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

by Audrey Kurth Cronin

Terrorists also take advantage of grievances but, lacking sufficient military capacity, they draw their ability to threaten the nation-state from leveraging the political and military actions of the state itself. Their goal is to use symbolic violence to demonize a government and inspire potential constituents, to grab their attention and shift it from the present to a vision of the future, so as to justify the extraordinary, gruesome, and illegitimate measures they take against ordinary people as they seek to get there. In short, most terrorist groups aspire to become insurgencies—though they may not foresee the escalation of violence that their attacks spark. In the next section we will consider a group that transitioned out of a primary reliance on terrorist attacks into insurgency, and eventually ignited widescale atrocities and civil war.