Lecture Five - Is Terrorism Effective?

Lecture five - Is Terrorism Effective?

Hi class, and welcome to our lecture on whether terrorism is an effective approach for non-state militant groups that seek to coerce governments into making tangible political changes.

Essential Background

Alright, now, this lecture is going to be based on a study undertaken by Max Abrahms, who is one of the most prolific scholars in the debate over the effectiveness of terrorism. He sought to analyze whether nonstate militant groups are likely to be more successful if they pursue guerrilla warfare or terrorism to try to achieve their strategic objectives, which, as you'll no-doubt recall from one of our earlier lectures, are the goals that a militant group is trying to accomplish. These tend to be some sort of tangible change to the political status quo, like convincing a government to give up control over a piece of territory or change some of its foreign or domestic policies.

He agrees with the elements of the definition of terrorism that we discussed earlier in this module, which defined terrorism as "the use of random violence by nonstate actors against noncombatants for political purposes."

The most important element of this definition for this lecture is the word "noncombatants," which Abrahms equates with "civilians" or anyone who is not a member of a government security force or a government itself, such as a politician.

Therefore, he thinks that violence by nonstate militant groups that targets civilians should be considered terrorism whereas violence by militant groups that targets members of a government security force or a government itself should be considered guerrilla warfare. These are important terms to remember because I will use them quite often in this lecture.

Now, to try to determine whether militant groups are likely to be more successful if they pursue guerrilla warfare or terrorism to try to achieve their strategic objectives, Abrahms analyzed one hundred twenty-four violent campaigns waged by fifty-four militant groups. He defined a "campaign" as multiple attacks that killed at least one person from the target country for the stated purpose of exacting a political concession from the target country's government.

As could be expected, the number of campaigns is much larger than the number of militant groups because many of these groups have waged more than one campaign. For example, a group called Ansar al-Islam has waged two campaigns - one against the Government of Iraq to try to convince it to establish Sharia law in Iraq and one against the United States to try to convince it to remove its armed forces from Iraq.

Abrahms defined "guerrilla warfare" campaigns as ones where the group focused their attacks on the country's security forces. And he defined "terror" campaigns as ones where the group focused their attacks on civilians. And, since some campaigns mounted by militant groups have targeted and killed both civilians and members of security forces, he determined how to classify each campaign on the basis of which kind of person the group targeted most of the time.

So, for example, al-Qaeda's campaign to oust the United States military from Iraq is designated a "guerrilla" campaign because most of the Americans targeted were military personnel. On the other hand, al-Qaeda's campaign that culminated in multiple attacks on September eleventh, two thousand one, is designated a "terror" campaign because most of the Americans targeted were civilians.