Agents and Mechanisms of Terrorist Campaigns

The paper offers a framework to identify the most important generative processes of terrorist campaigns. It focuses on links between macro and micro levels involving a plurality of agents, the most important being armed groups, insurgency collaborators, and active fighters, and, at the same time, three kinds of causal or social mechanisms. These are: situational mechanisms that identify agents’ constraints and opportunities associated with the psychological, cultural, political, economic, and military context of an armed struggle; action formation mechanisms, that analytically concentrate on agents’ decision-making; and transformational mechanisms, describing the interactions between agents. Armed groups instrumentally resort to terrorist tactics to purse operative goals associated with asymmetric conflicts, but in the case of collaborators and active fighters the article proposes moving beyond assumptions of the rational choice theory and adopting a more general paradigm of rationality.