Collaboration and Competition in Counterterrorism

Is the field of counterterrorism one of cooperation or competition? Few politicians or policymakers would dare to suggest that certain counterterrorism policies serve only to shift the threat to other nations. But in a study entitled “The ‘Peer-Effect’ in Counterterrorist Policies,” Eric Neumayer, Thomas Plümper, and Mariaelisa Epifanio suggest that this may in fact be the exact result.

Comparing the number of defensive measures taken by various Western nations, the authors explore the theory that a given nation will seek to position itself to be more strongly protected than other states facing comparable levels of terrorist threats. Using a dataset developed by Epifanio, the study examines some factors that may explain the number of laws a country will enact in order to protect itself.

The study’s hypotheses rest on the assumption that defensive security actions, such as tightening airport security or increasing collaboration between law enforcement and intelligence agencies, create negative externalities for other countries. As one country becomes a more difficult target for potential attackers, other nations become more vulnerable by comparison and thus more likely to face threats. Of course not all nations are considered to be of equal value as targets. For this reason, Neumayer et al. divide Western nations into “peer groups,” which are considered to face comparable terrorist threats. Countries are assigned low, medium, or high levels of predicted threat based on numbers of terrorist attacks from 2001 to 2008 using the International Terrorism: Attributes of Terrorist Events database (ITERATE), as well as on characteristics such as military expenditure, number of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and national as well as per capita income.

Through a Poisson regression analysis, the researchers test the hypothesis that countries respond only to the level of counterterrorism actions within their peer group and not the global community as a whole. Controlling for the predicted threat of a terrorist attack (as discussed above), the existing number of counterterrorist policies, and per capita GDP, they find a significant correlation between a state’s actions and those of its peer group, as predicted. The presence of right-wing or left-wing governments and per capita GDP are used as further independent variables in an attempt to control for existing population preferences, with the assumption that wealthier countries place a higher value on individual freedoms when they come into conflict with security measures.

From their results, the authors draw the conclusion that the tendency of nations to react to increased security measures on the parts of their peers with similar security actions suggests the existence of competition, in which states fear falling behind and becoming the most accessible target for terrorists. While their findings do support this theory as a possibility, the causal relationship is far from proven. Further analysis might shed light on other explanations for these correlations, such as transnational trends in public perception of threats or willingness to sacrifice civil liberties. In addition, there remains much research to be done in determining whether or not the trends that the authors demonstrate may be extended beyond the relatively short time period and the specific context of Western worries over international terrorism, which in this framework is considered to be synonymous with attacks by militant Islamist groups.

Measures pertaining to national security and counterterrorism are generally discussed in terms of the absolute gains in citizen safety, representing them as part of a unified progression towards a safer world. Neumayer et al. challenge this characterization, revealing that even as nations tout their increased collaboration in the face of international terrorism, their policies in fact represent a certain degree of rivalry, as states jockey for a position in a competition for relative safety.

Article Source: Eric Neumayer, Thomas Plümper, and Mariaelisa Epifanio, “The ‘Peer-Effect’ in Counterterrorist Policies,” International Organization 68, No. 1 (Jan 2014): 211-34.

Feature Photo: cc/(US Army Africa)