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Terrorist groups attack
civilians to coerce their governments into making policy concessions, but
does this strategy work?1 If target countries systematically resist rewarding
terrorism, the international community is armed with a powerful message to
deter groups from terrorizing civilians. The prevailing view within the ªeld of
political science, however, is that terrorism is an effective coercive strategy. The
implications of this perspective are grim; as target countries are routinely coerced
into making important strategic and ideological concessions to terrorists,
their victories will reinforce the strategic logic for groups to attack civilians,
spawning even more terrorist attacks.2
This pessimistic outlook is unwarranted; there has been scant empirical research
on whether terrorism is a winning coercive strategy, that is, whether
groups tend to exact policy concessions from governments by attacking their civilian populations. In the 1980s, Martha Crenshaw observed that "the outcomes
of campaigns of terrorism have been largely ignored," as "most analyses
have emphasized the causes and forms rather than the consequences of
terrorism."3 Ted Robert Gurr added that terrorism's policy effectiveness is "a
subject on which little national-level research has been done, systematically or
otherwise."4 This lacuna within terrorism studies is both a symptom and a
cause of the lack of data sets with coded information on the outcomes of terrorist
campaigns.5 Within the past several years, numerous scholars have purported
to show that terrorism is an effective coercive strategy, but their
research invariably rests on game-theoretic models, single case studies, or a
handful of well-known terrorist victories.6 To date, political scientists have neither
analyzed the outcomes of a large number of terrorist campaigns nor attempted
to specify the antecedent conditions for terrorism to work. In light of
its policy relevance, terrorism's record in coercing policy change requires further
empirical analysis.
