Abstract
This article investigates the determinants of logistical and negotiation successes in hostage-taking incidents using an expanded dataset that runs from 1978 to 2010. Unlike an earlier study, the current study has a rich set of negotiation variables in addition to political, geographical, and organizational variables associated with the perpetrators or targets of the attacks. The 33 years of data permit a split into two subperiods: 1978–1987 and 1988–2010, before and after the rise of religious fundamentalist terrorist groups. Logistical success depends on resource and target vulnerability proxies, while negotiation success hinges on bargaining variables. Among many novel findings, democracy significantly hampers logistical success throughout the entire period. Kidnappings, tropical climates, and high elevations foster logistical success. Religious fundamentalist terrorists’ logistical advantage during 1978–1987 was lost during 1988–2010. Abducting protected persons, making demands on the host country, and staging incidents in a democracy limit negotiation success for the terrorists. If terrorists moderate or replace one or more demands, the likelihood of negotiation success for the terrorists goes up.
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Notes
The results for these alternative models and the LR test results are available upon request. For logistical success and later for negotiation success, the best-fitting models have the least overlap with the models in Gaibulloev and Sandler (2009).
The correlation between terrorist casualties and high-powered weapons is minimal. When terrorist casualties are excluded from the model, the high-powered weapons variable remains a negative and significant predictor of logistical success, depressing it by 14.6 percentage points.
We thank an anonymous referee for this insight.
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Acknowledgements
This article has profited from comments by an anonymous referee, William Shughart, and Peter Leeson. This study was funded, in part, by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) through the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorist Events (CREATE) at the University of Southern California, Grant 2010-ST-061-RE0001. However any opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of DHS or CREATE.
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Santifort, C., Sandler, T. Terrorist success in hostage-taking missions: 1978–2010. Public Choice 156, 125–137 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-012-0008-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-012-0008-z
Keywords
- Hostage-taking
- Logistical success
- Negotiation success
- Logit regressions
- Democracy
- Religious fundamentalists