The Determinants of Terrorist Listing

• Published date: 01 January 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00220027231164924
• Author: Chia-yi Lee,Yasutaka Tominaga
• Date: 01 January 2024
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Journal of Conf‌lict Resolution

2024, Vol. 68(1) 53–79

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/00220027231164924

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The Determinants of

Terrorist Listing

Chia-yi Lee

1

and Yasutaka Tominaga

2



Abstract

Terrorist designation has increasingly become an important counterterrorism tool used by

intergovernmental organizations and state governments. This article examines the deter-

minants of terrorist listing and argues that terrorist listing is driven by security as well as

political concerns. While countries tend to designate groups that pose a greater security

threat, terrorist listing can also be inf‌luenced by interstate relationships including alliance ties

and state rivalry. We test these arguments using a dataset on 35 countries that currently

maintain their own lists of designated terrorist organizations. Our f‌indings show that gov-

ernments are more likely to list groups that have a record of attacking their domestic interests.

Domesticgroupsaremorelikelytobedesignated than foreign groups. Moreover, countries

are more likely to designate groups that are designated by their allies, even when these groups

do not pose a direct threat. Our study contributes to the literature on terrorism and more

broadly international security by systematically examining the determinants of terrorist

designation and explaining the heterogeneity of terrorist lists across countries.

Keywords

terrorism, foreign policy, counterterrorism, economic sanctions

Introduction

Terrorism is a form of political violence that is different from a “war”or “crime”in that

terrorists are not soldiers and they have more specif‌ic political goals than merely

1

National Chengchi University, Taiwan

2

Hosei University, Japan

Corresponding Author:

Yasutaka Tominaga, Faculty of Economics, Hosei University, 4342 Aihara-town, Machida-city Tokyo

1940298, Japan.

Email: y-tominaga@yasutakatominaga.com

affecting victims. Due to the lack of a universal def‌inition of terrorism, however, one

political group could be labeled as a terrorist group by some governments, but not by

others. The Myanmar government, for instance, declares that the Arakan Rohingya

Salvation Army (ARSA) involved in the ongoing Rohingya insurgency in northern

Myanmar is a terrorist group with who they refuse to negotiate, despite being criticized

by the international community for the humanitarian crisis generated by the battles. In

some cases, foreign governments label rebels as terrorists, whereas the host government

is unwilling to attach this label. In 2016, for example, the President of Colombia asked

the U.S. government to remove the rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of

Colombia (FARC), from its off‌icial list of terrorist organizations once a peace deal was

established,

1

although the FARC had remained on the list until December 2021. These

observations lead to an interesting question that has rarely been answered in the lit-

erature: Why do governments list some groups as terrorists but not others?

This article examines the determinants of listing “terrorist organizations”from the

perspective of governments.

2

We argue that terrorist listing is driven by both security

and political concerns. On the one hand, countries are more likely to designate terrorist

groups that pose a greater security threat. To measure a terrorist group’sthreat level, we

propose a nuanced approach that takes into account the group’s base, the victim’s

nationality, and the venue of attacks, and argue that groups that have a record of

attacking a country’s domestic interests are more likely to be designated. On the other

hand, terrorist listing can be a political tool to deal with domestic threats or dissidents,

as well as a foreign policy tool to cater to allies or target rivals.

We test these arguments using a newly compiled dataset on designated terrorist

organizations worldwide. The dataset includes 35 countries that currently maintain

their own lists of designated terrorist organizations, and covers 504 terrorist groups.

Employing a probit model, we f‌ind evidence partially supporting our arguments.

Terrorist listing is mainly driven by the security concern as well as alliance com-

mitments, and domestic groups are more likely to be designated than foreign groups.

While terrorist designation has increasingly become an important counterterrorism

instrument, little is known about the political logic of this controversial policy tool. Our

study contributes to the literature on terrorism and more broadly international security

by systematically examining the motivations behind terrorist designation and ex-

plaining the heterogeneity of terrorist lists across countries.

The remainder of this article proceeds as follows. The next section discusses the

designation regimes across different countries and the existing literature on this issue.

The section that follows develops our hypotheses. The fourth section is our research

design, and the section afterward presents the empirical f‌indings. The last section

concludes the article.

Off‌icial Designation of Terrorists

Although the nature and legal effects of their lists vary to some degree, many gov-

ernments and major intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), such as the United

54 Journal of Conf‌lict Resolution 68(1)