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Terrorist Factions

Integrated United States Security Database (IUSSD): Data on the Terrorist Attacks in the United States Homeland, 1970 to 2011

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About This Report and the Global Terrorism Database

The authors of this report are Gary LaFree (START Director, UMD), Laura Dugan (START Associate, UMD), Erin Miller (GTD Project Manager). Questions about this report should be directed to Gary LaFree (garylafree@gmail.com).

The initial collection of data for the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) data was carried out by the Pinkerton Global Intelligence Services (PGIS) between 1970 and 1997 and was donated to the University of Maryland in 2001. Digitizing and validating the original GTD data from 1970 to 1997 was funded by a grant from the National Institute of Justice in 2004 (PIs Gary LaFree and Laura Dugan; grant number: NIJ2002-DT-CX-0001) and thereafter in 2005 as part of the START Center of Excellence by the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate (DHS S&T), Office of University Programs (PI Gary LaFree; grant numbers N00140510629 and 2008-ST-061-ST0004). Data collection funding for GTD from 1998 to 2007 was supplied by the DHS S&T Human Factors/Behavioral Sciences

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The Changing Nature of State Sponsorship of Terrorism

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The U.S. approach toward state sponsorship of terrorism rests on a flawed understanding of the problem and an even more flawed policy response. The U.S. Department of State’s current formal list of state sponsors includes Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria. But Cuba and North Korea have done almost nothing in this area in recent years, and Sudan has changed its ways enough that elsewhere the Bush administration credits Sudan as a “strong partner in the War on Terror.” Of those on the list, only Syria and Iran remain problems, and in both cases their involvement in traditional international terrorism is down considerably from their peaks in the 1980s. What seems like a brilliant policy success, however, is really an artifact of bad list management, because much of the problem of state sponsorship today involves countries that are not on the list at all. Pakistan has long aided a range of terrorist groups fighting against India in Kashmir and

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Terrorist Factions

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ABSTRACT

I study how a variety of structural and strategic factors affect terrorist mobilization, the likelihood of a splinter faction forming, and the positions adopted by terrorist leaders. The factors considered include the state of the economy, the viability of institutions for the nonviolent expression of grievance, the ability of the factional leaders to provide nonideological benefits, and the risks associated with splintering. The model highlights that, for strategic reasons, changes in the structural environment often entail trade-offs between decreasing terrorist mobilization and increasing extremism. For instance, strengthening the economy or institutions for the nonviolent expression of grievance is found to decrease terrorist mobilization, increase the extremism of terrorist factions, and decrease the likelihood of a splinter faction forming. These results suggest competing micro-level effects of such changes on the expected level of violence that, because they are offsetting, might not be observed in macro-level data analyses, which have been the mainstay of empirical studies of terrorism.

Republican militants in Northern Ireland have experienced a variety of splinterings. In the late 1960s, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) split from the Original IRA...

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