International Studies Review (2011) 13, 318–321

Examining the Causes and Effects

of Terrorism
Review by Victor Asal
Department of Political Science, University at Albany, State University of New York

Terrorism, Elections, and Democracy: Political Campaigns In The United States, Great Britain,
And Russia. By Sarah Oates, Lynda Lee Kaid, and Mike Berry. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009. 260 pp. $95.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-230-61357-7).

Terrorism, Instability, and Democracy in Africa and Asia. By Dan G. Cox, John Falconer, and
Brian Stackhouse. Lebanon, NH: Northeastern University Press, 2009. 244 pp. $60.00
hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-1-555-53705-7).

Before 2001, the circle of people studying terrorism and counterterrorism was
a fairly small one being led by people like Martha Crenshaw, Bruce Hoffman,
Walter Enders, Todd Sandler, and Brian Jenkins and could be found in a small
set of journals. The circle studying these topics using quantitative methods was
smaller still (Lum, Kennedy, and Sherley’s 2006 review of the literature found
only 3% of articles were empirically based), with much of it being done by a
small number of scholars such as Enders, Sandler, Leonard Weinberg and their
collaborators (Silke 2004; Lum et al. 2006). For terrorism research as a whole,
this changed radically after 9 ⁄ 11. Lum, Kennedy, and Sherley, surveying more
than 14 000 articles about terrorism written between 1971 and 2003 for a
Campbell Collaboration literature review, found that more than half of these
articles were written after the attacks (2006, p. 7). The amount of this research
that is quantitatively based in whole or in part, while growing, is still a very small
part of this growth (Lum et al. 2006). The two books reviewed here are part of
this growing trend but focus on very different parts of the world and on a very
different research questions.
Terrorism, Elections, and Democracy: Political Campaigns In The United States, Great
Britain, And Russia by Sarah Oates, Lynda Lee Kaid, and Mike Berry looks at how
the fear of a terrorist threat has impacted recent elections in the United States,
Great Britain, and Russia. The authors use coded data of newscasts and advertise-
ments as well as focus groups in all three countries to examine how the issue of
terrorism was framed by the candidates and the news media and how this fram-
ing was seen by a sample of potential voters. One of the key contributions of the
authors is that they examine these questions by two new sets of data that allow
for some interesting insights. Terrorism, Instability, and Democracy in Africa and Asia
by Dan G. Cox, John Falconer, and Brian Stackhouse examines four large institu-
tional, cultural, and economic factors and how they relate to the amount of ter-
rorism in two areas, Africa and Asia, that have not received as much attention as
the Middle East (although two subregions they cover, North Africa and South
Asia, have received a fair degree of attention). The authors use a data-driven
approach looking at the two areas as a whole and then examine several overview
case studies of the different subregions that make up their areas of interest. One
of the key contributions of the authors is that they look at domestic terrorism
(close to nine tenths of all terrorist events [MIPT, 2006]) in addition to transna-
tional terrorism which is often not examined in quantitative terrorism research.

doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2486.2011.01017.x
 2011 International Studies Association
 Victor Asal 319

Both books offer interesting insights and provide coverage of important issues.
At the same time, both books suffer from important limitations that suggest the
need for further research. It is important to note though that one of the key lim-
itations of both books is not the fault of the authors but a product of the state
of quantitative terrorism research itself. Until recently, there have been very few
publically available sources of data related to terrorism and its effect that were
freely available to the academic community. Even now there is a paucity of data,
and without numbers, quantitative analysis cannot be done. To paraphrase a for-
mer Secretary of Defense, ‘‘We go to war with the data we have, not necessarily
the data we want.’’ This is an acceptable of course when authors have done their
due diligence about either identifying the best existing data or when they pro-
duce data themselves. The second option is best when there is a lack of data.
The second option though is resource intensive and thus inherently limited, and
research should not be judged negatively if the authors have done their due dili-
gence. It would be wonderful if Oates, Kaid, and Berry could do their analysis
on ‘‘candidate messages and news framing’’ across their three countries of inter-
est with data for several elections before 9 ⁄ 11 and for all the elections after, but
this is not a reasonable expectation given the intense labor needed to code polit-
ical advertisements and news content for three different countries. Their data
problem is complicated further by the fact that retrospective research in this area
becomes very expensive because past media content is often not free—nor in all
cases are such data available even for money. The authors, while constrained to
elections after 2001, still code more than one election for the United States and
Russia.
Cox, Falconer, and Stackhouse face a different problem in that until recently
freely available data on terrorism differentiated by domestic or transnational ori-
gin has not been available. While this problem has been addressed partially by
the release of the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) created by the National
Center for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (LaFree and
Dugan 2007), this is a fairly recent development. The authors chose to use the
National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism’s (MIPT) Terrorism
Knowledge Base (MIPT 2006) which had data on both domestic and interna-
tional terrorism. Unfortunately, while MIPT has over 30 years of data for interna-
tional terrorism, it only has <10 years of data for domestic terrorism which
placed constraints on what they could do with the data.
Following in the footsteps of Nacos (2002), Norris and Kern (2003) and oth-
ers, Oates, Kaid, and Berry focus on the impact of the fear of terrorism, the tri-
angle of politicians and their TV media efforts, the TV news media and the
public that consumed information from both sources. The authors focus more
tightly than other works by looking specifically at media related to national elec-
tions following September 11th. The book ‘‘analyzes the framing of security
issues and terrorism in political advertizing, campaign news on television and
through audience reaction to security messages’’ (p. 1) by coding the content of
news broadcasts and ads with a coding scheme that is well explained in their
book. The book seeks to answer how politicians and the news media handled
the issue of terrorism, how they framed it, and how political consumers
responded.
The authors point out that the UK and Russia share similar dealings with
terrorism, given more frequent attacks and a longer history of such ongoing
violence. Despite these similarities in experience of terrorism that the UK and
Russia share, the authors find that it is the American and Russian voters who
seemed to respond in a similar fashion with a ‘‘desire for strong leadership’’ (p.
2), while British voters seemed to be angry and disaffected with their leadership
that involved them in a violent conflict in Iraq. The three country case studies
are well done. For example, the book does a good job illustrating how the Bush
320 Examining the Causes and Effects of Terrorism

campaign was effective at emotive appeals related to terrorism as well as using

the issue of security to knock down Kerry’s credibility as a potential leader. The
effectiveness of these efforts is shown through the emotional and fearful filters
the authors identified in their American focus groups. This is compared to the
similar Russian case and the very different case of the United Kingdom where
voters in the focus group had ceased to believe what their government was tell-
ing them.
Terrorism, Elections, and Democracy makes a valuable contribution to the litera-
ture with the new data it presents and the analysis of the data within each coun-
try. The major limitation and drawback of the book are the comparison of the
three cases and the choice of the cases themselves. The authors do not put a lot
of effort into justifying why they selected these three cases, and this is a problem
from a research design perspective since they are comparing such a small num-
ber of cases. One of these cases, Russia, is not a stable democracy and depending
on your definition not a democracy at all. As the authors point out themselves,
Russia has ‘‘political institutions that are Western in form but Soviet in content’’
(p. 19). Given the focus on elections and democracy, the lack of a clear argu-
ment for why these are the right three countries to compare is problematic. Why
not compare France, for example, or Spain, which both have had experience
with terrorism and are much more comparable as stable long-term democracies?
While Terrorism, Elections, and Democracy focuses on terrorism as an input into
the political process, Terrorism, Instability, and Democracy in Africa and Asia focuses
on terrorism as the output and looks at the factors that help explain the variance
in the amount of terrorism that different regions experience. Before launching
into their theoretical arguments and analysis, the authors define terrorism as vio-
lence directed at noncombatants by nonstate actors to ‘‘influence a target audi-
ence larger than the intend victims toward or against a particular policy action’’
(p. 21). The case they make for this definition is well thought out, and while
one could write a book arguing the issue of what terrorism is or is not, the
authors usefully make it clear what they are planning to analyze in the book and
why. With one exception noted below, Cox, Falconer and Stackhouse also do a
good job explaining why and how they operationalized the theoretical concepts
under discussion.
The authors are interested in exploring how democratic peace, poverty, regime
instability, and a clash of civilizations can help explain variance in the amounts
of terrorism experienced in Africa and Asia, both domestically and transnational-
ly. While the authors make a case for the importance of exploring each of these
theories, the theory chapter leaves one wanting more. While they do a good job,
for example, in explaining the potential importance of a clash of civilizations
model in relation to Islamist terrorism as well as why the areas of the world they
have chosen to study are an appropriate testing ground, they do not do as a good
job defining exactly what they mean by civilizations as they did with defining ter-
rorism. They mention both ethnicity and religion but do not lay out a clear
approach for why the concept of civilizational cleavages are more useful than an
ethnic identity model that has been explored broadly in the ethnic conflict litera-
ture. They also make the claim that there is less literature on the relationship
between terrorism and poverty than on democracy or the clash of civilizations
and terrorism which does not jibe with my understanding of the literature (see
for example Piazza 2006 or (Krueger and Maleckova 2003)). Most importantly,
perhaps, the authors do not take a stand on how they see these factors impacting
terrorism which could have enriched their theoretical discussions.
Cox, Falconer, and Stackhouse do their analysis with the MIPT using graphical
frequency representations eschewing regressions because they feel that the limi-
tations of the domestic data (only 6 years) does not allow for using more com-
plex methods and because graphical frequency representations are easier for
 Victor Asal 321

policymakers and others to understand. I am not sure I agree about their first
argument, but I see the utility of their second. Still I think the book would have
benefited from analysis that would have allowed the authors to control for vari-
ous factors and allowed them to assess the impact of the various variables when
considered together in the same analysis. As they say in the conclusion of their
book ‘‘no single factor explains all, or even most of the terrorist events and cam-
paigns on these two continents’’ (p. 202). They do find support in their analysis
of MIPT and in their case studies for the argument that instability, whether pro-
duced by regime type, poverty or civilizational clashes, breeds terrorism. They
also find that government oppression of minorities is ‘‘one of the worst actions a
government can take’’ (p. 202).
While both books discussed in this review have their limitations, they each
offer interesting insights into terrorism and its interaction with the rest of the
political world. Terrorism, Elections, and Democracy enlightens us about the interac-
tion of media framing and voter perspectives on terrorism during elections in
three different countries. Terrorism, Instability, and Democracy in Africa and Asia
provides a readily accessible overview of how democracy, poverty, ethnic, and
religious differences are related to different levels of terrorism in these regions.

References
Krueger, Alan B., and Jitka Maleckova. (2003) Education, poverty and terrorism: is there a causal
connection? The Journal of Economic Perspectives 17 (4): 119–144.
LaFree, Gary, and Laura Dugan. (2007) Introducing the Global Terrorism Database. Terrorism and
Political Violence 19 (2): 181–204.
Lum, Cynthia, Leslie W. Kennedy, and Alison J. Sherley. (2006) The Effectiveness of Counter-
Terrorism Strategies. Oslo: Campbell Collaboration.
MIPT. (2006) MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base. Retrieved January 29, 2006. Available at http://
www.tkb.org/Home.jsp. (Accessed January 8, 2006.)
Nacos, Brigitte L. (2002) Mass-Mediated Terrorism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Norris, Pippa, M. Kern, and, Marion Just. (2003) Framing Terrorism: The News Media, the Government,
and the Public. London: Routledge.
Piazza, James P. (2006) Rooted in poverty? Terrorism, poor economic development, and social
cleavages. Terrorism and Political Violence 18 (1): 159–177.
Silke, Andrew, Ed. (2004) Research on Terrorism. London: Frank Cass.