25 April 2015

Why Groups Use Terrorism: A Reassessment of the Conventional Wisdom

April 22, 2015

Over the past decade, political scientists have learned a great deal about terrorism. For a while, the conventional wisdom held that groups commit terrorism because it’s strategically effective. For this reason, the dominant paradigm is sometimes referred to as the Strategic Model of Terrorism. Its logic seemed self-evident: To avert additional pain to their civilians, governments were presumed to adopt a more dovish stance by granting the perpetrators their political demands. Prominent scholars from Robert Pape to David Lake to Andrew Kydd and Barbara Walter promoted this viewpoint until it became the conventional wisdom.

There was only one problem with this emerging scholarly orthodoxy. It wasn’t supported by the evidence. Increasingly, empirical evidence has revealed that terrorism is a remarkably ineffective tactic for groups to induce government concessions. In 2006, I published the first study to examine a sample of terrorist groups in terms of their political effectiveness. 

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