Provoking Ordinary People: The Effects of Terrorism on Civilian Violence

Abstract

<jats:p> Research on the effects of terrorism mostly focuses on the coercive effects of violence on the macrolevel, while other effects like provocation, particularly on the microlevel, do not receive the same attention. In this article, we seek to address previous omissions. We argue that terrorism can provoke ordinary people into a violent reaction. By reducing perceived security and creating a desire for revenge terrorism may lead civilians to attack uninvolved members of the terrorists’ constituency. Using geo-referenced data on terrorism (Global Terrorism Database) and violent riots (Social Conflict Analysis Database), we assess with a matched wake analysis if the treatment of terrorist violence against civilians causes an increase in violent behavior. The results of our analyses show that terrorism significantly increases violent riots. We thus conclude that terrorism can not only provoke governments but also civilians into an overreaction. </jats:p>

Mutual radicalisation of opposing extremist groups via the Internet

“…Recent evidence of mutual radicalisation between Islamic extremist groups and far-right extremist groups across Europe is increasing (Ebner, 2017;Fielitz et al, 2018). Offline, terrorist violence against civilians predicts an increase in violent behaviour from these same civilian groups against the perceived perpetrators of the original violence (Brandsch & Python, 2020), whilst learning that Islamic extremists dehumanize Westerners increases the likelihood Muslims will be dehumanized in return (Kteily, Hodson, & Bruneau, 2016). Additionally, there is prior evidence for each of the individual links between online and offline radicalisation shown in Figure 1, which this study builds on.…”

Predicting non-state terrorism worldwide

“…With regard to the variables selected, we grouped them into six categories. Since terrorism is mainly a communication strategy that either seeks to coerce or to provoke ( 22 ), we first identified structural variables (time-invariant variables) that heighten the demonstration effects of violence, either coercive or provocative. We considered population density derived from the 2000 Gridded Population of the World (GPW v4.10) ( 51 ) per percentage of land area ( 52 ) along with travel time to cities of more than 50,000 inhabitants ( 53 ), distance to capital data ( 52 ) [from 2002 to 2014 and extrapolated the missing years (2015–2016)], and density of road at grid-cell level from the Global Roads Inventory Project dataset ( 54 ) to capture spatial variations in the ease of sending a message to the audience of the attack.…”

“…Non-state actors who are unable to overpower their adversaries militarily use this tactic to compensate for their weakness. Terrorism thus may have many purposes ( 25 ), but its two core strategies are either coercing or provoking an opponent or a population ( 22 , 26 ). In coercion strategies, terrorists use violence to threaten further violence in the future.…”

“…Fourth, provocative attacks seek to engender a violent reaction either by the government or the local population. Previous research showed that terrorists particularly seem to target those locations that have a high probability of escalating into more violent conflict because this creates more recruits for the terrorists’ organizations ( 22 , 32 ). In line with this research, we include variables on past conflict events ( 32 ) and politically excluded ethnic groups ( 33 – 35 ).…”

“…A definition focusing on attacks against civilians is in line with recent research (22,23) but necessitates modifications of the raw GTD data. Therefore, we first gather data on terrorism from the GTD dataset from 2002 to 2016 for each region and adapt it to our definition (20).…”