Effects of Defensive and Proactive Measures on Competition Between Terrorist Groups

Subhayu Bandyopadhyay and Todd Sandler

No 2021-008, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

Abstract: A two-stage game investigates how counterterrorism measures affect within-country competition between two rival terrorist groups. Although such competition is commonplace (e.g., al-Nusra Front and Free Syria Army; Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the National Liberation Army; and al-Fatah and Hamas), there is no theoretical treatment of how proactive and defensive measures influence this interaction. Previous studies on rival terrorist groups are solely empirical concerning group survival, outbidding, and terrorism level, while ignoring the role that government countermeasures exert on the rival groups’ terrorism. In a theoretical framework, alternative counterterrorism actions have diverse impacts on the level of terrorism depending on relative group sizes and government-targeting decisions. In the two-stage game, optimal counterterrorism policy rules are displayed in terms of how governments target symmetric and asymmetric terrorist groups. Comparative statics show how parameter changes affect Nash or subgame perfect equilibrium outcomes.

Keywords: competitive terrorist groups; defensive and proactive counterterrorism; two-stage game; comparative statics; outbidding between rival groups (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 49 pages
Date: 2021-06-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth and nep-mic
Note: Publisher DOI: 10.1177/00220027221108432
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Published in Journal of Conflict Resolution

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Journal Article: Effects of Defensive and Proactive Measures on Competition Between Terrorist Groups (2022)
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DOI: 10.20955/wp.2021.008

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