Strategic Substitution and Complimentarity in the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Terrorism is one of many possible tactics to which actors may resort in political conflicts; however, previous studies of the strategic substitution within terrorism have primarily focused on shifts in attack modes following government countermeasures. Yet, the decision to resort to specific violent tactics can be highly complex, and will typically also depend on number of factors other than government countermeasures. In this paper, we use the Israel-Palestine conflict as a case study to understand the strategic dynamics of violent conflict and their political context. We show strong empirical evidence that factors such as public support and inter-group competition, the anticipation of countermeasures, and nontrivial non-violent political payoff have an observable effect on the behavior of terrorist groups. We further cast these results in a more general framework of innovation, imitation, competition and dependence, which can be applied to other prolonged conflicts where we observe terrorist tactics, such as Northern Ireland, Colombia and Sri Lanka.