Research
My current working papers include:
“Rage Against the Regime: Terrorism and the Arab Spring”
The Arab Spring spawned a whole host of political opportunities for previously restricted or outlawed political actors in civil society, formal politics, and beyond. Despite political mobilization amongst these actors, one group of actors had decidedly mixed efforts, Salafi-Jihadist terrorist groups. In this paper, I consider the various outcomes of Salafi-Jihadist groups and answer the question, Why didn’t more Salafi-Jihadist groups capitalize on the Arab Spring to achieve some measure of success? I argue that three factors undergird the ability of a Salafi-Jihadist terrorist group to be successful – prevalence of economic opportunities and the embeddedness of terrorist groups within those informal economic networks, strength in the ideological competition with Islamist political parties, and internal ideological cohesion within the group. Using a comparative case study paired with a statistical text analysis of Salafi-Jihadist groups, I find that groups that provided greater economic opportunities saw moderately more success than those who did not, but only if they were able to show internal ideological cohesion. Groups that made efforts to distinguish themselves ideologically from other Islamists were more likely to solidify their own ideological beliefs.
Paper available upon request
Poster available here
“Anonymous Attackers: An Alternative Logic to Credit-taking in Terrorism.”
Acts of terrorism left unclaimed have puzzled scholars in the study of terrorism and counterterrorism policymakers alike. The very idea to commit an act of terrorism, but not take credit for it runs contrary to the conventional wisdom of credit-taking and political communication in terrorism. Extant literature has understood terrorist groups as unitary actors, failing to account for inter-group variation and individual preferences. As a consequence, unclaimed terrorism, or attacks left unclaimed, present a dilemma to the rational model where acts of terrorism are understood to be a form of costly signaling. If such a costly form of ‘signaling’ is authorized by a group, how do so many attacks go unclaimed? This paper explores an alternative theoretical approach to answer the question, what explains the incidence of unclaimed or “anonymous” terrorism? I present an argument about the role of low-level members of terrorist organizations as central agents in the prevalence of attacks that are registered as unclaimed. Utilizing data from the Global Terrorism Database and the Minorities at Risk Organizational Behaviour dataset, I show that countries with less cohesive or weakly organized groups, on average, see a higher rate of unclaimed terrorism.
Paper available upon request
My current works in progress include: