“Terrorism Works, for Its Supporters”, 2024-09-28 (; similar):
Empirical studies have shown that terrorists’ policy goals are rarely achieved, leading some to conclude that terrorism doesn’t work. We theorize that terrorism can work, but for its supporters rather than for the terrorists themselves. Because supporters are willing to contribute resources to a terrorist organization, thereby increasing the organization’s ability to launch attacks, this can coerce the targeted government to revise its policies in accordance with the supporters’ preferences.
Targeted governments may respond with concessions in order to erode support and thereby render the terrorists easier to defeat. Support can be rational even when supporters’ ideal policies are closer to those of the government than to those of the terrorists.
We examine Hamas and the Provisional IRA, generally regarded as failures. We show that targeted governments sometimes made concessions that placated supporters but not the terrorists, and that this was followed by reduced support for and occurrence of violence.
…We present a different solution to this puzzle: under certain conditions, terrorism works, but for its supporters, who compensate the terrorists for their low chance of success and use them as a tool to coerce a government. We conceptualize a terrorist organization as an agent, working at the behest of a base of supporters, who are not themselves members of the terrorist organization, that forms the principal. These supporters provide the resources the terrorist organization needs to carry out its campaign. Even if their own goals are quite moderate, they might still rationally support terrorism, and may even prefer to support terrorists with remarkably extreme goals.
We analyze a game-theoretic model in which the support base and the targeted government implicitly bargain over the policies set by the government on which they disagree. The support base can choose to offer support to the terrorist organization, thereby enabling and motivating it to conduct attacks against the government.
These attacks might result in the overthrow of the government and its replacement by the terrorist organization, but even if they do not, they impose costs on the government, as well as the terrorists and the supporters. The targeted government therefore anticipates this possibility in setting its policies. Individuals join the terrorist organization and conduct attacks because their efforts are materially and socially rewarded by the organization’s supporters. Those with the most radical views, or the most tolerance for violence, are more likely to join and choose to fight even if the chance of victory is low. But these and others will also be motivated by the prospect of money and status provided by the base of supporters. This rationalizes participating in terrorism.
Supporters contribute to the terrorist organization to encourage it to conduct attacks when they anticipate this will lead to concessions from the government. They avoid the danger and cost of doing the fighting themselves, but nonetheless can use their support of the terrorist organization to exert leverage on the government. We show that supporters can rationally do so even in situations where their own policy goals are closer to the government’s than to the terrorist organization’s, as seems plausible given the extreme goals of most terrorist organizations. Such moderate supporters may even prefer to support a more extreme organization, because it can be motivated at a lower cost in support.
If the targeted government makes changes to its policy, it does so not to pacify the terrorist organization, but to placate its supporters. By giving them at least some of what they want, the government can cause them to lessen or end their support for the terrorist organization’s violence, undermining the organization’s ability to conduct attacks and making it easier for the government to suppress terrorism. In effect, the support base employs the terrorist organization as an instrument of coercion, much as a government uses its military.
In this view, whether the terrorists achieve their stated goals is a potentially misleading answer to whether terrorism works, in much the same way as whether an infantry division achieves its objectives would not necessarily tell us whether war works. Instead, this view would have us ask whether the supporters of the terrorist organization achieve their goals, something that might happen even if the terrorists themselves are decisively defeated.
…Terrorism works only sometimes because the conditions must be right: the supported terrorists must be able to inflict high enough costs to coerce the government, and the supporters must be willing to provide the support required and to endure the campaign of terrorism and counter-terrorism. Even then, it works only in the narrow sense of extracting concessions, as there is no guarantee that those concessions will outweigh the costs supporters bear during the campaign. Finally, it may only work partially, in that supporters get some, but not all, of the concessions they desire from the government.