[2019-05]

Sink or swim together?: the diffusion of death among allied terrorist groups

Choi, Hyeseung

Moon Soul Graduate School of Future Strategy, KAIST

Yang, Jae-Suk

Moon Soul Graduate School of Future Strategy, KAIST

Abstract:
Interdependencies among allied terrorist groups make an action taken by a terrorist group to
influence the allied partner. While many previous studies focus on the spread of terrorist groups,
we focus on the diffusion of death among allied terrorist groups from 2001 to 2016. This paper
uses longitudinal logistic regression to analyze the diffusion of demise among dyadic terrorist
groups and observe diffusion patterns among different ideologies, and different regime types
in which terrorist groups reside. We found in general that diffusion of death occurs among
terrorist groups. However, the diffusion process is alleviated for religiously driven terrorist
groups. Also, we found that terrorist groups that reside in democracies tend to have a higher
probability of group dismantling through diffusion as compared to other regime types.
Interestingly, we observed that if allied terrorist groups reside in different regime types,
diffusion does not impact the probability of ending for partnering terrorist group.