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International Terrorism and the Clash of Civilizations CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by LSE Research Online Eric Neumayer and Thomas Plümper International terrorism and the clash of civilizations Article (Accepted version) (Refereed) Original citation: Neumayer, Eric and Plümper, Thomas (2009) International terrorism and the clash of civilizations. British journal of political science, 39 (4). pp. 711-734. DOI: 10.1017/S0007123409000751 © 2009 Cambridge University Press This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/20414/ Available in LSE Research Online: October 2010 LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website. This document is the author’s final manuscript accepted version of the journal article, incorporating any revisions agreed during the peer review process. Some differences between this version and the published version may remain. You are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it. 0 International Terrorism and the Clash of Civilizations SECOND REVISED VERSION March 2008 Eric Neumayera and Thomas Plümperb a Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), London WC2A 2AE, UK and Centre for the Study of Civil War, International Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), [email protected] b Department of Government, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK, and Centre for the Study of Civil War, International Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), [email protected] _________________________________________ We thank Han Dorussen, Vera Troeger, Christina Schneider, Hugh Ward, Kristian Gleditsch and several referees for helpful comments. Previous versions were presented at the 2007 Midwest Political Science Association and American Political Science Association Conferences, and in seminars at the University of Oxford, Trinity College Dublin and the University of Exeter. 1 International Terrorism and the Clash of Civilizations Abstract An emerging “clash of civilizations” should reveal itself in patterns of international terrorism. Huntington himself explicitly refers to terrorism in the conflict between specific civilizations, and particularly so in the clash between the Islamic civilization and the West. We confront his hypotheses with ones derived from our theory of the strategic logic of international terrorism. We predict more terrorism against nationals from countries whose government supports the government of the terrorists’ home country. Similar to Huntington, we also predict excessive terrorism on Western targets, but because of the high strategic value of attacking Westerners, not because of inter- civilizational conflict per se. Contrary to Huntington, our theory does not suggest that groups from the Islamic civilization commit more terrorist acts against nationals from other civilizations in general. Nor do we expect a general increase in inter-civilizational terrorism after the end of the Cold War. Our empirical analysis – based on estimations in a directed dyadic country sample from 1969 to 2005 – finds broad support for our theory: foreign political support generates more terrorism against nationals of the supporting foreign country. Our results also suggest that the Rest-West and the Islam- West dyads indeed encounter significantly more terrorism, which is in line with Huntington, but not necessarily inconsistent with our own theory either. However, in contradiction to Huntington we do not find that there is generally more terrorism from the Islamic against other civilizations. Also, we find no evidence for a general structural break in the pattern of international terrorism after the end of the Cold War. 2 This struggle has been called a clash of civilizations. In truth, it is a struggle for civilization. George W. Bush 2006 Al Qaeda could not be happier than in a real clash among civilizations. Giandomenico Picco 2005: 14 The current struggle against Islamist terrorism is not a clash of civilizations. Joseph Nye 2004: 17 It is not … in the interest of the West to view this as a clash of Western and Muslim civilizations. Ahmed S. Hashim 2001: 29 This is no less than a clash of civilizations – the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo- Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both. Bernard Lewis 1990: 60. 1. Introduction After the end of the Cold War, conflicts between civilizations struggling for influence on a new world order pose the greatest danger for international stability and peace. This, at least, is the central tenet of Samuel Huntington’s famous and best-selling book The Clash of Civilizations (Huntington 1996) and his earlier Foreign Affairs article (Huntington 1993a). Recently, events such as the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the bombings in Bali, Madrid and London were interpreted by many as striking evidence for Huntington’s paradigm. Yet, the wide attention Huntington’s works has attracted in public discussion of international terrorism (Ahmed and Forst 2005; United Nations 2006) contrasts with its reception in the empirical academic debate in at least two respects. First, scholarly work that has tested Huntington’s theoretical predictions has focused exclusively on 3 patterns of militarized inter-state dispute, inter-state and civil wars. To our knowledge, no test exists of hypotheses derived from Huntington’s work on terrorism. And second, tests of Huntington’s arguments have typically failed to find evidence for a clash of civilizations.1 However, empirical tests of Huntington are hampered by the fact that the term “clash” is nowhere clearly defined in his work and that, depending on the pair of civilizations looked at, it means many different things to Huntington. Given the ambiguity of the term, tests that fail to find that inter-civilizational dyads in general are more likely to experience one particular type of conflict do not establish fully convincing evidence against Huntington. More importantly, existing scholarship has neglected that, for some civilizational dyads for which Huntington predicts a high level of conflict, he himself mentions terrorism, as in the clash of “Rest versus West”, or even explicitly emphasizes the use of terrorism, as in the clash of “Islam versus Rest” and “Islam versus West”. Our test of Huntington’s predictions, then, provides additional insights as to the relevance of his paradigm. Rather than merely testing predictions derived from Huntington’s work, however, we also compare his paradigm to a strategic theory of international terrorism. Our the- ory argues that the leaders of terror groups are predominantly rational and act strategically to reach their goal of gaining political influence on the political system of their home country. We argue that terror group leaders from other civilizations have a general interest in attacking Western targets due to their high strategic value, and a specific interest in attacking targets from those foreign countries whose government lends support to the government of the terrorists’ home country. We find broad support for our strategic theory as well as some limited support for Huntington’s predictions in a directed country dyad sample over the period 1969 to 2005. 4 2. Huntington and the Clash of Civilizations Hypothesis 2.1 A new Era in World Politics? Huntington’s clash of civilizations hypothesis has many facets (Huntington 1993a, 1996). If there is, however, one central hypothesis in his work it is this: The dominant source of conflict will shift from the clash of ideologies during the Cold War period (li- beral democracy vs. communism) to the clash between nations and groups of different civilizations after the end of the Cold War: “…conflicts between groups in different civilizations will be more frequent, more sustained and more violent than conflicts between groups in the same civilization” (Huntington 1993a: 48). He defines civilizations as “the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have”, being “differentiated from each other by history, language, culture, tradition, and, most important, religion” (ibid.: 25). Huntington distinguishes seven, or possibly eight civilizations – Western, Sinic, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and, possibly, African. He posits that civilizational differences “are the product of centuries” and “far more fundamental than differences among political ideologies and political regimes” and are therefore “less mutable and hence less easily compromised and resolved than political and economic ones” (Huntington 1993a: 25 and 27). Moreover, such differences are not merely an abstract construction: “[that] civilizations are meaningful entities accords with the way in which people see and experience reality” (Huntington 1993b: 194). He then goes on to argue that the Cold War had artificially plastered over and dampened inter-civilizational conflicts. The end of the Cold War allowed these conflicts to emerge and gain
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