Meta Knowledge/ Knowledge Calculus - classification of Action Research
COMMENTS:
It is comprehensive deliberation on Calculus of Terrorism, especially emerging in the Middle-East after forced solution by the world-order power on the principles of might-is-right. The chapters: Introduction right upto Conclusion invites attention, but the word Calculus is in deficit and not duly justified analytically.
Conclusion are jumping projection and inconsistent. The root cause is ill-transparent and latent, right from the WMD and the follow up, mostly biased to Asian's cleansing in the hands of holocaust like revenge of faith on the strength of westerners who failed in India and Afghanistan in the last century. The terrorism-Calculus theory did not work, due to irrational supremacy of a faith, although the was gifted land in Australia for Israel, to implement monotheist model on Europe after WWII.
Inconsistency of write-up reflected biasedness like:
Ghan-Towns of Australia and Pakistan vs. Racial
Discrimination and Human Trafficking– Conjectural Model:
http://b4gen.blogspot.com/2017/02/ghan-towns-of-australia-and-pakistan-vs.html
World peace is far from the accomplishment, of ultimate objectives of Divine-interventions in the hands of irrationality, of color justifications
Anyway, till the time flow, these conspiracies will, due to meanness of caste and creed.
****
Abstract
Introduction
Strategy and Terrorism
Substitution and Competition in the Israel-Palestine Conflict
A Conceptual Model of Israeli and Palestinian
Interactions
Empirical data
Attacks and countermeasures
Competition, imitation, and the role of public
opinion
Election-driven behavior
Substitution and competition in terrorism
Conclusions
References
COMMENTS:
It is comprehensive deliberation on Calculus of Terrorism, especially emerging in the Middle-East after forced solution by the world-order power on the principles of might-is-right. The chapters: Introduction right upto Conclusion invites attention, but the word Calculus is in deficit and not duly justified analytically.
Conclusion are jumping projection and inconsistent. The root cause is ill-transparent and latent, right from the WMD and the follow up, mostly biased to Asian's cleansing in the hands of holocaust like revenge of faith on the strength of westerners who failed in India and Afghanistan in the last century. The terrorism-Calculus theory did not work, due to irrational supremacy of a faith, although the was gifted land in Australia for Israel, to implement monotheist model on Europe after WWII.
Inconsistency of write-up reflected biasedness like:
Ghan-Towns of Australia and Pakistan vs. Racial
Discrimination and Human Trafficking– Conjectural Model:
http://b4gen.blogspot.com/2017/02/ghan-towns-of-australia-and-pakistan-vs.html
World peace is far from the accomplishment, of ultimate objectives of Divine-interventions in the hands of irrationality, of color justifications
Anyway, till the time flow, these conspiracies will, due to meanness of caste and creed.
****
The Strategic Calculus of Terrorism: Substitution and
Competition in the Israel-Palestine Conflict
Aaron Clauset∗ Lindsay
Heger‡
Maxwell Young• Kristian
Skrede Gleditsch◦,⋆
∗Santa Fe
Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 USA
‡Department
of Political Science, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093
USA
•Department of Computer Science, University of Waterloo,
Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1 Canada ◦Department of Government, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park,
Colchester CO4 3SQ UK
⋆Centre for the Study of Civil War, PO
Box 9229 Grønland, 0134 Oslo, Norway
Abstract
Previous work on the dynamics of
conflicts where we see terrorism has tended to focus on whether we see shifts
in attack mode following government countermeasures. We contend that many
factors other than counterinsurgency can influence whether groups resort to
terrorism, including competition between groups, as well as their relationship
to public opinion and other political events. Hence, understanding terrorist
tactics in prolonged conflicts with multiple actors requires us to consider a
more general framework of innovation, imitation, competition and dependence
between actors. We use disaggregated data on terrorist attacks,
counterterrorism, and public opinion in the Israel-Palestine conflict to
jointly evaluate predictions derived from several conventional theories of
strategic behavior. We find that the strategic calculus of Palestinian groups
is complex and cannot be treated as time invariant. Our results suggest that
factors such as the degree of public support, inter-group competition, the
anticipation of countermeasures and nontrivial non-violent political payoffs
have an observable effect on the strategic behavior of the Palestinian groups,
and that structural relationships often are far from constant over time.
Introduction
Terrorism, or the use of violence to create
fear for political purposes, has attracted a great deal of scholarly interest,
especially after the 11 September 2001 attacks against New York City and
Washington, DC, the 11 March 2004 train bombing in Madrid, and the 7 July 2005
London bombings. These recent events have led to a renewed interest in previous
work on terrorism and the use of terrorism in other conflicts prior to these
attacks. Despite the international nature of these attacks, where Islamist
groups attack targets in other industrialized countries, the bulk of terrorist
attacks tend to be much more local in character, with groups targeting local
governments to advance certain local political goals.
Some observers tend to describe terrorists as “evil” and
irrational political or religious fanatics. However, terrorism is a strategic
tool, used for political purposes, rather than merely haphazard or expressive
acts (Bell 1990; Enders and Sandler 1993). Terrorism is very much a “weapon of
the weak” and particularly likely to be used in asymmetric conflicts. The
resort to terrorism by the weaker side that lacks the capacity for conventional
warfare can potentially and to some degree counterbalance the terms of the
conflict by substituting fear for real military might. Moreover, the resort to
terrorism is not a constant tactical choice. Many groups that have used
terrorism at some point have switched to other strategies under other
conditions. For example, the African National Congress carried out a number of
bombing attacks through its military wing Umkhonto we Sizwe, explicitly citing
the lack of real opportunities for other actions under the South African
government, but also lacking the capacity for effective conventional warfare
against its opponent. However, the ANC suspended these operations once the
South African government removed the ban on the organization and indicated a
real willingness to enter into substantial negotiations.
Statements by terrorist organizations themselves strongly
attest to their strategic use of such tactics, both with regards to carrying
out attacks and to call for caution. For example, in a statement made on 10
January 2003, Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin asserted the strategic value of
suicide attacks, arguing that “Iraq could win if it equipped its citizens with
explosive belts and turned them into human bombs.” In contrast, on Friday 26
March 2004, Hamas organizer Osama
Hamdan instructed allied
organizations that
The lone suicide martyr method has
scored great achievements, but now, as we stand at the threshold of a decisive
stage, we must resort to a tactic that brings us the desired results; I
therefore tell you not to hurry to exact revenge. We have to be sure our
assault is concerted and perfectly orchestrated. Don’t waste resources and
manpower on small operations.
These and similar statements by other organizations
strongly suggest that both the general and specific use of terrorism is often a
carefully calculated choice. However, we still know relatively little about the
strategic calculus of terrorism. First, existing research has tended to focus
exclusively on particular individual factors as driving the resort to
terrorism, such as government counterterrorism efforts or its relationship to
public opinion, but rarely considered how such factors may interact with one
another in shaping the context in which actors chose terrorist tactics. Second,
existing research has tended to simply count violent terrorist attacks and how
these frequencies correspond with particular factors, but rarely considered or
distinguished between their specific tactical forms (e.g., hostages, arson,
etc.) or their severity (i.e., the number of casualties).[1]The
implicit assumption has thus been that all violent events convey roughly the
same information about a group’s strategy and goals. But clearly terrorism
comes in many forms, and it is known that differences in the degree of severity
matter a great deal (Clauset et al. 2007). For instance, the political impact
of severity is illustrated by how the severe attacks of 11 September 2001 in
New York and Washington DC, and the 7 July 2005 bombings in London, stimulated
much more dramatic political and economic responses than incompetent and
non-severe attacks such as Richard Reed’s shoe-bombing attempt, or the London
copy-cat attacks of 21 July 2001.
In our view, a full understanding of terrorism requires us
to look beyond counting incidents to also consider its severity and its
strategic character. One piece of this more complete understanding must be to
assess a group’s strategic choices and constraints – that is, the range of
viable options, both violent and non-violent, and the limits to action, perhaps
induced by organizational dynamics, its host populace or competition from other
groups. Without this understanding, government countermeasures may be less
effective than they could be, and scarce resources may be used to protect
targets that are unlikely to be attacked and against tactics groups are
unlikely to use. In the worse cases, countermeasures may actually be counterproductive,
to the extent that they could instead serve to further the terrorist’s goals
(Mueller 2006; see also Ganor 2008).
In the following, we first review existing work on the
resort to terrorism, synthesize key claims and propositions, and expand on why
we believe that existing work is too narrowly focused. In order to better
understand the context of terrorism we examine the Israel-Palestine conflict,
where detailed data exist that allow us to examine a large number of
propositions empirically.
Strategy and Terrorism
Previous work on the strategic character of
terrorism has focused on several aspects believed to make terrorism more or
less likely. Perhaps the best studied of these is the phenomenon of strategic substitution following state
counter-terrorism efforts (Landes 1978; Enders and Sandler 1993, 2004), where
groups change tactics after the state’s actions increase the cost of the
current terrorist tactic relative to some alternative. For instance, a vector
autoregression analysis of the relative attack-mode frequencies bracketing the
introduction of metal detectors in U.S. airports lends support to the
hypothesis that the detectors decreased the frequency of airplane hijackings,
but increased the frequency of other kinds of hostage situations (Enders and
Sandler 1993).
Other studies have highlighted the political rationale or advantages accruing to groups from the use
of terrorist tactics. Pape (2003), for example, argues that suicide attacks are
most typically used in asymmetric conflicts over territory, since they have
proven to be a useful approach to wear out the resolve of the occupying forces,
which eventually may lead to their withdrawal from the disputed territory. Brym
and Araj (2006) argue that the impetus for terrorist attacks arise from the
desire to retaliate against government repression (see also Araj 2008). In this
sense, terrorism can become more frequent and severe through action-reaction
dynamics and escalating conflicts between the parties.[2]
Bloom (2004) highlights how suicide attacks can become popular as these
are thought to serve the dual purpose of severely wounding the enemy and
raising the public profile of the attacking group.
Other researchers have suggested that conflicts where there
are multiple and potentially competing groups
on the insurgent side can display very different dynamics and prospects for
termination than groups where there is a single organization, operating as a
hierarchical organization with a central leadership (Cunningham 2006). In the
context of terrorism, attacks by one group can serve the role of a “spoiler” to
prevent other groups from engaging in non-violent political tactics like peace
talks (Kydd and Walter 2002). Moreover, groups may resort to terrorism as part
of their competition with other groups (Bloom 2004).
Many previous studies have evaluated propositions relating
these factors to terrorism empirically. However, although such studies have
shed considerable light on the strategic character of terrorism, they have not
typically considered more than a single aspect of the strategic calculus of
terrorism. As such, our understanding of how groups actually behave in complex
conflicts remains limited. In this paper, we wish to consider substitution in
light of counterterrorism efforts jointly with competition between groups and
the role of public opinion. Our basic premises are (1) that terrorist
organizations are innovative agents, rather than passive actors that merely
adapt to government countermeasures, and (2) when a conflict is characterized
by several terrorist organizations, their actions are not independent, and they
may compete with each other for political support or learn from each other.
Moreover, existing empirical research has often looked at
highly aggregated measures of terrorism, often yearly counts by country,
despite the fact that large databases of individual events, e.g., the ITERATE
data set (Mickolus et al. 2004) or the MIPT data set (National Memorial
Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism 2006), allow researchers to
disaggregate trends by actors and time in more insightful ways. However,
comparative analysis of a large set of conflicts can be difficult if the
strategic calculus of terrorism is complex and sensitive to other features of
the political context. In particular, the relationships may not be stable
across conflicts or over time, and may depend on idiosyncratic political events
specific to each conflict, which may be difficult to compare across conflicts.
As an alternative, we here propose to test and consider the scope for
conventional theories within the context of a single conflict, where we can get
more detailed data and carefully examine the political context. We use
empirical data on recent events in the IsraelPalestine conflict as a model
system of the context where terrorism is used, which we in turn hope will allow
us to make progress to extend our understanding to more general theories of
terrorism.
We will comment in the following section on why we believe
that the Israel-Palestine conflict is an appropriate model system. First,
however, we would like to briefly comment on our empirical approach. We note
that our approach is explicitly data-centric, in the sense that we do not posit
any complete mathematical models of terrorist behavior from which we derive
formal propositions, but instead draw on empirical data from a number of
sources to evaluate a number of plausible and potentially competing conjectures.
Although model-centric approaches can be a powerful way to test specific
theories, it is unclear whether it is possible to simultaneously model the
several theories mentioned above, and one might question whether these theories
are sufficiently welldeveloped and specified that they are best approached
formally. Moreover, many key features often cannot be observed directly. For
many potentially important factors such as the financial stability of a group
and its recruitment concerns, data are either scarce, of poor quality, or
nonexistent. In many conflicts, even the most basic data on the public support
of terrorist activities do not exist. In contrast, a data-centric approach
provides some flexibility in evaluating theories primarily through observable
characteristics of conflicts, i.e., features that are quantifiable and
measurable, and allows us to discover novel statistical patterns or
relationships not embodied in current theoretical explanations. The drawback of
this approach, of course, is that it leaves some room for ambiguity in terms of
confounding effects. Still, we find that focusing our attention on the
observable characteristics of the conflict in this case allows us to draw
several reasonably clear conclusions about the strategic behavior of
Palestinian groups. In particular, we find that factors such as inter-group
competition and the degree of public support seem to have a strong influence,
often simultaneously, on the strategic use of violence by the Palestinian
groups. Further, we find that substitution, public support and spoiler effects
are all considerably more complicated than previously thought.
Substitution and Competition in the Israel-Palestine Conflict
The Israel-Palestine conflict is an ideal
conflict to examine strategic behavior for several reasons. First, the
Israel-Palestine conflict is intrinsically important, and has given rise to a
very high share of the recorded terrorist events worldwide since 1968. As many
as 3,017 (10.6%
of 28,445) events in the MIPT terrorism database (2006) were located in
Israel or the Palestinian territories, and many of these events resulted in at
least one casualty (1,057 or 8.3% of 12,726). Second, the
conflict is complex in terms of the number of actors and their relationships.
There are many Palestinian groups, and the competition between them is well
documented, as witnessed by the rivalry between Fatah and Hamas. Third, unlike
many other conflicts where terrorism is used, there exists several detailed
data sources on the Israel-Palestine conflict. In particular, we have direct
data on government counterrorism efforts and public opinion on support for the
different actors. This in turn enables us to examine and revisit the
conclusions of prior studies on how countermeasures and public opinion impact
terrorists’ violent strategies.
We start with a very a brief overview of the conflict. Our
focus here will be on the situation Israel and the Palestinian territories and
the resort to terrorism there, and as such we will not examine terrorism in extra-regional
extensions of the conflict such as the 1972 Black September incident where
Palestinian militants held Israeli athletes hostage in a third country. Our
review will necessarily be selective, intended to serve as a background for our
subsequent analysis, and we refer the interested reader to Bickerton and
Klausner (2004), Eckstein and Tsiddon (2004), Gerner (1994), or Kimmerling and
Migdal (2003) for more comprehensive overviews.
There is a long history of conflict and occasional
cooperation between Arabs and Jews in the territory currently known as either
Israel or Palestine. Indeed, terrorism in this region precedes the
establishment of the state of Israel, as Jewish groups such as Irgun Tsvai
Leumi used terrorist strategies to force the UK to give up control over the
territory of Palestine.[3]
The main lines of divisions in the modern Israel-Palestine conflict were
shaped by the 1947 creation of the state of Israel and the failure of United
Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 to divide the territory in an Arab and
a Jewish part. There have been several international efforts to foster
negotiated settlements (notably the 1991 Madrid conference and the 1993 Oslo
Peace Accords), yet the conflict has proved persistent and difficult to
resolve.
Unlike many other struggles for autonomy, the Palestinian
side has not coalesced into a vertically organized, state-like institution
under the leadership of one dominant organization. Instead, the Palestinian
side of the conflict consists of many distinct organizations, which share a
loose ideological or political bond, and often have a complicated historical
and political relationship with each other. The umbrella organization known as
the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)
was set up at the initiative of other countries in the Arab League in 1964. It
includes a large number of organizations, and has no centralized leadership.
The PLO was never a coherent organization, and the Palestinian side has become
increasingly fragmented following disputes over the Oslo agreement, the idea of
a two-state solution, and whether to engage in negotiations with the Israeli
side more generally. The largest faction Fatah
has been dominant since 1969, and has a largely secular orientation.
Traditionally, Fatah has emphasized conventional armed struggle and guerrilla
warfare against Israeli military targets, and, more recently, negotiations with
the Israeli government. Since the start of the Second Intifada in 2000, however, groups connected to Fatah,
including the alAqsa Martyrs’ Brigades,
have carried out numerous terrorist attacks against civilians.[4]
The second largest faction of the PLO, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) has a Marxist
orientation, and at one point left the PLO. It has rejected the Oslo agreement,
and has generally been skeptical of negotiations with Israel. The PFLP carried
out numerous airplane hijackings in the 1960s and 1970s, but has recently
switched to attacks against civilians in Israel. The now prominent Hamas movement, formed in 1987 in
opposition to the Oslo agreement, seeks to create an Islamic republic. Hamas
has never been part of the PLO, and rejects a two-state solution and
recognition of Israel. Hamas has emphasized the provision of social services in
the occupied territories, but has also engaged in terrorist attacks, and was
the first group in this conflict to use suicide attacks in 1993. Another group
not affiliated with the PLO that has engaged in terrorism on the Palestinian
side is the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ),
which has links to Hezbollah in Lebanon and is believed to be supported by
Iran.
A Conceptual Model of Israeli and Palestinian
Interactions
To help the reader place our empirical
analyses within a unified context, we introduce a simple conceptual model of
the structure of relevant interactions between groups in the Israel-Palestine
conflict. The schematic model in Figure 1 is in no way meant to be a formal
model in the statistical or mathematical sense. Rather, it is simply a way to
represent and organize the many types of linkages and actions by both Israel
and the Palestinian groups.
Clearly Palestinian actions and Israeli countermeasures are
likely to be related to one another, as suggested by both theories of
deterrence or substitution following countermeasures, or theories of
escalation. However, interactions between Palestinian groups and the Israeli
government are in our view unlikely alone to provide much insight into the
resort to terrorism, and it is unreasonable to think that the individual groups
respond independently to the government. Most importantly, we expect the
inter-group competition for the support of the Palestinian people to be crucial
for the success of any Palestinian group. A competitiveenvironment between the
different factions implies that one group’s optimal response or action to
increase its support among Palestinians is partially a function of other
groups’ actions and responses. Thus, in Figure 1 we represent the interplay of
these factors as a “sandwich” in which the Palestinian groups vie for, and
depend upon, the support of the Palestinian people, subject to the constraints
imposed on them by the actions Israel takes to
protect itself.
We note that there appears to be relatively good historic
evidence for exactly this kind of interplay between organizations on the
Palestinian side. Fatah, in part through its dominance of the PLO, has been the
central organization on the Palestinian side. However, the involvement of its
leadership in negotiations with Israel and the Oslo accords in the early 1990s
was quite unpopular among large segments of the Palestinian populace, which led
to a hemorrhaging of Fatah’s public support. Moreover, Fatah’s perceived
ineffectiveness in terms of providing basic security and social services to the
Palestinian people and the perceived corruption among its leadership have
further undermined its popularity. These shortcomings provided opportunities
for other organizations to increase their support by opposing or filling-in for
Fatah. Hamas, in particular, has successfully capitalized on Fatah’s woes by
the provision of social services in an efficient manner, the relative lack of
corruption among its leadership, and, through its suicide attacks, the
perception of strong resistance to Israel’s incursions into the Palestinian
territories. If the relationship between different Palestinian groups is indeed
competitive, then they should be treated as separate groups. Many previous
studies of the Israel-Palestine conflict, however, have treated each side of
the conflict as a
Figure 1: The “sandwich”
conceptual model of the Israel-Palestine conflict, illustrating the three
primary constraints on the strategic decisions made by Palestinian groups.
single actor, see for example Goldstein et
al. (2001), thus obscuring any competitive behavior on the Palestinian side –
an abstraction that is reasonable only if separate groups apparently pursue a
common goal utilizing coordinated behavior. In this study, we will treat
different named groups in our data as separate actors.
Several propositions on when we should expect to see a
resort to terrorist activities can be stated in terms of this conceptual model.
The arguments about substitution following counterrorism would suggest that
terrorists primarily respond to counterattacks by the government and change
their behavior accordingly. In contrast, the escalation and retaliation
argument implies that we should see an increase in attacks following
countermeasures. Arguments about group competition imply that groups should
resort to attacks when these can be politically advantageous. Actors may
emulate other groups and switch to more lethal forms of attacks when these have
proven advantageous to other groups.[5]
Moreover, we would expect there be some relationship between public
opinion and the use of specific attack modes. The fact that these effects can
all appear simultaneously, however, means that we must be sensitive to the
potential complexity of the conflict.
Relationships may change over time, and
other changes in the political context may induce shifts in strategies. With
this conceptual model, and the corresponding predictions, in hand, we now turn
to empirical analysis of these expectations.
Empirical data
We draw our terrorist incident data from
the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (2006)
database.[6]
This database contains information about terrorist events worldwide
between January 1968 and June 2006. It provides the event date, target, city
(if applicable), country, type of weapon used, terrorist group responsible (if
known), number of deaths (if known), number of injuries (if known), as well as
a brief description of the attack and the source of the information. The MIPT
database contains both transnational and purely domestic events, and has been
used in several recent studies of terrorism (Bogen and Jones 2006; Clauset et
al. 2007). The perhaps better known and more commonly used ITERATE data set
(Mickolus et al. 2004) is limited to transnational events. Here, we consider
only those events that occurred in the conflict region itself — i.e., Israel,
and Gaza or the West Bank.[7]
This yields a total of 3,017 events; 81.6% of which have occurred since
the beginning of the al-Aqsa Intifada in September 2000. When it becomes
relevant which of the 48 groups is associated with a particular event, we
restrict our analysis to Fatah, PFLP, Hamas, PIJ, and the catchall group
“Unknown/Other”, as these account for over 90% of the
Israel-Palestine events in the database; in terms of violent events, these five
can thus be
Total
|
Total
|
Suicide
|
Suicide
|
|
Group name
|
incidents
|
casualties
|
events
|
casualties
|
Fatah
|
180
|
1596
|
22
|
640
|
Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine (PFLP)
|
63
|
505
|
7
|
161
|
Hamas
|
543
|
3474
|
50
|
2485
|
Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)
|
150
|
1165
|
29
|
787
|
Unknown/Other
|
1798
|
2754
|
38
|
485
|
Subtotal (5 groups)
|
2734
|
9494
|
146
|
4558
|
Percent of total (48 groups)
|
90.6%
|
81.9%
|
94.2%
|
94.3%
|
Table 1: A summary of the
events and casualty statistics for each of the main actors on the Palestinian
side of the Israel-Palestine conflict, through June 2006.
considered the primary
actors in the conflict. Table 1 summarizes these events by group.[8]
To examine the relative popularity of different terrorist
groups, we draw on public opinion data from the Palestinian Center for Policy
and Survey Research (2007), which routinely conducts polls on a variety of
issues in different areas of the Palestinian territory.[9]
Of the large amount of data in these polls, we focus specifically on the
questions asked between 1994 and 2006 concerning how much support individuals
give to Fatah, PFLP, Hamas, and PIJ respectively.
To examine the extent to which interactions between
Palestinian groups are competitive or generally cooperative, we draw on the
Levant data, which are derived by the Kansas Event Data System[10]
from automated coding of English-language news reports. These data
identify specific events where a particular actor—i.e., the source—carries out
an identifiable action against another actor—i.e., the target—(see Schrodt and
Gerner (1994) for further discussion on coding event data). For simplicity, we
focus primarily on the relationship between Hamas and Fatah here, and consider
all interactions between Hamas and PLO/Fatah/Palestinian authorities. The event
codes in the Levant data are classified in terms of a set of different
categories, known as WEIS codes (after the earlier World Event Interaction
Survey data project). These event categories can in turn be mapped onto a
numerical scale of conflict-cooperation, created by Goldstein (1992), which
ranges from -10 for the most conflictual behavior to 10 for increasingly cooperative
events. These events can then be summed over a period for an aggregate measure
of relations between parties. Here, we aggregate by week, and assign a score of
zero to weeks with no recorded events. [11]
Finally, we draw on counter-terrorism data from the Israeli
Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2006). The Ministry provides brief reports of
Israeli anti-terror activity from 1995 onward.[12]
Events are coded as counter-terrorism measures if they indicate active Israeli operations against
terrorist threats, such as the confiscation of funds or direct attacks against
terrorist operatives and/or their supporters. We define active counter-terrorism efforts as those which require targeted
decisions by Israeli officials, while passive
efforts encompass environmental and physical barriers, such as the security
fence project initiated in May 2002. For the most part our analysis of
countermeasures takes place after 2002, so we assume the fence had a constant,
likely decreasing, effect on terrorist incidents over the entire period. Other
reports in the Ministry’s anti-terrorism data describe events not related
specifically to counter-terrorism efforts, such as government statements on
prisoner exchanges, announcements, or condemnations of violent activities; we
exclude these from our
analysis.
Attacks and countermeasures
We begin by considering the relationship
between terrorist attacks and countermeasures, and the accuracy of the
conventional theory of substitution. Recall that this theory suggests that the
frequency of subsequent attacks should depend mainly on the state’s
countermeasures.
During the al-Aqsa Intifada (September 2000 to the
present), Israel’s active counter-terrorism efforts fall into two qualitatively
different strategies. First, prior to the end of 2003, we find that changes in
Israel’s activity level in a given month are strongly anti-correlated with changes in the number of suicide incidents in
the previous month (r =−0.47,
p < 0.01).[13]
That is, during this period, we suggest that Israel directly reacted to
Palestinian attacks, effectively pursuing a tit-for-tat strategy, where one
actor escalates their activity in response to the other’s recent activity
(Figure 2a). Indeed, the cross-correlation function (CCF) of Israel’s
activities to the number of suicide attacks peaks strongly at a τ = −1 month lag (Figure 2a inset), indicating that Israel’s
response rate was most highly correlated with the Palestinian suicide attack
rate from the previous month. However, we do not have a perfect tit-for-tat
cycle, which would lead to a pattern of mutual reciprocity, as the Palestinian
side does not appear to directly respond to Israeli counter-measures.[14]Since
there is no reciprocity or little evidence of deterrent effect on the
Palestinian side, counterterrorist efforts were not able to limit escalation of
the conflict. This pattern of reprisals runs counter to the conventional
assumption that increased counter-terrorism activity can only suppress future
terrorist activity (Sandler et al. 1983; Rosendorff and Sandler 2004).[15]
Further, we find that during this time, the Palestinian groups pursued a
relatively singleminded strategy – suicide attacks – as their response to
Israeli counterattacks. In contrast to the temporal dynamics of suicide
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005
2006
Year
(a) (b)
Figure 2: Incident counts
for (a) suicide and (b) non-suicide attacks, and for Israeli counterterrorism
events. Between 2001 and the end of 2003, Israel pursues a clear tit-for-tat
strategy with the Palestinian groups (inset shows the cross-correlation
function for this period, with a strong peak at τ = −1 month
delay, reflecting how Israeli attacks are most correlated with the prior
month’s suicide attack rate). Beginning in 2004, Israel pursues markedly
different strategy, with its counter-terrorism attacks being largely independent
of the incidence of suicide attacks.
attacks, there is no significant
correlation for non-suicide attacks (Figure 2b) over the same period (r =−0.10, p > 0.5), and the
corresponding CCF shows no significant peaks at any lag.
Beginning in January 2004, however, changes in the
frequency of suicide attacks and counterattacks become uncorrelated (r =−0.21, p > 0.25), with the
corresponding CCF showing no significant peaks at any lag, illustrating an end
to the tit-for-tat response pattern. Further, the overall frequency of attacks
shifted decisively between these two periods: the rate of suicide attacks
dropped from 3.0
per month to only 1.1
per month, while the rate of counterattacks increased from 2.2 per month to 4.2 per month.
Supplementarily, we also consider what relationship the severity of Palestinian attacks, i.e.,
the number of casualties, have with the Israeli counterattacks, as opposed to
the number of incidents. During the initial period, we find a slightly weaker
anti-correlation between changes in the severity of suicide attacks and the
frequency of Israeli countermeasures (r =−0.31,
p < 0.1), and that this
relationship also disappears in the second period, (r =−0.23, p > 0.2). Overall, this dynamic behavior
suggests that the Palestinian groups considered the severity of their response
to Israeli counterattacks as being somewhat less important than responding
proportionally in frequency. It could, however, also be the case that
Palestinian groups simply have little control over the resulting severity of
their attacks (see also Harrison 2006).
Initially, these results are completely consistent with our
expectations, given the theory of strategic substitution, i.e., the Palestinian
groups shifted to non-suicide attacks because Israel’s new strategy (beginning
in 2004) made it more difficult for them to execute suicide attacks. Indeed,
the official explanation given by official Israeli sources matches this story
quite closely, and there is some causal empirical evidence to support these
claims. In particular, during the second time period, Israel made significant
progress in building the security fence while also relying on the targeted
assassinations of bomb makers, attack coordinators, and suicide bombers
themselves in an effort to undermine the Palestinian groups’ ability to conduct
suicide attacks (IMFA 2006).
The remaining details of these statistical trends, however,
are difficult to explain using only the conventional theory of strategic
substitution, as such an argument implies that both the large number of suicide
attacks during the first period (2001 through 2003) and the dramatic spikes in
non-suicide attacks around the beginning of 2005 were the Palestinian groups’
most cost-effective reaction to Israel’s counter-terrorism policies at the
time. One significant problem with this line of reasoning is the assumption
that changes in strategies by the non-state actors are driven exclusively, in a
causal manner, by the actions of the state. Although there are certainly
examples when such entailment is important, e.g., the case of metal detectors
studied by Enders and Sandler (1993), it seems unlikely that it is the most
important factor in all situations. In the next two sections, we consider
alternative explanations, outside the conventional theory of strategic
substitution, for these statistical features of the Israel-Palestine conflict,
and give empirical evidence suggesting that several other factors are at least
as important in influencing the behavior of the Palestinian groups as the
actions of Israel.
Competition, imitation, and the role of public
opinion
To understand the first of the two
statistical features, we now consider the use of suicide attacks by individual
Palestinian groups. Bloom’s (2004) analysis of the relationship between shifts
in Palestinian public opinion and the incidence of violence in the conflict
suggests that suicide attacks serve a dual purpose: they attack Israel by
punishing and terrorizing Israeli citizens who, on account of Israel’s policy
of universal conscription, many Palestinians see as being complicit in the
military engagement against Palestinians, and they raise the profile of the
group responsible for the attack. Bloom’s latter reasoning suggests that groups
with low profiles or popularity problems could use suicide attacks to bolster
their standing. If this hypothesis is correct, then we expect to see a
relationship between a group’s support among Palestinians and their use of
suicide attacks.
We first consider the data for Fatah and Hamas: Figure 3
shows the Palestinian public approval rating of Fatah and Hamas between 1994
and 2006. Overlaid on these trends are the severities of the suicide attacks
claimed by these two groups over the same period. Although both groups carried
out a large number of attacks from 2001 to 2002, Hamas initiated its suicide
campaign several months prior to Fatah. Additionally, Fatah’s inaugural suicide
attack was in February 2002 (or November 2001, if we include the first al-Aqsa
Martyr Brigade attacks), yet suicide attacks had been used by other groups on
the Palestinian side since Hamas pioneered the tactic in April 1994.
Fatah originally strongly condemmed Hamas’ use of suicide
attack. For example, Arafat in 1996 condemned Hamas and PIJ suicide attacks as
“illegal” and “attacks against the Palestinians and the peace process,” and
emphasized that the Palestinian authorities would “pursue our policy of
fighting terrorism here and abroad ...[working] with the Israelis to destroy
their infrastructure and to uproot terrorism.”[16]
During the first wave of suicide bombings in the second Intifada, Fatah
continued to criticize the use of suicide attacks. For example, in response to
the 2 June 2001 Hamas suicide attack on a night club in Tel Aviv, which killed
18 and wounded many others,
(a) (b)
Figure 3: Suicide attack
severity (shown as blue stars with severity given by the left axis) over time
for (a) Fatah and (b) Hamas, overlaid on the public approval ratings for each
of the groups (shown on the right axis).
Arafat insisted that “we will ...exert the
utmost efforts to stop the bloodshed of our people and of the Israeli people.”[17]
However, the coincidence of Fatah’s low approval ratings in 2002 with its
adoption of the suicide tactic (Figure 3a), suggests that Bloom’s hypothesis
may be a reasonable explanation for Fatah’s change in its behavior here.[18]
That is, in the period following the signing of Oslo II and the beginning
of the al-Aqsa Intifada – the period of roughly 1996 to 2000 – Fatah’s public
support consistently decreased, at a rate of about 2.5% per year, from 48% in
1996 to about 38% in 2000. Over this period, Fatah claimed no violent attacks.
Beginning in 2002, however, this decline seemed to stabilize, and then reverse
starting in roughly 2004 – a period that coincides precisely with Fatah
carrying out a number of severe suicide attacks.
Over the same period, support for Hamas among the
Palestinians increased only marginally, by about 1% per year, never exceeding
the 15% approval rating of 1994. Yet, this marginal support persisted despite
Hamas carrying out several extreme suicide attacks, such as the 4 March 1996
suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, and the 4 September 1997 suicide bombings in
Jerusalem, both with roughly 200 casualties (Figure 3b). Thus, Bloom’s
hypothesis seems inconsistent, or at least incomplete – why did public support
for Hamas not increase after its first campaign of suicide attacks in the
early-to-mid 1990s? To resolve this puzzle, we suggest a slight modification of
Bloom’s hypothesis: in order for a group to get a lift in approval by using a
particular tactic, be it suicide or otherwise, the public must support its use.
As a corollary, we expect that if the public supports the use of a particular
violent tactic, a group that can successfully employ it against Israel will
receive a lift in approval, provided it is seen as a viable contender. From
this perspective, it should be no surprise that Hamas gained little support
from its early attacks because public support for such attacks was not
particularly high during this period, being roughly 30% between 1994 and 2000
(Jerusalem Media and Communication Centre 2006).
With the beginning of the al-Aqsa Intifada, however, the
situation had changed in several important ways. First, by 2001 Fatah’s
popularity had continued to erode, falling below 30%, while Hamas’s had risen
to almost 20%. Although both groups conducted low-severity campaigns of
non-suicide attacks beginning in the second half of 2000, Hamas distinguished
itself from Fatah early on by conducting seven suicide bombings in 2001. But,
unlike the 1990s, these attacks now coincide with increases in public approval
of Hamas. The corollary above suggests that this lift is due to Hamas carrying
out attacks using a tactic the Palestinian people approved of, and indeed, we
find this to be the case: by the beginning of the Second Intifada, Palestinian
approval of the suicide tactic had risen to more than 60% (Jerusalem Media and
Communication Centre 2006). Thus, Hamas’s use of its suicide strategy in this
more supportive environment would seem to explain its progressive increase in
approval ratings.
Turning back to Fatah’s behavior, we note that Bloom’s
explanation of the effect of suicide attacks does not explain why Fatah chose
to adopt the suicide tactic at the beginning of 2002, and not earlier or later.
That is, what circumstances in early 2002 led Fatah to adopt a tactic with
which it had no experience? We suggest that it was inter-group competition:
Fatah chose to adopt
(a) (b)
Figure 4: Conflict
cooperation scores for directed behavior of (a) Fatah to Hamas (b) Hamas to
Fatah, with events aggregated over weeks.
the suicide attack in order to capitalize
on public sentiment to mitigate its loss of public support and perhaps slow or
halt Hamas’s rising approval ratings. From this perspective, the nine month
delay between Hamas’s and Fatah’s first suicide attacks in this period may
reflect a period of time in which Fatah was deciding whether Hamas posed a
significant threat to its hegemony, and was developing the necessary expertise
and human resources to conduct suicide operations.
A troubling alternative to this hypothesis is that the use
of suicide attacks in 2002 by Hamas and Fatah was a coordinated, rather than
competitive, effort. Using the conflict-cooperation scores generated from
events in the Levant data (Figure 4; recall that negative scores indicate
conflictual interactions), we find little evidence that Fatah and Hamas had
anything but a largely competitive relationship in this time period. The
average of the weekly conflict-cooperation scores are only slightly less
negative, or slightly more cooperative, in the period prior to the first
recorded suicide attack by the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade on 29 November 2001 (−0.928 in the case of
Fatah-toHamas events, and −0.619
for events from Hamas-to-Fatah) than in the following period (−1.728 and −1.794,
respectively). Thus, if there was a change in the character of their
relationship, it was not in the direction of increased cooperation, as the
difference in the conflict-cooperation score
Figure 5: Proportion of
events that were claimed or attributed to Fatah, PFLP, Hamas or PIJ versus
those unclaimed (i.e., attributed to an Unknown or Other group), with events
aggregated over a six-month sliding window.
has the wrong sign and is
also statistically significant in the case of Hamas behavior to Fatah
(p < 0.04).
Further indirect support of the competitive hypothesis
comes from considering whether attacks during this period are claimed or not.
In a competitive environment, association with an event should improve that
group’s public standing with the Palestinian people. Were Fatah and Hamas (and
other groups) cooperating, such distinctions should not be necessary. Thus, if
we construct a time series of the fraction of events that are claimed versus
unclaimed, a competitive environment would be denoted by a large fraction of
claimed events. Figure 5 shows this proportion for a sliding window of six
months, which increases from virtually zero in early 2000 to almost 70% by the middle of 2003, where it largely remains through
2006.
Fatah and Hamas are not the only groups to employ suicide
attacks, and an important test of Bloom’s hypothesis is to consider the effect
of suicide attacks on the public standing of more marginal groups such as PFLP
and PIJ. Although both carried out a number of severe suicide attacks during
the 2002–2004 period, neither saw significant gains in public support (Figure
6), despite the public’s support for these tactics. Thus, Bloom’s hypothesis,
even in the modified form
(a) (b)
Figure 6: Suicide attack
severity (left axis; blue stars) over time for (a) PFLP and (b) PIJ, overlaid
on the public approval ratings for each groups along with those for Hamas and
Fatah (right axis).
suggested above, is not completely
consistent with the empirical data — the use of suicide attacks cannot alone
improve a group’s public standing, even when the public generally supports the
use of these tactics.
One potential explanation of this inconsistency is that
only a plausible challenger to a dominant organization, such as Hamas
challenging Fatah, can enhance its public standing by engaging in particular
forms of dramatic and high impact terrorism. In such a situation, the dominant
organization is likely to try to contain the growing popularity of the
challenger — and may have some success — by emulating the latter’s methods,
thereby removing the apparent novelty or distinctiveness of the challengers’
strategy that resonated with the public. Less established and more obscure
groups, however, do not necessarily gain similar benefits from resorting to a
particular tactic, even if it is a popular one. More generally, the incentives
for resorting to extreme terrorism may be very different for “large” groups
that are generally well known than for “small” groups that the public is less
familiar with, unless such small groups first manage to establish themselves in
a position as a plausible challenger or central player. In the case of Hamas,
its growth into a large organization seems due partly to its provision of
public goods, something that the PIJ has never done. Thus, Hamas’s rise to
power in Palestine may not have been caused by its use of suicide bombings;
rather, its success as a large organization may have encouraged other groups to
emulate its violent tactics.
Election-driven behavior
We now turn to the second unexplained
statistical feature in our analysis of attacks and countermeasures: the
intermittent but distinctive spikes in the frequency of non-suicide attacks
(Figure 2b), and, in particular, the two dramatic spikes in late-2004 and
mid-2005, each with more than 100 events. Here again, we suggest that internal
politics on the Palestinian side – in particular, the first municipal and
Presidential elections since 1996 – can explain the first of these spikes,
while the second can be understood as a symbolic response by Hamas in the
run-up to the Israeli evacuation of 25 Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West
Bank.
During this period, Hamas was, by far, the most active of
the major actors on the Palestinian side, and the statistics of the conflict
are dominated by its attacks. Figure 7 shows the frequency of incidents
(suicide and non-suicide; upper pane) and the average number of casualties per
attack (lower) for Hamas from 2000 onward. To illustrate the relationship
between these statistics and the Palestinian’s internal politics, we overlay
these series with the dates of Palestinian elections (municipal, legislative,
and Presidential).[19]
From this combination, several patterns are clear. Most notably,
Hamas abandons its use of suicide bombing shortly after the January 2005
Presidential election.[20]
Further, between 2001 and 2005, the average severity of these suicide
attacks consistently decreases – suggesting that either Israel’s
countermeasures (see above) were increasingly effective at curtailing the
severity of these attacks, or Hamas deliberately attenuated its bombing
campaign for other, possibly internal
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006
(a) (b)
Figure 7: Incident
frequency (upper pane) and average casualties per attack (lower) for (a)
suicide and (b) non-suicide attacks by Hamas, from January 2000 to June 2006.
The right-most election line corresponds to the 2006 legislative elections.
reasons.
The conventional theory of substitution would lead us to
conclude that the large spike in nonsuicide attacks from October through
December 2004 must have been a direct consequence of Israel’s countermeasures
making the cost versus benefit of suicide attacks relatively unfavorable
compared to non-suicide attacks. This explanation, however, does not explain
the peculiar timing of these events, which occurred precisely before the
Palestinian Presidential election in January 2005, the first in almost 10
years. Given this coincidence, and the difficulty of directly testing the more
conventional interpretation, a plausible alternative explanation for Hamas’s
shift away from severe suicide attacks toward non-severe non-suicide attacks is
internal Palestinian politics rather than external countermeasures.
In addition to the Presidential election, three rounds of
municipal elections (December 2004, January 2005 and May 2005) were also held
in this timeframe. It is possible that Hamas’s activities were driven by these
smaller elections, as the dramatic activity around the New Year in 2005 also
preceded two of the three election. However, the lack of any activity preceding
the last of the three elections supports our suggestion that the 2004 spike may
have been driven by the upcoming Presidential election alone.
Politically, Hamas boycotted all four of these elections,
and, it would seem, chose instead to use violence in a highly strategic way to
independently demonstrate its political and military strength. Indeed, these actions
may now be seen as part of a larger strategy in preparation for the 2006
legislative elections, which Hamas did not boycott. That is, finally achieving
a competitive status with Fatah in late 2003, which we observe from the degree
of support from the Palestinian people (Figure 3), Hamas may have believed
itself to now be a viable electoral challenger to Fatah’s dominance in the
Palestinian Authority. From this point onward, Hamas seems to have shifted its
strategic use of violence to prepare for precisely such a challenge at the
legislative level, phasing out its use of suicide attacks – perhaps encouraged
by effective Israeli countermeasures – and increasingly using non-lethal,
non-severe attacks to demonstrate its military strength. Another consideration
may have been Hamas’s desire to continue to attack Israel, but without directly
stimulating an Israeli retaliation that might undermine Palestinian support for
Hamas in future
elections.
In agreement with this interpretation, we note that in the
vicinity of the legislative election in 2006 – the first that Hamas did not
boycott – we see virtually no attacks by Hamas, either suicide or non-suicide.[21]
Another plausible factor influencing Hamas’s behavior in this timeframe
is the incentive to signal its ability to control the use of violence to both
the Palestinian and Israeli audiences. In prior time periods, the Palestinian
Authority’s peace negotiations with Israel were disrupted by suicide attacks.
Kydd and Walter (2002) suggest that this behavior implies that terrorism is
used as a strategic “spoiler,” whereby attacks are used to violate Israel’s
trust in the Palestinian side’s ability to control its extremist factions.
Hamas’s abandonment of suicide attack thus may signal authority over its
extremist factions and, more generally, its ability to control violence and
engage in effective internal policing. This control could serve to increase
Hamas’s appeal as an effective political organization to both Palestinians and
Israelis, demonstrating to Palestinians that it can guarantee security, while
signaling to Israel that it will be negotiating with a party able to control
the violence. Certainly in a political environment where multiple groups
compete to coerce Israeli policies, demonstrating organizational control by
freezing the use of a particular tactic, which may be the most effective (and,
by extension, the most detrimental to Israeli interests), seems like a
reasonably attractive strategy.
Finally, we observe that the second spike of non-lethal,
non-suicide attacks, in mid-2005 was largely in response to Israel’s planned
evacuation of 25 settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. Hamas launched a large
number of mortar and Qassam rocket attacks at about half of these settlements,
as well as at a few that were not being evacuated, but largely inaccurately. In
light of our previous discussion, this behavior appears to be largely symbolic
– again demonstrating Hamas’s military strength, but not in a way that would
stimulate a vigorous response from Israel, or halt the pull out.
Substitution and competition in terrorism
In the preceding sections, we gave several
empirical examples from the Israel-Palestine conflict to illustrate the idea
that the conventional notions of strategic substitution in terrorism (Enders
and Sandler 2004), which locate actions by the state as the central driving
force, is an insufficient explanation of the full strategic calculus of
terrorism. In particular, the conventional theory ignores the internal dynamics
of the Palestinian side. If these findings can be generalized, then we expect
to observe qualitatively similar behavior in other regional conflicts with a
heterogeneous mixture of actors, to the extent that the specific political
context and phase of the conflict allows. To make our findings more generally
applicable, we now extrapolate our analysis of the Israel-Palestine conflict
into a set of stylized conjectures about the features that we expect will be
influential in the resort to terrorism, and the character of violence, for
conflicts with multiple non-state actors. Here, we provide brief qualitative
evaluation of these general principles, and leave their more systematic or
quantitative evaluation for the future.
First, we should consider whether relations between actors
within each side of the conflict are primarily competitive, or cooperative. In
the former case, a resort to terrorism may be more likely as less extreme
groups face competition from more extreme factions over scarce resources such
as public support, recruits, financing, media attention, etc. Likewise, a
competitive atmosphere may make negotiations between key antagonists difficult,
as marginal groups on either side can undermine these actions through violence
(a la the “spoiler” effect of Kydd and Walter).
An important extension of this observation is that the
cohesion within groups may also be vitally important. That is, if the internal
factions of a group are cooperative, with nonconformists or extremists being
contained or controlled, political negotiations are less likely to be derailed.
On the other hand, when internal dissent dominates, marginalized factions can
play the spoiler to political negotiations by the larger organization. For
instance, in Northern Ireland, talks between British authorities, Unionists,
and Sinn Fein may have been undermined on numerous occasions because of the
actions of IRA members who saw Sinn Fein’s participation in politics as an
illegitimate extension of the Republican cause. In the Israel-Palestine
conflict, Hamas’s ability to control its internal factions may have contributed
to its electoral success. Whether Hamas can be a reliable negotiator for the
Palestinian people, however, likely depends on the behavior of other groups,
such as Fatah, PLFP and PIJ, who could play spoiler to Hamas’s efforts.
Second, we should consider whether the political process
engages or marginalizes the interests of significant extremist factions. That
is, marginalizing such groups may provide them with an incentive to demonstrate
their importance, and thus tacitly encourage them to employ violence. By
contrast, cases where extremists are engaged in conventional and non-violent
political processes— e.g., perhaps through elections—may reduce violence by
providing groups with an incentive to demonstrate their ability to control
violence.
However, for some groups, engagement in politics indicates
a level of unacceptable acquiescence, or assent to the very system they
currently oppose. These groups remain outside of the main political arena, and
may see violence as their only tactical option to exert the degree of influence
they desire. Although our study focuses on politically engaged violent groups,
the significance of political involvement should not be overlooked. Groups that
are engaged in the political process during a conflict may demonstrate very
different characteristics than those that choose to remain outside the
political arena. In Hamas’s case, its behavior prior to 2005 is similar to a
violent but marginalized political group, while its behavior since engaging in
the conventional electoral process is considerably more moderate. Similarly, in
the Irish conflict, attacks carried out after the IRA began pursuing its
“ballot paper in one hand and the armalite in the other” strategy—i.e., began
supporting Sinn Fein’s political role and a pan-nationalist alliance—have been
described as more specific and less destructive. For example, Moloney (2002)
notes that
The IRA’s military strategy had to
be tailored so that it would not offend the rest of nationalist Ireland. That
meant the IRA had to concentrate on hitting targets in England and military
targets in the North while avoiding civilian casualties of any sort in Ireland.
Third, we conjecture that the degree of alignment between
public opinion and the ideology of the group(s) is inversely related to the
frequency and severity of attacks. That is, when a group becomes accepted as
representatives for a large number of constituents, it also has a greater
incentive to engage in policing activity to prevent violent attacks that may
stimulate counterproductive or overly harsh responses from the other side.
Furthermore, because such groups are sensitive to public opinion, they will
likely be more cautious in attacking targets that are considered illegitimate
among potential or existing supporters.
Fourth, strategic innovation in terrorism may be partly due
to competition with or imitation of other successful terrorist organizations.
From this perspective, Fatah’s adoption of Hamas’s signature strategy in the
wake of its declining public standing is likely an example of precisely this
competition-induced innovation. Imitation is not limited to groups located in
the same theatre; rather groups may look to actors in other conflicts for
inspiration, e.g., the IRA campaign against the British inspired Jewish
settlers in Palestine to adopt similar tactics against the British, and the
Irish Republican prisoners in the Long Kesh prison during the early 1980s spent
at great deal of time learning and discussing the characteristics of other
revolutionary struggles (McKeown 2001). Similarly, the PFLP was initially
inspired by the ideas of guerrilla warfare popularized by Che Guevara, and, in
turn, their innovative use of aircraft hijacking in 1968 led to a surge of
subsequent hijackings, including many by groups not connected to the
Israel-Palestine conflict, such as Sikh separatists. Thus, strategic innovation
in one conflict may have a “non-local” effect on other conflicts, and it
remains an open question as to what kind of innovations are or are not most
likely to spread.
Finally, the severity of violent attacks, and likely also
their timing relative to political events, should be considered a component of
the strategic calculus of terrorism. Hamas’s shift to nonsevere, non-suicide
attacks prior to the 2006 elections represents both a tactical shift in the
type of violence, but also a shift in the deadliness of its attacks. Although
it is difficult to discern whether the change in severity and approach, or the
combination of both, has led to the effect that Hamas desired, Hamas could
likely have produced many more casualties over the same time period, if it had
wanted. Indeed, other groups such as ETA and the IRA have at times gone to
great lengths to reduce the number of casualties caused by their attacks. For
instance, on July 27th 2001, ETA called to warn Spanish authorities about a
bomb in the Malaga airport which certainly would have killed or injured many.
The attention that groups pay to this aspect of their attacks indicates that
the severity of attacks is a strategic consideration independent of their
incidence, and we would suggest that it is likely to be subject to many of the
factors we have introduced here.
Conclusions
At face value, the conventional theories of
the strategic calculus of terrorism – such as strategic substitution, Bloom’s
ideas about the political utility of suicide attacks to organizations, and the
conventional assumption that counterterrorism activities can only decrease the
likelihood of future attacks – seem entirely reasonable. However, they have
mainly been explored in relatively narrow contexts, and thus their generality
has not yet been established. The Israel-Palestine conflict, due to its long
and well documented history and, more importantly, relatively plentiful
empirical data, is thus a model conflict by which we can test hypotheses such
as these. That being said, we consider our findings here to be preliminary; a
comparative study that considers the statistics of many different conflicts
would likely settle many of these questions, and better identify the
circumstances under which these conventional theories apply. Still, our
analyses allow us to draw several cautionary conclusions.
First, the evidence supporting the conventional notion of
strategic substitution (Landes 1978; Enders and Sandler 1993, 2004) as an
explanation for changes in attack modes is not very strong in the
Israel-Palestine conflict – among the data studied here, the only place where
it seems a plausible explanation is in Israel’s efforts from late 2003 and
onward to reduce the number of suicide attacks by the Palestinian groups. From
this perspective, the conventional theory is surely incomplete, with the critical
missing piece being an explanation of when strategic substitution is a
reasonable hypothesis and when it is not. Our finding that Palestinian groups
behave in ways that are independent of Israel’s actions, and in particular that
they seem to be motivated at least as much by inter-group dynamics as by
Israel’s actions, suggests that the more general theory should likely account
for whether the internal dynamics of the conflict are competitive or
cooperative.
Second, we find that the conventional notion in
counterterrorism that increased countermeasures can only reduce the frequency
of future attacks (Sandler et al. 1983; Rosendorff and Sandler
2004) is flawed. As evidenced by the
tit-for-tat behavior of Palestinian groups using suicide attacks during the
Second Intifada (Figure 2a) some countermeasures can actually increase the
frequency of future attacks, perhaps by implicitly engaging the terrorist
organizations in a dominance competition. Thus, it seems that the choice of
which counterterrorism actions to take must be made carefully, so as not to
encourage such reciprocal behavior. Furthermore, less common approaches, such
as fostering a political path for violent organizations, may be highly
successful ways to reduce the frequency of suicide attacks, and perhaps even
other types of violence. Hamas’s behavior after the decision to hold
legislative elections in 2006, for instance, demonstrates that such non-violent
paths may be an effective means of tempering the character of violence in a
conflict. Hence, a more comprehensive approach to both active counterterrorism
and other strategies like political incorporation that accounts for the
internal dynamics influencing violent groups’ activities is needed.
Third, the evidence for Bloom’s (2004) notion that suicide
attacks serve to raise the public standing of the attacking group is marginal.
In the Israel-Palestine conflict, suicide attacks per se are sometimes associated with measurable improvements to a
group’s public standing (e.g., in the case of Fatah), but this is not the
typical case. For Hamas in the early 1990s, and for PFLP and PIJ during the
Second Intifada, the use of suicide attacks did not produce the predicted
gains. Thus, Bloom’s hypothesis is incomplete, and marginal groups may employ
suicide attacks for different reasons than larger and more established groups
like Fatah and, since 2000, Hamas.
Fourth, a competitive environment among terrorism-inclined
groups is a crucial factor in understanding, and likely forecasting, their
strategic behavior. For instance, a weakened mainstream group may adopt the
tendencies of more extremist but marginal groups, if it feels the public will
support them for it; a situation that seems to well describe Fatah’s response
to Hamas’s growing popularity (Figure 3a).
Finally, our findings highlight the importance of the
internal dynamics of the terrorism-inclined side of a conflict. For policy
makers, this point suggests that devising strategies to deal with one type of
attack may prove fruitless if the internal dynamics of the opposing side shift
for unanticipated reasons. But, without public support, terrorism-inclined
groups often cease to exist. Thus, ideal protective measures should not
aggravate existing internal tensions in a way that stimulates a productive
competition for public support.
In closing, we note that this study shows the utility in
stepping away from the model-centric perspective on terrorism to use a more
data-centric approach to learn about complex conflicts with multiple actors.
Although the specific political context and actors will undoubtedly vary across
conflicts, we believe it is possible to formulate organizing principles about the
dynamics of strategic substitution and competition in terrorism that can be
applied to other conflicts.
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[1] This tendency may be
partly due to the fact that much research on terrorism only provides highly
aggregated figures statistics, such as the number of “significant” events or
the number of deaths worldwide from terrorist attacks, as given for example in
the discontinued reports by the United States Department of State (2004).
[2] More generally, Lichbach
(1987) argues that repression can have ambiguous effects and lead to both
successful deterrence or escalation, depending on the specific context and
whether governments target nonviolent and violent activities, or provide other
accommodative responses.
[3] These groups drew
inspiration from the Irish Republican Army, and their strategies were in turn
emulated by others such as the National Organization of Cypriot Fighters
(EOKA).
[4] The Second Intifada, also
known as the al-Aqsa Intifada, followed in the wake of Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon’s controversial visit to the al-Aqsa mosque on the site of the
Dome of the Rock to assert Israeli control.
[5] The only study that we are
aware of examining the severity of attacks in the Israel-Palestine conflict is
Harrison (2006), but this considers factors associated with more or less severe
events (based on the assumption that terrorist groups always seek to maximize
lethality) rather than the strategic rationale of attacks.
[6] Since the initiation of
this project, the original MIPT database has become defunct, and the data are
no longer available online. Our understanding is that the MIPT data eventually
will be merged with the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) managed by the START
program, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence, at the
University of Maryland, College Park.
[7] There are several
area-specific data collections, including collections by B’tselem (www.btselem.org/English/)
and the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism at the
Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya (www.ict.org.il). We choose the
MIPT data set over these because using a global data source will allow future
research to more easily make comparisons between the Israel-Palestine conflict
and other conflicts using similar coding criteria.
[8] We will examine the named
organizations in the MPIT data as the key actors, and assume that actions
explicitly carried or acknowledged out by particular organizations can be
treated as planned or at least endorsed by a central elite or leadership.
Pedahzur and Perliger (2006) argue that many suicide attacks often are planned
by local activist, and that participation does not always follow clear
organizational lines. However, focusing only on acknowledged or claimed events
makes it less problematic to treat the organizations as individual actors. In
the analyses reported, we do not include attacks by the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade
(AAMB) as attacks by Fatah. The AAMB is often linked to Fatah, but is not
consistently endorsed by Fatah. Combining the AAMB and Fatah’s attacks,
however, does not notably alter the results reported here.
[9] The Jerusalem Media and
Communication Centre (2006) conducts similar polls. We find that an analysis of
the JMCC data yields results consistent with that of the PSR data.
[11]
We code actors in the Levant data by the following approach: We identify
PLO/Fatah by the actor codes
PSEGOVFTA, PALPLO, PSEGOV, PSEREBAAM, PSEELI, PSECOP (i.e.,
Palestininian government, PLO, Fatah, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigape, Palestinian
elites, and the Palestinian Police), while the events involving Hamas are
labelled PSEREBHMS
in the Levant data. The events recorded by KEDS will primarily reflect
the statements of acts of elites, rather than individual rank and file members,
but this is appropriate given our focus on organizations.
[12] For more information see
the Ministry’s anti-terror activity reports, accessed
October 31 2006, at http://tinyurl.com/qhalca.
[13] Throughout this paper, we
report two-tailed p-values
from a standard t-test
for the significance of the Pearson correlation r between series.
[14] For a more detailed
explanation of this pattern of reprisals in the Israeli-Palestine conflict, see
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3556809.stm.
Jaeger and Paserman (2008) find similar results, using different data on
terrorist events.
[15] Brym and Araj (2006) find
support for retribution from Israeli actions as a motive for suicide attacks,
based on data on assassinations of Palestinian insurgents.
[16] See The Independent, 4 March 1996, http://tinyurl.com/qezlfq and The New York Times, 5 March 1999, http://tinyurl.com/pcyvro.
[18] If we include al-Aqsa
attacks, the first attack would be the 19 Nov. 2001 Vadi Ara bombing as its
first foray into suicide attacks. However, this attack was condemned by the
Palestian authorities (see Chicago Tribune, 21 November 2001, http://tinyurl.com/on88eb),which
gives us reason to suspect that Fatah’s leadership did not approve. However,
our conclusions do not change if we use this earlier attack as the starting
point.
[19] A similar analysis using
Israeli election dates suggests that Palestinians’ violence is not
significantly driven by external politics, at least in this period.
[20] At the time of writing,
the last documented suicide attack by Hamas was on 18 January 2005, near the
Gush Katif settlement in the Gaza Strip (National Memorial Institute for the
Prevention of Terrorism 2006).
[21] In fact, at the time of
writing, since the mid-2005 spate of attacks, Hamas has not resorted to
concentrated nonsuicide attacks at any comparable level.
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