Who is a Terrorist? Ethnicity, Group Affiliation, and Understandings of Political Violence

D’Orazio, Vito; Salehyan, Idean

doi:10.1080/03050629.2018.1500911

Cited by 47 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…For example, it might matter if the actor is described as Muslim, rather than Christian, or left‐wing, rather than right‐wing. Most broadly, we hypothesize that incidents perpetrated by an actor described as Muslim are more likely to be classified as terrorism than other types of descriptions (D'Orazio and Salehyan ; Lemieux and Karampelas ). The second is through the explicit motivation attributed to the action.…”

Section: A Typology For Classifying Terrorismmentioning

confidence: 99%

How the Public Defines Terrorism

Huff

Kertzer

2017

American J Political Sci

120

118

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(Hattem 2015). His assessment was condemned from across the political spectrum, from critics on both the left (including then Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton) and right (including then GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum). Similar public debates erupted following other violent incidents, including the bombing at the Boston Marathon and shooting in Orlando, Florida. These debates highlight not only the contentiousness of classifying terrorism, but also the stakes involved in doing so, for policy makers, academics, and members of the public alike. In this article, we turn to experimental methods to explain the tenor of these public debates. We investigate terrorism in a public opinion context not because we believe that the mass public's intuitions can necessarily resolve normative debates about what should or should not be considered terrorism, but rather because of the central role that public opinion plays in our understanding of how terrorism works. In a vast array of prior research, terrorism is understood as a form of violence that functions by attracting public attention. It is because terrorism hinges on public reaction that Margaret Thatcher suggested terrorists depend on "the oxygen of publicity," that Carlo Pisacane declared terrorism to be "propaganda by deed," and that Ayman al-Zawahiri suggested that for al-Qaeda, media coverage is "more than half" the battle (Smith and Walsh 2013, 312). If the responses of ordinary citizens constitute a central causal mechanism through which terrorism operates, it logically follows that understanding what ordinary citizens think terrorism is is a crucial prerequisite to understanding how they react to it.

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Section: A Typology For Classifying Terrorismmentioning

confidence: 99%

How the Public Defines Terrorism

Huff

Kertzer

2017

American J Political Sci

120

118

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“…Academic terrorism definitions differ on issues concerned with who the perpetrator is (state vs. non-state actor) who the target of violence is (non-combatants only vs. broader boundaries), ideological motivations (political vs. non-political), and a number of other criteria (Schmid, 2004). Furthermore, the public's perception of whether an attack is deemed terrorism or not is impacted by attributes of the incident including the type and severity of the violence, motive and the social categorization of the perpetrator(s) (Huff & Kertzer, 2018;D'Orazio & Salehyan, 2018). A consensus definition is non-existent.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modelling the spatial decision making of terrorists: The discrete choice approach

Bouhana

Gill

2019

Applied Geography

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This is the first study to apply a discrete choice model to understand terrorist spatial decision making. The findings support the proposition that terrorists make decisions that are guided by rationality and act in a similar way to urban criminals. A conditional logistic regression ascertained which characteristics increased the likelihood that an area would be selected as a target, using a dataset of attacks carried out by the Provisional Irish Republican Army in Belfast over a twentyyear period. An increase in distance from the terrorist's home to the attack site decreased the likelihood that an area would be chosen and an area was more likely to be chosen if it contained a major road, police station or military base.

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“…Our proposed framework contributes to the literature on the contrasting effects of nonviolent protest and violent protest (McAdam and Su 2002; Wasow 2017; Madestam et al 2013; Mazumder 2018), and extends work that explores the determinants of support for repression (Lupu and Wallace 2019). Secondly, we contribute to the literature on identity and contentious events by extending it from terrorism (D'Orazio and Salehyan 2018; Huff and Kertzer 2018) to the setting of nonviolent and violent events. We show that the identity of an actor affects the public's willingness to justify a repressive state response.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Violence on Many Sides: Framing Effects on Protest and Support for Repression

Edwards

Arnon

2019

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

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The success of protests depends on whether they favorably affect public opinion: nonviolent resistance can win public support for a movement, but regimes counter by framing protest as violent and instigated by outsiders. The authors argue that public perceptions of whether a protest is violent shift based on the framing of the types of action and the identities of participants in those actions. The article distinguishes between three dimensions: (1) threat of harm, (2) bearing of arms and (3) identity of protesters. Using survey experiments in Israel and the United States, the study finds support for framing effects. Threat of harm has the largest positive effect on perceptions of violence and support for repression. Surprisingly, social out-groups are not perceived as more violent, but respondents favor repressing them anyway. Support for repressing a nonthreatening out-group is at least as large as support for repressing a threatening in-group. The findings link contentious action and public opinion, and demonstrate the susceptibility of this link to framing.

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Who is a Terrorist? Ethnicity, Group Affiliation, and Understandings of Political Violence

Cited by 47 publications

References 44 publications

How the Public Defines Terrorism

How the Public Defines Terrorism

Modelling the spatial decision making of terrorists: The discrete choice approach

Violence on Many Sides: Framing Effects on Protest and Support for Repression

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