Looking for waves of terrorism

Terrorism and Political Violence

Volumn 21, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 28-41

  Rasler, Karen ^a   Thompson, William R ^a  

^a INDIANA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

ITERATE; Terrorism; Waves

Indexed keywords

EID: 61449165022     PISSN: 09546553     EISSN: 15561836     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09546550802544425     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the Pisa meeting of the European Consortium for Political Research, September, 2007. We thank our discussant there, Ekkart Zimmerman, and our anonymous reviewers for their comments.
2. A representative sampling would include Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999);
3. R.A. Hudson, Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why? The 1999 Government Report on Profiling Terrorists (Guilford: Lyons Press, 1999);
4. Walter Lacqueur, The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Aims of Mass Destruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999);
5. I.O. Lesser, Bruce Hoffman, John Arquilla, D.F. Ronfelt, M. Zanini, and B.M. Jenkins, Countering the New Terrorism (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 1999);
6. Robert J. Lifton, Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shirikyo, Apocalyptic Violence and the New Global Terrorism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999);
7. Martha Crenshaw, "Why America? The Globalization of Civil War," Current History 100 (December, 2001): 425-132;
8. M.B. Jenkins, "Terrorism and Beyond: A 21st Century Perspective," Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 24 (2001): 321-327;
9. Paul Kennedy, "Maintaining American Power," in Strobe Talbott and Nanda Chandra, eds., The Age of Terror (New York: Basic Books, 2001);
10. David Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror (New York: Random House, 2002);
11. Nadine Gurr and Benjamin Coleman, The New Face of Terrorism: Threats from Weapons of Mass Destruction (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2002);
12. Charles W. Kegley, The New Globed Terrorism: Characteristics, Causes, Controls (Upper Saddle Valley, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002);
13. Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003);
14. Russell D. Howard and Reid L. Sawyer, Terrorism and Counter terrorism: Understanding the New Security Environment: Readings and Interpretations (New York: McGraw-Hill/Dushkin, 2005);
15. Thomas R. Mackaitis, The "New" Terrorism: Myths and Reality (New York: Praeger, 2006);
16. and John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization (New York: Wiley, 2007).
17. There are at least four variably different arguments, three of which are keyed on the four-wave interpretation found in David C. Rapoport, "The Four Waves of Modern Terrorism," in Audrey K. Cronin and James M. Ludes, eds., Attacking Terrorism: Elements of a Grand Strategy (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004), 46-73.
18. William R. Thompson, "Emergent Violence, Global Wars, and Terrorism," in Tessaleno Devezas, ed., Kondratieff Waves, Warfare and World Security (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2006), 186-194 adds two earlier waves, pushing the sequence back to the Napoleonic Wars.
19. Mark Sedgwick, "Inspiration and the Origins of Global Wars of Terrorism," Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 30 (2007), 97-112 can be read as endorsing the two earlier waves loosely and inserting one between Rapoport's first and second wave, although his perspective stresses opportunities for on-the-job training of terrorists and major periods of global flux.
20. Albert J. Bergesen and Omar Lizardo, "International Terrorism and the World-System," Sociological Theory 22 (2004), 38-52 have a different approach altogether, emphasizing globalization, hegemonic decline, and imperial competition, but two of their waves correspond roughly to two of the waves found in the other three. Their third wave, associated with the period pre-ceding the Thirty Years War, suggests an even earlier manifestation than the ones claimed by Thompson and Sedgwick. That makes 8 possible waves, some interesting empirical pro-blems, including one centered on causality. Who is right? How many waves have there been? How does one evaluate wave claims encompassing some 350 or so years? For that matter, are there really waves of distinct activity-as opposed to short-lived concentrations of kindred activity? Assuming that there are waves, is it possible to differentiate the reasons for wave-like activity? Finally, what difference do waves of terrorism make?
21. Rapoport, "Four Waves" (see note 3 above).
22. Ami Pedahzur, William Eubank, and Leonard Weinberg, "The War on Terrorism and the Decline of Terrorist Group Formation: A Research Note," Terrorism and Political Violence 14 (2002): 141-147.
23. Walter Enders and Todd Sandier, "After 9/11: Is it All Different Now?" Journal of Conflict Resolution 49 (2005): 259-277.
24. Another study of interest is Chris Quillen's "A Historical Analysis of Mass Casualty Bombers," Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 25 (September, 2002), 279-292. Quillen, however, was reluctant to categorize bomber motivations and, therefore, does not speak directly to the question of varying group activity.
25. Thompson (see note 3 above) made use of the terrorism entries found in Cindy C. Combs and Martin Slann, Encyclopedia of Terrorism (New York: Facts on File, 2003).
26. ITERATE focuses on systematizing the who, what, where, and outcome of transnational terrorist events. Each event is specified according to date, location, nature of incident, and number of people killed and wounded. Based largely on Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) sources as described in Edward F. Mickolus, Todd Sandier, Jean M. Murdoch, and Peter Flem-ming, International Terrorism: Attributes of Terrorist Events, 1968-2004 (Dunn Loring, VA: Vin-yard Software, 2004), its main drawback is that it excludes events occurring within declared wars and military interventions, or against occupying military forces. Another drawback is manifested by the fact that ITERATE lists the New York and Washington D.C. 9/11 attacks as carried out by unknown attackers. Presumably, very early data codings are not updated when better information becomes available. In this case, however, we would have had to control for the impact of the 9/11 events for the purposes of our study. Given this drawback, we do not need to do so and our tests should consequently be seen as a conservative one. Any changes we find in the more recent years of our analysis will have a higher threshold to demonstrate.
27. Actually, there are 1485 coded "actors," but not all of them are groups. "Unidentified Moluccan rebels" for instance could be one coded party believed responsible for a terrorist event. A number are coded simply as unknown actors. We treat these unknowns as unidentified groups, thereby exaggerating our ultimate failure to find all of the group identities. Approximately 36% of the terrorist events are not identified with any group. For a complete list of the groups and their categorization, please e-mail William Thompson: wthompso@indiana.edu
28. The precise distinction between leftists and Marxists in the press and terrorism data bases is treacherous. We tried to distinguish between them but are most comfortable clustering them as a single group.
29. We recognize that some of the names are incomplete and could certainly be spelled differently. Terrorist groups share one characteristic with Chinese and Korean cultures. There are few family names in China and Korea, making it very difficult to design distinctive names. Terrorist groups restrict themselves to a few code words that are altered slightly in the order of presentation. It is possible to find different groups in different regions with identical names. Since the English order of the words in a name are not always the same as the order in names expressed originally in French, Spanish, Arabic and so forth, it is often difficult to trace group identities in virtual space. ITERATE provides some implicit assistance by listing the groups roughly according to the space in which they operate.
30. The number of religious groups suggests that the tendency to proliferate groups is not restricted to any specific type of group.
31. Yet keep in mind that if we had subtracted the events with no group identities at the outset, our 44% of groups identified accounted for 68% of the remainder of activity.
32. More correctly, we do not recognize too many temporal biases. Groups in the first four years in the series (1968-1971) are not well identified (the average is 30%). After 1971, the poorly identified years (less than 44%) occur in 1976, 1981, 1986, 1989, 1994, 1999, and 2004. While 1994 had 38% of the groups identified, 1993 was one of the better years with 60%) of the groups identified. 16. We are actually able to identify a few more groups than the 763 but none of the categories yield enough entries to pursue at this point in time. Nor are they all that directly pertinent to our present question. Short of joining a major power's intelligence agency, we doubt that many more groups are likely to be identified.
33. Enders and Sandier (see note 6 above), 263.
34. Enders and Sandler's (ibid.) study examined bombing and hostage-taking as proportions of total activity.
35. Rapoport (see note 3 above).
36. Just how old the heterogeneity pattern is cannot really be assessed with currently available data.
37. See Audrey K. Cronin, "How al-Qaida Ends: The Decline and Demise of Terrorist Groups," International Security 31 (2006): 7-48 for an inventory of reasons for the endings of terrorist movements.