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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]

Why do some militant organizations participate in human trafficking? We investigate this question by introducing a new dataset that records insurgent organizations' involvement in four types of human trafficking: sexual exploitation, forced recruitment, slavery, and kidnapping. Marrying our data to the BAAD2I population of insurgent organizations, we uncover the organizational attributes related to human trafficking. We find that groups with wide alliance networks and territorial control are more likely to commit human trafficking. Organizations that are losing command of the territory and suffering rank-and-file losses are also more likely to turn to human trafficking. Our study sheds theoretical light on insurgent groups' involvement in crime. It also contributes to the empirical scholarship on sexual violence by violent groups by studying different forms of human trafficking in both conflict and non-conflict environments. Our paper presents an original dataset and empirical analysis of insurgent groups' human trafficking patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Terrorist designation has increasingly become an important counterterrorism tool used by intergovernmental organizations and state governments. This article examines the determinants of terrorist listing and argues that terrorist listing is driven by security as well as political concerns. While countries tend to designate groups that pose a greater security threat, terrorist listing can also be influenced by interstate relationships including alliance ties and state rivalry. We test these arguments using a dataset on 35 countries that currently maintain their own lists of designated terrorist organizations. Our findings show that governments are more likely to list groups that have a record of attacking their domestic interests. Domestic groups are more likely to be designated than foreign groups. Moreover, countries are more likely to designate groups that are designated by their allies, even when these groups do not pose a direct threat. Our study contributes to the literature on terrorism and more broadly international security by systematically examining the determinants of terrorist designation and explaining the heterogeneity of terrorist lists across countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a country panel from 1995 to 2013, this study examines the relationship between state failure and transnational terrorism with respect to perpetrator’s proximity to the target and logistical complexity of attacks. Using concentration curves and generalized estimating equation negative binomial models, the study shows that failed states experience significantly more transnational terrorism when the perpetrators are from the home country. But these states do not produce terrorists who cross borders and carry out attacks in other countries, neither do they attract foreign perpetrators. The latter suggests that conditions in failed states present major operational challenges to foreign terrorists. State failure also causes more logistically complex attacks due to lack of effective counterterrorism measures by failed states. The main results hold true for both relative and dichotomous measures of state failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When rebels provide social services, do they have more leverage negotiating the terms of a peace deal? The literature suggests service-providing groups may, on average, have a wider base of support and a more centralized organizational structure. We argue that these features deter potential spoilers from breaking away from the organization during negotiation processes. This, in turn, makes governments more willing to enter negotiations since the threat from spoilers is smaller. Thus, compared to nonproviders, service-providing rebels are more likely to engage in negotiations and these processes are likely to be more stable. This article analyzes these propositions by gathering service provision data on nearly 400 rebel groups and their involvement in and behavior during peace talks. It also serves as an introduction to a larger project about the implications of rebel service provision on conflict outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the effect of foreign military interventions on the incidence of suicide attacks. It presents three theoretical explanations. Foreign military interventions may boost insurgent use of suicide attacks by (a) fomenting a nationalist backlash that sanctions the use of more extreme and unconventional tactics like suicide attacks, (b) providing more and better targets against which suicide attacks can be launched, or (c) prompting insurgents to use suicide tactics in order to overcome their power asymmetries and to confront better defended targets that are enhanced by interventions. We test these competing explanations using a battery of statistical tests on cross-national, time-series data for 138 countries during the period from 1981 to 2005. We find that only foreign interventions with specific features -- pro-government interventions involving larger numbers of ground troops -- boost suicide attacks in countries experiencing interventions. This finding suggests that by tipping the balance of power against insurgents and hardening targets in the context of assisting a local government, foreign military interventions are likely to increase the use of suicide attacks by regime challengers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study asserts that countries with large internally displaced populations (IDPs) are more likely to experience a higher rate of suicide terrorism. After demonstrating this, the study tests four intervening factors hypothesized to drive the relationship between IDPs and suicide attacks: IDPs are expected (1) to increase the pool of potential suicide recruits, thereby lowering the labor costs for suicide terrorist groups; (2) to increase local ethnic conflicts that foster a favorable environment for suicide terrorism; (3) to worsen the human rights conditions in countries, prompting aggrieved people to support suicide terrorist tactics; and (4) to raise the counterterrorism and policing costs of the state, enabling terrorists to plan and execute suicide attacks. Results from negative binomial regression and Tobit models show evidence for the IDPs-suicide terrorism connection. When recursive models are employed to evaluate the effects of four intervening variables, the results most consistently support human rights violations as a significant and substantive mediator between IDPs and suicide attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]