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

by Audrey Kurth Cronin

The immediate effects of removing a leader vary, depending on the structure of the organization, the degree to which it fosters a cult of personality, the availability of a viable successor, the nature of its ideology, the political context, and whether the leader was killed or imprisoned. This chapter employs comparative case studies of the arrest or assassination of top leaders so as to probe the complex relationship between their removal and the ending of terrorist campaigns. A clear finding in what follows is that arresting a leader damages a campaign more than killing him does, especially when the jailed leader can be cut off from communicating with his subordinates yet also paraded in humiliation before the public. More surprising, however, a crucial consideration in determining whether the removal of a leader will succeed in ending a campaign is not the type of action a state uses against him or even his operational effectiveness, as we might logically expect, but rather the effects of his removal on potential supporters of both the terrorist campaign and the counterterrorist operation. Killing the leader of a group that has widespread popular support either has no measurable effect or is counterproductive. In this case, as in many others, the reaction of terrorism’s multiple audiences proves crucial.