Article

Terrorism, Democracy, and Credible Commitments

May 2011
International Studies Quarterly 55(2):357 - 378

DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2478.2011.00647.x

Authors:

Michael Findley

University of Texas at Austin

Joseph Young

American University

What explains the variation in terrorism within and across political regimes? We contend that terrorism is most likely to occur in contexts in which governments cannot credibly restrain themselves from abusing their power in the future. We consider a specific institutional arrangement, whether a state has an independent judiciary, and hypothesize that independent judiciaries make government commitments more credible, thereby providing less incentive for the use of terrorism. Using a recently released database that includes transnational and domestic terrorist events from 1970 to 1997, we estimate a set of statistical analyses appropriate for the challenges of terrorism data and then examine the robustness of the results. The results provide support for the credible commitment logic and offer insights into the different ways that political institutions increase or decrease terrorism.

Spatial Distribution Assessment of Terrorist Attack Types Based on I-MLKNN Model

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2021
ISPRS

Terrorist attacks are harmful to lives and property and seriously affect the stability of the international community and economic development. Exploring the regularity of terrorist attacks and building a model for assessing the risk of terrorist attacks (a kind of public safety risk, and it means the possibility of a terrorist attack) are of great significance to the security and stability of the international community and to global anti-terrorism. We propose a fusion of Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW) and a Multi-label k-Nearest Neighbor (I-MLKNN)-based assessment model for terrorist attacks, which is in a grid-scale and considers 17 factors of socio-economic and natural environments, and applied the I-MLKNN assessment model to assess the risk of terrorist attacks in Southeast Asia. The results show the I-MLKNN multi-label classification algorithm is proven to be an ideal tool for the assessment of the spatial distribution of terrorist attacks, and it can assess the risk of different types of terrorist attacks, thus revealing the law of distribution of different types of terrorist attacks. The terrorist attack risk assessment results indicate that Armed Attacks, Bombing/Explosions and Facility/Infrastructure Attacks in Southeast Asia are high-risk terrorist attack events, and the southernmost part of Thailand and the Philippines are high-risk terrorist attack areas for terrorism. We do not only provide a reference for incorporating spatial features in multi-label classification algorithms, but also provide a theoretical basis for decision-makers involved in terrorist attacks, which is meaningful to the implementation of the international counter-terrorism strategy.

Terrorism and Democracy: A Reconsideration

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2021
Comp Sociol

This article proposes a new explanation of the positive correlation between democracy and terrorism detected in many previous studies. It is shown that this might be accounted for by the fact that factional democracies are subjected to more terrorist attacks than the other political regimes. A positive relationship between the democratic regime and the level of terrorist activity can be obtained due to the inclusion of factional democracies in the sample of democratic states. If factional democracies are excluded from the sample, the relationship between the level of terrorist activity and the democratic regime is negative. The analysis allows to maintain that factional democracy is a rather powerful factor of a high level of terrorist activity, while non-factional democracy turns out to be rather a statistically significant predictor of a relatively low intensity of terrorist attacks.

Democracy and Terrorism: A Re-analysis

Article

Jan 2019

The authors analyze the relationship between the type of political regime and the level of terrorist activity, with a particular emphasis on the so-called factional democracies. The key difference of factional democracies from other political regimes is the presence of polarization between opposing factions. It has been reported that political polarization transforms the conventional institutionalized political process into unconventional politics. The authors draw attention to the fact that in the existing scientific debate, there is no clear conclusion about the nature of the relationship between the type of political regime and the level of terrorist activity in the country. A literature review suggests that there is a curvilinear, U-shaped relationship between the level of terrorist activity and the type of political regime, which is consistent with the findings of previous works describing the relationship between socio-political destabilization and the type of political regime. Preliminary testing conducted by the authors indicates that factional democracies are subject to significantly more terrorist attacks than any other political regimes. While analyzing data on the level of terrorist activity, the authors address the need to split the sample into subsamples, due to the nonlinear nature of the relationship between the level of terrorist activity and GDP per capita, as well as the mean of years of schooling. The presence of a positive relationship between factional democracies and the level of terrorist activity is also verified by applying a negative binomial regression. The authors offer their own answer to the question of why so many previous studies have detected a positive correlation between democracy and terrorism. Attention is drawn to the fact that the positive relationship between democratic regime and the level of terrorist activity can be obtained due to the inclusion of factional democracies into the overall sample of democratic states. If factional democracies are excluded from the sample, the relationship between the level of terrorist activity and the democratic regime turns out to be clearly negative. The findings about the relationship between regime type and terrorist activity are replicated at the subsamples level. The general conclusion is that a factional democracy turns out to be a very strong positive predictor of high levels of terrorist activity, whereas a non-factional democracy turns out to be a statistically-significant predictor of the relatively lower levels of the intensity of terrorist attacks.

Terrorism and the Varieties of Civil Liberties

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2020

How do government protections of, and infringement upon, its citizens’ civil liberties influence the country’s exposure to terrorism? Existing research remains divided on whether civil liberties protections increase or decrease vulnerability to terrorism, and the conditions under which violating civil liberties mitigate or exacerbate the security threats associated with terrorism. We provide clarity on these debates by disaggregating civil liberties into component dimensions—political liberties, private liberties, and physical integrity—which we argue have distinct effects on a country’s exposure to terrorism. We argue political liberties increase terrorism while physical integrity rights decrease terrorism. These countervailing effects provide an alternative explanation for the“inverted-U” relationship between civil liberties protections and terrorism. We isolate the effects of specific political institutional features and government behaviors by leveraging the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) data. We measure a country’s exposure to terrorism using the Global Terrorism Database. Our sample covers 176 states from 1970-2016. We find evidence consistent with our hypotheses regarding the effects of the distinct component dimensions of civil liberties.

Exploring the Connection Between Inequalities and Radicalisation: Reviewing the Evidence Base

Book

Jan 2022

Fighting Terrorism in Africa When Existing Terrorism Levels Matter

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2021

This study examines policy tools in the fight against terrorism when existing levels of terrorism matter in 53 African countries for the period 1998-2012. The empirical evidence is based on contemporary, non-contemporary and Instrumental Variable Quantile regressions (QR) which enable the investigation throughout the conditional distributions of domestic, transnational and total terrorism dynamics. The following findings are established. First, counterterrorism policy instruments of inclusive human development and military expenditure further fuel terrorim. Second, political stability negatively affects terrorism with a negative threshold effect. Political stability estimates are consistently significant with increasing negative magnitudes throughout the conditional distributions of domestic and total terrorism. Policy implications are discussed.

Fighting terrorism in Africa when existing terrorism levels matter

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2021

Regime Type and Counterterrorism: Revisiting the Debate

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2019

Onur Sultan

In this study, we focus on the effects of different types of regimes, such as democracy, autocracy and anocracy on survival of terrorist groups. In this regard, we perform statistical analyses not only with a way that tests the effect of the said regimes types on terrorist group termination, but we also test their impact based on their degrees on terrorist group failure. The results of our empirical analysis demonstrate that terror groups are less likely to fail in weak democracies. They also suggest that there is no significant relationship between being an autocratic regime and terrorist group termination regardless the strength of the autocratic regime.

Systematic Review of Quantitative Studies on Inequality and Radicalisation

Technical Report

Full-text available

Dec 2018

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The aim of this report is to provide a methodological evaluation and review of studies that focus on the relationship between inequality and radicalisation. Studies included in this systematic review were quantitative (or mixed-method) empirical studies published in English between 1 January 2001 and 31 December 2017. The studies concerned different forms of ‘radicalisation’ (e.g. cognitive and behavioural radicalisation, far-right and religious/Islamist radicalisation) and inequality (e.g. economic and socio-political). They also differed in terms of geographic location and their focus on the individual or the social/macro level. A total of 132 publications meeting inclusion criteria were identified through a search of seven well-known journal databases as well as two highly relevant journals, not listed in these databases, and the body of relevant grey literature. An additional nine publications were identified through cross-referencing. Of the 141 studies finally selected: 84 focused on a macro-level of investigation; 42 studies were based on survey research related to non-radicalised individuals; and 15 drew on biographical evidence about radicalised individuals. The review findings suggest an inconsistent relationship between economic inequality and radicalisation. At the individual level, data on objective economic indicators were inconsistent regarding their association with cognitive radicalisation although slightly more consistent regarding behavioural radicalisation. The data suggest that behavioural radicalisation is more characteristic for more educated Muslims in dominantly Muslim countries, while, in Western European countries, less educated participants were more likely to demonstrate features of Islamist radicalisation. Data regarding individual-level radicalisation in the USA yielded no consistent outcomes. Similarly, data regarding the relationship between perceived (or subjective) economic inequality and radicalisation provided inconsistent results. At the social level, there was some evidence that a higher per capita GDP and unemployment, as well as lower education levels, may be related to higher terrorism incidence. In relation to per capita GDP, the majority of studies indicate that countries with both a high and a low, per capita GDP tend to experience less terrorism than countries with an average per capita GDP (indicating a non-linear trend). Although inequality indicators generally showed an inconsistent pattern of relationships with radicalisation, countries with a higher percentage of people living in poverty were more likely to be targets of transnational terrorist attacks, while interregional inequality appears to be related to a higher incidence of domestic terrorism. Other economic inequality indicators (interpersonal inequality, Human Development Index, adult literacy) failed to show consistent results. At the individual level more consistent patterns were found between cognitive radicalisation and various measures of perceived social inequality. Higher perceived inequality was related to more radicalised attitudes in different contexts, regardless of the ideological orientation of radicalisation. This could also be seen at a transnational level, with respect to human rights since where human rights (physical integrity rights) were upheld, incidence of terrorism was consistently lower, while repression was related to higher terrorism incidence. Gender equality was associated with lower incidence of attacks, but incidence of terrorism was higher when Islamist or far-right domestic terrorism was the focus of the study. Data on civil rights and liberties as well as democracy yielded no consistent results; some evidence indicated an underlying non-linear trend. Although these results do not indicate the irrelevance of economic inequality in the context of radicalisation, they do imply that socio-political rights, in terms of objective estimates at a macro level or subjective perception at an individual level, may play a more important role than economic inequality in the inequality-radicalisation nexus. This suggests – in the absence of any formal causal relationship testing – that higher socio-political inequality leads to higher probability of radicalisation and terrorism incidence. This is important for policy-making because it suggests that given the limited possibility for rapidly reducing economic inequality, a similar, or greater, positive impact on the lowering of terrorism incidence might be achieved by reducing socio-political inequality. Thus, assuming we can imply any causal relationship, future policies should focus on minimising the experience of marginalisation and injustice by individuals and communities. This is because perceived inequality – sometimes itself an unintended consequence of counter-radicalisation measures – has been shown to be related to radicalisation in its various forms. The conclusions of this review should be read in the context of a number of methodological limitations of the studies analysed. These include: the lack of an experimental methodological approach; poor, or inconsistent, operationalisation of variables; and a scarcity of studies including a range of potentially important variables. Some studies were also found to have: employed inappropriate means of analysing or presenting data; omitted to explore the combined (or interactive) effects of different inequality variables on radicalisation; or demonstrated other limitations. These are noted below where relevant. This review, therefore, does not provide a definitive answer to the question of the relationship between radicalisation and inequality but serves as a starting point for future research that, through the employment of more sophisticated research designs, might allow more precise conclusions.

The role of inclusive development and military expenditure in modulating the effect of terrorism on governance

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2018
J Econ Stud

Purpose-The study investigates the role of inclusive human development and military expenditure in modulating the effect of terrorism on governance. Design/methodology/approach-It is based on 53 African countries for the period 1998-2012 and interactive Generalised Method of Moments is employed. Six governance indicators from the World Bank and two terrorism variables are used, namely: domestic and transnational terrorism dynamics. Findings-The following main findings are established. There is a negative net effect on governance (regulation quality and corruption-control) when inclusive human development is used to reduce terrorism. There is a positive net impact on governance ("voice and accountability" and rule of law) when military expenditure is used to reduce domestic terrorism. Originality/value-We have complemented the sparse literature on the use of policy variables to mitigate the effect of policy syndromes on macroeconomic outcomes.

Fighting terrorism in Africa: evidence from bundling and unbundling institutions

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2019
EMPIR ECON

This study assesses government mechanisms in the fight against terrorism with particular emphasis on the bundling and unbundling of ten governance dynamics. The empirical evidence is based on a panel of 53 African countries for period 1998-2012 and Generalized Method of Moments. The following findings are established. First, for the most part, political governance and its constituents respectively have negative effects on all terrorism dynamics, with the following consistent increasing order of negative magnitude: unclear terrorism, transnational terrorism, domestic terrorism and total terrorism. Second, overwhelmingly for economic and institutional governances, the governance dynamics and their constituent components affect terrorism negatively, with the magnitude on domestic terrorism consistently higher than that on transnational terrorism. Third, for most specifications, the effect of general governance is consistently negative on terrorism variables. Theoretical and practical policy implications are discussed.

Domestic Terrorism in Democratic States: Understanding and Addressing Minority Grievances

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2017

Scholars continue to disagree on the relationship between regime type and political violence, perhaps because the empirical evidence remains contradictory. To date, most studies generally explore the direct relationship between democracy and terrorism. Yet, we think the effect of regime type on terrorism is conditional on the presence of politically excluded groups whose grievances motivate them to challenge the state. We need to take into account both willingness/grievance and opportunity to understand political violence. Using a global data set of domestic terrorism between 1990 and 2012, we find that different regime-associated features of democracy relate differently to domestic terrorism. Higher levels of the rule of law tend to decrease terrorism, whereas electoral democracies tend to experience more domestic terrorism. However, domestic terrorism increases in every form of democracy in the presence of political exclusion. As such, an effective counterterrorism policy must address underlying grievances as democratization by itself may actually drive domestic terrorism up.

Spatiotemporal evolution of Nigeria’s armed conflicts and terrorism and the associated shift in social perceptions

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2024

Nigeria is one of the largest countries in Africa that is most severely affected by armed conflict and terrorism. To help Nigeria design effective measures to curb armed conflicts and terrorism, it is essential to analyze all available data. We propose to first systematically characterize the spatiotemporal evolution of armed conflicts and terrorism in Nigeria using the events and fatalities data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) Project by constructing a few new and readily computable indexes, then utilizing another media big data, the Global Database of events, language, and Tone (GDELT), to construct two general indices, to describe the collective national activity about cooperation and conflicts and examine how social perception on conflicts and terrorism in Nigeria has been changing. We find that armed conflicts and terrorism in Nigeria have become more widespread spatially and more uniform temporally, characterized by appropriate changes in Shannon entropy. We have also found that economic decay, erosion in democracy, and increase in corruption are all highly correlated with the increase in armed conflicts and terrorism, and the general societal perception in Nigeria has been accepting the severe armed conflicts and terrorism after the COVID-19 pandemic as a new normal. Therefore, great care has to be taken to ensure better economic development in Nigeria, besides calling for greater support and enhanced international and regional cooperation.

What Restrains Military from Targeting Civilians in Civil Wars?

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2022

What explains the role of restraints on military for limiting victimisation of civilians? We find that a higher number of officers trained on counterinsurgency are associated with a lower number of civilians killed by government forces in civil wars. We also find that the number of civilians killed by government forces reduces as the degree of military involvement in politics reduces, and as the judiciary becomes independent. These results suggest that if the goal is to curb indiscriminate civilian killings, better training in counterinsurgency, the existence of judicial checks, and lowering military influence in politics are practical policy tools.

Is Terrorism Deadlier in Democracies?

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2022

A long literature examines the relationship between terrorism and democracy. However, little research examines the lethality of terrorist attacks across regime type. This article theorizes the terrorism that democracies do experience will be less deadly. Democracy increases the opportunity for nonstate actors to use terrorism to attract attention to their causes, which we argue also mitigates the need to carry out deadly attacks. Using cross-national data on domestic terrorist attacks committed between 1970 and 2013, a multilevel statistical analysis demonstrates that terrorist attacks in democracies are less lethal. A time-series cross-sectional analysis further reveals that consolidated democracies and harsh authoritarian regimes experience few deaths from terrorism. While democracies experience high volumes of nonlethal terrorism, strong autocracies experience low amounts of deadly terrorism. Thus, there is strong evidence that—in one important sense—democracies are safer from terrorism. Existe una extensa literatura que examina la relación entre el terrorismo y la democracia. Sin embargo, son pocos los estudios que examinan la letalidad de los atentados terroristas según el tipo de régimen. Este artículo sostiene que el terrorismo que registran las democracias será menos mortífero. La democracia aumenta la oportunidad de que los actores no estatales utilicen el terrorismo para atraer la atención hacia sus causas, lo que, según argumentamos, también mitiga la necesidad de llevar a cabo ataques mortales. Utilizando datos transnacionales sobre ataques terroristas nacionales cometidos entre 1970 y 2013, un análisis estadístico multinivel demuestra que los ataques terroristas en las democracias son menos mortales. Un análisis transversal de series cronológicas revela además que las democracias consolidadas y los regímenes autoritarios duros registran pocas muertes por terrorismo. Mientras las democracias registran grandes volúmenes de terrorismo no letal, las autocracias fuertes registran bajas cantidades de terrorismo mortal. Por lo tanto, hay pruebas sólidas de que, en un sentido importante, las democracias son más seguras frente al terrorismo. Si une vaste littérature analyse les relations entre terrorisme et démocratie, peu de travaux se sont penchés sur la létalité des attaques terroristes selon le type de régime. Cet article émet l’hypothèse que le terrorisme qui frappe les démocraties est moins meurtrier. En effet, dans la mesure où le régime démocratique augmente les possibilités, pour les acteurs non étatiques, de recourir au terrorisme pour attirer l’attention sur les causes qu’ils défendent, il limite également la nécessité de perpétrer des attaques meurtrières. S’appuyant sur des données transnationales portant sur les attaques terroristes intérieures entre 1970 et 2013, une analyse statistique multiniveau démontre que les attaques terroristes sont moins létales dans les démocraties. Par ailleurs, une analyse transverse et temporelle révèle que les démocraties solidement établies et les régimes autoritaires ne subissent que peu de morts dues au terrorisme. Tandis que les démocraties connaissent une quantité importante de terrorisme non létal, les autocraties fortes ne souffrent que de peu de formes de terrorisme meurtrières. Par conséquent, il est clair que, dans un sens (particulièrement important), les démocraties sont un meilleur rempart contre le terrorisme.

Fighting terrorism in Africa: Complementarity between inclusive development, military expenditure and political stability

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2021
J POLICY MODEL

This study examines complementarities between inclusive development, military expenditure and political stability in the fight against terrorism in 53 African countries for the period 1998-2012. Hence the policy variables employed in the study are inclusive development, military expenditure and political stability. The empirical evidence is based on Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) with forward orthogonal deviations. The paper reports three main findings. Firstly, military expenditure and inclusive development are substitutes and not complements. Secondly, it is more relevant to use political stability as a complement of inclusive development than to use inclusive development as a complement of political stability. Thirdly, it can be broadly established that military expenditure and political stability are complementary. In the light of the sequencing, complementarity and substitutability, when the three policy variables are viewed within the same framework, it is more feasible to first pursue political stability and then complement it with military expenditure and inclusive development.

Terrorism, Surveillance, and Police Powers: An Analysis of Political Ideology and Trust in Government

Preprint

Dec 2020

Christopher Martin

In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, law enforcement in the United States began to employ powers and tactics that infringe upon the civil liberties of the suspects that they targeted. Though some of these uses have been challenged and reversed in the courts, there is still a portion of the population that believes that tactics like these, even up to torture, have been justified to combat terrorism. This study seeks to use General Social Survey data about people’s views of the use of expanded police and surveillance powers to combat terrorism to compare these with people’s age, sex, race, education, political ideology, and trust in different branches of the government. This will improve our understanding of who puts more emphasis on security over civil liberties when it comes to terrorist suspects. Through this analysis, it is found that political ideology was not as important as was thought in the literature. It was found that confidence in the military was the strongest indicator of people favoring policies that expanded surveillance and gave increased power to go after terrorist suspects.

POLITICAL EXCLUSION AND DOMESTIC TERRORISM IN AFRICA

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2021

Hyginus Chibuike Ezebuilo

Many scholars have noted the prevalence of domestic terrorism in Africa and elsewhere. Scholars argue that ethnically motivated terrorism is caused by problems of political exclusion, and many nation-states have alienated distinct ethnic groups, even under domestic constitutions and practices. This study examines whether the exclusion of ethnic groups from political power is an important contributing factor to domestic terrorism. If political exclusion causes ethnic terrorism, can reforms promoting greater ethnic inclusion and democracy reduce risks of terrorism? Global concern over terrorism and how to reduce the severity of terrorist attacks have been growing. Although much attention has been focused on transnational terrorist events, most recorded terrorist activities tend to be fully domestic, and often tied to groups with claims against their home government. Previous studies have shown that ethnic exclusion and restricted political access can motivate civil war, and evidence indicates that ethnic accommodation and political reform can reduce the risk of civil war. The same logic should apply to ethnic terrorism as well. This line of research is to examine whether political inclusion can reduce terrorism by lessoning motivation and expanding opportunities for alternative actions. This goes beyond the question of whether ethnic groups that are excluded/included engage in more/fewer terrorist attacks, and examine whether resort to terrorism by the group decline after inclusion.

Income inequality, human capital and terrorism in Africa: Beyond exploratory analytics

Article

Jan 2021

This study uncovers the effect of income inequality on terrorism, delineated with four distinct markers, namely: domestic, transnational, uncertain and total respectively, intermediated with the role of human capital, on a panel of 34 African countries, over the period 1980-2012. Thus, rather than presenting correlation analyses implied by exploratory analytics among these key variables of interest, this study further employs a zero-inflated negative binomial regression estimator due to the preponderance of zero values of the terrorism data. The following findings are consistently established. First, income inequality remains a substantive predictor of terrorism across the model specifications, with the exception of transnational terrorism. Second, human capital variables exert a positive first-order effect on both domestic and total terrorism. Third, the marginal impacts of interactions between human capital measures and income inequality indicators are negative at the higher levels of educational attainment. These findings remain robust in the presence of endogeneity concerns, time and country- specific effects, alternative estimators and regional effects respectively. On the policy front, eliminating the gaps in income inequality remains an effective policy antidote to quell the ember of angers and frustration that may aggravate into arm taking by the aggrieved.

One Strike and You’re out…Dictators’ Fate in the Aftermath of Terrorism

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2020

We use a cross-country dataset on terrorism and leadership survival from 1970 through 2015 to shed light on a leader’s fate after terrorists’ strike. We provide robust evidence that incumbents in electoral authoritarian regimes face an increased hazard of exit from political power. This is contrasted with the closed authoritarian dictators that remain intact. Moreover, we fail to find a robust effect of terrorism on a leader’s survival probability in democracies. We conceive this effect to be due to the collapse of the elite coalition in autocracies after an attack, suggesting that the dictator’s ‘loyal friends’ betray him in the aftermath of terrorism.

Shaking Hands with the Internal Enemy: Democracy and Civil Conflict Settlement

Article

Aug 2020

Omer Zarpli

How does regime type affect the likelihood of negotiated settlements that end civil conflicts? A limited number of previous studies have offered divergent theories and mixed findings about whether democracy is an asset or a liability. I draw these disparate findings together and present a novel theory on why leaders under fully democratic and autocratic regimes may have a particularly difficult time in peacemaking, and how leaders in anocratic (hybrid) regimes are more likely to be successful in reaching negotiated settlements. Thus, I hypothesize that the relationship between regime type and the likelihood of conflict-resolution is inverted U-shaped. I test this hypothesis using data on all internal conflicts between 1946 and 2014, and find empirical support. The findings suggest that even if anocracies are more prone to the outbreak of civil wars as has been proposed by previous studies, they are also better at settling these conflicts.

The Effect of Foreign Aid on Political Violence: Learning from Case Studies of Nigeria and Sierra Leone

Thesis

Full-text available

Apr 2019

Charlotte Rohrer

Policymakers in OECD countries regularly cite reducing political violence as a fundamental purpose of foreign aid. For example, countries such as Pakistan and Iraq have received considerable amounts of aid meant to address the root causes of political violence. This project analyzes quantitative and qualitative evidence to assess whether foreign aid can reduce political violence. The quantitative and qualitative analyses study Boko Haram in Nigeria and the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone to focus on regional and country-wide political violence. The study further focuses on aid projects in Sierra Leone and Nigeria as a means to reduce or curb this violence. This paper finds evidence for aid projects playing a significant role in reducing political violence or reconsolidating a country after a conflict. However, this is highly contingent on the projects addressing and adequately understanding the needs in these countries. Note: This honors thesis began as a Ursinus College Summer Fellows project in June/July 2018. Sections on the following pages are taken from Rohrer (2018): pgs. 7, 14-16, 22

How Terrorism Spreads: Emulation and the Diffusion of Ethnic and Ethnoreligious Terrorism

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2020

Sara M. T. Polo

Previous research on the causes of domestic terrorism has tended to focus on domestic determinants. Although this approach can be helpful to understand many causes of terrorism, it implicitly disregards how the tactical choices made by similar nonstate actors elsewhere influence a group’s decision to resort to terrorist tactics. This study argues that the adoption of terrorism among ethnic and ethnoreligious groups results from a process of conditional emulation. Groups are more likely to emulate the terrorist choice of others with whom they are connected by shared political grievances and spatial networks. The theory is tested on a new and original group-level data set of ethnic and ethnoreligious terrorism (1970 to 2009) using geospatial analysis and spatial econometric models. The results provide strong support for the hypothesized mechanism leading to the diffusion of terrorism and suggest that emulation—more than domestic and contextual factors—substantially influences dissidents’ tactic choice.

Fighting Terrorism in Africa: Complementarity between Inclusive Development, Military Expenditure and Political Stability

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2021
J POLICY MODEL

Communications Technology and Terrorism

Article

May 2019

By facilitating the flow of information in society, communications technology (CT; e.g., newspapers, radio, television, the Internet) can help terrorists to (i) spread their message, (ii) recruit followers, and (iii) coordinate among group members. However, CT also facilitates monitoring and arresting terrorists. This article formulates the hypothesis that a society’s level of CT is systematically related to terrorism. We introduce a simple theoretical framework, suggesting that terrorism first becomes more attractive with a rise in CT, but then decreases, following an inverted U shape. Accessing data for 199 countries from 1970 to 2014, we find evidence consistent with these predictions: terrorism peaks at intermediate ranges of CT and corresponding magnitudes are sizable. Our estimations control for a range of potentially confounding factors, as well as country fixed effects and year fixed effects. Results are robust to a battery of alternative specifications and placebo regressions. We find no evidence of a potential reporting bias explaining our findings.

Civil society and exposure to domestic terrorist attacks: Evidence from a cross-national quantitative analysis, 1970–2010

Article

Apr 2019

This article examines the connection between a nation’s level of civil society organizational openness and the number of domestic terrorist attacks across 167 countries from 1970 to 2010. Following the contentious politics approach, we conceptualize terrorist organizations as engaged in high-risk movement activity and sensitive to organizational opportunities that make contention more likely. Panel fixed-effects negative binomial regression models support our hypothesis that a nation’s level of civil society openness increases exposure to domestic terrorist attacks. This work connects social movement theory with the cross-disciplinary literature working to understand terrorism by offering an explanation for terrorist attacks that are rooted in the organizational opportunity paradigm. It provides us a useful tool for future work on cross-national social movements in a cross-national perspective, as well as further work on terrorist organizations.

The Comparative African Economics of Governance in Fighting Terrorism

Article

Full-text available

Feb 2019

This study assesses the comparative economics of governance in fighting terrorism in fifty-three African countries for period 1996–2012. Four terrorism variables are used: domestic, transnational, unclear, and total terrorism dynamics. Nine bundled and unbundled governance variables are employed: political stability (no violence), voice and accountability, political governance, government effectiveness, regulation quality, economic governance, corruption control, the rule of law, and institutional governance. The empirical evidence is based on fixed effects regressions. In the analytical procedure, we first bundle governance indicators by means of principal component analysis before engaging the empirical exercise with the full sample. In the final step, specifications are based on a decomposed full sample in order to articulate the fundamental characteristics for comparative purposes. The following broad findings are established. First, good governance is an appealing tool in fighting terrorism. Second, the relevance of the good governance dynamics is as follows in order of increasing relevance: economic governance, institutional governance, and political governance. The findings are presented in increasing order of magnitude to emphasize fundamental features in which governance dynamics have the highest effect in mitigating terrorism.

The Comparative African Economics of Governance in Fighting Terrorism

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2018

This study assesses the comparative economics of governance in fighting terrorism in 53 African countries for period 1996-2012. Four terrorism variables are used, namely: domestic, transnational, unclear and total terrorism dynamics. Nine bundled and unbundled governance variables are employed, notably: political stability/no violence, voice & accountability, political governance, government effectiveness, regulation quality, economic governance, corruption-control, the rule of law and institutional governance. The empirical evidence is based on Fixed Effects regressions. In the analytical procedure, we first bundle governance indicators by means of principal component analysis before engaging the empirical exercise with the full sample. In the final step, specifications are based on a decomposed full sample in order to articulate the fundamental characteristics for comparative purposes. The following broad findings are established. First, good governance is an appealing tool in fighting terrorism. Second, the relevance of the good governance dynamics is as follows in order of increasing relevance: economic governance, institutional governance and political governance. The findings are presented in increasing order of magnitude to emphasise fundamental features in which governance dynamics have the highest effect in mitigating terrorism.

From protection to persecution: Threat environment and refugee scapegoating

Article

Dec 2018
J PEACE RES

The security consequences associated with refugee flows are among the most widely studied aspects of forced migration. While the majority of this research program has focused on how refugee movements affect the risk of political violence, scant scholarly attention has been paid to violence perpetrated against refugees. Building upon the state repression literature, we argue that refugees are particularly vulnerable to the violation of their physical integrity rights in the wake of terrorist attacks in host states. Governments are pressured to respond to security crises but prefer to take actions without jeopardizing public support. In this context, refugee groups can be strategically attractive targets of repression because they lack electoral power and citizens are often supportive of government crackdown against foreigners in times of security crises. Given that leaders have stronger incentives to respond to voters’ demands quickly in democracies, we expect the effect of terror attacks on violence against refugees to be stronger in democratic host states. Using a novel global dataset on anti-refugee violence between 1996 and 2015, we show that refugees are more likely to be exposed to violence by the coercive agents of the state in the wake of security crises. We provide suggestive evidence that the repression of refugees is more consistent with a scapegoating mechanism than the actual ties and involvement of refugees in terrorism. The findings reveal that the well-being of uprooted populations is particularly at risk when host countries face a security threat.

“Any press is good press?” Rebel political wings, media freedom, and terrorism in civil wars

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2018

As part of a recent effort to bridge the studies of terrorism and civil war, new research has begun to emerge on the use of terrorism by rebel groups as a strategy of war. Building on these findings, we examine the role of affiliated political wings in shaping the use of terrorism by rebel groups during civil wars. We contend that the presence of an affiliated political wing during the civil war should increase the use of terrorism by rebel groups only in countries where there are relatively few restrictions on the freedom of the press. As political wings are often designed to engage with the civilian population through the dissemination of information, these apparatuses are in a key position to frame the use of terrorism as part of the rebel’s broader war effort. To test this proposition, we examine the use of terrorism by all rebel groups from 1970 to 2011. The results from the analysis provide strong support for our argument that political wings increase the use of terrorism by rebel groups only when the press is allowed to independently cover terrorist attacks.

On the Risk Assessment of Terrorist Attacks Coupled with Multi-Source Factors

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2018
ISPRS

Terrorism has wreaked havoc on today’s society and people. The discovery of the regularity of terrorist attacks is of great significance to the global counterterrorism strategy. In this study, we improve the traditional location recommendation algorithm coupled with multi-source factors and spatial characteristics. We used the data of terrorist attacks in Southeast Asia from 1970 to 2016, and comprehensively considered 17 influencing factors, including socioeconomic and natural resource factors. The improved recommendation algorithm is used to build a spatial risk assessment model of terrorist attacks, and the effectiveness is tested. The model trained in this study is tested with precision, recall, and F-Measure. The results show that, when the threshold is 0.4, the precision is as high as 88%, and the F-Measure is the highest. We assess the spatial risk of the terrorist attacks in Southeast Asia through experiments. It can be seen that the southernmost part of the Indochina peninsula and the Philippines are high-risk areas and that the medium-risk and high-risk areas are mainly distributed in the coastal areas. Therefore, future anti-terrorism measures should pay more attention to these areas.

When the Messengers Are Targets of Terrorism: Restricted Media, State and Domestic Terrorism

Article

May 2024

Terrorist organizations are argued to have a symbiotic relationship with media. Despite the mutually beneficial relationship, media personnel and media outlets are frequently targeted by terrorist organizations across the world. This study explores this puzzle by arguing that the symbiotic relationship between media and terrorism is conditioned by the level of restrictions a state exercises on the media. State restrictions diminish media's utility to the terrorists who would view the restricted media as a proxy for the state, prompting the groups would attack the media targets and deliver a political message to the state. This conjecture is tested on a global cross-national dataset of domestic terrorism between 1970 and 2012, showing strong support for the hypothesized positive relation between media restrictions and terrorist attacks on media targets.

Conceptualizing religion and religious ideology in political science research: what is in a name and what description can do

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2024
Int Polit

Irmak Yazici

This article demonstrates that concept of ‘Islamism’ is sometimes used arbitrarily in political science literature to describe ideological political activism, supposedly grounded in Islam, and argues that descriptive work can improve the academic engagement with Islam by acknowledging the pitfalls of naming ideologies that are affiliated with religions. Instead of labeling a broad range of political activism as Islamism in an arbitrary fashion and/or taking such labels for granted and proceeding with causal inquiry and inferences in reference to such labels, scholars can communicate the nuances in different forms and actors of activism to the readers by descriptively specifying the who, the what, and the when of the activisms that quote particular religions as their subject matters or motives—the histories, agencies, contexts, and contents that elaborate on what is in a name.

The Invisible Impact of Conflict: A Study of Terrorism, Regime Type, and the Shadow Economy

Article

Jul 2024

Quantitative Analysis of Factors of Terrorist Activities: A Systematic Review

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2024

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the number of empirical studies devoted to the analysis of factors influencing the risks of terrorist activity has grown significantly. At the same time, assessments of the influence of individual factors may differ in various studies, due to which there is a need for a generalizing work that will consider the key results of the studies. The last generalizing works were published in English in 2011. Since then, a large number of works have appeared that clarify the influence of various determinants of terrorism. This study presents an analysis of the results of quantitative studies of factors influencing terrorist activity. As part of the study, 75 papers published in 2011–2022 have been analyzed. The most widely studied determinants of terrorism can be divided into three groups: political, social and economic. A total of 53 factors were identified, the statistical significance of which was demonstrated in at least two studies. Studies of the factors of terrorist destabilization of the last ten years have yielded the following main results. They have shown that countries with a hybrid political regime (anocracy), in a state of internal or external conflict, with a weak central government (for example, “fragile” or “failed” states), with an intermediate level of socio-economic development (i.e. with intermediate levels of GDP per capita, urbanization and education) have the greatest risks of terrorist destabilization, although in recent years the zone of greatest risk of terrorist activity has shifted somewhat towards the socio-economically least developed countries. In addition, these states are characterized by low rates of economic growth, high inflation, large amounts of foreign financial aid, high levels of inequality, a fairly large population, pronounced discrimination against minorities, as well as high levels of repression and terrorist activity in previous years.

Taming the Beast: Democratic Institutions and Terrorist Groups’ Involvement in Civil War

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2023

Sambuddha Ghatak

The Ambivalent Effect of Autocratization on Domestic Terrorism

Article

Oct 2023
STUD CONFL TERROR

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.

State capacity matters in ‘the middle:’ A new perspective on domestic terrorism

Article

Mar 2023
J PEACE RES

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.

Upping the ante without taking up arms: Why mass movements escalate demands

Article

Feb 2023
J PEACE RES

Sooyeon Kang

One of the unresolved puzzles in the civil resistance and contentious politics literatures is why some movements that begin seeking limited redress in a certain policy space escalate their claims to demand the ousting of a national leader or the entire regime, a process the article terms ‘demand escalation’. For instance, in the summer of 2019, thousands took to the streets of Hong Kong to protest about a proposed extradition bill that would allow criminal suspects to be sent to mainland China to face trial in courts controlled by the Communist Party. However, even after Hong Kong’s leader, Carrie Lam, announced the formal withdrawal of the controversial bill, protests continued with some calling for greater democracy and others demanding Lam’s resignation. Whereas most of the literature on civil resistance treats demands as fixed and focuses on different methods of struggle to pursue predefined ends, this article shows that demands can change as a result of the state–dissent interaction. The article argues that movements are more likely to escalate their demands when the state responds to the initial nonviolent action with a disproportionate use of force, because such an action intensifies the grievances the protesters have against the state and betrays the remaining trust that people might have had in the government. The analysis of a new quantitative dataset that catalogues both reformist and maximalist opposition campaigns globally supports this claim. By incorporating non-maximalist campaigns into the analysis and not treating demands as fixed, this article adds to our understanding of mass campaigns and highlights an overlooked means by which nonviolent campaigns can up their ante without resorting to violence.

Kurumsal Yapı ve Terör İlişkisinin Toplumsal Maliyeti Özet Societal Cost of the Relationship between Institutional Structure and Terrorist Actions

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2014

Aynur Yildirim

Terörizm, siyasi, tarihsel, kültürel, ekonomik, ideolojik ve dini inancı kapsayan, son derece karmaşık ve farklı bir olgudur. Yaşandığı ülkelerde önemli bir sorun olan terörün nedenlerine bakıldığında, karşımıza çıkan tüm nedenlerin o ülkenin sahip olduğu kurumsal yapıyı işaret ettiği görülmektedir. Mevcut kurumsal yapı-da yaşanan bozulmalar veya söz konusu kurumsal yapının hiç tesis edilememiş olması, terör olaylarının ortaya çıkmasına zemin hazırlamaktadır. Terör eylemle-ri yaşandığı toplumlarda yatırımların azalması, yasalara(devlete) olan güvenin düşmesi ve işlem maliyetlerinin artması gibi ekonomik sorunlara yol açmaktadır. Toplumun kurumsal yapısının güçlü olması halinde terörizm eylemlerini gerçek-leştireceği uygun ortamı bulmakta zorlanacaktır. Bu nedenle ülkelerin kurumsal yapılarında gerekli düzenlemeleri yaparak, güçlü kurumlara sahip olmaları terör sorununu çözmelerini sağlayacaktır. Abstract Terrorism is an extremely complex concept that encompasses political, historical, cultural, economic, ideological and religious beliefs. When we look at the root causes of terrorism that poses significant problems to the countries that experience it, we see that all these causes point to the institutional structure of the country in question. The degeneration of the existing institutional structures or the lack of such structures prepares the ground for emergence of terrorist acts. Acts of terrorism cause economic problems such as decline in investments, loss of confidence to the state and to the rule of law as well to an augmentation in transaction costs in the societies that experience it. When the institutional structure is strong, terrorism would have difficulties in having an appropriate ground to realize its acts. Therefore, the undertaking of the required measures in institutional structures in order to have strong institutions would enable countries to overcome the problem of terrorism.

Incumbent-Aligned Terrorism and Voting Behavior: Evidence from Argentina’s 1973 Elections

Article

Aug 2022

What is the relationship between domestic terrorism and voting behavior? Past research notes the prevalence of domestic terrorist attacks in democratic regimes, but focuses primarily on such violence as a “weapon of the weak.” We extend this literature by focusing on terrorism by incumbent-aligned armed groups and argue these actors use selective violence against political elites to delegitimize the political opposition and provide credible signals of the instability and unrest that is likely to accompany a transfer of power. Using data from two Argentine presidential elections in 1973, we evaluate the relationship between incidents of violence and changes in two measures of voting behavior—vote share and turnout. Consistent with expectations, left-wing political violence between elections reduced right-wing vote share but did not reduce turnout. Additional tests support the mechanism that violence increased voters’ doubts about a potential right-wing government’s ability to govern, and show violence is correlated with future repression.

Democratic breakdown and terrorism

Article

Apr 2020

Joshua Tschantret

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.

The Two Faces of US Counterterrorism Under Trump

Chapter

Mar 2020

Stephen Tankel

Donald Trump made defeating terrorism one of the defining themes of his campaign for president, but his counterterrorism policies in office have been Janus-faced. On one side is actual counterterrorism. These are policies that have evolved under a Trump administration and are sometimes in place despite, rather than because of the president, but which still exist within a traditional counterterrorism paradigm. The other side is faux counterterrorism—policies dressed up as counterterrorism, and which are intended purely to serve Trump’s political purposes.

Protestors, terrorists or something else? How to think about dissident groups

Article

Oct 2019

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.

The People's Duty: Collective Agency and the Morality of Public Policy

Book

Jun 2019

Shmuel Nili

Cambridge Core - Political Philosophy - The People's Duty - by Shmuel Nili

References

Chapter

May 2019

Ignacio Sanchez-Cuenca

The Historical Roots of Political Violence - by Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca June 2019

The Historical Roots of Political Violence: Revolutionary Terrorism in Affluent Countries

Book

Jun 2019

Ignacio Sanchez-Cuenca

Cambridge Core - European Studies - The Historical Roots of Political Violence - by Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca

Deadly foreign terrorism and the rank-ordered tournament for foreign press attention: implications for counterterrorism

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2019
INT INTERACT

Limiting the attention countries receive from the foreign press is thought to reduce the incidence of deadly foreign attacks, but by how much? We show that the incidence of deadly foreign terrorism increases as a nonlinear function of the level of foreign press attention states receive. As a result, the benefits of reducing foreign press attention to prevent deadly foreign terrorist attacks are uneven: some states stand to benefit more than others. Nevertheless, we also show that reducing press attention produces, at best, only minor reductions in the number of deadly foreign terrorist attacks states experience. These results suggest that reducing foreign press attention may not provide as much security as governments expect.

Shaken or stirred? Terrorism and third-party state resolve in civil war interventions

Article

Dec 2017

Does terrorism against third-party state interveners affect their willingness to continue an intervention into a civil war? Drawing on research examining the impact of terrorism on partisanship, public opinion, and political survival, as well as the targeting of states by terrorists, we link terrorist attacks originating from a civil war state with an intervening state’s resolve to continue an ongoing military intervention into a civil war in support of the government. Terrorism can either undermine a third party’s resolve, because the political costs resulting from terror attacks are perceived to be larger than the national security benefits advertised in support of an intervention or it can fortify a third party’s resolve to continue an intervention because it produces a domestic rally effect that raises the political costs of early departure. Event history analysis of 127 interventions with military personnel into civil conflicts on the side of the government during the 1975–2005 period indicates that terrorist campaigns shake the resolve of third-party states and reduce time to their departure.

Terrorism before and after 9/11 – A more dangerous world?

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2017

Was 9/11 the opening salvo in a new age of terrorism? Some argue that this act ushered in a more chaotic world. Others contend an increased focus on terrorism in the past 15 years is the result of conflating terrorist activity with insurgency. We shed light on these claims by analyzing data on domestic and transnational terrorist incidence from 1989 to 2014. The evidence suggests that the years since 9/11 have been different from those preceding them. Once the prevalence of conflicts is accounted for, the post-9/11 era is a significantly less terror prone period than the years before it. A country not suffering civil conflict was upwards of 60 percent more likely to experience terrorism prior to or during the year 2001 than since. However, the opposite trend holds for those countries with a higher proportion of Muslims. Prior to 2001, countries with higher Muslim populations experienced less domestic terrorism. Since 9/11, these countries have experienced significantly more terrorism – both domestic and international – than they had previously.

Toward a Democratic Civil Peace? Democracy, Political Change, and Civil War, 1816–1992

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2001
AM POLIT SCI REV

Coherent democracies and harshly authoritarian states have few civil wars, and intermediate regimes are the most conflict-prone. Domestic violence also seems to be associated with political change, whether toward greater democracy or greater autocracy. Is the greater violence of intermediate regimes equivalent to the finding that states in political transition experience more violence? If both level of democracy and political change are relevant, to what extent is civil violence related to each? Based on an analysis of the period 1816-1992, we conclude that intermediate regimes are most prone to civil war, even when they have had time to stabilize from a regime change. In the long run, since intermediate regimes are less stable than autocracies, which in turn are less stable than democracies, durable democracy is the most probable end-point of the democratization process. The democratic civil peace is not only more just than the autocratic peace but also more stable.

Governing for Prosperity

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2000

Why Violence Spreads: The Contagion of International Terrorism

Article

Full-text available

Jun 1980

This study examines the spread of international terrorism from 1968 to 1974. Using Poisson and negative binomial probability models, a diffusion of international terrorism was found in the first segment of the time period (1968–1971) and contagion as a direct modeling process in the second (1973–1974). Accordingly, the theory of hierarchies in which the diplomatic status of a country predicts its degree of imitability was found to operate among Latin American countries during the second portion of the overall period, but not during the first. An inverse hierarchy is suggested as an explanation for the contagion of violence from Latin America and other third world countries to Western Europe. Autocorrelation functions were used to assess which forms of terrorism were most contagious in which regions.

Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America

Article

Full-text available

Jan 1991
SLAVIC REV

Fire of Iolus: The role of state countermeasures in causing terrorism and what needs to be done

Chapter

Full-text available

Jun 2005

Andrew Silke

When Hercules chopped-off a head of the Hydra, more simply grew in its place. On the verge of defeat in his battle with the creature, Hercules was only saved when his nephew, Iolaus, used fire to cauterise the Hydra’s wounds and thus prevented more heads from growing. This chapter considers why some counter-terrorism and anti-terrorism policies and tactics have proven so unsuccessful and have often seemed to create more terrorism than they stopped or prevented. Examples of such counter-productive strategies include extra-legal assassinations (e.g. South Africa, Israel); military retaliations (e.g. USA against Libya 1986); internment without trial (e.g. Northern Ireland). The chapter considers the circumstances in which such policies have been adopted by various states. An argument is made that a better understanding of human psychology, particularly as it relates to needs for retribution and punishment, provide the key for an objective understanding of the impact of high risk counter-terrorism policies. The chapter ends with a consideration of the lessons to be taken away from such experiences.

Understanding Interaction Models: Improving Empirical Analyses

Article

Full-text available

May 2006
POLIT ANAL

Multiplicative interaction models are common in the quantitative political science literature. This is so for good reason. Institutional arguments frequently imply that the relationship between political inputs and outcomes varies depending on the institutional context. Models of strategic interaction typically produce conditional hypotheses as well. Although conditional hypotheses are ubiquitous in political science and multiplicative interaction models have been found to capture their intuition quite well, a survey of the top three political science journals from 1998 to 2002 suggests that the execution of these models is often flawed and inferential errors are common. We believe that considerable progress in our understanding of the political world can occur if scholars follow the simple checklist of dos and don'ts for using multiplicative interaction models presented in this article. Only 10% of the articles in our survey followed the checklist.

Order, Disorder, and Economic Change: Latin America vs. North America

Chapter

Full-text available

Jan 2000

Dictatorial Institutions and the Survival of Autocrats

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2007
COMP POLIT STUD

Why do some autocrats survive for decades, and others fall soon after taking power? The authors argue that when authoritarian rulers need to solicit the cooperation of outsiders or deter the threat of rebellion, they rely on political institutions. Partisan legislatures incorporate potential opposition forces, giving them a stake in the ruler's survival. By broadening the basis of support for autocrats, these institutions lengthen their tenures. An analysis of all authoritarian rulers in power during the 1946-1996 period provides evidence of the effect of nominally democratic institutions on their political survival.

Democratic Compromise: A Latent Variable Analysis of Ten Measures of Regime Type

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2010

Using a Bayesian latent variable approach, we synthesize a new measure of democracy, the Unified Democracy Scores (UDS), from ten extant scales. We accompany this new scale with quantitative estimates of uncertainty, provide estimates of the relative reliability of the constituent indicators, and quantify what the ordinal levels of each of the existing measures mean in relationship to one another. Our method eschews the dicult—and often arbitrary—decision to use one existing democracy scale over another in favor of a cumulative approach

Introducing the Global Terrorism Data Base

Article

Full-text available

Apr 2007

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 Political Regime on Civil War

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2008

James Raymond Vreeland

Research published in the American Political Science Review shows that anocracies—as defined by the middle of the Polity index of political regime—are more susceptible to civil war than are either pure democracies or pure dictatorships. Yet, certain components of the Polity index include a factional category, where political competition is ``intense, hostile, and frequently violent. Extreme factionalism may be manifested in the establishment of rival governments and in civil war'' (Gurr 1989, 12). Not surprisingly, these components exhibit a strong relationship with civil war. When they are removed from the Polity index, however, the original relationship disappears. I conclude that the original finding is not driven by the relationship between political institutions and civil war but rather by a less provocative relationship between political violence and civil war.

Economic Globalization and Transnational TerrorismA Pooled Time-Series Analysis

Article

Full-text available

Apr 2004

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.

Paradise is a Bazaar? Greed, Creed, and Governance in Civil War, 1989-99

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2002
J PEACE RES

Indra De Soysa

Some prominent recent studies of civil war argue that greed, not grievance, is the primary motivating factor behind violence, basing their conclusions on a strong empirical association between primary commodity exports and civil war. This study contrasts alternative propositions that see need-, creed-, and governance-based explanations that are intimately related to the question of primary commodity dependence and conflict. Maximum likelihood analysis on approximately 138 countries over the entire post- Cold War period shows little support for neo-Malthusian claims. Abundant mineral wealth makes countries highly unstable, whereas scarcity of renewable resources is largely unrelated to civil conflict. A positive effect of population density on conflict does not seem to be conditioned by renewable resource scarcity. Ethnicity is related to conflict when society is moderately homogenous; a highly plural society faces less risk. Very slight political liberalization leads to conflict, but larger increases reduce the danger considerably, supporting the view that conflict is driven by opportunistic behaviour rather than by grievance. Increases in homogeneity among Islamic and Catholic populations make them riskier. Perhaps institutional factors relating to separation of church and state rather than competing creeds explain culture conflicts. Larger shares of both Christians and Muslims within countries make them safer, contrary to claims of natural antagonism between the two. Governance, proxied by the ratio of total trade to GDP, predicts peace strongly, an under-theorized area within the study of civil war. Trade's relationship to peace is robust to specification and sample size, supporting the findings of the State Failure Project. Greater attention should perhaps be paid to formal and informal institutional factors that create the synergy between private and public spaces for overcoming collective action problems of maintaining peace.

The Central Role of the Propensity Score in Observational Studies For Causal Effects

Article

Full-text available

Apr 1983
BIOMETRIKA

The propensity score is the conditional probability of assignment to a particular treatment given a vector of observed covariates. Both large and small sample theory show that adjustment for the scalar propensity score is sufficient to remove bias due to all observed covariates. Applications include: (i) matched sampling on the univariate propensity score, which is a generalization of discriminant matching, (ii) multivariate adjustment by subclassification on the propensity score where the same subclasses are used to estimate treatment effects for all outcome variables and in all subpopulations, and (iii) visual representation of multivariate covariance adjustment by a two- dimensional plot.

Does Democracy Promote or Reduce Transnational Terrorist Events?

Article

Full-text available

Apr 2005

Quan Li

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.

Understanding Terrorism in America

Book

Sep 2003

Christopher Hewitt

The Making of Iran's Islamic Revolution: From Monarchy to Islamic Republic

Book

Mar 2018

Mohsen M. Milani

In this fully revised and expanded second edition, Dr. Milani offers new insights into the causes and profound consequences of Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Drawing on dozens of personal interviews with the officials of the Islamic Republic and on recently released documents, he presents a provocative analysis of the dynamics and characteristics of factional politics in Islamic Iran. Among the new issues covered are the events leading up to the Teheran hostage crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini’s life and writings, President Rafsanjani’s activities against the Shah, Rafsanjani’s recent reforms, Iran’s involvement in the Kuwaiti crisis, and the domestic and foreign policy challenges facing Iran in the post?Cold War era.The second edition is specifically revised for use as a text for courses dealing with Iran, the Middle East, and revolutionary movements.

Regression models for categorical dependent variables using Stata

Book

Jan 2001

Promise and Pitfalls of Terrorism Research

Article

Jan 2010

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.

The Quality of Terror

Article

Jul 2005
AM J POLIT SCI

Ethan Bueno de Mesquita

I present a model of the interaction between a government, a terrorist organization, and potential terrorist volunteers in which, as a result of an endogenous choice, individuals with low ability or little education are most likely to volunteer to join the terrorist organization. However, the terrorist organization screens the volunteers for quality. Consequently, the model is consistent with two seemingly contradictory empirical findings. Actual terrorist operatives are not poor or lacking in education. And yet lack of economic opportunity and recessionary economies are positively correlated with terrorism. The model also endogenizes the effect of government counterterrorism on mobilization. Government crackdowns have competing effects on mobilization: they decrease the ability of terrorists to carry out effective attacks (making mobilization less attractive), and they foment ideological opposition to the government and impose negative economic externalities (making mobilization more attractive). This provides conditions under which government crackdowns increase or decrease mobilization.

Democracies at War

Article

Jul 2010

Why do democracies win wars? This is a critical question in the study of international relations, as a traditional view-expressed most famously by Alexis de Tocqueville-has been that democracies are inferior in crafting foreign policy and fighting wars. In Democracies at War, the first major study of its kind, Dan Reiter and Allan Stam come to a very different conclusion. Democracies tend to win the wars they fight-specifically, about eighty percent of the time. Complementing their wide-ranging case-study analysis, the authors apply innovative statistical tests and new hypotheses. In unusually clear prose, they pinpoint two reasons for democracies' success at war. First, as elected leaders understand that losing a war can spell domestic political backlash, democracies start only those wars they are likely to win. Secondly, the emphasis on individuality within democratic societies means that their soldiers fight with greater initiative and superior leadership. Surprisingly, Reiter and Stam find that it is neither economic muscle nor bandwagoning between democratic powers that enables democracies to win wars. They also show that, given societal consent, democracies are willing to initiate wars of empire or genocide. On the whole, they find, democracies' dependence on public consent makes for more, rather than less, effective foreign policy. Taking a fresh approach to a question that has long merited such a study, this book yields crucial insights on security policy, the causes of war, and the interplay between domestic politics and international relations.

The International Spread of Ethnic Conflict: Fear: Diffusion, and Escalation

Article

Jan 1998

Democratic Electoral Systems Around the World, 1946–2011

Article

Jun 2013
ELECT STUD

This research note describes an update to Golder's (2005) Democratic Electoral Systems (DES) dataset. We extend the temporal scope of the original dataset by including all legislative and presidential elections that took place in democratic states from 2001 to 2011. In addition to significantly expanding the size of the DES dataset, we offer a simplified classification scheme for electoral systems. We also provide more detailed information about all democratic elections since 1946, including the dates for each round of elections as well as the rules used in different electoral tiers. A brief temporal and geographic overview of the data is presented.

The Institutional Environment for Infrastructure Investment

Article

Apr 2002

Witold Jerzy Henisz

The empirical evidence that links political institutions to economic outcomes has grown dramatically in recent years. However, virtually all of this analysis is undertaken using data from the past three decades. This paper extends this empirical framework by performing a two-century long historical analysis of the determinants of infrastructure investment in a panel of over 100 countries. The results demonstrate that political environments that limit the feasibility of policy change are an important determinant of investment in infrastructure.

The Faces of Terrorism: Social and Psychological Dimensions

Book

Dec 2007

Neil J. Smelser

Terrorism is the most clear and present danger we confront today, yet no phenomenon is more poorly understood by policymakers, the media, and the general public.The Faces of Terrorismis the first serious interdisciplinary examination of terrorism in all its facets. What gives rise to it, who are its proponents and how do they think, and how--and why--does it work? Neil Smelser begins by tackling the fundamental problem of defining what exactly terrorism is. He shows why a precise definition has eluded us until now, and he proposes one that takes into account the full complexities of this unconventional and politically charged brand of violence. He explores the root causes and conditions of terrorism, and examines the ideologies that inspire and fuel it throughout the world. Smelser looks closely at the terrorists themselves--their recruitment, their motivations, the groups they form, their intended audiences, and their uses of the media in pursuing their agendas. He studies the target societies as well, unraveling the complicated social and psychological impacts of having to cope with the ever-present threat of a terrorist strike--and responding when one occurs. He explains what it means to live under constant threat of terrorism, and addresses the thorny domestic and foreign policy challenges this poses. Throughout, Smelser draws from the latest findings in sociology, political science, anthropology, economics, psychology, psychiatry, and history.

The Palestinian H-Bomb: Terror's Winning Strategy

Article

Jul 2002
FOREIGN AFF

Gal Luft

Suicide bombing, once the tool of religious fanatics, has won wide acceptance among Palestinians as a legitimate weapon. Neither retaliation nor a fence will stop the bloodshed. Only deploying Palestinian hopes of independence can do that.

A Linear Poisson Autoregressive Model: The Poisson AR(p) Model

Article

Jan 2001

Time series of event counts are common in political science and other social science applications. Presently, there are few satisfactory methods for identifying the dynamics in such data and accounting for the dynamic processes in event counts regression. We address this issue by building on earlier work for persistent event counts in the Poisson exponentially weighted moving-average model (PEWMA) of Brandt et al. (American Journal of Political Science 44(4):823–843, 2000). We develop an alternative model for stationary mean reverting data, the Poisson autoregressive model of order p, or PAR(p) model. Issues of identification and model selection are also considered. We then evaluate the properties of this model and present both Monte Carlo evidence and applications to illustrate.

Arms and Influence

Article

Jan 1966

Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America

Article

Dec 1992

Dynamic Models for Persistent Event Count Time Series

Article

Oct 2000

We present a method for estimating event-count models when the data is generated from a persistent time-series process. A Kalman filter is used to estimate a Poisson exponentially weighted moving average (PEWMA) model. The model is compared to extant methods (Poisson regression, negative binomial regression, and ARIMA models). Using Monte Carlo experiments, we demonstrate that the PEWMA provides significant improvements in efficiency. As an example, we present an analysis of Pollins (1996) models of long cycles in international relations.

Violence in Politics

Article

Nov 1975

The Causes of Terrorism

Article

Jul 1981

Martha Crenshaw

Research on Terrorism: Trends, Achievements and Failures

Book

Jan 2004

Andrew Silke

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.

The Mind of the TerroristA Review and Critique of Psychological Approaches

Article

Feb 2005

Jeff Victoroff

This article reviews the state of the art of available theories and data regarding the psychology of terrorism. Data and theoretical material were gathered from the world’s unclassified literature. Multiple theories and some demographic data have been published, but very few controlled empirical studies have been conducted investigating the psychological bases of terrorism. The field is largely characterized by theoretical speculation based on subjective interpretation of anecdotal observations. Moreover, most studies and theories fail to take into account the great heterogeneity of terrorists. Many practical, conceptual, and psychological barriers have slowed progress in this important field. Nonetheless, even at this early stage of terrorism studies, preliminary reports suggest that modifiable social and psychological factors contribute to the genesis of the terrorist mind-set. Psychological scholarship could possibly mitigate the risk of catastrophic attack by initiating the long overdue scientific study of terrorist mentalities.

A New Dataset for Measuring Democracy, 1810-1998

Article

Mar 2000
J PEACE RES

Tatu Vanhanen

Democracy has been defined and measured in various ways. This article argues that combining two basic dimensions of democracy - competition and participation - can yield a theoretically satisfactory measurement of democracy that employs three measures: degree of electoral competition, degree of electoral participation and a combined index of democratization. These variables have been used in the author's previous comparative studies of democracy. The new dataset combines previous data and extends these to cover the period 1810-1998. That dataset includes 187 contemporary and former independent states from the year 1810 or from the year of independence. In the dataset, original electoral and other political data needed to calculate the values of Competition and Participation variables are given and documented separately for each country. The values of the three variables are calculated and given for each year over the period of comparison. Finally, the new dataset is compared with the Polity98 measures of democracy and the combined Freedom House ratings of political rights and civil liberties.

The Politics of Collective Violence

Article

Mar 2003

Charles Tilly

Are there any commonalities between such phenomena as soccer hooliganism, sabotage by peasants of landlords' property, road rage, and even the events of September 11? With striking historical scope and command of the literature of many disciplines, this book seeks the common causes of these events in collective violence. In collective violence, social interaction immediately inflicts physical damage, involves at least two perpetrators of damage, and results in part from coordination among the persons who perform the damaging acts. Charles Tilly argues that collective violence is complicated, changeable, and unpredictable in some regards, yet also results from similar causes variously combined in different times and places. Pinpointing the causes, combinations, and settings helps to explain collective violence and also helps to identify the best ways to mitigate violence and create democracies with a minimum of damage to persons and property. Charles Tilly is the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University. He has published more than twenty scholarly books, including twenty specialized monographs and edited volumes on political processes, inequality, population change and European history.

A Theoretical Analysis of Transnational Terrorism

Article

Mar 1983

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.

Why Some Civil Wars Last Longer Than Others

Article

James Fearon

Democratic electoral systems around the world, 1946-2000

Article

Mar 2005
ELECT STUD

Matt Golder

This article describes a new data set that covers the electoral institutions used in all of the democratic legislative and presidential elections in 199 countries between 1946 (or independence) and 2000. A clear and consistent classification of the electoral institutions used in these elections is followed by a concise geographical and temporal analysis. The worldwide focus of the data set reveals several striking patterns. For example, there have been almost as many elections under dictatorship as there have been under democracy. Other patterns include the fact that presidential regimes nearly always employ proportional electoral formulas, absolute majority rule has become the worldwide norm for electing presidents, and non-majoritarian systems have become more complex due to the increasing use of multiple tiers and mixed electoral formulas.

Regression Models for Categorical Dependent Variables using STATA

Article

Jan 2006

Regression Models for Categorical Dependent Variables Using Stata

Article

J. Freese

Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance In Thirty-Six Countries

Article

Jan 1999

Arend Lijphart

In this updated and expanded edition of his classic text, Arend Lijphart offers a broader and deeper analysis of worldwide democratic institutions than ever before. Examining thirty-six democracies during the period from 1945 to 2010, Lijphart arrives at important-and unexpected-conclusions about what type of democracy works best. Praise for the previous edition: "Magnificent.... The best-researched book on democracy in the world today."-Malcolm Mackerras, American Review of Politics "I can't think of another scholar as well qualified as Lijphart to write a book of this kind. He has an amazing grasp of the relevant literature, and he's compiled an unmatched collection of data."-Robert A. Dahl, Yale University "This sound comparative research ... will continue to be a standard in graduate and undergraduate courses in comparative politics."-Choice.

Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries

Article

Jan 1999

Arend Lijphart

In this updated and expanded edition of his classic text, Arend Lijphart offers a broader and deeper analysis of worldwide democratic institutions than ever before. Examining thirty-six democracies during the period from 1945 to 2010, Lijphart arrives at important-and unexpected-conclusions about what type of democracy works best. Praise for the previous edition: "Magnificent...The best-researched book on democracy in the world today."-Malcolm Mackerras, American Review of Politics "I can't think of another scholar as well qualified as Lijphart to write a book of this kind. He has an amazing grasp of the relevant literature, and he's compiled an unmatched collection of data."-Robert A. Dahl, Yale University "This sound comparative research ...will continue to be a standard in graduate and undergraduate courses in comparative politics."-Choice

Committing to Peace: The Successful Settlement of Civil Wars

Article

Jan 2002
FOREIGN AFF

Barbara Walter

Commitment Problems and the Spread of Ethnic Conflict

Article

Jan 1998

James D Fearon

The Mind of the Terrorist

Article

Jan 2005

Jeff Victoroff

Why Lagged Variables Can Suppress the Explanatory Power of Other Independent Variables

Article

Jan 2000

Christopher H. Achen

The Logic of Violence in Civil War

Article

Jan 2006

Stathis N. Kalyvas

By analytically decoupling war and violence, this book explores the causes and dynamics of violence in civil war. Against the prevailing view that such violence is an instance of impenetrable madness, the book demonstrates that there is logic to it and that it has much less to do with collective emotions, ideologies, and cultures than currently believed. Kalyvas specifies a novel theory of selective violence: it is jointly produced by political actors seeking information and individual civilians trying to avoid the worst but also grabbing what opportunities their predicament affords them. Violence, he finds, is never a simple reflection of the optimal strategy of its users; its profoundly interactive character defeats simple maximization logics while producing surprising outcomes, such as relative nonviolence in the 'frontlines' of civil war.

Democracy and the Market

Article

Jul 1991

Adam Przeworski

The quest for freedom from hunger and repression has triggered in recent years a dramatic, worldwide reform of political and economic systems. Never have so many people enjoyed, or at least experimented with democratic institutions. However, many strategies for economic development in Eastern Europe and Latin America have failed with the result that entire economic systems on both continents are being transformed. This major book analyzes recent transitions to democracy and market-oriented economic reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America. Drawing in a quite distinctive way on models derived from political philosophy, economics, and game theory, Professor Przeworski also considers specific data on individual countries. Among the questions raised by the book are: What should we expect from these experiments in democracy and market economy? What new economic systems will emerge? Will these transitions result in new democracies or old dictatorships?

Terror in the Mind of God

Article

Jan 2003

Mark Juergensmeyer

Terrorism, Democracy, and Credible Commitments

Abstract

No full-text available

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