Rational Extremism: Understanding Terrorism in the Twenty-first Century

In the last decade, the field of international relations has undergone a revolution in conflict studies. Where earlier approaches attempted to identify the attributes of individuals, states, and systems that produced conflict, the “rationalist approach to war” now explains violence as the product of private information with incentives to misrepresent, problems of credible commitment, and issue indivisibilities. In this new approach, war is understood as a bargaining failure that leaves both sides worse off than had they been able to negotiate an efficient solution. This rationalist framework has proven remarkably general—being applied to civil wars, ethnic conflicts, and interstate wars—and fruitful in understanding not only the causes of war but also war termination and conflict management. Interstate war is no longer seen as sui generis, but as a particular form within a single, integrated theory of conflict. This rationalist approach to war may at first appear to be mute in the face of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Civilian targets were attacked “out of the blue.” The terrorists did not issue prior demands. A theory premised on bargaining, therefore, would seem ill-suited to explaining such violence. Yet, as I hope to show, extremist terrorism can be rational and strategic. A rationalist approach also yields insights into the nature and strategy of terrorism and offers some general guidelines that targets should consider in response, including the importance of a multilateral coalition as a means of committing the target to a moderate military strategy. Analytically, and more centrally for this essay, extremist terrorism reveals a silence at the heart of the current rationalist approach to war even as it suggests a potentially fruitful way of extending the basic model. In extant models, the distribution of capabilities and, thus, the range of acceptable bargains are exogenous,