Is Terrorism Designation An Effective Counterterror Tool?

• In Event: The Strategies of Terrorist Organizations

Abstract

Many countries and intergovernmental organizations (IO), such as the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and the United Nations (UN), have their lists of designated terrorist groups. Despite various political considerations behind the decision-making, terrorism designation is an important counterterrorism policy tool that is aimed to outlawing and cracking down notorious terrorist groups, particularly after the 9/11 events. The literature on the proscription of terrorists has divergent views on this policy tool. While some scholars believe that officially labeling a group as a terrorist group is effective in curbing its terror activities, others argue that criminalizing a group in fact impedes any peaceful resolutions between the government and the group. No empirical analysis, however, has been done to systematically examine the consequences of terrorism designation except for Phillips’ (2019) analysis on the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organizations list.

Is having an official list of terrorist organizations effective in combating terrorism? Does being designated by a government reduce a group’s terrorist activities in the designating country and other countries? This paper answers these questions by using a self-collected database which covers official lists of terrorist organizations worldwide. We argue that terrorism designation is more effective when it is followed by financial sanctions, because terrorist groups that suffer from funding cut are less capable of launching new attacks. While terrorism designation decreases terrorist attacks in the designating countries, transnational terrorist groups that are proscribed may move their activities overseas, and thus show an increase in their attacks in other countries.

We test our hypotheses using our self-collected data on official terrorism designation worldwide and data from the Global Terrorism Database. We employ parametric approaches to identify the causal effects of designation such as difference-in-differences and the matching method based on our group-level panel data to consider groups’ different tendencies to be designated. Our treatment is whether a group is designated by a government or an IO in a given year, and we measure the impacts through the number of attacks perpetrated by a group in the following year and survival years of designated groups. We expect that in general a terrorist group is less likely to carry out attacks or may even disband after it is designated and financially sanctioned. We also examine the conditional effects of the designation.

Author

• Yasutaka Tominaga, Hosei University