The Politics of Listing Terrorist Organizations

• In Event: Domestic Politics of Terrorism

Abstract

Terrorism is a form of political violence that aims to terrify the audience beyond the immediate victims. It is different from a “war” or “crime” in that terrorists are not soldiers and that they have more specific political goals than merely hurting the victims. The distinction between terrorist groups and some political groups, such as insurgent or separatist groups, however, is sometimes blurred. Due to the lack of a universal definition of terrorism, a political group could be labelled as a terrorist group by some governments but not by others. Many countries and intergovernmental organizations, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and the United Nations, maintain their lists of designated terrorist groups, although their lists vary to a large degree.

Listing of terrorist groups can be done through two pathways: judicial and executive, but it is commonly agreed that the executive branch should be the main actor that determines the list. Despite this, the process of listing terrorist organizations is underexplored in the political science literature, especially in comparison to the law literature. This paper examines the political motivation of labelling terrorist groups, focusing on why governments brand some groups as terrorists and not others. We argue that, in addition to national security considerations, political survival concerns and foreign policy preferences largely shape a government’s decision of whether to designate a terrorist group or not. In specific, authoritarian governments are more likely to proscribe domestic groups that threaten their regime stability, whereas democratic governments are more likely to label foreign terrorist groups that are connected to their foreign interests. In other words, terrorist labelling is not only a counter-terrorism policy, but it is also used as a repressive tool to eliminate domestic dissidents or separatists in non-democracies as well as a foreign policy tool to assist friendly countries in democracies.

To test our hypotheses, we have collected data on all designated terrorist groups worldwide and the governments that designated them. Using this self-collected dataset, we explore the political determinants of labeling terrorist groups. We expect that a terrorist group is more likely to be proscribed by an authoritarian government when it advocates separation or operates within the territory of this country, and a foreign terrorist group is more likely to be labelled by a democratic government when it has connection with this government’s foreign allies.

Authors

• Chia-yi Lee, Nanyang Technological University

• Yasutaka Tominaga, Hosei University