| Chapter 1: | The Challenge of Global Terrorism |
Significance
The study presented here extends Asymmetric War and Conflict Resolution theories to transnational terrorism. Using transnational terrorism events data, it tests contending theories about the effects of force on this phenomenon. More specifically, it tests the extent to which preemptive force, in general, and the War on Terrorism, in particular, have had an escalating effect on transnational terrorism. As such, the study has important theoretical, empirical, and policy implications.
Outline
Chapter 2 presents the background, rationale for, and controversies over the preemptive military strategy known as the GWOT. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the conceptual and theoretical issues related to defining and explaining terrorism and counterterrorism, and chapter 4 also provides a synopsis of previous research on the effects of force as a response to terrorism as a tactic of contention.
Chapter 5 introduces the main hypotheses, the design of the study, and the rationale for merging two database sources (ITERATE and RAND–MIPT) for the analysis. This chapter also discusses the time series statistical techniques that are employed to test change in transnational terrorist activity and the limitations of the potential findings.
Chapter 6 contains the results of my study. In this chapter, I describe the overall characteristics of the merged data set. I then present the results of the time series analyses of the impact of the onset of the GWOT and the other events (the invasion of Iraq, the capture of Saddam Hussein, and the release of photos from Abu Ghraib) on the frequency, dispersion, lethality, type of attack, and type of victim of subsequent transnational terrorist activity.