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

by Audrey Kurth Cronin

The central questions in determining whether repression will end terrorism are: how well mobilized is a group’s support; who is the audience—that is, what specific constituency are they trying to reach with their actions; how likely are they to further influence that constituency through violence; and how will a state’s actions affect their ability to do so? In other words, the key variables for whether repression ends terrorism are how mobilized the population is for a cause and how despised a regime makes itself in its response. It comes down to perception and identity, a social-political tug-of-war for support that the state or regime usually wins, but at great cost. Terrorism is not a threat to be analyzed using the kind of unitary actor theories that are the foundation of twentieth-century strategic thought in the West. States operate in a world where they benefit from a constituent population and the right to use force. Groups that use terrorism have neither;

they are premodern and postmodern, subnational and transnational, and transcend our Westphalian state system. There are no existential terrorist organizations; instead, terrorist groups are really political, religious, ethnic, and ideological communities. When a state treats such a community like another state, it suffers from a fundamental misreading of the challenge. States use force to enhance power and influence others’ behavior in specific ways. Most groups are concerned with gaining a foothold by developing a broader constituency and a degree of popular legitimacy first, so as to move toward the eventual accomplishment of their aims. There is much more similarity between the actions of various states (difficult enough to generalize about) than there is between the actions of various groups that use terrorism (almost always reactive and distinctive). It is foolish to treat the latter as a monolith. Instead we must disaggregate the individual groups, review their mobilizing systems of belief, find the similarities and differences in their philosophies, and dissect their strategic thinking very carefully—then calculate how particular state actions will advance or frustrate th...

Narodnaya Volya disintegrated under tsarist repression, but its philosophies went underground, survived its demise, and contributed to the coming Russian Revolution. The Egyptian Islamists’ reactionary and extreme ideology actually grew out of repression and now powers a violent international movement. The state suffers from all the advantages and disadvantages of being the incumbent actor. Especially in our age of globalized communications, no amount of force can kill an infectious inspiration—a potential source of countermobilization, especially when it

is spread through informal networks operating below the radar of state bureaucracy.

In determining the likelihood of demobilizing a state’s active internal support, on the other hand, the key variable is the degree to which the state and i...

On the whole, democracies have been the most legitimate governments in the modern world, and thus they have had the most staying power against terrorism. That said, democracies or liberal governments face particular short-term difficulties in repressing terrorist groups. Because military or police action requires a target, the use of force against operatives works best in situations where members of the organization can be separated from the general population. This essentially forces “profiling” or some method of distinguishing members from nonmembers—always a sensitive issue, particularly when the only available means of discrimination relates to how members are defined (race, age, religion, nationality, etc.) rather than what they do (or are planning to do). Excellent intelligence is essential for the latter, especially in advance of an attack, but even in the best of situations it is typically scarce. Repressive measures also carry high resource and opportunity costs. Long-term repressive measures against suspected operatives may challenge civil liberties and human rights, undermine domestic support, polarize political parties, and strain the fabric of the state itself, thus further undercutting its ability to respond effectively to future terrorist attacks. Mistakes and abuses by governments, including democracies, are endemic in counterterrorism, but usually democracies have the stamina to maintain internal support as they learn and adapt their methods over time.

It is true that terrorism is the tactic of desperation, but not for the reasons usually cited (e.g., poverty, humiliation, frustration, oppression). Instead, the desperation of terrorism results from the need to use this attention-getting violence to mobilize support for an idea or cause. Terrorism kills innocent civilians in a way that is repulsive to most people. Groups that have well-mobilized support generally do not have to resort to such a risky and potentially counterproductive tactic to gain attention to their cause. States are blind to this logic, because they are the status quo actors and generally do not concern themselves with establishing their fundamental legitimacy. Not so revolutionary organizations, which, if they had sufficient mobilized support, would not be likely to employ the tactic of terrorism. As we have seen, there are far more effective ways to use force. Of greatest importance in understanding the use of terrorism today— indeed, the use of force in any form in the twenty-first century—is the unique, revolutionary effects of globalized communications upon the ability to animate and legitimate violence. Terrorism, like other forms of political violence, arises out of the beliefs and aspirations of communities and must be analyzed within a social and political context. The strategic dynamic is not between states and “nonstate actors”—an anachronistic phrase that is a negation, not a concept. The core of the relationship is between states and commun...

Because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor. —A pirate, in St. Augustine’s City of God1

TERRORISM CAN “END” when the violence continues but takes another form. Groups may transition out of a primary reliance on terrorist tactics toward either criminal behavior or more classic types of regular or irregular warfare.

This transformation may be good or bad news for the state. It is good news when a violent group stops killing civilians and turns to petty criminality,

The state is better designed to deal with this kind of criminal behavior, which falls squarely within a legal framework and usually does not intimidate its citizens to the same degree. Or the transformation can be bad news when the group gains enough strength that it no longer relies primarily upon terrorism (an inherently weak tactic, as we have seen) because it has developed more effective means, such as guerrilla warfare, insurgency, or even major conventional war.

Terrorism can instigate or escalate into other forms of violence; the end of terrorism is not necessarily the beginning of “peace.”

Transition to criminal behavior implies shifting away from collecting resources as a means of pursuing political ends toward acquiring goods and profits that are ends in themselves.

The driving purpose becomes personal profit. This changes both its ability and incentive to attract a popular following, and it has implications for the type and degree of threat posed to the state and to the international system.

Terrorist groups can also escalate to insurgency or even conventional war in order to achieve their political ends.

connection to a territory and grounding in an ethnic population

In these situations, the evolution in the form of violence involves changes in size or type of operations (do they operate as a military unit and attack mainly other military targets?), and whether or not the organization holds territory (even temporarily). Terrorism and insurgency are not the same thing; but they are cousins, distinguishable by the strength of the movement and differences in targeting. Very weak territorially based movements use terrorist attacks and transition to insurgency when they gain strength, especially when (as was the case for most groups in the twentieth century) their enemy is a single state government. Concepts overlap, as insurgencies typically use terrorist tactics alongside irregular guerrilla warfare; but during the last century, the key in understanding the relationship between the two has been to analyze the group’s motivation, attraction to a constituency, size, strength, targeting, and degree to which its goals are associated with control of a piece of territory.

These concepts—terrorism, crime, insurgency, war—have different emphases and purposes. They have always been ambiguous in relation to one another and are only becoming more confused in the twenty-first century. The haziness in terminology reflects the changing nature of the nation-state as it interacts with emerging state and nonstate variants in mission, structure, and organization, as well as a mix of new and old ways of using force. Projecting a false clarity between them only lays bare the limitations in the language we use. Yet how we use these terms does matter, because the language has practical effects upon what governments do and the subsequent evolution of the violence. When we declare a “war on terrorism,” for example, or label the al-Qaeda movement an “insurgency,” we tap into language that is evocative. The phrase affects the way we frame conflicts, how we fight them, the narratives that emerge out of them, and, most important of all, the degree to which the parties involved are able to mobilize support for or opposition to the campaigns at the heart of them—all of which affect a group’s viability.

Criminal groups and terrorist groups often engage in similar behavior, including kidnappings, assassinations, and bombings, but their purposes are different. Many, if not most, terrorist groups engage in criminal activity in order to fund their operations. Particularly in the wake of the end of the Cold War and the withdrawal of much clandestine state funding, terrorist organizations diversified their sources of income, branching out into both legal and illegal enterprises.

It could be said that criminals use violence to enable them to acquire resources, whereas terrorists acquire resources to enable them to practice violence.”8 Criminal syndicates aim toward personal gain, and their activities are normally hidden from view. Indeed, whether or not a group wants publicity can indicate whether it is engaged in terrorism, which is symbolic violence intended to have a psychological impact upon an audience, or criminality, which results in personal, material gain and is not helped by exposure. Another easy way of distinguishing between criminality and terrorism is to consider whether the group wants the perpetuation of the current political order. The criminal group is a status quo actor, content to operate within the current order, from which illicit gains are siphoned off. Domestically, criminal groups circumvent the legal structure but do not directly threaten the political foundation of the state or the nature of its government. They can be brutally violent but rarely want to run governments themselves. The terrorist group is a revisionist actor, having as its ultimate goal altering the national or international political system in accordance with some concept of justice, piety, fulfillment, or popular welfare. The group may or may not be able to transition to political leadership—and as we saw in chapter 3, few actually do; but they certainly want to determine what that political structure is and who controls it. It is because criminal groups...

As groups sample the astonishing profits made by meeting the demand for illicit substances (especially in the wealthy West), their political motivations can be eclipsed by greed.

While such things are difficult to measure, academic studies estimate that the vast majority of the FARC’s murders, anywhere from 75 percent to 88 percent of the total number of killings, have been related to apolitical, economic goals, particularly protecting the routes and assets of the narcotics trade.16

The terms insurgency and terrorism overlap. Insurgencies often use terrorism as one of many tactics; to assert that terrorist organizations and insurgencies can be neatly distinguished would be foolish: neither term is fully satisfactory. However, degrees of difference and emphasis are important in analyzing what a group is trying to achieve, how great a threat it poses, and how best to respond to it. From the perspective of state military forces, transitioning to insurgency can put a terrorist group onto more familiar ground. Best thought of as military rebellions against indigenous governments or foreign occupiers, insurgencies present themselves as alternatives to the current regime, hold a type of sovereignty over people and territory, and use force as pseudo-armies or guerrilla forces. For this reason, they primarily target the opposing military forces of the state, often using guerrilla-style hit-and-run tactics.36 Insurgents may use terrorism, particularly when they target “noncombatants” such as government officials, police forces, or noncompliant civilian leaders; but unlike terrorist organizations, they can hold territory and engage the military.37 Summing up the differences between the two, Bruce Hoffman argues that, compared to terrorist groups, insurgencies are numerically larger organizations of armed individuals who operate as military units, target military forces, and seize and held territory (at least temporarily).38 Which label we use has practical effec...

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.

Extremists had apparently so infiltrated each other’s organizations that at times no one was certain who was responsible for the crimes, with some alleging that military forces were instigating or encouraging atrocities to demonize the GIA.

Compared to conventional war, terrorism is an unimportant tactic. But it is a powerful means of leverage, and therein lies its menace. There are two ways in which terrorism can be so powerful that it kills millions and destabilizes the international system. The first, use of a “weapon of mass

destruction” (especially nuclear) by a nonstate actor, represents a looming threat of which many are aware. The proliferation of nuclear technology and materials following the breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War holds greater potential and opportunity for groups such as al-Qaeda (and associates) to buy or steal a small nuclear device. The international community is right to focus on this problem; in particular, a large number of academics and policymakers who dealt with nuclear weapons and the complicated theology of nuclear strategy during the Cold War have turned their attention to the breakdown of the international nonproliferation regime, and are coming up with new means of controlling or tracing nuclear substances (especially highly enriched uranium). This is an outstanding use of their skills that may well lead to a reduction in this threat.59 One only hopes that extensive knowledge of the supply side of nuclear weapons technology is eventually matched by equal sophistication regarding the demand side, especially the motivations and opportunities of nonstate actors (about which there is relatively little good research). In any case, if a terrorist group were to use a nonconventional weapon, there is no doubt that the result would almost immediately be major war. The second, much less discussed or well-known threat is the use of conventional terrorism as a catalyst for interstate war. As we have seen, terrorism feeds both hope and insecurity. Attac...

Nothing about terrorism and its toll is worth mentioning beside such an unimaginable calamity—except the key fact that it was a terrorist act that set it all in motion and that, under the right international conditions, another such act could do so again.

Kashmir-associated terrorism is a critical destabilizing factor in the India-Pakistan relationship, a rivalry that has all the potential for major catastrophic state uses of force up to and including nuclear strikes.

They have meaning today in reference to the organizational and intellectual structures of that kind of state, especially its legal and strategic communities. The early twenty-first century is another period of transition—but not toward the dissolution of the state itself and its replacement by nonstate actors, a false and ahistorical dichotomy drawn by short-sighted pundits. Instead, in keeping with a long-standing pattern, today’s familiar nation-state is evolving to become a range of other types of states. For good or ill, we are witnessing the natural evolution of the nineteenth-century European-style nation-state toward new, more flexible structures better suited to the challenges of the global, information-based context of the twenty-first century, with virtual communities overshadowing parliaments, international corporations displacing government bureaucracies, and private contractors supplanting national armies.

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These changes are casting new light on old ideas that drew their meaning from structures of the state. Most notably: what is a civilian? In a world where borders are increasingly permeable, where the organization of state armed forces is becoming more diffuse, and where the use of armed contractors is increasingly taking the place of traditional military members, this concept (always difficult) becomes still more tricky. Historical, cross-cultural norms derived from secular and religious traditions insist that civilians are by definition illegitimate targets, to be avoided through the discriminate use of force. States may have described them as “collateral damage,” unavoidable victims sacrificed in the cause of ending a war (self-conscious excuses that are revealing in themselves). But rightly or wrongly, the international community had accorded nation-states the authority under certain circumstances to use force, and those states gained or lost legitimacy on the basis of their efforts to do so discriminately. Indeed, this norm is at the heart of what makes terrorism wrong: its deliberate targeting of civilians.79 But how do we isolate civilians from attack when we are no longer clear exactly where the boundaries of “ civilian” lie? To our discomfort, even the reliable reference to “innocent women and children” fails in a world where child soldiers are coerced into becoming combatants and women are suicide bombers.80 For good or ill, we are moving backward, into the prenat...

own making and partly reflective of broader historical forces, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the nation-state to use force legitimately. The concept of civilian is imperfect and in need of updating because, as the nation-state evolves, its boundaries (both physical and political) are more and more difficult to discern. Whether or not one wears a uniform or receives a paycheck from a state does not give us as much to go on in identifying “civilians” as it once did, and therefore in clarifying the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the force that is used against them. We will resolve this issue only through agreement on the sources of legitimacy for the future state—the question that is, after all, at the core of the problem.81 Some have argued that the new state should draw its legitimacy from being “democratic,” for example. In response, some terrorist groups counter that, with universal suffrage at the heart of democracies, all citizens share responsibility for the actions of their governments and are legitimate targets of attack. This interpretation makes a mockery of the norm of the discriminate use of force—reflecting the confusing status of the twenty-first-century state. Likewise, what is the difference between a state and a nonstate actor? In a world with a proliferation of warlords, contractors, networks, and private security firms—or even nongovernmental organizations, web-based movements, regional networks, and global corporations—what is a non-state actor...

than just a terrorist group—it must target the military. The nonstate group benefits from the concept as well: insurgencies typically resist occupation and benefit from a long historical tradition of partisan resistance. But again we face ambiguity. Does targeting private contractors make the act insurgency or terrorism? There is no agreement on whether contractors are military or civilian, because the degree to which they carry the imprimatur of the state itself is disputed. No ...

As we have seen, national or international periods of transition are uniquely vulnerable to the catalytic use of force that terrorism represents. Especially in the context of twenty-first-century globalized communications, terrorist groups are nonstate actors that target the most vulnerable members of society as a means of provoking outrage, garnering attention, and, most importantly, gaining adherents to their cause—as a means of mobilizing a popular movement. Guerrillas and insurgents are actors who have successfully mobilized enough popular support, in both physical and ideological terms, to be strong enough to take on the power of the state by targeting its representatives and seeking military gains for the cause. Both of these tactics are distinctive and defined only in relation to the mass movements they aim to catalyze. Insurgencies are larger, more mobilized groups that have the strength and popular constituency to take on the military forces of the state using irregular warfare tactics. They primarily target military or government forces instead of ordinary civilians because they realize the risk of backlash and implosion in targeting illegitimates (see chapter 4). Both terrorism and insurgency are more dangerous now than they have been in the past because, again in the context of proliferating globalized communications, their means of popular mobilization have multiplied, while those of the state have comparatively diminished, resulting

in increased leverage for the nonstate actor and an undercutting of the legitimacy of the nation-state, well beyond the outcome of individual engagements. Thus, during this time of transition, as the traditional structure of the modern nation-state begins to seem less clear, even less legitimate, other types of human organization have been asserting themselves. Tribal groups, sects, crime syndicates, families, social networks all existed long before, but were generally subsumed in the overarching identity and purpose of the nation-state, and their ways of using force were overshadowed or controlled by the industrial nation-state’s unprecedented ability to mobilize its people and monopolize power at home and abroad.83 But this is changing. While the state retains unprecedented power, it is losing its capacity to mobilize as it once did. With the aid of globalized communications, other actors are gaining a competitive edge not just in how they use force, but much more importantly in how they mobilize and inspire people to support, participate in, and legitimate their use of force. Nonstate groups that use terrorism are emerging from these age-old human networks and connections to use twenty-first-century means that empower them in unprecedented ways to mobilize and inspire others. Whatever we name them or however we respond to them, their ability to inspire and mobilize popular movements is the real source of their threat to the current order. Until we realize this, we will ...

Terrorism can “end” by evolving into or sparking other types of violence, ranging from criminal behavior to nuclear war. Today, the language we use to describe that violence is anachronistic. More relevant to understanding the role of political violence in the twenty-first century is to examine two dimensions: the ability of a group to mobilize and to shape state behavior.

Terrorism as a means of mobilization is a long-established phenomenon, as old as the tactic itself; but today its power to mobilize is enhanced by uniquely favorable international circumstances, especially new means of communication, the breakdown of economic barriers, and increasingly porous borders between states. No matter what we name it, success or failure in mobilizing a following determines the form the violence will take, be it terrorism, insurgency, guerrilla warfare, or civil war. Far more serious, a terrorist act may provoke a state to take actions that are against its own interests. Under conditions of global transition, where an act of terrorism is perceived to threaten a state’s stability or to be sponsored by a rival state, it may be especially dangerous.

All we have to do is send two mujahedin . . . [and] raise a piece of cloth on which is written “Al Qaeda” in order to make the generals race there, to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses. —Osama bin Laden, videotaped message, 20041