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Several studies have found restrictions on minority faith-based communities to be related to the onset of violent religious hostilities. Absent from this work, though, is a consideration of the fact that minority religious discrimination can take different forms, and, consequently, may encourage violence in different ways. This paper seeks to fill this void by examining different forms of minority religious restrictions and their relationship to religious violence. Specifically, we analyze the comparative strength of three basic types of religious discrimination—restrictions on minority religious practices, restrictions on minority religious institutions, and restrictions on conversion and proselytizing —on violence carried out by both religious majority groups and religious minority groups. Interestingly, our analysis shows all three forms of restrictions encourage violence from religious majorities, but not from minorities. We supplement the statistical analysis with a case study of faith-based discrimination and violent religious hostilities in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing research portrays militant splinter groups as more violent than their parent organizations due to factors like more extreme preferences or capacity-building needs. Though widely held, the assumption that splinters are particularly violent has not been systematically tested. In this paper, we develop and test an alternative explanation for splinter behavior. We argue splinter groups often appear less violent than their parents due to an underlying selection effect. Splinters break away where there are large organizational barriers to internally address a faction's grievances. These barriers tend to exist in well-organized parents that are also capable of high levels of violence. Splinter groups lack this established organizational infrastructure, resulting in lower levels of relative violence. We test this logic with an original dataset on parent and splinter groups and a pair of comparative case studies. We find that splinters are less violent than parent organizations, challenging conventional wisdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between ISIS propaganda content and ISIS-inspired attacks by those outside of the group's control. We examine the content of ISIS' English language magazines, as well as speeches by two of its top leaders. We find that statements made about enemy countries in most contexts are not associated with a higher likelihood of violence in those countries. However, when a country is mentioned in ISIS propaganda in the context of its participation in the air campaign, this corresponds to an increased likelihood that the country will experience a violent attack. This suggests that propaganda highlighting key military adversaries may play a role in directing attackers that are outside the control of the organization's hierarchy to the group's preferred targets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does democracy heighten or lessen the incidence of terrorism? This question has eluded a definitive answer for over three decades. Some terrorism researchers find that democracy has dampened terrorism; others that democracy has encouraged it; still others that there is a curvilinear or more nuanced relationship between the two. In this article, we contend that democracy has differential effects on terrorism, depending on the goals of particular terrorist groups. We claim that efforts to restrict democracy, by decreasing political rights and civil liberties, will effectively constrain terrorist activity from "strategic" groups but will have the opposite effect on "universalist" groups. The reason for this variance, we argue, involves the scope of ambition and underlying motivation distinguishing these very different types of terrorist movements. Because universalist groups have abstract ambitions and non-negotiable goals, they are unlikely to be deterred by crackdowns on democracy. Alternatively, because strategic groups do not see their missions as all-or-nothing campaigns of good versus evil and instead seek limited and concrete goals, anti-democratic measures are more likely to succeed against them. Our analysis of 200 countries from 1972 to 2016 finds strong support for this claim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That terrorism is a "weapon of the weak" is such deeply held conventional wisdom it has become almost a cliché. "Weak" means many different things in the literature, however, and little rigorous empirical research has tested the contention that weaker groups, however conceived, are more likely to employ terrorism. This article explores prominent weapon of the weak arguments to develop testable hypotheses about group strength and the prevalence of terrorism. Using measures of deliberately indiscriminate attacks on civilians by rebel groups in civil conflicts, as well as multiple measures of rebel strength, it examines systematically whether weaker groups are more likely to employ terrorism. I find surprisingly little empirical support for the conventional wisdom. There is no clear or consistent evidence that deliberately indiscriminate terrorism is a weapon of the weak rather than the strong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the relationship between domestic terrorism and voting behavior? Past research notes the prevalence of domestic terrorist attacks in democratic regimes, but focuses primarily on such violence as a "weapon of the weak." We extend this literature by focusing on terrorism by incumbent-aligned armed groups and argue these actors use selective violence against political elites to delegitimize the political opposition and provide credible signals of the instability and unrest that is likely to accompany a transfer of power. Using data from two Argentine presidential elections in 1973, we evaluate the relationship between incidents of violence and changes in two measures of voting behavior—vote share and turnout. Consistent with expectations, left-wing political violence between elections reduced right-wing vote share but did not reduce turnout. Additional tests support the mechanism that violence increased voters' doubts about a potential right-wing government's ability to govern, and show violence is correlated with future repression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High rates of missing perpetrator information in political violence data pose a serious challenge for studies into militant group behavior and the microdynamics of conflict more generally. In this article we introduce multiple imputation (MI) as the best available method for minimizing the impact of missing perpetrator information on quantitative analyses of political violence, a method that can easily be incorporated into most quantitative research designs. MI will produce unbiased attributions when the reasons for missingness are known and can be controlled for using observed variables, rendering responsibility for unclaimed attacks, “missing at random” (MAR) – which we show is a reasonable assumption in the case of political violence based on current theory of militant group claiming. We lay out the logics and steps of MI, identify variables and data sources, and demonstrate that MI produced better results in the case of the Pakistani Taliban’s response to drone strikes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Turkey has been suffering from separatist terrorism and the political conflict it implies since the mid-1980s, both of which are believed to have a negative impact on economic welfare. This article investigates the economic costs of Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) terrorism, particularly in the Eastern and Southeastern provinces of Turkey by invoking the synthetic control method. We create a synthetic control group that mimics the socioeconomic characteristics of the provinces exposed to terrorism before the PKK terrorism emerged in the mid-1980s. We then compare the real gross domestic product (GDP) of the synthetic provinces without terrorism to the actual provinces with terrorism for the period 1975 to 2001. Causal inference is carried out by comparing the real per capita GDP gap between the synthetic and actual provinces against the intensity of PKK terrorist activity. Extended over a period of fourteen years (1988 to 2001), we find that after the emergence of terrorism, the per capita real GDP in Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia declined by about 6.6 percent relative to a comparable synthetic Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia without terrorism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What kind of war is Mexico’s drug war? The prominent “criminal insurgency” approach helpfully focuses attention on cartel–state conflict, but unnecessarily redefines insurgency as “state-weakening,” eliding critical differences in rebels’ and cartels’ aims. Whereas rebels fight states, and cartels fight with one another, to conquer mutually prized territory and resources, cartels fight states “merely” to constrain their behavior and influence policy outcomes. This distinction yields a typology with theoretical consequences: decisive victory plays an important role in most models of civil war but is impossible or undesirable in wars of constraint. Theories of criminal war must therefore explain how ongoing coercive violence can be preferable to pacific strategies. I distinguish two such coercive logics of cartel–state conflict: violent lobbying and violent corruption. Lobbyings' more universalistic benefits elicit free riding, so turf war among cartels should make it rarer than violent corruption. This prediction accords with qualitative and quantitative evidence from Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on the importance of linking micro and macro levels of analysis in order to advance our current understanding of civil wars and political violence processes and discusses the contributions of the articles in this special issue. We first identify the main problems in research on political violence that is focused on a single level of analysis and describe the challenges faced by research that attempts to establish connections between different levels. We then introduce the different articles in the special issue, with an emphasis on the micro–macro-level linkages they develop and highlighting their commonalities. We conclude by emphasizing the importance of a new research agenda for the study of civil wars and political violence that bridges social, economic, and political dynamics occurring at the local level and conflict processes taking place in the macro arena. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]