| Chapter 1: | The Challenge of Global Terrorism |
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
Terrorism, in this analysis, is undertaken to provoke a massive response and is specifically designed to “shift the balance of power between the parties” and build support, perhaps “to produce a better bargain at some point in the distant future.”30
Insights from conflict resolution theory support the contention that escalation in conflicts is highest when hard tactics have a mobilizing effect. Early on in their work on “conflict spirals,” Dean Pruitt and Jeffrey Rubin showed that conflict tends to escalate when tactics move from light to heavy, issues proliferate, more and more parties join, and there is a shift from doing well to winning and hurting the other.31 Later, Rubin, Pruitt, and Kim proposed that the escalatory effect of heavy tactics was largely mediated by the psychological states they produced in the other party. In particular, they proposed that when such tactics produced anger, blame, fear, and threats to image, the potential for escalation was highest and was most likely to produce polarization.32
Extended to the problem of terrorism, these considerations suggest that the use of massive force is unlikely to have had the desired effect of deescalating terrorist activity and more likely to have had the reverse effect. Still, the “big picture,” as former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has put it, is not yet clear and the “complexity of conflict,” as Dennis Sandole has described it, is such that reality does not always fit neatly into present theories or paradigms.33
Prior Research
So far, to the author’s knowledge, only one systematic quantitative study has attempted to analyze the impact of 9/11 and the military effort known as the War on Terrorism on subsequent transnational terrorism.