The conventional wisdom in political science is that terrorism works. Terrorism, many scholars argue, is an effective strategy for organisations to achieve their political ends. I first came across this thesis in 2004 when I was doing field research in the West Bank.
In the back of the cab, between outings from Tulkarm to Hebron, I read the most influential article on terrorism ever written. Robert Pape's "The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism" (Summer 2003, American Political Science Review) argues that terrorism is rising because terrorists have learned that it effectively coerces target countries into making major policy concessions. Pape says in the piece that the Palestinians are the paradigmatic example that terrorism pays. As I watched the "security wall" being erected in the middle of Palestinian neighbourhoods and listened to villagers lament the death of the peace process - along with any hope of leading a normal life - I wondered: if Palestinians are the success story, how successful are other groups that rely on terrorism?
Terrorism: fact and fiction
This question led me to publish the first study to systematically assess terrorism's policy effectiveness. My sample includes every terrorist organisation on the State Department's list over the past five years. My methodology was simple: I compared the stated political goals of the 28 organisations on the list to their policy accomplishments.
The data put to bed the conventional wisdom that terrorism is an effective political strategy.
Terrorist organisations achieved their policy objectives less than ten percent of the time. Equally important, the only organisations to achieve their policy goals were the ones that mainly attacked military targets, such as the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. A clear trend emerges when the organisations are disaggregated by target selection: organisations that primarily attack civilian targets do not achieve their political aims.
This makes intuitive sense. Ferreting out al-Qaida from Afghanistan, increasing the U.S. troop presence in the Persian Gulf by fifteen times, and strengthening U.S. relations with moderate Muslim regimes and Israel is hardly what the hijackers hoped to achieve on 9/11. Yet it is not hard to imagine the guerrilla attacks on U.S. military targets in Iraq leading to a U.S. withdrawal.
My study explains why terrorist attacks on civilians elicit such a different response from the target country than guerrilla attacks on its military assets. The answer is found in social psychology.
Correspondent inference
In the 1970s, Edward Jones came up with the theory of correspondent inference. The idea is quite simple: people infer the motives of others based on the consequences of their actions. A young boy, for example, might infer that his mother wanted quiet if she closed the door and it silenced the racket coming from outside.
Countries make the same type of inference when attacked. Countries rarely know much about terrorists until after being attacked. Countries therefore infer terrorist motives based on the consequences of their violence.
Terrorism scares and often kills people, disrupting a country's society with the inevitable restriction of civil liberties and expenditure of resources in combating terrorists and their supporters. Target countries infer that the terrorists are motivated to destroy their citizens and way of life - even when the terrorists may have limited policy objectives. When a country believes its enemies are motivated by existential objectives, appeasement is dismissed as a viable option; governments grow increasingly reluctant to make policy concessions. Al-Qaida, for example, says it attacked the U.S. to get it out of the Persian Gulf and to sever U.S. relations with moderate Muslim regimes and Israel. But most Americans interpreted 9/11 as evidence that the terrorists simply want to blow up Americans and destroy their way of life. Not surprisingly, the United States went on the offensive.
On the other hand, countries infer from attacks on the military and state targets that the enemy is protesting government policies. When the costs of policy exceed its benefits, governments eventually make concessions and compromises. The insurgent - understood through the restricted lens of state policy - is thus invariably more successful than the terrorist, whose seemingly existential aim brooks no compromise.
This article is based on Max Abrahms' recent study in International Security, which can be accessed for free here.
