Is Terrorist Designation an Effective Counterterror Tool? (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Security in Multi-Ethnic Systems

Abstract

Many countries and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), 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, terrorist 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 (FTO) 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 titled Designated Terrorist Organizations (DTO), which covers official lists of terrorist organizations from two IGOs and 148 countries, among which 38 countries have their unique lists whereas others simply follow the IGOs’ lists. We argue that terrorist 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. We also argue that the UN list and the FTO list have a larger impact on designated groups than other national lists, since these two serve as a “trendsetter” that influence other countries’ lists.

We test our hypotheses using the DTO database and event-based 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 IGO in a given year, and we measure the impacts using 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, especially by the UN or the FTO, and financially sanctioned.

Authors

• Chia-yi Lee, National Chengchi University

• Yasutaka Tominaga, Hosei University