Whose Turn is It? Evaluating Causal Relationships Between Terrorist Ideologies

Prior research indicates that terrorists use violence to coerce audiences to a political agenda, but one motivation for terrorist action that has yet to be explored is whether violence by one ideology may influence the rate of offending of another. Terrorists are motivated by a set of previously held belief systems, so if a symbol representative of their ideology is threatened, actors may perceive the threat as an attack against themselves which as they rationalize may justify violence. Drawing from the conflict perspective of Tit-for-Tat and vicarious retribution framing, the current study explores the interactive relationship between far-right, far-left, and jihadist ideologies by approaching terrorist activity as a product of reciprocal action between belief systems. Using a vector autoregression (VAR) analytic methodology, the study explores the dynamic relationship between conflicting ideologies by examining the causal mechanisms of event patterns through a series of lagged profiles. The results conclude that an increase in violence by one group will often be associated with an increase in violence by another. This has several theoretical and practical implications, including establishing that terrorist activity does not occur within a vacuum and therefore can be accounted for in current threat assessments and prevention policies.