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

by Audrey Kurth Cronin

States generally go to war over disagreements about the relative distribution of international power. There is no disagreement over the distribution of power between a state and a terrorist organization: the latter has little and exploits its absence. Indeed, terrorist groups are compelled to consciously draw their power from states. They are not sovereign entities, having neither the strengths nor the weaknesses of states: they do not have the responsibilities and constraints implied in governing—indeed, they cannot even count on their own survival. The common assumption (especially among political scientists) that strategic theories developed on the basis of state behavior are directly comparable to terrorist group activities glosses over vital differences in their decision-making processes, as will be seen below in the study of outcomes. In their behavior, terrorist groups do not behave as if they were the equivalent of weak little states, and efforts to analyze them as if they were are misguided.19