Just the Two of Us? Civil Conflicts,Pro-State Militants,and the Violence Premium

Quantitative literature discussing violence in civil conflicts tends towards a typical model of engagement between governments and revolutionaries. Whilst recent work has shown the significant impact of multiple anti-government groups, a further feature remains understudied—the role of pro-state militants. This article theorizes a “violence premium” when such groups arise, which leads to all connected groups devoting greater energy to conflict than they would in isolation. Employing duration analysis and data from The Troubles in Northern Ireland, where Republicans act as revolutionary insurgents, Loyalists as pro-state militants, and the British Army as government forces, the violence premium is empirically confirmed. Both Loyalists and Republicans deviate from their underlying strategies to attack more frequently when violence by their rivals increases, with Republicans and the British Army engaging in the same way. An extended analysis, accounting for the status of the victim, shows that the violence premium resulting from interaction between Loyalists and Republicans targeted only the civilian population of Northern Ireland, elucidating the sectarian component of The Troubles. These results show that including all conflict parties and considering how they are linked are important features in studies that aim to determine the net level of violence in civil conflicts.     

Making sense of terrorism: a narrative approach to the study of violent events

ABSTRACT

How does violence become understood as terrorism? In this article, we show how a narrative approach to the study of violent events offers a conceptually productive way to understand the process of “seeing” an event as a terrorist act, one that explicitly integrates the phenomenology of violence. While the collective practice of defining terrorism in academia and the policy arena has struggled to produce a universal definition, we identify a set of “common sense” characteristics. We argue that if the framing of violent events prominently features these characteristics as discursive anchors, this primes processes of sensemaking toward interpreting violence as terrorism. While terrorism markers are often articulated as being pragmatic and apolitical indicators of terrorist acts, we show that they are indeed at the core of political contests over historical and physical facts about violent events. The narrative approach we develop in this article underscores that intuitive leanings toward interpreting violence as terrorism are a sign of political agency precisely because they are produced through the stories political agents tell.     

Politically motivated violence in the southwest pacific

Over the past 20 years the Southwest Pacific has been changing and there is now considerable scope for unrest within the states and territories of the region. Some of these tensions have already been manifested in politically motivated violence, for example in Irian Jaya, Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia and Fiji. Those incidents which have occurred to date have stemmed from local issues and been directed against local targets, but an increase in tensions could bring the prospect of international terrorist activity. There is also the possibility of interference from outside elements seeking to capitalize on such unrest as part of a wider campaign.     

Terrorist violence and the enrollment of psychology in predicting Muslim extremism: critical terrorism studies meets critical algorithm studies

Discourse on terrorist violence has long facilitated an especially liberal form of securitisation. Originally evoked in reference to anarchists and communists, a rational consideration of terrorist violence, inaugurated by the concept, asks for deferred judgement about the nature of, or reasons behind, violence related to terror on the premise that state and international legal norms governing the legitimate use of violence fail to circumscribe the proper capacities of the state to regulate and explain terrorism. Where sovereign powers along with their military and civilian instruments of coercion are deemed unable to regulate violence effectively, analysts of terrorist violence and their readership are invited to consider and cultivate new sensibilities. Beginning in the 1980s, studies by psychologists found renewed urgency among a growing cadre of interdisciplinary terror experts who found religion, Islam especially, a key variable of analysis. I situate their contributions in a longer history of secular and racialising discourse about terrorist violence. Central to this history are practices of reading, translating, interpreting and archiving texts. Evidence for the argument is based on the analysis of an algorithm that allegedly predicts the likelihood of terrorist strikes by counting words spoken by al-Qa?ida leaders and correlating their frequency with over 30 psychological categories.     

Do Terrorist Attacks Increase Closer to Elections?

The shadow of violence that elections cast remains poorly understood. A key obstacle impeding cross-national empirical analysis of electoral violence has been the varied nature of such violence. To address this challenge, I examine terrorist attacks as one particular form of electoral violence. By tracking the incidence of terrorist violence relative to election dates over time and across countries using an original dataset for the period from 2000–2005, I find strong support for the hypothesis that terrorist violence increases as we move closer to an election date. In fact, terrorist violence approximates a normal distribution centered on the election date.     

Strong State,Smothered Society: Explaining Terrorist Violence in Thailand's Deep South

Why have militants in southern Thailand utilized anonymous and at times indiscriminate terrorist violence against civilians? This article gauges three explanations: resource wealth, weak states, and strong states. I argue that terrorist violence against civilians in southern Thailand is partially sustained and largely structured by the considerable institutional strength of the Thai state. This helps sustain the conflict by providing an additional grievance and it structures the form of violence by forcing militants underground and severing their links to civilians. A potential response would be to trim state agencies and scale back the presence of the state in Patani.     

Internal Report Submitted to the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies

Dissident Irish Republicans have increased their violent activities in recent years. These “spoilers” reject the 1998 Good Friday Agreement power-sharing deal between Unionist and Nationalist traditions in Northern Ireland. Instead dissident IRAs vow to maintain an armed campaign against Britain's sovereign claim to Northern Ireland and have killed British soldiers, police officers, and civilians in recent years. These groups have small political organisations with which they are associated. The assumption across the political spectrum is that, whereas Sinn Fein enjoyed significant electoral backing when linked to the now vanished Provisional IRA, contemporary violent Republican ultras and their political associates are utterly bereft of sympathy. Drawing upon new data from the Economic and Social Research Council 2010 Northern Ireland election survey, the first academic study to ask the electorate its views of dissident Republicans, this article examines whether there are any clusters of sympathy for these irreconcilables and their modus operandi. The piece assesses whether there are any demographic, structural, ideological, religious, or party trends indicating Republican dissident sympathies. It also assesses the extent to which dissidents are seen as a threat and examines whether this perception is shared evenly across Northern Ireland's two main communities.     

Intraethnic Dominance and Control: Violence Against Co-Ethnics in the Early Sri Lankan Civil War

In some ethno-separatist wars, rebel groups direct a large share of violence against members of their own ethnic community. But why do rebels target the co-ethnics they claim to represent in the war against the government? Our aim in this paper is to provide the components for a conceptual framework that we assess using unique disaggregated casualty data on violence committed by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam against co-ethnic Tamils in territories claimed for the Tamil Eelam state in the early phase of the Sri Lankan conflict, 1985–88. We propose that there are two distinct processes of intraethnic violence: violence against co-ethnic civilians and violence against co-ethnic rivals. While the former aims at controlling the population to win the war against the government, the latter aims at establishing leadership dominance over the ethnic minority. We examine the role of ethnic homogeneity in shaping the use of violence directed against the two types of co-ethnic targets in the buildup phase of ethno-separatist war. We conclude that ethnic demographic structures matter for how the rebels treat co-ethnics in the early phase of war before they have established territorial control.     

Why Violence Abates: Imposed and Elective Declines in Terrorist Attacks

Previous scholarship on variations in violence within a given terrorist organization has primarily focused on factors that lead to the inception or destruction of that organization. However, violence varies substantially even during the “prime” of an organization's life. This article aims to understand why violence varies in the short term within many organizations, and places a special focus on declines in violence. Specifically, I argue that terrorists face countervailing incentives in terms of how much violence to use, and that when declines in violent activity do occur, they can be divided into two types: a) elective declines, which are usually temporary and used for organizational or reputational recovery; and b) imposed declines, which are dictated by changes in the relative capability of an organization, and are more likely to be permanent. The causal pathways to each type of decline are discussed, and a plausibility probe, consisting of case studies of three terrorist organizations, is then developed to substantiate this theory. The findings have notable implications for counterterrorism policy, as they illustrate not only when and why terrorists choose to curtail violent attacks, but also the conditions that determine whether declines in violence are temporary or permanent.     

Issues in teaching terrorism as cultural artefact

From a humanities course on terrorism that focuses on how terrorist ideology and acts are transformed into cultural artefacts, several pedagogical–theoretical issues have emerged: the incongruity of viewing terrorist violence as art; 9/11 as an ahistorical event; the impossibility of defining terrorism; the infiltration (trivialisation?) of terrorism into popular culture; subgenres of terrorist works, each with its own paradigm; and the iconoclastic potential of many terrorist texts and films. These issues have implications for the curricular design of terrorism courses and for the role of instructors – in academia and in the larger community.     

Assessing the Risk Posed by Terrorist Groups: Identifying Motivating Factors and Threats

While terrorist organizations have been analyzed for their motivations and tactics, little has been done to develop a systematic understanding of what makes some groups more dangerous than others. Knowing what makes some groups more threatening than others, or what conditions can influence a single group to become more or less of a threat, would help governments to prioritize resources during counterterrorism efforts. Using an approach similar to Ted Robert Gurr's assignment of a risk score to identify impending minority group rebellion, this article develops and tests a set of terrorist organizational characteristics. A two-phased approach is used. First, the authors identify key characteristics that could be anticipated to drive groups to be more active or deadly. The characteristics were identified and measured for terrorist groups for 1990–1994. The authors test group characteristics against subsequent group violence intensity from 1995 to 1999. Findings indicate that some group characteristics, such as religious ideology and group size, are important to understanding a group's relative level of violence. Though the study focused on a relatively short period of time, the findings indicate that a more comprehensive study of the impact that group characteristics have on violence levels would be a worthwhile undertaking.     

Islamic terrorist activities in turkey in the 1990s

This article focuses on Islamic terrorism in the framework of overall Islamic activity in Turkey. It argues that Islamic terrorist organizations active in Turkey during the 1990s strived to establish an Islamic shari ’a‐based state on the Iranian example, profited from deeper social and political trends in Turkish society and, at the same time, strengthened those trends by their violence. These groups enjoyed wide Iranian support and often acted on behalf of Iranian local and regional, political and strategic interests. The reaction of Turkish authorities in the past to Islamic terrorist activity was limited, and thus encouraged leaders of these groups and their sponsors to continue escalating violence, hoping it would bring down the secular democratic regime in Turkey.     

The Collective Nature of Lone Wolf Terrorism: Anders Behring Breivik and the Anti-Islamic Social Movement

Anders Behring Breivik, a lone wolf terrorist, killed 77 people in two terrorist attacks in Norway in 2011. This study uses framing theory from social movement studies to compare his Manifesto with the rhetoric of the anti-Islamic movement that inspired him. The anti-Islamic movement has a dual, and sometimes inconsistent, collective action framing. On the one hand, they portray Islam as an existential threat to the West and a warlike enemy; on the other, they promote peaceful and democratic opposition. The potential for radicalization is thus immanent. This case study reveals the importance of seeing lone wolf terrorists as acting from rhetoric embedded in larger social movements. It further demonstrates, in detail, the subtle and complex ways in which political narratives rejecting terrorism and political violence still end up inspiring such acts.     

The Stagnation in Terrorism Research

Despite over a decade of government funding and thousands of newcomers to the field of terrorist research, we are no closer to answering the simple question of “What leads a person to turn to political violence?” The state of stagnation with respect to this issue is partly due to the government strategy of funding research without sharing the necessary primary source information with academia, which has created an unbridgeable gap between academia and the intelligence community. This has led to an explosion of speculations with little empirical grounding in academia, which has the methodological skills but lacks data for a major breakthrough. Most of the advances in the field have come from historical archival research and analysis of a few field interviews. Nor has the intelligence community been able to achieve any breakthrough because of the structure and dynamic of this community and its lack of methodological rigor. This prevents creative analysis of terrorism protected from political concerns. The solution to this stagnation is to make non-sensitive data available to academia and to structure more effective discourse between the academic and intelligence communities in order to benefit from the complementary strengths in these two communities.     

The subjective and objective violence of terrorism: analysing “British values” in newspaper coverage of the 2017 London Bridge attack

This article examines how ?i?ek’s analysis of “subjective” violence can be used to explore the ways in which media coverage of a terrorist attack is contoured and shaped by less noticeable forms of “objective” (symbolic and systemic) violence. Drawing upon newspaper coverage of the 2017 London Bridge attack, it is noted how examples of “subjective” violence were grounded in the externalisation of a clearly identifiable “other”, which symbolically framed the terrorists and the attack as tied to and representative of the UK Muslim community. Examples of “systematic” violence were most notable in the ideological edifice that underpinned this framing but also in the ways in which newspaper reports served to draw upon British values in the aftermath of the attack. This directed attention away from the contradictions within the UK, towards narratives that sought to “fix” these contradictions through eradicating the problem of “the other” and/or by violently protecting the British values “they” seek to undermine. As a consequence, newspaper coverage worked to uphold the illusion that “peace” could be achieved by eradicating terrorism through further forms of objective violence, including, internment without trial; the “ripping up” of human rights; and closer surveillance of Muslim communities. Indeed, it was this unacknowledged violence that worked to maintain British values in the press' coverage.     

The Greek state response to terrorism

Since 1975 Greece has been suffering a persistent assault of terrorism mainly at the hands of the 17 November, revolutionary communist group. The Greek state after two decades of bitter and bloody experience, has been unable to resolve the problem. The purpose of this article is to identify and examine the attitudes of Greek political elites towards the problem and the tactics and responses which they have utilized to combat it. Focusing on the major political parties, the study explores opinions and reactions to different manifestations of the problem of political violence. It also attempts to demonstrate that, although each party stands in principle against terrorism, the overall response of the Greek state has been uniquely lethargic, dilatory and unbalanced. Four conclusions emerge from this study: the inefficacy of legislation that treats terrorism like organized crime; the need for a thoroughgoing reform of the security services; the lack of a national strategy to combat all terrorist activity; and the necessity for Greek governments to put party politics aside, when dealing with terrorism.     

中期选举对美内外政策和中美关系的影响

11月2日美国中期选举结束后,计票结果显示,共和党以绝对优势重新掌控众议院,民主党则以微弱多数勉强保住参议院过半席位,形成国会两院分治的新局面。此次选举民主党惨败有多重原因。未来两年,奥巴马为力争2012年连任,可能选择走“中左”路线,其内外政策会有所调整,中关关系也面临一些新变数。     

Intolerant Allies: Canada and the George W. Bush Administration, 2001–2005

This analysis examines the disharmony in American–Canadian relations in the period from 2001 to 2005. Canada and the United States co-operated in the early days after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, managing their mutual border and fighting the war in Afghanistan. Yet they soon came into conflict over American plans to invade Iraq and create a ballistic missile defence [BMD] system for North America. President George W. Bush and Paul Cellucci, his ambassador in Ottawa, were insensitive to Canadian concerns. Canadian leaders sent mixed messages to Washington, hinting that they would support a war in Iraq and participate in the BMD system, but ultimately deciding against each. The article examines the limitations of the tolerant ally interpretation of the Canadian–American relationship and illuminates the role of leadership in the rupture that took place between the two countries.