| Academic literature on the topic of motivational factors for non-state actor violence has found itself in a dichotomy. The existing body of quantitative research concerning violent nonstate actors finds little support for the traditional arguments for motivational factors having to do with the dissatisfaction to dissent process resulting from such factors as ethnic fractionalization, political disenfranchisement, discrimination factors, etc. Instead, quantitative literature finds support for economic and facilitating factors, such as levels of GDP per capita or mountainous terrain. This paper contends that this disagreement stems from taking the approach of terrorism as a monolithic syndrome with generalizable root causes, rather than as a tool used under specific conditions and for local motivations. I propose that what quantitative literature is actually finding support for are factors of environmental permissiveness and that, owing to use of pooled data sets, it is not capturing actual motivational factors at all. I further propose that a closer qualitative scrutiny of regions and typologies, rather than the entirety of the international system, will reveal more localized motivational factors that should be testable using quantitative methods. I present three papers, one on the transnational typology, one on the Middle Eastern region, and one on Latin America to explore this propositiion and find that examining terrorism typologically finds little quantitative support for propositions put forth in qualitative literature, while regional examination yield much better results. |
