Is the Enemy of My Enemy My Friend?

The terrorist organizations that have posed the greatest threat to international security are those with allies. Terrorist groups at the core of alliance networks, particularly the Islamic State and al Qaeda, define the threat today, as they are able to accrue and disperse the benefits of their alliances—including greater lethality, longevity, and resilience—to their partners. While the consequences of these alliances are clear, their causes remain poorly understood, especially with respect to why terrorist alliances cluster around a small number of organizations. I propose that groups ally with the organization at the core of a network to address organizational deficits. In addition, the prospective partners must have both complementary needs and the ability to link their ideologies and frames to build a shared identity. Finally, groups must overcome their inherent suspicions and build trust to ally. These three mechanisms lead to alliance formation, but they also offer numerous avenues for disruption.     

Foreign Terrorist Organization designation,international cooperation,and terrorism

How does branding militant groups as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” (FTOs) affect them? Beyond its obvious policy importance, this question speaks to debates about counterterrorism, terrorism financing, and organizational dynamics of subnational violence. This article analyzes FTO designation, a key policy used by the U.S. government since 1997 to impose costs on foreign terrorist groups and those who might support them. Contrary to arguments that sanctions are ineffective and that terrorism is too “cheap” to be affected, it is argued that designation should weaken terrorist groups, reducing their attacks over time. However, the effect is probably conditional. FTO designation should be especially effective against groups operating in U.S.-aligned countries, given the importance of international cooperation in counterterrorism. Global quantitative analyses suggest that FTOs operating in U.S.-aligned countries carry out fewer attacks over time than other groups, taking many other factors into consideration.     

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.     

CBRN Incidents: Political Regimes,Perpetrators, and Targets

This article investigates the relationship between regime characteristics and the likelihood of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) terrorist incidents. Odds ratios establish that democratic ideals—democratic rule, strong rule of law, and honest regimes—are associated with more CBRN incidents. Failed states may be where some terrorist groups form or take refuge, but these states have not been the venue of choice for CBRN incidents. Religious (cults and fundamentalists) and nationalist/separatist groups are not more likely than others to engage in CBRN attacks. To date, indiscriminate CBRN attacks are as likely as discriminate attacks to cause casualties. Transnational terrorist groups are less adept than others in concealing their acquisition of CBRN substances. For some regressions, democratic rule and strong rule of law are positive determinants of CBRN incidents.     

International bounty hunting: From problem to opportunity

Scholars have traditionally argued that Islamist terrorist groups tend to commit higher casualty attacks. Noting that casualty rates of attacks vary widely across Islamist terrorist groups, this study advances an alternative hypothesis that group organizational features and goal structures better explain differing casualty rates than does the overarching ideological type. Using both cross-national analysis and a case study of post-invasion Iraq, I demonstrate that there are two basic types of Islamist terrorist groups whose organizational and goal-structure features explain divergent casualty rates: “strategic groups” that function similarly to secular national-liberation and regime-change movements and “abstract/universal groups” that are affiliated with the global al-Qaeda network.     

The Ancient Fire: Religion and Suicide Terrorism

Does religion lead to greater destructiveness from suicide terrorism? And if so, how does it influence this form of political violence? Recent analyses of terrorism point to the significance of religion, but are divided as to whether religion itself matters, or certain types of religious terrorist groups are actually driving suicide terrorist violence. This article draws on social movement theory and recent work in the study of suicide terrorism to argue that religion influences the severity of suicide terrorist attacks as an ideology groups use to justify their struggle and gain public support. This effect occurs regardless of a group's goals or organizational nature. The theory is tested using a generalized estimating equation to account for multiple attacks by several groups. The study finds that the religious ideology of a group greatly increases the number of deaths from a suicide attack, even if varying group motivations and structural factors are taken into account. The article helps to clarify the effect of religion on contemporary terrorism, contributing to the study of both terrorism and religion and politics.     

The Rational Foraging Terrorist: Analysing the Distances Travelled to Commit Terrorist Violence

Abstract

This paper applies the distance-to-crime approach to the case of Improvised Explosive Device (IED) and shooting attacks conducted by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) during the Northern Ireland conflict, 1970–1998. The aim is to (a) measure the typical ‘distance to crime’ (b) detect whether a distance-decay effect is noticeable and (c) investigate whether there is a discernible difference in the distance traveled depending upon individual offender characteristics or aspects of how the offence was committed. In particular, it highlights that many of the same dynamics that influence offender decision making within the volume crime world, also apply within the terrorism realm. Five findings stand out in particular. First, a distance decay effect is identifiable. Second, younger offenders travel significantly smaller distances. Third, complex attacks typically involve greater distances. Fourth, our results show the ability of leading decision-makers within PIRA to impact upon the day-to-day operations of the field operatives. Together the results reinforce the argument that when we focus on terrorism from a preventative angle, we should focus on their behaviors: what they do rather than remain preoccupied with concerns about who they are and/or what they might be like. Collectively the results also highlight the fact that for a finer-grained understanding of terrorist behavior we need to disaggregate on a number of levels: within the cadre of operatives, across terrorist attacks, across targets and within conflicts.     

Alessandro Orsini. Anatomy of the Red Brigades: The Religious Mind-Set of Modern Terrorists

ABSTRACT

Those who study terrorism are familiar with the claim that suicide attacks are the most lethal form of terrorism today. Suicide attacks kill more people on average than non-suicide attacks, thereby justifying why terrorist organizations use this costly method of attack and explaining in part why suicide tactics have proliferated. However, extant empirical support for this claim is largely insufficient, focusing only on macro-level analysis of lethality data. Using data from the Global Terrorism Database, this study examines variation in lethality among suicide and non-suicide attacks based on geographic location, attack type, and target/victim type. It also introduces a new metric—the lethality ratio—to measure costs and benefits of attacks in terms of lives lost. It finds that, although suicide tactics are generally more lethal than non-suicide tactics, they also come at greater costs to the organization. This analysis also finds behavior that is inconsistent with the premise that terrorist groups are focused on maximizing lethality while reducing costs in all cases; that despite certain advantages, suicide attacks may remain a suboptimal tactic from the perspective of the terrorist group; and that additional criteria may help explain why suicide tactics are used.     

What Makes Terrorism Salient? Terrorist Strategies,Political Competition,and Public Opinion

This article analyzes the determinants of terrorism saliency in public opinion. It is usually assumed that after a terrorist attack, terrorism becomes automatically salient. However, this assumption is only true in those countries where terrorist attacks are exceptional events. In democracies that have suffered domestic terrorism for decades, the evolution of terrorism saliency does not only depend on the frequency or intensity of terrorist attacks. In this article it is claimed that the tactics carried out by terrorist groups (the type of victim, especially) and the dynamics of political competition (especially the ideology of the incumbent) are also factors that explain the evolution of terrorism saliency. The article also analyzes how these two factors interact with citizens’ predispositions to explain variation in their reactions to terrorist threat. The empirical test relies on a novel database from monthly public opinion surveys in Spain from 1993 to 2012.     

When Heads Roll: Assessing the Effectiveness of Leadership Decapitation

Leadership targeting has become a key feature of current counterterrorism policies. Both academics and policy makers have argued that the removal of leaders is an effective strategy in combating terrorism. However, leadership decapitation is not always successful, and existing empirical work is insufficient to account for this variability. As a result, this project answers three primary questions: (1) Under what conditions does leadership decapitation result in the dissolution of a terrorist organization?; (2) Does leadership decapitation increase the likelihood of organizational collapse beyond the baseline rate of collapse for groups over time?; and (3) In cases where decapitation does not result in group collapse, to what extent does it result in organizational degradation and hinder a group's ability to carry about terrorist attacks? I develop a dataset of 298 incidents of leadership targeting from 1945–2004 in order to determine whether and when decapitation is effective. First, I identify the conditions under which decapitation has been successful in bringing about organizational decline. The data show that a group's age, size, and type are critical in identifying when decapitation will cause the cessation of terrorist activity. As an organization grows in size and age, it is much more likely to withstand the removal of its leadership. Organizational type is also significant in understanding the susceptibility of an organization to decapitation. Ideological organizations are most likely to experience a cessation of activity following the removal of leader, while religious organizations are highly resistant to leadership decapitation. Second, I determine whether decapitation is an effective counterterrorism strategy that results in organizational collapse. The data show that decapitation does not increase the likelihood of organizational collapse beyond a baseline rate of collapse for groups over time. Organizations that have not had their leaders removed are more likely to fall apart than those that have undergone a loss of leadership. The marginal utility of decapitation is negative for many groups, particularly for larger, older, religious, and separatist organizations. Finally, I look at the extent to which decapitation results in organizational degradation and hinders a group's ability to carry about terrorist attacks. Case studies illustrate whether decapitation has an effect on the operational capacity of an organization by identifying whether the removal of key leaders changes the number and lethality of attacks. If certain organizations are more resilient than others, it is important to know when decapitation should be effective and when it could lead to counterproductive outcomes. Overall, these findings illustrate the need to develop a new model for evaluating the efficacy of leadership decapitation and for developing effective counterterrorism policies.     

Why the Internet Is Not Increasing Terrorism

Policymakers and scholars fear that the Internet has increased the ability of transnational terrorists, like al Qaeda, to attack targets in the West, even in the face of increased policing and military efforts. Although access to the Internet has increased across the globe, there has been no corresponding increase in completed transnational terrorist attacks. This analysis examines the causal logics—which have led to the conventional wisdom—and demonstrates both theoretically and empirically that the Internet is not a force multiplier for transnational terrorist organizations. Far from being at a disadvantage on the Internet, state security organs actually gain at least as much utility from the Internet as terrorist groups do, meaning that at worst the Internet leaves the state in the same position vis-à-vis terrorist campaigns as it was prior to the Internet.     

How Al Qaeda Innovates

Innovative terrorist organizations pose exceptionally dangerous threats because of their potential to surprise declared enemies, inflict heavy costs upon them, and set new trends that other militant groups seek to emulate. Despite this importance, researchers have shed little light on where terrorist innovation originates. Although military innovation scholars have emphasized the importance of both top-down and bottom-up innovation, the few existing studies on terrorist innovation have acknowledged the importance of the terrorist leadership but largely ignored the role played by middle- or lower-ranking operatives in the innovation process. This study examines the planning of the September 11, 2001 attacks and finds that, contrary to the predominant claims on terrorist innovation, the 9/11 attacks featured both top-down and bottom-up processes of innovation, with the latter including a critical role played by an independent terrorist entrepreneur. Theoretically, the findings suggest that the conventional wisdom of the predominance of top-down innovation in terrorism is dependent on a problematic assumption, namely that terrorist groups are centralized, hierarchical, and localized entities. As more terrorist groups adopt decentralized structures, they are increasingly likely to display multi-directional processes of innovation. The study has important implications for counterterrorism policy. It suggests that thwarting the most innovative terrorist groups requires targeting senior- and middle-management operatives of the group itself and expending greater effort at apprehending independent terrorist innovators with fluid organizational affiliations. A mix of offensive and defensive counterterrorism strategies, coupled with greater international cooperation, is critical to achieving this goal.     

Target Hardening and Terrorist Signaling: The Case of Aviation Security

In this article, we examine the relationship between hardening a target and the value that a terrorist group derives from attacking it. We use a simple expected value framework to compare how the expected value of attacking a hardened target varies between a violence-based approach, where terrorists are presumed to be maximizing the physical damage done to the target, and a signaling-based approach, where terrorists are presumed to be maximizing the symbolic value of their attack. We argue that, if it is proper to understand terrorist attacks as costly signals of terrorist strength or determination, hardening a target actually increases the expected value of attacking a target (relative to its value before hardening), even if the attack fails. We go on to examine the evolution of aviation security, and trace how al-Qaeda's views of airplanes and airports as targets have changed since 9/11. As aviation targets were hardened with increasingly onerous security measures, al-Qaeda began to see even attacks that did not result in detonation as successes, in large part because of what they signaled about al-Qaeda's abilities, and the ability of al-Qaeda to impose costs on the U.S. and other countries even in the absence of explosions.     

Transnational Terror and Human Rights

Do terrorist attacks by transnational groups lead governments to restrict human rights? Conventional wisdom holds that governments restrict rights to forestall additional attacks, to more effectively pursue suspected terrorists, and as an excuse to suppress their political opponents. But the logic connecting terrorist attacks to subsequent repression and the empirical research that addresses this issue suffer from important flaws. We analyze pooled data on the human rights behavior of governments from 1981 to 2003. Our key independent variable of interest is transnational terrorist attacks, and the analysis also controls for factors that existing studies have found influence respect for human rights. Repeated terrorist attacks lead governments to engage in more extrajudicial killings and disappearances, but have no discernable influence on government use of torture and of political imprisonment or on empowerment rights such as freedom of speech, assembly, and religion. This finding has important implications for how we think about the effects of terrorism and the policy responses of states, non-governmental organizations, and international institutions interested in protecting human rights.     

Suicide Squads: The Logic of Linked Suicide Bombings

What strategic logics underlie terrorist groups’ use of linked suicide attacks? Are the goals that groups seek to achieve when sending linked bombing teams somehow inherently different than when sending individual suicide bombers? To answer these questions, this article introduces three typologies of linked suicide bomber detonation profiles—simultaneous, sequential, and nonproximate—and theorizes why terrorist groups might view each type of linked suicide bombing to be preferable to deploying a single suicide bomber. Improvements resulting from using an individual attacker include: ensuring a higher likelihood of successfully hitting a given target (simultaneous detonations); causing more casualties than a single bombing (sequential-wave detonations); and engendering wider-spread shock and awe (nonproximate detonations). Drawing on an original dataset detailing the entirety of Boko Haram’s suicide bombing efforts from 2011 to 2017, we then examine the extent to which these linked bombing typologies do actually appear to successfully lead to an improvement over the deployment of single suicide bombers. While we find that sequential-wave and nonproximate suicide bombings demonstrate evidence of hypothesized improvements over the deployment of single suicide bombers, our data show that deploying simultaneous suicide attackers does not lead to higher efficacy at targeting when compared to the deployment of individual bombers. In attempting to account for this fact, we argue that Boko Haram’s simultaneous detonation teams likely fail to show an improvement over single-bomber attacks because they tend to be composed of what we call “unenthusiastic and under-trained” bombers: teams of often uncommitted women, and sometimes children, which it deploys in tandem in a bid to avoid individual defection and increase the likelihood of at least one detonation in an attack. We conclude by suggesting what the process of linked bombing reveals about both terrorist groups in general and Boko Haram specifically.     

Notes on contributors

The question of the linkage of democratic forms of government with the incidence of terrorist violence is explored. Distinguishing between the presence of terrorist groups in a nation and violent terrorist events, and using multiple indicators of democratic development, evidence is presented clearly linking democracy with the presence of terrorist groups. Terrorist groups are less likely to be found in non‐democratic settings than in democratic ones.     

Brides,black widows and baby-makers; or not: an analysis of the portrayal of women in English-language jihadi magazine image content

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the depiction of women in image content from 39 issues of official English-language magazine publications produced by designated terrorist organisations that follow a jihadist ideology. Research on the role of women in jihadi organisations has found that women are active at all levels within terrorist groups. This includes creating and disseminating terrorist content; planning, co-ordinating and carrying out attacks; and, supporting fighters as wives, mothers and homemakers. Our analysis, however, found that women are almost never depicted within the images of terrorist organisations’ official magazines. We argue that this airbrushing is a deliberate attempt to reinforce traditional gender roles and strengthen existing gender hierarchies within terrorist organisations, and we make a number of suggestions for future research in this understudied field.     

A Counterterrorism Strategy for the Obama Administration

This article assesses the scope and nature of the current terrorist threat to the United States and suggests a strategy to counter it. Al-Qaeda continues to pose the most serious terrorist threat to the U.S. today. If the September 11, 2001 attacks have taught us anything, it is that al-Qaeda is most dangerous when it has a sanctuary or safe haven from which to plan and plot attacks. Al-Qaeda has acquired such a sanctuary in Pakistan's Federal Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and its North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and surrounding environs. Accordingly, the highest priority for the new American presidential administration must be to refocus our—and our allies'—attention on Afghanistan and Pakistan, where al-Qaeda began to collapse after 2001, but has now re-grouped. This will entail understanding that al-Qaeda and its local militant jihadi allies cannot be defeated by military means alone. Success will require a dual strategy of systematically destroying and weakening enemy capabilities—that is, continuing to kill and capture al-Qaeda commanders and operatives—along with breaking the cycle of terrorist recruitment among radicalized “bunches of guys” as well as more effectively countering al-Qaeda's effective information operations. The U.S. thus requires a strategy that harnesses the overwhelming kinetic force of the American military as part of a comprehensive vision to transform other, non-kinetic instruments of national power in order to deal more effectively with irregular and unconventional threats. This article first discusses the scope and details of the terrorist threat today and then proposes a counterterrorism strategy for the new presidential administration. It focuses first on creating a micro approach to address the deteriorating situation in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. It then considers the requirements of a broader macro strategy to counter terrorism and insurgency.     

Weak States,State Failure,and Terrorism

It is common to hear the assertion that weak or failed states are fertile ground for terrorism. Yet terrorist groups have emerged from, and operated within, countries which have strong, stable states and a variety of systems of government. Terrorist organizations operate in weak and failed states but it is not necessarily the condition of weak or failed statehood which explains their presence. Moreover, it is not necessarily the weakest states which do host such groups. Therefore, this condition is not a sufficient explanation for their presence. While weak or failed states might provide an enabling environment for certain types of terrorist groups to operate, additional explanatory variables need to be identified.