Assessing the Risk Posed by Terrorist Groups: Identifying Motivating Factors and Threats

Abstract While terrorist organizations have been analyzed for their motivations and tactics, little has been done to develop a systematic understanding of what makes some groups more dangerous than others. Knowing what makes some groups more threatening than others, or what conditions can influence a single group to become more or less of a threat, would help governments to prioritize resources during counterterrorism efforts. Using an approach similar to Ted Robert Gurr's assignment of a risk score to identify impending minority group rebellion, this article develops and tests a set of terrorist organizational characteristics. A two-phased approach is used. First, the authors identify key characteristics that could be anticipated to drive groups to be more active or deadly. The characteristics were identified and measured for terrorist groups for 1990–1994. The authors test group characteristics against subsequent group violence intensity from 1995 to 1999. Findings indicate that some group characteristics, such as religious ideology and group size, are important to understanding a group's relative level of violence. Though the study focused on a relatively short period of time, the findings indicate that a more comprehensive study of the impact that group characteristics have on violence levels would be a worthwhile undertaking. Keywords: civil violencegroup characteristicsrebellionrisk assessmentterrorism Notes *p > .10, **p > .05, ***p > .01. Ted Robert Gurr, Peoples Versus States: Minorities at Risk in the New Century (Washington, DC: United States Institute for Peace, 2000), 225. Ted Robert Gurr, "Ethnopolitical Rebellion: A Cross-Sectional Analysis of the 1980s with Risk Assessments for the 1990s," American Journal of Political Science 41, no. 4 (1997): 1079–1103. We recognize that defining terrorism is difficult and problematic, something we discuss in detail in the Data and Methods section of the paper. Jeff Victoroff, "The Mind of the Terrorist: A Review and Critique of Psychological Approaches," The Journal of Conflict Resolution 49, no. 1 (2005): 34. Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, Greed and Grievance in Civil War (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2001). See, for example, Ted Robert Gurr, Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethhnopolitical Conflicts (Washington, DC: United States Institute for Peace, 1993); Gurr, Peoples Versus States (see note 1 above); Stuart Kaufman, "Spiraling to Ethnic War: Elites, Masses, and Moscow in Moldova's Civil War," International Security 21 no. 2 (1996): 108–138; Steven Saideman, The Ties that Divide: Ethnic Politics, Foreign Policy, and International Conflict (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). See, for example, Benjamin Most and Harvey Starr, Inquiry, Logic, and International Politics (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1989) for a discussion of opportunity and willingness. Barbara Walter, "Information, Uncertainty, and the Decision to Secede," International Organization 60 (Winter 2006): 105–135; James Piazza, "Rooted in Poverty?: Terrorism, Poor Economic Development, and Social Cleavages," Terrorism and Political Violence 18 (2006): 159–177; Ethan Bueno De Mesquita, "The Quality of Terror," American Journal of Political Science 49, no. 3 (2005): 515–530; Nils Petter Gleditsch, Peter Wallensteen, Mikael Eriksson, Margareta Sollenberg, and Havard Strand, "Armed Conflict 1946–2001: A New Dataset," Journal of Peace Research 39, no. 5 (2002): 615–637. Marie Olson Lounsbery and Frederic Pearson, Civil Wars: Internal Conflicts, Global Consequences (Toronto, ON: UTP Higher Education, 2009). Gurr, Minorities at Risk (see note 6 above). Dursun Peksen and Marie Olson Lounsbery, "Foreign Military Intervention and Regional Destabilization," a paper presented at the International Studies Association-South Annual Meeting, October 23, 2010; Idean Saleyhan, "Transnational Rebels: Neighboring States as Sanctuary for Rebel Groups," World Politics 59, no. 2 (2007): 217–242; Idean Salehyan, "No Shelter Here: Rebel Sanctuaries and International Conflict," Journal of Politics 70, no. 1 (2008): 54–66; Idean Salehyan, "The Externalities of Civil Strife: Refugees as a Source of International Conflict," American Journal of Political Science 52, no. 4 (2008): 787–801; Myron Weiner, "Bad Neighbors, Bad Neighborhoods: An Inquiry into the Causes of Refugee Flows," International Security 21, no. 1 (1996): 5–42. Marie Olson Lounsbery and Alethia Cook, "Intrastate Conflicts: Rebel Group Splintering, Tactics, and Impacts on Negotiations," Journal of Peace Research 48, no. 1 (2011): 73–84. Sara Jackson Wade and Dan Reiter, "Does Democracy Matter? Regime Type and Suicide Terrorism," The Journal of Conflict Resolution 51, no. 2 (2007): 329–348; Ami Pedhazur, "Struggling with the Challenges of Right-Wing Extremism and Terrorism within no. 3 Democratic Boundaries: A Comparative Analysis," Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 24, no. 3 (2001): 339–359. Joe Eyerman, "Terrorism and Democratic States: Soft Targets or Accessible Systems," International Interactions 24, no. 2 (1998): 151–170; Pedhazur, Struggling with the Challenges (see note 13 above), 2001; Quan Li, "Does Democracy Promote or Reduce Transnational Terrorist Incidents?," The Journal of Conflict Resolution 49, no. 2: 278–297; Wade and Reiter, "Does Democracy Matter?," 2007 (see note 13 above). Ethan Bueno De Mesquita and Eric Dickson, "The Propaganda of the Deed: Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Mobilization," American Journal of Political Science 51, no. 2: 364–381; Bueno De Mesquita, "The Quality of Terror" (see note 8 above). Robert Pape, "The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism," American Political Science Review 97 (2003): 343–361. Scott Ashworth, Joshua Clinton, Adam Meirowitz, and Kristopher Ramsay, "Design, Inference, and the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism," American Political Science Review 102, no. 2 (2008): 269–273. So-called guerilla movements, as described in Ernesto Guevara, "Che," Guerrilla Warfare (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1961), 9–10. Gurr, Minorities at Risk (see note 6 above), 223–238. It is certainly possible that the list of groups identified is not exhaustive. In order to test our hypotheses, we needed to have group characteristic information and attack information (if the group did indeed attack during the specified time period). If we could not get reliable information about group characteristics using our multiple sources, we eliminated the group from the analysis. As a result, our findings are limited to groups about which we were able to collect at least minimal information. It is possible that the post-9/11 world exhibits different characteristics that may challenge our ability to generalize beyond the time period examined here. We suggest, however, that the impact of group characteristics of propensity for violence is unlikely to be influenced significantly by time or system structure. Mohtadi and Murshid data identify terrorist attacks for a larger time period (1968–2006). Reliable data for independent variables in the study were not available for the same time period. As a result, we limit our analysis to the time period specified. Hamid Mohtadi and Antu Panini Murshid, "Risk of Catastrophic Terrorism: An Extreme Value Approach," Journal of Applied Econometrics 49, no. 2 (2009): 537–559. START, Global Terrorism Database (GTD), http://www.start.umd.edu/start/data/gtd (accessed November 2009-January 2010); START, Terrorism Organizational Profiles (TOPS), http://www.start.umd.edu/start/data/tops (accessed November 2009-January 2010). Due to the fact that the TKB is no longer being maintained, finding information about how it coded and collected data was difficult. What we have provided here is a proxy, based on the definition applied by RAND's current Database of Worldwide Terrorism Incidents, which had the TKB and the RAND-MIPT Terrorism Incident Database as its predecessors. As the current database flowed out of the others, it was deemed likely that the definition applied would be relatively consistent. RAND, Database of Worldwide Terrorism Incidents: Database Definitions, http://www.rand.org/nsrd/projects/terrorism-incidents/about/definitions.html (accessed January 25, 2011). START, Terrorism Organizational Profiles (TOPS (see note 24 above.) Another participant in the TKB project was the American Terrorism Study, from the University of Arkansas. That project's definition of terrorism was the FBI's, which is "the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives," which is also consistent with the RAND Database of Worldwide Terrorism Incidents definition. Brent Smith and Kelly Damphousse, American Terrorism Study, 1980–2002, http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ ICPSR/studies/4639/detail#methodology (accessed January 25, 2011). These have been replaced by the State Department's Country Reports on Terrorism as of 2004. U.S. Department of State, Country Reports on Terrorism (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, 2008); U.S. Department of State, Patterns of Global Terrorism (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, 1990–1999). An appendix with the complete list of the groups included in, and excluded from the analysis, along with the reasons for those decisions, is available, along with the full dataset, at http://www.ecu.edu/polsci/faculty/lounsbery.html Lawrence Kuznar, "Rationality Wars and the War on Terror: Explaining Terrorism and Social Unrest," American Anthropologist 109, no. 2 (2007): 318–329; James Lutz and Brenda Lutz, Global Terrorism (New York: Routledge, 2004); Cindy Combs, Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000, Second Edition); and Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). A comparable definition was used in a discussion of the decision rules created for the accumulation of the Global Terrorism Database, Gary LaFree and Laura Dugan, "Introducing the Global Terrorism Database," Terrorism and Political Violence 19, no. 2 (2007): 188, though the authors in this article would deem the actions of a state "state terrorism." Alethia Cook and Marie Olson Lounsbery, "Choose Your Weapon (or Strategy)! An Analysis of the Factors Influencing Strategy in Civil Wars," Democracy and Security 6, no. 3 (2010): 256–277. Olson Lounsbery and Pearson, Civil Wars (see note 9 above). Victoroff, "The Mind of the Terrorist" (see note 4 above), 19. Cook and Olson Lounsbery, "Choose Your Weapon (or Strategy)!" (see note 32 above); Olson Lounsbery and Pearson, Civil Wars (see note 9 above). Admittedly, group membership is dynamic. We rely on figures provided by our data sources, which provided a range of membership during the time period under study. Olson Lounsbery and Cook, "Intrastate Conflicts" (see note 12 above). Monica Duffy Toft, "Got Religion? The Puzzling Case of Islam and Civil War," International Security 31 (2007): 100–101, as cited in Robert J. Brym, "Religion, Politics, and Suicide Bombing: An Interpretive Essay," Canadian Journal of Sociology 33, no. 1 (2005): 90. START, Terrorism Organizational Profiles (TOPS) (see note 24 above). We recognize that propensity for attack may also be a function of counter measures employed by states in response to previous attacks (see Enders and Sandler 2000 for a discussion in this regard). As governments become more focused or more effective in their response, the opportunity to commit violent acts declines. Although countermeasures certainly have the potential to deter groups from attacking, when they do attack, such measures are unlikely to influence magnitude of attacks. The 1995–1999 attack (DV) time period was used because this is not a group characteristic, but one of the environment the group encountered at the time of the attack. There is great debate about the influence of regime type and terrorism. For international terrorism, there are arguments both that it facilitates and deters terrorist attacks. In the domestic terrorism literature, less has been done on the issue. For an excellent discussion of the extant literature on the issue, see Burcu Savun and Brian J. Phillips, "Democracy, Foreign Policy, and Terrorism," Journal of Conflict Resolution 153, no. 6 (2009): 318–329. Additional informationNotes on contributorsAlethia H. Cook Alethia H. Cook is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science, East Carolina University. Marie Olson Lounsbery is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science, East Carolina University.

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