Terrorism, Identity and Legitimacy

The Four Waves theory and political violence

Jean E. Rosenfeld

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136848667
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book argues that terrorism in the modern world has occurred in four "waves" of forty years each. It offers evidence-based explanations of terrorism, national identity, and political legitimacy by leading scholars from various disciplines with contrasting perspectives on political violence.

Whether violence is local or global, it tends to be both patterned and innovative. It elicits chaos, but can be understood by the application of new models or theories, depending upon the methods and data experts employ. The contributors in this volume apply their experiences and studies of terrorists, mob violence, fashions in international and political violence, religion's role in terrorism and violence, the relationship between technology and terror, a recurring paradigm of terrorist waves, nation-states struggling to establish democratic/elective governments, and factions competing for control within states - in order to make sense of both national and international acts of political violence and to ask and answer some of the most disturbing questions these phenomena present.

This book will be of much interest to students of terrorism, religion and violence, nationalism, sociology, war and conflict studies and IR in general.

Part I
The Four Waves theory and global terrorism

1
Looking for waves of terrorism

Karen Rasler and William R. Thompson

Introduction

Much is said about old and new terrorism.¹ If one talked or taught about the subject even a decade ago, the stress was usually placed on how it was rational for terrorists to avoid killing too many people if the goal was to increase support for their political agenda. That particular generalization no longer seems very accurate.² Public beheadings and events resulting in thousands of casualties are not intended to impress observers with the righteousness of their cause; yet at no point in time is terrorism activity entirely homogeneous. That is, jihadists are not the only groups who employ terrorist tactics. They compete for attention with Tamil separatists, old Marxists engaging in kidnapping for profit, and even the stray anachronistic anarchist. In any given decade, the nature of terrorist activity is less than monolithic. Since old and new forms of terrorism tend to occur at the same time, it is difficult to make generalizations that assume behavioral homogeneity.

Should we make a distinction, therefore, between old and new terrorism? We argue in the affirmative. We begin with the assumption that terrorism is a tactic or family of tactics adopted by political groups engaged in asymmetrical struggles with more powerful groups – a point well developed in Table 1.1, which compares war, insurgency, and terrorism. The greater the symmetry between two opposing groups in conflict, the greater is the tendency for groups to pursue the war end of the continuum. The less the symmetry, the greater is the penchant of at least one group to favor the terrorism end. However, these generalizations do not imply that all groups engaging in terrorism will utilize precisely the same tactics, fight in the same locales, or demand the same things. We maintain that there is variation in the groups that utilize terrorist tactics from decade to decade as old groups win, are eradicated, or suffer exhaustion. As old groups disappear, new groups are apt to emerge, but not necessarily in the same places and for the same reasons.

A metaphor for dealing with heterogeneity in terrorism groups and tactics is the wave. A wave is a buildup of surface water caused primarily by wind. Below the wave is a mass of water of varying temperature and visibility. The waves that we see may look different than the body of water immediately below.

Table 1.1 Conventional war, guerrilla war, and terrorism

For terrorism groups, waves mean that certain groups stand out as particularly salient in some respect, and that what is salient in one wave is not likely to be equally salient in preceding and following waves. As it happens, though, scholars tend to disagree about how many waves there have been and how best to identify the ones that have been seen.³ Since it is not possible to sort out all of the disagreements about terrorism waves in one article, we focus here on the first wave interpretation to appear in print (Rapoport 2004). After reviewing its key arguments, we conduct a limited test to see if terrorism manifests a wave-like behavior in terms of which groups dominate terrorist activity, whether different groups favor dissimilar tactics, and what sort of damage different groups achieve. Our findings, limited to the 1968–2004 period, provide empirical support for the Rapoport model, which depicts succeeding waves of anarchism, nationalism, leftist/Marxism, and religious fundamentalism. Waves do indeed appear to characterize contemporary terrorist activity.

Rapoport’s model

Rapoport’s argument is particularly distinctive because of its emphasis on generational waves of terrorism. Specifically, Rapoport observes four waves since the late 1870s – each one lasting approximately 40 years. The First Wave began in Russia and was largely the result of slow democratization processes. Russian anarchists conceptualized the idea and tactics for a strategy of overthrowing political systems by conducting serial attacks on public conventions. The predominant strategy in this First Wave centered on the assassination of authority figures, which anarchists sometimes financed through bank robberies. Changes in the world economy’s communication and transportation technology especially aided the emergence of this strategy in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. For instance, information on the terrorist attacks could be circulated relatively quickly just as anarchists could travel widely to carry out attacks and to encourage others to do the same. These technological changes also facilitated large-scale emigration from various parts of Europe to more democratic political systems, thereby creating sympathetic audiences abroad (see Table 1.2).

World War I, precipitated in part by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, encouraged reforms and revolution, which depressed the incentives for anarchic terrorism. Meanwhile, the post-war treaties also helped to delegitimize colonies and empires by breaking up the imperial and colonial structures of the losers and establishing supposedly temporary mandate arrangements. The winners, on the other hand, were able to hold on to their empires, but they were not able to eradicate the notion of national self-determination. Hence, the Second Wave of terrorism focused on dissident efforts to secure European withdrawal from overseas territories, particularly in areas where some elements of the local public preferred their colonial status quo in comparison to what independence might bring (e.g., Ireland, Palestine, Algeria). Although World War II extended this Second Wave of terrorism, it decreased the ability of the European states to hang on to their empires and hastened the disintegration of

Table 1.2 Rapoport's four waves of terrorism

the remaining European empires. Consequently, this Second Wave of terrorism produced by nationalists and anti-colonial groups tapered off.

A Third Wave of terrorism which predominated in the last third of the twentieth century centered on Marxist revolution. It was also reinforced by the Viet Cong’s abilities to withstand the military might of the United States in Vietnam. Tactics such as assassinations came back into favor, along with hijackings of airplanes and public offices, as well as increasingly lucrative kidnappings of individuals whose release required concessions and/or ransoms. Within the Cold War context, training and support for terrorists became increasingly internationalized, as did the targets of terrorist attacks. The end of the Cold War and the international community’s sustained resistance to these terrorist demands eventually led to the phasing out of this wave by the 1980s.

A Fourth Wave coincided with the confluence of two major events in southwest Asia. The first event occurred with the overthrow of the Shah in Iran, bringing to power Islamic clerics who sought to “export the revolution.” In the same year, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in an attempt to save a client regime against an internal revolt, mobilizing Muslims to wage a holy war against the infidels. The Fourth Wave of terrorism quickly assumed a strongly religious orientation, initially centered on Islam. Eventually, terrorism spread to include actions from radical wings of other religions in reaction to militant Islam. In the process, a new tactic, suicide bombings, emerged, as did a strong emphasis on attacking U.S. targets in order to encourage American withdrawal from the Middle East.

The general pattern is thus not one of random and unstructured violence. Each wave has a life cycle with initial expansion and contraction phases, which are influenced by the number of terrorist organizations in operation and the intensity of their attacks. Terrorist organizations that survive the contractionary phase of the wave in which they originated adapt by taking on the operational characteristics and tactics that appear in the next wave of terrorism. The duration of each wave depends upon myriad explanations: the presence or lack of successes attributable to terrorism, the resilience of terrorist organizations, and the effectiveness of states’ responses to terrorist claims and tactics. Duration may also be contingent upon generational differences associated with terrorists’ aspirations and calculations about what works and what does not seem to be efficacious. Or it may be that new generations simply find it easier to break with older strategies that have lost their allure. The central motivation for terrorism in each wave is distinctive, as are the tactics that are most likely to be employed. The violence is carried out by non-state organizations and is directed at states and their populations deemed to be antagonistic to the aims of revolutionary organizations. Terrorists, including some of their targets, are apt to view their conflict as warfare, albeit an unconventional form of warfare. Yet, the one recurring pattern in terrorism waves is their limited duration. Each wave is likely to play itself out and to be replaced by a new wave of terrorism that is centered on a motivation which is as difficult to predict as the timing of the next upsurge.

Analytical questions

Our immediate question focuses on whether terrorism reflects wave-like qualities. In other words, can we discern waves of terrorism in the data on terrorist activity? Unfortunately, we lack long time series on terrorism at the present. What we have are compendiums of “illustrative” events, which cover various periods of time in addition to systematic databases that usually span shorter periods of time. The main problem with “illustrative” events lists is that the principles used to include or exclude terrorist events are unclear. However, the central problem with databased lists is the brevity of the time series. For instance, a series that encompasses 37 years is not all that appropriate for an empirical question which deals with 137 years of terrorism activity. Since there are no “illustrative” lists covering events over 100 years, we focus our inquiry initially on the contemporary period. At the same time, we acknowledge that our efforts to discern wave-like patterns in terrorism are not the first attempt to do so. Although not directly focused on waves per se, Pedahzur, Eubank, and Weinberg (2002) examined the nature of terrorist group formation in the twentieth century. They concluded that the number of groups peaked in the 1970s and 1980s, reflecting at that time a mixture of nationalist, left-and right-wing, and religious groups, but during the 1990s religious groups largely dominated new group formation.

Enders and Sandler (2005) examined time series of terrorist activity and found breakpoints in the mid-1970s, early 1990s, and 2001 that they attribute to various factors. An increase in deaths in 1975 is traced to a rise in the formation of terrorist groups around this time. The early 1990s increase in deaths is said to be due to the decline in left-wing groups and to decreases in state sponsorship. After 9/11, Enders and Sandler find that bombings increased and hostage-taking decreased. They hypothesize that groups became more interested in the amount of carnage that could be inflicte...

Table of contents

• Series: Political Violence
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I The Four Waves theory and global terrorism
• Part II Terrorism
• Part III Identity, legitimacy, and political violence
• Select bibliography
• Index