Does US presidential rhetoric affect asymmetric political violence?

ABSTRACT

Although political violence has proven to be difficult for governments to manage, predict or control, previous research on the impact of relevant federal government actions and US presidential rhetoric on terrorist attacks and hate crimes demonstrates that what the US government does matters in ways that are both expected and unexpected. In the US, government counterterrorism strategies changed rapidly in response to the September 11th, 2001 attacks on the US. The Bush administration formed a new executive department, centralised intelligence agencies, invested in tangible counterterrorism measures, implemented two invasions and occupations, and spoke publicly about terrorism on a near-daily basis. Yet much has changed since that research, as the US has since elected a president whose presidential campaign relied upon espousing antagonism towards Muslims, immigrants and other minority groups. Further, President Trump’s administration has repeatedly demonstrated its commitment to isolate and suppress Muslims as a strategy to combat Islamist extremism in contrast to previous administrations’ more cooperative approaches. This article considers what existing research tells us about whether and how the different actions of the Trump administration may fuel both Jihadi and far-right extremism.

KEYWORDS:

• Counterterrorism
• terrorism
• rhetoric
• United States
• American politics
• presidential politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In a 2016 speech, Obama explained: “The reason that I haven’t used the particular phrase ‘radical Islam’ on a regular basis is because, in talking to Muslim allies, in talking to the Muslim-American community here, that was being heard as if we were ascribing to crazy groups like ISIL or al Qaeda the mantle of Islam. And since we need them as allies, I think it’s useful for us to listen to how the president of the United States’ words and messages are being received, because, if we’re going to defeat those organisations, we need help from the billion-plus Muslims in this world, so that they can help root out this perversion of Islam that’s taking place” (Obama 2016).

2. The American Presidency Project database is “the only online resource that has coded and organised into a single searchable database, all presidential speeches and papers” (Bartolucci 2012: 565). In order to identify the presidential communications that concerned terrorism, a systematic search was conducted of the American Presidency Project database between 1969 and 2018 using the search term “terrorism”. This search term was selected because any communications that contained this word were explicitly connected to terrorism. Additional searches using the term “terror” did not yield any additional relevant public communications. Terms such as “assassination” and “bombing” were also trialled as additional key words; however, both included events that were explicitly connected to warfare or were framed as other forms of violence.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daren G. Fisher

Daren G. Fisher received his PhD in Criminology and Criminal Justice from the University of Maryland, for his dissertation examining the impact of US Presidential Communications on Terrorism targeting the United States. He specializes in empirically testing the predictions of criminological theory to better inform government policies that aim to reduce terrorism using econometric methods and qualitative approaches. Daren has published articles in Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Police Practice and Research, the International Journal of Law, Crime, and Justice, and Critical Criminology. He has also authored book chapters on Sociological and Criminological Explanations of Terrorism (Oxford University Press, eds. Erica Chenoweth, Andreas Gofas, Richard English, and Stathis Kalyvas) and the Emergence of Classical Criminological Theory (Wiley, ed. Ruth A. Triplett).

Laura Dugan

Laura Dugan is a Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland. Her research examines the predictors and consequences of terrorist violence and the efficacy of violence prevention/intervention policy and practice. She also designs methodological strategies to overcome data limitations inherent in the social sciences. Dr. Dugan is a founding co-principal investigator for the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) and co-principal investigator of the Government Actions in Terrorist Environments (GATE) dataset. Dugan holds a doctorate in Public Policy and Management and a Masters in Statistics from Carnegie Mellon University. She has coauthored Putting Terrorism into Context: Lessons Learned from the World’s Most Comprehensive Terrorism Database, along with more than sixty journal articles and book chapters.

Erica Chenoweth

Erica Chenoweth, PhD is Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. An internationally recognized authority on political violence and its alternatives, Foreign Policy magazine ranked her among the top 100 global thinkers in 2013 for her efforts to promote the empirical study of civil resistance. Chenoweth received the 2014 Karl Deutsch Award, which the International Studies Association gives annually to the scholar under the age of 40 who has made the greatest impact on the field of international politics or peace research.