To instill fear or love: Terrorist groups and the strategy of building reputation

Abstract

Why does one terrorist group employ actions that win the hearts and minds of its constituency while another resorts to tactics that alienate their support? The paper investigates terrorist groups' strategy of building reputation in their constituency/in-group population and non-constituency/out-group population. Studying all domestic terrorist groups between 1980 and 2011 with original data, we find that ethnic/religious groups and those with territorial control invest in positive reputation in their constituency as they can minimize the risks of returns. Radical groups and those with cross-border support, however, tend to build negative constituency reputation. While the former type of group has a small constituency, the latter ones can find resources across borders, which reduces their dependency on the constituency. Lastly, we find that terror groups seeking policy concessions avoid building a negative reputation in their non-constituency as this strategy enhances their chances of negotiating with the government.

Fratricidal Rebels: Ideological Extremity and Warring Factionalism in Civil Wars

“…18 Rebels can also compete with rivals by distinguishing themselves through the provision of public goods to their supportive constituencies. 19 Outbidding could be triggered by another mechanism. Regime repression can remove the established political leadership of a contentious movement, triggering competition for succession within the movement.…”

Rebel governance in de facto states

“…Hegemonic groups can rely on their monopolistic position to institutionalize a governance system, strengthen their legitimacy with the local population, and deter new entrants into the local marketplace of authority. Akcinaroglu and Tokdemir (2018) claim that, given the costs of providing governance, armed groups that control territory monopolistically will be more likely to invest in positive reputation in their communities, through the provision of goods and services, because the risks on their investment will be lower. By contrast, groups confronted with internal rivals will be less inclined, or less able, to provide governance.…”

Terrorist Constituencies in Terrorist–State Conflicts: The Debate on the Use of Violence Among Irish Nationalists and West Germany’s Radical Left in the Mid-1970s

“…These cases represent two distinctly different types of modern terrorism: the Provisional IRA belongs to the category of 'ethnonationalist' terrorism, the RAF to that of 'social-revolutionary' terrorism. This has important implications, because, as has been recently shown, 21 ethnonationalist terrorists generally find it easier to become embedded in a larger community that transcends class divisions and shares a broad sense of identity and communal grievances (often against an outsider-enemy), whereas social-revolutionary terrorists are forced to build up networks between dispersed pockets of society, based on bonds of social class or self-chosen counter-cultural or radical-political identities. There is a corresponding distinction in the counter-terrorist communication of state agencies in both cases.…”