A great deal of the political economy literature on terrorism has explored the correlation between economic conditions and the occurrence of terrorism. The preponderance of this literature has shown there is little—or no—relationship between economic factors and the quantity of terrorism. This work has done well to debunk the assumption that terrorism is the outlet of poor, uneducated and disaffected individuals with nothing to live for; when in fact, many of the world’s worst terrorist come from upper-middle class backgrounds with high levels of education. An alternative question; however, is the link between economic conditions and the effectiveness of a terrorists’ attacks, and is exactly the subject explored in a new paper fittingly titled, “Economic Conditions and the Quality of Suicide Terrorism“.
This paper adds to the debate on the relation between economics conditions and terrorism by studying the intensive rather than the extensive margin of terrorism. Whereas the related empirical literature has focused on the quantity or the amount of terror, we study the quality of terror and its relation to underlying economic conditions…We combine a detailed data set on the universe of Palestinian suicide terrorists during the second Intifada, with data on earnings and labor force participation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and with data on Israeli counterterrorism measures.
Unlike previous studies of political economic variables in terrorism, this study finds a strong relationship between poor economic conditions and terrorist groups’ ability to recruit. The authors find that poor economic conditions allow these groups to recruit and motivate more capable perpetrators, who in effectively target high value locations. Poor economic conditions; however, do not affect terrorist groups equally, instead these circumstance help “groups that provide excludable public goods by increasing their ability to commit terror attacks during difficult economic times.” The relationship between the quality of terrorist and economic conditions is an extremely important question, and this work provides some interesting initial insight. Considerably more research; however, is needed to gain a more meaningful understanding of this phenomenon.
A significant criticism of this work is its focus on only a single conflict (second Intifada), as well as a single attack tactic (suicide terrorism). As I have previously noted, it is difficult to justify the external validity of any study of terrorism that focuses exclusively on the conflict between Israel and Palestine. This case is extremely unique, and in many large-scale studies of terrorism it may be more appropriate to isolate these cases and analyze them separately. Of more immediate concern; however, is the focus on only suicide terrorism. Suicide terrorism is, in fact, one of the easiest tactics to execute, made clear by its popular adoption worldwide. A study of terrorist quality should focus on specific attributes of attacks, such as multiple site coordination, lethality, tools used, country of attack (not all counter-terror forces are created equal), etc. To address these problems, the research should connect more robust data on terrorist databases (such as the GTD or ITERATE data sets) with detailed economic data (such as the World Bank or IMF).
Photo: Eureka Street
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Drew,
I think you raise an interesting question of internal versus external validity with their study, however I have to disagree with the main thrust of your argument. How successful a terrorist attack is, suicide bombing or otherwise, is a product of both the terrorist’s ability, group capacity and external factors (such as govt. counterterror and luck). The question as researchers is how to control for these external factors and isolate the treatment (changes in economic conditions). This a largely a function of data quality and availability. By focusing on suicide bombings in Israel (a country that has had a lot of suicide bombers and high quality data), the authors are able to control for the majority of the variation in those external factors and more accurately measure the direct effect (economic conditions on terrorist ability). If one expanded this research to include multiple measures of terrorist effectiveness across countries, the ability to construct a comparable measure for counterterror and individual attacker ability across countries would be greatly reduced. Keep posting thought-provoking articles.
-Thomas
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Thomas,
You make a very good point, and one that I had not considered. I stand by my point, however, in the measure of ‘quality’ used here. Their finding is that more vulnerable target are attacked when a higher quality of terrorist is present, but this direction of causality here is confusing. Why would it not be the case that when higher quality terrorist are present the targets become harder, since presumably a more capable terrorist is better able to target these installments?
More to your point, I suppose a instrumental variable valid across countries would be necessary for the type of study I have proposed–which of course–would be very difficult to find.
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