Poverty, Minority Economic Discrimination, And Domestic Terrorism

jour nal of

peace
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Poverty, minority economic discrimination, and domestic terrorism

E S E A R C H

Journal of Peace Research
48(3) 339–353
ª The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0022343310397404 jpr.sagepub.com James A Piazza
Department of Political Science, The Pennsylvania State University

Abstract
Recognizing that the empirical literature of the past several years has produced an inconclusive picture, this study revisits the relationship between poverty and terrorism and suggests a new factor to explain patterns of domestic terrorism: minority economic discrimination. Central to this study is the argument that because terrorism is not a mass phenomenon but rather is undertaken
I also find minority economic discrimination to be a strong and substantive predictor of domestic terrorism vis-a`-vis the general level of economic development. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of the findings for scholarship on terrorism and for counter-terrorism policy.
Keywords
discrimination, economic development, minorities, terrorism
Though it remains a popular thesis among policymakers that poverty causes terrorism,1 the empirical literature has been inconclusive regarding the link between socioeconomic factors and terrorism. Studies that use crossnational analysis to model the effects of macroeconomic indicators on terrorism fail to show conclusively that impoverished or underdeveloped countries experience higher rates of terrorism, or produce more terrorists, than do

1

See, for example, public statements linking poverty, poor education and unemployment to terrorism made by former Presidents Bush and
Clinton in the immediate aftermath of the 11 September
Though the experience of minority group discrimination has been identified as a factor that motivates and fuels terrorist campaigns in a host of qualitative studies of individual countries or individual terrorist movements (see, for example, Bradley, 2006; Buendia,
2005; Ergil, 2000; Laqueur, 1999; O’Hearn, 1987; Van de Voorde, 2005; Whittaker, 2001), it has largely been ignored in the growing cross-national, time-series quantitative literature investigating the root causes of terrorism.
Aside from control findings in studies focused on democratic rule (Eubank & Weinburg, 1994), political stability
(Lai, 2007), and national demographic composition as predictors of terrorism (Wade & Reiter, 2007), a crossnational empirical investigation of minority economic status as a cause of terrorism has not been systematically undertaken. This is striking, given the proliferation of cross-national empirical research on the causes of terrorism since 2001 (Young & Findley, 2011) and