The RAND Corporation recently published a tome reviewing the breadth of social science literature addressing terrorism and counterterrorism. The monograph, entitled “Social Science for Counterterrorism: Putting the Pieces Together,” is one of the most thorough reviews of the literature to date, and will be a welcome reference text to any researchers in this area. Each chapter deals with a different aspect of the literature, such as pathways to terrorism, organizational dynamics and leadership; providing a review of the various of each discipline, and often concluding with a brief editorial perspective from the chapter’s author(s).
Given its overall length, I was drawn to the title of chapter five and skipped ahead to “The Economics of Terrorism and Counterterrorism,” by Cluade Berrebi. Picking up on the notion that economic factors play little or no role in the motivation of terrorists, Berrebi presents one of the most complete reviews of evidence rebutting the “conventional wisdom” that terrorist are the product of disadvantage socio-economic factors. The author presents the empirical conclusions of studies from several different aspects of this question; specifically, that terrorism is not directly caused by poverty, lack of education, religious zealotry or mental health issues. I was particularly pleased with Berrebi’s critical viewpoint of this work, even as he was using it to support his thesis—at one point even noting the statistical weakness of many studies in the literature:
The above-mentioned studies rely on cross-country analyses and examine the effect of macroeconomic conditions on the amount of terrorism at the state or country level. Arguably, cross-country studies have serious limitations. The underlying assumption in such analyses is that changes in countries’ economic conditions share a common effect on the quantity of terrorism that those countries produce, once all the observed country characteristics have been accounted for. However, this assumption is implausible because many features of individual countries cannot be feasibly controlled for in a multivariate regression analysis framework. These relate to, for example, underlying institutions; social, cultural, or psychological sensitivity to economic conditions or to violence in general and terrorism in particular; and to variations in how economic activity and terrorism activities are classified and reported.
The chapter moves on to provide an equally thorough treatment of the rational choice literature on terrorism as a motivation for its value, highlighting competing theoretical models for each topic. There is some cause for concern in this section, however, as the author often cites the findings of Robert Pape’s work on suicide terrorism as conclusive, which is problematic given that these findings have largely been rejected by the community. Additionally, I was disappointed in the minimal (a single article) reference to the works of Walter Enders and Todd Sandler, who address many of these subjects directly in their book The Political Economy of Terrorism.
In all, however, this chapter—and the entire volume—are both impressive accomplishments, and as I mentioned, should be quickly added to the bookshelf or hard drive of any research studying terrorism.
Photo: RAND Corporation
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