Terrorist Inter-Group Cooperation and Terror Activity

Aditya Bhan () and Tarun Kabiraj
Additional contact information
Aditya Bhan: Indian Statistical Institute

Group Decision and Negotiation, 2020, vol. 29, issue 6, No 4, 1085-1106

Abstract: Abstract The present work is the first to formally model inter-outfit strategic cooperation in a manner which reveals that the cooperating terror outfits may conduct more, less or the same number of attacks as in the absence of cooperation; based on whether they are resource-constrained or not a priori; and on the extent to which cooperation can serve to ease such a constraint through inter-outfit resource-transfer. In the absence of external sponsorship, the paper shows that strategic cooperation between two outfits has no impact on terror activity if neither outfit is resource-constrained a priori. If only one outfit is resource-constrained a priori, on the other hand, then inter-group cooperation increases terror activity if and only if there is sufficient resource-asymmetry between the outfits. Further, if both outfits are resource-constrained a priori, then cooperation may increase or decrease terror activity depending on parametric asymmetries. Finally, it is demonstrated that while cooperation can neutralize the impact of strategic external sponsorship on terror activity and thereby remove the incentive for its provision, minor modifications to the sponsorship mechanism can often mitigate this phenomenon.

Keywords: Terror outfit; Terror attacks; Non-cooperative competition; Outfit cooperation; External sponsorship; Counter-terrorism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C71 C72 D74 H79 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10726-020-09696-w Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:grdene:v:29:y:2020:i:6:d:10.1007_s10726-020-09696-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10726/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10726-020-09696-w

Access Statistics for this article

Group Decision and Negotiation is currently edited by Gregory E. Kersten

More articles in Group Decision and Negotiation from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().