Does state repression stimulate terrorism? A panel data analysis on South Asia

ABSTRACT While earlier research confirms the association between state repression and terrorism, I revisit the state repression-terrorism thesis in the context of South Asia by using two alternative measures of state repression – political terror scale (PTS) and human rights and rule of law indicator (HRRL) of the Fragile State Index (FSI) – and an alternative measure of the impact of terrorism – Global Terrorism Index (GTI). I employ panel-corrected standard errors (PCSE) models and feasible generalised least square (FGLS) models to analyze the panel dataset of this research that covers seven South Asian countries, excluding the Maldives between 2006 and 2019. Consistent with previous studies, I find state repression to have a statistically significant relationship with terrorism for the sample of this study. In contrast, unemployment, poverty, and population among control variables are statistically significant predictors of terrorism of selected South Asian countries.