MEASURING AND UNDERSTANDING THE IMPACT OF TERRORISM

instance, it is striking that it recruits in the
most economically marginalised regions of
Nigeria. al-Shabaab recruitment in Kenya tells
a similar story. How do we explain this
disparity? It is partly because the economists
focused on transnational terrorism, and their
work mostly pre-dated the emergence of
Islamist militias such as Boko Haram and
al-Shabaab that adopt the garb of
transnational movements while being
fundamentally grounded in local injustices.
It also probably demonstrates a re-shaping of
context by analysts whose conception of
terrorism had suddenly become so dominated
by al-Qa’ida in the wake of the September 11
attacks that they sought parallels to the group
in everything else that they analysed. Prior to
9/11, terrorism was considered a marginal
activity; after that event it became the
defining menace of our age, something that
has ramifications for those studying and
analysing it. The story suddenly became a big
one which editors would actively push their
reporters towards — but their interest was in
transnational terrorism targeting the West,
potentially to the detriment of other forms of
politically motivated violence, thereby further
skewing datasets and analysis. All of this may
also have had an impact on the threat side of
the picture: groups that previously may have
been engaged in anti-state violence due to
specific grievances might now find that
adopting the garb of Islamist extremists would
bring the bright light of publicity to them.
Some, like Boko Haram in West Africa, have
sought to raise the al-Qa’ida banner (and then
later the ISIL banner) to attract attention
without having a strong operational
connection to either group.
Distinguishing between different types of
militancy is important: if their causes are
different then the response must be different
too. Poverty-reduction may be an important
counter-measure for a group like Boko Haram,
but utterly irrelevant to, say, al-Qa’ida.
Governments are becoming increasingly
attracted to ideological counter-measures,
and these should not be discounted — but nor
should they be assumed to work on the basis
of an over-simplified diagnosis of what causes
political violence. Furthermore, while one
strategy may work in one context, it might
have the opposite effect in another, potentially
even exacerbating the problem that is trying
to be addressed.
What we need, then, is a more precise set of
terms and definitions to enable us to
distinguish between violence perpetrated by
different groups (or individuals) in different
circumstances and for different purposes.
But we should not underestimate the
difficulty of the task. If terrorism is a
notoriously difficult word to define — the
academic Alex Schmid counted 250
definitions in use and proposed one himself
that ran to 570 words — then its potential
surrogates are not much easier. 4 ‘Violent
extremism’, for example, has achieved a
great deal of currency among governments
and civil society organisations, but is also
problematic, and not just because
‘extremism’ is almost indefinable in anything
other than relative terms. As a broader term,
it serves a purpose in negating some of the
political contention of ‘terrorism’, but if
anything this breadth makes it even worse
as a catch-all term which can cover any
form of violence. Terms describing different
kinds of war participants, such as
‘insurgent’ and ‘guerrilla’, may be less
politically fraught but tend to be used rather
loosely and distinctions between them are
difficult to draw. A universal definition of
these terms may be too much to hope for,
but that should not stop us from deploying
them and others as long as we define them
in each study.
How far, though, can and should we go in
developing a more precise vocabulary for
violent groups? The scale of the challenge is
well illustrated by a 2008 study by the Israeli
academic Boaz Ganor, who examined the
many typologies of terrorist organisations
which academics in a variety of fields and
combined them into a model which proposed
fifteen variables (such as preferred target, size,
and organisational structure). 5 Ganor proposes
that a typology of terrorism must reflect the
complexity and variability of terrorist violence,
while cautioning that, taken to extremes, a
typology may begin to contain categories so
precise that they contain only one group. But
even Ganor focuses only on certain kinds of
violence (which he subsumes under the label
‘terrorism’) and unconsciously excludes
others, so that his admirable work does not
quite solve the conceptual problems thrown
up by statistical studies.
What, then, should we do? The terrorism
research community will continue the
empirical study of terrorism and this can only
be a good thing. Analyses such as the GTD are
important contributions to our knowledge.
The more we can develop and hone our
methodological tools for categorising the
varied and dynamic phenomena we study, the
closer we will come to answering the
fundamental questions of what terrorism is,
how it can be managed, and whether we are
making progress. But there is still some way to
go before Rumsfeld’s questions can be
adequately answered.
1. Donald Rumsfeld, memo ‘Global War on Terrorism,’
October 16, 2003 http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/
washington/executive/rumsfeld-memo.htm
2. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why
Violence Has Declined, New York: Viking, 2011.
3. Peter R. Neumann, ‘The Trouble with Radicalization’,
International Affairs 89.4 (2013).
4. Alex P. Schmid, ‘The Definition of Terrorism’ in Alex P.
Schmid (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Terrorism
Research (London and New York: Routledge, 2011).
5. Boaz Ganor, ‘Terrorist Organization Typologies and the
Probability of a Boomerang Effect’, Studies in Conflict and
Terrorism 31.4 (2008).
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