About the Book
Insurgent groups consist of individuals willing to organize and commit acts of terror to achieve their goals. By nature, they depend on public support, yet they sometimes target private civilians in addition to military personnel and government officials. This book examines insurgent embeddedness--the extent to which an insurgent group is enmeshed in relationships with the state, other insurgents, and the public--in order to understand why they attack civilians.
Using Big Allied and Dangerous (BAAD) as the dataset, this book drills into civilian attacks in specific contexts, including schools, news media, and nonmilitary/nongovernment spaces designed for the general public. This book goes one step further, presenting in-depth analyses of intergroup alliances and rivalries, their changes and determinants over time, and the implications for several types of bloodshed against civilians.
Insurgent Terrorism offers a comprehensive, modern approach for academics, students, and policy practitioners who seek to understand interorganizational relationships between insurgent organizations.
Table of Contents:
SECTION I. Introduction, Theory, and Initial Testing
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. The Embeddedness Theory of Civilian Targeting by Insurgent Groups
Chapter 3. Describing the BAAD2 Insurgency Data and Other Data Sources
Chapter 4. Testing Primary Hypotheses
SECTION II. Empirical Extensions: Types of Civilian Targeting
Chapter 5. Why Do Some Insurgent Groups Attack Schools?
Chapter 6. Why Do Some Insurgent Groups Attack Journalists?
Chapter 7. Why Do Some Insurgent Groups Mostly Attack the General Public?
SECTION III. Further Analysis of Inter-Group Relationships
Chapter 8. Longitudinal Modelling of Insurgent Alliances
Chapter 9. Understanding Insurgent Rivalry
Chapter 10. Conclusion
About the Author :
Victor Asal is the Director of the Center for Policy Research and a Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY. His research focuses on violent nonstate actors (VNSAs), pedagogy and political discrimination related to ethnicity, gender and sexuality. He has been involved in research projects funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, The Department of Homeland Security, The
National Science Foundation, and The Office of Naval Research.
Brian J. Phillips is a Reader in the Department of Government at the University of Essex, and an Affiliated Professor at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE) in Mexico City. His research focuses on subnational violence including terrorism, civil conflict, organized crime, and dynamics of violent groups. His research has been funded by the Department of Homeland Security, the National Science Foundation, and the Mexican Presidency.
R. Karl Rethemeyer is the Dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences (SBS) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a faculty member in SBS's School of Public Policy. His research spans terrorism, terrorist organizations, terrorist networks, counterinsurgency/stabilization operations, and the structure and operation of collaborative and policy networks in the public sector.
Review :
In this compelling book, Asal, Phillips, and Rethemeyer provide a much-needed investigation into why armed militant organizations target civilians during conflicts. The authors use both original quantitative data and numerous case references to construct a comprehensive picture of militant group targeting behavior that considers group relations with civilians, state counter-insurgency strategy, inter-group competition, group criminal activity, group ideology and ethnic ties and a host of other factors. The end result is a book that will inform both scholarly and policy audiences alike. A must-read for anyone interested in insurgent group behavior.
By honing in on relational explanations, this book makes a major contribution to our understanding of why insurgent organizations sometimes kill civilians and other times not. The concept of insurgent embeddedness provides a compelling and novel theoretical lens to explain this variation. Combined with a rich qualitative and quantitative empirical material, it generates profound insights that will inform and inspire students of insurgent violence in years to come.
Insurgent Terrorism is a thought-provoking, provocative investigation by three leading scholars on why insurgent groups may target civilians in pursuit of political goals. This is an important question of increasing relevance for sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East and North Africa. The book supports its theses with data-driven, careful empirical analysis based on insurgent attacks, goals, and inter-organization linkages.
This book provides a fresh look at organizations' choices to engage in terrorist attacks against civilians. Advancing a theory of embeddedness, the authors examine complex relationships between insurgent organizations, the state, other insurgents, and the civilian population. They find a diverse set of factors impact different types of terrorism, advancing our understanding of this phenomena.
Insurgent Terrorism is an important book that presents detailed cross-national data and analyses of civilian targeting by insurgent groups in civil conflict. Asal, Phillips, and Rethemeyer persuasively argue that the embeddedness of insurgent groups - that is, their relations with the state, the public, and each other - explains variation in civilian victimization. This relational account produces novel and intriguing findings, such as that both alignment and rivalry with other groups lead to more frequent civilian targeting. Marked by empirical richness, the book advances knowledge on the behavior of insurgent groups, civilian victimization, and civil conflict.
