Fighting together? understanding bilateral cooperation in the realm of counterterrorism

ABSTRACT

Since September 11, there has been marked rise in research on the transnational aspect of terrorist organizations, such as Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. However, there has been little focus on when and why nations sometimes cooperate in counterterrorism, while at other times they deal with the challenge of terrorism separately. Our contribution here is two-fold. First, we develop a conceptual framework that identifies the different ways in which polities cooperate when they are executing CT policies. Second, using a newly collected dataset of CT campaigns and state cooperation from 1970 to 2007, we test the theoretical framework in an effort to explain under which conditions countries choose to cooperate or fight alone. The results indicate that traditional power-centric explanations for cooperation matter, but not to the exclusion of less-tangible factors such as identity and the nature of the violence used by the terrorist group.

KEYWORDS:

• Terrorist groups
• counterterrorism
• bilateral cooperation
• alliances
• terror campaigns

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. International Business Times, 11 September 2014, online.

2. Los Angeles Times, 11 September 2014, online.

3. The Global Terrorism Database (GTD) is publicly available at https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/.

4. Though we elected to pursue a quantitative approach, there is little doubt that other approaches, particularly interviews with counterterrorism policymakers and practitioners, would provide additional valuable insights as to the beginning, evolution, and termination of counterterrorism cooperation.

5. Due to space constraints, we are only able to briefly discuss the coding and construction of our dataset in the main text. We discuss the dataset in more detail in the online appendix to this article. Beyond what is contained in the online appendix, we will make any of the coding materials related to the construction of this dataset available upon request.

6. There is a case to be made that “any action” lumps together too many differing types of cooperative actions that are analytically distinct. Due to space constraints, this valid critique is discussed in more detail in the online appendix.

7. For example, the term “counterterrorism” appeared in 309 New York Times articles from 1991–2000. In the next ten years, from 2001–2010, the same term was used in 4,078 articles.

8. Initially, the authors attempted to gather a more fine-grained measure of cooperation, to include the number of cooperative actions taken. It quickly became apparent that, while it was possible in most cases to find sources that would allow for one to distinguish between kinetic and non-kinetic cooperation, it was nearly impossible to find sources that would speak to the frequency, intensity, and depth of the cooperative CT actions undertaken by states.

9. The reason for using COW alliance data is that the Alliance Treat Obligations and Provisions (ATOP) dataset, which contains more granular information on alliances, unfortunately only includes alliances through 2003 (Leeds, Ritter, McLaughlin Mitchell, & Long, 2002).

10. The starting temporal point in our dataset is limited due to the availability of the GTD, which records terrorism incidents starting in 1970. The ending temporal point is constrained by the availability of several of the independent variables. The complete list of countries in the dataset is available in the online appendix.

11. This is a similar idea to that seen in the effect of leadership decapitation on group duration. When decapitation occurs early in a group’s history, it leads to more of a negative impact on a group’s longevity than a decapitation later in the group’s history (Price, 2012).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Arie Perliger

Arie Perliger is a Professor and Director of Security Studies in the School of Criminology and Justice Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. Daniel Milton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Sciences and Director of Research in the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy.