What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism - 10th Anniversary Edition

What Makes a Terrorist

What Makes a Terrorist

Economics and the Roots of Terrorism

Lionel Robbins Lectures

10th Anniversary Edition

With a new prologue by the author

ALAN B. KRUEGER

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Princeton and Oxford

Copyright © 2007 by Princeton University Press

Prologue to the Tenth Anniversary Edition copyright © 2018

by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

press.princeton.edu

Jacket image courtesy of Shutterstock

All Rights Reserved

Original cloth edition published 2007

Fourth printing, and first paperback printing, 2008

Tenth anniversary edition, with new prologue, published 2018

ISBN: 978-0-691-17782-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017953925

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Sabon, Gotham, and Scala Sans

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

Printed in the United States of America

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

To the memory of

Pat Tillman,

whose life exemplified

the courage and dedication

of American heroes

and whose death revealed

their shameful exploitation

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE TO THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION   ix

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION   xxxi

Introduction   1

1  Who Becomes a Terrorist? Characteristics of Individual Participants in Terrorism   11

2  Where Does Terror Emerge? Economic and Political Conditions and Terrorism   53

3  What Does Terrorism Accomplish? Economic, Psychological, and Political Consequences of Terrorism   105

Questions and Answers Following the Lectures   143

AFTERWORD   163

REFERENCES   177

INDEX   187

PROLOGUE TO THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

One of the best pieces of advice I received when I was chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (2011–2013) was from one of my predecessors, Edward Lazear, who advised me to stay in my own lane. To me, that meant avoiding becoming involved in national security issues, such as terrorism. I had enough on my plate dealing with the sluggish recovery from the Great Recession that this was not such a tall order. Although I was occasionally pulled into meetings on national security issues, especially involving the effects of the Iran sanctions—and I was invited to give a lecture at Langley on What Makes a Terrorist—for the most part I followed Lazear’s advice and stayed in my lane of economic policy.

Now that I am back to being an academic, however, I can venture into other lanes. Indeed, I would argue that it is often the case in the social and physical sciences that interlopers make important contributions. Wandering into other lanes frequently leads to progress, because outsiders can bring a fresh perspective or new methods to bear on longstanding problems.¹ What Makes a Terrorist was an attempt to bring empirical analysis to the study of terrorism, a field that had been dominated by security professionals, international relations scholars, and intelligence experts who are typically more comfortable with qualitative assessments than hard data. The tenth anniversary of the publication of What Makes a Terrorist provides a fitting occasion to consider how the original research findings have held up and to reflect on the direction of the field.

Revisiting What Makes a Terrorist is also timely as there has been a spate of horrific terrorist attacks in several Western cities in recent months, including Paris, Nice, Manchester, London, Orlando, Berlin, Brussels, Barcelona, and Stockholm. England suffered its worst terrorist incident in more than a decade in the suicide bombing attack that took place outside an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester in May 2017. Terrorist attacks have been so frequent in Afghanistan, Iraq, Istanbul, and Israel that they have become almost routine news events, while new cities have become targets of attacks in the Middle East, including Tehran. When I gave a lecture on terrorism in Singapore, the reaction I received from the audience was that it is not a matter of whether the wealthy city-state will be a target of terrorism but when. Political leaders around the world are frequently responding to terrorist attacks and in some cases seeking to exploit such tragedies for political gain. Too many nationalist political leaders have turned to overheated xenophobic and anti-minority rhetoric to divide countries, which could provoke further hate crimes and intolerance. This is an environment where serious scholarly study of terrorism and hate crimes is more important than ever.

The most newsworthy conclusion of What Makes a Terrorist was that terrorists do not tend to come from underprivileged, impoverished backgrounds. Instead, terrorists—especially international terrorists—tend to be drawn from the ranks of the relatively advantaged in the societies from which they come, in terms of family income, occupational opportunities, and education. The conclusion that economic deprivation has little relationship with terrorism, and often an inverse correlation, was bolstered by my analysis of expressed support for terrorist acts in public opinion polls (higher support from those with more education and higher income) and by my analysis of the country of origin of international terrorists (disproportionately higher gross domestic product per capita and lower civil liberties).² Despite claims to the contrary by countless world leaders, there is simply no compelling evidence that terrorists are lashing out in response to their own economic circumstances or that of their countrymen.³

The profiles of terrorists are typically quite different from those of common criminals, who tend to have low levels of education and poor job prospects. This was certainly the case for the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks and for those behind several subsequent attacks, including the 2007 Glasgow attack (carried out by medical doctors and a PhD student in engineering) and the brutal 2016 Dhaka hostage taking and massacre (carried out by wealthy, well-educated young Bangladeshis who had attended elite schools and universities, according to The Telegraph).⁴ The so-called underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, earned a degree in mechanical engineering from University College, London, and was the son of a wealthy Nigerian banker. In What Makes a Terrorist, I argued that we should reorient our view of terrorism: Most terrorists are not so desperately poor that they have nothing to live for. Instead they are people who care so deeply and fervently about a cause that they are willing to die for it (p. 4). I further commented that, Terrorism is a violent and inappropriate form of political expression. I do not think this form of political expression should be tolerated, but I think that voting is a better analogy than crime (p. 146). Viewed in this light, it is not so surprising that extremists of all stripes who use violent means to pursue their geopolitical goals tend to be drawn from the well-educated elites.

Yet there have been a number of notable recent exceptions to this pattern, with several prominent attacks in Europe and the United States perpetrated by individuals with erratic employment histories, unexceptional educational achievement, and criminal records, often involving convictions for violent acts or petty crimes. Consider, for example, the case of Ahmad Khan Rahimi, who placed pressure bombs in locations in New York City, Elizabeth, and Seaside Park, New Jersey, in September 2016, injuring thirty-one people. Mr. Rahimi was a naturalized U.S. citizen whose parents emigrated from Afghanistan. After graduating from high school, he attended Middlesex County College, New Jersey, majoring in criminal justice, but he dropped out before completing his degree. Prior to carrying out his terror attacks, Mr. Rahimi worked in his family’s fried chicken restaurant; he had been arrested and charged with aggravated assault and unlawful possession of a weapon for allegedly stabbing his brother in the leg. Or consider Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a Tunisian national living in France, who rented a nineteen ton cargo truck that he deliberately drove into a crowd of people celebrating Bastille Day on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice on the evening of July 14, 2016, wantonly killing eighty-six individuals and injuring 434 others. Mr. Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had committed five prior criminal offenses for violence or threatening behavior and petty theft, and he had been reported to the authorities for domestic violence. He had been employed off and on as a delivery truck driver. These terrorists would more accurately be described as thugs, lowlifes, and scoundrels rather than elites with geopolitical aspirations.

It is certainly possible that terrorism and terrorists are morphing. Terrorist acts are increasingly being franchised—loosely inspired and fomented by remote terrorist organizations rather than assiduously planned and carried out by them. Daniel Byman (2017) reports that, As the Islamic State emerged on the scene, both the United States and Europe saw roughly (much depends on exactly what is counted) twice as many successful Lone Wolf attacks in 2015 and 2016 as they did in the 2011–14 period. I argued in What Makes a Terrorist that both supply and demand factors push terrorists to be drawn from the ranks of the well off and well educated. On the supply side, as mentioned, educated people are more likely to hold stronger political views and seek to influence geopolitical events. On the demand side, terrorist groups screen terrorists and often select the elite to carry out their despicable acts to reduce their likelihood of being detected and raise their odds of success, particularly for high-value targets (Benmelech and Berrebi, 2007). But if those committing terrorist acts are increasingly only loosely connected to terrorist organizations, the screening process is less relevant, and involvement in terrorism is potentially open to a broader array of individuals. At the same time, terrorist acts may also be becoming less sophisticated. The use of cars, vans, and trucks to deliberately and wantonly assault innocent bystanders has become a more common form of terrorism, which requires little preparation, commitment, expense, or expertise. Enough prominent terrorist incidents have been carried out by people of low socioeconomic status and a history of violence to warrant a systematic reconsideration of the backgrounds of individuals involved in recent terrorist incidents. Perhaps the composition of the individuals drawn to terrorism is changing and becoming more pedestrian.

The evolving nature of terrorism exacerbates the difficult task of defining and measuring terrorism. In What Makes a Terrorist, I often relied on the State Department’s official definition of terrorism: premeditated politically motivated violence, perpetrated against non-combatant targets by sub-national groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience. Deducing the motivation and intention of people who commit acts of violence is even more of a challenge when it comes to lone wolves. These individuals may spout allegiance to various groups (which are sometimes diametrically opposed to one another) and have a long record of committing violent crimes that are wholly unrelated to any political motivation, but have no connection to a terrorist organization that ex post makes a dubious claim of credit for their acts. For researchers, it is important that the definition of terrorism be aligned with the objectives and method of the research. For example, in modeling the success or failure of plots, it makes sense to cast a broad net. For understanding changes in terrorist profiles over time, it is essential to be consistent in applying a comparable definition of terrorism over time, so that the composition of the sample is not changing because of changes in the boundaries of the definition.

Relatively little systematic research has been done on the backgrounds of terrorists in the past decade.⁵ To fill this void, I assembled data on Muslim-Americans who were involved in terrorist activities from 2008 to January 2017, based largely on Charles Kurzman’s (2016) comprehensive compilation of individuals involved with violent extremism.⁶ This list includes the aforementioned Ahmad Khan Rahimi; the Tsarnaev brothers, who carried out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing; and 155 others. Ideally, I would have liked to also include in my sample non-Muslim Americans who were involved in violent extremism, such as Dylann Roof (the white supremacist who murdered nine parishioners at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 2015), but comprehensive, comparable data on non-Muslim-American terrorists were not readily available. Using data from the American Community Survey (ACS) for the years 2008–2014, I matched the individuals in Kurzman’s database to 8,755 other Americans who were the same age and sex, lived in the same geographic area, and (where appropriate) had immigrated to the United States from the same country of origin at roughly the same age. A detailed description of the data, matching algorithm, and statistical analysis is provided in the Appendix to this Prologue.

Figure I.1 provides a summary of the main findings. The Muslim-Americans who were involved in terrorist activities are decidedly drawn from the middle of the education distribution—they are more likely to be high school graduates and have some college education than other Americans. On average, there is no difference in years of schooling between the two groups. This profile is similar to what I found for homegrown terrorists (tending more toward the middle of the education and income distributions than that of terrorists found elsewhere) in the Afterword to the first edition of this book (see p. 170).⁷

Figure I.1. Comparison of the education of Muslim-American terrorists and matched comparisons.

Notes: Sample consists of 158 Muslim-Americans associated with violent extremism from 2008 to January 2017 and is based largely on Charles Kurzman’s (2016) comprehensive compilation. These individuals were matched to 8,755 other Americans who were the same age and sex; lived in the same geographic area of the United States; and, where appropriate, who immigrated to the United States from the same country of origin at roughly the same age using data from the American Community Survey (ACS) in the years 2008–2014. If multiple non-terrorists were matched to one terrorist, the non-terrorists were weighted inversely proportional to the number of matches, so that after weighting each terrorist had one matched comparison. Weighted averages of educational attainment are reported for the non-terrorist matches. See the Appendix for further details.

Available public information that I linked to Kurzman’s data suggests that 70 percent of the Muslim-Americans involved in terrorist plots since 2008 could be described as lone wolves, in that they were operating on their own. The remainder were part of a group. Although it is possible that many of the lone wolves were tacitly coordinating with others, and many were likely inspired by international terrorist organizations and sometimes radicalized by exposure over the Internet, the apparently high representation of lone wolves among homegrown Muslim-American terrorists is a sign that the jihadist terrorism threat has evolved over time.

The growth in lone-wolf attacks has been partly spurred on by the defeat of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) on the battlefield. ISIS has apparently changed its strategy. The group was quick to claim responsibility after terrorist attacks in Orlando and Paris, even if it may have had little or nothing to do with those attacks. Its chief spokesman, Mohammed al-Adnani, appealed to Muslims to carry out lone-wolf attacks against targets in the West, stating: The smallest action you do in the heart of their land is dearer to us than the largest action by us.

Speaking in Bethlehem alongside Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on the day after the Manchester terrorist attack, Donald Trump remarked:

So many young, beautiful innocent people—living and enjoying their lives—murdered by evil losers in life. I won’t call them monsters because they would like that term. I will call them losers from now on—because that is what they are—losers.

Although most terrorists are not losers in that their economic and educational prospects are not worse than others in their communities, there is a sense in which Donald Trump was correct: the losses that ISIS is facing on the battlefield are causing the organization to change tactics and seek to inspire individuals to commit terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States for which it can claim credit.

What makes a terrorist is evolving along with the evolving threat. Terrorists who were drawn to participate in major international terrorist actions at the time of 9/11 were largely elites who were willing to sacrifice themselves in furtherance of their extreme causes. Lone-wolf terrorists are more run-of-the-mill malcontents who are misdirected by what they read on the Internet or people with a violent past whose motivations are often hard to discern and who may only be partly or remotely motivated by terrorist organizations’ causes. Still, lone-wolf terrorists as a group are not drawn from the least educated or most impoverished members of their societies, suggesting that lack of economic opportunity is not a major driving force for their involvement in terrorism.

Fortunately, one area in which researchers and the law enforcement community have made much progress in the past decade involves understanding and preempting homegrown terrorist plots, although analyzing comprehensive, unclassified data on foiled plots remains a challenge. Strom, Hollywood, and Pope (2015) studied 150 foiled and successfully executed terrorist plots against targets in the United States from 1995 to 2012. Al Qaeda and affiliated groups, or individuals apparently inspired by such groups, accounted for 38 percent of these plots, while white supremacist and militia/anti-government plots accounted for 37 percent of the plots. A majority of the 150 plots were foiled, and the share of plots that were interdicted by law enforcement before they could be executed jumped from 32 percent before 2001 to more than 80 percent after 2001. It appears that more vigilant law enforcement efforts and tips from community members are helping disrupt an increasing proportion of terrorist plots. Nearly 30 percent of the foiled plots were thwarted because law enforcement was initially tipped off by someone in the public. Strom, Hollywood, and Pope (2015, p. 14) note that it is vital that members of the public in all communities are comfortable enough with authorities to report potential terrorist-related activity to them.

Research has also found that public opinion plays a role in international terrorism. In a 2009 article in Science, Jitka Malečková and I found that the incidence of international terrorism perpetrated by people from country i against targets in country j was greater when people in country i disapprove of the leadership in country j (Krueger and Malečková, 2009). We concluded by conjecturing whether the change in leadership in the United States from President George W. Bush to President Barack Obama would lead to an improvement in public opinion regarding the United States and a decline in international terrorism. In his farewell speech delivered in Chicago on January 10, 2016, President Obama noted that no foreign terrorist organization has successfully planned and executed an attack on our homeland these past eight years.

In view of available research on terrorism, public opinion, and