415506

Calle and Snchez-CuencaPolitics & Society

PAS39310.1177/0032329211415506de la

Politics & Society

What We Talk About When 39(3) 451472

2011 SAGE Publications
Reprints and permission:
We Talk About Terrorism sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0032329211415506
http://pas.sagepub.com

Luis de la Calle1
and Ignacio Snchez-Cuenca1

Abstract
There is no consensus in the literature about the nature of terrorism. The authors
main claim is that this is ultimately the result of the coexistence of two senses of the
term, the action and the actor sense, which are not fully congruent. Rather than trying
to advocate a specific conceptualization, the authors provide in this article a map of
the different ways in which scholars talk about terrorism. They identify first the set of
terrorist actions and the set of terrorist actors. Terrorist tactics are a variety of the
power to hurt, based on the lack of military power. Terrorist groups are underground
ones with no territorial control. When the two criteria meet, the core of terrorism
exists: coercive violence perpetrated by underground groups. The ambiguity that
surrounds terrorism is caused by two other possibilities: actors with some measure of
territorial control adopting coercive tactics and underground actors adopting military
tactics. Although it is not possible to remove this ambiguity in empirical research,
scholars can at least identify it and analyze it. The authors illustrate the two senses of
terrorism and their interaction by using the most comprehensive dataset on terrorist
incidents, the Global Terrorism Database (GTD).

Keywords
terrorism, guerrilla, civilian targeting, territorial control, coercive violence

1
Juan March Institute, Madrid, Spain

Corresponding Author:
Luis de la Calle, Center for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, Juan March Institute, Castell 77,
28006 Madrid, Spain
Email: lcalle@march.es
452 Politics & Society 39(3)

The concept of terrorism is intrinsically ambiguous. There is no consensus about its

exact meaning or about how to operationalize it in empirical research. Some think that
terrorism is overall violence against civilians. However, should all attacks against civil-
ians be considered terrorist in nature? If so, we would be forced to conclude that the
main terrorist actors are states, as states are the actors that historically have killed the
most civilians.1 If states are excluded and we focus on nonstate actors, should attacks
such as the 2000 al-Qaeda bomb against the USS Cole in Yemen not be defined as ter-
rorist simply because the military was the direct target? Could we say that the attack
against the WTC was terrorist because it targeted civilians whereas the attack against
the Pentagon was not because it targeted the main symbol of the U.S. military?
Instead of the target, some other scholars emphasize the communicative nature of
the terrorist attack. A terrorist act aims to instill fear in an audience larger than the
actual target. But is every violent act aimed at threatening some particular group an act
of terrorism? Stathis Kalyvas has shown that guerrillas often kill civilians with the aim
of deterring people from collaborating with the enemy.2 Should these killings fall
under the label of terrorism? More generally, almost every violent act has some com-
municative effect, transmitting fear to some audience. It is not clear that there is some-
thing specific about the fear that terrorism produces.
Still others think that the key feature of terrorist violence consists of the extreme
asymmetry between the state and the armed group. When the group is so weak in terms
of weaponry and recruitment that it lacks the capacity to launch even small-scale mili-
tary operations against the enemy, it resorts to violence that we consider terrorist. This
is usually the case when the groups lack territorial control and act clandestinely.
After a long period in which the academic literature on terrorism was plagued with
lexicographic debates,3 current scholars simply prefer to avoid the issue. Some authors
follow the trend and extend the term terrorism to every form of insurgency. Some oth-
ers accept that terrorism is what data sets on terrorism measure (among others,
ITERATE, the Global Terrorism Database, the RAND-MIPT data set, Patterns of
Global Terrorism). These data sets, however, were not conceived with a clear idea
about the nature of terrorist violence and therefore reproduce many of the aforemen-
tioned ambiguities. The RAND-MIPT database, for instance, codes terrorist attacks by
the nature of the act, not by the identity of the perpetrator: terrorism is violence
calculated to create an atmosphere of fear, usually targeting civilians, but not neces-
sarily always.4 With such broad coding criteria, it is possible to question the results
that are obtained in large-N analyses of terrorist incidents. Even if the statistical results
are technically correct, their ultimate meaning remains obscure because of a lack of
clarity about what goes into and what is left out of the data sets.
The root of the ambiguity lies, in our view, in the coexistence of two different senses
within the concept of terrorism, the action and the actor senses. For the first, terrorism is a
tactic, an act of violence; for the second, terrorism is a type of insurgency. A careful reading
of the literature shows that researchers use different criteria for each of the two senses that
are not always fully compatible; this would explain many of the theoretical inconsistencies
observed in the debate on terrorism. Although those who focus on the action sense talk
de la Calle and Snchez-Cuenca 453

mainly about the coercive nature of terrorist violence and are usually agnostic about the
potential authors of terrorist violence (any kind of insurgency, the army, or the state appa-
ratus), those who talk about terrorist groups as different from other armed groups such as
guerrillas tend to emphasize the underground nature of the group and the extreme asym-
metry between the challenger and the state.
This root ambiguity cannot be removed by linguistic stipulation. It is possible, none-
theless, to find common ground in both meanings. Their intersection, we argue, repre-
sents the deep core of terrorism. The action sense identifies a particular repertoire of
violence, such as planting bombs and shooting policemen, that does not require strong
military capabilities. The actor sense of terrorism identifies groups that act in secrecy,
under the constraints of clandestinity. The connection between the two senses is the
following: groups are forced to use terrorist tactics when they lack a territorial base.
Table 1 represents the different possibilities. The core of terrorism is coercive vio-
lence carried out by those insurgent groups not holding territorial control within the
states borders. Here the two senses of the concept reinforce each other, and the same
holds in the case of groups with territory using guerrilla tactics in which some military
power may be employed. Still there are two off-diagonal cells with mixed combina-
tions. On one hand, nonterritorial groups may try to carry out guerrilla tacticssuch
as raids and small-scale battles. This is typical in the first stages of a conflict, when
terrorists still think they can become fully guerrilla. Here the actor is terrorist, but the
violence adopted is not. On the other hand, actors controlling territorysuch as guer-
rillas and statesmay adopt tactics that we would identify as fully terrorist. Here the
actor is not terrorist, but the violence adopted is.
With regard to these two possible cases of mismatch, we think that the first one
(underground groups engaging in guerrilla violence) is largely residual. The second
case (nonunderground groups engaging in terrorist violence) is much more pervasive
and merits further exploration. We argue below that this possibility occurs when actors
with territorial control act under the constraints of clandestinity.5 If a rebel group that
holds territory in the countryside decides to act in the capital city, it will be forced to
operate there as any other underground group and therefore will use terrorist tactics.
We next discuss the two senses of terrorism. We start with the action sense. Several
arguments are provided to rule out the view that holds that terrorism is violence against
civilians or noncombatants. From the action sense point of view, terrorism can be
understood as a special form of coercive violence used to compensate for the lack of
military power. We then proceed to discuss the actor sense of terrorism, which corre-
sponds to armed groups that act underground, without territorial control. Following
the logic of Table 1, we intersect the two senses and analyze their complementarities
as well as their differences. By illustrating the discussion with four insurgent groups
(Lebanons Hezbollah, Turkeys PKK [Kurdistan Workers Party], Spains ETA
(Basque Homeland and Freedom), and Argentinas Montoneros) we show that the
armed groups who do not hold territory more often than not resort to terrorism, but this
does not exhaust the universe of groups who do so. The article ends with some general
conclusions and some comments on a future research agenda.
454 Politics & Society 39(3)

Table 1. The Intersection of the Two Senses of Terrorism

Actor sense

Underground Territorial control

Action sense Coercive violence: Pure terrorism Guerrilla operating
improvised explosive clandestinely in
devices, hijackings, state-controlled
bank robberies areas
Military power: battles, Proto-guerrilla Pure guerrilla
ambushes

The Action Sense of Terrorism

There are two ways to characterize the terrorist condition of an armed attack. The first
one looks at the condition of the target: terrorism is violence against civilians or non-
combatants. This is, by far, the most popular understanding among social scientists
and moral and political philosophers alike.6
We do not dare to deny that terrorist attacks target civilians, particularly in cases of
international terrorism, which are indeed the most visible ones, with the greatest media
coverage. When people discuss terrorism, they tend to think of examples where civil-
ians were the main target, such as the 1972 Munich Olympics attack by Black
September or 9/11 by al-Qaeda.
Nevertheless, there are powerful reasons for resisting the identification of terrorism
with the killing of civilians. One reason is that many terrorist organizations, particu-
larly domestic ones, target combatants (the military, police forces) in a systematic way.
Table 2 shows evidence from the Domestic Terrorist Victims data set (DTV) about the
proportion of civilians killed by terrorist groups in eighteen Western European coun-
tries in the period 19652005.7 As we can see, this varies greatly depending on the
ideological orientation of the groups. Thus, whereas extreme-right, neo-Nazi
(xenophobic, racist attacks), and vigilante groups kill mainly noncombatants, con-
firming the definition, nationalist and extreme-left (revolutionary) groups kill more
combatants (59.3 and 55.2 percent, respectively). And this is not only a European
phenomenon. We have tracked all the killings of the Tupamaros in Uruguay, and 78.8
percent of the victims were combatants.
One could argue that these organizations are not in fact terrorist ones because they
do not fit the definition that establishes what terrorism is. The problem with this view
is that no major database counting terrorist incidents (GTD, RAND-MPIT, ITERATE)
restricts its coverage to only attacks against civilians. Both in data sets and in the aca-
demic literature on political violence, organizations such as the PIRA (Provisional
Irish Republican Army), ETA, and the Red Brigades are routinely defined as terrorist
groups even if these groups kill more combatants than noncombatants. The percent-
ages of combatants killed by these three groups are, respectively, 60.2, 65.0, and 60.4
(according to the DTV data set).
de la Calle and Snchez-Cuenca 455

Table 2. Target Selection (Fatalities) and Types of Terrorism in Western Europe, 19652005

Nationalist Extreme left Extreme right Vigilante Neo-Nazi

Noncombatants (%) 40.7 44.8 83.3 87.4 96.6
Combatants (%) 59.3 55.2 16.7 12.6 3.4
Total fatalities 2,920 362 372 1,033 268

Another reason for resisting the identification of terrorism with the killing of civilians
is that this is by no means a prerogative of terrorism. Recent work on wars, guerrillas,
and genocides has shown that civilians are systematically targeted;8 noncombatants
represent between 50 and 62 percent of all victims in war-related conflicts (either
interstate or civil wars).9 Kalyvass theory on violence in guerrilla conflicts shows that
guerrilla insurgencies, as they try to rule and impose order in the areas that they liber-
ate from state control, kill civilians in an attempt to terrorize those who could defect
and denounce the insurgents to state troops.10
It is sometimes assumed that civilians are more likely to be targeted in terrorist
attacks because these attacks tend to be indiscriminate. The paradigmatic example is
obviously 9/11. However, it is far from obvious that terrorists kill civilians because of
the indiscriminate nature of their attacks.11 To begin with, civilians can be killed in
other ways, in sectarian or selective attacks.12 In a sectarian killing, every member of a
rival (religious, ethnic, ideological) group is a potential target. In a selective killing,
only those who display a certain behavior are targeted. According to DTV, which also
codes the selectivity of terrorist violence in Western Europe, only 8 percent of all fatali-
ties died in indiscriminate attacks. This low percentage can be related to the fact that in
many cases, indiscriminate attacks are rejected by the terrorists support community.13
Second, the mechanism by which sowing fear in society through indiscriminate
attacks will prompt decision makers to change their policies is ambiguous. To force
compliance, violence must be selective. Random targeting gives the targeted popula-
tion no incentive to accommodate since it remains uncertain about whether conces-
sions will stop violence.14 In fact, lawmakers could feel more pressed to address
insurgents demands when they are the direct target of violence.
If we leave aside the civilian targeting thesis, the most promising characterization
of the action sense comes from the analysis of terrorist violence itself. Although the
list is tentative, here are some attacks that are typically regarded in the literature as
terrorist: hostage taking and kidnapping, assassinations, plane hijackings, selective
shootings, bank robberies, and the destruction of property and life through IEDs
(improvised explosive devices) in urban areas. These actions are usually executed
with firearms and IEDs and do not involve the participation of many activists.
These terrorist actions are different from the kind of irregular warfare operations
that take place in most guerrilla conflicts: skirmishes, ambushes, the seizing of vil-
lages, raids, and even small-scale battles. These usually require heavier weaponry and
a larger number of insurgents.15
456 Politics & Society 39(3)

From a more analytical point of view, what terrorist actions have in common is the
aim of instilling fear in the population. It is often argued that terrorist violence assumes
a distinction between the direct target of violence and the general or main target that
contemplates the violence and understands what could happen if it does not comply
with the perpetrators demands.16 In this sense, the terrorist attack is a communicative
act since violence carries a message intended for the main target.17 People learn to fear
the consequences of not complying with the perpetrators demands. As is usually said,
the point is to kill a few to terrorize the many.
Terrorism, from this point of view, is a form of coercive violence. Coercive vio-
lence consists of imposing a cost on someone through violent means to force the
person to act as the coercer wants. As Thomas Schelling puts it in his characteristic
style, [T]here is a difference between taking what you want and making someone
give it to you.18 Taking what you want corresponds to military power; making
someone give it to you corresponds to the power to hurt. Coercion works thanks to
the power to hurt.19
Although the idea of coercive violence is not particularly problematic from a theo-
retical point of view, its operationalization is another matter. It is worth examining
how the data sets that are used for comparative analyses cope with the troubles of
measurement. Most data sets are organized at a very low level of aggregation, the unit
of observation being the attack.20 We have analyzed the Global Terrorism Database
(GTD), compiled by Gary LaFree and Laura Dugan based on the files of the Pinkerton
Global Intelligence Service, a private security agency.21 In line with other data sets on
terrorist events, terrorism is defined as the threatened or actual use of illegal force and
violence to attain a political, economic, religious or social goal through fear, coercion
or intimidation.22 The GTD is the largest data set of terrorist events in the world,
covering both domestic and international violence since 1970. Thanks to its coverage
and its public nature, this database has quickly replaced ITERATE and MIPT-RAND
as the main source for empirical research on terrorism. We use here the updated ver-
sion, GTD1, which covers the period 197097, containing 61,637 incidents.23
The issue here is how to apply this definition to actual cases. Table 3 contains infor-
mation about terrorist incidents and fatalities of the ten most active groups according
to GTD1. Whereas there might be some consensus regarding the terrorist nature of
ETA (Euskadi ta Askatasuna, Basque Homeland and Freedom) in Spain and the IRA
in Northern Ireland, the other cases are more contentious. Eight of these groups were
involved in civil wars and might be considered in some sense false positives. Civil
wars are broadly defined as intrastate conflicts in which the state is one of the parties
and there are at least one thousand fatalities.24 Organizations such as the Shining Path
in Peru, the FMLN in El Salvador, the FARC in Colombia, and the LTTE in Sri Lanka
are routinely included in data sets of civil wars.25
Does it make sense to consider that all civil war violence is terrorist in nature? Or
only part of it? How can civil wars be disaggregated into their terrorist and nonterrorist
parts? Civil war is categorized as a type of conflict, whereas terrorism is often predi-
cated at the level of particular violent events. What is then the relationship between
de la Calle and Snchez-Cuenca 457

Table 3. The Ten Most Active Groups in GTD1

Name of the group Country # events # people killed

Sendero Luminoso Peru 3,796 11,437
(Shining Path)
FMLN (Farabundo Mart El Salvador 2,924 8,703
Liberation Front)
IRA (Irish Republican United Kingdom 2,501 1,866
Army)
ETA (Basque Fatherland Spain 1,695 745
and Liberty)
FARC (Revolutionary Colombia 1,100 3,220
Armed Forces of
Colombia)
ELN (National Liberation Colombia 983 1,294
Army)
PKK (Kurdistan Workers Turkey 968 3,274
Party)
NPA (New Peoples Army) Philippines 940 3,119
LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Sri Lanka 896 7,194
Tamil Eelam)
Contras Nicaragua 875 7,263

civil war and terrorism? These are questions that have not been adequately addressed
in the literature on political violence.26
As we suggest later, one way to answer some of these questions consists of inter-
secting the action sense we have discussed in this section with the actor sense we
examine in the next.

The Actor Sense of Terrorism

In addition to a type of violence, terrorism is also predicated of certain armed groups.
Here the unit of analysis is not the attack, but the group. In most Western European
countries, the legal system defines terrorist crimes in terms of the actor. The starting
point is always the existence of an armed group that acts for political reasons against
the system (variously characterized as the constitutional order, public security, or the
states monopoly of violence).27 Being a member of the organization is considered in
itself a crime. A heavy emphasis is put on the actor. Thus, if a thief kills a policeman
in a bank robbery, this is not considered terrorism. But if the same policeman is killed
by a member of a terrorist group, then the special antiterrorist legislation is applied to
this crime, and so incurs a different sentence.
Apart from legal approaches, there is also a rich literature on terrorist organiza-
tions, embodied in case studies of groups such as ETA, Hamas, the PIRA, the Red
458 Politics & Society 39(3)

Brigades, al-Qaeda, and many others.28 In these studies, the emphasis is put on the
actor, whose nature is labeled terrorist or, in some cases, urban guerrilla, as opposed
to the rural one.29
In this literature, the basic assumption is that terrorist groups (or urban guerrillas)
are different from rural guerrillas because the former are clandestine, surviving under-
ground, while the latter are open organizations, with some capabilities of fighting
against the state army. In the traditional rural guerrilla, the insurgents are able to gain
control over certain areas within the state boundaries. In these areas, the rebels replace
the authority of the state and become the new rulers. Typically, they impose order and
extract rents from the population, and, in some cases, they also provide some basic
social services. Urban guerrillas or terrorist groups do not have a territorial base and
have to go underground, operating within enemy territory, mainly in urban settings.
Because they hide all the time, they cannot wear uniforms when they act.
Although the importance of (a lack of) territory has been pointed out by several
authors,30 it was Ariel Merari who first systematically theorized about it. Merari wrote
that as strategies of insurgency, terrorism and guerrilla are quite distinct. The most
important difference is that unlike terrorism, guerrilla tries to establish physical con-
trol of a territory.31 Noticeably, the existence of some degree of territorial control by
the insurgents has also been included among the conditions that a conflict must meet
to qualify as a civil war, according to the operational rules devised by Nicholas
Sambanis.32 Beyond these explicit references, there is an implicit endorsement of this
criterion in many studies that automatically make the connection between under-
ground groups and terrorism. Thus, Donatella della Portas book on terrorist groups in
Germany and Italy assumes that these are clandestine and devotes a chapter to the
logic of underground organizations.33
Territorial control, however, is not a clear-cut concept. We propose some fairly
concrete rules about what counts as territorial control. Thus, the insurgents must be
able to do some or all of these three things:

a. Set up camps or bases in which they store weapons, train recruits, and so on,
within the countrys borders.
b. Establish stable roadblocks, disrupting the flow of goods and persons within
the country, to finance the insurgency.
c. Rule the civil population in the localities they seize (e.g., extracting rents,
administering justice). To be recognized as the new authority, insurgents may
wear uniforms and carry arms in the controlled areas.

When any one of these conditions is met, the group has territorial control. Otherwise,
it is an underground group. The RAF (Red Army Faction) in Germany clearly quali-
fies as an underground group: it never had a territorial base; it had to hide all the
time.34 The Shining Path in Peru is a clear case of a group with territorial control. At
some point it controlled almost 25 percent of all Peruvian municipalities.35 Sometimes,
both possibilities coexist within the same country. Thus, the PKK controlled large
de la Calle and Snchez-Cuenca 459

parts of southeastern Turkey and was able to build parallel institutions such as a
rudimentary judiciary.36 By contrast, Dev-Sol (Revolutionary Left) was a purely
urban group with no territorial base.37
Perhaps the most extreme manifestation of nonterritorial violence is that of interna-
tional terrorism, as epitomized by the frequent hijacking of planes by Palestinian
groups in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In this kind of international attack, the terror-
ists act in complete isolation, and the connection to a territory is completely severed.
In fact, as many authors have pointed out, the shift into international terrorism by the
Palestinian insurgency was a response to the impossibility of establishing a proper
guerrilla within Israeli borders.38
Terrorists do not have the opportunity to build an army with military power. Under
the conditions of clandestinity, they cannot but resort to the technology of violence
associated with terrorism. The kind of violence exerted by terrorist groups therefore
follows from the constraints that secrecy imposes. The means they use are restricted to
the power to hurt. Guerrillas, by contrast, liberate territory from the states control,
developing a base, normally in the jungle or in the mountains. The logic of their vio-
lence consists of seizing an ever greater portion of the states territory and ruling in it,
creating a sort of proto-state.
The difference that territory makes has some observable consequences, which to a
great extent reinforce our judgments about what guerrilla and terrorist warfare are.
Terrorist groups, being clandestine and mostly urban, tend to be much smaller in
terms of recruits than guerrillas. They rarely have more than several hundred activ-
ists, whereas guerrillas may be made up of thousands of guerrilleros. Given this dif-
ference in numbers, it follows that guerrillas should be in general more lethal than
terrorist groups.
We can test these two conjectures thanks to the comprehensiveness of GTD. Many
of the terrorist events registered in GTD correspond to unknown groups or to short-
lived groups that produced no fatalities. To analyze only groups that pose a real chal-
lenge to the state, we have selected in GTD1 (197097) all groups that killed at least
ten people in more than one year of activity. This is, we believe, a fairly minimalist
rule about which rebel groups should be considered for comparative analysis. There
are 156 groups in GTD that fit these conditions, accounting for 41 percent of the
events included in the data set. For each of these groups, we have searched external
information (case studies, monographs, Internet sites) about territorial control and
recruitment.39 After careful examination of the 156 cases, 81 correspond to groups
with territorial control and 75 to groups without it.40
The first two columns of Table 4 confirm our basic point: territorial control has
implications for recruitment and lethality. First, groups with territorial control are able
to field larger armies, with more than five thousand members, than underground
groups, which on average recruit fewer than one thousand militants. Second, the mean
lethality for territorial groups is 822, and for nonterritorial ones it is only 113.41
GTD1 also includes information about the type of attack the insurgent group
carried out, distinguishing four major categories of attacks: bombing, facility attack,
460 Politics & Society 39(3)

Table 4. Some Characteristics of Warfare by Territorial Control

Recruitmenta Lethalityb Bomb attacksc Facility attacksd

Armed groups 3.3 822.1 0.18 0.61
with territorial
control (n = 81)
Armed groups 1.3 113.4 0.38 0.28
without
territorial
control (n = 75)
t-value 7.64*** 2.93** 5.45*** 8.79***
a. Recruitment: 0 = <100; 1 = 100500; 2 = 5001,000; 3 = 1,0005,000; 4 = 5,00010,000; 5 = >10,000.
Data available only for seventy-eight groups with territory and sixty-nine clandestine groups.
b. Lethality = number of people killed by the nonstate, armed groups (GTD1)
c. Bombing = proportion of bomb attacks over the total number of incidents (GTD1)
d. Facility attack = proportion of facility attacks over the total number of incidents (GTD1)
**p < .01. ***p < .001.

assassination, and kidnapping. Interestingly, the GTD1 coders interpreted a bombing

as the typical clandestine attack,42 whereas facility attacks were identified as open
operations carried out by multimember teams trying to occupy installations such as vil-
lages and buildings in the middle of which people may be killed.43 In turn, assassina-
tions are insurgency neutral, since the definition of the category does not make any
assumption about the existence of territorial control. As for kidnappings, this is a quint-
essential terrorist attack, practiced to extort rents and fund the terrorists activities.44
The mean number of deaths in bombings carried out by the 156 identified armed groups
is 0.62, a very low figure in comparison to the figure for facility attacks (4.6 deaths).45 This
helps to clarify why those groups forced to carry out terrorist attackssuch as bombings
because of their lack of territorial control produce fewer deaths than the insurgencies with
liberated areas. Columns 3 and 4 in Table 4 clearly confirm this intuition.
Insurgent groups with territorial control carry out many facility attacks (61 percent
of all attacks), but few bombings (18 percent). Underground groups, on the other hand,
resort more to bombings than to facility attacks (38 percent vs. 28 percent).46 The two
differences are statistically significant at 1 percent.
The previous analyses reinforce the claim that the nature of the insurgent actor mat-
ters. Underground groups tend to be small and not highly lethal compared to groups
that gain territorial control. Moreover, holding territory has a strong impact on the
repertoire of violence the armed groups utilize. Groups that seize territory attempt to
increase their control by raiding other areas; clandestine groups, given their weakness,
cannot but resort to covert attacks such as planting IEDs.

The Intersection of the Two Senses of Terrorism

As shown in Table 1, the existence of two nonoverlapping criteria about the nature
of terrorism creates four possibilities. The first two correspond to the cases where the
de la Calle and Snchez-Cuenca 461

action and the actor sense are mutually reinforcing. This happens when nonterritorial
insurgencies employ mostly coercive violence or when insurgencies with territorial
control employ mostly irregular warfare. These two cases are the ones that best fit
the distinction between guerrilla and terrorist warfare. They are, so to speak, pure
cases. There are, however, two possibilities in which the action and the actor sense
go in opposite directions. The most important case is that of insurgencies with ter-
ritorial control that engage in coercive violence in a systematic way, combining it
with more traditional guerrilla actions. The other possibility is that of nonterritorial
insurgencies trying to employ guerrilla tactics. To some extent, this is a residual pos-
sibility, since nonterritorial groups do not usually have the capabilities to engage in
guerrilla activity.
To analyze these possibilities, we have selected four cases of armed groups. These
are ETA in Spain, the PKK in Turkey, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Montoneros in
Argentina. We consider that ETA and the PKK represent pure cases. ETA is one of the
oldest terrorist organizations in the world, with no territorial control in Spain, and its
tactics are typically terrorist. The PKK is a paradigmatic example of guerrilla, with
strong territorial control and mostly engaged in guerrilla tactics. Hezbollah and the
Montoneros are mixed cases in which the action and the actor sense do not fully over-
lap. Thus, Hezbollah is a territorial insurgency, but it has used terrorist tactics very
frequently, while the Montoneros never had territorial control but tried to emulate the
tactics of the typical Latin American rural insurgency.
We begin with the nonterritorial groups. ETA has never been able to control terri-
tory in the Basque Country. It was created in 1959, and its armed activity was fairly
limited in the 1960s. Emulating the liberation movements of the Third World, ETA
members sought to behave as guerrilleros, seizing small villages for a few hours or
imposing road controls,47 but they soon discovered that their only chance lay in terror-
ist attacks. The first mortal victim claimed by ETA was in 1968. Since the 1970s, ETA
has perpetrated numerous attacks against security forces through IEDs and shootings.
It has also carried out a high number of selective killings, aimed at informers, drug
dealers, entrepreneurs, politicians, and public officials. These tactics are typically ter-
rorist in nature. ETA thinks that this kind of violence is necessary to put pressure on
the Spanish state and to build a broad movement in favor of independence.
Although ETA acts in a fully underground manner, it had for many years a sanctu-
ary or safe haven in the south of France, where it was able to move around with rela-
tive ease. However, a sanctuary is quite different from the territorial control that
guerrillas have, among other reasons because the rebels do not become the local rulers
and do not commit violent acts in the safe haven. Thus, to all effects, when members
of ETA carry out terrorist acts, they do it under the constraints of clandestinity.
The case of the Montoneros (the leftist branch of the Peronist movement) is more
controversial. They followed the path set by the Tupamaros in Uruguay, which was the
first group in Latin America to abandon the idea of creating a revolutionary foco in the
countryside in favor of fighting in the cities. According to Abraham Guilln, the main
advocate of the urban guerrilla, the conquest of space could no longer be the aim in
462 Politics & Society 39(3)

highly urbanized countries, since in the cities, the guerrillas agitate, fight and give
cover to the masses, but cannot establish liberated zones.48 As Argentina in the 1960s
was already an urban country, several attempts to create rural guerrillas from 1959 to
1968 systematically failed.49
During the period 197074, the Montoneros engaged almost exclusively in urban
violence (shootings and bombings).50 After the breakdown between Pern and the
Montoneros in May 1974, the political situation deteriorated quite dramatically. Pern
died shortly afterward, in July, and he was replaced by his widow; she presided over
an increasingly reactionary and repressive government that sponsored death squads
against activists of the left. The spiral of violence that followed ended with the military
coup in March 1976. In this context of radicalization, the Montoneros tried to create a
real army with a capacity for military operations that involved several hundred attack-
ers.51 Perhaps the most spectacular deed was the assault on a garrison in Formosa in
October 1975. This was a large-scale guerrilla attack in which the Montoneros wore
uniforms. This guerrilla period, however, was brief and ended in failure. The under-
ground nature of the movement prevented the launching of ambitious guerrilla opera-
tions against the army.
Regarding territorial insurgencies, the PKK is a standard case of guerrilla. It was
created in 1978, when Turkey was swept by a wave of urban political violence between
revolutionaries and ultranationalists. The Kurdish civil war was extremely bloody,
with around thirty-five thousand fatalities. The PKK started its guerrilla attacks in the
early 1980s, with hit-and-run tactics that were launched from the territorial base the
organization had in the mountains in the southeastern part of the country.52 It expanded
quickly, in part helped by the indiscriminate and counterproductive repression of the
Turkish army. The PKK ruled in the liberated areas, imparting justice and spreading
the use of Kurdish. Internal violence against Kurdish people not willing to collaborate
with the PKK was harsh indeed.53
In the mid-1990s, the Turkish army sufficiently improved its effectiveness to deal a
severe blow to the PKK. Interestingly, it was in the aftermath of military defeat that the
insurgency decided to launch typically terrorist tactics such as suicide missions and
attacks against tourists. Between 1995 and 1999, the year in which the PKK leader,
Abdullah calan, was arrested, fifteen suicide missions were carried out.54 Terrorism
in the action sense became more attractive for the PKK in a context of declining mili-
tary power.
The Lebanese Hezbollah was born in 1982 as a consequence of two major factors.
First, the Shiite community was increasingly discontented with its political leadership,
grouped in the Amal militia, because of the broad concessions granted to the Israeli
forces in southern Lebanon. Second, the influence of the Islamic revolution in Iran
encouraged radical Shiites to try to pursue the same path in Lebanon, by setting up a
new Shiite militia calling for an Islamic regime in the region. Thanks to Iranian spon-
sorship, Hezbollah controlled some towns in the Bekaa Valley and used this liberated
territory to carry out attacks abroad.55
de la Calle and Snchez-Cuenca 463

Hezbollah focused on harassing the Israeli forces in Shiite-dominated southern

Lebanon and on targeting the Western troops that had been deployed in Beirut to over-
see a peace agreement largely favoring the occupying nations. In the absence of terri-
tory, Hezbollah successfully adopted the use of suicide attacks against foreign troops
stationed in Lebanon and also kidnapped foreigners to force their exchange for
Hezbollah militants in prison. Guerrilla tactics progressively replaced these two tactics
as Hezbollah gained territorial control in the south. The real breakthrough took place
in 1991, when the armed group considered it had sufficient capabilities to engage in
military operations against the Israeli troops. Hezbollah also launched a campaign of
international terrorism against Israeli interests. The variation regarding territorial con-
trol and the aims pursued (expulsion of Israeli troops from Lebanon, creation of an
Islamist regime, an international campaign against Israel) lead us to expect a mixed
choice of tactics.56
If our analysis of the four cases is on the right track, we should observe patterns of
violence that fit the pure and mixed natures of the armed groups. Our assumption is
that guerrillas with territorial control will specialize in tactics that are consistent with
their capabilities, namely, facility attacks as defined by GTD1, whereas terrorist
groups will opt for those tactics, such as IEDs, that are compatible with their under-
ground nature. We are agnostic about assassinations, since they can be carried out by
any kind of insurgency, territorial or not. As for kidnappings and hijackings, we think
they should be more associated with terrorism.
The two pure cases, those of the PKK and ETA, should display opposite patterns,
with ETA concentrating on bombings rather than on facility attacks, and the PKK the
other way around. Given that Hezbollah and the Montoneros are mixed cases,
Hezbollah being closer to the guerrilla model and Montoneros to the terrorist one, their
patterns should be less obvious.
Table 5 provides a profile of the tactics employed by these four groups, according
to GTD1. There is a clear difference between the two pure cases, the PKK and ETA.
Of all actions by the PKK, 76 percent correspond to facility attacks. This percentage
goes down to 14 percent in the case of ETA. With regard to bombings, the pattern is
the opposite: 54 percent of all attacks are bombings in the case of ETA, as compared
to a mere 9 percent in the case of the PKK.
Regarding the mixed cases, Hezbollah still has a majority of facility attacks, 53
percent, but it is clearly lower than the PKKs 76 percent. Likewise, Hezbollah used
bombings much more frequently (29 percent) than the PKK. The Montoneros tried to
imitate territorial guerrillas, as shown by the relatively high percentage of facility
attacks (23 percent), higher than those of ETA.
Assassinations seem to be more frequent in the two cases of nonterritorial groups
than in the two territorial ones, but this difference is not necessarily implied by our
argument (rebels may kill people selectively regardless of the territorial nature of the
insurgency). Finally, ETA and the Montoneros kidnapped more than the PKK but less
than Hezbollah. The latter organization specialized in taking hostages to negotiate
their exchange for Hezbollah prisoners.
464 Politics & Society 39(3)

Table 5. Type of Attacks for Selected Insurgent Groups (vertical percentages)

PKK Hezbollah Montoneros ETA

Bombings 9.1 28.6 42.2 53.8
Facility attacks 76.1 52.9 23.3 14.1
Assassinations 11.2 10.2 28.5 27.8
Kidnappings 3.6 8.3 6.0 4.3
Total attacks 968 206 116 1,695

Overall, two lessons can be learned from Table 5. The first is the importance of ter-
ritory. The choice of tactics by armed groups is largely conditioned by the capabilities
and constraints that stem from territorial control (or a lack of it). But, second, the con-
nection between the actor and the action is not a deterministic one. The choice between
terrorist and guerrilla attacks depends on the relevance of the territory under the insur-
gents control, but also on other factors such as the resources of the insurgency (domes-
tic and foreign) and the level of competition between armed groups. To understand the
mixed cases, in which violence is a mix of terrorism and guerrilla, we can think here
of three potential scenarios, two dynamic and one static. The dynamic scenarios refer
to groups passing from one condition to another. The static scenario refers to the varia-
tion in space rather than in time.
On one hand, rebels whose territorial strength is shrinking may switch to terrorist
attacks as a way to compensate for lesser military power. An apt illustration is the use
of suicide attacks by the PKK in the late nineties. By the same token, rebels who are
able to seize territory will switch from terrorism to guerrilla tactics as a way to hold
and broaden their territorial presence, as the Hezbollah example has shown. On the
other hand, from a static perspective, guerrillas besieging the capital could trigger ter-
rorist attacks in the city to spread fear and accelerate surrender.
It is not our aim in this article to account for this internal variability in the choice of
tactics of territorial groups. We simply want to show that even though the cell in Table 1
that corresponds to territorial groups using terrorist tactics is the most problematic
one, it is not impossible to find ways of analyzing tactical choices, once we identify
the opportunities and constraints that these groups have.

Conclusions
The message we have conveyed in this article is that most comparative research on
terrorism is based on shaky foundations because of the ambiguity that surrounds the
concept of terrorism. Scholars working in this field are rarely explicit about what they
mean by terrorism. This has important implications for the generation of data. Most
researchers accept existing data sets at face value. But the rules that the data sets fol-
low to decide whether some violent act is terrorist or not are notoriously vague. As a
consequence, these data sets conflate different types of violence and different types of
de la Calle and Snchez-Cuenca 465

actors. The issue is not merely theoretical because it affects the selection of cases and
the codification of the information. Different empirical results can be produced,
depending on the decisions made about what falls under the terrorist label.
The confusion associated with terrorism stems from the coexistence of two senses
of the term, the action and the actor senses, which are not fully congruent. Rather than
trying to advocate a particular definition, we have provided a conceptual map of the
different ways in which we talk about terrorism. We tend to say that certain violent
tactics are unequivocally terrorist ones, and that certain armed groups are also unequiv-
ocally terrorist groups. When the two criteria meet, we have the core of terrorism:
terrorist tactics perpetrated by terrorist groups. Terrorist tactics (bombings, assassina-
tions, kidnappings, hostage taking, and the like) are a variety of the power to hurt,
based on the lack of military power. Terrorist groups are underground groups with no
territorial control.
The ambiguity that surrounds terrorism is caused by two possibilities that remain
outside the core: nonterrorist actors adopting terrorist tactics and terrorist actors adopt-
ing nonterrorist tactics. Although it is not possible to remove this ambiguity in empiri-
cal research, we can at least identify it and analyze it.
Concretely, we can take advantage of the high level of disaggregation in terrorism
data sets. The unit of observation is in most cases the attack. This means that we can
recode attacks according to various definitional schemes, and we can also deal with
the perpetrators of these attacks in different ways. As we have shown regarding GTD1,
the largest data set on terrorism, we can distinguish attacks that fit the terrorist reper-
toire of violence from those that fit the guerrilla one. Moreover, based on external
information on the nature of the insurgencies, we can codify whether the perpetrators
had territorial control or not. Thus, we can analyze various combinations of tactics and
actors, as we have done in an exploratory way in this article. In fact, thanks to this
exercise, we have been able to unearth different profiles in the actions carried out by
armed groups that are consistent with the capabilities and constraints these groups had.
When the proper distinctions are made, a fascinating research agenda emerges. At
the country level, it becomes possible to inquire into why some conflicts evolve into
civil wars, where the insurgency holds territory and pursues a war against the state,
whereas other conflicts remain of low intensity, with rebels unable to liberate territory
and to create parallel institutions.
At the insurgency level, the big issue is the conditions under which armed groups
resort to terrorism. This raises several questions. Why do some guerrillas use terrorist
attacks whereas others refrain from doing so? Why do some terrorist groups attack
abroad (international terrorism) whereas the violence of others is fully domestic?
Why do some insurgent groups systematically target civilians whereas others avoid
this tactic?
In sum, this kind of approach lends itself to the unification of two largely disjointed
literatures, that on civil wars and that on terrorism. Civil wars are types of conflicts.
Terrorism refers either to a type of violence or to a type of insurgent actor. Empirical
results about civil wars and terrorism are therefore not strictly comparable: they do not
466 Politics & Society 39(3)

refer to comparable units. However, if we move to an analysis on the nature of the

insurgency (whether it has territorial control or not) and on the nature of the tactics
(those of terrorism and guerrilla warfare), we can create categories that are valid for
the study of violence in both civil wars and terrorism.
One final implication of our analysis is that we must resist certain simplifications
that are dominant in the public debate on terrorism. There cannot be a single recipe in
the fight against armed struggle. The counterinsurgent strategy must be sensitive to the
kind of actor the state is fighting against, as well as to the kind of tactics the actor may
resort to. For instance, it follows from our argument that if the state is able to weaken
substantially the military power of an insurgency with territorial control, it is most
likely that the insurgency will change its mix of tactics, spending more resources on
terrorist attacks. This might seem counterintuitive: as security forces get closer to vic-
tory over the rebels, terrorist actions, which by their very nature are spectacular and
attract a lot of attention, may increase. The PKK in Turkey resorted to terrorism in the
face of heavy military defeats, and this logic also seems to apply to the Sunni insur-
gency in Iraq, whose vanishing territorial control was replaced by the recourse to more
terrorist attacks.57
Given the current focus of the multilateral organizations on strengthening state capa-
bilities to foster economic growth and counter domestic unrest, we should not be sur-
prised if terrorism becomes in the next years the most usual warfare technique for
insurgents. On one hand, the large diffusion of sophisticated equipment to effectively
guard state borders and keep control of isolated internal areas will make it more difficult
for insurgents to seize territory. On the other, the process of democratization affecting
most of the developing world will offer more chances for weak insurgents to operate
comfortably underground. Far from disappearing, terrorist groups may well be on the rise.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
This article is part of the research project The Emergence of Terrorist Groups, funded by the
Spanish Ministry of Science (CSO2010-21704).

Notes
1. Christian Davenport, State Repression and Political Order, Annual Review of Political
Science 10 (2007): 123.
2. Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2006).
3. Alex P. Schmid and Albert J. Jongman, Political Terrorism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transac-
tion, 1988), collected more than one hundred definitions.
4. See http://www.rand.org/nsrd/projects/terrorism-incidents/about/scope.html.
de la Calle and Snchez-Cuenca 467

5. In this article, we focus on violence produced by substate insurgent groups. Thus, the role
of the state in the production of terrorist violence is not discussed in detail. This is not to
say, however, that we reject the possibility of states practicing terrorism. From the action
sense, states can carry out covert terrorist attacksusually in foreign countries, such as the
Libya-backed Lockerbie bombing. From the actor sense, states can also promote or sponsor
terrorist groups that act clandestinelyusually in reaction to existing insurgent groups,
such as the typical death squads in many Latin American countries.
6. Max Abrahms, Why Terrorism Does Not Work, International Security 31, no. 2 (2006):
4278; Eli Berman, Radical, Religious and Violent (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009);
Jeff Goodwin, A Theory of Categorical Terrorism, Social Forces 84, no. 4 (2006): 2028
46; Frances M. Kamm, Terrorism and Intending Evil, Philosophy & Public Affairs 36,
no. 2 (Spring 2008): 15786; Andrew Kydd and Barbara Walter, The Strategies of Terrorism,
International Security 31, no. 1 (2006): 4980; Gordon H. McCormick, Terrorist Deci-
sion Making, Annual Review of Political Science 6 (2003): 474507.
7. Available at www.march.es/dtv. See Luis de la Calle and Ignacio Snchez-Cuenca, The
Quantity and Quality of Terrorism: The DTV dataset, Journal of Peace Research 48, no. 1
(2011): 4958.
8. Alexander Downes, Targeting Civilians in War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2008); Kalyvas, Logic of Violence; Benjamin A. Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing
and Genocide in the 20th Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).
9. Downes, Targeting Civilians in War, 1.
10. Kalyvas, Logic of Violence; also see Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley, Terror and Guerrilla
Warfare in Latin America, 19561970, Comparative Studies in Society and History 32,
no. 2 (April 1990): 20137.
11. Martha Crenshaw, Explaining Terrorism: Causes, Processes and Consequences (London:
Routledge, 2011), 3.
12. For a deeper analysis of these distinctions, see de la Calle and Snchez-Cuenca, Quantity
and Quality of Terrorism.
13. Stathis Kalyvas and Ignacio Snchez-Cuenca, Killing without Dying: The Absence of
Suicide Missions, in Making Sense of Suicide Missions, ed. Diego Gambetta (Oxford,
UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), 20932.
14. Abrahms, Why Terrorism Does Not Work; Kalyvas, Logic of Violence, chap. 6.
15. Ariel Merari, Terrorism as a Strategy of Insurgency, Terrorism and Political Violence 5,
no. 4 (1993): 21351.
16. Martha Crenshaw, Thoughts on Relating Terrorism to Historical Contexts, in Terrorism
in Context, ed. Martha Crenshaw (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1995), 424; Walter Enders and Todd Sandler, The Political Economy of Terrorism
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 3; Bruno Frey, Dealing with Terrorism:
Stick or Carrot? (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2004), 7; Bruce Hoffman, Inside Ter-
rorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 44; Alan B. Krueger, What Makes
a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2007), 14; Schmid and Jongman, Political Terrorism, 28.
468 Politics & Society 39(3)

17. Ronald D. Crelinsten, Terrorism as Political Communication: The Relationship between

the Controller and the Controlled, in Contemporary Research on Terrorism, ed. Paul
Wilkinson and A. M. Stewart (Aberdeen, UK: Aberdeen University Press, 1987), 323.
18. Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 2.
19. This distinction resurfaces in the more recent literature on political violence. Kalyvas,
Logic of Violence, talks about two overarching aims of violence, extermination and compli-
ance, which roughly correspond to military power and the power to hurt, respectively.
20. The most widely used dependent variable in this literature is the number of terrorist inci-
dents in each country. Two recent examples on the relationship between terrorist incidents
and democracy are Erica Chenoweth, Democratic Competition and Terrorist Activ-
ity, Journal of Politics 72, no. 1 (2010): 1630; and Burcu Savun and Brian J. Phillips,
Democracy, Foreign Policy and Terrorism, Journal of Conflict Resolution 53, no. 6
(2009): 878904.
21. We cannot but speculate about the coding procedures used by this agency. The first data
sets on terrorism were all produced by private companies gathering information about
domestic unrest in countries where clients were interested in doing business. This is why
the boundaries in these data sets between terrorism and civil war seem tenuous, as we dis-
cuss below.
22. Gary LaFree and Laura Dugan, Introducing the Global Terrorism Database, Terrorism
and Political Violence 19, no. 2 (2007): 184.
23. Gary LaFree and Laura Dugan, Global Terrorism Database 1.1, 19701997 (Computer
file, ICPSR22541-v2) (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and
Social Research [distributor], 2008). We have not used the global version of GTD because
the codification of events was substantially altered after 1997, rendering any comparison
between the two periods (pre- and post-1997) problematic.
24. Nicholas Sambanis, What Is Civil War? Conceptual and Empirical Complexities of an
Operational Definition, Journal of Conflict Resolution 48, no. 6 (2004): 81458.
25. Such as those of James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil
War, American Political Science Review 97, no. 1 (2003): 7590; Sambanis, What Is
Civil War?
26. An exception is Nicholas Sambanis, Terrorism and Civil War, in Terrorism, Economic
Development, and Political Openness, ed. Philip Keefer and Norman Loayza (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 174206.
27. Manuel Cancio, Sentido y limites de los delitos de terrorismo, in Terrorismo y Estado
de Derecho, ed. Jos Ramn Serrano-Piedracasas and Eduardo D. Crespo (Madrid: Iustel,
2010), 381416; Amitai Etzioni, Terrorists: A Distinct Species, Terrorism and Political
Violence 23, no. 1 (2011): 112.
28. There are also some quantitative studies using the organization as the unit of analysis. See,
e.g., Abrahms, Why Terrorism Does Not Work; Victor Asal and Karl R. Rethemeyer,
The Nature of the Beast: Organizational Structures and the Lethality of Terrorist Attacks,
Journal of Politics 70, no. 2 (2008): 43749; Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic
Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005).
de la Calle and Snchez-Cuenca 469

29. We are assuming that the perpetrators form part of a group. The limiting case is that of a
single individual committing terrorist acts, the Unabomber being the paradigmatic case.
This is a largely residual possibility. There are very few cases of lone-wolf terrorists out-
side the United States, the country where this behavior is more common. Although a single
killer does not count as an organization, there is no doubt that these lone-wolf mavericks
lie under the category of terrorism since they always act underground and employ coercive
violence rather than military power. This also holds for Timothy McVeigh, who belonged
to an extreme right-wing group. Thus, Timothy McVeighs Oklahoma City bombing is
included in the data sets on terrorist events, but given our operational rule (more than ten
killings in more than one year of activity) it does not enter into our analysis.
30. For instance, Audrey K. Cronin, How Terrorism Ends (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2009), 147; Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, 41; Gordon McCormick, From the Sierra to
the Cities: The Urban Campaign of the Shining Path (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1992);
Robert Moss, The War for the Cities (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1972),
12; Ignacio Snchez-Cuenca and Luis de la Calle, Domestic Terrorism: The Hidden Side
of Violence, Annual Review of Political Science 12 (2009): 3149; and Jeremy Weinstein,
Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2007), 17.
31. Merari, Terrorism as a Strategy of Insurgency, 224.
32. Sambanis, What Is Civil War?
33. Donatella della Porta, Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
34. Stefan Aust, Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F (Oxford, UK: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2008).
35. Cynthia McClintock, The Decimation of Perus Sendero Luminoso, in Comparative
Peace Processes in Latin America, ed. C. J. Arson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1991).
36. Dogu Ergil, Partiya Karkarn Kurdistan, in Terror, Insurgency, and the State: Ending
Protracted Conflicts, ed. Marianne Heiberg, Brendan OLeary, and John Tirman (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) 32357.
37. Sabri Sayari, Political Violence and Terrorism in Turkey, 197680: A Retrospective Anal-
ysis, Terrorism and Political Violence 22, no. 2 (2010): 198215.
38. Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 18812001
(New York: Vintage, 2001), 376; Barry Rubin, Revolution until Victory? The Politics and
History of the PLO (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 37; Yezid Sayigh,
Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement 19491993
(Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1997), 210.
39. We double-checked our coding on recruitment with the data compiled by Seth Jones and
Martin Libicki in their How Terrorist Groups End: Lessons from Countering al Qaida
(Washington, DC: RAND, 2008), 14286. We found information for 139 groups, whereas
Jones and Libickis data cover only 106 of the 156 groups meeting the minimum require-
ment of violent activity. The correlation of the two recruitment measures is .73 (n = 98).
470 Politics & Society 39(3)

The final results reported in Table 4 include information for 147 groups, 139 groups from
our own measure of recruitment plus 8 groups that remained missing in our coding, col-
lected from Jones and Libickis data set.
40. The list of the 156 insurgent groups is available on request.
41. These are very low figures, particularly for guerrillas, if compared for instance with more
thorough estimates, such as those of Bethany Lacina, Explaining the Severity of Civil
War, Journal of Conflict Resolution 50, no. 2 (2006): 27689. The reason why GTD1
reports such low figures in guerrilla conflicts is simply that the aim of the data set was to
cover only terrorist violence. We think that the presence of guerrilla violence in the data set
is simply the result of the loose concepts that were used for the coding of events.
42. In contrast to a facility attack, which often is aimed at physically taking over the instal-
lation, a bombing is designed simply to destroy or damage it. The clandestine nature of
bombing separates it from facility attacks (LaFree and Dugan, Global Terrorism Database
1.1, 28).
43. The objective of the [facility attack] is to rob, damage or occupy a specific installation. The
term installation includes towns, buildings and in some cases, vehicles. Thus a bank robbery
is a facility attack although all its guards may have been killed.... The occupation of a town,
wherein persons may be killed or wounded, also is a facility attack since the objective was
to take the town (installation), not to kill or wound persons.... Normally, a multi-member
team is involved. The operation is carried out openlyin contrast to the covert placement of
bombs at night (LaFree and Dugan, Global Terrorism Database 1.1, 28).
44. We add hijackings to kidnappings since the same rationale lies behind the two types.
Besides, the number of hijackings reported in the database is not large.
45. If only attacks with at least one person killed are considered, the mean number of deaths for
bombings scales up to 4.7, compared to 8.3 deaths for facility attacks. This indicates
that there may be many bombings not purporting to kill that decrease the real lethality of
this type of attack.
46. This high proportion is in part the result of the fact that bank robberies, a usual funding
strategy for terrorist groups, are included in the category of facility attack.
47. Xavier Zumalde, Mi Lucha Clandestina en ETA (Arrigorriaga, Spain: Status, 2004).
48. Abraham Guilln, Philosophy of the Urban Guerrilla: The Revolutionary Writings of
Abraham Guilln (New York: William Morrow, 1973), 250, 281.
49. Richard Gillespie, Soldiers of Pern: Argentinas Montoneros (Oxford, UK: Clarendon,
1982), 76; Mara Jos Moyano, Argentinas Lost Patrol: Armed Struggle, 19691979 (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 2122.
50. One exception was the occupation of the small village of La Calera in 1970, clearly inspired
by the Tupamaros occupation of Pando in 1969. Montoneros imitated the guerrillero style,
wearing for instance identifying armbands. See Gillespie, Soldiers of Pern, 95.
51. Moyano, Argentinas Lost Patrol, 57.
52. Ergil, Partiya Karkarn Kurdistan, 325; Matthew M. Kocher, The Decline of PKK and
the Viability of a One-State Solution in Turkey, International Journal on Multicultural
Societies 4, no. 1 (2002): 120.
de la Calle and Snchez-Cuenca 471

53. David Romano, The Kurdish Nationalist Movement: Opportunity, Mobilization and Identity
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 51.
54. Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2005), chap. 5; Shaul Shay, The Shahids: Islam and Suicide Attacks (New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction, 2004), 1026.
55. Hala Jaber, Hezbollah: Born with a Vengeance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997),
51; Edgar OBallance, Civil War in Lebanon, 197592 (New York: Palgrave, 1998), 147.
56. Martin Kramer, Hizbullah: The Calculus of Jihad, Bulletin of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences 47, no. 8 (1994): 2043; Samir Makdisi and Richard Sadaka, The
Lebanese Civil War, 197590, in Understanding Civil War: Evidence and Analysis, vol. 2,
ed. Paul Collier and Nicholas Sambanis (New York: World Bank, 2005), 5985.
57. Stathis Kalyvas and Matthew Kocher, Ethnic Cleavages and Irregular War: Iraq and
Vietnam, Politics & Society 35, no. 2 (2007): 183223.

Bios
Luis de la Calle (lcalle@march.es) is Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the
Social Sciences (Juan March Institute, Madrid)

Ignacio Snchez-Cuenca (isc@march.es) is Research Director at the Center for Advanced

Study in the Social Sciences (Juan March Institute, Madrid). He is also Associate Professor of
Sociology at Universidad Complutense (Madrid).