The Impact of British Counterterrorist Strategies on Political Violence in Northern Ireland: Comparing Deterrence and Backlash Models*

Abstract

Since philosophers Beccaria and Bentham, criminologists have been concerned with predicting how governmental attempts to maintain lawful behavior affect subsequent rates of criminal violence. In this article, we build on prior research to argue that governmental responses to a specific form of criminal violence—terrorism—may produce both a positive deterrence effect (i.e., reducing future incidence of prohibited behavior) and a negative backlash effect (i.e., increasing future incidence of prohibited behavior). Deterrence‐based models have long dominated both criminal justice and counterterrorist policies on responding to violence. The models maintain that an individual's prohibited behavior can be altered by the threat and imposition of punishment. Backlash models are more theoretically scattered but receive mixed support from several sources, which include research on counterterrorism; the criminology literature on labeling, legitimacy, and defiance; and the psychological literature on social power and decision making. In this article, we identify six major British strategies aimed at reducing political violence in Northern Ireland from 1969 to 1992 and then use a Cox proportional hazard model to estimate the impact of these interventions on the risk of new attacks. In general, we find the strongest support for backlash models. The only support for deterrence models was a military surge called Operation Motorman, which was followed by significant declines in the risk of new attacks. The results underscore the importance of considering the possibility that antiterrorist interventions might both increase and decrease subsequent violence.

Moving Beyond Deterrence

“…In the eighteenth century, Beccaria ([1764] 1983) argued that the state should punish law-breakers just enough so that the burdens of punishment outweigh any pleasure derived from perpetrating the crime-an idea that directly informs U.S. criminal law, military strategy, and a host of other social policy domains. Scholars have since applied the notion of deterrence to a range of areas, including nuclear doctrine (Brodie 1959), as well as a broad range of offending behaviors (Matsueda, Kreager, and Huizinga 2006;Nagin 1998;Paternoster 1987), including terrorist violence (LaFree, Dugan, and Korte 2009). The clear appeal of deterrence theory is its parsimony, as well as the fact that punishment can be imposed with relative ease.…”

Counterterrorism Killings and Provisional IRA Bombings, 1970–1998

“…Larger brigades, in terms of membership, seem to have launched fewer overall IED events (models 2, 4, 6, 7) and fewer bombings against noncivilian targets (models [12][13][14]. This may be a result of PIRA's compartmentalization of roles and functions within these brigades.…”

“…LaFree et al found that three of the six high-profile British counterterrorist operations employed by the British government against PIRA resulted in a significant increase in subsequent terrorist attacks. 14 Dugan and Chenoweth's study shows that repressive actions by the Israeli state sometimes led to increases in Palestinian terrorism. 15 Fielding and Shortland came to a similar conclusion in their analysis of insurgency in Egypt.…”

Altruistic and Anomic Suicide: A Durkheimian Analysis of Palestinian Suicide Bombers

“…Subsequently, our data consisted of 82 belt bombing attacks that included the age of the attacker, income level of the attacker, the gender of the attacker, group affiliation, as well as the number of causalities and injuries inflicted by the attack. In addition, we considered the density of a suicide attack, as defined in Lafree et al (2009), to account for further variation in our data. The density of the attack is meant to account for any possible changes or actions taken by the perpetrators as a reaction to a failed attack.…”