1 July 7, 2010, marks the fifth anniversary of the 2005 terrorist attacks on London’s Metro system. In 2005, terrorists launched a coordinated attack against London’s transportation system, with 3 bombs detonating simultaneously at three different Metro stations and a fourth bomb exploding an hour later on a city bus. In all, there were 52 victims in these bombings with an additional 700 injuries resulting. The four terrorists who executed the attacks were killed in the explosions.

National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism

Why are some terrorist organizations so much more deadly then others? This article examines organizational characteristics such as ideology, size, age, state sponsorship, alliance connections, and control of territory while controlling for factors that may also influence lethality, including the political system and relative wealth of the country in which the organization is based. Using data from the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism's Terrorism Knowledge Base (TKB), we use a negative binomial model of organizational lethality, finding that organizational size, ideology, territorial control, and connectedness are important predictors of lethality while state sponsorship, organizational age, and host country characteristics are not.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1017/S0022381608080419

The Nature of the Beast: Organizational Structures and the Lethality of Terrorist Attacks

States in an international dispute sometimes choose to attack their enemies with their own military forces but other times choose to empower domestic insurgent groups. What explains the decision to act through rebel proxies rather than directly engage a rival? Theories and empirical analyses of international conflict have adopted a state-centric bias, ignoring the substitution between direct uses of force and indirect action through rebel organizations. This note examines the decision to delegate conflict to rebels through the lens of principal—agent theory. While states support rebel groups to forgo some of the costs of conflict, they also lose a degree of foreign policy autonomy. Preliminary evidence of conflict delegation is presented, along with a number of empirically testable propositions. Finally, the consequences of delegation from the rebels’ perspective are explored. This framework serves as a starting point for future research on rebel—patron interactions.

The Delegation of War to Rebel Organizations

Terrorists attack civilians to coerce their governments into making political concessions. Does this strategy work? To empirically assess the effectiveness of terrorism, the author exploits variation in the target selection of 125 violent substate campaigns. The results show that terrorist campaigns against civilian targets are significantly less effective than guerrilla campaigns against military targets at inducing government concessions. The negative political effect of terrorism is evident across logit model specifications after carefully controlling for tactical confounds. Drawing on political psychology, the author concludes with a theory to account for why governments resist compliance when their civilians are targeted.

The Political Effectiveness of Terrorism Revisited

Little existing work has systematically examined the factors that help terrorist groups survive or contribute to their failure. State support for terrorist groups is commonly thought to be a factor that helps groups to survive. I demonstrate with newly collected data that state sponsorship is not always helpful to terrorist groups. The resources provided by sponsors increase a group's ability to maintain itself internally. However, when a group has a sponsor that provides it with safe haven, the risk of the group being forcefully eliminated by the target increases. I argue that sponsors that provide safe haven can have incentives to provide information to the target about the groups to avoid potential costs from target military operations within their territory. The key empirical findings suggest that state sponsorship is a less serious problem for target states than many previously thought.

/pdf/a-blessing-or-a-curse-state-support-for-terrorist-groups-53nl5b55ur.pdf

A Blessing or a Curse? State Support for Terrorist Groups

MODERN HISTORY AND POLITICS Deadly Connections: States that Sponsor Terrorism, by Daniel Byman. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005, xi + 311 pages. Map. Appendix to p. 333. Bibl. to p. 357. Index to p. 369. $30. Anyone brave or foolish enough to wrestle with the contentious issue of state sponsorship of terrorism is immediately confronted by several obstacles. The first is a problem that has long corrupted research in the terrorism field: the frequently imprecise, partisan, and indeed propagandistic uses of terms such as "terrorism" and "state sponsorship." The second is the question of whether, in an era when transnational terrorist networks operating in far-flung regions are increasingly dominating the headlines, traditional ways of thinking about state sponsorship of terrorism have become outmoded, i.e., an example of "old-think" (p. 2). Although Georgetown University professor Daniel Byman has not managed to resolve all of the thorny issues related to his chosen topic, he deserves credit both for not ignoring these problems and for helping to clarify various matters that have often not been given adequate consideration. Byman's focus herein is on "the nexus between terrorist groups and state sponsors" (p. 8), and he defines state sponsorship as "a government's intentional assistance to a terrorist group to help it use violence, bolster its political activities, or sustain [its] organization" (p. 10). Although this focus on active state support for non-state terrorist groups precludes a consideration of acts of terrorism carried out directly by the security forces of particular states, he later devotes an entire chapter to "passive [state] sponsors" who "deliberately turn a blind eye to the activities of terrorists in their countries but do not provide direct assistance" (p. 13). Indeed, the entire middle portion of his book is devoted to illustrative and intrinsically interesting case studies of state sponsorship of terrorism (Iran, Syria, Pakistan, and the Taliban's Afghanistan). The first and last portions of Deadly Connections are instead more theoretical and/or policy-oriented. In chapter 1, he rightly emphasizes that there are "several types of state sponsorship" of terrorism and offers a typology of four categories of state support: "strong supporters" are states with both the desire and the capacity to support terrorist groups; "weak supporters" are those with the desire but not the capacity to offer significant support; "lukewarm supporters" are those that offer rhetorical but little actual tangible support; and "antagonistic supporters" are those that actually seek to control or even weaken the terrorist groups they appear to be supporting (p. 5). In chapter 2, he correctly notes that "[understanding motivations is vital both for predicting when a state might support a terrorist group and for determining how to end this backing" (p. 21 ), and he goes on to identify three primary motivations that lead states to risk supporting terrorist groups: "strategic" reasons, above all to weaken or destabilize rival regimes; "ideological" reasons, especially to export their doctrines or political systems; and "domestic" reasons, in particular to gain popular support by aiding "oppressed" kinsmen (p. 32). In chapter 3, he argues that states provide six types of support to terrorists: "training and operations; money, arms, and logistics; diplomatic backing; organizational assistance; ideological direction; and (perhaps most importantly) sanctuary" (p. 59). He concludes, perhaps unjustifiably, that terrorist groups that receive significant amounts of state support are far more difficult to counter and destroy than those that do not. Later, Byman addresses the complex issue of how to stop state sponsorship of terrorism. In chapter 9, he argues that states which support terrorism are difficult to deter, either because they have already calculated that the strategic benefits of sponsoring terrorist groups outweigh the potential costs - inasmuch as sponsoring terrorism is often perceived as vital to their own geopolitical or domestic interests but is not usually viewed as an outright act of war by the states that are victimized - or because they are ideologically driven to do so in spite of those costs. …

Jeffrey M. Bale

Papers

Deadly Connections: States That Sponsor Terrorism