Why do some terrorist campaigns escalate to civil wars but others do not?

Abstract

ABSTRACT The recent literature on antecedents of civil wars focuses primarily on the escalation of non-violent movements to civil wars. Still, it remains silent on why some terrorist campaigns manage to turn their violent campaign into a sustained insurgency. By filling this lacuna, we provide empirically supported explanations for this puzzle. Specifically, we explore the effects of three factors on a terror group’s chance to escalate the civil war, which are 1) how the state responds to the group’s terror campaign, 2) how the group responds to the state’s counterterrorism strategies, 3) and the state’s relations with other states. By testing our theory with recently released data on terrorist groups, we find that a terror group’s campaign is more likely to escalate to a civil war when 1) the state uses more repression against the terror group and 2) the group diversifies its attack portfolio. In addition, we also find that a terror group is less likely to escalate its campaign to a civil war if the state engages in an interstate rivalry, and the state responds to the group with higher spending on public goods, specifically social welfare goods. The results provide implications for future studies on terrorism and civil war.