Kydd And Walter's Five Logics

Kydd and Walter assess the five principle strategic logics (attrition, intimidation, provocation, spoiling, and outbidding) as the primary tools available to terrorist groups. Attrition, they argue, is likely to succeed when the target state is relatively weak and not particularly invested in the issue being fought over. Regardless of which state is in question, it’s military is most probably stronger than any terrorist sect. Even weak states have strong enough militaries that could face off with loosely organized terrorist organizations. Thus, such organizations must be selective and only target states that are unwilling to lose many lives over a particular issue and are in some way (usually politically) constrained from unleashing their full
He claims that the traditional method of understanding the causes and uses of suicide terrorism are no longer sufficient and a new manner of thinking must be adopted. To pave the way for his logic of suicide terrorism he argues there are five principles to understand. Suicide terrorism is strategic, it’s designed to coerce modern democracies to make concessions, terrorists have learned that it works and thus have used it more over the last twenty years, using it as a tactic for their most ambitious goals doesn’t work, and the only way to reduce it is to reduce terrorists’ confidence in its effectiveness. For the purposes of his article, Pape trichotomizes terrorism into three groups: demonstrative, destructive, and suicide. Demonstrative terrorism is conducted with the goal of gathering publicity and drawing attention to their cause. They can use this to draw new supporters, pressure their opposition, etc. Destructive actions aim to coerce the enemy and draw support (through mobilization) for their cause as well. Finally, suicide terrorism acts as a combination of the other two to the most extreme end. It has the greatest public impact and often is the most destructive as