Letter from the editor

Abstract

Welcome to the thirteenth volume, second issue of the Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict: Pathways towards Terrorism and Genocide Journal. We have four data-heavy articles to share with you in this Issue, from Matthew Sweeney and Meghan Kubit’s analysis of the Islamic State’s framing of religion amongst its violent propaganda to Gary Uzonyi’s investigation of the relationship between the quality of a country’s bureaucracy and the severity of mass violence carried out by the state. True to DAC’s mission of outstanding scholarship across disciplines, the authors vary in academic specializations and contributed new knowledge for our field using a variety of methods. In the first article, Susan Fahey and Victor Asal explore the factors that influence terrorist attacks on schools and other educational institutions. Using Global Terrorism Database data from 75 countries from 1981 to 2010, Drs. Fahey and Asal find that restrictions of human rights by the state, such as dampening religious expression and limiting women’s rights, is associated with increased attacks on education targets. The second article by Gary Uzonyi examined the relationship between bureaucratic quality and state violence to contrast the differences in thinking between firstand second-generation genocide scholars. Dr Uzonyi’s findings support arguments from the first-generation scholar camp that the quality of the bureaucracy is important to the ability of a government to commit mass violence and its severity. The findings apply to cases of genocide and politicide in less developed states as well. In the third article, Dr Joshua Freilich and an All-Star Collaborator Team examine the effect of policy on far-right extremist homicides in the United States. Using a monthly time series over 25 years, the authors find that there is no significant impact on far-right fatal violence from existing policy interventions. Overall, they observe that current federal legislation, civil lawsuits, and changes to federal investigative guidelines, have no significant impact on far-right ideological violence and a limited impact on non-ideological violence. Our final article focuses on the use of religion in non-state actor propaganda. Matthew Sweeney and Meghan Kubit expand on prior work of the Islamic State’s propaganda by examining how the group mixed violence with religion in its video propaganda, pulling from SITE Intelligence Group as a unique data source. Drs. Sweeney and Kubit found that the Islamic State leveraged this combination for legitimization and intimidation, and specifically for justifying the use of violence against specific demographics. Finally, I need to recognize our outgoing Editorial Assistant Michael Logan, who will join Kennesaw State University as an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice. Logan has worked tirelessly over the past year to improve your journal, and he has raised our DYNAMICS OF ASYMMETRIC CONFLICT 2020, VOL. 13, NO. 2, 99–100 https://doi.org/10.1080/17467586.2020.1776965