 11th marked a sea change in the number of terrorist attacks. While a rich literature has evaluated why terrorists participate in suicide attacks, none have considered the uptick in volume after 9/11, and fewer yet have considered how female fighters may be contributing to this. We evaluate how both structural and female-specific factors affect the likelihood of female fighter suicide attacks. Recent literature discovered a trend in terrorist groups using females as suicide bombers due to cultural norms that permit them to get closer to targets. We test our theory using data from the Chicago Project on Security and Threats Suicide Attack Database (CPOST-SAD) and various datasets from the Quality of Government (QOG) compendium for the 1986–2016 time period. We construct a series of models that consider both female-specific and structural factors that could explain variation in the number of female suicide attacks. Our results indicate that our models encompass relatively stable patterns. Female political empowerment, female educational attainment, and female employment rates are significant and positive in our post-9/11 models, indicating that they may increase female suicide attacks. Democracy is a relevant structural factor and generally yields a positive effect on female suicide attacks across both time periods and multiple models. Ethnic fractionalization is significant in both time periods but yields a negative effect before 9/11 and a positive effect in the later period.
... Finally, in applying Sutherland's focus to society's reaction to the breaking of laws, it is essential to note that political violence, especially in democracies, is often intended to communicate a message to a broader audience (Hoffman, 2006;Young & Findley, 2011). As described by Brian Jenkins (1974), "Terrorism is theatre: terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead". ...
On January 6, 2021, thousands of supporters of then-President Trump marched on the U.S. Capitol to disrupt the congressional tallying of votes – ultimately resulting in five deaths and hundreds of injuries. Since then, polling in the United States has continued to indicate support for political violence– with credible estimates suggesting that this attitude may be held by between 10 and 76 million Americans.
Around the same time, millions of Americans participated in civil rights demonstrations following the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor – advocating for changes to policing practices. Despite the presence of outside
agitators and heavy-handed police tactics, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement
overwhelmingly abstained from violent mobilization.
My dissertation addresses a key question behind this issue. Why do some people support political violence, while others do not? As the January 6 and BLM supporters contrast, key narratives from political leaders and precise attribution of grievances play a critical role. Building upon strain and grievance-based theories, I propose the Politically Salient Stress model of support for political violence, centering the intersection of impacts, attribution, and narratives. I find that generalized ‘strain’ or grievance approaches are ineffective at explaining
support, while theorized mechanisms of the PSS model show promise. I further find support for the PSS approach, with narratives among a far-right online community, and increases in ingroup empathy leading to greater support for political violence.
To test these relationships and mechanisms I integrate quantitative approaches and
leverage data from three sources: a nationally representative survey, a far-right online community forum, and a sample of U.S. adults. For the nationally representative survey, I examine how strains and perceived legitimacy of institutions correspond with respondent criminality and support for political violence. I then assess acute shifts in violent rhetoric following salient political speech on a far-right web-forum in the lead-up to the January 6 attack.
Finally, I consider the divergent impacts of empathy on support for political violence using a survey experiment on a sample of U.S. adults. Combining these approaches, this dissertation tests key hypotheses from the PSS model and illustrates the utility of disaggregating strains.
... Azam and Thelen (2008) found that countries receiving more foreign aid had fewer terrorist attacks, as did countries with a higher average level of education. And Young and Findley (2011) found that aid targeted to promote education, health, and civil society dampens terrorist activities. Likewise, Savun and Tirone (2018) argued that aid for governance and civil society could discourage participation in and support for terrorist activity by improving the country's political conditions. ...
Can foreign aid reduce violence in recipient countries? Empirical studies on the aid–conflict nexus have had mixed results. This paper argues that foreign aid can alleviate political violence in the recipient country, especially when it contributes to economic growth. To test this hypothesis, I collected data on aid-receiving countries in Asia from 1980 to 2010 and empirically examined the relationships among development aid, winning coalition size, economic growth, civil wars, and domestic terrorism using a moderated mediation model. I find that the impact of foreign aid on economic growth depends on the size of the winning coalition. Countries with larger winning coalitions tend to have faster economic growth. And consequently, these countries are less susceptible to civil wars and domestic terrorist attacks.
... Inquiries into whether and how health and security are integrated in national policy and when states respond to terrorist attacks remain scarce. Furthermore, there are continued debates pertaining to the definition of terrorism, including which characteristics should be determinant for labelling an event as a terrorist attack (Schmid 1992;Weinberg et al. 2004;Young and Findley 2011). This also has implications for states' handling of terrorism and adjacent phenomena, such as violent crime. ...
Terrorist attacks threaten the security of states and individuals, and often spur widespread state responses once they have occurred. Recent research has focused on health contingency in relation to terrorism and unveiled divergence in terms of how European countries approach this task. To understand more about this divergence, it is relevant to investigate how states define the issue of terrorism in contingency policies. The current study utilized theories of framing as part of policymaking and document analysis with a thematic analysis approach, to scrutinize to what extent terrorism was framed as a security issue in health contingency in relation to terrorist attacks in Norway and France, and how this affected policy outcomes. The analysis unveiled that a securitized frame was not prominent in the Norwegian approach to health contingency. In the French material, however, terrorism was described as a threat to national security. Second, terrorism response within the healthcare field was described as a form of “nonmilitary defense,” clearly positioning the healthcare system in the response to this national security threat. The framing of terrorism in policy documents was linked to diverging policy responses in the two countries. The most distinct difference is that victims of terrorism hold particular rights in France, but not in Norway. This entails that in France, the definition of terrorism, and whether specific events are defined as terrorism or not, in part become decisive for the help received.
... Our main empirical strategy employs a negative binomial regression model in line with the associated literature because the dependent variable constitutes a non-negative count variable and exhibits overdispersion (Walsh and Piazza, 2010;Young and Dugan, 2011;Young and Findley, 2011;Piazza, 2013;Gaibulloev et al., 2017). For region i and year t, we estimate: ...
This paper first introduces a theoretical formalization connecting a polity’s income level to terrorism. Our framework can accommodate different underlying assumptions about individual- and society-level grievances, yielding competing hypotheses. We then construct a panel database to study terrorism for 1527 subnational regions in 75 countries between 1970 and 2014. Results consistently imply an inverted U-shape that remains robust to incorporating a comprehensive set of region-level covariates, region- and time-fixed effects, as well as estimating an array of alternative specifications. The threat of terrorism systematically rises as low-income polities become richer, peaking at GDP/capita levels of ≈ US), but then falls consistently above that level. This pattern emerges for domestic and transnational terrorism alike. While peaks differ by perpetrator ideology, the inverted U shape also prevails across ideology-specific subsamples. In sum, alleviating poverty may first exacerbate terrorism, contrary to much of the proposed recipes advocated since 9/11.
... The phenomenon of terrorism is not new (see for a brief history), but the studies on this topic increased exponentially after several striking terrorist incidents that took place in the West, as the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States; the March 11, 2004 attacks in Madrid; or the July 7, 2005 attacks in London (Young & Findley, 2011), among others. The subject has been of interest to several disciplines, although it has been mostly addressed by political science and international relations, followed by criminology, penology and law (Haghani et al., 2022). ...
Imagine that you are a researcher interested in disentangling the underlying mechanisms that motivate certain individuals to self-sacrifice for a group or an ideology. Now, visualize that you are one of a few privileged that have the possibility of interviewing people who have been involved in some of the most dramatic terrorist attacks in history. What should you do? Most investigations focused on terrorism do not include empirical data and just a handful of fortunate have made face-to-face interviews with these individuals. Therefore, we might conclude that most experts in the field have not directly met the challenge of experiencing studying violent radicalization in person. As members of a research team who have talked with individuals under risk of radicalization, current, and former terrorists, our main goal with this manuscript is to synopsize a series of ten potential barriers that those interested in the subject might find when making fieldwork, and alternatives to solve them. If all the efforts made by investigators could save the life of a potential victim, prevent an individual from becoming radicalized, or make him/her decide to abandon the violence associated with terrorism, all our work will have been worthwhile.
... By contrast, reports of cyberterrorism attacks targeting civilian infrastructure have only begun to emerge in the last three years (Sanger and Perlroth 2021), and so the public may simply not have paradigmatic examples of cyberterrorism targeting civilians in mind. Alternatively, Young and Findley (2011) have raised the possibility that attacks against military targets-conducted during peacetime-might reasonably qualify for the category of terrorism. For example, the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, and the September 11 plane attack on the Pentagon, are both commonly referred to as terrorism, even though the attacks were conducted against military targets. ...
Research into cyber-conflict, public opinion, and international security is burgeoning, yet the field suffers from an absence of conceptual agreement about key terms. For instance, every time a cyberattack takes place, a public debate erupts as to whether it constitutes cyberterrorism. This debate bears significant consequences, seeing as the ascription of a "terrorism" label enables the application of heavy-handed counterterrorism powers and heightens the level of perceived threat among the public. In light of widespread conceptual disagreement in cyberspace, we assert that public opinion plays a heightened role in understanding the nature of cyber threats. We construct a typological framework to illuminate the attributes that drive the public classification of an attack as cyberterrorism, which we test through a ratings-based conjoint experiment in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel (N ¼ 21,238 observations). We find that the public (1) refrains from labeling attacks by unknown actors or hacker collectives as cyberterrorism; and (2) classifies attacks that disseminate sensitive data as terrorism to a greater extent even than physically explosive attacks. Importantly, the uniform public perspectives across the three countries challenge a foundational tenet of public opinion and international relations scholarship that divided views among elites on foreign policy matters will be reflected by a divided public. This study concludes by providing a definitive conceptual baseline to support future research on the topic.
... With the 2010s approaching, there seemed few grounds for optimism about the state of research on terrorism. Authors continued to note the field's various methodological issues (Jacques and Taylor, 2009;Young and Findley, 2011), the detrimental influence of pseudo-experts (Stampnitzky, 2014) as well as a tendency to use data because they are available, rather than because they suit the research design (Mahoney, 2018). Particularly noteworthy was Sageman's (2014) claim that so little progress had been made on understanding key issues, that research on terrorism had become stagnant. ...
... For states harboring terrorist groups, a combination of pressure from its domestic constituents and the international community may drive states to use ratification of treaties as a mechanism to signal their commitment to fight terrorism either to acquire resources, or for symbolic purposes. As a starting point in understanding how and why a domestic terror threat may generate such pressure, we first note that although "terrorism" is a concept fraught with definitional challenges long discussed by scholars (Ganor 2002;Weinberg, Pedahzur, and Hirsch-Hoefler 2004;Hoffman 2006;Young and Findley 2011) what is broadly agreed upon is that one of the primary purposes of terrorist violence is to induce fear in a target audience in order to impact behavior of both citizens and governments. Indeed, as noted by one scholar, the fear generated by terrorism is seen as "a tool of change" (Garrison 2004). ...
Why do states commit to UN counterterrorism treaties? This article posits that state accession to UN counterterrorism treaties is likely informed by the nature of the terrorist threats a state faces, and consequently, the pressures that such threats generate from domestic and international audiences on the state to address (or appear to address) them. As such, we hypothesize that states ratify UN CT treaties for either material, needs-based reasons—to gain external assistance for counterterror capacity building—or for symbolic reasons—to visibly signal their commitment to fight terrorism in order maintain legitimacy, and mitigate reputational costs to both domestic and international audiences. To test these hypotheses, we use a newly compiled dataset of state accessions to the 19 UN counterterrorism treaties from 1970–2016, testing both our needs-based versus symbolic hypotheses, as well as more “traditional” explanations for state treaty accession. Across the universe of 19 UN counterterrorism treaties, our study implies that states may be more likely to ratify treaties as mechanisms to signal intent to address terror threats rather than to build threat-specific counterterrorism capacity. This research thus broadens both academic and policy-related understandings of state counterterror treaty ratification.
... Namely, to succeed in securing concessions, terrorist attacks aim to capitalize on factors known to contribute to perceptions of risk (Slovic et al. 2004) in order to get the public to overestimate the risk from terrorism and press their governments for concessions. The role of public opinion in this attrition process may explain why democracies are much more likely to be the targets of terrorist attacks than autocracies (Enders and Sandler 1993;Siqueira and Sandler 2010;Young and Findley 2011). Government accountability to their citizens may make concessions more likely and, as such, a strategy of attrition comparatively more attractive. ...
Terrorism presents a fundamental paradox - groups that use terrorism are vastly weaker in terms of their capacity to inflict harm than the government they oppose, yet they often receive a tremendous amount of attention from the state. However, despite the widespread assumption regarding terrorism's 'terrifying' effect, there has been little systematic testing of the factors that make terrorism so emotionally and politically powerful for civilian populations, and how this impacts both state responses to militant violence and militant groups' tactical choices. In my dissertation, Risk or Retribution: The Micro-foundations of State Responses to Terror, I interrogate the emotional mechanisms motivating the mass public's response to terrorism, demonstrating how public anger in the wake of terrorist violence shapes state policies and incentivizes militant tactics. To examine the dynamics of the strategic interplay between civilians, militants, and political leaders, I test this theory with a combination of experimental, qualitative, formal, and statistical methods. In a series of pre-registered experimental studies in the United States, I find that, in contrast to the predominant narrative of terrorism's power to terrify, the dominant public response to such attacks is moral outrage and a desire for vengeance. I then develop a formal model that illuminates the dilemma this type of angry electorate creates for elected politicians. Namely, when an outraged public demands punishment of militant actors, retaliation becomes a uniformly more attractive option for politicians, even against relatively weak militant groups and even if this retaliation is not the best way to minimize future terrorism. Indeed, the model identifies a potential risk from retaliation,whereby effective counterterrorism can actually cause more terrorism by increasing weakened militants' instrumental motives to attack 'easier,' civilian targets. Content analysis of internal al-Qaeda communications confirms the prevalence of this problematic substitution effect. Moreover, analysis of these documents reveals the centrality of anger and moral outrage as mechanisms shaping militant tactics as well. Namely, desire for revenge in the wake of US strikes increased the intrinsic value militants placed on targeting civilian populations in order to punish the United States in kind for the collateral damage and perceived human suffering their actions had caused the so-called 'Muslim nation.' By identifying these parallel retributive motives driving the preferences of both the victims and perpetrators of terrorism, this project contributes to a deeper understanding of the distinct micro-foundations driving cycles of terrorism and counter-terrorism violence. Specifically, this work reconciles three central puzzles: 1) why groups that use terrorism rarely achieve concessions, and why they nonetheless continue to use it; 2) why democratic governments appear to 'overreact' to terror threats from weak actors; and 3) why this retaliation is often unsuccessful in reducing terrorist violence. Specifically, this work shows how terrorism and counter-terrorism violence are driven, not necessarily by fear, but by anger. By constraining elected leaders' policy options and encouraging them to retaliate, public outrage in the wake of terrorist violence can indirectly fuel an increasing reliance by militant groups on terrorism, as state retaliation and counterterror efforts increase both the instrumental and intrinsic motives of militants to further increase their reliance on terrorist tactics.
... The chapter concludes by discussing the empirical literature on desistance from terrorism and provides some guidance on opportunities for future research. Freilich et al., 2009 ;Schmid & Jongman, 1988 ;Young & Findley, 2011 ), Maruna (2001 , p. 17) laments that measuring and understanding desistance from any crime adds additional challenges as "it is not an event that happens, but rather it is the sustained absence of a certain type of event." As noted elsewhere in the terrorism literature, the absence of terrorism cannot confi rm counterterrorism success ( Lynch, 2011 ), and any observed inaction after a terror attack may be due to planning and preparation for a subsequent attack ( Cothren et al., 2008 ). ...
Understanding how and why people and groups desist from committing acts of terrorism is a central but understudied topic. As recent findings suggest that recidivism from terrorism is higher than for other crimes, the value of understanding terrorism desistance has large policy implications for the reduction and prevention of future terrorism. Despite the increasing attention that has been paid to why people commit acts of terrorism and the impacts of specific counterterrorism initiatives, insights on terrorism desistance have lagged behind this progress. Leveraging developments from criminology, this chapter discusses some of the key perspectives on the nature and measurement of desistance. It then examines some of the key theoretical perspectives on desistance from the criminological literature, including deterrence, rational choice theory, control theories, and general strain theory, and explores how these perspectives inform our understanding of desistance from terrorism. The chapter concludes by providing guidance for future research on desistance from terrorism.
... Despite the saturation levels of attention that terrorism has attracted since the events of 11 September 2001, a universally agreed definition of terrorism remains absent (Aven & Guikema, 2015;Ganor, 2002;Rothenberger et al., 2018;Young & Findley, 2011). The quest for a universal definition has been fundamentally frustrated by the diversity of motives that propel the terrorist actor (Lutz & Lutz, 2013). ...
This thesis investigated the nexus between terrorism-specific prisoner classifications and management practices and identity salience through the application of Structural Symbolic Interactionism. Utilising Applied Thematic Analysis as the analysis framework, document content was developed into themes which were then applied to the premises of the underlying theory. Focus was directed at the historical practice of assigning Special Category Status in Northern Ireland between 1972 and 1976, coupled with the subsequent Criminalisation Policy between 1976 and 1981. It then compared these findings with the current practice of assigning the terrorism-specific Category AA classification in New South Wales.
The findings offered a detailed understanding of the ways in which terrorist-specific classifications and management practices were interpreted by terrorist prisoners as identity symbols. Such interpretations subsequently acted to promote a sense of differentness between incarcerated terrorists and ordinary criminals. This perceived distinction afforded a source of validation to the terrorist’s self-view of being something other than that of an ordinary criminal, and by extension, that their violent acts were something other than a crime. Through this interpretation process, incarcerated terrorists were observed to embrace a salient identity which rejected the criminality of their acts and supported their belief that they were being persecuted for their beliefs rather than prosecuted for their crimes.
The effects of such prisoner management practices were evidenced in Northern Ireland through the prisoner’s continued commitment to terrorist group ideals and the high potential for recidivism. The New South Wales practice was found to produce similar outcomes, which lent support to concerns that such classification and management practices may serve to perpetuate the terrorist violence that it intended to prevent.
... Consequently, the diversity dividend might be driven by features unique to the domestic level of analysis. As such, their analysis of international terrorism is hindered by their monadic approach, while the strength of Neumayer's and Plümper's argument stems from their use of directed-dyad analysis (see Young and Findley 2011 for an explanation). 4 With that said, however, Nuemayer and Plümper are theoretically indifferent to the subject of domestic terror. ...
I propose a neo-Lockean model of religious freedom that links the “clash of civilizations” to a phenomenon described as the “diversity dividend,” and contend that the effects of religious diversity on political violence are conditioned by a regime’s church-state relationship. I propose that religious heterogeneity will lead to a clash-of-civilizations-style spike in terrorism under conditions of religious non-freedom, while conditions of religious freedom should ameliorate such violence. Several hypotheses stem from this model and are tested against the occurrence of domestic terrorism in African states from 2001-2008. Ultimately, I find that religious non-freedom better predicts domestic terrorism in Africa than religious homogeneity, but evidence of an interaction is inconclusive. I conclude by problematizing the policy implications of these findings given critical work on the subjects of religious freedom and the democratic peace.
... Incidents of considerable media interest are also likely to draw attention from researchers. For example, research on terrorism and terrorism-related issues has increased dramatically since the 9/11 attacks (Young and Findley, 2011). The media coverage of 9/11 has been labelled as the "largest, most compelling global media event in human history" (Grusin, 2010). ...
Purpose
Research fatigue occurs when an individual or population of interest tires of engaging with research, consequently avoiding further participation. This paper considers research fatigue in the context of the current COVID-19 pandemic, to identify contributory factors and possible solutions for future post-disaster research.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors draw on examples from the literature and their own observations from the recruitment and data collection phases of qualitative and quantitative studies, to provide an overview of possible research fatigue in the current COVID-19 pandemic, with implications for future post-disaster research.
Findings
People affected by disasters sometimes receive multiple requests for study participation by separate teams who may not necessarily be coordinating their work. Not keeping participants informed of the research process or outcomes can lead to disillusionment. Being overburdened with too many research requests and failing to see any subsequent changes following participation may cause individuals to experience research fatigue.
Originality/value
Guidelines for researchers wishing to reduce the occurrence of research fatigue include ensuring greater transparency within research; sharing of results and using oversight or gatekeeper bodies to aid coordination. Failure to restrict the number of times that people are asked to participate in studies risks poor participation rates. This can subsequently affect the quality of information with which to inform policy-makers and protect the health of the public during the COVID-19 pandemic or other public health disasters/emergencies.
... All parties in a dispute rely on civilians for recruitment, financing, and other logistical support, so disrupting the population which supports an opposing side weakens the capacity of the enemy 5 This logic runs counter to Li (2005), who argues that democracy has differing effects, with participation decreasing terrorism and executive constraints increasing its presence. However, Li's study focused on transnational terrorism, when Young and Findley (2011) replicated Li's study for domestic terrorism, the only democracy variable they found to be significant was executive constraints, which resulted in greater levels of terrorism. (Azam and Hoeffler 2002;Kalyvas 2006). ...
Does the introduction of UN forces impact terrorism? We argue that at least initially, UN peacekeeping missions may significantly shift the local conflict bargaining process, creating incentives for terrorist and insurgent groups to increase their attacks against civilians. UN missions create a symbolic endpoint to initial negotiations, alter the balance of power between combatants, and may change the relationship between local combatants and the civilian population they rely on for support. We test this argument using monthly data from 12 African countries, analyzing the risk of terrorism at the local level. We find that the introduction of UN forces in an area significantly increases the short-term risk of terrorism, but longer missions in the country reduce this risk.
... Blakeley, 2007, p. 234) maintain that the label 'terrorist' can and probably should be used to denounce publically actions by states that are "morally no different from (non-state) terrorism" (Finlay, 2009, p. 773). A survey conducted by Young and Findley (2011) found that the terrorism studies literature from 1980 to 2008 has been dominated by qualitative and case-study work. As the number of observations in case studies are generally very small, researchers have been careful to define terrorism in a way that fits their particular case under study; thus contributing to the continuous proliferation of definitions. ...
Studies in ‘terrorism and the media’ begin with the proposition that terrorists view media attention as important and desirable. These studies usually proceed by examining the characteristics of this media attention, especially volume. To the extent that they touch on terrorist behaviour at all, these studies tend to deal with terrorists’ media strategies which are strongly tied to the terrorists’ desire for media attention and predominantly assume that terrorists simply choose the action that has had the highest media attention accorded to it. This approach is disconnected from the study of underlying terrorist behaviour, especially terrorists’ choice of action, and obscures the most important elements of this behaviour behind the general proposition of the desirability of media attention.
By contrast, this thesis recognises that terrorist choice is shaped by the media attention that is accorded to each type of terrorist action. Viewed in this way, terrorism is not simply a generic means by which terrorists obtain media attention. This new approach allows us to account for observed terrorist behaviour that cannot be incorporated into an analytical framework that simply depicts terrorists as choosing the single action that maximises media attention. Among its contributions, the analysis presented in this thesis accounts for: (a) choices of actions that are not expected to yield maximum media attention, (b) combinations of more than one action and (c) situations in which terrorists choose their action with reference to the media attention accorded to the actions of rival groups.
The analytical work is supported by significant independent archival research that collected the media coverage accorded to every act of terrorism perpetrated in West-Germany during the 1970s, a period when groups such as the Red Army Faction, 2nd June Movement and the Revolutionary Cells vied for their position in the terrorism context and demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of the media. By measuring the media attention accorded to individual actions, this thesis overcomes certain analytical weaknesses that emerge when broader, more general, data is used. Only when the media attention that has been accorded to each type of action is collected and measured can a study of terrorist choice of action be effectively undertaken.
... Given the rise in studies attempting to explain the causes and consequences of terrorism (Sandler, 2014;Young and Findley, 2011), it would seem that terrorism is the domain of a group of specialists in violence. Scholars like Moore and Charles Tilly would likely argue that terrorism is a tactic (or strategy) 3 that any group or individual may select from a menu that also includes many other tactics. ...
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 their goals, such as non-violence, violence, or specific kinds of violence, like terror. We make the claim that both sides of the debate are empirically valid and that both types of group exist. That is, some groups tend to specialize in a single tactic while others use a variety of tactics. This paper examines the empirical distribution of group types by examining the mix of tactics that groups employ. The analysis helps resolve part of the debate and pushes scholarly thinking in new directions about how often, why, and when groups operate across this spectrum.
... Also, the quite recent literature suggests that properly testing transnational terrorism processes might require a directeddyad research design or another type of research design considering multiple actors. 70 Since the unit of analysis in my analyses is country-year, a different research design considering multiple actors might change the results. ...
Gendarmerie forces are actively deployed by many states in the world to fight terrorism, but its role on terrorism has not been explored. This study fills this gap in the literature and examines the effect of having gendarmerie forces on terrorist activities in a state. I discuss competing arguments about the relationship between having these forces and terror incidents and also address the conditioning effect of bureaucratic capacity on this relationship. By constructing a time series cross-sectional data that identifies the countries having gendarmeries in given years, I test these arguments, and the results of the empirical analyses suggest that states having gendarmerie forces experience more terrorist violence than those without gendarmeries. However, the number of terror incidents in states with gendarmeries decreases as these states have greater bureaucratic capacity. The results have implications in terms of the role of militarized policing on terrorism and countering terrorism.
Does economic deprivation fuel terrorist recruitment? A large empirical literature has explored this question, but the findings remain contradictory and inconclusive. We argue that this is due to inconsistencies in the way deprivation has been defined and measured. This article identifies these deficiencies and provides a roadmap toward more precise measurement of deprivation and consequently toward a better understanding of its potential impact on the emergence of terrorism. More specifically, we propose a conceptual framework that distinguishes three different dimensions of relative deprivation: individual vs. collective, objective vs. subjective, and synchronic vs. diachronic. Combining them yields eight different mechanisms that could link economic status to terrorist radicalization. Drawing inspiration from fields such as conflict studies, social psychology, and political behavior, we outline some measurement approaches that could capture the mechanisms in a targeted way. The findings have implications for how researchers should collect data and design studies as well as for how policymakers should interpret the statistical results.
Transnational terrorism is often portrayed as a force that can clandestinely threaten enemies across oceans and borders. This portrayal, or caricature, simplifies the motives, and intricate methods for, terrorist organisations choosing to expand their area of operations or alliances. This chapter aims to detail the transnationality of terrorist organisations, including fundraising, communications, alliance-forming, as well as movement and target selection. By completing this exercise, the true threat that terrorism ‘going global’ poses can be better understood.
How should we measure terrorism? Political scientists typically use executed attacks as the dependent variable and test covariates to identify factors that produce terrorism. But attacks are an imperfect measure of terrorist activity because of ‘plot attrition’ — the tendency for plots to derail due to police intervention or other factors. We examine whether the exclusion of foiled plots from event datasets constitutes a measurement problem in terrorism studies. Building on recent advances in plot data collection, we study the correlation between plots and attacks and conduct an original analysis of jihadism in Europe. Our results suggest common research designs predicting terrorism can produce different results depending on whether incidents are operationalized as plots or attacks. Adjusting for state security capability does not solve the problem. Despite its limitations, plot data is a more complete measure of terrorist activity that should be incorporated, when available, in quantitative studies of terrorism.
This study asks if a decline of democratic regime attributes affects the volume of domestic terrorism. We argue that different forms of autocratization may stimulate or suppress terrorist activities. Democratic backsliding may dampen domestic terrorism, while autocratic consolidation may make autocracies more vulnerable to terrorism. This study empirically tests these assumptions on time-series cross-sectional data on domestic terrorism in 182 countries between 1970 and 2020 with a difference-in-differences design. We find that democratic backsliding reduces the amount of terrorism in the short to medium term. Autocratic consolidation increases the number of terrorist attacks in the short to medium term.
The article aims at the general description of the academic research that examines the fear of crime concept after September 11, 2001, when new areas of research became a part of security studies, substantially changing the very understanding of fear of crime. Thus, there was a change in the academic models for examining the social perception of crime. At first, there were some fruitful years for the sociological analysis of the fear of crime concept. Today, sociological studies of fear of crime continue, but this concept became even more important for criminological studies. Therefore, we analyzed the fear of crime category in the articles published in peer-reviewed academic journals in the criminological and sociological perspectives (Sage, Jstor, EbscoHost, and others). The findings explain the evolution of the fear of crime concept in the research from 2001 to 2021. For Latin America, the concept of fear is quite recent, which is very different from other regions of the world. Moreover, the interpretation of fear in Latin America is very different from both Europe and the United States. Although Latin America and the United States have much in common, the article presents the unique features of the Latin-American approach to this phenomenon.
When it comes to domestic terrorism (DT), state capacity matters in ‘the middle.’ Our article aims to bring together two apparently separate strands of terrorism research: one concerning the effects of regime type; and another concerning the effects of state capacity. We argue that state capacity can reduce DT in anocracies, but not so much in full dictatorships and democracies. Terrorists seek to maximize the reach of their attacks by exposing themselves to a larger audience. As a result, regimes with higher audience costs tend to be more vulnerable to domestic terror attacks. In anocracies, there is room for state capacity to influence the audience costs of a domestic terrorist attack. In full democracies and dictatorships, on the other hand, state capacity has little influence on the audience costs of DT. Consequently, if previous studies have purported linear, U-shaped, and inverted- U-shaped links between democracy and terrorism, we argue that the shape of the relationship is contingent on the level of state capacity. Theoretically, we substantiate our argument with a two-player simultaneous game between a terrorist group and a government. On the empirical side, we conduct a series of negative binomial panel regressions upon a time-series cross-sectional dataset of no less than 108 countries from 1970 to 2007.
How does the public respond to nonviolent resistance tactics? This survey experiment examines both approval and perceptions of legitimacy for five nonviolent tactics using a sample of American adults. We include two variations in our treatment – first examining responses to different protest tactics, then adding in the factor of co-partisanship, which we argue is a relevant identity in the US political context. In the non-partisan treatments, we find a stark dichotomy between our measures of approval and legitimacy. All nonviolent treatment tactics decrease approval for the neutral activist group using them, but three of four tactic treatments increase the probability that respondents will support our legitimacy indicators (congressional hearing invitation and media attention). We find that partisanship conditions how respondents evaluate nonviolent tactics of resistance, but not in ways we would expect based on the conventional wisdom that liberals favor ‘nonviolent resistance' while conservatives do not. Partisan alignment has a consistent effect on respondent approval of tactics in that the partisan treatment leads to disapproval of out-partisan groups across the nonviolent tactics (compared to no mention of tactic or partisanship). Surprisingly, however, this finding on co-partisanship does not extend to our measures of legitimacy. Partisanship clearly conditions the way that respondents evaluate nonviolent tactics of resistance, but not necessarily in predictable ways.
Terrorism is first and foremost viewed as a matter of security policy; however, its emergence, perception, effects, prevention and mitigation actually involve a multitude of societal sectors as well as academic fields, which also means that numerous academics, practitioners and decision-makers are in a position to contribute to analysing and countering terrorism. This handbook serves as the first German-language reference work on terrorism studies, capturing the complexity of this subject in its entirety. By using theories and perspectives from various academic disciplines, the handbook encourages scholars and students to apply their expertise to the field of terrorism studies and to emphasise interdisciplinary work. With contributions by Sebastian Baden, Stefanie Ballscheidt, Constanze Beierlein, Brahim Ben Slama, Christina Binder, Yannick Birlinger, Dana Bönisch, Raphael Bossong, Damaris Braun, Donald E. Brown, Carolin Coenen, Alexandra Dick, Dorothee Dienstbühl, Carola Dietze, Gisela Diewald-Kerkmann, Andreas Elter, Jérôme Endrass, Frank Fiedrich, Kai Fischer, Kira Frankenthal, Lena Frischlich, Michael Fürstenberg, Antje Glück, Stefan Goertz, April Gould, Anita Grabowska, Marc Graf, Frank Greuel, Thomas Grumke, Adrian Guelke, John Guelke, Valerie Hase, Hendrik Hegemann, Eva Herschinger, Julian Hohner, Björn Hossfeld, Simon Isemann, Klaus Peter Japp, Jannis Jost, Jana Kärgel, Markus Kaim, Uwe Kemmesies, Alexander Kocks, Burkhart Kowitz, Joachim Krause, Maximilian Kreter, Kristin Kuck, Stefan Kühl, Vincenz Leuschner, Rüdiger Lohlker, Tim Lukas, Saskia Lützinger, Tobias Meilicke, Kevin Moull, Mitra Moussa Nabo, Katharina Obens, Terri Patterson, Anneke Petzsche, Armin Pfahl-Traughber, Daniela Pisoiu, Matthias Quent, Diana Rieger, Julia Rosin, Astrid Rossegger, Liane Rothenberger, Gregory B. Saathoff, Hans-Jakob Schindler, Alex P. Schmid, Anja Schmidt-Kleinert, Friedrich Schneider, Sylvia Schraut, Nils Schuhmacher, Tanjev Schultz, Heidi Schulze, Julia Schumacher, Nauel Franziska Semaan, Norman Siewert, Kerstin Sischka, Alexander Spencer, Alexander Stolz, Alexander Straßner, Magdalena von Drachenfels, Malte von Ramin, Christian Wagner, La Toya Waha, Eva Walther, Janet I. Warren, Harald Weilnböck, Martin Wengeler, Josephin Winkler, Nils Wörmer, Thomas Wurmb, Ricardo Martin Zimic Zare and Bernd Zywietz.
Whether Islam is responsible for increased suicide terrorist attacks is a salient but highly controversial issue. Using independently produced demographics data, we investigate whether there is a correlation between Islam and suicide attacks. We find that (1) countries with greater Muslim populations are likely to experience more suicide attacks, (2) countries with greater Sunni Muslim populations are likely to encounter more suicide attacks, and (3) countries with greater Hanafi Muslim populations, in contrast to other Sunni legal schools, face the greatest risk of experiencing suicide attacks. The overall analysis suggests that Islam is positively associated with suicide attacks, although the degree of its association is not uniform among all branches.
White-collar crime and illegal political extremism share several characteristics with relevance to criminology. Neither is associated with lower socioeconomic status individuals, both involve perpetrators that rarely see themselves as criminal, and both face unique data challenges. Following Edwin Sutherland's influential research, the study of white-collar crime became a recognized specialization within criminology. Similarly, following the coordinated attacks of September 11, 2001, political extremism became increasingly accepted as a legitimate research topic in criminology. I explore several ways that the study of terrorism has influenced criminological research and how responses to terrorist attacks since 9/11 can help us understand policing. Terrorism research has vividly illustrated the socially constructed nature of crime, has encouraged researchers to see not only the deterrence potential of punishment but also its capacity to produce backlash, has accelerated cross-national criminology research, and has hastened the embrace of open sources as an important form of criminal justice data. Changes in policing following 9/11 and the resulting war on terror also provide critical insights into the extent to which policing depends on community trust and legitimacy. As with the embrace of white-collar crime nearly a century ago, mainstream criminology has been enriched by widening its scope to include political extremism.
Transnational terrorism is an inherently international phenomenon as it involves attacks where the perpetrators are from a different country than the victims. Accordingly, a growing literature explains patterns in transnational attacks with a focus on international variables, for example, the presence of a border wall or alliance patterns. Despite the importance of the topic, no common empirical framework with theoretical basis has emerged to analyze the flows of transnational attacks. We propose that recent versions of the structural gravity model of transnational flows, long the workhorse model in trade economics, can be modified to provide a theoretically motivated model of the flows of transnational terrorist attacks among countries. The gravity model provides several empirical advantages for the study of international variables and transnational terrorism, for example, recent specifications allow the researcher to estimate count models that condition out all time-varying country-level confounders with fixed effects. This facilitates sidestepping the typical problem that any international variables associated with transnational flows are often correlated with omitted or imprecisely measured domestic factors, which draws their estimates into question. Moreover, we demonstrate that the structural gravity model does a much better job in predicting outcomes, particularly when multiple attacks flow across borders.
According to the Religious Freedom Peace Thesis (RFPT), efforts to regulate religious expression stimulate political violence around the globe. Not only does this indicate that the spread of religious freedom abroad is an essential ingredient in the maintenance of domestic stability and international order, but it also implies that religious freedom can ameliorate the conditions said to give rise to terrorism and other social ills. This dissertation tests this theory.
The Religious Freedom Peace Thesis (RFPT) suggests that societies may reduce political violence by fully respecting individuals’ rights to live their faiths according to the dictates of their convictions, but little empirical evidence supports this contention. I redress this evidentiary lacuna by subjecting the RFPT to empirical examination. First though, I attempt to refine the RFPT by proposing a conditional model of political violence that turns to John Locke’s seminal works on religious toleration to link competing approaches to religion and violence, including the so-called “clash of civilizations” and an under-theorized empirical phenomenon described as the “diversity dividend.” The neo-Lockean variant of the RFPT contends that the effects of religious diversity on political violence—domestic terrorism, to be more specific—are conditioned by a regime’s church-state relationship. As such, I examine the possibility that religious heterogeneity drives terrorism under conditions of religious non-freedom. Since the neo-Lockean model is a Western-centric approach to political violence contingent upon Western values (i.e., religious freedom) though, I subject several hypotheses drawn from the RFPT to a battery of statistical analyses intentionally using data drawn from the non-Western world: namely, Asia and Africa from 2000-2009. I ultimately find no empirical support for the RFPT (even its more sophisticated neo-Lockean variant), and while this may stem from limitations in the data, it opens current religious freedom research to critical evaluation, particularly regarding its imperialistic implications.
In the aftermath of 11 September 2001 attack, there was increased security concern in relation to border entry of refugee claimants. Subsequent to this event, several new measures were implemented to enhance the control mechanisms to reduce the threat of terrorism. In light of the close link between refugee and security concerns, especially in relation to the fear of terrorism, this paper examines the consequences of 9/11 on the conceptualization of security and implications for refugees and migrants from Venezuela, assesses the consequences of hosting refugees by neighbouring countries of Venezuela and investigates and proffers solutions in reconciling State security and refugee security.
Democracy is one of the most consistent predictors of terrorism. Yet we know little about why there is an apparent relationship between terrorism and democracy. In this article, I argue that previous democratic breakdown is a significant predictor of terrorism. While democratic civil liberties increase the opportunity to carry out terrorist attacks, they do not explain why groups are motivated to use terrorism rather than legal means for implementing change. Democratic breakdown, however, creates grievances that motivate terrorism by excluding groups with full rights of participation from the political process. Such grievances, which persist over long periods of time, will lead to high levels of terrorism once the regime re-democratizes, since the motivation for political violence is combined with the opportunities provided by democratic civil liberties. Cross-national statistical evidence from 1970 to 2007 lends strong support for this argument. It further demonstrates that only democracies that have experienced democratic breakdown experience more terrorism than autocracies. Moreover, an extreme bounds analysis indicates that previous democratic breakdown is one of the most robust predictors of terrorism and the most robust among variables conceptually related to democracy.
We know a great deal more about the process of radicalization leading to violence than when the term entered the popular lexicon a few years after 9/11. Yet fundamentally, it remains difficult to specify who will turn to political violence, how, or why. Progress on this key issue depends on many developments. This article reviews and analyses five basic meta-methodological insights, on which there is growing consensus, which set the parameters for the ongoing study and modeling of radicalization: (1) the specificity problem; (2) the shift from profiles to process; (3) the necessity of a multi-factorial approach; (4) the heterogeneity problem; and (5) the primary data problem. The objective is to create a stronger understanding of the nature and collective relevance of these accepted insights, and point to two related emergent issues on which more systematic research still needs to be done in the context of combating terrorism: the relationship of attitudes and behavior, and the problem of accounts (i.e., the critical and contextual study of how people justify or excuse socially undesirable or problematic behavior and occurrences).
Throughout much of American history, but especially after the attack against the United States on September 11, 2001, the American political system has sought to balance its need to protect national security while still preserving civil rights and civil liberties. In the American system, the federal judiciary is the primary referee in this conflict between order and liberty. This chapter explains in detail the role of the US courts in settling this dispute. The first section outlines the landmark US Supreme Court cases that have guided how the American government has navigated the tension between security and liberty. The second section discusses the scholarly research that seeks to understand how American judges evaluate issues concerning liberty and security. Taken together, these two sections should edify readers of this volume on how American judges approach this important topic in the study of law and courts.
Objective
Why are some terrorist attacks so much more devastating than others? Despite the importance of this question, few studies examine the great variance in lethality across terrorist incidents. This article proposes that some cultures witness deadlier terrorism. In particular, it maintains that deadlier terrorism will occur in cultures of honor that socialize individuals to view violence as an acceptable means for upholding a reputation for toughness. Cultures of honor produce terrorists motivated by perceived slight and reputational challenges, which they are compelled to rectify through especially severe acts of violence. Reclaiming one's honor is possible by inflicting maximum damage on the offending person or group.
Method
This argument is empirically tested in a multilevel statistical analysis of domestic terrorism in the United States from 1970 to 2015.
Results
Clear evidence emerges that terrorism is deadlier in the U.S. South—the quintessential culture of honor—than in the other regions of the United States. Other variables highlighted in the existing literature, however, receive mixed support.
Conclusion
The evidence presented in this article indicates that cultural variables help explain variation in terrorist attack lethality. Future research on political violence, including terrorism, would benefit from taking culture into greater consideration.
Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, research on terrorism has grown exponentially. Data limitations, however, have made temporal generalization difficult. Most terrorism datasets extend back only to the 1970s, which inhibits the ability to quantitatively examine earlier waves of terrorism. To address this limitation, this article presents a dataset of over 250 terrorist organizations formed between 1860 and 1969. These data, which have global coverage, include country-year information on group formation, allowing scholars to examine the relationship between various country-year factors and the emergence of terrorist organizations. To illustrate their usefulness, these data are used to examine the relationship between democracy and terrorist group formation. Following several recent studies, the empirical analysis reveals a curvilinear or inverted u-shaped relationship between terrorism and democracy.
This study empirically tests what has become a central component of US anti- terrorism policy under the Bush administration: that terrorism is a byproduct of illiberal political and economic systems. Employing a series of statistical analyses on incidents of terrorism in 153 countries from 1986 to 2003, the author finds that variables measuring democracy and degree of economic openness are not significant predictors of terrorism. However, the study does find that experience of state failures is significant, thus providing empirical backing for a small, descriptive body of scholarship linking failed states to terrorism. International Politics (2007) 45, 72-91. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ip.8800220
Compared to most types of criminal violence, terrorism poses special data collection challenges. In response, there has been growing interest in open source terrorist event data bases. One of the major problems with these data bases in the past is that they have been limited to international events—those involving a national or group of nationals from one country attacking targets physically located in another country. Past research shows that domestic incidents greatly outnumber international incidents. In this paper we describe a previously unavailable open source data base that includes some 70,000 domestic and international incidents since 1970. We began the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) by computerizing data originally collected by the Pinkerton Global Intelligence Service (PGIS). Following computerization, our research team has been working for the past two years to validate and extend the data to real time. In this paper, we describe our data collection efforts, the strengths and weaknesses of open source data in general and the GTD in particular, and provide descriptive statistics on the contents of this new resource.
The effect of economic globalization on the number of transnational terrorist incidents within countries is analyzed statistically, using a sample of 112 countries from 1975 to 1997. Results show that trade, foreign direct investment (FDI), and portfolio investment have no direct positive effect on transnational terrorist incidents within countries and that economic developments of a country and its top trading partners reduce the number of terrorist incidents inside the country. To the extent that trade and FDI promote economic development, they have an indirect negative effect on transnational terrorism.
Democratic states are in general about as conflict- and war-prone as nondemocracies, but democracies have rarely clashed with one another in violent conflict. We first show that democracy, as well as other factors, accounts for the relative lack of conflict. Then we examine two explanatory models. The normative model suggests that democracies do not fight each other because norms of compromise and cooperation prevent their conflicts of interest from escalating into violent clashes. The structural model asserts that complex political mobilization processes impose institutional constraints on the leaders of two democracies confronting each other to make violent conflict unfeasible. Using different data sets of international conflict and a multiplicity of indicators, we find that (1) democracy, in and of itself, has a consistent and robust negative effect on the likelihood of conflict or escalation in a dyad; (2) both the normative and structural models are supported by the data; and (3) support for the normative model is more robust and consistent.
This article studies the various mechanisms by which democracy affects transnational terrorism. New theoretical mechanisms are identified that either complement or encompass existing arguments. Different effects of democracy on transnational terrorism are assessed for a sample of about 119 countries from 1975 to 1997. Results show that democratic participation reduces transnational terrorist incidents in a country, while government constraints increase the number of those incidents, subsuming the effect of press freedom. The proportional representation system experiences fewer transnational terrorist incidents than either the majoritarian or the mixed system.
This study empirically evaluates the question of whether or not the promotion of democracy in the Middle East will reduce terrorism, both in terms of terrorist attacks sustained by Middle Eastern countries and in terms of attacks perpetrated by terrorist groups based in Middle Eastern countries. Using a series of pooled, time-series negative binomial statistical regression models on 19 countries from 1972 to 2003 the analysis demonstrates that the more politically liberal Middle Eastern states—measured both in terms of democratic processes and in terms of civil liberties protections—are actually more prone to terrorist activity than are Middle Eastern dictatorships. The study demonstrates, furthermore, that an even more significant predictor of Middle Eastern terrorist attacks is the intensity of state failures, or episodes of severe political instability that limit central government projection of domestic authority, suffered by states in the region. States that are unable to respond to fundamental challenges to political stability posed by internal political strife, ethnic conflict or the phenomenon of “stateless areas,” geographic or political spaces within states that eschew central government authority, are significantly more likely to host or sustain attacks from terrorist groups. The findings have implications for current United States antiterrorism policy toward the Middle East and provide a statistical/empirical foundation to previous studies on the relationship between terrorism and state failure.
This article argues that social welfare policies may reduce international and domestic terrorism. Social policies likely affect terrorism in offsetting ways but, on balance, should diminish preferences for terrorism by reducing economic insecurity, inequality, poverty, and religious-political extremism. Thus, countries with more generous welfare provisions should suffer fewer terrorist attacks on their soil and have fewer of their citizens perpetrate terrorism. Supporting this argument, cross-sectional estimation reveals that a country's welfare efforts negatively correlate with transnational or total terrorist incidents on its soil, as well as transnational terrorism perpetrated by its citizens. Pooled cross-section time-series estimation reveals that several measures of welfare effort reduce the incidence of transnational terrorism in countries, robust to a range of estimators and controls. Such findings suggest that strengthening social policies at home and abroad may not only serve redistributive or development goals but also help combat terrorist violence.
A comprehensive and integrated framework for the analysis of data is offered and used to assess data sets on democracy. The framework first distinguishes among three challenges that are sequentially addressed: conceptualization, measurement, and aggregation. In turn, it specifies distinct tasks associated with these challenges and the standards of assessment that pertain to each task. This framework is applied to the data sets on democracy most frequently used in current statistical research, generating a systematic evaluation of these data sets. The authors’ conclusion is that constructors of democracy indices tend to be quite self-conscious about methodological issues but that even the best indices suffer from important weaknesses. More constructively, the article’s assessment of existing data sets on democracy identifies distinct areas in which attempts to improve the quality of data on democracy might fruitfully be focused.
This article conducts quantitative tests on the relationship between regime type and suicide terrorism for 1980 to 2003. We present the recently popularized argument that democracies are more likely to experience suicide terrorism and a new hypothesis that mixed regimes are especially likely to experience suicide terrorism. We offer several improvements in research design, including using more controls, the nation-year as the unit of analysis, and more appropriate statistical techniques. Using both Freedom House and Polity data, we find that in general, regime type is uncorrelated with suicide terrorism. We do find that there is a statistically significant interaction between regime type and the number of religiously distinct minorities at risk (MARs) with suicide terrorism, but the statistical significance of this finding is limited, and its substantive impact is marginal. We also find that national size, Islam, national experience with suicide terrorism, and global experience with suicide terrorism affect the likelihood of suicide terrorism.
Robert J. Brym and Bader Araj contest Mia Bloom's outbidding thesis, which holds that suicide attacks are a currency for outbidding rivals in the competition for popular support. They find that public opinion data are inconsistent with the outbidding thesis and argue that support for suicide bombing is more a function of social solidarity than competition within the Palestinian community.
In a review in 1988, Schmid and Jongman identified a number of key problems in research on terrorism. These included serious concerns with the methodologies being used by researchers to gather data and with the level of analysis that was undertaken once data was available. Following on from this work, this article draws on a review of research published between 1995 and 2000. It was found that the problems identified in 1988 remain as serious as ever. Research is ultimately aimed at arriving at a level of knowledge and understanding where one can explain why certain events have happened and be able to accurately predict the emergence and outcome of similar events in the future. Terrorism research, however, has failed to arrive at that level of knowledge. This article outlines some of the causes of these continuing problems and highlights ways in which the situation can be improved.
The recent literature on the root causes of suicide terrorism yields several testable hypotheses, most notably that suicide attacks are a strategic response by terrorist groups confronting foreign occupation by democratic states. This study does not find empirical support for this and other common hypotheses and instead demonstrates that suicide terrorism is a product of political and organizational features of the terrorists themselves. While foreign occupation, religious diversity, and group typology do predict suicide attacks, democracies are not more likely to be targets of suicide terrorism. Terrorists, however, who are nationals of nondemocracies are significantly more likely to launch suicide attacks.
In “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” Robert Pape (2003) presents an analysis of his suicide terrorism data. He uses the data to draw inferences about how territorial occupation and religious extremism affect the decision of terrorist groups to use suicide tactics. We show that the data are incapable of supporting Pape's conclusions because he “samples on the dependent variable.”—The data only contain cases in which suicide terror is used. We construct bounds (Manski, 1995) on the quantities relevant to Pape's hypotheses and show exactly how little can be learned about the relevant statistical associations from the data produced by Pape's research design.
Do governments of the left attract more terrorism than governments of the right? We ex-amine how the political orientation of governments affects the probability of states being the target of terrorist attack. We develop a series of related theoretical linkages between partisan orientation, policy choice, and terrorist behavior to explain why governments of the left should be more likely to see higher numbers of terrorist attacks than govern-ments of the right. We test our expectations using two different datasets; the Database of Political Institutions and the Party Manifesto data against the ITERATE terrorism dataset between the years 1975 and 1997. The results suggest that governments of the left are more likely to be the targets of terrorism than governments of the right and that the causal mechanisms behind this outcome might be context dependent.
The commonly accepted interpretation is that a religious motive—the desire to please God—is the principal reason why people volunteer for suicide missions. American political scientist Robert A. Pape rejects this view. For him the common thread linking suicide bombers is a political objective— driving out an occupier from one’s homeland, which they see as furthering the common good of their society. In arriving at this theory, Pape relied on the concept of “altruistic suicide,” developed by French sociologist Emile Durkheim in his pioneering work Suicide (1897). These ideas are discussed in Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (2005), from which the passage below is taken.
Introduction Terrorism is an elusive concept. It is a violent strategy that can take place during wartime or peacetime. Terrorism is also thought of as a distinct form of violence with different causes than other forms of violence such as insurgencies or civil wars. In this chapter, I consider what linkages, if any, connect terrorism to civil war. If we consider terrorism as a strategy - a means to an end - then the links are obvious: civil wars create opportune environments for terror and terrorists. Indeed, as we shall see later, most terrorist events tend to take place in countries affected by civil war. I accept the identification of terror as a strategy, but I also consider whether near-exclusive use of this violent strategy constitutes a distinct form of violence, with separate causes than other forms. If so, then we can probe further to uncover differences and similarities between terrorism and civil war. A way to approach the linkages between terrorism and civil war is to consider the conditions under which terrorism will lead to civil war and vice versa and to compare situations where terrorism takes place outside of the context of civil war to cases where there is civil war with or without terrorism. I provide such a comparison to illuminate the linkages between domestic terrorism and civil war. Both international and domestic terrorism can grow out of civil war or lead to it, but such a conflict transformation is more likely when terrorism is domestic.
Introduction Popular wisdom in the burgeoning literature on terrorism focuses on the economic motivations of terrorists. “We fight against poverty,” President George W. Bush explained in Monterrey, Mexico, on March 23, 2002, “because hope is an answer to terror.” Stern (2003) also draws a direct connection between poverty and terrorism. Though poverty is an attractive answer to the question of “why terrorism?”, the data do not lend much support for it. Macroeconomic shifts generally fail to map on to changes in terrorist activity. For example, in the late 1990s and 2000, when terrorism reached new heights against Israeli citizens, the typical Palestinian was reporting a rosier economic forecast and unemployment was declining. Using a longer time series, Berrebi (2003) finds little correlation between economic conditions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the number of terrorist incidents against Israel. An even more perplexing problem for the poverty thesis arises on the microlevel. Several studies at the individual level of analysis have failed to find any direct connection between education, poverty, and the propensity to participate in terrorism (Russell and Miller 1983; Taylor 1988; Hudson 1999; Krueger and Maleckova 2003; Berrebi 2003; Atran 2003). If anything, those who participate in terrorism tend to come from the ranks of the better off in society. Those who claim a connection between poverty and terrorism could respond that at least on the microlevel, well-to-do citizens become terrorists out of public spiritedness for their impoverished fellow citizens, and organizations choose them to perform these tasks because of their reliability and skill.
This book brings together leading international experts in the world of terrorism research and counterterrorism policy-making. It has three clear areas of focus: it looks at current issues and trends in terrorism research, it explores how contemporary research on terrorism is focused and conducted, it examines how this research impacts in terms of counterterrorism policy and practice. This is essential reading for all students of politics and security studies and scholars with an interest in terrorism and policy-making.
Using quarterly data from 1968 to 1988, we analyze the time series properties of the various attack modes used by transnational terrorists. Combining vector autoregression and intervention analysis, we find strong evidence of both substitutes and complements among the attack modes. We also evaluate the effectiveness of six policies designed to thwart terrorism. The existence of complements and substitutes means that policies designed to reduce one type of attack may affect other attack modes. For example, the installation of metal detectors in airports reduced skyjackings and diplomatic incidents but increased other kinds of hostage attacks (barricade missions, kidnappings) and assassinations. In the long run, embassy fortification decreased barricade missions but increased assassinations. The Reagan “get tough” policy, which resulted in the enactment of two laws in 1984 and a retaliatory raid on Libya in 1986, did not have any noticeable long-term effect on curbing terrorist attacks directed against U.S. interests.
This article identifies factors that help explain terrorist success in hostage-taking events. Two measures of success are examined: logistical success and negotiation success. In the empirical estimations, we regress the log of the odds ratio against various sets of explanatory variables. For both sets of models, the statistical results are robust to changes in the explanatory variables. Our results are compared with propositions derived from the economic theory of bargaining; these propositions are partly supported by our findings. The article also sketches the choice-theoretic model faced by a terrorist during the planning and negotiating stages of a hostage mission.
Researchers face three basic questions when testing theoretically driven hypotheses. First is research design: for example, what population should be analyzed, what sample should be drawn from that population, and what cases should be excluded from the sample? What statistical estimator should one use? What set of control variables should one employ? Results drawn from several permutations of the Correlates of War Militarized Interstate Dispute data set are compared using three statistical models. For some theories and variables (international institutionalism—intergovernmental organization and alliance membership; realism—balance of power; expected utility theory—international interaction game equilibria), research design and estimator choices substantially influence the findings. For others (trade and democratic peace theory), the relationship between the dependent and independent variables is relatively impervious to research design and estimator choices.
Most academic experts within the International Relations (IR) community and other, more specialized disciplines, failed to predict or warn government policymakers and the public of the possibility that events of 9/11 magnitude could take place on the U.S. homeland. Given that long-term investigation of trends in world affairs is one of the sources that has always informed policy analysis, this represents an interesting question to examine. The analysis contained in this assessment suggests that the ontological, methodological, and conceptual problems within and between the disciplines, combined with a skewed absorption with the prospect of developments in Asia, created a gap in the knowledge about Islamic terrorism and groups like Al Qaeda, which in turn caught most of the academic community unaware on 9/11. This article performs a quantitative study to determine the nature and scope of this apparent analytical failure on the part of academics in IR and other specialized disciplines to predict 9/11 and aims to address why this failure took place.
Strikingly, little systematic study of the relationship between democracy and terrorism has been undertaken. This article addresses this lacuna by laying some groundwork for further analytical study of the issues. It does so, first, by suggesting a family of independent variables related to the concept of political access that might be employed in this research; and second, by introducing a more expansive set of dependent variables, which will help capture the diverse effects of political access on militant group activity. The bulk of the paper examines the variety of causal logics that could potentially connect democracy and terrorist group activity, drawing from five analytical approaches to understanding terrorist motivation evident in the literature. Two major conclusions follow from the analysis. First, the democracy and terrorism debate constitutes not one research question, but many. Second, the prediction that follows from many approaches to terrorist motivation is not that democracy should promote an easy, inevitable lessening of terrorism. Rather, a more refined understanding of when democracy, or other forms of political access, may reduce violence or yield other desirable (and undesirable) outcomes is essential.
Abstract This article examines,how game- theoretic analyses of terrorism have provided some policy insights that do not follow from nonstrategic analyses. Some new game-theoretic applications are indicated that concern terrorist targeting of businesses, officials, and the general public, where targets can work at cross-purposes as th ey attempt to deflect the attack. Other novel applications involve government choice among alternative anti-terrorism policies, and government,concessionary,policy when terrorists are either hard-liners or moderates in their viewpoint. Directions for futureresearch,are also indicated. KEYWORDS: game theory, terrorism, transnational terrorism, deterrence, preemption, concessionary policy, target choice, asymmetric information Terrorism and Game Theory Over the last two decades, a small group of analysts in economics and political science have applied game theory to study terrorism, 1 which,involves the premeditated use or threat of use of violence or force on the part of terr orists to achieve a political objective through
This article presents some @'rational-actor@' models that depict the negotiation process between terrorists and government policymakers for those incidents where hostages or property are seized and demands are issued. The models account for the objectives and constraints faced by both the terrorists and the policymakers. Uncertainty is introduced through probability constraints (i.e., chance constraints) requiring a specific likelihood of some event occuring. Implications are subsequently extracted from the comparative static analysis as the models' parameters are changed. The last part of the article presents a club theory analysis concerning the sharing of transnational commando forces.
Relevant dyads are pairs of contiguous states or pairs of states including at least one major power. They are argued to be the population of dyads at risk of international conflict and are increasingly commonly used as the cases analyzed by conflict researchers. Does reliance on relevant dyads (a nonrandom sample of all dyads) introduce threats to valid inference? The authors argue that relevant dyad usage might introduce related problems of measurement error and selection bias and investigate whether there is evidence of such potential problems existing in actual relevant dyad data sets. Results show evidence for both types of potential problems, but neither problem substantively affects estimates of conflict relationships. Therefore, relevant dyad usage is not especially objectionable due to either of these problems, and retrospective sampling might be an even more profitable course for future research.
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 what is often called the ‘hearts and minds’ approach. Either approach places the population at the center of a struggle between the government and violent dissidents. Despite numerous works emphasizing either ‘attrition’ or ‘hearts and minds’, few theoretical studies have attempted to compare their relative success. Using an agent-based computational model, we examine which approach is more successful at quelling insurgencies and find that a hearts and minds approach is superior to an attrition strategy. We illustrate the model with insights from the Iraqi insurgency and, more generally, the model has implications for other insurgencies, such as in Chechnya.
“To have mastered ‘theory’ and ‘method’ is to have become a conscious thinker , a man at work and aware of the assumptions and implications of whatever he is about. To be mastered by ‘method’ or ‘theory’ is simply to be kept from working.” The sentence applies nicely to the present plight of political science. The profession as a whole oscillates between two unsound extremes. At the one end a large majority of political scientists qualify as pure and simple unconscious thinkers. At the other end a sophisticated minority qualify as overconscious thinkers, in the sense that their standards of method and theory are drawn from the physical, “paradigmatic” sciences.
The wide gap between the unconscious and the overconscious thinker is concealed by the growing sophistication of statistical and research techniques. Most of the literature introduced by the title “Methods” (in the social, behavioral or political sciences) actually deals with survey techniques and social statistics, and has little if anything to share with the crucial concern of “methodology,” which is a concern with the logical structure and procedure of scientific enquiry. In a very crucial sense there is no methodology without logos , without thinking about thinking. And if a firm distinction is drawn—as it should be—between methodology and technique, the latter is no substitute for the former. One may be a wonderful researcher and manipulator of data, and yet remain an unconscious thinker.
One central element of the current war on terrorism is “draining the swamps,” addressing conditions within a state that produce international terrorism. This paper empirically examines what factors lead a state to become a “swamp,” drawing on a theoretical approach that guides current U.S. policy. This theory looks at the ability of a state to impose costs on terrorist groups within its own borders. The lower the operating costs within a state, the greater the amount of terrorism produced within that state. Using data on the number of international terrorist events originating from a state from 1968 to 1998, an empirical model incorporating variables designed to test this theoretical argument as well as relevant control variables is employed. Strong support was found for the state strength approach, suggesting that one way to address the threat of international terrorism is to strengthen a government's ability to control its own territory.
This article argues that the agent-based computational model permits a distinctive approach to social science for which the term “generative” is suitable. In defending this terminology, features distinguishing the approach from both “inductive” and “deductive” science are given. Then, the following specific contributions to social science are discussed: The agent-based computational model is a new tool for empirical research. It offers a natural environment for the study of connectionist phenomena in social science. Agent-based modeling provides a powerful way to address certain enduring—and especially interdisciplinary—questions. It allows one to subject certain core theories—such as neoclassical microeconomics—to important types of stress (e.g., the effect of evolving preferences). It permits one to study how rules of individual behavior give rise—or “map up”—to macroscopic regularities and organizations. In turn, one can employ laboratory behavioral research findings to select among competing agent-based (“bottom up”) models. The agent-based approach may well have the important effect of decoupling individual rationality from macroscopic equilibrium and of separating decision science from social science more generally. Agent-based modeling offers powerful new forms of hybrid theoretical-computational work; these are particularly relevant to the study of non-equilibrium systems. The agentbased approach invites the interpretation of society as a distributed computational device, and in turn the interpretation of social dynamics as a type of computation. This interpretation raises important foundational issues in social science—some related to intractability, and some to undecidability proper. Finally, since “emergence” figures prominently in this literature, I take up the connection between agent-based modeling and classical emergentism, criticizing the latter and arguing that the two are incompatible. ! 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
This paper is the second in a series of analyses which explore relationships between terrorism and democracy. In this instance, the authors use the Rand‐St Andrews Chronology of International Terrorism for 1994, as well as the US State Department's Patterns of Global Terrorism collection of events for 1995. The authors use these data sets to determine if there is a linkage between the occurrence of terrorist attacks and the type of incumbent political regime in the countries where they are perpetrated. The two classifications of political regimes were drawn from Robert Wesson's 1987 study Democracy: a Worldwide Survey and the Freedom House Publication Freedom in the World for 1984–85 and 1994–95, in order to evaluate the impact of regime change on the incidence of terrorist events. Our principal finding, consistent with earlier work, is that terrorist events are substantially more likely to occur in free and democratic settings than in any of the alternatives. We do discover, though, that change in and of itself makes a difference. Countries which underwent regime change in the period under consideration were more likely to experience terrorism than countries which did not.
This study evaluates the relationship between democracy and the decision calculus of terrorist organizations. Starting with a simple formalization of the budget constraint for terrorist organizations, this project evaluates two schools of thought regarding the role of democracy. The first school, labeled the strategic school, argues that democratic regimes decrease the price of violence and therefore encourage terrorism. The second school, labeled the political access school, argues that democratic regimes decrease the price of non‐violent political expression and thereby decrease the probability of terrorism. These competing explanations are evaluated against the ITERATE cross‐national time series data for the years 1968 to 1986, using a negative binomial regression event count model. The results show that established democracies are less likely to experience terrorism than non‐democracies, but that newly formed democracies are more likely to experience terrorism than other types of states.
Why is terrorist activity more prevalent in democracies than in nondemocracies? I argue that the main motivation for terrorist attacks in democracies is intergroup dynamics, with terrorist groups of various ideologies competing with one another for limited political influence. I conduct a cross-national, longitudinal analysis of 119 countries for the period 1975–97, using political competition as the key independent variable and the number of transnational terrorist incidents originating in the country as the dependent variable. I find preliminary support for the hypothesis that intergroup competition, motivated by the competition of the political regime, explains an increase in terrorist incidents originating in a state. Evidence also reveals a positive relationship between political competition and the number of terrorist groups that emerge within a state and a positive relationship between the density of domestic interest group participation and terrorist activity. Officials should consider intergroup dynamics to predict terrorist activities and derive effective counterterrorism policies.
Suicide terrorism is rising around the world, but the most common explanations do not help us understand why. Religious fanaticism does not explain why the world leader in suicide terrorism is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a group that adheres to a Marxist/Leninist ideology, while existing psychological explanations have been contradicted by the widening range of socio-economic backgrounds of suicide terrorists. To advance our understanding of this growing phenomenon, this study collects the universe of suicide terrorist attacks worldwide from 1980 to 2001, 188 in all. In contrast to the existing explanations, this study shows that suicide terrorism follows a strategic logic, one specifically designed to coerce modern liberal democracies to make significant territorial concessions. Moreover, over the past two decades, suicide terrorism has been rising largely because terrorists have learned that it pays. Suicide terrorists sought to compel American and French military forces to abandon Lebanon in 1983, Israeli forces to leave Lebanon in 1985, Israeli forces to quit the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 1994 and 1995, the Sri Lankan government to create an independent Tamil state from 1990 on, and the Turkish government to grant autonomy to the Kurds in the late 1990s. In all but the case of Turkey, the terrorist political cause made more gains after the resort to suicide operations than it had before. Thus, Western democracies should pursue policies that teach terrorists that the lesson of the 1980s and 1990s no longer holds, policies which in practice may have more to do with improving homeland security than with offensive military action.
Richardson's finding that the severity of interstate wars is power-law distributed belongs to the most striking empirical regularities in world politics. Yet, this is a regularity in search for a theory. Drawing on the principles of self-organized criticality, I propose an agent-based model of war and state-formation that exhibits power-law regularities. The computational findings suggest that the scale-free behavior depends on a process of technological change that leads to contextually-dependent, stochastic decisions to wage war.. I am grateful to the participants of those meetings and to Robert Axelrod, Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, and the editor and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for excellent comments. Laszlo Gulyas helped me reimplement the model in Java and Repast. Nevertheless, I bear the full responsibility for any inaccuracies and omissions.
This document provides a list of substantive errata for the book. This typically means an error or problem of some importance to the substance of the discussion. Erratum (1) In the discussion of figure 2.2 says that one should use the "square root" to model the adjective "very" and that one should use the "square" to model the adjective "some-what." These should be flipped: one should use the square for "very" and the square root for "somewhat." Figure 2.2 shows this correctly. Erratum (2) Following a discussion with David Collier I think the whole section in chapter, pp. 80–83, dealing with Collier and Levitsky should be rewritten. The text below then replaces that section. Note also that the caption of figure 3.1 should read "Ladder of generality versus diminished subtypes" as in the original figure in Collier and Levitsky.
This article investigates the determinants of logistical and negotiation success from the terrorists’ viewpoint in hostage-taking missions. Logistical success indicates that the terrorists apparently completed the mission as planned, while negotiation success means that the terrorists received some of their initial demands. In the empirical analysis, the article utilizes a new dataset on hostage incidents from 1978 through 2005 for the logit regressions. Empirical results broadly support the authors’ theoretical predictions. Logistical success depends positively on terrorist resources and target vulnerability, while negotiation success increases with the relative disagreement values and relative bargaining strengths of the terrorists. More specifically, terrorist success at the execution stage depends positively on kidnappings and large hostage grabs and varies negatively with attack force diversity and terrorist casualties. Negotiation success depends on bargaining variables (i.e. the number of hostages, casualties, incident duration, and other proxies). The article shows that the factors that determine terrorist negotiation success differ between kidnappings and non-kidnappings (i.e. skyjackings, the takeover of buildings, and the hijacking of non-aerial means of transport), owing to location and other considerations (e.g. types of demands). In particular, making multiple demands bolsters negotiated success in non-kidnappings, while demanding money fosters negotiated success in kidnappings. Lengthier incidents have a positive influence on the likelihood of terrorists gaining concessions in kidnappings and non-kidnappings.