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"This book investigates the ways in which the lethality of terrorist violence depends on how rebel organizations finance their rebellion. The leaders of rebel groups make calculated decisions on the intensity of terrorism killings, considering the benefits and costs of targeting non-combatants against the financing needs of their organization. The study specifically focuses on analysing the effects of different external financing options available to rebel groups and takes into account the role of local populations in making financing available. This comparative approach to external financing reveals new hypotheses that are empirically verified and differ from the expectations and findings of prior research. The book's findings are relevant to policy discussions on counter-insurgency strategies that prioritize protecting populations from human rights abuses. Existing doctrines tend to overlook the potential impact of targeted efforts to isolate insurgents from specific financing sources on the capacity to secure local populations. This book will be of interest to students of civil wars, terrorism studies, political violence and security studies."--

When and why do groups participating in mass dissent choose to initiate terrorist campaigns? I argue that groups involved in civil wars and mass civil resistance might face similar organizational pressures, which encourage the initiation of terrorism due to higher tactical effectiveness. Internal organizational pressure might depend on leaders' expectations of a decline in followers' commitment with protracted use of mass tactics. This is likely to motivate leaders to initiate terrorist campaigns to secure organizational survival. External organizational pressures might depend on increasing dissident campaigns' fragmentation. This intensifies competition making leaders more likely to initiate terrorism so as to establish themselves at the forefront of their movements. The findings provide empirical support consistent with my claims and indicate no significant difference between civil wars and mass civil resistance movements with regards to these effects. Contrary to the common idea that the use of conventional violence should entail a higher willingness to engage in illegal violence against non-combatants, this finding suggests that conflict dynamics affect the decision to initiate terrorism and that terrorist campaigns have a coherent strategic logic across different types of mass dissent.

This study proposes an organizational mechanism that links ideology to the use of terrorism in mass dissident campaigns. Ideology affects the level of competition among factions within mass dissident campaigns by shaping whether actors see their interactions as a positive- or zero-sum game. We identify ideological diversity within a campaign and the degree to which ideologies embrace the principle of pluralism as key factors affecting the intensity of factional competition and, consequently, the occurrence of terrorism. We introduce new data on the ideologies of campaigns from the Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes 2.0 dataset and use causal mediation analysis to test our proposed mechanism. We find that greater ideological diversity within a campaign increases the likelihood of terrorism by increasing factional competition. We also find that the presence of a pluralist ideology is associated with a lower likelihood of terrorism by the lowering of factional competition. By shedding light on the mechanisms that link ideology to terrorism, this study helps advance our understanding of why dissident groups might decide to use terrorism tactics within the context of a campaign of mass resistance.

We argue that rebel groups with a higher share of female fighters carry out more lethal terrorist operations using more female perpetrators. Rebels have incentives to exploit gender-specific tactical and propaganda advantages of their female operatives in terrorist operations to cause more damage to the opponents and to attract support. Gender stereotypes make female fighters more effective in terrorist operations, and common media narratives on female perpetrators discredit the government and allow rebels to shame men and encourage other female sympathizers to take up arms. We test this mechanism using casual mediation analysis against new data on the prevalence of female fighters in terrorist operations on a sample of 186 rebel groups fighting in civil wars. We find robust empirical evidence that rebels with a higher prevalence of female fighters employ a higher share of females in terrorist attacks leading to more lethal terrorist violence.

We argue that rebel groups with a higher share of female fighters carry out more lethal terrorist operations using more female perpetrators. Rebels have incentives to exploit gender-specific tactical and propaganda advantages of their female operatives in terrorist operations to cause more damage to the opponents and to attract support. Gender stereotypes make female fighters more effective in terrorist operations, and common media narratives on female perpetrators discredit the government and allow rebels to shame men and encourage other female sympathizers to take up arms. We test this mechanism using casual mediation analysis against new data on the prevalence of female fighters in terrorist operations on a sample of 186 rebel groups fighting in civil wars. We find robust empirical evidence that rebels with a higher prevalence of female fighters employ a higher share of females in terrorist attacks leading to more lethal terrorist violence.

Fringe terrorism is common during nonviolent campaigns. We examine how this can modify the strategic environment between dissident groups and the state in ways that present both challenges and opportunities to moderate factions. Terrorism is intended to promote violent escalation in a conflict, but we argue that fringe terrorist activities in a nonviolent campaign under certain conditions can induce an advantage for well-organized moderate factions. The risk of escalation following terrorism can give the government more incentives to offer concessions to moderate campaign leaders if the movement can credibly prevent armed escalation. The ability to control and prevent violence is more likely when nonviolent movements have a hierarchical structure and a centralized leadership, as such campaigns are better able to prevent shifts by supporters towards violent fringes. Using new data on terrorist attacks by factions sharing the same overall objectives as ongoing nonviolent campaigns, we show that nonviolent campaigns are more likely to see substantial gains in spite of fringe terrorist activities when a movement has a hierarchical structure and a centralized leadership.

AbstractDo peacekeeping missions facilitate nonviolent political contention in post–civil war countries? The nonviolent expression of political grievances is a crucial part of the post–civil war peace-building process but is understudied thus far. We claim that the presence of peacekeepers significantly contributes to establishing a secure environment for nonviolent political contention, particularly nonviolent public protest. In addition, we claim that peacekeeping missions with personnel from countries with robust civil societies are more likely to promote nonviolent political contention because of prior socialization to civic engagement and bottom-top political participation. This is particularly true for UN police personnel (UNPOL), who both train local police forces and have the most direct interaction with protesters. We test our hypotheses using a newly crafted dataset on nonviolent protests in post–civil war countries and peacekeeping missions' presence, size, and home-country composition. We find that peacekeeping missions' presence significantly increases nonviolent protests in post–civil war country-years. This effect is largely explained by the presence of UNPOL from countries with strong civil societies. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of post–civil war political revitalization and policy implications for the composition of peacekeeping missions.