The Political Economy of Terrorism presents a widely accessible political economy approach to the study of terrorism. It applies economic methodology – theoretical and empirical – combined with political analysis and realities to the study of domestic and transnational terrorism. In so doing, the book provides both a qualitative and quantitative investigation of terrorism in a balanced up-to-date presentation that informs students, policy makers, researchers and the general reader of the current state of knowledge. Included are historical aspects, a discussion of watershed events, the rise of modern-day terrorism, examination of current trends, the dilemma of liberal democracies, evaluation of counterterrorism, analysis of hostage incidents and much more. The new edition expands coverage of every chapter, adds a new chapter on terrorist network structures and organization, accounts for changes in the Department of Homeland Security and the USA Patriot Act and insurance against terrorism. Rational-actor models of terrorist and government behavior and game-theoretic analysis are presented for readers with no prior theoretical training. Where relevant, the authors display graphs using data from International Terrorism: Attributes of Terrorist Events (ITERATE), the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), and other public-access data sets.

/pdf/the-political-economy-of-terrorism-3fasro8h94.pdf

The Political Economy of Terrorism

This article studies the various mechanisms by which democracy affects transnational terrorism. New theoretical mechanisms are identified that either complement or encompass existing arguments. Different effects of democracy on transnational terrorism are assessed for a sample of about 119 countries from 1975 to 1997. Results show that democratic participation reduces transnational terrorist incidents in a country, while government constraints increase the number of those incidents, subsuming the effect of press freedom. The proportional representation system experiences fewer transnational terrorist incidents than either the majoritarian or the mixed system.

http://people.tamu.edu/~quanli/papers/JCR_2005_terrorism.pdf

Does Democracy Promote or Reduce Transnational Terrorist Incidents

This article reviews the state of the art of available theories and data regarding the psychology of terrorism. Data and theoretical material were gathered from the world’s unclassified literature. Multiple theories and some demographic data have been published, but very few controlled empirical studies have been conducted investigating the psychological bases of terrorism. The field is largely characterized by theoretical speculation based on subjective interpretation of anecdotal observations. Moreover, most studies and theories fail to take into account the great heterogeneity of terrorists. Many practical, conceptual, and psychological barriers have slowed progress in this important field. Nonetheless, even at this early stage of terrorism studies, preliminary reports suggest that modifiable social and psychological factors contribute to the genesis of the terrorist mind-set. Psychological scholarship could possibly mitigate the risk of catastrophic attack by initiating the long overdue scientific stu...

/pdf/the-mind-of-the-terrorist-a-review-and-critique-of-44hz4poc7d.pdf

The Mind of the Terrorist A Review and Critique of Psychological Approaches

The effect of economic globalization on the number of transnational terrorist incidents within countries is analyzed statistically, using a sample of 112 countries from 1975 to 1997. Results show t...

http://people.tamu.edu/~quanli/papers/JCR_2004_terrorism.pdf

Economic Globalization and Transnational Terrorism: A Pooled Time-Series Analysis

What do terrorists want? No question is more fundamental for devising an effective counterterrorism strategy. The international community cannot expect to make terrorism unprofitable and thus scarce without knowing the incentive structure of its practitioners. The strategic model—the dominant paradigm in terrorism studies—posits that terrorists are political utility maximizers. According to this view, individuals resort to terrorism when the expected political gains minus the expected costs outweigh the net expected benefits of alternative forms of protest. The strategic model has widespread currency in the policy community; extant counterterrorism strategies seek to defeat terrorism by reducing its political utility. The most common strategies are to fight terrorism by decreasing its political benefits via a strict no concessions policy; decreasing its prospective political benefits via appeasement; or decreasing its political benefits relative to nonviolence via democracy promotion. Despite its policy r...

What Terrorists Really Want: Terrorist Motives and Counterterrorism Strategy

The question of the linkage of democratic forms of government with the incidence of terrorist violence is explored. Distinguishing between the presence of terrorist groups in a nation and violent terrorist events, and using multiple indicators of democratic development, evidence is presented clearly linking democracy with the presence of terrorist groups. Terrorist groups are less likely to be found in non‐democratic settings than in democratic ones.

Does democracy encourage terrorism

Most observers believe that the 'democratic rules of the game' provide a peaceful means for resolving political conflicts. This may be true but not all groups or even single individuals in democratic societies need play by these rules. This analysis uses two data sets: one that classifies most countries of the world based on how they were ruled in the mid-1980s, and the other on the frequency with which their nationals either perpetrated or were victimized by terrorists attacks, to investigate the relationship between terrorism and democracy. The findings suggest that stable democracy and terrorism go together. An analysis of the data reveal that terrorist attacks occur most often in the world's most stable democracies, and that, further, both the perpetrators and victims of those attacks are citizens of the same democracies.

Terrorism and Democracy: Perpetrators and Victims

This paper is the second in a series of analyses which explore relationships between terrorism and democracy. In this instance, the authors use the Rand‐St Andrews Chronology of International Terrorism for 1994, as well as the US State Department's Patterns of Global Terrorism collection of events for 1995. The authors use these data sets to determine if there is a linkage between the occurrence of terrorist attacks and the type of incumbent political regime in the countries where they are perpetrated. The two classifications of political regimes were drawn from Robert Wesson's 1987 study Democracy: a Worldwide Survey and the Freedom House Publication Freedom in the World for 1984–85 and 1994–95, in order to evaluate the impact of regime change on the incidence of terrorist events. Our principal finding, consistent with earlier work, is that terrorist events are substantially more likely to occur in free and democratic settings than in any of the alternatives. We do discover, though, that change in and of...

Terrorism and democracy: What recent events disclose

This paper seeks to assess the role of women in Italian terrorist groups. It is based on biographical information concerning 451 women who were active in such organizations between 1970 and 1984. The analysis suggests that there were a number of ways in which women terrorists differed from their male counterparts. These differences have to do with the time at which women became involved in terrorist activities, the routes they took prior to entry in the groups, the particular terrorist organizations they joined, and the roles they came to play in them.

Italian women terrorists

Italian democracy may not be as fragile as many of its observers feared or imagined. It has lasted more than twice as long as the Fascist dictatorship that preceded it. Since the end of the Second World War, Italy's citizens and their political leaders have had to overcome massive problems of both state and society that their counterparts in more tranquil parts of Europe have not encountered. The particular problem to which this book is devoted is that of political terrorism. This book deals with a large-scale and protracted outbreak of domestic terrorism. It is concerned with terrorist violence in Italy committed by Italians against other Italians, the purpose of which was to influence the course of that country's political life.

William Lee Eubank

Papers

Does democracy encourage terrorism

Terrorism and Democracy: Perpetrators and Victims

Terrorism and democracy: What recent events disclose

Italian women terrorists

The rise and fall of Italian terrorism