Philip B. K. Potter

Allying to Kill: Terrorist Intergroup Cooperation and the Consequences for Lethality

Terrorist organizations do not operate in isolation. Instead, they forge alliances with one another, which generate a tight network of intergroup relationships. We argue that these relationships serve to increase group capacity, manifesting itself in the ability of a group to conduct deadly attacks. However, groups are notably judicious when they forge these cooperative ties, preferring to link to the strongest groups to which they have access. The result of this process of preferential attachment is a core/periphery structure in the broader network of alliances. Moreover, groups with ties to organizations at the core of the broader universe of relationships reap more rewards than those with large numbers of less meaningful alliances. Terrorism research and counterterrorism policy should assess terrorist organizations in the broader context of their interrelationships and depth of alliances rather than in isolation.

Democratic Peace, Domestic Audience Costs, and Political Communication

This article addresses a gap in the literature connecting the empirical observation of a democratic peace to a theoretical mechanism based on domestic audience costs. We argue that the link between these literatures lies in the way leaders reach the ultimate source of audience costs: the public. The audience cost argument implicitly requires a free press because, without it, the public has no reliable means of obtaining information about the success or failure of a leaders foreign policy. Hence, leaders can credibly commit through audience costs only when the media is an effective and independent actor. The implication is that while leaders might gain flexibility at home by controlling the media, they do so at the cost of their capacity to persuade foreign leaders that their “hands are tied.”

War and Democratic Constraint: How the Public Influences Foreign Policy

War and Democratic Constraint: How the Public Influences Foreign Policy engages with the questions of military interventions, the role of the public in determining and effecting foreign policy, and the effect of information access on determining this role. This is a niche that is not only key to understanding International Relations from a scholarly perspective but that has also seen a recent upsurge in public discourse.

Looking for Audience Costs in all the Wrong Places: Electoral Institutions, Media Access, and Democratic Constraint

For leaders to generate credibility through audience costs, there must be mechanisms in place that enable citizens to learn about foreign policy failures. However, scholars have paid relatively little attention to variations among democracies in the extent to which the public is able to obtain this sort of information. We argue here that electoral institutions play this role by influencing the number of major political parties in a country and, with it, the extent and depth of opposition to the executive. Opposition leads to whistle-blowing, which makes it more likely that that the public will actually hear about a leader’s foreign policy blunders. The effectiveness of this whistle-blowing, however, is conditional on the public’s access to the primary conduit for communication between leaders and citizens: the mass media. We test these expectations statistically, demonstrating that leaders in systems with these attributes fare better with respect to their threats and the reciprocation of conflicts that they initiate. These findings suggest that democracies are not automatically able to generate credibility through audience costs and that the domestic institutions and political processes that link the public and leaders must be taken seriously.

Explaining Terrorism: Leadership Deficits and Militant Group Tactics

Certain types of militant groups—those suffering from leadership deficits—are more likely to attack civilians. Their leadership deficits exacerbate the principal-agent problem between leaders and foot soldiers, who have stronger incentives to harm civilians. We establish the validity of this proposition with a tripartite research strategy that balances generalizability and identification. First, we demonstrate in a sample of militant organizations operating in the Middle East and North Africa that those lacking centralized leadership are prone to targeting civilians. Second, we show that when the leaderships of militant groups are degraded from drone strikes in the Afghanistan-Pakistan tribal regions, the selectivity of organizational violence plummets. Third, we elucidate the mechanism with a detailed case study of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a Palestinian group that turned to terrorism during the Second Intifada because pressure on leadership allowed low-level members to act on their preexisting incentives to attack civilians. These findings indicate that a lack of principal control is an important, underappreciated cause of militant group violence against civilians.

Sizing Up the Adversary: Leader Attributes and Coercion in International Conflict

Leaders negotiate, not states. Yet the extensive body of work on coercive diplomacy in international relations pays little attention to variation among leaders. In contrast, we argue that individual-level attributes directly influence leaders’ beliefs about their own military capabilities and, by extension, their selection of disputes. Specifically, leaders with combat experience and careers in national militaries are relatively better judges of their own military power. As a consequence, targets tend to take their threats more seriously. In contrast, leaders who have military careers but lack combat experience tend to be less selective in their demands and correspondingly less successful when they make threats. Similar patterns hold for those with rebel experience. Drawing on new data on leader attributes, we find strong evidence that these leader-level attributes influence both dispute and compellent threat reciprocation. This leader-level approach provides a new explanation for why some countries initiate disputes against determined adversaries who are likely to escalate rather than back down.

Tactical Diversity in Militant Violence

Militant groups, like all organizations, face crucial decisions about the strategies that they employ. In this article, we assess why some militant organizations successfully diversify into multiple tactics, while others limit themselves to just one or a few. This is an important puzzle because militant organizations with more diversified tactics are more likely to stretch counterterrorist defenses. Drawing on literatures from business, economics, and organizational studies, we theorize that pressure and competition incentivize groups to diversify their tactical portfolios. The results, which include tests drawn from multiple datasets, show robust support for the notion that tactical diversification is a response to organizational stress stemming from state repression and organizational rivalry. The policy implication is that while countries cannot anticipate the character of future tactical innovations, they may be able to anticipate which groups will most readily adopt them.