The Credibility Paradox: Violence as a Double-Edged Sword in International Politics?

The media can be accessed here: http://streaming.osu.edu/knowledgebank/mershon11/051611.mp4Max Abrahms research focuses on the consequences of terrorism, its motives, and the implications for counterterrorism strategy.Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security Studie

Terrorism works in theory, but not in practice

In the study of terrorism, there is a widespread belief that I call the “Strategic Model”. It posits that groups adopt terrorism because it offers the best chance of having their grievances redressed. More specifically, the Strategic Model maintains that attacking civilians with acts of terrorism is a successful way for groups to pressure governments into meeting their political demands. Despite the prevalence of this rationalist perspective, it actually rests on very weak empirical foundations. In the face of terrorism, target countries seldom make strategic concessions to the perpetrators of the attacks. On the contrary, they generally dig in their political heels and go on the offensive. This article looks at why so many scholars assume that terrorism pays despite its political futility

Why Terrorists Overestimate the Odds of Victory

<p><span><em>Terrorism is puzzling behavior for political scientists. On one hand, terrorist attacks generally hail from the politically aggrieved. On the other hand, a growing body of scholarship finds the tactic politically counterproductive. Unlike guerrilla attacks on military targets, terrorist attacks on civilian targets lower the odds of governments making&nbsp; concessions. This article proposes and tests a psychological theory to account for why militant groups engage in terrorism, given the political costs of attacking civilians.</em></span></p><div><span><em><br /></em></span></div

Leadership Matters:The Effects of Targeted Killings on Militant Group Tactics

Targeted killings have become a central component of counter-terrorism strategy. In response to the unprecedented prevalence of this strategy around the world, numerous empirical studies have recently examined whether "decapitating" militant groups with targeted killings is strategically effective. This study builds on that research program by examining the impact of targeted killings on militant group tactical decision-making. Our empirical strategy exploits variation in the attack patterns of militant groups conditional on whether a government's targeted killing attempt succeeded against them operationally. In both the Afghanistan-Pakistan and Israel-West Bank-Gaza Strip theaters, targeted killings significantly alter the nature of militant group violence. When their leaderships are degraded with a successful strike, militant groups become far less discriminate in their target selection by redirecting their violence from military to civilian targets. We then analyze several potential causal mechanisms to account for these results and find strongest evidence that targeted killings tend to promote indiscriminate organizational violence by empowering lower level members with weaker civilian restraint

Blue whales increase feeding rates at fine-scale ocean features.

Marine predators face the challenge of reliably finding prey that is patchily distributed in space and time. Predators make movement decisions at multiple spatial and temporal scales, yet we have a limited understanding of how habitat selection at multiple scales translates into foraging performance. In the ocean, there is mounting evidence that submesoscale (i.e. less than 100 km) processes drive the formation of dense prey patches that should hypothetically provide feeding hot spots and increase predator foraging success. Here, we integrated environmental remote-sensing with high-resolution animal-borne biologging data to evaluate submesoscale surface current features in relation to the habitat selection and foraging performance of blue whales in the California Current System. Our study revealed a consistent functional relationship in which blue whales disproportionately foraged within dynamic aggregative submesoscale features at both the regional and feeding site scales across seasons, regions and years. Moreover, we found that blue whale feeding rates increased in areas with stronger aggregative features, suggesting that these features indicate areas of higher prey density. The use of fine-scale, dynamic features by foraging blue whales underscores the need to take these features into account when designating critical habitat and may help inform strategies to mitigate the impacts of human activities for the species