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

by Audrey Kurth Cronin

The point of understanding these masochistic aspects of terrorist campaigns is decidedly not that states can simply sit back and wait for a movement to end in failure. Terrorist groups can do a great deal of damage even as they hobble along, especially in the context of enhanced access to increasingly destructive weapons. But comparative study demonstrates that some policies are synergistic with the natural tendency of groups to implode, while others increase their ability to prolong themselves, or even gather momentum. Waiting passively for failure is insufficient; but understanding these self-defeating dynamics and nudging them along through carefully targeted, synergistic counterterrorism is indispensable. A major purpose of terrorism is to use shock and outrage to mobilize a population. To the extent that that population does indeed become mobilized, however, terrorism may become counterproductive, because terrorist violence contains within itself the seeds of repulsion and revulsion. Violence has an international language, but so does decency.