Verbal attacks on terrorist groups increase violence against civilians.

ABSTRACT: Terrorists and other transnational extremist groups are responsible for thousands of civilian deaths. In confronting extremists, governments have relied heavily on threats, demands, denunciations, and other forms of verbal conflict. Do these efforts at verbal coercion have any effect on terrorist behavior? This analysis focuses on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which continues to be the world's deadliest terrorist group and was responsible for recent high-profile attacks in Baghdad, Vienna, Kabul, and Russia. We use Bayesian structural vector autoregression models to analyze daily event data on interactions between ISIS and foreign governments for the 2014-2020 period. We find that verbal conflict initiated by governments not only failed to deter ISIS but in fact increa

SUBMITTER: Iliev I 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11477982 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature