Hinweis zum Urheberrecht
Bericht / Forschungsbericht / Abhandlung zugänglich unter
URL: https://epub.sub.uni-hamburg.de/epub/volltexte/2008/1870/
The production of terrorist violence: Analyzing traget selection within the IRA and ETA
Calle, Luís de la ;
Sánchez-Cuenca, Ignacio
| Originalveröffentlichung: |
| (2006) http://www.march.es/ceacs/publicaciones/working/archivos/2006_230.pdf |
| pdf-Format:
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| BK - Klassifikation: |
| 89.58 |
| Sondersammelgebiete: |
| 7.34 Spanien, Portugal |
| DDC-Sachgruppe: |
| Politik |
| Dokumentart: |
| Bericht / Forschungsbericht / Abhandlung |
| Schriftenreihe: |
| Estudios // Centro de Estudios Avanzados en Ciencias Sociales, Instituto Juan March de Estudios e Investigaciones |
| Bandnummer: |
| 230 |
| Sprache: |
| Englisch |
| Erstellungsjahr: |
| 2006 |
| Publikationsdatum: |
| 18.10.2008 |
| Kurzfassung auf Englisch: |
| One of the main shortcomings of studies of civil wars is the impossibility of analyzing
in a quantitative way the dynamics and logic of violence. Most quantitative comparative work
on civil wars takes countries as the unit of observation. We simply lack detailed information
about who was killed and why. Unlike civil war violence, terrorist violence can be studied
more systematically, given its lower magnitude and its recurrence in affluent countries. More
concretely, we can collect all fatalities in a terrorist conflict with very precise information at
the individual level about the circumstances of the killing, the status of the victim and the
strategic reasons for why the victim was targeted. In this paper, we analyze the production of
violence by Republican terrorist organizations in Northern Ireland and by nationalist ones in
the Basque Country. We have reconstructed the history of 2,793 fatalities in total. We
analyze the data according to a simple theoretical framework in which violence is the
outcome of terrorist organizations pursuing certain goals under certain constraints. Terrorists
are constrained materially by the resources they have, and ideologically by the preferences of
their supporters. We test in various ways how variations in resources and in supporters’
preferences produce variations in the patterns of target selection. Our results confirm our
theoretical expectations. |
