Dilettantes, Ideologues, and the Weak: Terrorists Who Don't Kill

Abstract

Why do some terrorist organizations choose not to—or fail to—kill? Of the 395 terrorist organizations operating between 1998 and 2005 only 39% had actually killed anyone. What factors account for this outcome? This article examines a series of organizational factors, including ideology, capability, and “home-base” country context, that the literature suggests are related to the decision to “go lethal.” We then test six hypotheses using data from the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT). Our statistical modeling suggests that ideology, capabilities, and “dilettantism” explain a significant proportion of the variation in whether an organization chooses to kill or not to kill. Leftists, anarchists, and environmentalists are far less likely to kill than those organizations inspired by religious ideologies. Larger organizations and those with more alliance ties are more likely to kill, while others are too “dilatory” and unserious about the “terrorist enterprise” to become lethal.

Keywords:

• resource mobilization
• terrorism
• terrorist ideology
• terrorist networks
• terrorists who do not kill

Notes

¹ Given the importance of definitions it is worth citing full: “Terrorism is violence, or the threat of violence, calculated to create an atmosphere of fear and alarm. These acts are designed to coerce others into actions they would not otherwise undertake, or refrain from actions they desired to take. All terrorist acts are crimes. Many would also be violation of the rules of war if a state of war existed. This violence or threat of violence is generally directed against civilian targets. The motives of all terrorists are political, and terrorist actions are generally carried out in a way that will achieve maximum publicity. Unlike other criminal acts, terrorists often claim credit for their acts. Finally, terrorist acts are intended to produce effects beyond the immediate physical damage of the cause, having long-term psychological repercussions on a particular target audience. The fear created by terrorists may be intended to cause people to exaggerate the strengths of the terrorist and the importance of the cause, to provoke governmental overreaction, to discourage dissent, or simply to intimidate and thereby enforce compliance with their demands.” (MIPT, 2006)

² Until March 30, 2008, MIPT's Terrorism Knowledge Base was available online. The references throughout this paper include the URL to the legacy site. Subsequently, MIPT closed the site and transferred the data to the University of Maryland's National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) (see www.start.umd.edu). START intends to integrate the MIPT data with its Global Terrorism Database (GTD), but as of this writing (April 2008) does not have a definitive timeline for completion of this integration

³ Our perspective may complement Braithwaite and Li's (2007) work on geospatial “hot-spots.” Some regions tend to have a great many terrorist incidents. Social networks among terrorist organizations may help to explain why. Ideas and “repertoires” travel along relationships; those relationships themselves tend to be regionally concentrated. Via standard social contagion processes, hot spots may emerge. When organization have few relationships, the potential for regional spread is diminished, thus the propensity for hotspots to emerge may also decline

⁴ It is possible that the primary target country of the group may also condition the choice between lethal and nonlethal violence. However, we were unable to establish any statistical relationship between target country characteristics independent of home-base country characteristics. This may be partly due to the fact that home-base and target county are the same in 339 of 395 cases. Of the 56 cases where home-base and target are different, a plurality (26) of the organizations target the U.S. from another country. Organizations targeting Israel from other countries account for 8 of the 56. Pakistani and Indian organizations contesting over Kashmir account for 5 others

⁵ Please see footnote 2 regarding the current and future availability of the MIPT data

⁶ We are indebted to Brian Lai of the University of Iowa for this insight

⁷ Impressionistically, it appears that many of the missing groups are new organizations that have sprung up in Iraq since the U.S. military action began

⁸ We are also indebted to Brian Lai for raising this question

⁹ We tested models with the standard set at one, two or fewer, four or fewer, or five or fewer attacks. The results were comparable, with the coefficient on dilettantism and the pseudo-R² increasing up to a standard of three or fewer and then falling

∗Because environmental and animal rights groups killed no one between 1998 and 2005, the Environmentalist/animal rights variable could not be included in the analysis. These groups were folded into the Other ideologies category. Thus the means of the ideologies will not sum to 1.00 but to 1.013

∗ p < 0.05

† p = 0.077

¹⁰ We note parenthetically here that the propensity to kill prolifically is not driven by the same factors as the choice to kill or not kill. For instance, energy consumption, military expenditures, leftism, environmentalism, and anarchism play no role in determining lethality. For a full discussion of the determinants of lethality, see Asal and Rethemeyer (2008)