Communications Technology and Terrorism

• Author: Michael Jetter,Rafat Mahmood
• Published date: 01 January 2020
• Date: 01 January 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0022002719843989
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Communications

Technology and

Terrorism

Rafat Mahmood

1,2

, and Michael Jetter

2,3

Abstract

By facilitating the flow of information in society, communications technology (CT;

e.g., newspapers, radio, television, the Internet) can help terrorists to (i) spread their

message, (ii) recruit followers, and (iii) coordinate among group members. How-

ever, CT also facilitates monitoring and arresting terrorists. This article formulates

the hypothesis that a society’s level of CT is systematically related to terrorism. We

introduce a simple theoretical framework, suggesting that terrorism first becomes

more attractive with a rise in CT, but then decreases, following an inverted U shape.

Accessing data for 199 countries from 1970 to 2014, we find evidence consistent

with these predictions: terrorism peaks at intermediate ranges of CT and corre-

sponding magnitudes are sizable. Our estimations control for a range of potentially

confounding factors, as well as country fixed effects and year fixed effects. Results

are robust to a battery of alternative specifications and placebo regressions. We find

no evidence of a potential reporting bias explaining our findings.

Keywords

communications technology, GTD, information flows, terrorism, panel data

1

Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, Islamabad, Pakistan

2

The University of Western Australia, Crawley, Western Australia, Australia

3

CESifo, Munich, Germany

Corresponding Author:

Rafat Mahmood, Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, Islamabad, Pakistan; The University of

Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, Western Australia 6009, Australia.

Email: rafat.mahmood@research.uwa.edu.au

Journal of Conflict Resolution

2020, Vol. 64(1) 127-166

ªThe Author(s) 2019

Article reuse guidelines:

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DOI: 10.1177/0022002719843989

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[U]nlike their predecessors, contemporary terrorists operate in a global information and

communication environment with opportunities for mass self-communication that ear-

lier terrorists could not have imagined.

Nacos (2016, in mass-mediated terrorism)

In virtually every definition of terrorism, the communication of a message to a target

audience plays a key role.

1

In most terrorist attacks, those who directly lose their

lives are not the primary victims—they merely serve as a communication tool

between the terrorists and an audience. Realizing this fundamental characteristic

of terrorism carries a simple corollary: if information does not flow from the terrorist

group to the target audience and is not distributed well among that audience, an

attack fails its purpose of (i) spreading the group’s message, (ii) creating fear in a

target population, and (iii) recruiting followers (see Wilkinson [1997], Pries-Shimsh

[2005], Frey, Luechinger, and Stutzer [2007], or Walsh [2010] for these goals of

terrorist attacks). Beyond these goals, information flows also become important for a

terrorist group’s financing, planning, and execution of attacks (see Stenersen 2008;

Jacobson 2010; Theohary 2011; Nacos 2016).

Over the past decades, the flow of information, that is, the ease and speed with

which information travels through society, has been transformed in virtually every

country as never before. This trend has been crucially driven by communications

technology (CT) to facilitate and accelerate the free flow of information (see Harvey

1989; Castells 2008, 2011). By CT, we refer to the availability of means of com-

munication, such as newspapers, radio, television, or the Internet, that enable the

exchange of information and enhance the speed of that exchange. However, even

though terrorism as an explicit communication tool has been employed as early as

2,000 years ago (e.g., see Malamat et al. 1976), we still have little empirical evidence

on potential links between the degree of information flows in a society and terrorism.

In the following pages, we propose the occurrence of terrorism to be intimately

linked to the state of CT.

We begin by formulating a simple theoretical model to understand how the

existing level of CT may influence a potential terrorist’s decisions.

2

Our aim here

is to provide the most basic framework that builds on few, but simple assumptions in

framing a representative agent’s choice between engaging in terrorism and partici-

pating in the labor market. The theoretical implications suggest that as CT improves,

terrorism activity first increases because of increasing returns that an improvement

in CT offers but later diminishes owing to an increased probability of apprehension,

thereby following an inverted U shape. To check whether these propositions can be

observed in reality, we study a sample of up to 199 countries from 1970 to 2014.

Specifically, we connect the Konjunkturforschungsstelle (KOF) index of informa-

tion flows to the number of terrorist attacks in a given country and year.

3

The

corresponding results indeed document a bell-shaped relationship. Furthermore, this

relationship holds (i) after considering a range of potentially confounding factors, as

128 Journal of Conflict Resolution 64(1)

well as country fixed effects and year fixed effects, (ii) for domestic and transna-

tional terrorism alike, and (iii) across a range of additional robustness checks.

We also show why, perhaps, previous empirical studies have focused less on

information flows since a purely linear specification produces a coefficient that is

not statistically significant at conventional levels. However, as soon as our suggested

nonlinearity is accounted for, the relationship becomes statistically significant at the

1 percent level. Terrorism is suggested to peak in countries with moderate levels of

information flows, everything else equal. In reality, this corresponds to countries

with a KOF score in the range of .44 to .56, examples of which are India, Nigeria,

Kenya, Bangladesh, or Yemen in 2014. To give an idea about the associated mag-

nitudes, our results imply that improving a KOF score of .45 (e.g., Bhutan in 2014) to

.55 (e.g., Sri Lanka in 2014) corresponds to a rise in terrorist attacks by 2.8 percent.

However, raising CT by another ten percentage points, from .55 to .65 (e.g., to the

level of the Dominican Republic in 2014), would relate to a decrease in the number

of terrorist attacks by 5 percent. Thus, the implied magnitudes are sizable and, as we

show in the article, larger than the suggested relationship between democracy and

terrorism, for example (see Figure 4).

Overall, we aim to contribute to two distinct streams of research. First, our results

speak to our understanding of what can drive terrorism. As CT has improved—from

newspapers over the radio to television, the Internet, and now social media—our

results suggest that these conditions may be intimately linked to terrorism, every-

thing else equal. The closest existing research to our hypothesis considers the link

between press freedom and terrorism (see Li 2005; Chenoweth 2010, 2012, 2013; R.

Bakker, Hill, Jr., and Moore 2016). Although the regulatory freedom of the press can

play an important role for terrorism in its own right, such characteristics form only a

subset of our general concept of information flows presented here. Other related

lines of scientific inquiry consider the link between media coverage of terrorism and

subsequent attacks (e.g., see Nelson and Scott 1992; Scott 2001; Rohner and Frey

2007; Jetter 2014, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c), as well as the influence of press attention

(A. M. Hoffman, Shelton, and Cleven 2013; Asal and Hoffman 2016). The under-

lying hypotheses here, also, consider a subset of our concept of information flows.

Thus, we believe this article is the first to systematically formulate a general rela-

tionship between CT and terrorism with an empirical assessment of this hypothesis.

Second, this artic le speaks to the literature concern ing consequences of technologi-

cal improvements, in particular those related to CT. Although a number of works are

proposingand documentingsubstantialgains in terms of productivityand outputgrowth

from improved CT (see Brynjolfssonand Hitt 2000; Schreyer 2000; Blackand Lynch

2001; Radjou 2003; Timmer and Van Ark 2005), some studiessuggest these develop-

ments also carry societal costs (Kiesler,Siegel, and McGuire 1984; Kraut et al. 1998;

Silverstone2017). Our findingsimply that improved CT initiallymakes terrorism more

attractive as a strategy to communicate grievances. However, once CT has crossed a

threshold, further advancements are suggested to diminish terrorism.

Mahmood and Jetter 129