EconTech

I’ve had the opportunity to do some original research on terrorism and intra-national civil violence and its ‘root causes.’ While I was digging through newspapers, entering data into a spreadsheets, and reviewing the author’s chapters, I learned quite a bit. Namely, most of the common beliefs about terrorists are utterly unsubstantiated in any dataset you look at, however you look at it. Robert Pape at the University of Chicago has a number of papers and a book or two on the subject (no, I was not working with him) that do a great job of dispelling the myths with the same kind of data we were looking at. I continue to beg anyone reading to not form strong opinions on empirical subjects until they sit down with some models and some data and get a chance to see the relationships. Also, go into this with an open mind. You can be surprised to see what you will learn (and hopefully UNLEARN!).

Anyway, the model presented here looks interesting, but please don’t take it as gospel. One, I haven’t actually read the paper to see if it makes sense, so I would hate to make you believe that it does without knowing myself. 2) Looking over the paper, it doesn’t look like there has been substantial data driven work, just some minor statistical analysis. Suggestive, but far from strong evidence, and no where near conclusive.

Conciliation, Counterterrorism, and Patterns of Terrorist Violence

Governments make concessions to terrorists organizations. This often leads to an increase in the militancy of the terrorist organizations. So why do governments make concessions to terrorists organizations if it’s going to make the terrorist organizations more militant? Ethan Bueno de Mesquita of The Harris School at the University of Chicago uses a formal (mathematical) model to shed some insight to this puzzle (article here):

The model developed in this study yields three key results. First, it suggests an explanation of the observation that government concessions often lead to an increase in the militancy of terrorist organizations. Namely, concessions draw moderate terrorists away from the terrorist movement, leaving the organization in the control of extremists. Second, it provides an answer to the question of why governments make concessions in light of the increased militancy they engender. The government’s probability of succeeding in counterterrorism improves following concessions because of the help of former terrorists that directly improves counterterror and leads the government to invest more resources in its counterterror efforts. Thus terrorist conflicts in which concessions have been made are more violent but shorter. Third, it demonstrates how the ability of former terrorists to provide counterterror aid to the government can solve the credible commitment problem that governments face when offering concessions.