ECONOMIC EXPLANATIONS OF TERRORISM
For many years, terrorism was studied primarily by historians, political scientists, and psychologists. These fields came with their own subject-matter biases and found their analyses proscribed by the methodological limits of their ontological character, but they provided the first wellspring of knowledge for the academic study of terrorism. Historians gave a full accounting of terrorism as a tactic—which, when combined within a strategic framework, could have the necessary operational tempo to change history, with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand being only one of many examples. Psychologists were the first to acknowledge that terrorists were not necessarily mentally deficient and that many terrorists throughout history seemed quite normal and stable. Political scientists, especially those studying comparative politics, looked for structural features that made all types of political violence, including terrorism, possible, whether this was weakness in government or the generation of grievances by capricious autocratic governments. More important, academia maintained the study of terrorism as something worth researching when most military studies focused on conventional conflict. In other words, academia has always been quite forceful in establishing that terrorism is something that can alter the world and should be studied.
Nonetheless, academic silos and the overarching character of the Cold War precluded a robust accounting of the phenomenon divorced from instinctual or moralized prejudgments. Even once the study of terrorism became more prevalent toward the end of the 1960s, the conventional wisdom emphasized irrationality, religiosity, and ideology to explain terrorism, with one infamous book in the 1980s arguing that all global terrorism was a conspiracy by the USSR to destabilize the West. This created a myopic understanding of terrorism and the danger it posed. Indeed, until 9/11, many individuals of the structural realist school of international relations, which analyze great power dynamics exclusively at the state level, tended to regard terrorism as a strategic nuisance that did not amount to a threat capable of changing the world, despite the historical record suggesting otherwise. Just like the organizational firewalls that precluded American intelligence agencies from cooperating with one another until the early 2000s, this balkanization of terrorism academically had a pernicious effect, as it prevented cross-pollination and the ability to innovate the field.
This started to change in the 1990s. Although quantitative and statistical research methods had been ubiquitous in certain social science disciplines since the early twentieth century, only in the early 1990s did scholars attempt to study terrorism from an empirical and quantitative perspective, beginning with Martha Crenshaw’s landmark research into when the use of terrorism becomes a logical choice by nonstate actors, challenging the status quo. An increasing number of social scientists soon realized that it was possible to study terrorist violence using statistical methods culled from the physical sciences. An increasing number of these scholars came from economics.
Economists specialize in understanding how people make decisions under conditions of scarcity. Normally understood to mean money and resources, economics is applicable to virtually any situation where decisions must be made involving trade-offs. Terrorist groups, like other violent actors, make trade-offs when it comes to strategies, tactics, targets, and resources. In addition, because such groups are organizations manned by normal people, individual motivators for violence are legion but generally follow a rational path.
Applying economics to terrorism has proven innovative and fruitful in a few key regards. First, the empirical research done by these scholars has helped disentangle Islam from the perspective as the main driver of terrorism. As discussed in other parts of this book, as far as indicators go, being Muslim is no more of an indicator that someone will become a terrorist than belonging to other religions. Besides the cases of Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese death cult behind the Tokyo sarin attacks, or the secular and atheistic Tamil Tigers, examples of other religious groups being led to violence are numerous. Whether it is American white nationalists deploying an overtly Christian rhetoric to justify racial violence or Jewish extremists opposed to a two-state solution in Israel, any religion or ideology that proffers simple solutions to complex problems is bound to provide sufficient justification for violence.
Second, using economics has divorced terrorism from normative and moral debates about the validity of its use as a tactic and has instead focused on its innate rationality. As Martha Crenshaw noted many years ago, given that terror groups must maintain an internal coherence through shared values, “terrorism is seen collectively as a logical means to advance desired ends.” From her analysis, it emerges that the use of targeted violence to inspire fear generally results when power disparity exists between a nonstate actor and a government, individuals have attempted various other approaches such as guerrilla-cum-military action or democratic activism, the group cannot attract sufficient followers to transform into a viable insurgency, and there is an opportunity to attack. If terrorism is thought of as a rational choice from a selection of bad options, it helps explain more broadly the structural factors at play for terrorism to be deemed a viable tactic and, more important, how to prevent them from occurring. Again, this further helps detangle terrorism from the association with purely Islamic causation and helps universalize the study to explain violence for all generations.
These two reasons are not the only value given by economists studying terrorism, but they certainly help push the field forward. This section therefore gives a nonexhaustive overview of how economics has influenced the modern study of terrorism. The purpose of this chapter is to provide analytical support toward the hypothesis guiding this book, largely that Islamic State has come to define the nature of terrorism for the foreseeable future. The optimistic component of this chapter is that terrorism is a tactic with vulnerabilities that can be acted upon, suggesting a path forward for countries experiencing protracted terror campaigns.
TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS AS INDUSTRIAL ACTIVITY
In the 1970s and 1980s, terrorists had a degree of romanticism akin to that of rock stars. With their balaclavas and their rebellious images, terrorists lived globe-trotter lifestyles, with many having unfettered access to drugs, alcohol, and sex. Certainly this has changed, especially with the rise of more religious and seemingly pious groups, but when individuals become professional terrorists, meaning they derive their livelihood from this trade, they still enjoy social benefits not available to normal folk. At the heart of this image is the conceit that an individual has the ability to foment change on a grand scale either through violence or by inspiring others to follow in his or her footsteps. The problem with this image is that it is false and impractical. Rarely do terror plots ever succeed without some sort of sustenance from a larger organization. The terrorists of the 1970s and 1980s often depended on external support, either through donations, through state support from countries like Iran or Libya, or via fund-raising activities, as was the case with the Irish Republican Army and the money collected from the Irish American community during the Troubles. In the case of lone wolves, without an extensive infrastructure for disseminating an ideology and tactical guidance, they would be even less successful.
For terrorism to be a viable tactic, there needs to be an industrial effort behind the planning, recruiting, training, procurement of supplies, and actual execution. This reality means that in many ways, groups like IS and AQ fall within the bounds of Ronald Coase’s theory of the firm. Coase’s theory, at its most basic level, argues that pricing in open markets rarely takes into account such transaction costs as information costs, trade, and enforcement of contracts that inflate the costs of trade. Coase argues that an entrepreneur who could organize a firm could reduce these costs. For example, in an open-market system, each transaction, whether in the form of directions or allocation of profits, would require many simple contracts that add a price in terms of time. By contrast, internalizing this mechanism allows firms to establish one-off complex managerial arrangements that reduce the necessary level of bargaining, thereby reducing the costs.
Terrorist organizations have an incentive for organizing along these lines for the reasons outlined above, with the added caveat that they manufacture political violence. This line of study has been useful in informing how terrorist organizations operate and what their weaknesses are, and it is best exemplified in the work of Jacob Shapiro of Princeton. Shapiro argues that unlike traditional firms, terrorists must contend with the fact that their business is not legally sanctioned. This adds an additional cost that normal firms do not have to worry about: the importance of secrecy as they move toward command and control, and various decisions taken by a group are often determined by the pressure they feel in both domains. If terrorists are violent ideologues bent on changing the world, when they organize into a group, they must have some strategic purpose and a tactical idea on how to accomplish this goal.
Shapiro takes this idea into a very practical domain. If a group’s ideology is to create carnage and remains indiscriminate in its targeting, then command and control matter little. The only thing that matters is slaughter. This is seen in cases when terrorist groups want to create bloodshed for the sake of bloodshed, as this damages a government’s legitimacy and the perspective that it can provide security. In contrast, if a group has a specific agenda for the policy changes it seeks, violence is modulated and requires greater coordination. Like all firms, the ability to choose targets and to advance a vision requires experience, talent, and learning. Leaders of terrorist groups are unlikely to contribute to plots directly, because they must live for another day and continue coordinating other similar attacks. They must therefore delegate this responsibility to foot soldiers, who may not be as talented or might have joined a violent group for the sake of committing violence, and lack perspective about committing too much violence. This, of course, means bureaucracy, which oftentimes means creating regular methods of dispatching orders through means that create extensive paper trails. Electronic communication, for example, is easily traceable, while orders via couriers might identify where a leader is hiding. Depending on the pressure leaders are facing, communication might falter, enervating its ability to control behavior of groups. Shapiro explains that this translates into tangible group behavior. If a group is treated as a unitary actor and counterterrorism policies focus exclusively on leadership, then lower-level personnel might find themselves unconstrained and act more violently. Of course, efforts to conceal behavior depend on whether terrorists have safe havens and the strength of the government they are fighting.
This also appears in the question of finance. Groups relying on secrecy must still fund plots, but the question becomes how you transmit money without exposing the makeup of an organization while assuring that the funds are used correctly. Normal firms use audits and the threat of legal sanctions to prevent fraud. Terrorist organizations can of course use violence to coerce behavior, but this would require a means of monitoring personnel more directly. This is not a luxury most terrorist groups have, and if foot soldiers and middle managers have an incentive to cheat, they most likely will. Evidence collected by the United States in areas controlled by al-Qaeda in Iraq during the surge support this conclusion. American soldiers found USB drives with Excel sheets documenting payments made by AQ to foot soldiers. Per Shapiro, the person crunching the numbers for AQ realized the organization was making payments to nonexistent soldiers and their families. This was only one among many documents recovered by coalition forces, which revealed the organization’s structure, reflecting the inherent risk of bureaucratization for organizations that require secrecy to survive.
The implications of this research are many when it comes to counterterrorism, but for the purpose of this book, they help in removing the mystical cloak that accompanies many terrorists. Rather than seemingly unified rational organizations capable of committing wanton acts of violence, these groups suffer from the same problems other human institutions experience. One of the most telling cases of this dilemma came in late 2014, when Islamic State found itself struggling in creating health policy in Mosul. Unlike its counterparts in Raqqa, IS leadership in Mosul found itself overwhelmed in trying to provide health care services to a city of nearly a million while also enacting the group’s vision. At this point, the United States and its allies had begun its bombing campaign, weakening communication networks between both cities and also limiting how effectively the group used its funds. With such a perilous circumstance, IS started suffering the challenge of governance while maintaining secrecy. Governing improperly would alienate the population and would turn them against it, but that would require more bureaucracy than it could manage.
WHY IS TERRORISM EFFECTIVE?: THE CLUB GOODS THEORY
Why do seemingly rational people join terrorist organizations? Because they feel they benefit from participation. That answer seems self-evident, but it is worth exploring. Joining groups like Islamic State or al-Qaeda involves the exchange of one’s autonomy for membership in a group. The profiles of terrorists outlined elsewhere in this book noted that terrorists, both contemporary and historical, have always shown a high degree of intelligence and normality from a psychological perspective. Yet as high-functioning individuals aware of perceived injustices in their home countries or places where they might have an emotional attachment, such as their heritage countries, they also often feel disgust toward the status quo. These ideas are likely shared by many people in society, but very few are willing to delve into them deeply or, more important, try to act upon them.
Ron Wintrobe has written on this subject, arguing that for many individuals, joining terrorist organizations is a way of finding the solidarity they felt missing within nonextremist groups. These groups might not only share the individual’s values, validating his or her beliefs, but also provide solutions. Using the concept of individual utility curves, Wintrobe theorizes that as individuals give up more of their autonomy in exchange for solidarity, they tend to align their beliefs even closer with the leaders of an organization. As time passes, the desire for more solidarity requires even more sacrifices to maintain allegiance with a group, encouraging the individual to act more extreme.
Building off this idea, Eli Berman and others have found that this type of sacrifice is critical in preventing defections, which enables deadlier attacks. When individuals join extremist organizations, the loss of autonomy usually involves some sort of sacrifice. The typical examples are religious groups that sanction behavior not seen as pious or that require some sort of bodily alteration to signal a person’s commitment to a cause, such as circumcision in Jewish communities. Berman gives the example of poor Afghans spending years studying at madrassas, learning skills that are not necessarily transferrable to higher-paying jobs but makes them attractive to the Taliban as recruits. Another illustrative case is Palestinians who go to jail for supporting Hamas. This type of sacrifice serves a few functions. One, it separates individuals from the mainstream society, making it harder for them to reintegrate or for society to accept them. Two, much like Wintrobe argues, these types of sacrifices also change a person’s utility function, bringing them closer in line with a terrorist organization’s vision. Three, it helps weed out individuals who are not as committed to the values of a group, bringing in recruits that are less likely to defect. According to Berman, it is this latter point that makes certain groups deadlier than others: preventing defections. People that defect not only threaten specific plots but might also reveal to the authorities the organizational structure of a terrorist group. Preventing this type of behavior is critical for the long-term success of groups like al-Qaeda and Islamic State.
Berman takes this a step further and argues that the most successful terrorist groups also provide benefits exclusively to its members. These can be social services, monetary payments, or guarantees that an organization will provide for a member’s family if they happen to die in combat. Examples of this type of behavior are rife throughout contemporary history. Jabhat al-Nusra and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula both engaged in this behavior to win over recruits in Syria and Yemen, respectively. The Taliban managed to take over large swaths of Afghanistan in part because of its ability to impose the rule of law and allow for markets to function. In all these cases, these groups demanded that individuals adhere to the group’s values to receive these benefits, further strengthening the bond of solidarity individuals feel.
Looking beyond individual rationality, when a person adopts an organization’s values, his or her worldview alters. Taking into account the club goods model for terrorism, what emerges is a rational explanation for the acts of terror but also for why suicide bombings seem rational. If terrorists tend to be more educated and psychologically normal, when they join an organization, they are aligning their moral system to that of a group, which from the outside seems abnormal. Once these values are completely internalized, terrorist behavior no longer takes on a selfish characteristic, especially if the group engages in social services to a community. Rather, terrorism becomes an altruistic action intended to benefit coconspirators or to advance a political cause the individual believes to be just. Therefore, it is more likely that individuals engage in suicide terrorism not because they believe they will be rewarded in the afterlife but because they feel their actions will benefit their compatriots, their friends, their nations, or their families.
TERRORISM AS THEATER AND THE MACRO/MICRO DIVIDE WITHIN CONFLICTS
There are two final ideas, not exclusive to economics, that are worth exploring for their explanatory and descriptive power in relation to modern political violence. First is the idea of terrorism as theater, a concept that dates back to the earliest terrorists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and their idea of propaganda of the deed. The second is the narrative divide between the macro and micro conflicts that arise in all political violence.
Early on in this book, it was noted that a universally accepted definition of terrorism was nearly impossible because of how contested the term is by both practitioners and scholars. Nonetheless, if one operates from the belief that terrorism is a violent tactic designed to inspire fear to effect political change, then terrorism depends on a broader audience for the ensuing fear to be able to change the political calculus of a society. Bruce Hoffman has contrasted the fear that terrorism inspires from that of a mugger. A mugger might threaten violence with a gun to compel a person to give up his or her wallet, but the threat is short term and directed exclusively at the individual being mugged. In contrast, the violence threatened by an act of terrorism has a larger audience in mind and involves a gripping spectacle, which keeps people watching and affects their own calculus.
There is an economic logic to this violence. As Tyler Cowen explains, spectacular acts like 9/11 not only inspire fear but serve as cultural touchstones that create a rally-around-the-flag effect that helps cement identities. Such overt violence, with its ability to shock, is demonstrative of a group’s ability and helps draw recruits and donations. Those wanting to become terrorists wish to be associated with the most effective and deadly terror groups, and these wishes create a sorting effect among terrorist organizations. More important, people supporting a terrorist group want to see more spectacular acts and are encouraged to donate money to see more such events. Terrorism as theater is then another way to argue that terrorist groups engage in image curation to help generate capital investment. Al-Qaeda, for example, became known for committing mass-casualty attacks with multiple targets across the world. Islamic State has yet to commit a plot on the scale of 9/11, but it has released dozens of videos depicting beheadings, crucifixions, mutilations, and other cruel punishments. More important, it declared the caliphate, which trumped many of AQ’s accomplishments. These are but different approaches to the same goal: inspiring would-be recruits and generating funding.
If terrorism as theater is a form of institutional branding, it only affects the behavior of a group if it is viewed as a monolith. For individuals joining terrorist groups, theatrics allow them to act with the legitimacy of a brand that comes with political underpinnings viewed as morally acceptable by a member’s community of origin. In this sense, understanding the macro and micro narrative divide elucidates other more nuanced reasons for why people become terrorists.
Throughout history, chroniclers of violence have noted that there is often an overarching theme that explains conflict, but at the more localized level, this is more often a pretext for taking up arms rather than the primary cause. When war breaks out, the general atmosphere of organized chaos makes behavior like settling scores, seeking revenge, and handling other kinds of personal disputes permissible, as long as they are couched in terms that are politically palatable to a broader community. David Kilcullen notes that in contemporary conflicts, the definition of what constitutes a member of the Taliban shifts routinely as villages and tribes change their allegiance depending on what benefit they might obtain. Similarly, Stathis Kalyvas has documented hundreds of examples of this phenomenon from conflicts as diverse as the American and Spanish Civil Wars and various insurgencies.
This happens frequently with terrorists. Fernando Reinares, in his seminal study on the 2004 Madrid train bombings, notes that al-Qaeda used Spain’s involvement in the Iraq War as a moral justification for the attacks. In reality, though, the plot was first conceived in the weeks following 9/11 by members of Spain’s al-Qaeda cell for reasons unrelated to Iraq. Shortly after the attacks in New York and Washington, Spanish authorities discovered that the AQ cell in Madrid had collaborated with the Hamburg network that crashed the airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Cognizant of the severity of these revelations, they apprehended most of the members of this cell, seeking to dismantle it. Spanish authorities failed to arrest all the members, though. One in particular managed to flee to Pakistan and began plotting the attacks in December 2001 as an act of revenge against Spanish society. Afterward, this individual, Amer Azizi, traveled to the headquarters of al-Qaeda’s central command and convinced the group’s leadership to support his plans. By 2003, with the war in Iraq ongoing, the impending attack was incorporated into AQ’s global strategy and messaging, giving the eventual attack a political and moral legitimacy normally not afforded to acts committed solely because of vengeance. When the attack occurred in March 2004, it coincided with the country’s elections and helped tip the vote toward the leftist socialist party, leading to Spain’s withdrawal from Iraq a few weeks later. In the popular discourse, the attacks were a direct reaction to Spain’s involvement in the war, but rarely are the private motivations of the attackers discussed.
This phenomenon holds true in virtually all locations where terrorism is present. In Afghanistan, Libya, and Yemen, individuals and groups strategically align themselves with terrorist groups, adopting their messaging and cause, both to receive support and to justify their violence. Of course, this violence might be motivated for reasons as simple as access to resources or drunken disputes that escalated into blood feuds. Lone-wolf terrorists also exhibit the same behavior. When these individuals commit attacks, even if they have never interacted with members of a large organization, they often seek to align their violence with the political messaging of groups and movements like AQ, IS, or the alt-right because of the moral cover it provides. The 2016 Orlando nightclub shooter showcased this behavior, attempting to align his own unstable behavior with the seemingly superior motives presented by IS.
The four ideas discussed in this section barely scratch the surface of the contribution of economics to the study of terrorism, but they give a foundation for understanding terrorism as a phenomenon divorced from religion and the mistaken notion of irrationality. Throughout this book, it has been argued that terrorism is a strategic activity committed by weaker nonstate actors to change the world. Oftentimes, this is lost in discussion, as people focus on its outcomes—death and fear—and never consider the thought process behind it. While it is easy to treat it as a black box activity and focus only on the results, doing so makes terrorists seem preternaturally evil, when in reality they are as human as anyone else. This might be unsettling, but returning them to a human-centric perspective shows how constrained and limited they are.
As such, if economics is the study of decision-making under conditions of scarcity, then its theories are applicable to terrorists, as they must also react and respond to limitations. Consider IS. The reason it so befuddles and induces fear is because of how industriously it kills and turns those deaths into propaganda consumed by viewers across the globe. The segmentation that occurs at every level of the group—from a leadership that gives strategic guidance, to organizational branches charged with administering social services and training recruits, to the creation of middle managers to regulate a bureaucracy—underpinned its ability to assert that it was creating a state. This, however, occurred when the Iraqi and Syrian governments were weak, giving the group freedom to build and organize. Since their activities are not protected by the rule of law and are not something desired by most people, as soon as a competent government could pressure it, the organization began falling apart, and with it vanished the notions of creating a state.
Its comparative advantage right now, relative to rival groups, is that it has an efficient public relations machine that has helped maintain its brand even as it loses territory in various theaters. In the meantime, it has lost most of the middle managers that helped it assert control in Iraq and Syria, and it has lost the thousands of troops necessary for implementing its policies. It has certainly tried rebuilding its cadres, but these individuals lack the experience of the early cohorts, who cut their teeth fighting the American-led coalition during the Iraq War and later when IS stormed across northern Iraq. Its legitimacy still depends on the creation and maintenance of the caliphate, yet it must seek to do this even as its ability to provide social services diminishes, and even as its propaganda increasingly fails to match reality. If terrorism is theater, then IS is being exposed as wanting by the Iraqi military and its foreign supporters, thus changing the calculus for would-be recruits and for donors watching from abroad. Indeed, with a resurgent al-Qaeda slowly winning over fighters and providing social services in various continents, the next wave of jihadists will have more market options for its violence.
It is important to remember, however, that this is only one narrative about IS. It still remains quite influential with its base and the lone wolves in Europe who consume its propaganda. Even within individual theaters, there are variations of IS that affect its behavior. In Syria, it is both part of the rebel groups fighting Assad and the dominant power in the city of Raqqa. Elsewhere, IS fights AQ for supremacy as the leading jihadist group in Yemen and Afghanistan, but finds itself collaborating with AQ in Libya in a nationalist struggle cloaked in the language of religion. In fact, among those using its brand are thrill-seekers, formal criminals seeking redemption through jihad, tribal leaders wishing to advance the interests of their people, cause-fighters seeking access to arms, and people drawn to violence by circumstance and not by choice.
This is to say, terrorism is a much more complex and fraught subject than popularly thought. At the same time, it is a form of political violence constrained by human rules, making terrorists just as fallible as regular people. While this is not to underestimate the lethality of terrorists, it also provides an alternative paradigm for understanding organizations like AQ, IS, or any other violent group.