Delegating repression?: Pro-government militias and domestic terrorism

ABSTRACT Scholars have increasingly disaggregated domestic terrorism from transnational terrorism and sought to understand the causal factors of the former by focusing on endogenous features of the state and the actions of the government that either provoke or create opportunities for the occurrence of domestic terrorist attacks, especially repressive actions of the government. These arguments are implicitly framed by a unitary view of the state within intra-state conflict. The conflict literature, however, has increasingly looked beyond this unitary view and examined the role and impact of pro-government militias (PGMs) as a tactical means of increasing the state’s ability to wage violence. Using negative binomial analysis of data on domestic terrorism and PGMs, this article demonstrates that PGM activity that serves as a force multiplier for official security forces increases the likelihood of an increase in domestic terrorism, an argument that is robust to various model specifications.