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

by Audrey Kurth Cronin

Rightly or wrongly, is it any wonder that terrorist attacks on U.S. civilians elicited the same state-centered response? But this thinking leaves out half of the strategic equation. It is a remnant left over from a war between peer competitors, a relic that needs updating and may bear little relation to the continuing evolution of international terrorism. Lacking a significant military structure, terrorist groups evade the state’s military apparatus and seek to pull it deeper and deeper into an unwinnable, irregular war. A better approach is to consider strategies from the perspective of a group aiming to influence state action for its own purposes. For nonstate challenger groups, wars of attrition and annihilation are parallel to operations that undermine the state’s contract with its citizens (attrition) and operations that elicit action counterproductive to the interests of the state (annihilation). In other words, today’s terrorism assaults the state by either threatening its purpose or influencing its behavior. Both are strategies of leverage, used by the weak against the strong. Both coerce the state either to change its policies or defeat itself.