Terrorism, Instability, and Democracy in Asia and Africa

Chapter 5: Analyzing International Terrorism in Asia and Africa

chapter 5 Analyzing International Terrorism in Asia and Africa A major goal of this book is to examine four major factors (democracy , economics, civilization, and regime stability) in order to determine whether one of more of these factors inhibits or enables the development of terrorism. We use both statistical analysis and case studies to accomplish this goal. This chapter is the statistical examination portion of our study of international terrorism, while Chapter 5 is a statistical examination of domestic terrorism. As laid out in the preceding chapter, we are examining twenty-nine years of international terrorist incidents for the Asian and African states included in our study. The results are largely depicted in this and the subsequent chapter through scatter plots generated by the SPSS statistical program. We decided to use the twenty-nine-year average for a given variable in order to examine and compare all the states in our study simultaneously. Each point in any of the scatter plots represents one state in our study. There is some overlap, as some states scored exactly the same for a given variable. Because we used SPSS to generate our scatter plots, we were able to add a constant, a fit line, and produce a rudimentary rsquared statistic. This allowed us to depict the direction and the strength of the correlation between any two variables we were examining. The total number of states in our study is seventy-five. A very few states were excluded because their populations were below one million or, in the case of North Korea, no reliable information was available. However, this represents almost every Asian and African state and should provide sound insight into terrorism in these two regions. Lower numbers of cases reported for some tables resulted from missing data for that particular variable . When some data were missing for a particular state, the missing data 49 years were dropped and only the years with valid data were used to compute the average for that particular state. Democracy and Terrorism Some notable scholars have argued that democracies are more susceptible to terrorist attacks. This is due to the openness of democratic regimes. Citizens and legal aliens are allowed to travel and assemble freely not only within democratic states but between democratic and nondemocratic states, allowing for ease in planning, training, and carrying out terrorist attacks . Also, democratic states are less likely to violate civil rights and, therefore, less likely to intrude into a citizen’s private affairs. This is argued to give terrorists an advantage in planning and carrying out attacks. In opposition to this view are scholars who believe that democracies offer so many different avenues of peaceful political activism, such as public protest, voting, party competition, interest-group activism, and so on, that groups with a grievance will not have to resort to violence or terrorism . Further, the vast literature on the democratic peace indicates that democracies do not wage war with one another. While no definitive cause has been found for this statistical fact, some authors have speculated that democratic citizens are more reluctant to support prolonged military action in general and unwilling to support war against other democracies. If democratic citizens are generally more pacific, then they might be less likely to become terrorists and/or to support terrorism. Figure 1 is a scatter plot of a state’s average competitiveness of participation score by the state’s average number of international terrorist events. The competitiveness of participation score from the Polity IV data set ranges from 0 to 5, with 0 representing no competitiveness or avenues of political expression for the average citizen and 5 representing the highest competitiveness and political access. The Polity IV variable code book defines this variable as the “extent to which non-elites are able to access institutional structures for political expression.” This makes this variable ideal for measuring the potential dilutionary effect democracy has on terrorism. Figure 1 shows no appreciable correlation between competitiveness or participation and international terrorist events. The r-squared value is 0, giving us confidence that there is no correlation between these variables, despite a slight uptrend in the fit line. If there is no correlation between international and domestic terror groups and their actions, then this finding is 50 Terrorism, Instability, and Democracy in Asia and Africa not all that surprising. However, if domestic groups often work in concert and sympathy with larger international terror organizations, then...