The quality of terrorist violence: Explaining the logic of terrorist target choice
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343319829799 |
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Research Articles |
The quality of terrorist violence: Explaining
the logic of terrorist target choice
Sara MT Polo
Department of Government, University of Essex
Abstract
Existing research on terrorism as a strategy has largely neglected the apparent differences in what groups target.
Whereas some organizations primarily target undefended civilians, others attack mainly official and hard targets. I
develop an explanation of terrorist groups’ relative target preferences based on how a group’s ties to its constituency
and specific government repressive strategies either constrain or incentivize terrorist attacks against soft civilian vs.
hard/official targets. Specific sources of support and the degree of out-group antagonism in their constituency shape
terrorist groups’ primary targeting strategy. While groups with transnational support are generally more likely to
target primarily undefended civilians, not all groups with local support are restrained. Groups with low out-group
antagonism and local civilian support incur high political costs for targeting civilians and focus primarily on official
targets. Instead, groups with domestic support but high out-group antagonism have mixed incentives. When facing
indiscriminate government repression these groups become more likely to target primarily undefended civilians,
because they can justify such a response to their audience, direct attacks against out-group civilians, and radicalize
local constituents. Indiscriminate repression, however, does not change the targeting strategy of groups who face high
political costs for attacking civilians. I examine the observable implications of the theory in a comparative analysis of
terrorist organizations (1995–2007) as well as an over-time analysis of repression and targeting in the Israeli–
Palestinian conflict (1987–2004), and find strong support for the theoretical argument.
Keywords
counterterrorism, popular support, substitution, targets, terrorism
Introduction
Whom do terrorists target? Popular accounts of terrorism
portray such violence as indiscriminate almost by defini-
tion. In practice, there is great variation in the targeting
decisions of groups that resort to terrorism. In the Phi-
lippines, between 1990 and 2007, the New People’s
Army (NPA) carried out thousands of terrorist attacks;
however, 73% of those attacks targeted government offi-
cials, police, and property, and only a minority targeted
undefended civilians.
1
In contrast, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’
Brigades, military wing of Fatah, primarily attacked soft
civilian targets (over 70% of attacks), and did so consis-
tently for nearly ten years. The NPA and Al-Aqsa have
secular ideologies, enjoy local support and territorial con-
trol, have a strong leadership, and do not have powerful
state sponsors or access to natural resources (Cunning-
ham, Gleditsch & Salehyan 2009). Existing studies
would therefore conclude that both these organizations
should limit terrorist violence against civilians (e.g. Asal
et al. 2009; Salehyan, Siroky & Wood 2014; Weinstein,
2007), but that is not the case. In absolute levels, both
organizations carried out a large number of attacks
against civilians. At the same time, Al-Aqsa almost
Corresponding author:
sara.polo@essex.ac.uk
1
I use the terms ‘undefended civilians’ and ‘soft civilian targets’
interchangeably to indicate civilian targets that do not benefit from
armed protection and are not associated with the government. Unless
specified otherwise, the source forallpercentagesistheGlobal
Terrorism Database.
Journal of Peace Research
2020, Vol. 57(2) 235–250
ªThe Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0022343319829799
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exclusively attacked soft civilian targets whereas the NPA
primarily focused on official targets.
These patterns are not unique. In the Syrian conflict,
between 2012 and 2015, all the main insurgent groups
carried out terror attacks. However, the targeting strate-
gies employed varied widely, with the Islamic State (IS)
being the most indiscriminate (over 75% of attacks
against undefended civilians) while the Syrian Islamist
Jabhat Fateh al-Sham targeted undefended civilians
about 40% of the time and the Free Syrian Army (FSA)
exhibited the greatest level of restraint, mainly attacking
government targets (81%).
What explains these differences in terrorist targeting
strategies? And when are undefended civilians more
likely to be targeted in terror attacks? The primary pur-
pose of this article is to answer these related questions
from an actor-level perspective.
Extant terrorism research has mainly focused on struc-
tural causes and determinants of attack frequency and
lethality. While providing substantial insights, this
approach cannot explain who is targeted in terrorist
attacks and why. These are important questions because
they tell us when specific targets are most at risk, and
thus help to improve counterterrorism efforts and miti-
gate the human costs of terrorism.
2
Of course, conflict
scholarship has analyzed attacks against civilians, but it
has typically looked at civilian targets in isolation, with-
out considering the choice of such targets in the context
of other available options (e.g. public officials, police,
and low-casualty targets such as property).
3
This exclu-
sive focus on soft civilian targets has several shortcom-
ings. First, it has little to say about more discriminate
terrorist strategies such as those of the NPA or FSA, and
whether different targets are substitutes or complements.
Second, it cannot distinguish between a high level of
terrorist violence overall (e.g. NPA) and violence target-
ing undefended civilians specifically (e.g. Al-Aqsa and
IS). In general, in the existing studies, attacks against
undefended civilians are rarely viewed as a cost-
effective strategy; rather, the attacks are seen from the
perspectives of ideological commitments (religion, in
particular), principal–agent problems, military control,
and the absence of feasible alternatives for weak groups
(e.g. Abrahms & Potter, 2015; Asal, Brown & Schulzke,
2015; Drake, 1998; Kalyvas, 2006; Polo & Gleditsch,
2016; Weinstein, 2007).
4
This study takes a different approach by focusing on
civilian targets as an endogenous choice of terrorism. It
argues that the choice between undefended civilians and
official targets reflects how terrorists strike the balance
between inflicting harm on the opponent and mobilizing
support for their cause. Terrorist attacks against unde-
fended civilians require fewer resources, are highly news-
worthy, and can effectively undermine government
control; at the same time they can be much more costly
than attacks on official targets in terms of loss of popular
support and legitimacy (Kalyvas, 2006; Abrahms, 2013).
However, I argue that these political costs are not uni-
form and vary significantly across militant organizations.
Whether attacking civilians is politically costly (or ben-
eficial) relative to official targets depends on three key
factors: the level of local support a group enjoys; the
existence of a strong in-group–out-group cleavage which
defines membership in terrorists’ local constituency; and
government repressive strategies.
The combination between terrorists’ reliance on
external vs. local support and the degree of antagonism
between terrorists’ local constituency and the general
population (i.e. the out-group) determines an organiza-
tion’s initial preference for undefended civilians or offi-
cial and low-casualty targets. Some groups have very
weak ties with local civilians because they mainly rely
on external sources of support. These groups are rela-
tively unconstrained by the risk of losing popular sup-
port and generally prefer to invest their resources in
attacking soft civilian targets. Groups that depend on
local support and have low out-group antagonism are
instead exposed to a high risk of popular backlash. These
groups favor restraint and choose to impose costs and
attract support through attacks on official and low-
casualty targets. Groups with local support but high
out-group antagonism are placed in between and face
competing incentives. Government indiscriminate
repression dynamically influences these groups’ targeting
strategies by mitigating their pre-existing constraints for
targeting civilians. Following indiscriminate repression,
groups that rely on local support and high out-group
antagonism are incentivized to retaliate and shift their
target preference toward soft civilian targets in the out-
group. In contrast, groups with local support and low
out-group antagonism are less responsive to repression
and choose to keep restraint in their targeting profile in
2
Brandt & Sandler (2010) and Santifort, Sandler & Brandt (2013)
analyze targeting patterns from a global perspective, but not the
determinants of targeting strategies at the organizational level.
3
See e.g. Asal et al. (2009); Salehyan, Siroky & Wood (2014);
Stanton (2013); Wood (2010).
4
Among the notable exceptions, see Stanton (2013).
236 journal of PEACE RESEARCH 57(2)
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