The Connections

between
State Failure, Insurgency, and Terrorism

Insurgency and Terrorism

The Connections between
State Failure, Insurgency, and Terrorism
• International security experts are coming to the consensus that threats to
international security may arise from areas within states or at boundaries
between states that, for various reasons, are not controlled by state
authority.
• These states provide favourable demographic and social conditions,
which are key factors in their conduciveness to terrorism or to the
development of an insurgency.
• According to this view, the front lines of the war on terrorism and the
increasingly difficult fight against insurgency lie within these failed
states.
The Connections between
State Failure, Insurgency, and Terrorism
• The main argument as to the relevance and relationship
between failed states, insurgency, and terrorism revolves
around the fact that failed states are easier for terrorist
organisations to penetrate and operate from and that they are
easier for insurgencies to develop and thrive within.
• This logic emerges from the fact that failed states lack the
ability to project power internally and have incompetent and
corrupt law enforcement capacities.
The Connections between
State Failure, Insurgency, and Terrorism
• It has been long understood that they provide opportunities for
terrorist groups to organise, train, generate revenue, and set up
logistics and communications centres.
• In this regard, terrorist groups can essentially develop their own
capabilities with little governmental interference.
• Building on this is the argument that failed states offer terrorist groups
larger pools of recruits or potential recruits as they contain larger
numbers of disaffected and alienated citizens, for whom political
violence is, in the majority of cases, an accepted avenue of behaviour.
The Connections between
State Failure, Insurgency, and Terrorism
• Failed states, through their inherent incompetence,
create political vacuums into which these terrorist
groups step.
• In doing so terrorist groups provide personal security,
economic assistance, and other special services to the
citizens in return for protection and the time to widen
their base of operations.