How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns

by Audrey Kurth Cronin

they are premodern and postmodern, subnational and transnational, and transcend our Westphalian state system. There are no existential terrorist organizations; instead, terrorist groups are really political, religious, ethnic, and ideological communities. When a state treats such a community like another state, it suffers from a fundamental misreading of the challenge. States use force to enhance power and influence others’ behavior in specific ways. Most groups are concerned with gaining a foothold by developing a broader constituency and a degree of popular legitimacy first, so as to move toward the eventual accomplishment of their aims. There is much more similarity between the actions of various states (difficult enough to generalize about) than there is between the actions of various groups that use terrorism (almost always reactive and distinctive). It is foolish to treat the latter as a monolith. Instead we must disaggregate the individual groups, review their mobilizing systems of belief, find the similarities and differences in their philosophies, and dissect their strategic thinking very carefully—then calculate how particular state actions will advance or frustrate them. Repression is more than simply state use of brute force against challenges from below. That dichotomous framework misses an entire dimension of strategic effectiveness over the longer term, which is the various audiences that are witnessing the violence—sympathetic to the state or to the group. ...