The Impact of Ideological Ambiguity on Terrorist Organizations

• Author: Susan Olzak
• DOI: 10.1177/00220027211073921
• Published date: 01 May 2022
• Date: 01 May 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Journal of Conflict Resolution

2022, Vol. 66(4-5) 836–866

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00220027211073921

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The Impact of Ideological

Ambiguity on Terrorist

Organizations

Susan Olzak

1



Abstract

Organizations that have a clear and unambiguous focus acquire greater legitimacy,

which raises their capacity for mobilization. Using data on terrorist organizations, this

paper explores two empirical implications of this claim: A terrorist organization’s

survival and lethality will be threatened to the extent that it has an ambiguous

ideological identity. Analyses using panel data from the Extended Data on Terrorist

Groups (EDTG) test these arguments for 474 global terrorist organizations observed

over 1970–2016. The key empirical predictions are that ambiguity inhibits lethality and

curtails survival. This paper finds support for these claims, controlling for competition

from rivals and allies, ethno-nationalist or Islamic ideological orientation, and a variety

of other measures of organizational capacity.

This paper proposes that ideological ambiguity diminishes the performance and

shortens the lifetime of terrorist organizations (TOs). Two parallel lines of theoretical

work inspire this claim. The first comes from a theoretical perspective on conceptual

ambiguity that treats concepts as expectations about the properties of entities, such as

organizations (Hannan et al. 2019:5–7). Less clearly recognized entities are con-

ceptually ambiguous and harder to interpret (Negro and Leung 2013). This implies that

adverse consequences can result if high levels of conceptual ambiguity arise when

classifying an object (Kov´

acs and Hannan 2015;Hannan et al. 2019). Empirical work

in this tradition finds that having a clearly focused identity improves the performance of

1

Department of Sociology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Susan Olzak, Department of Sociology, Stanford University, 450 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305-2047, USA.

Email: olzak@stanford.edu

many types of organizations, including restaurants, film productions, and environ-

mental social movement organizations (Hannan et al. 2019;Hsu 2006;Kov ´

acs and

Hannan 2010,2015;Negro, Koçak, and Hsu 2010;Olzak and Johnson 2019). Con-

versely, ambiguous organizations tend to confront more obstacles (Hsu, Negro, and

Perretti 2012).

A second line of work that draws similar inferences about the consequences of an

organization’s lack of focus comes from the study of social movement organizations

(hereafter SMOs). In social movement theory, a SMO that lacks focus risks being

perceived as having a fuzzy or indeterminant identity (Fassioto and Soule 2017).

Having a strong identity assists SMOs in demarcating group boundaries, recruiting, and

reinforcing solidarity (Levy 2021;Luna 2017;Polletta and Jasper 2001). SMOs

perceived as having a distinctive and well-focused identity thrive (Beck and Schoon

2019;Gamson 1975;McCarthy and Zald 1977;Wang, Rao, and Soule 2019). Theories

of SMOs also specify that issue specialization assists organizations in performing

routine activities and attaining goals because it streamlines coordination processes

(McCarthy and Zald 1977: 1234). When such organizations are well understood, they

are also more likely to be perceived as authentic members of a category (Luna 2017;

Piazza and Wang 2020;Walker and Stepick 2020). Such perceptions further increase an

organization’s access to valuable resources.

TOs can be usefully considered a subset of SMOs: both tend to be organized around

a distinctive collective identity and express goals of political or social change (Beck

2008;Beck and Schoon 2019;Crenshaw 1987). Recognition that a particular

movement is representative of a distinct type of SMO improves the likelihood that it

will resonate with an audience (Benford and Snow 2000). Such resonance commu-

nicates a SMO’s purpose to current and potential supporters.

Social movement scholars have also argued that SMOs with contradictory or

ambiguous ideological affiliations have a diminished capacity to mobilize (Fassioto and

Soule 2017). For example, environmental social movement organizations focusing on

two issues related to environmental justice and endangered species would be expected

to have shorter life spans than organizations that focus on just one of these categories

(Olzak and Johnson 2019). It follows that having an ambiguous ideological identity

ought to hamper TOs in the same manner. An example of a TO with high ambiguity is

one that was assigned to three ideologies is the Jordanian Islamic Resistance, which

received labels of Islamic, anti-globalization, and racist/genocidal. A TO that received

an assignment of a singular, leftist ideology is the Baader-Meinhof Group (see Table 1).

The paper tests these ideas using the newly available dataset on TOs from the

Extended Data on Terrorist Groups (hereafter EDTG). EDTG is an organizational-level

dataset based on the Global Terrorism Database (GTD). The GTD provides a chro-

nological listing of researcher verified terrorist events and, if known, the names of

perpetrator organizations, and the numbers killed or injured. The original GTD dataset

does not contain pertinent information on organizational characteristics, such as

ideology,

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rivals, allies, tactical diversity, or the timing of an organization’s demise. The

EDTG dataset offers an unusually comprehensive picture of many of these key

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