The Political Effectiveness of Terrorism Revisited

Abstract

Terrorists attack civilians to coerce their governments into making political concessions. Does this strategy work? To empirically assess the effectiveness of terrorism, the author exploits variation in the target selection of 125 violent substate campaigns. The results show that terrorist campaigns against civilian targets are significantly less effective than guerrilla campaigns against military targets at inducing government concessions. The negative political effect of terrorism is evident across logit model specifications after carefully controlling for tactical confounds. Drawing on political psychology, the author concludes with a theory to account for why governments resist compliance when their civilians are targeted.

Why Target the “Good Guys”? The Determinants of Terrorism Against NGOs

“…Why does such violence occur? This is similar to the puzzle in Abrahms (2006Abrahms ( , 2012 and Humphreys and Weinstein (2006) in that NGOs are noncombatant targets that could entail high audience costs for the violent group. Given that terrorist organizations need supporters from the population that could benefit from the work of the NGO, why would a group risk the public relations backlash that could result from targeting a NGO?…”

“…Similarly, Toft et al (2010) look at the determinants of attacks against energy infrastructures and find that more attacks are likely to small geographic clusters, typically when associated with other types of terrorist attacks. On a somewhat larger scale, Abrahms (2006Abrahms ( , 2012 focuses not on the choice of target but whether the choice of either a civilian or military target matters for the overall ability of the terrorist organization to reach its policy objectives. Abrahms (2006Abrahms ( , 2012 finds that terrorist organizations rarely are able to get policy concessions from a government when they target civilians, something Abrahms (2006Abrahms ( , 2012 links to issues of miscommunication of policy objectives after civilian attacks.…”

“…On a somewhat larger scale, Abrahms (2006Abrahms ( , 2012 focuses not on the choice of target but whether the choice of either a civilian or military target matters for the overall ability of the terrorist organization to reach its policy objectives. Abrahms (2006Abrahms ( , 2012 finds that terrorist organizations rarely are able to get policy concessions from a government when they target civilians, something Abrahms (2006Abrahms ( , 2012 links to issues of miscommunication of policy objectives after civilian attacks. After a civilian attack, "misperception[s] that terrorists invariably harbor radical political ends closes the bargaining space even when it should objectively exist" (Abrahms 2012:383).…”

“…Below, we take the extant literature on terrorism writ large, especially the literature by Bloom (2005) and Kydd and Walter (2006) on "outbidding" and the literature of Abrahms (2006Abrahms ( , 2008Abrahms ( , 2012 on terrorist motivations, as a launching point for our research into the determinants of terrorism attacks against NGO targets.…”

A Social Movement Theory Typology of Militant Organisations: Contextualising Terrorism

“…66 Comparing very different groups without taking into account their levels of mobilisation and the political opportunity structure they are operating in, leaves analysts comparing guerrilla armies with very small, clandestine groups. This puts too great a weight on group selection, and arguably does not offer much analytical clarity over terrorism in comparative context.…”