Seeking the Roots of Terrorism By ALAN B. KRUEGER and JITKA MALECKOVA
. . . In December 2001, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, conducted a public-opinion poll of 1,357 Palestinians age 18 or older in the West Bank and Gaza on topics including the September 11 attacks in the United States, support for an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, and attacks against Israel.
The poll reveals several things. First, support for attacks against Israeli targets by the Palestinian population is widespread (from 74 percent to 90 percent, depending on the subgroup), though it is important to emphasize that there is a distinction between support for attacks expressed in a poll at a particular moment and participation or active collusion in such attacks. Second, a majority, more than 60 percent of the population surveyed, believes that attacks against Israeli civilians have helped to achieve Palestinian rights in a way that negotiations could not have.
These results offer no evidence that educated people are less supportive of attacks against Israeli targets. In fact, the support for attacks against Israeli targets is higher among those with more than a secondary-school education than among those with only an elementary-school education, and the support is considerably lower among those who are illiterate.
The study showed also that support for attacks against Israeli targets is particularly strong among students, merchants, and professionals. Notably, the unemployed are somewhat less likely to support such attacks. If poverty were indeed the wellspring of support for terrorism or politically motivated violence, one would have expected the unemployed to be more supportive of attacks than were merchants and professionals, but the evidence points the other way. . . .
Hezbollah is a multifaceted organization that provides health and educational services, has a political wing, and is also believed to engage in terrorism. The U.S. State Department and British Home Office have both classified Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. We compared the background characteristics of 129 members of Hezbollah's militant wing who died in action in the 1980s and early 1990s to the Lebanese population from which they were drawn. We culled a data set from the biographies gathered by Eli Hurvitz, of Tel-Aviv University, in 1998 that included the individuals' age at death, highest level of school attended, poverty, region of residence, and marital status, and compared it to data on the general population in Lebanon.
Despite the limitations of both data sets, several findings are of interest. The poverty rate is 28 percent among the Hezbollah militants and 33 percent for the population. In terms of education the Hezbollah fighters are more likely to have attended secondary school than are people in the general population (47 versus 38 percent). The results suggest that poverty is inversely related, and education positively related, to the likelihood that someone becomes a Hezbollah fighter.
Similarly, Claude Berrebi, a graduate student in economics at Princeton, has studied the characteristics of recent suicide bombers in Israel. From information on the Web sites of Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, he was able to paint a statistical picture of suicide bombers. He compared that to survey-based data on the broader Palestinian population of roughly comparable age. His results indicate that suicide bombers are less than half as likely to come from impoverished families than is the population as a whole. In addition, more than half of the suicide bombers had attended school after high school, while less than 15 percent of the population in the same age group had any post-high-school education.
We regard these findings as suggestive but not definitive. First, data limitations prevent us from drawing strong conclusions. Second, the process of participation in Hezbollah, primarily a resistance organization, may not be representative of participation in other organizations that are more exclusively focused on terrorist activities. Nevertheless, the findings provide no support for the view that those who live in poverty or have a low level of education are disproportionately drawn to participate in terrorist activities.
On the other side of the conflict, the picture is not too different. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, numerous violent attacks against Palestinians were conducted by Israeli Jews in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, led most prominently by the Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) group. Those attacks included attempts to kill three Palestinian mayors of West Bank cities and to blow up the Dome of the Rock, the third-holiest shrine of Islam. From 1980 to 1984, 23 Palestinians were killed in attacks by the Jewish Underground, and 191 people were injured.
Looking at the backgrounds of the perpetrators of those violent attacks, it is clear that the Israeli extremists were overwhelmingly well educated and in high-paying occupations. The list includes teachers, writers, university students, geographers, an engineer, a combat pilot, a chemist, and a computer programmer. As Donald Neff, in a 1999 issue of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, observed of the three men convicted of murder, "All were highly regarded, well-educated, very religious."
Although those who carry out terrorist acts themselves do not appear to be particularly impoverished, it is possible that they are acting out of concern for their countrymen, who are less advantaged. One way to investigate that hypothesis is to use cross-country data. Unfortunately, data on the quantity of terrorism carried out by citizens of various countries is difficult to come by.
We made a first pass at the issue by analyzing data on "significant international terrorist events" as recorded by the U.S. State Department. Specifically, we tried to infer the national origin of the events' perpetrators. We then related the number of terrorists produced by each country to characteristics of the country, including gross domestic product per capita, literacy rates, religious fractionalization, and political and civil freedoms. 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. Think of a country like Saudi Arabia: It is wealthy but has few political and civil freedoms. Perhaps it is no coincidence that so many of the September 11 terrorists -- and Osama bin Laden himself -- came from there.
What does economic theory tell us about participation in terrorism? Consider the supply side first -- that is, why do people join terrorist organizations or commit terrorist acts? As is conventional in economics, involvement in terrorism is viewed as a rational decision that depends on the benefits, costs, and risks involved compared with those of other activities.
According to the standard model of crime, participation increases as one's market wage falls relative to the rewards associated with crime, and decreases if the risk of being apprehended after committing a crime, or the penalty for being convicted of a crime, rises. Available evidence -- like Isaac Ehrlich's 1973 study, "Participation in Illegitimate Activities: A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation," in The Journal of Political Economy -- suggests that people are more likely to commit property crimes if they have lower wages or less education, though the occurrence of violent crimes, including murders, is typically found to be unrelated to economic opportunities. When it comes to terrorism, an important benefit from the standpoint of the terrorist is the furtherance of the goals of the terrorist organization. Affluent, educated people may care more about the political goals of a terrorist organization than impoverished illiterates do. The Harvard economist Edward L. Glaeser emphasizes the role politicians play in fueling hatred against certain groups to solidify their own power. There is little reason to suspect that the supply or demand of hatred would be strongly connected to economic factors in his model, and that is consistent with what we have found.
The demand side is also important. Terrorist organizations recruit and screen their participants. According to Nasra Hassan, a relief worker for the United Nations who interviewed nearly 250 militants and associates of militants involved in the Palestinian cause, there is an excess supply of willing suicide bombers. "The selection process is complicated by the fact that so many wish to embark on this journey of honor," said a senior member of al-Qassam, Hamas's armed wing. "When one is selected, countless others are disappointed." Thus, the demand side clearly plays a role.
A planner for Islamic Jihad explained to Hassan that his group scrutinizes the motives of a potential bomber to be sure that the person is committed to carrying out the task. Now, a high level of educational attainment is probably indicative of one's commitment to a cause and determination, as well as ability to prepare for an assignment and carry it out. For this reason, the stereotype of suicide bombers being drawn from the ranks of those who are so impoverished that they have nothing to live for may be wildly incorrect.
Suicide bombers are clearly not motivated by the prospect of their own individual economic gain, although it is possible that the promise of payments to their families may increase the willingness of some to participate in suicide-bombing missions. We suspect their primary motivation is their passionate support for the ideas and aims of their movement. "Over and over," Nasra Hassan reported, "I heard them say, 'The Israelis humiliate us. They occupy our land, and deny our history.'" Eradication of poverty and universal high-school education are unlikely to change those feelings. Indeed, it is possible that those who are well off and well educated perceive such indignities more acutely. . . .
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. . . .
Alan B. Krueger is a professor of economics and public policy at Princeton University. Jitka Malecková is an associate professor of Middle Eastern studies at Charles University, in Prague. . . .
Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 39, Page B10 . . . Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education <http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i39/39b01001.htm> *****
***** Alan B. Krueger, Poverty Doesn't Create Terrorists," New York Times, 29 May 2003
. . . The stereotype that terrorists are driven to extremes by economic deprivation may never have held anywhere, least of all in the Middle East. New research by Claude Berrebi, a graduate student at Princeton, has found that 13 percent of Palestinian suicide bombers are from impoverished families, while about a third of the Palestinian population is in poverty. A remarkable 57 percent of suicide bombers have some education beyond high school, compared with just 15 percent of the population of comparable age. . . .
Once a country's degree of civil liberties is taken into account - measured by Freedom House, a nonprofit organization that promotes democracy, as the extent to which citizens are free to develop views, institutions and personal autonomy without interference from the state - income per capita bears no relation to involvement in terrorism. Countries like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, which have spawned relatively many terrorists, are economically well off yet lacking in civil liberties. Poor countries with a tradition of protecting civil liberties are unlikely to spawn terrorists.
Evidently, the freedom to assemble and protest peacefully without interference from the government goes a long way to providing an alternative to terrorism.
Apart from the size of a country and the extent of its civil liberties, no factor that I could find - including the literacy rate, infant mortality rate, terrain, ethnic divisions and religious fractionalization - could predict whether people from that country were more or less likely to take part in international terrorism. . . .
If this is right, then terrorist attacks should increase in a repressive regime whenever the political situation is not heading in a direction the extremists prefer, irrespective of economic incentives. And terrorism and hate crimes seem to be particularly prevalent when countries go through an evolution in which normal law enforcement is disrupted, as in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The ultimate joke would be if civil liberties are sacrificed in the fight against terrorism, as a lack of civil liberties seems to be a main cause of terrorism around the world. Support for civil liberties should be part of the arsenal in the war against terrorism, both at home and abroad.
<http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/bush/povterror.htm> & <http://www.irs.princeton.edu/krueger/05292003a.pdf> *****
Alan B. Krueger: <http://www.irs.princeton.edu/krueger/>
Claude Berrebi, "Evidence About The Link Between Education, Poverty and Terrorism Among Palestinians": <http://www.princeton.edu/~cberrebi/edu-pov-terror.pdf>.
[Note that Claude Berrebi, on whose data Berrebi's mentor Alan B. Krueger draws, gives more right-wing interpretations than liberal ones made by Krueger above.] -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>