Militarized Law Enforcement Forces, State Capacity and Terrorism

ABSTRACT

Gendarmerie forces are actively deployed by many states in the world to fight terrorism, but their impact on terrorism has not been explored. This study fills this gap in the literature and examines the effect that having gendarmerie forces has on terrorist activities in a state. I discuss competing arguments about the relationship between having these forces and terror incidents and also address the conditioning effect of bureaucratic capacity on this relationship. By constructing a time series cross-sectional data that identifies the countries having gendarmeries in given years, I test these arguments, and the results of the empirical analyses suggest that states having gendarmerie forces experience more terrorist violence than those without gendarmeries. However, the number of terror incidents in states with gendarmeries decreases as these states have greater bureaucratic capacity. The results have implications in terms of the role of militarized policing on terrorism and countering terrorism.

KEYWORDS:

• Gendarmerie
• terrorism
• state capacity
• security forces

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

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Mustafa Kirisci

Mustafa Kirisci is Visiting Assistant Professor at Saint Mary’s College of California. His research focuses on terrorism, civil wars, nonviolent movements, and international conflict. His papers appear in Government and Opposition and International Negotiation.