KSG associate professor researches freedom-terrorism link
Harvard News Office
A John F. Kennedy School of Government researcher has cast doubt on the widely held belief that terrorism stems from poverty, finding instead that terrorist violence is related to a nation's level of political freedom.
Associate Professor of Public Policy Alberto Abadie examined data on terrorism and variables such as wealth, political freedom, geography, and ethnic fractionalization for nations that have been targets of terrorist attacks.
Abadie, whose work was published in the Kennedy School's Faculty Research Working Paper Series, included both acts of international and domestic terrorism in his analysis.
Though after the 9/11 attacks most of the work in this area has focused on international terrorism, Abadie said terrorism originating within the country where the attacks occur actually makes up the bulk of terrorist acts each year. According to statistics from the MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base for 2003, which Abadie cites in his analysis, there were 1,536 reports of domestic terrorism worldwide, compared with just 240 incidents of international terrorism.
Before analyzing the data, Abadie believed it was a reasonable assumption that terrorism has its roots in poverty, especially since studies have linked civil war to economic factors. However, once the data was corrected for the influence of other factors studied, Abadie said he found no significant relationship between a nation's wealth and the level of terrorism it experiences.
"In the past, we heard people refer to the strong link between terrorism and poverty, but in fact when you look at the data, it's not there. This is true not only for events of international terrorism, as previous studies have shown, but perhaps more surprisingly also for the overall level of terrorism, both of domestic and of foreign origin," Abadie said.
Instead, Abadie detected a peculiar relationship between the levels of political freedom a nation affords and the severity of terrorism. Though terrorism declined among nations with high levels of political freedom, it was the intermediate nations that seemed most vulnerable.
Like those with much political freedom, nations at the other extreme - with tightly controlled autocratic governments - also experienced low levels of terrorism.
Though his study didn't explore the reasons behind the trends he researched, Abadie said it could be that autocratic nations' tight control and repressive practices keep terrorist activities in check, while nations making the transition to more open, democratic governments - such as currently taking place in Iraq and Russia - may be politically unstable, which makes them more vulnerable.
"When you go from an autocratic regime and make the transition to democracy, you may expect a temporary increase in terrorism," Abadie said.
Abadie's study also found a strong connection in the data between terrorism and geographic factors, such as elevation or tropical weather.
"Failure to eradicate terrorism in some areas of the world has often been attributed to geographic barriers, like mountainous terrain in Afghanistan or tropical jungle in Colombia. This study provides empirical evidence of the link between terrorism and geography," Abadie said.
In Abadie's opinion, the connection between geography and terrorism is hardly surprising.
"Areas of difficult access offer safe haven to terrorist groups, facilitate training, and provide funding through other illegal activities like the production and trafficking of cocaine and opiates," Abadie wrote in the paper.
A native of Spain's Basque region, Abadie said he has long been interested in terrorism and related issues. His past research has explored the effect of terrorism on economic activity, using the Basque country as a case study.
Abadie is turning his attention to the effect of terrorism on international capital flows. Some analysts have argued that terrorist attacks wouldn't have much of an impact on the economy, since unlike a war's widespread damage, the damage from terrorist attacks tends to be relatively small or confined to a small area.
In an era of open international capital markets, however, Abadie said terrorism may have a greater chilling effect than previously thought, since even a low risk of damage from a terrorist attack may be enough to send investors looking elsewhere.
http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/11.04/05-terror.html
1 comment:
Scholars in political science have been saying for years that states undergoing transitions to democracy are the most likely to both use violence and be the target of violence. This fits pretty well with what we already know about political violence and institutions. Transition states are more likely to start an international conflict, more likely to use severe repression (the murder in the middle hypothesis), more likely to collapse into civil war, and more likely to be the targets of domestic terrorism. The reason behind this, which I am surprised was not addressed in this analysis, seems to be that the processes of moving from a strongly autocratic state to a more open political system is inherently destabilizing and unpredictable. Different groups within the state are jockeying for power, trying to define the rules as they go, and trying to lock in certain political or economic leverage. Jack Snyder has a really good book on this called From Voting to Violence (2000) in which he shows how electoral opening can lead to ethnic-nationalist conflicts.
This presents a lot of problems for policy makers who see democracy as the key to global peace and stability. Democracy can be pacifying, yes. In fact, in international relations the observation that democratic states almost never go to war with other democratic states (though they go to war a plenty with non-democracies) is about the closest thing we have to a "law". of international interaction. Democracy also has been shown to reduce risk of civil conflict, terrorism, state repression, etc. The problem is you have to traverse the sticky middle first. And this most often where states get bogged down. There are far more middling states now than in the past--strict autocracy is a thing of the past, and it has been replaced with the more volatile mixed regime or electoral autocracy. This one reason for the increase in terrorism and civil conflict post-Cold War. In part, the West's drive to democratize the world has contributed to this.
I am not at all saying that the West should not promote democracy. Indeed, it should. The problem is that what the West expects is for countries to move almost immediately from Saddam era Iraq to Sweden in a couple of years--it doesn't happen. The best case scenario is what happened in Eastern Europe, but that took a lot of effort and promises from the EU and a ton of money and oversight. Not to mention, in reality those states were starting from a different place. Communist regimes may not have been democratic, but they had highly evolved bureaucratic systems and institutions as well as a semblance of competitiveness--even if it was only within one party--that could help the transition. In part, they were already in the middle area and just needed to be moved over the hump. States that start from the ground floor, especially the poorest states, are likely to spend a long time meandering in between democracy and autocracy, which is likely to promote violence and instability. This should caution policy wonks that want to liberate the world and impose democracy. The instability created by this approach can be devastating.
Lastly, here is another piece that discusses the faulty logic that suggests democracy quashes terrorism:
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/
20050901faessay84506/f-gregory-gause-iii/
can-democracy-stop-terrorism.html
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