Preoccupation
Transnational terrorism, US military aid, and the incentive to misrepresent
Navin Bapat
Journal of Peace Research, May 2011, Pages 303-318
Abstract:
This study proposes a strategic explanation for the USA's continued provision of military aid to host states with problems of terrorism, despite its poor empirical record. Using a game theoretic model, I demonstrate that US military aid creates a moral hazard problem. If host states are provided with the tools to pacify their territory only if terrorist campaigns are ongoing, but will lose this aid once the problem of terrorism ceases, host states have little incentive to accelerate the demise of terrorist groups. However, the model demonstrates that while military aid does not accomplish the US goal of disarming terrorists, military aid is effective at preventing host states from negotiating with terrorist organizations. The provision of military aid provides a disincentive for host states to reach a negotiated settlement with terrorist groups, and therefore prevents terrorist organizations from altering the status quo that is favorable to the USA. This suggests that while military aid may not be effective at actually disarming terrorist groups, it can be effective at keeping terrorist groups out of power. These hypotheses are tested using the Jones & Libicki (2008) data on terrorism from 1997 to 2006. The empirical results support the conclusions of the theoretical model.
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Andrew Kydd
Terrorism and Political Violence, Summer 2011, Pages 458-473
Abstract:
A key problem for counterterrorism is how large numbers of individuals can be screened most efficiently to discover terrorists. This question arises at security checkpoints of all kinds, from roadblocks to airline security counters. Some argue that certain categories of individuals, for instance, young Muslim men in the airline context, should be screened more heavily than others. Others deride this as racial profiling, and argue that any such scheme would be easily evaded. I examine a model of searching for terrorists among a population divided into categories that vary in their potential reliability or ease of recruitment as agents of terrorist attacks. The equilibria in the model feature profiling, in that different categories are searched with different intensities. Practical difficulties in implementing a rational profiling scheme are discussed.
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Value Judgment: Why Do Americans Support Israel?
Michael Koplow
Security Studies, Spring 2011, Pages 266-302
Abstract:
Many theories purport to explain American support for Israel, from strategic considerations to ideological affinity to a strong pro-Israel lobby that has captured Congress. This article argues that domestic politics play a large role not due to the influence of a lobby, but through voter preferences translating into official support. First, the paper documents high levels of public affinity for Israel and demonstrates that policy toward Israel is driven primarily by public opinion rather than by an Israel lobby. Second, it uses five case studies to demonstrate that public support for Israel is based on ideological, rather than strategic, grounds. Finally, it uses these conclusions to make some observations about the future of American support for Israel.
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Differences Between Tight and Loose Cultures: A 33-Nation Study
Michele Gelfand et al.
Science, 27 May 2011, Pages 1100-1104
Abstract:
With data from 33 nations, we illustrate the differences between cultures that are tight (have many strong norms and a low tolerance of deviant behavior) versus loose (have weak social norms and a high tolerance of deviant behavior). Tightness-looseness is part of a complex, loosely integrated multilevel system that comprises distal ecological and historical threats (e.g., high population density, resource scarcity, a history of territorial conflict, and disease and environmental threats), broad versus narrow socialization in societal institutions (e.g., autocracy, media regulations), the strength of everyday recurring situations, and micro-level psychological affordances (e.g., prevention self-guides, high regulatory strength, need for structure). This research advances knowledge that can foster cross-cultural understanding in a world of increasing global interdependence and has implications for modeling cultural change.
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Slowing Down to Keep the Lead in Military Technology
Leo Blanken & Jason Lepore
Defence and Peace Economics, May/June 2011, Pages 317-334
Abstract:
We develop a model of military technology competition among states. States can choose to introduce new military technology, mimic rivals' level of technology, or withdraw from the contest. States can choose to implement any level of technology within their current feasible technologies. We find that states with significant technological leads should sometimes withhold new technologies, only strategically releasing them to trump rivals' efforts. We develop the model by refining Admiral Jackie Fisher's roughly articulated concept of 'plunging'. We then use this refined argument to reanalyze the case of naval rivalries among European powers between the Crimean War and the First World War. Finally, we conclude by discussing the model's implications for current US military force structure planning.
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Terrorism and the economics of trust
Brock Blomberg, Gregory Hess & Daniel Tan
Journal of Peace Research, May 2011, Pages 383-398
Abstract:
Previous research has shown that trust is an important component that encourages investment and capital formation which, in turn, enhances economic performance. This article investigates the effect of terrorism on income, including its indirect role through lowering trust. We consider terrorism as a factor that can increase the cost of investing in technology and capital formation due to its ability to diminish trust in an economy. We then develop a novel and rich dataset spanning 179 countries from 1968 to 2007 using associated community, social, cultural, political, and economic factors from the World Values Survey and international terrorism incidence data from ITERATE. Using empirical tests, we first show that terrorism has a negative and statistically significant impact on individual income. This impact is larger than what has previously been found, possibly due to aggregation effects and data selection. We then estimate the societal impact of terrorism on economic growth by examining the extent to which terrorism taxes trust and how this, in turn, hinders economic performance. Consequently, we develop a measure of the economic consequences of terrorism through sizing the magnitude of the ‘trust tax' from terrorism. We find that the trust tax is relatively minor compared to the direct impact of terrorism on income.
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Women's Involvement in Terrorism
Leonard Weinberg & William Eubank
Gender Issues, June 2011, Pages 22-49
Abstract:
Women have had a long history of participating in terrorist activity. This history extends from the earliest modern terrorist group, from the nineteenth century Russian People's Will to the current wave of suicide bombings carried out by the Chechen Black Widows and the Tamil Tiger's Birds of Paradise. This article traces the history of female involvement in modern terrorism and then goes on to make a number of generalizations about this experience. Among other things, the writers point out that women have played strong leadership roles in left-wing, revolutionary bands, while these roles have been far fewer with right-wing and racist aggregations. Women have tended to be late-comers to contemporary, religiously-inspired terrorism: Muslim religious authorities first had to endorse their participation.
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Michael Dartnell
Contemporary Security Policy, Spring 2011, Pages 116-133
Abstract:
This research on suicide terrorism and arms control focuses on use of the human body as a weapon and the intersection of the body with technology. Through the case of the French terrorist group Action directe (Direct Action) the article analyzes the impact of suicide terrorism on conventional terrorists, the possibility that conventional terrorists become more violent when another group with similar or identical goals turns to suicide terrorism, and asks whether conventional terrorists turn to suicide terrorism once an example is set by another group. The article concludes that contemporary suicide fosters a perception of strength and of the vulnerability of conventional forces. In this light, suicide terrorism and the role that the body plays with an exploding prosthetic, are a major new challenge to how arms control is analyzed and discussed.
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Designing a Viable Prediction Market to Forecast Defense Acquisition Cost and Schedule Outcomes
Danny Davis
Defence and Peace Economics, May/June 2011, Pages 351-366
Abstract:
This paper is the first to demonstrate a viable prediction market that successfully forecasts defense acquisition cost and schedule outcomes, and to provide insights for defense executive decision-making. Already used in private industry, prediction markets can also accurately forecast outcomes and their associated risks for government programs. Using virtual money, prediction markets allow traders to 'bet' on some future outcome. This market mechanism turns out to be a relatively simple and accurate way to discover, aggregate, and communicate to a defense executive the collective market's beliefs about the likelihood of an eventual outcome of an acquisition program of interest.
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When is Democracy an Equilibrium? Theory and Evidence from Colombia's La Violencia
Mario Chacón, James Robinson & Ragnar Torvik
Journal of Conflict Resolution, June 2011, Pages 366-396
Abstract:
The conventional wisdom is that for a democracy to be consolidated, all groups must have a chance to attain power. If they do not, then they will subvert democracy and choose to fight for power. In this article, the authors show that this wisdom is seriously incomplete because it considers absolute, not relative payoffs. Although the probability of winning an election increases with the size of a group, so does the probability of winning an armed conflict. Thus, in a situation in which all groups have a high chance of winning an election, they may also have a high chance of winning a fight. Indeed, in a natural model, the authors show that democracy may never be consolidated in such a situation. Rather, democracy may only be stable when one group is dominant. The authors explore this key aspect of the theory using data from La Violencia, a political conflict in Colombia during the years 1946-1950 between the Liberal and Conservative parties. Consistent with their results, and contrary to conventional wisdom, the authors show that fighting between the parties was more intense in municipalities where the support of the parties was more evenly balanced.
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Poverty, minority economic discrimination, and domestic terrorism
James Piazza
Journal of Peace Research, May 2011, Pages 339-353
Abstract:
Recognizing that the empirical literature of the past several years has produced an inconclusive picture, this study revisits the relationship between poverty and terrorism and suggests a new factor to explain patterns of domestic terrorism: minority economic discrimination. Central to this study is the argument that because terrorism is not a mass phenomenon but rather is undertaken by politically marginal actors with often narrow constituencies, the economic status of subnational groups is a crucial potential predictor of attacks. Using data from the Minorities at Risk project, I determine that countries featuring minority group economic discrimination are significantly more likely to experience domestic terrorist attacks, whereas countries lacking minority groups or whose minorities do not face discrimination are significantly less likely to experience terrorism. I also find minority economic discrimination to be a strong and substantive predictor of domestic terrorism vis-à-vis the general level of economic development. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of the findings for scholarship on terrorism and for counter-terrorism policy.
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The effects of government intervention on the market for corporate terrorism insurance
Erwann Michel-Kerjan & Paul Raschky
European Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming
Abstract:
Nine OECD countries presently have national terrorism insurance programs based on some type of public-private risk sharing. While such arrangements helped provide the necessary insurance capacity in the post-September 11, 2001 era, little is known about the effect of such governmental intervention in terrorism insurance markets. This paper focuses on the United States, where the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2002 (TRIA) provides insurers with no cost federal reinsurance up to an industry-wide loss of $100 billion. We present an empirical analysis to compare how insurers' diversification behavior varies between property coverage (no governmental intervention) and terrorism coverage (with government intervention). We find evidence that insurers in the U.S. are much less diversified for terrorism coverage than they are for property lines of coverage. We interpret these findings as tentative evidence for moral hazard caused by the governmental intervention under TRIA.
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Terrorism risk concern in Europe
Konstantinos Drakos & Cathérine Müller
Economics Letters, August 2011, Pages 195-197
Abstract:
Motivated by the Bayesian framework, we explore terrorism risk perception differences across European countries. Perception variation is explained by the long term terrorism countries face, while the cyclical part of terrorism does not seem to play any role.
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It's the Local Economy, Stupid! Geographic Wealth Dispersion and Conflict Outbreak Location
Halvard Buhaug et al.
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
Income varies considerably within countries and the locations where conflicts emerge are rarely typical or representative for states at large. Yet, most research on conflict has only examined national income averages and neglected spatial variation. The authors argue that civil conflicts are more likely to erupt in areas with low absolute income, even if a country's gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is not necessarily low, and in areas with large deviations from national averages. The authors test these hypotheses empirically using spatially disaggregated data on the location of conflict outbreaks and per capita income estimates. The authors find that areas with absolute poverty indeed see more outbreaks of conflict, and they find some evidence that inequality increases the risk of conflict. Subnational information can improve on conventional country-based measures and help our understanding of how local features and variation can give rise to mobilization and violence.
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Erik Nisbet & Teresa Myers
Communication Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many have attributed anti-American sentiment within Arab countries to a highly negative information environment propagated by transnational Arab satellite TV news channels such as Al-Jazeera. However, theoretical models and empirical evidence evaluating the linkages between media exposure and opinion about the United States remains scant. Drawing on theories of media effects, identity, and public opinion, this article develops a theoretical framework explicating how the influence of transnational Arab TV on opinion formation is contingent on competing political identities within the region. Employing 5 years of survey data collected across six Arab countries, we empirically test several propositions about the relationship between Arab TV exposure and public opinion about the United States generated by our theoretical framework. Our results demonstrate significant associations between transnational Arab TV exposure and anti-American sentiment, but also show these associations vary substantially by channel and political identification. The theoretical and policy implications of the study are discussed.
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On the economics of interrogation: The Big 4 versus the Little Fish game
Walter Enders & Paan Jindapon
Journal of Peace Research, May 2011, Pages 287-301
Abstract:
While military protocol requires that POWs provide only name, rank, serial number, and date of birth (the so-called Big 4), it is naive to think that all detainees, including terrorists, behave in this fashion. Instead, there is evidence that detainees partially cooperate with their captors by revealing a limited amount of valuable information during the interrogation process. Such a strategy makes it appear that the detainee is cooperative and, since interrogations can be costly, serves as a disincentive for further interrogation. In order to capture the essential differences between the two strategies, we model two different types of games between the interrogator and the detainee. Specifically, we compare the Big 4 game to a two-stage game (the Little Fish game) in which the detainee is permitted to reveal low-level information to the interrogator. We formalize both games, derive the optimal rules for each player, and show that the Big 4 game may not be optimal for either player or for the overall well‐being of the interrogating nation. As such, the Little Fish game can Pareto‐dominate the Big 4 game. Hence, it is possible that the al-Qaeda strategy of partial cooperation is superior to that used by most standing armies. We also show that the level of intensity selected by the interrogator must be balanced by such factors as the moral values of the society and recruiting potential of the terrorists versus the likelihood of obtaining important information.
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Avoiding Audience Costs: Domestic Political Accountability and Concessions in Crisis Diplomacy
Jonathan Brown & Anthony Marcum
Security Studies, Spring 2011, Pages 141-170
Abstract:
We challenge the widely accepted proposition that democratic leaders are more accountable than autocratic leaders. We argue that a winning coalition's abilities to monitor and sanction a leader increase as its size decreases. Hence, contrary to conventional wisdom, our theory suggests that autocratic leaders are more accountable than democratic leaders due to the monitoring and sanctioning advantages of smaller coalitions relative to larger coalitions. Many international relations scholars hold that the conventional wisdom explains important variation in leaders' behavior during crisis bargaining and in the outcomes of international disputes. We evaluate our theory and the conventional perspective by examining rival predictions regarding leaders' ability to avoid incurring audience costs by conducting crisis negotiations and making concessions outside their coalitions' view. A reassessment of us-ussr diplomacy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a favored case of the conventional wisdom, indicates the plausibility of our theory in the context of security crises.