Does state repression stimulate terrorism? A panel data analysis on South Asia

ABSTRACT

While earlier research confirms the association between state repression and terrorism, I revisit the state repression-terrorism thesis in the context of South Asia by using two alternative measures of state repression – political terror scale (PTS) and human rights and rule of law indicator (HRRL) of the Fragile State Index (FSI) – and an alternative measure of the impact of terrorism – Global Terrorism Index (GTI). I employ panel-corrected standard errors (PCSE) models and feasible generalised least square (FGLS) models to analyze the panel dataset of this research that covers seven South Asian countries, excluding the Maldives between 2006 and 2019. Consistent with previous studies, I find state repression to have a statistically significant relationship with terrorism for the sample of this study. In contrast, unemployment, poverty, and population among control variables are statistically significant predictors of terrorism of selected South Asian countries.

KEYWORDS:

• State repression
• political terror
• terrorism
• South Asia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Institute for Economics & Peace. (2020). Global Terrorism Index. Retrieved from https://www.visionofhumanity.org/maps/global-terrorism-index/#/. The Global Terrorism Index (GTI) covers the impact of terrorism for 158 countries from 2006 to 2019. The GTI, developed based on the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), is the first composite measure of the impact of terrorism. The GTI is useful for cross-national comparison since it provides a relative measure of the impact of terrorism for every individual country. This database is reliable since it has been used in a significant number of studies. For instance, Procasky and Ujah (2016) and Hyslop and Morgan (2014) have used this database in their research.

2 The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START). (2020). Global Terrorism Database. Retrieved from https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/. The Global Terrorism Database (GTD) is a widely used database in terrorism studies since it provides comprehensive and reliable data on all types of terrorist attacks. Among many, Bell (2019) and Mroszczyk (2019) have used the GTD for their empirical analyses.

3 Gibney, Mark, Linda Cornett, Reed Wood, Peter Haschke, Daniel Arnon, Attilio Pisanò, Gray Barrett, and Baekkwan Park. (2021). The Political Terror Scale 1976-2020. Retrieved from http://www.politicalterrorscale.org/. Existing literature on state repression and terrorism, for instance, Bell (2019) has used this dataset in her study.

4 The Fund for Peace. (2020). Fragile States Index. Retrieved from https://fragilestatesindex.org/. Existing studies have used this dataset. For instance, Piazza (2008) and Okafor and Piesse (2017) have used this database for their research.

5 The World Bank. (2020). World Development Indicators. Retrieved from https://databank.worldbank.org/source/world-development-indicators. In addition, I gather information on mean years of schooling in years (MYSCH) from Human Development Reports of the United Nations Development Programme. Retrieved from http://hdr.undp.org/en/indicators/103006?fbclid = IwAR2pBJkTx7HFu1NOJ--rvQM1esKrI2pXTix0I6eANSLVhgTZTvIADt7o3o0