Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Few empirical studies examine the relationship between ideology and lethality among terrorist organizations. In this paper, I seek to test how ideological affiliation may affect a terrorist organization’s overall lethality. I theorize jihadist groups are relatively more lethal than other groups because of the abstract goals, strong intragroup cohesion, and intergroup affinity jihadist ideologies promote. In particular, I hypothesize to find jihadist groups are, on average, more lethal than non-jihadist groups, and that among jihadist groups, apocalyptic groups are most lethal. Using data from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) on a sample of over 200 terrorist organizations, I intend to find evidence supporting my theoretical claims. From a policy perspective, my findings will help indicate which groups warrant the most focus by counterterrorism authorities and evaluate the effectiveness of the latter’s efforts. If I find support for my theory, then higher jihadist lethality would justify greater investment in fighting jihadist groups, but growing jihadist lethality would reveal counterterrorism efforts have thus far proved inadequate to this task.