Fighting for survival: responding to state capacity and terror group end

ABSTRACT

The well-established argument in the literature suggests that the higher state capacity is associatedwith the lower chance of experiencing civil conflict or higherchance of defeating the violent non-state groups. However, theliterature does not sufficiently address how these groups respondto increasing state capacity, and how their responses to that shapethe dynamic of political violence. I investigate the impact of statecapacity on terrorist group termination by exploring the waysterrorist groups respond to increasing state capacity. I argue thatincreasing state capacity might lead to a set of responses fromthe terror group in a way that it might induce the group to producemore terrorist violence to show that the group can still persist. Itmay also encourage the group to provide positive and negativeincentives to its constituents in order to rehabilitate its physicalcapacity to operate, and to prevent a shift of popular support a wayfrom the group towards to the government. Thus, such responsesof the group will decrease the likelihood of its terror campaign. Ialso expect that these arguments are especially relevant for ethnicor religious terror groups. The results of the empirical analysessupport these theoretical expectations.

KEYWORDS:

• Terrorism
• state capacity
• termination
• terror groups

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Please see https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/turkey/sri-lanka for a detailed comparison of Turkey with Sri Lanka.

2. I use Polo and Gleditsch (2016) UCDP2GTD data to get these numbers.

3. Young and Dugan (2014) recognises this measure of life span of terror groups is only a proxy and may have limitations as they suggest that the group may have attacked outside of the documented span without being attributed to the attack. Also, the other limitation would be that it might be hard to determine when the group conducted its last attack. Young and Dugan (2014) provide more discussion about the limitation of this measure of lifespan of terror groups in pages 4–5.

4. The graph illustrating the survival patterns of terror groups is presented at Figure A1 at the appendix.

5. Another model that can be used is the Cox proportional hazard models. Diagnosis tests, however, suggest that the proportional hazard assumption does not hold.

6. Although I focus particularly on relative political capacity and bureaucratic capacity, l have also run to test the effect of military capacity on terrorist group end. I use two measures of military capacity, the value of arms imports from SIPRI data and military spending per soldier from COW data. The results are presented at Table A2 at the appendix. Neither variable has a statistically significant impact on the likelihood of terror group end.

7. The coefficient of the individual bureaucratic quality variable in the interaction term is significant as I have shown in the fourth model. I didn’t have a separate graph on that since the interaction term didn’t achieve the statistical significance. But I have calculated the substantive impact of the individual bureaucratic quality variable. Moving from the lowest quality of bureaucracy to highest quality of bureaucracy decreases the probability of demise of ideological terror groups from 0.358 to 0.238 (33.5%).

Additional information

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Mustafa Kirisci

Mustafa Kirisci is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Saint Mary’s College of California. His research interests are terrorism, counterterrorism, civil wars, non-violent movements, and international conflict. His papers appear on International Negotiation, Government and Opposition and Terrorism and Political Violence.