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Dilettantes, Ideologues, and the Weak: Terrorists Who Don’t Kill

Victor Asal & R. Karl Rethemeyer (2008). Dilettantes, Ideologues, and the Weak: Terrorists Who Don’t Kill. Conflict Management and Peace Science 25(3):244 - 263 Why do some terrorist organizations choose not to or fail to kill? Of the 395 terrorist organizations operating between 1998 and 2005 only 39% had actually killed anyone. What factors account for this outcome? This article examines a series of organizational factors, including ideology, capability, and home-base country context, that the literature suggests are related to the decision to go lethal. We then test six hypotheses using data from the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT). Our statistical modeling suggests that ideology, capabilities, and dilettantism explain a significant proportion of the variation in whether an organization chooses to kill or not to kill...continue to full post

Full post as published by Terrorism Research News on September 24, 2008 (boomark / email).