How Terrorist Leaders Matter

• In Event: Rebel Leaders

Abstract

How do terrorist leaders matter? The role of leaders in contemporary religious terrorist organizations remains underdeveloped and poorly understood. To fill this deficit, this multidisciplinary approach includes an inductive review of 40 religious terrorist organization and draws on literature from sociology, business management literature, and organizational theories. Terrorist leadership types emerge from a dynamic interaction between organizational type—specifically the level of institutionalization—and the way that leaders derive authority over their group. I challenge the conventional wisdom that leaders matter less as groups decentralize and rather argue that leaders matter differently depending on this intercation of organizational type and authority. The interaction between institutionalization and organizational type produces eight terrorist leadership types: administrator, dictator, diplomat, change manager, unifier, visionary, motivator, and symbolic leader. Counterterror implications flow from each specific leadership type as the expected effects of decapitation, for example, vary significantly across type. In order to more closely examine the effects of organizational structure and sources of authority in producing various types of leaders, I apply a most-similar approach to Salafi-jihadist terrorist organizations. I will present the preliminary findings from the case studies examining al-Qaida, al-Shabaab, Abu Sayyaf Group, and the Egyptian Islamic Group to demonstrate the impact of variations in institutionalization and authority type on religious terrorist organizations over time. Without such a systematic approach, scholarship related to decapitation risks making incorrect assumptions about how terrorist leaders matter.

Authors

• Elizabeth Grimm Arsenault, Georgetown University

• Tricia Bacon, American University