Rooted in poverty?: Terrorism, poor economic development, and social cleavages

Terrorism and Political Violence

Volumn 18, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 159-177

  Piazza, James A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHARLOTTE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 32144459975     PISSN: 09546553     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/095465590944578     Document Type: Article

References (72)

1. The author would like to acknowledge the work of Amy R. Hobbs, who served as research assistant to the project.
2. "Press Release GA/9971: Terrorism Must Be Addressed in Parallel with Poverty, Underdevelopment and Inequality, General Assembly is Told," United Nations News Service, November 2001.
3. Teresa Watanabe, "Clinton Says U.S. Must Give More to End Terrorism," Los Angeles Times, 15 January 2002.
4. Harry Kreisler, "The World Bank and Private Sector Development: A Conversation with Nemat Shafik," Conversations with History Series (2001), Institute of International Studies, U.C. Berkeley, 13 November 2001.
5. Janet L. Jai, "Getting at the Roots of Terrorism," Christian Science Monitor, 10 December 2001.
6. Paul Blustein, "Bush Seeks Foreign Aid Boost; Plan Counters Overseas Critics," Washington Post, 15 March 2002, p. A10.
7. This is the timeframe for the main statistical analysis in the paper.
8. Source: U.S. State Department, Patterns of Global Terrorism (Washington, D.C.: Office of Counterterrorism).
9. The figures for Israel-Palestine are aggregate measures of terrorist activity and the socioeconomic measurements are combinations of population-weighted figures for per capita GDP and HDI scores. In the larger study, Israel and the Palestinian Occupied Territories are treated as one unit.
10. Alan B. Krueger and Jitka Maleckova, "Does Poverty Cause Terrorism?: The Economics and the Education of Suicide Bombrs," The New Republic, 24 June 2002.
11. M. I. Lichbach, "An Evaluation of "Does Inequality Breed Political Conflict?' Studies," World Politics 41 (July 1989): 431-470.
12. See, for example, Ekkart Zimmerman, Political Violence, Crises, and Revolution: Theories and Research (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1983)
13. and William J. Linehan, "Political Instability and Economic Inequality: Some Conceptual Clarifications," Journal of Peace Science 4 (Spring 1980): 134-139.
14. Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 3-4.
15. Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968).
16. Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978).
17. Edward N. Muller and Mitchell A. Seligson, "Inequality and Insurgency," Journal of Conflict Resolution 34, no. 4 (1990): 425-452.
18. Bruce London and Thomas D. Robinson, "The Effects of International Dependence on Income Inequality and Political Violence," American Sociological Review 54, no. 2 (April 1989): 305-308.
19. James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, "Ethnicity, Insurgency and Civil War," American Political Science Review 97, no. 1 (2003): 75-90.
20. Hassan M. Nejad, "Inequality in an Urban Revolution: The Case of Iran," in Manus I. Midlarsky, ed., Inequality and Contemporary Revolutions (Denver, CO: Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver, 1986).
21. Clive Kileff and Leland W. Robinson, "The Elitist Thesis and the Rhodesian Revolution: Implications for South Africa," in Manus I. Midlarsky, ed. (see note 19 above).
22. Russell R. Hamby, "Coffee and Conflict in Colombia: Spatial, Temporal and Class Patterns of 'La Violencia'," in Manus I. Midlarsky, ed. (see note 19 above).
23. Manus I. Midlarsky, "Rulers and Ruled: Patterned Inequality and the Onset of Mass Political Violence," American Political Science Review 82, no. 2 (June 1988): 491-509.
24. Morehead Kennedy, "The 21st Century Conditions Likely to Inspire Terrorism," in Harvey Kushner, ed., The Future of Terrorism: Violence in the New Millennium (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998).
25. Douglas A. Hibbs, Mass Political Violence (New York: Wiley, 1973).
26. Austin T. Turk, "Social Dynamics of Terrorism," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 463 (September 1982): 119-128.
27. Lawrence C. Hamilton and James D. Hamilton, "Dynamics of Terrorism," International Studies Quarterly 27, no. 1 (March 1983): 39-54.
28. Edward N. Muller and Erich Weede, "Cross-National Variation in Political Violence: A Rational Action Approach," Journal of Conflict Resolution 34, no. 4 (1990): 624-651.
29. Kurt Schock, "A Conjunctural Model of Political Conflict: The Impact of Political Opportunities on the Relationship Between Economic Inequality and Violent Political Conflict," Journal of Conflict Resolution 40, no. 1 (March 1996): 98-133.
30. Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, "Greed and Grievance in Civil War," Working Papers on Social Development (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2000).
31. Harold R. Kerbo, "Foreign Involvement in the Preconditions for Political Violence: The World System and the Case of Chile," Journal of Conflict Resolution 22, no. 3 (1978): 363-391.
32. Stephen M. Walt, "International Relations: One World, Many Theories," Foreign Policy (Spring 1998).
33. Robert I. Rotberg, "Structural Causes of Oppositional Political Terrorism: Towards a Causal Model," Journal of Peace Research 30, no. 3 (1993): 317-329.
34. The unusually high levels of political turbulence in the 1970s are well documented empirically, and the exceptionalism of the 1970s applies to phenomena beyond terrorism. Consider the dramatic increase in labor conflict during the 1970s. See, for example, Michael Shalev, "The Resurgence of Labor Quiescence," in Mario Regini, ed., The Future of Labor Movements (London: Sage, 1992), 102-132.
35. Muller and Weede (see note 27 above); Schock (see note 28 above).
36. Seymour Martin Lipset, "The Social Requisites of Democracy Revisited," American Sociological Review 59 (1994): 1-22;
37. Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, Party Systems and Voter Alignments (New York: Free Press, 1967);
38. Joseph LaPalombara and Myron Weiner, Political Parties and Political Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966).
39. See Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957).
40. The philosophical hegemony of the social cleavage theorists' preferences for the two-party system of the United States or Great Britain as a more stable alternative to the multiparty system of France and Italy was such that the American Political Science Association formally endorsed it in 1950. See American Political Science Association, "Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System," American Political Science Review 44, no. 3 (1950).
41. Robert W. Jackman and Karin Volpert, "Conditions Favouring Parties of the Extreme Right in Western Europe," British Journal of Political Science 26, no. 4 (1996): 501-521;
42. Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982);
43. Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976);
44. Leon Epstein, Political Parties in Western Democracies (New York: Prager, 1967).
45. Note that the definition of "noncombatant" used by the U.S. Department of State includes, in addition to civilians, military personnel who are either not armed or not on duty at the time of the incident.
46. The author originally constructed two datasets, one allocating terrorist incidents and casualties to the country where the event(s) occurred or originated and another taking into account the national origins of the perpetrators (e.g., a terrorist attack by Turks living in Germany was registered as an incident in Germany in one set and Turkey in another set) and found no significant statistical effects on the results. This is primarily due to the small number of these sorts of events in the total dataset.
47. Therefore, the kidnapping of thirty people in Angola by UNITA rebels in 1989 would be registered as thirty victims, one incident for Angola in 1989.
48. See the United Nations Development Program, "Technical Note 1: Calculating the Human Development Indices," Human Development Report (2001).
49. Adam Przeworski, Michael E. Alvarez, José Antonio Cheibub, and Fernando Limongi, Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950-1990 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
50. Hibbs (see note 24 above).
51. Gurr (see note 13 above).
52. Fearon and Laitin (see note 18 above).
53. Huntington (see note 14 above).
54. Fearon and Laitin (see note 18 above).
55. Donald L. Horrowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985).
56. Freedom House has conducted annual surveys of political freedom and civil liberties in 192 countries and eighteen disputed territories since 1955 and produced a rating between one and seven and an overall designation of "free," "partly free," and "not free" for each country or territory. A full description of the methodology used by Freedom House in conducting its surveys and coding the results can be found at www.freedomhouse.org/research/freeworld/2003/methodology.htm.
57. A "bureaucracy" is a nondemocratic state characterized formally as a republic where one party dominates all power without legal competitors. An "autocracy" is a nondemocratic state where the leadership does not use a party system to monopolize political power. For full empirical definitions of "bureaucracy" and "autocracy," see Przeworski et al. (note 42 above).
58. Fearon and Laitin (see note 18 above).
59. Gurr (see note 13 above).
60. Downs (see note 36 above).
61. G. Bingham Powell, "Political Cleavage Structure, Cross-Pressure Processes and Partisanship," American Journal of Political Science 20 (1976): 1-24; Epstein (see note 37 above);
62. Gabriel Almond and G. Bingham Powell, Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1966);
63. Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (New York: Doubleday, 1960);
64. David Truman, The Governmental Process (New York: Knopf, 1951).
65. Olson (see note 37 above). Note that there are some detractors to the aggregative majority party system preference. Arend Lijphart, noting the instability of the two-party system in Austria immediately following World War II, argues that deeply divided societies could in principle benefit from multipartism because representation of interests would be wider and elites could be empowered to better represent their constitutents' interests. He also notes that if a country is already homogeneous and has little social tension, any party system could be stable. See Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977).
66. Huntington (see note 14 above).
67. Sartori (see note 37 above).
68. Jackman and Volpert (see note 37 above).
69. Source for all statistics: CIA World Factbook (www.cia.gov/cia/ publications/factbook/).
70. Source for all statistics: "Elections Around the World" (www.electionworld.com).
71. "Elections Around the World" www.electionworld.com, Ibid.
72. See Pradeep K. Chhibber, Democracy Without Associations: Transformation of the Party System and Social Cleavages in India (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999).