Negotiating with Terrorists: The Costs of Compliance
Document Type
Article
Source of Publication
Southern Economic Journal
Publication Date
7-1-2019
Abstract
© 2019 by the Southern Economic Association It is often argued that negotiating with terrorists will encourage terrorist attacks. To date, corroborating empirical evidence is scarce. Using ITERATE data, we investigate the impact of conceding to terrorist demands on terror activity. We restrict attention to hostage events with clear-cut demands from terrorists. Our sample period runs from 1978 to 2005 and comprises 1435 events in 125 countries. Estimating a flexible and dynamic Structured Additive Regression model, we find that the percentage of successfully negotiated events has a nonlinear effect on future terror intensity consistent with our simple theoretical model. More specifically, although moderate rates of negotiation increase the number of future terror events, higher negotiation rates tend to have the opposite effect. The estimated threshold is around 20%.
DOI Link
ISSN
Publisher
Wiley Blackwell
Volume
86
Issue
1
First Page
305
Last Page
317
Disciplines
Business
Scopus ID
Recommended Citation
Arin, Kerim Peren; Feess, Eberhard; Kuhlenkasper, Torben; and Reich, Otto F.M., "Negotiating with Terrorists: The Costs of Compliance" (2019). All Works. 2482.
https://zuscholars.zu.ac.ae/works/2482
Indexed in Scopus
yes
Open Access
no