Berman and Laitin (2008) ‘Religion, Terrorism and Public Goods.’
Citation: Berman, Eli, and Laitin, David (2008) ‘Religion, Terrorism and Public Goods: Testing the Club Model,’ Journal of Public Economics, 92:10-11, pp. 1942-67.
Time Period Covered:
Theory, Research Question, Hypothesis:
Why are religious radicals more lethal in carrying out attacks, and successful in perpetrating suicide attacks? Why are suicide attacks just as likely to attack rich countries and urban terrain when insurgencies often target poor and mountainous areas? Why do insurgents rarely use suicide attacks to kill coreligionists?
Argue that religious clubs are well suited to coordinated violence and terrorism.
Relationship to Other Research/Ideas Contested/Noted Gaps:
Research into failed suicide attackers and the families of successful attackers do not point to mental illness, nor do promises of the afterlife feature in their testimonies; the Tamil Tigers were nominally atheists.
Draws on three bodies of literature: economic theories of clubs, the sociology of religion, and the political science of insurgencies.
Concepts and Definitions:
Religious radical (p1943): “an individual who belongs to a group that distances itself from the mainstream culture by creating some sort of tension, as do Amish, or Hassidim.”
Method:
Descriptive background on Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Taliban.
Primary/Original Data:
Dataset on suicide attacks, combined from two from Robert Pape and one from the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, Herzliya. Tested model on data on incidents in Israel, Palestine and Lebanon, compiled from the Terrorism Knowledge Base. Used data from Gambetta on Iraq, as well as referencing Bloom on Sri Lanka and Lieven on Chechnya to test potential for expanding model.
Argument/Conclusion:
Berman and Laitin (2008): Organisations portray themselves as providers of public goods and require sacrifices of commitment from potential members. Religious clubs are well-suited to coordinated violence, and, because of sensitivities to defection, benefit from seeking commitment-signalling sacrifices. Where states can protect targets from conventional insurgent attacks, suicide attacks are preferred; coreligionists are harder for states to differentiate from insurgents and therefore harder to protect, making suicide attacks against them less necessary. [Ideology is thus neglected as an explanatory variable]
Limitations/Flaws:
By choosing individual cases rather than looking across an entire dataset, vulnerable to accusations of selecting those that best fit the model, and ignoring others.
Claims with regard to Chechnya that suicide attacks were initiated after the arrival of foreign fundamentalists providing money, they provided recruits and families with money, and prioritised hard targets. But suicide attacks have continued beyond the existence of the camps providing such services.
Abstract: Can rational models, once theological explanations are discredited, explain why certain radical religious rebels are so successful in perpetrating suicide attacks? The fundamental barrier to success turns out not to be recruiting suicide attackers; there is a rational basis for volunteering. Rather, the barrier is the danger of other operatives defecting. A club model, portraying voluntary religious organizations as efficient providers of local public goods, explains how they weed out potential defectors by requiring sacrifices as signals of commitment. They are thereby able to succeed in risky terrorist attacks. The model has testable implications for tactic choice and damage achieved by clubs and other rebel organizations. Data spanning a half-century on both terrorists and civil war insurgents, much from Middle East sources and Israel/Palestine, reveal that: a) missions organized by radical religious clubs that provide benign local public goods are both more lethal and are more likely to be suicide attacks than missions organized by other terrorist groups with similar aims and theologies; and b) suicide attacks are chosen when targets are “hard,” i.e., difficult to destroy. Our results suggest benign tactics to counter radical religious terrorism and insurgency.
Notes:
Berman and Laitin (2008:1943): Radical religious groups like Hamas and Hizbollah provide numerous public services.
Berman and Laitin (2008:1943): Argue that where local public goods (safety, law and order, welfare) are missing or inadequate, it is efficient for individuals to group together to form communities for their provision, and religion provides a logical organising principle. Prohibitions and sacrifices required from members are explained as internal incentive policies that allow access to the goods that these communities provide. [What about where groups are unable to provide such public services as education, welfare and safety?].
Berman and Laitin (2008:1947): Sees parallels across the Taliban, Hamas and Hezbollah: all formed as affiliates of non-violent radical Islamic organisations; all grew by providing public services where state provision was weak; each provided a local public good, namely security; each received foreign funding.
Berman and Laitin (2008:1962): “religious radicals will be active when government provision of public goods is weak and when nonmilitia market opportunities are poor.”
Berman and Laitin (2008:1965): “A government wanting to weaken a religious militia such as the Taliban, Hamas or Sadr’s militia in Iraq, should strive to create outside options for rebels and replace the social services provided by the militia’s parent religious sect with services provided by some combination of functioning markets, government, and nondiscriminatory NGOs.”