| Terrorist organizations face a difficult task in a hostile operational setting. First, they must achieve the controlled application of violence in the service of political goals. Hitting the wrong targets, or conducting too many attacks, can be just as damaging to the group's political cause as doing too little. Second, they must maintain this calibrated use of force in an environment where becoming known to government equals operational failure. The organizational challenge is that political and ideological leaders---the principals---have to delegate certain duties---planning attacks, soliciting funds, recruiting, and the like---to middlemen or low-level operatives, their agents. Such delegation is problematic as agents in terrorist organizations often see the world differently than their leaders do and tend to disagree with them on how best to serve the cause. Strategies to control the resulting agency problems all entail security costs. Thus, terrorist groups face a fundamental trade-off between security and control.; Using captured al-Qa'ida documents and a wide variety of historical evidence I show this tradeoff has plagued terrorist groups from the 1870s through the present and develop a theory of how terrorists will respond to it. The theory leads to three testable comparative hypotheses: (1) control will be increasing in the amount of discrimination in the use of violence demanded by a group's political goals; (2) control will be increasing in the level of uncertainty operatives face about what attacks will serve the political goal; (3) control will be decreasing in the extent of preference divergence between leaders and their agents. I find broad support for all three using case studies of Northern Ireland since 1969, Russian terrorism from 1879 through 1909, and Palestinian terrorism from 1987 through 2005. All three cases also offer strong evidence that the causal processes embedded in my theory drive groups' organizational choices. The enduring importance of the tradeoff between security and control in terrorist organizations points to a series of principles for counterterrorism policy and highlights the need for organizationally informed analysis of terrorist groups. |
