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Tactical Diversity in Militant Violence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 December 2017

Michael C. Horowitz ,
Evan Perkoski  and
Philip B.K. Potter
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Abstract

Militant groups, like all organizations, carefully consider the tactics and strategies that they employ. We assess why some militant organizations diversify into multiple tactics while others limit themselves to just one or a few. This is an important puzzle because militant organizations that employ multiple approaches to violence are more likely to stretch state defenses, achieve tactical success, and threaten state security. We theorize that militant organizations respond to external pressure by diversifying their tactics to ensure their survival and continued relevance, and that the primary sources of such pressure are government repression and interorganizational competition. We find consistent support for these propositions in tests of both the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) and Minorities at Risk Organizational Behavior (MAROB) data sets. We bolster these findings with an additional specification that employs ethnic fractionalization in the first stage of a multi-process recursive model. These findings are relevant not only for academic research but for policy as well. While it is difficult for countries to anticipate the character of future tactical choices, they may be able to anticipate which groups will most readily diversify and thereby complicate counterterrorism efforts.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Organization , Volume 72 , Issue 1 , Winter 2018 , pp. 139 - 171
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 2017 

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