The Strategic Logic of Credit Claiming: A New Theory for Anonymous Terrorist Attacks (Forthcoming in Security Studies) (original) (raw)

The Strategic Logic of Credit Claiming: A New Theory for Anonymous Terrorist Attacks

In theory, terrorism is a political communication strategy for groups to convey their grievances and the costs of ignoring them. In practice, though, terrorist groups take responsibility for just a small portion of their attacks. Rather than getting credit for the violence, terrorist leaders generally deny their operatives committed it. This theoretical and empirical disconnect may explain why scholars have ignored the subject of unclaimed attacks despite the fact that they are the norm. With a mixed-methods research design, our study helps to fill this lacuna by proposing and testing a new theory to account for these so-called “anonymous” acts of violence.

Voice and silence: Why groups take credit for acts of terror

Journal of Peace Research, 2010

Terrorism is designed to draw attention to particular issues and causes. Yet, the incidence of credit-taking (announcing one’s responsibility for acts of terror) varies even though anonymity can undermine the clarity of the intended messages. This article offers an explanation of the variation in credit-taking that emphasizes how the competitive context in which groups operate shapes terrorists groups’ need to cultivate support for their activities. Increasing numbers of terrorist organizations make it difficult for the supporters of terrorism to reward the perpetrators of particular attacks with their backing. Since such support is critical to the proper functioning of terrorist organizations, groups use claims of responsibility to distinguish themselves from those that had no hand in the violence. Consequently, variation in the probability of credit-taking fluctuates as a function of the number of active terrorist groups in a given theater of operations. This argument is contraste...

I.Articles Say Terrorist, Think Insurgent: Labeling and Analyzing Contemporary Terrorist Actors

2014

Terrorist groups are commonly understood to be groups that carry out acts of terrorism, and their actions viewed as terrorist campaigns. Yet, recent events are a reminder that the activities of even the most violent terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda or the Islamic State extend beyond the use of terrorist tactics. These actors usually employ classic guerrilla tactics as well, and their overall strategy combines both violent and political means. Furthermore, these acts of political violence do not merely constitute isolated campaigns of terrorism, but are usually part of a broader conflict such as an insurgency or civil war. The purpose of the present article is twofold. The first is to offer some empirical evidence in support of our claim that most major contemporary terrorist groups also employ other, non-terrorist, modes of warfare, notably guerrilla tactics. In the second part, we offer our reflections of these findings for theory and policy. Our main recommendation is for governm...

The philosophy of terrorism: why blaming victims offers no justification for terrorist attacks

2015

Terrorist attacks are often justified by their perpetrators on the basis that victims are complicit in some policy or action which is worthy of being met with by violence. But how should we view such arguments from a philosophical perspective? Igor Primoratz writes that while terrorists are likely to portray their actions as a morally justified ‘armed struggle’, the indirect contribution of the victims’ acts to the contested policies, insufficiently voluntary character of these acts, and the disproportionate nature of the violence inflicted on victims ensures that we can reject these arguments and legitimately condemn such attacks as ‘terrorism’.

Do attributions of terrorism made by elites function politically?

The word ‘terrorism’ has now become part of the common everyday political discourse, in which the notion is treated and crafted in such a way that influences the development of the counter-terrorism legal framework and policies. This essay tries to provide an answer to the dilemma of how the phenomenon of terrorism should be conceived by presenting a general overview of the main theoretical platforms in the field of terrorism studies. To this end, the inclusion of two study cases is supposed to empirically demonstrate the strengths of one theoretical approach over the other. Specifically, the study cases are an analysis of the connection between terrorism acts and the way in which these were interpreted by political elites in Italy during the Cold War and in Spain in 2004. Hence, the main goal of this work is that of demonstrating the importance of thinking critically about the generally accepted knowledge on a specific subject, keeping in mind that the way we envision the world affects the world itself.

Say Terrorist, Think Insurgent: Labeling and Analyzing Contemporary Terrorist Actors

Perspectives on Terrorism, 2014

Terrorist groups are commonly understood to be groups that carry out acts of terrorism, and their actions viewed as terrorist campaigns. Yet, recent events are a reminder that the activities of even the most violent terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda or the Islamic State extend beyond the use of terrorist tactics. These actors usually employ classic guerrilla tactics as well, and their overall strategy combines both violent and political means. Furthermore, these acts of political violence do not merely constitute isolated campaigns of terrorism, but are usually part of a broader conflict such as an insurgency or civil war. The purpose of the present article is twofold. The first is to offer some empirical evidence in support of our claim that most major contemporary terrorist groups also employ other, non-terrorist, modes of warfare, notably guerrilla tactics. In the second part, we offer our reflections of these findings for theory and policy. Our main recommendation is for governments to adopt an approach that separates the official labeling of these groups from the analysis of their origins, conduct, and threat potential. While official policy statements might continue to label actors involved in terrorism as terrorist groups, we argue that the policy analysis informing these governments' pronouncements and decisions should adopt greater nuance by regarding most of these actors as insurgent groups. Such an approach can help policy analysts adopt and employ a broader array of intellectual tools to understand the complex nature of the threat posed by these groups, and arrive at more adequate, comprehensive, and longer-term solutions to the problems they pose.