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What Makes a Terrorist?
This new book by Alan Krueger, full of first-rate empirical work, punctures many myths about terrorism. For instance poverty does not breed terrorism, once you look at the data. Here is the book's home page.
My only complaint is that the book does not deliver on its title; it tells me what doesn't make a terrorist, but I still don't know what does make a terrorist. (Don't even mention Islam in the comments unless you have something new -- and analytical -- to say; citing the Koran on jihad isn't going to solve the puzzle.)
My crude view sees terrorism as meshed with three factors:
1. The belief that it is justified to kill innocent people for sufficiently important political ends. Of course people who support the fighting of WWII hold this view too.
2. False positive beliefs about how the world works. Osama bin Laden probably doesn't know the Alchian and Allen theorem, the make-work fallacy, the Heckscher-Ohlin results, nor does he realize that his Islamic Caliphate would not work very well.
3. Some third factor(s), rooted in human psychology.
Most non-terrorists have more of #1 and #2 than is good for the world. And I expect that terrorists have a special excess of #1 and #2. I nonetheless think that the third factor is the key to understanding "what makes a terrorist." You could start your reading here, and here, good luck. Is it "narcissistic rage"? Authoritarian or submissive personality types? Freudian mumbo-jumbo at work?
By the way, the difficulty of pinning down the third factor(s) has policy implications. We should adopt policies which are robust toward not understanding the strategies or game-theoretic solution concepts of the terrorists. Complicated signals are unlikely to communicate the appropriate information in practice. However bad is our model of the terrorists, I suspect that their model of us is even worse.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on August 16, 2007 at 06:48 AM in Political Science | Permalink
Comments
Without reading the book...
Perhaps it's not so much that poverty causes terrorism, but overidentification with poverty. This is similar to saying when studying class, it is no longer important the actual income involved, but the cultural values that they adopt.
You could see terrorists as violent NGOs (after all, extremists and charities seem to share a hatred of free trade policies) campaigning on social issues in the worst possible way.
Posted by: Naadir Jeewa at Aug 16, 2007 7:53:15 AM
Up until about the age of 14, if the principle of my school had told me to strap explosives to myself and
blow up our rival school that often beat us on sports day, I would have done it. I wouldn't have been very
happy about it, but I would have done it because I had been taught to obey. So to me there is nothing very
mysterious about terrorism. All it takes is a fairly common strict upbringing and the presence of people
willing to exploit the results to make a terrorist, or rather to make some terrorists, as I'm sure there is
more than one path to becoming a murderer.
Posted by: Sadworld at Aug 16, 2007 8:27:57 AM
I don't know what makes a terrorist, but it seems to me there's quite a strong correlation between suicide bombing and the perception that one's country is being occupied by foreigners.
Posted by: Pat Mathews at Aug 16, 2007 8:30:55 AM
The addictive thrill of risk and self-righteous rage, all contained within a cohesive social group that mutually reinforces the actions.
Posted by: Bill Harshaw at Aug 16, 2007 8:38:07 AM
Under #2, there should probably be a note about outsized expectations. Terrorism is probably the least effective political weapon available but terrorists seem to believe, or at least delude themselves into believing, that it will get the results they are looking for.
The difference between the people who fought World War II and Osama bin Laden is that OBL has very little chance of success. He likely misperceives his chances and therefore his ability to contribute to his goal.
Posted by: Steven Schreiber at Aug 16, 2007 8:41:44 AM
Tyler:
You wrote: "Don't even mention Islam in the comments unless you have
something new -- and analytical -- to say; citing the Koran on jihad
isn't going to solve the puzzle"
What puzzle are you trying to piece together? Connecting the dots between
ALL terrorists is a macro puzzle (what does the unibomber have in common
with a disco bomber in Indonesia?). On the other hand, trying to fathom
the role of what most people publically proclaim to be perverse
interpretations of the Koran is obviously a much more specific,
albeit possible a MUCH more important, puzzle.
So the question is "what puzzle (either or both of the above or
some other) are you blogging about?"
It seems to me that just as microecnomics has been more fruitful in
generation operational propositions than macroeconomics, so discussions
of sub-sets of "terrorism" will probably be more fruitful than any
macro analysis of it.
Posted by: indiana jim at Aug 16, 2007 8:52:18 AM
Partly it's the classic fallacy of "only we have courage and loyalty, our enemies are weak, lack martial virtue, and will surrender if we bloody them slightly". Think the Civil War south, Germany for 100+ years prior to the end of WWII, Sparta, El Cid (the only victorious example I can think of), and to some degree the US in Iraq (but mixed with "they are just like us" rhetoric). Japan in Pearl Harbor was the ultimate example of this (and note their escalation to suicide bombing as well as fondness for blatantly suicidal infantry tactics and last stands).
Partly it's a fundamentally zero sum world-view. We have much. It follows axiomatically that we have stolen it.
Related to this, partly what Howard Bloom calls "the Lucifer Principle". When a group's or an individual's status rises they see themselves as having gained at the expense of rival groups and are inclined to try to keep rising, press their advantage, and gain more. In game theoretical sim tournaments "pavlov", e.g. keep doing something if it worked last time, else switch, is often (depending on conditions) a powerful strategy for exploiting the overly meek while maintaining cooperation with itself and some other strategies. One way of understanding the conflicts from my first paragraph is as aggressive pavlovs initiating conflict with highly vindictive versions of Tit-for-Tat which call for multiple defections in retaliation for a single defection.
Finally, I think that what I call the "principle of sacrifice" is involved. We all know there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, and that people are prone to logical errors where they use the inverse instead of the contrapositive. If you take the inverse of TANSTAAFL you get "there ain't no such thing as paying for lunch and not getting it" or worse, "the way to get lunch is to make someone pay for it".
Posted by: michael vassar at Aug 16, 2007 9:05:19 AM
I think it comes down to intelligent, well-off leaders who want power and glory (as most do) who have found something more powerful than nationalism (religion) to draw out a following. The followers follow either because they are clever (of course, with this base intelligence comes a mix of insanity, in my opinion) and see the organization as a means towards power and glory, or they are desperate
Terrorism and gangs are not very distant in many ways. Perhaps we could learn more about the former from our experience with the latter?
Posted by: Christopher at Aug 16, 2007 9:16:30 AM
Slaughtering innocents in order to achieve political aims is not a 20th Century phenomena as Tyler implies in point #1.
Suicidal attacks are not a recent invention.
So the answer to 'What Makes A Terrorist' is not much different than what has motivated any soldier, guerrilla, or fanatical jihadist. As a man who served under my father once said before launching a flank attack on panzers in Belgium; "I don't mind dying, my kids will have a better life because of all this'.
Posted by: michael at Aug 16, 2007 9:17:14 AM
"Religion began when the first scoundrel met the first fool."
—- Voltaire
Posted by: J. at Aug 16, 2007 9:31:00 AM
Tyler: Your #1 might be modified to say that terrorists dehumanize "everyone else," and consider everyone else the enemy, giving themselves psychological license to kill them. They have a very murderous sense of "us versus them," or, "if you're not with us, you're against us." To them they're just killing the enemy. Palestinian terrorists excuse themselves by saying all Israelis serve in the army. Al Qaeda-ists excuse themselves by saying all Americans are evil devil-like capitalists.
Terrorism begins with a quest to acquire power, and progresses by dehumanization and a great sense of desperation. Observers see the power-hungry desperation of terrorists and associate it backward with the simply-hungry desperation of poverty. "Socrates is desperate, Socrates is poor, therefore all desperate people are poor."
Posted by: Henrik at Aug 16, 2007 9:32:05 AM
I think it's wrong to assume that there is something inherently different from a terrorist and any other fighter.
Terrorism is a tactic. Regular soldiers in regular armies are also willing to give up their lives for what they believe is the greater good, so those that have no chance of winning a war by regular means tend to terrorism.
We tend to things of it as a bad thing (worse than regular war, that is) only because it happens to be on the other side of the battlefield, but if we were looking at the Apartheid instead of 9/11 we would probably feel slightly different.
So again, it is a tactic. I don't think there is something inherently different between the mind of those who use it and the mind of those who use other tactics.
I'll give one more example. During WWII, several groups in occupied territories went underground and seek to perform terrorist activities to undermine the Nazi regime. Planning ambushes, bombing rail lines. Go to any Holocaust museum, and they are portrayed as courageous heroes. So, once again, whether terrorists are good or bad, in my opinion, really depends more on whether they are fighting with or against us than in we believing there is something inherently wrong with their tactics.
Posted by: Fabio Drucker at Aug 16, 2007 9:34:52 AM
Does anyone else just consider terrorism the last step on the "war is politics by another means" pathway? Terrorism isn't an ideology, it's a tactic employed by individuals who lack the means of conducting conventional warfare. And by "lack the means", I don't mean that they are poor, but that they are poor relative to those that typically conduct wars (i.e., nation states).
In that sense, we should expect individuals and groups of individuals to use terrorism if they have political grievances that would, under other circumstances, to lead to wars between nations. I would not expect the terrorist to have generalizable motives outside of that.
[Or, to simplify: I think I agree with Michael.]
Posted by: Jared at Aug 16, 2007 9:44:58 AM
>1. The belief that it is justified to kill innocent people
I suspect they don't see them as innocent. "If you're not with us, you're with them". Many people believe it's justified to kill people that are sufficiently culpable. Therefore I don't agree that this is a distinguishing factor.
>2. False positive beliefs about how the world works.
The vast majority of people (let's say, all non-economists for a start ;-) have false beliefs about how the world works. Again, not a distinguishing feature.
While I'm not on first-name terms with any terrorists, I can say for certain that in Ireland, there is a VERY strong correlation between a sympathiser of the IRA, and being working-class. (I've some experience suggesting the same in Thailand with sympathisers of the Muslim insurgency in the south.) Being working-class is usually associated with poor education - but with state-run schools used by nearly everyone here and free third level education to those who want it, there isn't a major education gap. If you hold that poverty isn't the link, then I guess that just leaves class itself.
I suspect it's not entirely different from the motivation of playing on the local sports team. A break from drudgery, feeling part of a team and the chance to become a local hero.
Posted by: Cormac at Aug 16, 2007 10:11:56 AM
Does poligamy have any effect?
Posted by: Floccina at Aug 16, 2007 10:19:01 AM
Maybe it would be a good idea to turn the question around and ask what makes a non-terrorist. Or more precisely what makes a person believe that non violent solutions are better to solve certain problems and reach goals? It is certainly a set of values, including religious believe, combined with experience, civilization, culture, influence of parents and friends, school, individual psychology .... The problem with the "It's all Islam's fault"-view is the same as with the "Islam is innocent"-view or "poor people strike back"-view, all of these are basically trying to find a single answer instead of a wide range of conditions that - only together - make a terrorist.
Many terrorists were trained and prepared in a group or sort of sect. While we would all be not too surprised if for example a mass suicide happens in some sect - well they are all lunatics anyway - combined with politics, e.g. antiimperialism, the phenomenon is shifted away to benefit whatever purpose a single answer to the question "Why?" could deliver. However, it does not seem like terrorists are lunatics in the common meaning of the word. More likely their concept of the world may include some crazy ideas while in other aspects their views are ... healthy. As long as some elements of the solution are refused because they are not nice or don't add to a personal agenda, there won't be a clear picture of the terrorist. Of course, the idea that all infidels are basically animals or worse and that killing yourself together with "the enemy" will not finish you but take you to paradise has its part in all that. Ideas like conspiracies [against Muslims] or Jewish control over the economy or U.S. as the enemy of Islam and an imperial power or fight in the interest of other muslims in other places and so on, too. But I guess it is only a certain mix of identification, believe system and supposed and learned role the terrorist thinks he has to play.
Posted by: NUB at Aug 16, 2007 10:36:58 AM
The best argument I've heard about why people become *suicide* terrorists is Robert A. Pape, _Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism_: "to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland." Indeed, Osama bin Laden's original complaint was the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia. Perhaps Tyler can read the book and give his thoughts.
Posted by: mike at Aug 16, 2007 11:02:20 AM
I think that by using the word "terrorist" one has already limited one's ability to analyze causes properly.
If one means Muslim extremists who don't mind blowing themselves up then say so. This will then allow for the analysis of ETA, the IRA, and Tim McVeigh to be treated separately.
It is also necessary to separate the techniques. There are many attacks by the same Muslim forces that don't involve the bomber losing his life. So is the question really "why are people willing to kill themselves" or is the question "what is the aim of the movement"?
Once the various groups are separated from each other it might be possible to postulate some reasonable hypothesis for each.
Too much of the rhetoric seems designed to either make things worse or to garner support for our foreign policy through fear mongering. "They hate our freedoms" is one such phrase. So is "if we don't stop them there we will have to fight them here".
If, for the sake of argument, we assume that the objectives of some groups is to get the western forces out of their countries then how would either of these statements apply? Once we left they would have achieved their aim.
There also seems to be a Christian vs Muslim undercurrent in many of the public statements. The NYC police department made one such claim yesterday, thereby offending thousands of their fellow New Yorkers who happen to be Muslim. Why did they do this?
Posted by: robertdfeinman at Aug 16, 2007 11:12:30 AM
I suspect it's not entirely different from the motivation of playing on the local sports team. A break from drudgery, feeling part of a team and the chance to become a local hero.
A break from the drudgery of real life sounds like it might be very important. In the U.S., aren't school shooters typically sort of angsty melodramatic types? You know, the ones who like vampires. And in Rwanda, after the genocide, didn't many of the murderers confess that they did it partly because it was easier and more fun than farming? And similarly, when you get terrorist groups like the Bader-Meinhof Gang or the Weather Underground or whatever, isn't there a strong rejection of bourgeois norms of diligence and toil? Among the middle and upper-middle class terrorists of the Middle East, there may be something similar going on.
I guess there's different kinds of terrorists, though. There's those retarded Palestinian children persuaded to put on bomb belts and go kill Jews, and their reasons are probably very different from their Hamas handlers, whom I imagine as vastly more worldly and cynical. There are probably lots of operators in terrorist movements who treat the whole thing as a pragmatic enterprise -- raise the marginal costs of this or that activity by blowing things/people up now and again, and leverage enemy behaviour.
Posted by: Taeyoung at Aug 16, 2007 11:19:03 AM
I think its important to remember a couple of things:
1) One person's rational decision is not another person's rational decision. In other words, what seems like madness to us make perfect sense to them.
2) Economic has a problem in that they attempt to impose universal rationality on both non-rational decisions and subjectively rational decisions.
That being said: Suicide terrorist attacks are really just a subset of terrorism as a whole. The tactics are different but the goals are the same. So I believe its important to not focus on suicidal attacks as much as terrorism as a whole. So what breeds terrorism?
There are no simple answers and an attempt to explain something as complex as the mind of a terrorist with a unicausal model is foolishness. However, from a strategic point of view the tactics of terrorism make sense when confronting a significantly more powerful adversary. In a straight forward set battle there is no way that the disjointed and poorly trained (in military maneuver and the like) terrorist forces would be able to take on a major military power like the United States and even contemplate victory. On the other hand based on examples that go back for millennia its been shown that a dedicated insurgent campaign can cause significant disruption to a much larger military force - especially one that is in occupation of the terrorists home territory.
As such, in a population under occupation by a superior force dedicated men and women will likely resort to terroristic tactics in order to counter the occupation. The appeal to this will cut across class lines and both the well educated and uneducated will join forces - such as it is - with terrorist groups in order to preserve their autonomy. Terrorism doesn't come out of poverty - terrorism comes from, in part, significant power imbalances that close off 'traditional' war fighting methods.
Posted by: Chris at Aug 16, 2007 11:35:23 AM
"The belief that it is justified to kill innocent people . . ."
The belief is often that they are not innocent. Terrorists have a theory that civilians are oppressing them. We may not agree with their theory or view it as a mere rationalization, but they don't necessarily view them as innocent. (The previous comment that they dehumanize people is a slightly different point, but I don't disagree with it.)
What makes a terrorist? Surely the most general factor is that those with a deeply felt cause believe that no less-ugly tactic will accomplish their ends. Minorities oppressed by their government may see attacking civilians as effective if those civilians can influence government policy. So terrorists have operated in Israel and other democracies, but largely not in China, Cuba, or the Soviet Union. If they do not have the resources to attack the military, they may view this attacking civilians as their only choice.
Posted by: John Kunze at Aug 16, 2007 11:35:32 AM
Two books can give a clue.They portrait the nihilist movement that bred the russian terrorists: The Secret Agent and Under West sight .Both by Conrad.
Posted by: JEAN at Aug 16, 2007 11:52:29 AM
Poverty obviously is not a reason, but, as Krueger hypothesized in a WSJ article, lack of civil rights may be: "When nonviolent means of protest are curtailed, malcontents appear to be more likely to turn to terrorist tactics."
Posted by: Nico Luchsinger at Aug 16, 2007 12:25:21 PM
I agree with a couple of things that have been said already:
1) Terrorism is a tactic that is used to fight an enemy when conventional means could not prevail.
2) Terrorism is correlated with foreign military presence.
Taking it a bit further, let's think of why we had a military presence in the Middle East before 9/11: to protect our oil interests and Israel.
Why did we need to protect our oil interests? Oil producers collude and restrict production under the oversight of OPEC. If it were a free market, I doubt we would have been so concerned with the region.
As for why terrorists are willing to blow themselves up, radicals use promises of a rich afterlife. Religion probably holds a higher place in their society because there are fewer opportunities to gain material wealth for most. But religion isn't necessary for suicidal attacks, just desperation: think of the Japanese kamikazes.
Posted by: Dave at Aug 16, 2007 12:30:40 PM
@Dave
Suicide attacks are very effective, cruel, spreading fear, -terror- So when this is the ultimate weapon, like maybe nukes for Western countries, of course extremists consider this... By the way, Israel has a lot of experience before 9/11 happenend in the U.S. There is also something to learn from them, including interviews with detained terrorists. When you look at Islamic extremists you must also consider how many young Muslim men are brought up, in an autoritarian way, like the family father is the tyrant and women are inferior, have to obey - it's not in all families, but in many. The supression continues in society where at least political opposition, mostly any individuality can't be expressed in public, only private and opposition to the current government is only happening in mosques and other religious environments, because religion can't be forbidden. This climate is alltogether very anti-modern, anti-liberal, certainly starting to implant a view of the world into young people that can be abused and exaggerated by others later...
Posted by: NUB at Aug 16, 2007 12:58:25 PM
