Transformative Goals, Violent Methods, and International Opponents: How Revolutionary Ideology Affects Terrorism Open Access

Abstract

Does ideology affect rebel violence against civilians? I argue that revolutionary ideology’s goal of significant political transformation, identification of violence as the sole or primary method for that transformation, and identification of the international order as opponents make rebel groups which have revolutionary ideology more likely to commit terrorism and to target transnationally in terrorist attacks. Following prevailing arguments regarding nationalist ideology’s dampening effect on terrorism use, I also expect nationalist revolutionary groups to be less likely to commit terrorism and target transnationally than non-nationalist revolutionary groups but more likely than non-revolutionary groups. Using a dataset I created for this project which qualitatively measures the presence of revolutionary ideology among Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) rebel groups, I empirically test the concept of revolutionary ideology for the first time. I conduct a large-n analysis using a rare events logistic regression to calculate the revolutionary groups’ likelihood to commit terrorism. I find that both non-nationalist and nationalist revolutionary groups are more likely to commit terrorism and target transnationally than non-revolutionary groups, and I find that nationalist revolutionary groups, though slightly less likely than non-nationalists to commit attacks and target transnationally, are closer than initially expected. Ultimately, this research demonstrates the importance of considering ideology in explanations for rebel behavior, especially ideology’s identification of methods and opponents.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................................ 1

LITERATURE REVIEW ............................................................................................................................. 3

Conceptualizing Ideology and its Impact on Rebel Behavior ................................................................................................. 3

Revolutionary Ideology.............................................................................................................................................................. 6

What is Terrorism and Why is it Used? ................................................................................................................................. 11

The Logics of Terrorism .......................................................................................................................................................... 12

Table 1: Types of terrorism, their targets, and logic for use ................................................................................................. 14

Table 2: A sample of groups according to revolutionary/non-revolutionary and nationalist/non-nationalist ideologies ..... 16

THEORY AND HYPOTHESES ................................................................................................................ 17

Figure 1: Relationship between revolutionary ideology, terrorism, and targeting ............................................................. 18

RESEARCH DESIGN ................................................................................................................................ 19

Dependent Variable ................................................................................................................................................................. 20

Independent Variable .............................................................................................................................................................. 22

Controls..................................................................................................................................................................................... 26

Model Selection ........................................................................................................................................................................ 28

RESULTS AND ANALYSIS ..................................................................................................................... 29

The Data.................................................................................................................................................................................... 29

Table 3: Count of revolutionary and non-revolutionary groups ........................................................................................... 29

Table 4: Sums and means of the dependent variables across group types ............................................................................ 30

Table 5: Mean of control variables across group types ........................................................................................................ 31

Results and Analysis ................................................................................................................................................................ 32

Table 6: Rare Events Logit Results ....................................................................................................................................... 32

CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................................... 36

REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................................... 39

APPENDIX A: REVOLUTIONARY CODING RULES........................................................................... 45

APPENDIX B: GROUPS EVALUATED AND THEIR CODING ........................................................... 50

About this Honors Thesis

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School	Emory College
Department	Political Science
Degree	B.A.
Submission	Honors Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Political Science, International Relations Political Science, General
Keyword	Marxism Civil War Political Violence Ideology Terrorism Islamism Rebel Jihadism Communism Revolution Revolutionary Ideology
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	David Davis, Emory University
Committee Members	Courtney Freer, Emory University Renard Sexton, Emory University

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