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Awarded for the best dissertation completed and accepted during the past two calendar years in the field of policy studies. Supported by the Policy Studies Organization.

Award Committee: Michael E. Kraft, Chair, University of Wisconsin, Green Bay; Isabela Mares, Columbia University; and Emma R. Norman, Universidad de las Américas, Puebla

Recipient: Jennifer Kavanagh, RAND Corporation

Dissertation Title: "The Dynamics of Protracted Terror Campaigns: Domestic Politics, Terrorist Violence, and Counterterror Responses"

Citation: The Harold K. Lasswell Award for 2011 goes to Jennifer Kavanagh for her dissertation “The Dynamics of Protracted Terror Campaigns: Domestic Politics, Terrorist Violence, and Counterterror Responses.” Her thesis was completed at the University of Michigan in 2011 under the direction of Professors James D. Morrow and Melvyn Levitsky. Additional members of the dissertation committee were Professors Robert J. Franzese, Jr. and Allan C. Stam.

The award committee noted with great pleasure that Kavanagh’s dissertation is very much in the spirit of Harold Lasswell’s path-breaking work in fostering the study of public policy. She confronts one of the most critical of contemporary political challenges worldwide: terrorist movements and counterterror policy. Using a variety of creative research methods, Kavanagh’s remarkably original, thorough, and persuasive analysis breaks new ground in explaining the rise of terrorism and the range and likely effects of policies available to governments seeking to respond to terrorist attacks.
 
Kavanagh begins with an astute analysis of the problem of terrorism and its determinants, and also the kinds of responses, both violent and nonviolent, that governments have made to terrorist campaigns. She is particularly attuned to how domestic constituency expectations and demands affect the choice of policy responses that governments have at their disposal, where conflicts can be escalated or deescalated, with dramatically differing short- and long-term results.

The exhaustive, critical, and yet fair, literature review details important gaps in existing research, anachronisms that surprisingly prevail, and previous arguments that have been advanced but without supporting empirical evidence. Kavanagh thereby defines exactly and logically what research questions should be posed today, how they can be studied, how her work stands on the shoulders of what others have done, and precisely where her contribution lies. She offers two highly detailed case studies of Northern Ireland’s conflicts with Britain and the Second Intifada involving Israel and Palestinian forces. These are supplemented with four qualitative cases—Sri Lanka, Chechnya, Iraq, and Pakistan—that she hopes will permit greater generalization from her findings.

Using vector autoregression, Kavanagh identifies typical responses to distinct types of attacks and shows how divergent reactions reflect the way each government framed the conflict and viewed the terrorist challenge. Britain, for example, saw IRA supporters as British citizens whereas Israel viewed Palestinians quite differently and therefore was less inclined to be restrained in its responses to terrorist attacks.

The cases demonstrate effectively that state and non-state constituents tend to form expectations about the efficacy of violent, non-violent, or political approaches to protracted conflicts. They do this through what Kavanagh calls “retrospective projection,” which combines evaluations of the past, present, and anticipated future. She finds that demands for violence are most likely when the expected benefits of a military-based strategy exceed the prevailing confidence in existing political alternatives. In cases like this, demands for retaliation by various local constituencies create incentives for both state and non-state actors to use violence to meet public expectations.  

Based on this conceptual framework and the elaborate case studies and quantitative analysis, Kavanagh argues that effective counter-terror policies are those that shift the balance between the expected military efficacy and the more optimistic alternative of constraining violence by reducing demands for violence. There is a place for military-based counterterrorism, she notes, but considerable benefits are also yielded by strategies that encourage confidence in political alternatives and help to build public support for them.

Kavanagh emphasizes in conclusion that there are specific types of counterterror strategies that are most likely to encourage significant, lasting de-escalation in protracted conflict violence. She offers well considered policy prescriptions for how to manage conflicts of certain kinds and details how her findings might apply to current U.S. counterterror responses.

This policy analysis is solidly supported by sound, effective, and comprehensive empirical examination. The result is the most thorough and careful analysis of the dynamics of terror attacks and responses to date, and an important and unique contribution to the literature on terrorism and policy responses to it.