The life cycle of terrorist organisations

Abstract

That terrorist organisations come and go is a fact. This empirical fact tends to draw attention to the demise of the terrorist organisation and distracts from the dynamics of the terrorist organisation's life cycle. In this respect, the extant literature suffers from a serious weakness that is symptomatic of the absence from the literature of a rigorous theoretical explanation for the life cycle of terrorist organisations. This paper aims to address this by developing a theoretical explanation for the life cycle of terrorist organisations that is centred on competition for grassroots or popular support between the terrorist organisation and the government. The decline and demise of a particular terrorist organisation is not certain ex ante and a terrorist organisation may be expected to be most dangerous, not in its death throes, but during its early years as it competes with the government for grassroots support. These appear to be different conclusions to those that characterise some parts of the literature on this subject. The theoretical explanation developed herein also predicts a cyclical oscillation of conflict.