Democracy, Foreign Policy, and Terrorism

Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2005

This article proposes a new explanation of the positive correlation between democracy and terrorism detected in many previous studies. It is shown that this might be accounted for by the fact that factional democracies are subjected to more terrorist attacks than the other political regimes. A positive relationship between the democratic regime and the level of terrorist activity can be obtained due to the inclusion of factional democracies in the sample of democratic states. If factional democracies are excluded from the sample, the relationship between the level of terrorist activity and the democratic regime is negative. The analysis allows to maintain that factional democracy is a rather powerful factor of a high level of terrorist activity, while nonfactional democracy turns out to be rather a statistically significant predictor of a relatively low intensity of terrorist attacks.

A critical analysis of the dominant quantitative methodologies used to analyze international terrorism reveals serious flaws in the conceptualization of key terms, the measurement of key variables and the statistical estimation of key relationships, all of which lead to unsubstantiated results. I deconstruct these issues, and extend the literature on the relationship of regime type and acts of terrorism in the following ways: I add to the quantitative literature on the subject; I use an updated database on global terrorist events (START--Global Terrorism Database) which includes domestic and international events; and I analyze rates of terrorism by a variety of categories of system types across both space and time (all countries, 1970-2012). I demonstrate that democracies are not the primary targets of terrorists, and that much more work needs to be done to understand the causes of extreme political violence, given its non-random, yet highly stochastic nature

European Scientific Journal, 2013

Global rates of terrorism have skyrocketed since 9/11, yet the aggregate increase tells us very little about the distribution of attacks across different regime types. Contrary to the traditional scholarly view and popular perceptions in the West, my new article in the Journal of Democracy demonstrates that reasonably high-quality democracies enjoy a robust and growing "triple democracy advantage" in facing the scourge of Islamist terrorism. Not only are liberal democracies and polyarchies less prone to terrorist attacks than all other regime types, but the rate of increase in the number of attacks among these democracies is substantially lower in comparison to other regime types, and they are significantly better at minimizing casualties.

2012

The shock of the 9/11 attacks had complex and profound effects on US policy in the Middle East. One result was the decision of George W. Bush’s administration to place the discourse of democracy promotion at centre stage in its policy towards the region. This decision was based on the notion that the spread of democracy would serve as antidote to the emergence of Islamist terrorism and enhance Western security. This paper challenges the assumption that the causes of Islamist terrorism can be solely or primarily reduced to the political factors of exclusion and repression. The paper then argues that, if authoritarianism is not the cause of Islamist terrorism, we must look elsewhere for an explanation. Economic and social causes are not the main issue at play here either. Far from seeing them as irrational actors driven by religious or millenarian motives, Islamist terrorists – similarly to most other terrorist organisations, with some exceptions - are rational and calculating in thei...