Terrorism

Question 1

How many suicide terrorist attacks

Answer 1

1993-2003- 188 seperate suicide attacks

Question 2

the group most responsible for suicide attacks and how many they have carried out

Answer 2

the world’s leader in suicide terrorism is actually the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a group who recruits from the predominantly Hindu Tamil population in northern and eastern Sri Lanka and whose ideology has Marxist/Leninist elements.
The LITE alone accounts for 75 of the 186 suicide terrorist attacks from 1980 to 2001.

Question 3

Pape- the purpose of suicide attacks

Answer 3

Viewed from the perspective of the terrorist organization, suicide attacks are designed to achieve specific political purposes: to coerce a target government to change policy, to mobilize additional recruits and financial support, or both, signal there are more attacks to come
designed to coerce modern democracies to make significant concessions to national self-determination. In general, suicide terrorist campaigns seek to achieve specific territorial goals, most often the withdrawal of the target state’s military forces from what the terrorists see as national homeland.

Question 4

Pape - the rationality of suicide attacks

Answer 4

• Even if many suicide attackers are irrational or fanatical, the leadership groups that recruit and direct them are not- have a specific purpose
  suicide terrorism is an extreme form of what Thomas Schelling (1966) calls “the rationality of irrationality,” in which an act that is irrational for individual attackers is meant to demonstrate credibility to a democratic audience that still more and greater attacks are sure to come.

Question 5

Pape- isolation of suicide attacks

Answer 5

• The vast majority of suicide terrorist attacks are not isolated or random acts by individual fanatics but, rather, occur in clusters as part of a larger campaign by an organized group to achieve a specific political goal. Groups using suicide terrorism consistently announce specific political goals and stop suicide attacks when those goals have been fully or partially achieved.

Question 6

Pape- purpose of every suicide terrorist campaign 1890-2001

Answer 6

From Lebanon to Israel to Sri Lanka to Kashmir to Chechnya, every suicide terrorist campaign from 1980 to 2001 has been waged by terrorist groups whose main goal has been to establish or maintain self-determination for their community’s homeland

Question 7

Pape- example of successful suicide terrorism

Answer 7

. Suicide terrorists sought to compel American and French military forces to abandon Lebanon in 1983.

Israeli forces to leave Lebanon in 1985

Israeli forces to quit the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 1994 and 1995

the Sri Lankan government to create an independent Tamil state from 1990

July 2003 - Hamas leaders came to believe that Israel was backsliding and delaying with-drawl, Hamas launched a series of suicide attacks. Israel accelerated the pace of its withdrawal, after which Hamas ended the campaign.

the terrorist political cause made more gains after the resort to suicide operations than it had before- and these attacks are growing because people know it pays

Question 8

Pape- how suicide terrorists alter bargaining

Answer 8

• Suicide terrorism does not change a nation’s willingness to trade high interests for high costs, but suicide attacks can overcome a country’s efforts to mitigate civilian costs. Accordingly, suicide terrorism may marginally increase the punishment that is inflicted and so make target nations somewhat more likely to surrender modest goals, but it is unlikely to compel states to abandon important interests related to the physical security or national wealth of the state.

Suicide terrorism attempts to inflict enough pain on the opposing society to overwhelm their interest in resisting the terrorists demands and, so, to cause either the government to concede or the population to revolt against the government.

What creates the coercive leverage is not so much actual damage as the expectation of future damage.

Question 9

Pape- effect of the type of terrorism on support for the organisation

Answer 9

o Demonstrative terrorism is directed mainly at gaining publicity, to recruit more activists, to gain attention to grievances from soft-liners on the other side, and to gain attention from third parties who might exert pressure on the other side. Eg hostage taking and explosions announced in advance- avoid doing serious harm so not to undermine sympathy for the cause
o Destructive terrorism is more aggressive, seeking to coerce opponents as well as mobilize support for the cause. Destructive terrorists seek to inflict real harm on members of the target audience at the risk of losing sympathy for their cause. goal. For instance, Palestinian terrorists in the 1970s often sought to kill as many Israelis as possible, fully alienating Jewish society but still evoking sympathy from Muslim communities.

suicide terrorism maximizes coercive leverage at the expense of support among the terrorists’ own community and so can be sustained over time only when there already exists a high degree of commitment among the potential pool of recruits.

Question 10

Pape - what is a common feature/ inherent to all suicide terrorists

Answer 10

The common feature of all suicide terrorist campaigns is that they inflict punishment on the opposing society, either directly by killing civilians or indirectly by killing military personnel in circumstances that cannot lead to meaningful battlefield victory.

In suicide terrorism, the coercer is the weaker actor and the target is the stronger.

Question 11

Pape- exemplification of the purpose of suicide terrorists

Answer 11

o The rhetoric of major suicide terrorist groups reflects the logic of coercive punishment. Abdel Karim, a leader of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, a militant group, said the goal of his group was “to increase losses in Israel to a point at which the Israeli public would demand a withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip”.

Question 12

what percentage of attacks and deaths do terrorist attacks account for

Answer 12

• suicide attacks amount to 3% of all terrorist attacks but account for 48% of total deaths due to terrorism, again excluding September 11

Question 13

what percentage of suicide attacks are part of organised/ coherent campaigns

Answer 13

of the 188 from 1980-2001: 95%, were parts of organized, coherent campaigns, while only nine were isolated or random events.

Question 14

Pape- what is common to all of the targets of suicide terrorism in the modern day

Answer 14

all of the targets have been democracies

Question 15

Pape- prime examples of targeting of democracies in suicide terrorism campaigns

Answer 15

o Although Iraq has been far more brutal toward its Kurdish population than has Turkey, violent Kurdish groups have used suicide attacks exclusively against democratic Turkey and not against the authoritarian regime in Iraq.

Question 16

Pape- success rate of suicide terrorism

Answer 16

• of the 11 suicide terrorist campaigns that were completed during 1980-2001, six closely correlate with significant policy changes by the target state toward the terrorists’ major political goals.

In one case, the terrorists’ territorial goals were fully achieved (Hezbollah v. US/F, 1983)- The American and French withdrawal was perhaps the most clear-cut coercive success for suicide terrorism. In his memoirs, President Ronald Reagan (1990, 465) explained the U.S. decision to withdraw from Lebanon: The price we had to pay in Beirut was so great, the tragedy at the barracks was so enormous..We had to pull out..We couldn’t stay there and run the risk of another suicide attack

Question 17

Abrahms - failure of terrorist groups

Answer 17

2001 -2006
twenty-eight terrorist groups— the complete list of foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) as designated by the U.S. Department of State
- the groups accomplished their forty-two policy objectives only 3 times, 7 percent of the time

Question 18

Arbrahms- the biggest reason for terrorist success

Answer 18

the key variable for terrorist success was a tactical one: target selection. Groups whose attacks on civilian targets outnumbered attacks on military targets systematically failed to achieve their policy objectives, regardless of their nature.

Question 19

Abrahms- critique of Pape

Answer 19

o Pape who says terrorism is successful coercive means - Not only is his sample of terrorist campaigns modest, but they targeted only a handful of countries: ten of the eleven campaigns analyzed were directed against the same three countries (Israel, Sri Lanka, and Turkey).

if targeting civilians is unsuccessful would seem to go against Pape to some extent

Question 20

Abrahms - measure of terrorist success

Answer 20

• Terrorism’s effectiveness can be measured along two dimensions: combat effectiveness describes the level of damage inflicted by the coercing power; strategic effectiveness refers to the extent to which the coercing power achieves its policy objectives.

Question 20

Abrahms- effect of terrorist aims on success

Answer 20

• limited objectives are more conducive to locating a mutually acceptable resolution than disputes over maximalist objectives, which foreclose a bargaining range (Pape does agree w this)- , limited objectives typically refer to demands over territory (and other natural resources); maximalist objectives, on the other hand, refer to demands over beliefs, values, and ideology, which are more difficult to divide and relinquish.
  o Coercion succeeded in three out of eight cases when territory was the goal, but it failed in all twenty- two cases when groups aimed to destroy a target state’s society or values.

Question 21

Abrahms- why attacking civilians doesn’t work

Answer 21

• target civilians are unable to coerce policy change because terrorism has extremely high correspondence. Countries believe that their civilian populations are attacked not because the terrorist group is protesting unfavourable external conditions such as territorial occupation or poverty. Rather, target countries infer from the short- term devastating consequences of terrorism I.e. death, the objectives of the terrorist group.

In short, target countries view the negative consequences of terrorist attacks on their societies and political systems as evidence that the terrorists want them destroyed.

Question 22

Abrahms - Russian apartment bombings- the event

Answer 22

Three apartment bombings that killed 229 Russian civilians in September 1999
3 separate bombing incidents over 8 days

Question 23

Abrahms - Russian apartment bombings- view of Chechen war prior to terrorist attacks

Answer 23

• Prior to bombings it was agreed that Chechen objectives were restricted to independent Chechen state and most Russians favoured territorial compromise

Disdain for the war manifested itself most clearly in public attitudes toward Defense Minister Pavel Grachev. Opinion polls rated his approval at only 3 percent.

a strong majority of Russians (71 percent) supported the idea of trading land for peace

Question 24

Abrahms - effect of terrorism during second Chechen war on public opinion

Answer 24

polls showed that following the terrorist acts only 15 percent of Russians believed the Chechens were fighting for independence.

Russians were almost twice as likely to believe that Chechen motives were now to “kill Russians,” “bring Russia to its knees,” , “destroy and frighten Russian society,” and “bring chaos to Russian society” than to achieve “the independence of Chechnya.

• six months after they occurred, 73 percent of Russians favoured “the advance of federal forces into Chechnya,” compared with only 19 percent of Russians who wanted “peaceful negotiations

Question 25

Abrahms - effect of 9/11 terrorist attack on public opinion in America

Answer 25

• Since September 11, 2001, major Western journalists have devoted generous coverage to the fallout of terrorist attacks, but only since 2004, with the publication of Michael Schueur’s Imperial Hubris, have they consistently published excerpts of al-Qaida’s communiqués
• For Bush, September 11 demonstrated that the enemy “hates not our policies, but our existence.”
• Since September 11, more Americans have polled that the terrorists are targeting the United States because of its “democracy,” “freedom,” “values,” and “way of life” than because of its interference in the Muslim world.

Question 26

Arbahms - purpose of 9/11 attacks

Answer 26

o most well known ultimatum is for the United States to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia, “Land of the Two Holy Places.”
o al-Qaida spokesmen say that its terrorist acts are intended to dissuade the United States from supporting military interventions that kill Muslims around the world. + emphasize the goal of ending U.S. support for pro-Western Muslim rulers who suppress the will of their people.

Question 27

Abrahms - Specific military response from US to 9/11

Answer 27

(1) increased troop levels in the Persian Gulf fifteenfold
(2) strengthened military relations with pro-U.S. Muslim rulers, especially in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia;
(3) supported counterterrorism operations—either directly or indirectly—that have killed tens of thousands of Muslims around the world- AUMF
(4) became an even less partial mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Question 28

AUMF

Answer 28

o The Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) is a legislative mechanism introduced by the United States Congress to grant the executive branch the authority to use military force against specific enemies or in particular regions. It was initially introduced in 2001 in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks and has been used by successive U.S. administrations to justify military actions against terrorist organizations and in various conflict zones, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and other countries where U.S. forces are engaged in counterterrorism operations.
o Justified an unknown number of military operations, including airstrikes, combat, detention, and supporting partner militaries, in at least 22 countries

Question 29

Bush’s view of war on terrorism post 9/11

Answer 29

20 September 2001- President George W. Bush declared that ‘‘our war on terror begins withal-Qaida, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated’’

Question 30

Calle and Cuenca – two key senses within the concept of terrorism

Answer 30

the action and the actor senses. For the first, terrorism is a tactic, an act of violence; for the second, terrorism is a type of insurgency. I.e. do we define terrorism according to the actor or action.

deep core of terrorism upon their interaction - The action sense identifies a particular repertoire of violence, such as planting bombs and shooting policemen, that does not require strong military capabilities. The actor sense of terrorism identifies groups that act in secrecy, under the constraints of clandestinity.

Question 31

Calle and Cuenca
- two ways to characterise the action sense of terrorism

Answer 31

1. looks at the condition of the target: terrorism is violence against civilians or non-combatants.
2. the analysis of terrorist violence itself. - are some attacks that are typically regarded in the literature as terrorist: hostage taking and kidnapping, assassinations, plane hijackings, selective shootings, bank robberies, and the destruction of property and life through IEDs (improvised explosive devices) in urban areas. These actions are usually executed with firearms and IEDs and do not involve the participation of many activists.

Question 32

Calle and Cuenca- the unique nature of terrorist actors

Answer 32

• the basic assumption is that terrorist groups (or urban guerrillas) are different from rural guerrillas because the former are clandestine, surviving underground, while the latter are open organizations, with some capabilities of fighting against the state army

terrorists cannot do these things which guerrilla fighters can do (guerrillas must be Able to do some of these things):
. Set up camps or bases in which they store weapons, train recruits, and so on within the country’s borders.
o b. Establish stable roadblocks, disrupting the flow of goods and persons within the country, to finance the insurgency.
o c. Rule the civil population in the localities they seize (e.g., extracting rents, administering justice). To be recognized as the new authority, insurgents may wear uniforms and carry arms in the controlled areas.

Question 33

Calle and Cuenca - Spain as an impure terrorist case

Answer 33

• Since the 1970s, ETA has perpetrated numerous attacks against security forces through IEDs and shootings. It has also carried out a high number of selective killings, aimed at informers, drug dealers, entrepreneurs, politicians, and public officials. These tactics are typically terrorist in nature
• Although ETA acts in a fully underground manner, it had for many years a sanctuary or safe haven in the south of France, where it was able to move around with relative ease. However, a sanctuary is quite different from the territorial control that guerrillas have, among other reasons because the rebels do not become the local rulers and do not commit violent acts in the safe haven- when they carry out terrorist violence they do do it under constraints of clandestinity

Question 34

Calle and Cuenca - Argentina as an impure terrorist case

Answer 34

• 1970–74, the Montoneros engaged almost exclusively in urban violence (shootings and bombings).
• the Montoneros tried to create a real army with a capacity for military operations that involved several hundred attackers. Perhaps the most spectacular deed was the assault on a garrison in Formosa in October 1975. This was a large-scale guerrilla attack in which the Montoneros wore uniforms. This guerrilla period, however, was brief and ended in failure. The underground nature of the movement prevented the launching of ambitious guerrilla operations against the army.

Question 35

Calle and Cuenca - Argentina as an impure terrorist case

Answer 35

• The PKK started its guerrilla attacks in the early 1980s, with hit-and-run tactics that were launched from the territorial base the organization had in the mountains in the southeastern part of the country. . The PKK ruled in the liberated areas, imparting justice and spreading the use of Kurdish. Internal violence against Kurdish people not willing to collaborate with the PKK was harsh
• In the mid-1990s, the Turkish army sufficiently improved its effectiveness to deal a severe blow to the PKK. Interestingly, it was in the aftermath of military defeat that the insurgency decided to launch typically terrorist tactics such as suicide missions and attacks against tourists. Between 1995 and 1999, the year in which the PKK leader, was arrested, fifteen suicide missions were carried out.

Question 36

Calle and Cuenca- interaction of actor and action

Answer 36

• The choice of tactics by armed groups is largely conditioned by the capabilities and constraints that stem from territorial control (or a lack of it). But, second, the connection between the actor and the action is not a deterministic one. The choice between terrorist and guerrilla attacks depends on the relevance of the territory under the insurgents’ control, but also on other factors such as the resources of the insurgency

Under the conditions of clandestinity, they cannot but resort to the technology of violence associated with terrorism. The kind of violence exerted by terrorist groups therefore follows from the constraints that secrecy imposes.

Question 37

prevalence of female suicide bombers

Answer 37

Globally, women have killed themselves in 214 suicide attacks across seventeen different countries between 1985 and 2015

as of 2021 more than 800 people were killed by female suicide bombers in Iraq within a decade of the invasion. Female suicide attackers have been implicated in more than fifty successful attacks with a number directly targeting US forces

between 2011 and 2017, Boko Haram utilized more women as suicide bombers than men.

responsible for 2,000 deaths in last 3 decades

Question 38

Why are women employed as suicide bombers - quote from Ali

Answer 38

“women are able to shroud their weapons underneath their abayas, their Islamic dress…In doing so, they’re becoming invisible and it’s actually creating an enormous security problem for US and Iraqi forces.”

Question 39

Thomas - why are women employed as suicide bombers

Answer 39

• “Al-Qaeda repeatedly exploited a cultural taboo against the searching of women, allowing their female suicide bombers to pass through checkpoints without being searched.
• Women are also deployed as suicide bombers because they are viewed as expendable. According to Warner and Matfess, one former member of Boko Haram reasoned that the group prefers female suicide bombers because “using women allows you to save your men.”

short sightedness- “they are almost always unanticipated, underestimated, and highly effective

Question 40

example of success of femininity in terrorist attacks

Answer 40

female suicide attackers have used their status as mothers to gain access to their targets. In January 2017, two Nigerian female suicide bombers were able to bypass a security checkpoint because they were carrying infants, while two other female terrorists without babies were detained. The former two were able to generate casualties, while the latter two failed.

Question 41

Thomas- deadliness of female suicide attackers

Answer 41

• If proximity to one’s target is necessary to generate fatalities, the lack of attention given to women should result in more deadly attacks when terrorists are female

o On average, attacks including female terrorists kill about eleven individuals while those with only male terrorists kill about nine people.

Question 42

Thomas - effect of gender in civil society on deadliness of terrorism

Answer 42

• Where women do not participate in civil society, expectations of their involvement in formal organizations, violent or otherwise, should be low

o female attackers tend to be most lethal when women rarely participate in civil society.

Suicide attacks are expected to kill nearly five more individuals when that strike is executed by a woman and when women’s participation in civil society is at its lowest value (0.206).
o At the middle range of the scale, suicide attacks executed by female terrorists are expected to kill three (2.8) more people than those committed by male bombers.
At higher rates of civil society participation, however, the gender of the perpetrator has no significant effect on the expected number of fatalities from a suicide attack

Question 43

Thomas - effect of labour force participation on success of female suicide bombers

Answer 43

• Labour force participation refers to the “proportion of the population ages fifteen and older that is economically active”

o When five times as many men work as do women (20), the increase in expected deaths is only 4.5. When the female workforce is a third of the male workforce, an increase of only 3.8 deaths is expected from the use of female suicide attackers. When half as many women work as men, the first difference decreases to three. Beyond this range of labor force participation, there is no statistically discernible difference

Question 44

Sandler - what type of terrorist groups have emerged most prevalently since 9/11

Answer 44

• Religious fundamentalist terrorist groups represent the greatest percentage of new groups started after 2001. This trend starts in the beginning of the 1990s; in our sample, 14 percent (44) of the groups formed before 1990 are religious fundamentalists, whereas 30 percent (98) of the groups formed after 1990 are religious fundamentalists.

the average annual number of newly created religious fundamentalist terrorist groups more than tripled during the period after 2001

Question 45

Sandler - geographic distribution of types of terrorist groups

Answer 45

prior to 2001, leftist groups are heavily represented in middle- and high-income democracies, while the religious fundamentalist groups are heavily represented in low- and middle-income autocracies and partly free democracies- after 2001, these relative distributions of leftist and religious fundamentalist groups remain essentially the same.

. Out of fifty-two religious extremist groups, twenty-three emerged in Iraq following the Iraq invasion, three began in Afghanistan, and six started in Pakistan.

Question 46

Sandler- prevelance of Islam in new religious fundamentalist groups

Answer 46

• the names of 52 religious fundamentalist groups that appeared during 2001–06 and find that more than 61 percent of those names contain words related to Islam

Question 47

Mueller- migrant crossing numbers

Answer 47

There are over 3oo million legal entries by foreigners each year, and illegal crossings number between 1,ooo and 4,ooo a day-

Question 48

Mueller- the resources a terrorist organisation needs

Answer 48

Terrorism does not rely on a large force

Steven Simon has noted, for a terrorist attack to succeed, “all that is necessary are the most portable, least detectable tools of the terrorist trade: ideas.”

don’t need that long- 9/11 planned in 2 years

Question 49

how many attacks on USA before 9/11

Answer 49

no attacks in the 5 years before 9/11

Question 50

Mueller- main argument about terrorist attacks

Answer 50

the threat is massively exaggerated

Question 51

Mueller- US intelligence findings of terrorists

Answer 51

• Intelligence estimates in 2002 held that there were as many as 5,ooo al Qaeda terrorists and supporters in the United States. However, a secret FBI report in 2005 after more than three years of intense and well-funded hunting, it had been unable to identify a single true al Qaeda sleeper cell anywhere in the country.
• In addition to massive eavesdropping and detention programs, every year some 30,000 “national security letters” are issued without judicial review, forcing businesses and other institutions to disclose confidential information about their customers without telling anyone they have done so That process has generated thousands of leads that, when pursued, have led nowhere

Question 52

Mueller- response of citizens of Jordan terrorism

Answer 52

+ The 2005 bombing in Jordan of a wedding at a hotel (an unbelievably stupid target for the terrorists) succeeded mainly in outraging the Jordanians: according to a Pew poll, the percentage of the population expressing a lot of confidence in bin Laden to “do the right thing” dropped from 25 percent to less than one percent after the attack.

Question 53

Mueller- the real threat of terrorism on individuals

Answer 53

• the total number of people killed since 9/11 by al Qaeda or al Qaeda-like operatives outside of Afghanistan and Iraq is not much higher than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States in a single year, and that the life time chance of an American being killed by international terrorism is about one in 8o,ooo-about the same chance of being killed by a comet or a meteor.

Question 54

Tilly - downward trend in terrorist attacks

Answer 54

The State Department’s count of international terrorist incidents reached a high point in 1988 and generally declined thereafter. The number of deaths in attacks rose from 233 to 405 to an estimated 3,547 (including 3,000 deaths assigned to September 11) from 1999 to 2001. Nevertheless, the 346 attacks of 2001 lay far below the frequencies of the 1980s, and the overall levels of casualties declined as well from the 1980s onward.

Question 55

Tilly- when does terror work best

Answer 55

• terror works best when it alters or inhibits the target’s disapproved behaviour, fortifies the perpetrators’ standing with potential allies, and moves third parties toward greater cooperation with the perpetrators’ organization and announced program.

Question 56

Tilly - what is terror signalling

Answer 56

• In addition to whatever harm it inflicts directly, it sends signals—signals that the target is vulnerable, that the perpetrators exist, and that the per-petrators have the capacity to strike again. The signals typically reach three different audiences: the targets themselves, potential allies of the perpetrators, and third parties that might cooperate with one or the other. Although some users of terror (for example, a minority of 19th-century anarchists) operate on the theory that destruction of evil objects is a good in itself, most terror supports demands for recognition, redress, autonomy, or transfers of power

Question 57

Tilly- 4 different types of terrorist actors

Answer 57

no coherent set of cause-effect propositions can explain terrorism as a whole

1. Autonomists stand for all those politically active groups whose members sometimes launch terror attacks on authorities, symbolic objects, rivals, or stigmatized populations on their own territories without becoming durably organized specialists in coercion.
2. Zealots maintain similar connections with each other but commit their violent acts outside of their own base territories; they include long-term exiles who return home to attack their enemies.
3. Governmental, nongovernmental, and antigovernmental militias maintain enduring organizations of coercive specialists and exercise terror within their base territories
4. Finally, conspirators organize specialized striking forces for operations away from base.

Question 58

Press and Lieber - main argument

Answer 58

terrorists won’t use nuclear weapons

Question 59

Press and Lieber- anonymity of terrorists and states after nuclear attack

Answer 59

would not remain anonymous

data on a decade of terrorist incidents reveal a strong positive relationship between the number of fatalities caused in a terror attack and the likelihood of attribution. Roughly three-quarters of the attacks that kill 100 people or more are traced back to the perpetrators. Second, attribution rates are far higher for attacks on the U.S. homeland or the territory of a major U.S. ally—97 percent for incidents that killed ten or more people. Third, tracing culpability from a guilty terrorist group back to its state sponsor is not likely to be difficult… so passing weapons to terrorists would not offer countries an escape from the constraints of deterrence.
* One means of identifying the state source of a nuclear terrorist at- tack is through “nuclear forensics”—the use of a bomb’s isotopic fingerprints to trace the missile material device back to the reactors, enrichment facilities, or uranium mines from which it was derived. In theory, the material that remains after an explosion can yield crucial information about its source, some are more pessimistic about this but also combined with the fact terrorists are usually always found out when inflicting mass casualty

Question 60

Press and Lieber- failure of logic of transferring nuclear weapons from states to terrorists

Answer 60

• If a state were undeterrable—that is, if its leaders did not fear retaliation— it would presumably conduct a nuclear strike itself rather than subcontract the job to a terrorist group, ensuring that the weapons were used against the desired target at the desired time (not against a target ultimately chosen by terrorists). Nuclear weapons are the most powerful weapons a state can acquire, and hand- ing that power to an actor over which the state has less than complete control would be an enormous, epochal decision—one unlikely to be taken by regimes that are typically obsessed with power and their own survival.
• The state may give nuclear weapons and pretend they are stolen to avoid retaliation or try to avoid blame through other ways but Any state rational enough to seek to avoid retaliation for a nuclear attack would recognize the incredible risk that this strategy entails. + In the wake of a nuclear terror attack, a lack of full cooperation in showing all materials accounted for would be highly revealing.

Question 61

Press and Lieber- implication of nuclear weapons being traceable

Answer 61

o Thus the fear of terrorist transfer seems greatly exaggerated and does not—in itself—seem to justify costly measures to prevent proliferation (as used to justify the invasion of Iraq and fuel the debate over attacking Iran)
o Second, analysts and policymakers should stop understating the ability of the United States to attribute terrorist attacks to their sponsoring states. Such rhetoric not only is untrue, but it also undermines deterrence

Question 62

Vincenzo- effect of Immigration on terrorism

Answer 62

• the level of terrorism “at home” increases with a larger number of immigrants from countries of origin where terrorism has been present.

what matters are the countries of migrants’ origins and how present terrorism is in those states.

Question 63

Vincenzo - why does immigration effect terrorism

Answer 63

• migration flows affect the willingness and opportunity for and thereby the actual patterns of social interaction,
• social bonds play the most important role in joining terrorist groups - clusters of, for example, friends or worshippers, who are connected via strong ties. This improves social cohesion, common views and loyalties, and a strong sense of community. migrants can provide such social ties and bonds, and terrorist organizations may exploit them for their purposes.
• terrorist groups, are self-organized and lack a comprehensive recruitment drive, which implies that terror organizations need to build on pre-existing linkages, nodes, and thus net- works to pursue their goals. migration flows and diaspora communities provide those linkages, nodes, and preexisting social networks.

Question 64

Vincenzo - migration prevalence in terrorism

Answer 64

• an analysis of 212 perpetrators of terrorist acts by the Nixon Center: “they are all associated exogenously to their role in the attacks. That is to say, they were connected by immigration status or by nationality.”
• Migrant Inflow consistently has a positive and statistically significant effect on terrorist attacks (although the impact of the geography spatial lags is stronger), at least at the 10% level of significance. That is, terror events in one country travel to another state via the inflow of migrants.

Migrant inflow = influence of migrants from terror-prone states, that is, those countries that themselves experienced terrorist attacks in the past

migration as such—independent from or not weighted by the terror level in the country of origin— actually leads to a decrease in the number of terrorist attacks by 0.5%–0.6% when the number of migrants coming into a country is raised by 10%.

Question 65

Vincenzo - effect of income on terrorism

Answer 65

• a higher income leads to fewer terrorist attacks: on average, the number of terrorist attacks decreases by 1% for every 10% increase in a country’s gross national income per capita.

Question 66

Erica Chenoweth - where is terrorism most prevalent

Answer 66

• Terrorist incidents are more prevalent in democracies than non-democracies
• a state with a history of terrorist attacks in the previous year continues to experience more terrorist attacks the following year

Question 67

Chenoweth - nature of terrorism

Answer 67

terrorist violence is competitive: the more attacks perpetrated by Group A, the higher Group B’s incentive becomes to escalate its own activities
* Democratic participation has a positive and significant effect on terrorist incidents—further support of the political competition conjecture.
that proportional representation systems are more likely to experience terrorist incidents—a further confirmation of the political competition explanation.

Question 68

Chenoweth- why democratic competition leads to terrorism

Answer 68

o One reason why competition has produced such extreme manifestations of political preferences is that the policy process is susceptible to ‘‘crowding effects,’’ which result in different interest groups competing to obtain or maintain a position on the agenda and exclude other issues, especially those in ideological opposition to the given issue

o Where there is a non terrorist and a terrorist actor, Ideological opposition becomes especially salient in this dynamic, because the incompatible interests of the respective groups cause competition for public influence to be a zero-sum game. Paying attention to Group A necessarily diverts the audience’s attention away from Group B. Beginning in 1969, for example, right-wing terrorist groups in Italy pursues a ‘‘strategy of tension’’ to prevent the Italian government from succumbing to left-wing political parties, interest groups, and the ever-escalating tactics of the Red Brigades (Tarrow 1991). Violent escalation among the competing groups resulted in a dramatic cycle of violence throughout the 1970s and 1980s in Italy.

Political competition within the polity signals to terrorists that such attacks will not be in vain—some parts of society may potentially align with the terrorists’ interests and pressure the state to accommodate them

Question 69

Chenoweth - how terrorists exercise preferences in democracy

Answer 69

whereas conventional interest groups use inducements through positive sanctions (such as financial rewards, campaign support, etc.) to influence legislative voting on the agenda, terrorist groups use negative sanctions (violence) to influence policy. Second, whereas conventional interest groups participate in the political process through generally accepted means of public discourse, terrorist violence is always perceived as illegitimate and outside the range of acceptability in democratic societies. Thus, while normal interest groups may eventually gain access to the political process, terrorist groups are perpetual outsiders unless they denounce violence and become legally recognized political parties (as with Sinn Fein).

Question 70

Drake- terrorists as indiscriminate

Answer 70

attacks by non-state terrorist groups are rarely indiscriminate. Target selection is instead determined by a number of factors, and the terrorists’ ideology is central to this process- sets a moral framework

terrorism describes a particular use of violence for political ends, where the violence is intended to create a psychological reaction in a person or group of people - the psychological target - to make them act in a way which the attacker desires. terrorists acting rationally will choose to attack those which confer the greatest benefits upon their cause.

Question 71

Drake - what effects target selection of terrorists

Answer 71

Ideology is key
Terrorist strategy, and hence target selection, is also affected by factors such as the resources of the group, the reaction of society to the terrorists’ actions, and the security environment within which the terrorists operate. Thus, while the place of ideology in the selection process is crucial, there is no single cause which can adequately explain terrorists target selection.

Question 72

Drake - why ideology is important in target selection

Answer 72

The ideology of a terrorist group identifies the ‘enemies’ of the group by providing a measure against which to assess the ‘innocence’ or ‘guilt’ of people and institutions. This gives rise to the idea that certain people or things are somehow ‘legitimate targets’.

the supposed guilt of their victims absolves the terrorists - at least temporarily - of feelings of remorse for their actions, because a person who is defined as an enemy deserving punishment obviously deserves to be attacked.

, ideology also allows terrorists to displace the blame for their actions onto other people.

Question 73

Drake - example of blame on victims

Answer 73

according to Abu Iyad the Black September kidnapping of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in September 1972, was caused by failure of the International Olympic Committee, and the international community as a whole, to accord proper recognition to the Palestinians

Question 74

Drake - example of ideology in target selection

Answer 74

o groups holding different ideologies, but operating within the same geographical arena and with a common background of mutual communal antipathy: republican terrorists — primarily the Provisional IRA, but also including the Official IRA (OIRA), the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), and other smaller groups, and loyalist terrorists — primarily the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), but also other splinter groups. both republicans and loyalists have sought to protect the communities from which they almost exclusively derive their support - the Catholic community for republicans, the Protestant community for loyalists - from what they see as the depredations of the other side
o For republicans, particularly the PIRA which is the largest republican terrorist group, target selection is fairly simple. Anybody who is a member of the security forces, or who aids the British presence in Ireland, is automatically considered a member of the ‘British war machine’, and thus a legitimate target.