Foreign Aid, Military Interventions, and Terrorism

Interesting ideas and charts in this paper by Jean-Paul Azam and Véronique Thelen, which looks at the link between aid and presence of U.S. troops in foreign countries and terrorist attacks. 

From the abstract 

. . . military intervention, as captured by the presence of US soldiers on the ground is counter-productive, as it increases the number of terrorist attacks both by source country and by host country. 

. . . rich countries, with the exception of Germany, as well as Bangladesh, Chile, India, Indonesia and Nigeria, produce much less attacks than they host. In contrast, Iran is exporting quite a lot of attacks while hosting fewer of them. P. 10.

From the conclusions

These findings strongly support the view that foreign aid and educational capital are the main inhibitors of transnational terrorist attacks by source country, while military interventions are robustly counter-productive. P. 24

If aid is important, questions remain about the best way to allocate it.
I do not find very clear the way the authors dealt with endogeneity.
HT: Jacob A. Jordaan

Is there a link between terrorism and civil war?

In the new paper "Terrorism and Civil War: A Spatial and Temporal Approach to a Conceptual Problem" published in Perspectives on Politics (June 2012), Findley and Young write:

The data show a high degree of overlap between terrorism and ongoing civil war and, further, indicate that a substantial amount of terrorism occurs prior to civil wars in Latin America, but yet follows civil war in other regions of the world.

The author take a long term perspective and look in detail at cases like Argentina, Peru, El Salvador, Lebanon, Mozambique, and others. 

A graph from the paper:

A draft is here (2010). 

Poverty and terrorism

This article analyzes the link between economic conditions and the quality of suicide terrorism. While the existing empirical literature shows that poverty and economic conditions are not correlated with the quantity of terror, theory predicts that poverty and poor economic conditions may affect the quality of terror. Poor economic conditions may lead more able and better-educated individuals to participate in terror attacks, allowing terror organizations to send better-qualified terrorists to more complex, higher-impact terror missions. Using the universe of Palestinian suicide terrorists who acted against Israeli targets in 2000–06, we provide evidence of the correlation between economic conditions, the characteristics of suicide terrorists, and the targets they attack. High levels of unemployment enable terror organizations to recruit better educated, more mature, and more experienced suicide terrorists, who in turn attack more important Israeli targets.

That is the abstract of the paper "Economic Conditions and the Quality of Suicide Terrorism" (draft 2009) by Benmelecha, Berrebia, and Klora, published in the latest number of The Journal of Politics.