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Will Barack Obama’s election make terrorists less eager to strike?

By Amarendra Bhushan for CEOWORLD Magazine Updated:September 19, 2009

A data analysis released Thursday suggests it could make a difference. In the Science magazine study, researchers Alan Krueger of Princeton and Jitka Maleèková of the Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Science in Prague looked at terrorist attacks in nine countries, including the U.S., and their relation to public opinion in India, Middle Eastern and North African nations. “We found a greater incidence of international terrorism when people of one country disapprove of the leadership of another country,” concludes the study.

According to a study published Thursday which argues that terrorists do not act independently of their countrymen’s attitudes.

They found that a 20 percentage point increase in the disapproval rate of a country’s leaders was associated with a 93 percent increase in the number of terrorist attacks originating from a particular country.

The main finding: if the leaders of a given world power make decisions that are unpopular in a particular Middle Eastern or African country, terrorists from that country are more likely to launch an attack on the larger country.

The research was based on public opinion surveys in 19 Middle Eastern and African nations, conducted by the Gallup World Poll. People in those countries were asked whether they approved or disapproved of the leadership in nine world powers: the U.S., the United Kingdom, Russia, Germany, France, Canada, Japan, China and India.

Leadership in the U.S. and the U.K. had the highest average disapproval rating, at 71 percent for both. Japan was lowest at 41 percent.

The highest disapproval rate toward the U.S. was found in Cyprus (92 percent). Saudi Arabia was close behind at 88 percent. The polls were taken in 2006 and 2007; data on 111 terrorist attacks came from 2004 to 2008.

The analysis showed that, on average, terrorist attacks increased a substantial 300%, or four times, from 0.41 to 1.57, if the number of people disapproving of the other country’s leadership rose from under 40% to 70% of the population. The authors reason it could be because a high level of disapproval could mean more people willing to support, or themselves take part, in terrorist activities. However, they said the data doesn’t show if terrorists respond to public opinion per se or the political views of terrorists are aligned with that of the general population.

The authors also mention that other possible causes of terrorist attacks such as poverty, and the geographical distance between countries, were not as well correlated to predicting terror attacks as opinion of leadership. However, the authors don’t corroborate this assertion in their paper.

“It’s an interesting approach. One of the significant aspects of the paper is that poverty doesn’t correlate well with the likelihood of terrorist attacks,” said C. Uday Bhaskar, a New Delhi-based defence analyst and director of the National Maritime Foundation. Ajai Sahni, executive director, Institute for Conflict Management, termed the study “silly and trivial”. He said if public opinion polls had such a strong predictive value, there would be a huge number of terrorist attacks by several Latin American countries on the US, and several more by India on Pakistan.

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