Continuing with a fourth and final posting on the nineteenth lecture from Professor Michael Spagat’s Economics of Warfare course that he gives at Royal Holloway University. It is posted on his blog Wars, Numbers and Human Losses at: https://mikespagat.wordpress.com/
This lecture continues the discussion of terrorism, looking at whether poverty or poor education causes terrorism. The conventional wisdom, supported by a book by Alan Krueger, is that they do not. Dr. Spagat explores this in more depth and the data tends to support this theme, although there are exceptions.
On slide 39, Dr. Spagat leaves us with a gem of a quote. The data he had been looking at was responses to surveys about terrorism. As he notes: “It is one thing to voice support on a survey for terrorism or attacks–it is another matter entirely to strap on explosives and blow oneself up. In other words, suicide bombers have to be really committed individuals.”
He then goes to show Palestinian suicide bombers are generally less impoverished and better educated on average than the population they are drawn from. He sees a similar observation when looking at deceased Hezbollah militants (pages 39-41). This is not surprising if you are familiar with the history of revolutions and insurgencies.
The link to his lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%2019.pdf
Hi. It’s interesting that you characterize the conventional wisdom as saying that it’s not the poor and poorly educated who are the most likely to turn to terrorism. At the time that Krueger and other people started writing the stuff I cite the conventional wisdom was the reverse. Even now it may be the reverse although the balance has shifted a lot.
Also, the reality may even be shifting toward poorer, more poorly educated terrorists. Note sure.
Mike Spagat
Well, my focus over the years has been on insurgencies, and they are often led by people who are not particularly downtrodden, often educated people with an upper middle class background (Lenin, Castro, etc.). Added to that some of the earliest quantitative studies on political violence (Gurr, Feierabend & Feierabend) show that political violence is more likely in developing nations than in nations that are truly basket cases. I also attempted at one point as an econometrics class project to do regressions comparing the Gini index to political violence, and got the null result. As I consider terrorism to simply be a tool of an insurgency (as opposed to a different form of warfare), then it has always been my understanding that insurgencies are not dominated by the poor and poorly educated. So I was not surprised by Krueger’s findings. It is what I would expect he would find.