State Failure On Transnational Terrorism

The purpose of the current study is to analyze the impact of state failure on transnational terrorism with respect to the proximity of targets and logistical complexity of attacks using a negative binomial Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE) regression. The study departs from the existing studies due to the following reasons. First, based on proximity of attacks, I classify transnational terrorism into: ‘within’ attacks, when the perpetrator operates within his home country and attack a foreign target, ‘contiguous’ attacks, when the perpetrator operates in a country adjoining his country to attack a target and ‘non-contiguous’ attacks, when the perpetrator operates in a country which does not share borders with his home country similar to …show more content…
For within attacks, state failure is an important determinant of transnational terrorism and the relationship is robust to multiple individual indicators and the aggregate measure. However, there is no evidence to suggest that perpetrators from weak states cross the borders and carry out attacks in the neighboring countries or distant countries. Also, the findings suggest that on average, failed states are not preferred locations for foreign perpetrators due to a variety of challenges. With respect to type of terrorist attacks, weak states experience significantly more ‘logistically complex’ attacks compared to strong and stable states whereas for logistically simple attacks, the relationship is not significant. The results suggest that the major transnational threat posed by terrorism in failed states boils down to the safety of foreign targets traveling to the failed states . It does not appear from the results that terrorists who carry out attacks in other countries predominantly originate from weak states. This might be due to the fact that increased attention towards such states has made the movement out extremely difficult and terrorist organizations are looking for options elsewhere. The findings also lends support to the argument that failed states which have remote, ungoverned spaces are ‘non-permissive’ to foreign perpetrators just like it is to any other foreign citizen. Another important finding is the increased incidence of logistically complex attacks in the weak states. As most of the attacks in this category are targeted attacks towards individuals (For example, assassinations and kidnappings), ungoverned spaces and absence of rule of law might be more decisive in their implementation (Menkhaus,