'Root causes' of terrorism
oliverkamm.blogspot.com
The economists Alan B. Krueger and Jitka Maleckova review the empirical evidence for the "poverty is the root cause of terrorism" thesis (a cliche that for some reason is particularly popular among liberal Protestant clergy) and find it weak (link courtesy of Arts & Letters Daily):
"Apart from population - larger countries tend to have more terrorists - the only variable that was consistently associated with the number of terrorists was the Freedom House index of political rights and civil liberties. Countries with more freedom were less likely to be the birthplace of international terrorists. Poverty and literacy were unrelated to the number of terrorists from a country….
"Instead of viewing terrorism as a response - either direct or indirect - to poverty or ignorance, we suggest that it is more accurately viewed as a response to political conditions and longstanding feelings of indignity and frustration that have little to do with economic circumstances. We suspect that is why international terrorist acts are more likely to be committed by people who grew up under repressive political regimes."
Krueger and Maleckova published a longer account of their findings last year in The New Republic, after encountering an unexpected obstacle to presenting their original academic paper at the planned venue. According to the Harvard economist Robert Barro:
"The paper was scheduled for presentation at the World Bank’s annual conference in Washington in April but was pulled from presentation in response to complaints initiated by a Kuwaiti executive director and later joined by other executive directors. A source at the Bank confirmed that the paper was withdrawn in response to this pressure, as well as fears that a controversial study of terrorist identities would serve to inflame an already highly sensitive political situation in the Middle East. The irony is that the annual conference was created to be a forum in which outside researchers could participate without fear of censorship. Solving problems, such as those in the Middle East, depends on having the reliable information that can come only from this sort of free scientific inquiry."
Of course Barro is right about the primacy of scientific inquiry, but you can see the misplaced logic behind the frightened reaction he describes. If terrorist acts are more likely to be committed by those who grow up under repressive regimes, then you can plausibly infer that there is indeed a sort of "root cause" at work: the existence of the repressive regimes. The obvious case is Saudi Arabia, where the absence of outlets for political dissent has caused disaffection to migrate to the religious – or rather theocratic, Islamist – sphere. And rather than counter the spread of nihilist totalitarian ideology, the Saudi regime tries instead to channel it, with its own Wahhabist version, away from itself and towards instead the West, Israel, and the Jews.
There are, in short, empirical grounds as well as moral ones for believing the Bush administration has read the issue of terrorism much better than those who complain that force is no substitute for attending to "root causes" – which oddly always seem to be identical with whatever fashionable concerns these critics were protesting about in the first place. There is no economic or ameliorative solution to the problem of international terrorism. The only course open to us is to take the fight directly to those groups that have declared holy war on western civilisation, and then to undermine the autocracies that incubate them. |
