When Terrorism and Counterterrorism Clash: The War on Terror and ...

Today, intrastate war is thought to be on the decline.⁶ However, terrorism, especially transnational terrorism, broadly defined as politically motivated violence by substate and nonstate actors against foreign targets,⁷ is now dictating much of the political and security agendas of the world’s countries. Despite the political and security importance of this phenomenon, especially since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, terrorism until recently was, in Senechal de la Roche’s words, understudied and “greatly undertheorized.”⁸ More important for this book, relatively little research has been paid to the dynamics and outcomes of conflicts when terrorism and counterterrorism clash.

This may be because compared with interstate and intrastate wars, transnational terrorism causes relatively few deaths.⁹ It may also be because for years terrorism was considered too “policy oriented” an area of research in academia and was, therefore, only a subject of short-term episodic interest among scholars.¹⁰ In addition, as Rubenstein points out, it may be because, even before September 11 but especially since that time, there has been a tendency to minimize the rational instrumental aspects of terrorism in favor of an emphasis on its expressive purposes.¹¹

Much of the quantitative work on terrorism has focused on relatively static economic and political background conditions that might be relevant to the causes of terrorism. Although there is empirical evidence supporting the causal role of some of these variables (modernization, gross domestic product, political repression, lack of education), the results are fragile.¹² In other words, theory is limited. At the same time, although there is a growing qualitative literature on the dynamics of terrorist violence, there has been little systematic work.¹³ In particular, relatively little research attention has been paid to the ways in which the strategies of governments and those of adversaries who use terrorism for their own objectives shape some outcomes rather than others.