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Repression Hurts: Coercive Government Responses and the Demise of Terrorist Campaigns

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 October 2012

Ursula E. Daxecker  and
Michael L. Hess
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Abstract

The question of how coercive government policies affect the duration and outcome of terrorist campaigns has only recently started to attract scholarly interest. This article argues that the effect of repression on terrorist group dynamics is conditional on the country's regime type. Repression is expected to produce a backlash effect in democracies, subsequently lengthening the duration of terrorist organizations and lowering the probability of outcomes favourable to the government. In authoritarian regimes, however, coercive strategies are expected to deter groups’ engagement in terrorism, thus reducing the lifespan of terrorist groups and increasing the likelihood of government success. These hypotheses are examined using data on terrorist groups for the 1976–2006 period; support is found for these conjectures on terrorist group duration and outcomes.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , July 2013 , pp. 559 - 577
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012 

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Footnotes

*

Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam (email: u.daxecker@uva.nl); Department of Political Science, University of New Mexico. The authors would like to thank Kristian Gleditsch, Victor Asal and three anonymous reviewers for their exceptionally helpful comments. An online appendix for this article is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S00071234 and http://ursuladaxecker.weebly.com/research.html. Data and supporting materials to reproduce the numerical results are available at http://dvn.iq.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/ued.

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34 Walsh and Piazza, ‘Why Respecting Physical Integrity Rights Reduces Terrorism’.

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40 Cases of group success are empirically rare. Of all groups that ended their campaigns in our data, only 6.6 per cent of cases resulted in a group victory.

41 Moreover, splintering could be the result of competition among different groups within the same state, and thus be the result of groups competing over material resources and popular support rather than the government's actions. See Kydd and Walter, ‘The Strategies of Terrorism’. The proliferation of terrorist groups in Pakistan is an example of such a dynamic.

42 Jones and Libicki provide a list of all terrorist organizations and group attributes in their appendix. The data cover 648 terrorist groups between 1968 and 2006 and provide start and end dates for all groups, including those that did not terminate their campaigns by 2006. The RAND-MIPT data used to create their list of terrorist groups is available at http://www.rand.org/nsrd/projects/terrorism-incidents.html. Jones and Libicki include a few terrorist groups in colonies that were active before the country's independence, such as the Armed Revolutionary Action group in Mozambique. We excluded such groups from the analysis until states achieved independence. Data limitations on the repression variable limit our time frame to the 1976–2006 period. Jones and Libicki, How Terrorist Groups End, pp. 142–86.

43 Jones and Libicki identify a single host country for 430 of 539 groups in our sample. See Jones and Libicki, How Terrorist Groups End. For the remaining 109 groups, two or more states are identified as host countries. To identify the primary host for these groups, we consulted the list of terrorist groups provided by the Terrorism Knowledge Base (TKB), which formed the basis of the data on terrorist groups included in RAND-MIPT. The TKB provides a narrative of each group's evolution and frequently refers to the country in which groups organize the majority of their operations. The TKB data are available online at http://www.start.umd.edu/start/data_collections/tops. For groups without additional information, we consulted the RAND-MIPT data to determine the country in which groups carried out the majority of their attacks.

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45 Moreover, it is possible that such groups simultaneously engage in domestic attacks, since the two types of attacks are not mutually exclusive. The frequency with which groups target both domestically and across borders should ultimately be an empirical question, but we are not aware of research that addresses this question.

46 While Jones and Libicki's empirical analysis excludes ongoing campaigns, their appendix provides information on groups that have not terminated. Jones and Libicki, How Terrorist Groups End.

47 Jones and Libicki, How Terrorist Groups End, p. 5.

48 Jones and Libicki's categories are very similar to ours, but the authors further separate government victory into ‘victory through policing’ and ‘victory through military force’. Since terrorist groups that end because of policing and military force represent an achievement of the government's goals, we collapse these two categories. Jones and Libicki, How Terrorist Groups End.

49 Jones and Libicki, How Terrorist Groups End, pp. 142–85.

50 Gibney, Cornett and Wood, ‘Political Terror Scale 1976–2006’.

51 A score of 1 indicates that a country is under a secure rule of law, people are not imprisoned for their views, torture is rare or exceptional, and political murders are extremely rare. Countries that have a limited amount of imprisonment for nonviolent political activity were rated as a 2. Those with extensive political imprisonment, common executions or political murders and brutality, and unlimited detention for political views receive a score of 3 on the PTS. A rating of 4 indicates that a country violates the political and civil rights of a large portion of the population and that murder, disappearances and torture are a common part of life, especially for those who interest themselves in politics and ideas. Finally, a rating of 5 indicates that terror has expanded to the entire population of the country, and the leaders are not limited in the way they pursue personal or ideological goals. The PTS data provide scores for both Amnesty International and US State Department rankings; we average the two scores, meaning that the repression variable can take empirical values of 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5 and so forth.

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53 Of all countries in the data, 68 per cent are democracies with polity scores of 6 or higher.

54 One might object that findings based on this interaction are the result of a small number of cases, since repression and democracy likely co-vary. While we do not dispute that democracies, on average, have lower levels of repression than non-democratic regimes, numerous case studies document the use of coercive strategies in democracies. Moreover, a cross-tabulation of the repression and polity variables showed that 30 per cent of all democracies with polity scores of 6 or greater score 4 or higher on the repression variable. When only highly democratic countries (polity scores of 8 or greater) are included, the percentage of democracies engaging in such levels of repression decreases to 26 per cent. Although research by Davenport and Armstrong suggests that democracies exhibit lower levels of repression only when high levels of democracy are reached, one-fourth of highly democratic states in our data apply high levels of repression. Conversely, 13 per cent of non-democratic regimes have repression levels lower than 3. Christian Davenport and David A. Armstrong, ‘Democracy and the Violation of Human Rights’, American Journal of Political Science, 48 (2004), 538–54.

55 Jones and Libicki, How Terrorist Groups End.

56 This variable does not change over time. While it would be ideal to use a time-varying covariate, no such data are available.

57 Jones and Libicki, How Terrorist Groups End.

58 Nationalist groups were most represented in our sample, representing 38.2 per cent of cases, followed by leftist groups with 33.4 per cent and religious groups with 23.2 per cent; right-wing groups represented only 5 per cent of all cases.

59 The variable ranges from 1–6, where lower values indicate that the group's goals are more limited, and greater values represent more extensive goals. Groups are coded as 1 if their goal is to maintain the status quo, 2 if their goal is policy change, 3 if their primary goal is regime change, 4 if their goal is territorial change, 5 if their goal is revolution and 6 if their goal is empire. Since group goals could be correlated with group ideology and such multicollinearity could mask the statistical significance of covariates, we specified separate models excluding the group goal and ideology variables, respectively. The results remained similar to the ones presented here. In addition, correlation matrices for the variables did not show correlations greater than 0.16.

60 Alan Heston, Robert Summers and Bettina Aten, ‘Penn World Table Version 6.3: Center for International Comparisons of Production, Income and Prices at the University of Pennsylvania’, available at http://pwt.econ.upenn.edu/php_site/pwt_index.php. The natural log was taken because of high skewness in the data.

61 Data are available at http://publications.worldbank.org/WDI/. The variable was logged in order to achieve a normal distribution.

62 A Hausman test showed that the outcomes are independent of each other. Results for a multinomial logit model were similar.

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65 Box-Steffensmeier and Jones, Event History Modeling, p. 136.

66 In competing risk models, subhazard ratios are presented; they represent the effect of covariates on the hazard of the four terrorist campaign outcomes.

67 We also analysed models with standard errors clustered on the group's host country. Results were similar to the ones presented here.

68 Results for other distributional forms – such as the exponential, log-logistic and Gompertz distribution –were similar to the ones reported.

69 We cannot include time-interactions in this model because the command used to create the figure does not allow for their inclusion.

70 Cingranelli and Richards, ‘The Cingranelli-Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Dataset’.

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72 Cronin, How Terrorism Ends, p. 133.

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