Self-Enforcing Collective Counterterror Retaliation

Motivated by recent examples of collective effort on the war terror, we examine incentives that retaliation may produce for endogenous formation an international counterterror coalition. We show there are quite reasonable circumstances under which any nation is a target terrorist attack finds it desirable to be member coalition, holding choices all other nations as given. The join coalition group-specific benefits from enjoyed each member, relatively lower spillover benefit stand-alone nation, and inability pre-emptive measures avert attacks. disincentive anticipated backlash retaliation, targets members only.