Africa is often presented as a war-ridden continent, but this depiction is becoming outdated. In the 21^st century, the amount of warfare in Africa has declined dramatically, and today most Africans are more secure than ever.

“Africa” and “conflict” are words all too often linked in Western minds. From Cold War proxy wars, to what Robert Kaplan saw as “the coming anarchy”  in the 1990s, to Boko Haram massacres today, news from Africa may seem dominated by never-ending conflict. That image is out of date. In 2002 Tony Blair was justified in describing the state of Africa as a “scar on the conscience of humanity”, but in the years since there has been an underappreciated success story in Africa. The amount of warfare in Africa has declined dramatically, and today most Africans are more secure than ever. Troubled areas remain, unfortunately, but the larger picture of receding conflict has implications for how we think about African security needs. Outside actors can help reinforce positive external and internal trends that mitigate conflict, can avoid creating new conflict zones like Libya or South Sudan, and should recognize emerging human security needs that are becoming relatively more important as armed conflict declines.

Africa’s waning wars

Quietly over the last 15 years, many African wars did end, to paraphrase Scott Strauss. Lingering Cold War struggles like the Angolan civil war burned out. West African nations including Liberia and Sierra Leone ceased being playgrounds for warlords and regained their status as functional, if weak, states. Eastern Congo is still violent, but far less so than during the 1990s “African World War”. Overall, 21^st century Africa has seen more wars end or abate than ignite.

The trend towards peace in Africa can be seen by using various datasets on armed conflict (for more on data sources, tabulation, and trend analysis, see Burbach and Fettweis 2014). The Center for Systemic Peace (CSP), for example, tracks conflicts from 1946 to the present, scoring each for the intensity of its societal impact. Figure 1 shows the yearly sum of conflict intensity assessed by CSP, for both Africa and the rest of the world. The end of the Cold War brought peace to much of the world, but African conflicts increased in the 1990s. States like Somalia and Sierra Leone collapsed into warlordism, for example. Central Africa was hit by the Rwanda genocide and bloody chaos in Eastern Congo, killing one to five million people.  At least three-fourths of the world’s total war deaths in the late 1990s took place in Africa (Burbach and Fettweis 2014, Figure 4).

After the year 2000, the tide of war receded. Africa’s total conflict intensity as measured by CSP fell by approximately half. A similar pattern is shown by the Uppsala Conflict Data Project. Using somewhat different definitions, the Uppsala data shows that the number of conflicts in Africa resulting in 1,000 or more “battle deaths” per year declined from an average of 12 in the late 1990s to an average of 3.5 from 2010-2013. Some decades-long wars ended with formal peace accords, as with Angola in 2002; elsewhere, states gradually gained the upper hand on armed disorder. Given the unfortunate rise of warfare in the Middle East, Africa is no longer the most violent region of the world.

The decline of warfare in Africa is even more dramatic in terms of individual risks. Africa’s population is growing rapidly, up 150% since 1980. Declining conflict despite a much larger population means the mortality risk from war has fallen substantially. An average of 32 people per 100,000 population were killed per year in the 1980s and 45 per 100,000 in the 1990s. In 2013, though the rate was only 8 per 100,000 (Burbach & Fettweis 2014, Figure 5). World Health Organization data shows an astonishing 95% decline in African conflict deaths from 2000 to 2012. In the 1980s, warfare killed more Africans than vehicle accidents. Today, perhaps three to six times as many Africans die in road crashes than from conflict. Many more Africans are harmed by crime or domestic violence than by warfare. Africa is still afflicted by more conflict than most ofthe world and the suffering of those involved is very real. Nevertheless, a greater proportion of Africans live free of war today than ever in the post-independence period.

Celebrating African peace may seem premature given the civil war in South Sudan or the ravages of Boko Haram. Conflict has increased since 2011, but the level of armed conflict still remains lower than any time from 1970 – 2000. The most tragic development is the civil war in South Sudan, which the U.N. estimated had killed 50,000 as of spring 2016. Fortunately, South Sudan’s case is nearly unique: a newly created nation, devoid of physical or administrative infrastructure, with ethnically divided, soon-to-be-unemployed armed factions eyeing the lucrative oil revenues awaiting whomever could seize power. As academic panelists noted in 2011 – two years before the civil war –  predictors of conflict were flashing red in South Sudan. Few African countries contain such a combustible mix of problems anymore.

Accounting for the decline

Image by UN Photo via Flickr.

There are several factors behind the ebbing of conflict in Africa. One important change is the geopolitical environment. During the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviets armed and funded rival factions in civil wars, allowing bloody wars to fester for decades in countries like Angola, Mozambique, and Ethiopia. Then, 1990s Africa fell into turmoil as superpower-sponsored regimes collapsed. A disinterested world mostly left Africa to its fate, but continued trade in weapons and resources with warlords. In the last decade, however, the U.S., Europe, and China have all become more active in diplomacy, security assistance, and peacekeeping. The US and China are together pressing the South Sudanese factions to stop fighting, rather than choosing sides. The world has become somewhat less willing to sell arms or purchase minerals that directly fuel conflicts, admittedly with a long way to go.

Africans themselves deserve great credit for ending the wars that plagued their continent.  Economic growth, improvements in governance, and greater space for peaceful political participation have all made state failure and internal conflict less likely. As Paul Collier among others has noted, civil wars tend to create vicious cycles that spread insecurity to whole regions. Many regions of Africa have climbed out of the conflict trap; political, security, and economic improvements are reinforcing each other. The nations of Africa increasingly work together through the institutions of the African Union to head off or resolve conflict, and to deploy peacekeepers to conflict zones. Needs still outpace available resources, but that cooperation is a marked change from 20^th century Africa.

A peaceful future?

Whether the trend towards peace continues depends foremost on Africa’s leaders, but external actors can encourage positive trends in African security. Most directly, partners can help the AU and its member nations improve peacekeeping and conflict resolution capabilities. Likewise, the world should continue arms embargoes against combatants and regulating trade in valuable resources where exploitation appears to be a key ingredient of protracted conflict. Ongoing encouragement and incentives for democratization and governmental reform are helpful. Western countries should consider, however, that broad efforts like anticorruption programs are probably more helpful than International Criminal Court indictments of individual leaders, which can generate nationalist backlash.

The world should especially try not to create new ground for conflict. Libya and South Sudan are Africa’s worst conflict zones today. Both were birthed through Western action – the removal by force of the Qaddafi regime, and diplomatically sponsoring South Sudan’s independence from Khartoum. While the moral cases were sound, both countries were left with non-existent governments, antagonistic armed factions, and grossly inadequate provision for disarming, demobilizing, and re-integrating fighters. American and European governments focused more on freeing people from hated regimes than on answering – let alone resourcing – the “what next?” question. Chaos followed, just as many African governments had warned at the time.

From a humanitarian perspective, advocates should consider whether other challenges in Africa deserve relatively more attention. For example, Fearon and Hoeffler suggest that domestic violence against women and children now imposes larger human costs than warfare, and also that domestic violence can be reduced more cost-effectively than armed conflict. The ballooning toll of vehicle accident deaths in Africa may represent an opportunity for international technical or educational assistance to pay off with many saved lives. Beyond road safety, Africa is rapidly urbanizing.  Western visions of menacing rebels waving AK-47s in the bush privilege the exotic, but most Africans confront more prosaic threats to health and safety. The human security challenges Africans confront are increasingly those of city-dwellers:  crime, sanitation and utilities, safe and reliable transport, etc. Better policing, regularized urban housing, and expansion of infrastructure in megacities like Lagos and Kinshasa ought to be top priorities.

Conclusion

Sixteen years ago The Economist magazine suggested Africa was a “hopeless continent”. Lately The Economist has been bullish on Africa, citing the decline in warfare as a key reason for the continent’s improving business prospects. With remarkable speed, in the 21^st century African conflict declined and safety improved, a hugely positive change in the welfare of Africans. Africa’s international friends should ensure their priorities respond to contemporary human security challenges, not ghosts of the past – and certainly they should avoid making things worse. Recognition of Africa’s progress itself would be a boon:  the continent’s increasingly out-of-date image as an undifferentiated war-torn anarchy retards investment and engagement from overseas. The tragedies of the moment deserve action, but we should not overlook that there is also much good news out of Africa.

David T. Burbach is an Associate Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, RI.   Dr. Burbach received a Ph.D in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and has expertise in African security, defense planning, and U.S. foreign policy.   The views expressed in this article are personal and do not represent official positions of the U.S. Navy.

Author’s Note: This opinion peace is based on research conducted among South African Peacekeepers, published in the Journal of International Peacekeeping, 19 (2015) 227-248.

The motivation to increase the number of women in peacekeeping is based on the assumption that women peacekeepers enhance the access of local women to services, improve community relations, reduce the incidence of sexual and gender-based violence, build the capacity of local women and break down traditional views that discriminate and marginalize women. The extent to which women are able to perform these functions needs to be interrogated, as much of this rhetoric does not reflect the realities that women face on the ground. This is reflected in the findings of a study conducted among South African male and female peacekeepers returning from missions in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Darfur, Sudan. The findings are revealing, often countering many of the above-mentioned essentialist claims.

While there was general consensus that women peacekeepers are generally better at interacting with the local community, especially women and children, these claims were mostly context-specific. In the DRC, the female peacekeepers felt that they could reach out to women and children more readily. This was because ‘Sousa’ (as the locals call the South African contingent) tended to interact with the local community more than other contingents because they are mostly black, and could understand Swahili. This was not the case in Darfur, Sudan. Here, it was as if the local population (especially the local women) were afraid to speak to the peacekeepers, whether men or women. What this indicates is that not only gender, but race, the ability to speak the local language, and respect for the local culture are crucial determinants in fostering relations with the local community. Similarly, their ability to serve as norm-breakers, challenging existing stereotypes was met with some misgivings, given the fact that most often their identity was concealed behind their helmets and because of their low numbers.

In terms of improving the security of local women and children, female peacekeepers felt that locals placed more trust in male soldiers because they do not know how to judge female soldiers. Female peacekeepers also reported that they did not really know what the specific security concerns of women were, because little attention was paid to issues of gender in peacekeepers’ mission-readiness training. Thus, they had little understanding of the underlying gender power relations in the communities. Nor did they know how to address or assist victims of sexual violence. In fact, most knew very little if anything about the gender dynamics in these communities and in some cases there was a general lack of cultural awareness. This influenced their ability to identify what the specific security needs of women were, how to protect them, or where to refer them if they needed to deal with cases of sexual violence.

Members of the Guatemalan contingent of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti participate in a medal award ceremony in recognition of their service. Image by UN Photo via Flickr.

What this means is that the ability of female peacekeepers to make a difference is limited by their training, which is gender-neutral and where they are expected to act and perform functions ‘just like men’. The rationale for this is that when deployed on peace missions, all have to carry the same equipment, work in the same environment and face the same adversaries in the course of duty. This is specifically the case where they are drawn from the infantry environment and have to perform infantry-like functions. Added to this, women peacekeepers report being ‘othered’ on various levels. Physically, they are ridiculed for their lack of physical strength and endurance, especially on foot patrols. Psychologically and emotionally, the operational environment is seen to be more taxing for women, given the extreme forms of sexual violence against women. Women were also perceived to pose a ‘gendered’ security risk, especially in hyper-masculine contexts where women are seen as sexual objects, are used as weapons of war where they threaten existing gender power relations that affect male dominance.

This results in female peacekeepers facing many different forms of gender and sexual harassment which are used to denigrate them. Some of the female peacekeepers who served in positions of authority explained how they were often not respected, ignored, undermined and faced frequent sexual advances. Such forms of gender harassment occurred often, but not considered serious enough to evoke punitive action. This was simply explained away in terms of existing patriarchal relations that could not be changed. However, in some cases this evoked open hostility towards them “because in Sudan it is considered disrespectful to their culture for women to be soldiers, carry rifles and wear trousers”. Besides this, the threat of being raped served to further erode women peacekeepers’ agency, especially where they were excluded from certain operations which were considered too dangerous by their commanders. In this way, not only were old gender stereotypes replicated, but they are used to undermine the prospect of an equal partnership between men and women.

What this shows is that even where national armed forces espouse gender equality, the peacekeeping environment remains hostile to women. Multiple masculinities, patriarchy and sexism undermines the ability of women peacekeepers to imbue alternative ways of dealing with and resolving conflict. The only way to ‘regender’ the military is to stop privileging masculinity over femininity. This is unlikely to happen where peacekeeping remains steeped in the warrior ethos and where the ‘feminine’ is not valued, is suppressed, seen as a threat, or a liability. What is needed is for women to become less complicit and more assertive in making their voices heard. However, military women themselves typically do not embrace feminine values given the ‘nature’ of their work. They typically conform to and assimilate masculine values, norms and practices in order to be judged as capable soldiers. They have to assume what many term as a ‘militarized masculinity’, understood as the ability to ‘demonstrate an absence of emotion and a willingness to use violence’—they must excise all that is perceived to be feminine.

This makes it difficult to achieve the ideals advocated by UNSC Resolution 1325. The aim of this resolution is not only to increase the number of women serving in the military, but to mainstream gender by bringing about a greater sensitivity to the different effect that war has on men and women. In this regard, there has been little progress as the number of military women serving on peacekeeping missions have remained around 3 per cent. Even in the South African armed forces where women now represent 26 % of uniformed personnel and up to 15% of those deployed on peacekeeping missions, there seems to be little qualitative change in bringing about a more acrogenous military culture. This necessitates a closer introspection in terms of how women are trained, deployed and supported on peacekeeping operations. It raises the question as to whether a gender-neutral approach to gender integration in the military does not in fact perpetuate gender inequality. Clearly one cannot bring about a different perspective to war and peace if women are expected to embrace masculine norms and values and where gender difference is not recognised and valued.

Lindy Heinecken was formerly a researcher and Deputy Director of the Centre for Military Studies (CEMIS) at the South African Military Academy, where she worked for 17 years. Since 2006 she has been at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Stellenbosch University, South Africa and is currently Professor of Sociology lecturing in political and industrial sociology. The main focus of her research is in the domain of armed forces and society where she has published widely on a range of issues including military unionism, the management of diversity, gender integration, HIV/AIDS in the military and more recently on the experiences of military personnel on peace operations. She serves on numerous academic boards, including the Council of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, the Board of the International Sociological Association’s (ISA) Armed Forces and Conflict Resolution Group, and the National Research Foundation (NRF). She serves on the editorial board of the journals Armed Forces and Society and Scientia Militaria: South African Journal of Military Studies. She is a NRF B rated researcher and serves as one of the pool of specialists conducting research for the South African Army.

Generally, the Arctic has elicited only minor attention outside the countries whose borders or territories fall within the loosely-defined region. But that is changing rapidly. As Kuupik Kleist, the former Prime Minister of Greenland, put it,

 “The Arctic used to be the last frontier. Now it seems we are at the center of the world.”

While rapidly deteriorating environmental security in the region poses a grave threat to many regions of the world, the focus on militarized control of the area masks the very real need to mitigate further damage to the climate and increase our adaptive capacities to the inevitable climatic changes that will come in the 21st century.

Realpolitik or Environmental Security?

Indeed, much has been made lately about the ongoing and profound changes that are reshaping the Arctic region. There is no shortage of reports that detail the ways that climate change is forcing the region’s physical, social, and political environments into flux. Arctic sea ice is melting at an increasingly rapid rate, with the very real possibility that sometime between 2020-2050, the Arctic will soon experience its first (and undoubtedly not its last) sea ice-free summer. The effects of warming temperatures are likely to be dramatic: it will degrade habitats for vulnerable species, including polar bears and seals, and will accelerate and compound the effects of climate change, like volatile weather patterns and rising sea levels. A recent article in the journal Nature concluded that the long-term economic costs from a warming Arctic could reach $60 trillion, almost equal to the entire economic value of the world economy in 2012.

But in the face of these worrying trends, discussion has instead focused on the economic opportunities offered by the ‘opening up’ of the Arctic, including the creation of new shipping routes and increasing the accessibility of fossil fuel reserves. The area north of the Arctic Circle is said to contain about 30% of the world’s undiscovered gas and 13% of the world’s undiscovered oil. The Governance of newly opened shipping lanes like the Northwest Passage will remain a contentious political question. While the region has thus far suffered from general neglect and inattention, it is unrealistic to expect that to continue in the future.

Indeed, it is already becoming clear that the Arctic is the site of ongoing militarization. Recent security maneuvers have increased state control over the farthest reaches of state territory. In 2007, Russia planted its flag underneath the North Pole and resumed strategic bomber patrols over the area, echoing  its Cold War past. Canada’s official Arctic Foreign Policy proclaims “the first and most important pillar towards recognizing the potential of Canada’s Arctic is the exercise of our sovereignty over the far north.” Border disputes in the Arctic have led to strained relations for decades between Canada and Denmark as well as between Russia and Norway. Both cases have been peacefully resolved in the last few years. Yet, sovereignty and security have both been used to justify the proliferation of military ice-breakers, patrol ships, the creation of new deep water ports, and the deployment of military personnel including the Northern Rangers in Canada and the Danish Arctic command (which are both relatively small in terms of active personnel). Joint military operations conducted by Arctic countries (excluding Russia) such as Operation Cold Response and Operation Nanook have also contributed to the militarization of the Arctic.

It is worthwhile then to examine how sustainable forms of security are useful in the Artic context. What is needed principally is an increased awareness of the integrated connections between the natural environment and security. Large-scale changes to the natural environment are security threats.  Whether through an increase in extreme weather events causing enormous health and economic costs; rising sea levels leading to coastal flooding and climate-induced migration; or desertification, which devastates crop production, the effects of environmental change are severe. The task then in the Arctic is to combat the tendency to view environmental degradation as an opportunity for national gain, which will do little to counter-act the severe global effects. Such conventional, strategic responses inevitably lead only to further suspicion, distrust, and discord. The Arctic is one of the clearest manifestations of this tendency.

The Arctic will be without question a region of high strategic importance in the 21st century. Unfortunately, countries are likely to view the Arctic with an eye to using the region to bolster domestic support for increased militarization, surveillance, and sovereign control over vast, distant, territorial ‘frontiers’.  All told, Arctic security remains wedded to traditional, state-centric military threats despite the fact that the threat of outright conflict is as remote as the farthest reaches of the Arctic region itself. These approaches may be predictable, but they will contribute little to alleviating the complex, interrelated, and underlying drivers of insecurity in the Arctic region.

Demilitarizing the Arctic

So is the goal then to “demilitarize” the Arctic? Would the diverse sets of international issues arising from changes in the Arctic be better positioned in political terms, away from the exceptional demands that military thinking requires? Perhaps strengthening political institutions like the Arctic Council can alleviate the Arctic “rush” and ensure a lawful forum for state and indigenous negotiations in the Arctic. Formed in 1996, the Arctic Council has been the primary diplomatic forum used to facilitate cooperation, discussion, and negotiation. It was formed by eight Arctic countries (Canada, Denmark [Greenland], Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States) and includes six Arctic indigenous organizations and other Arctic inhabitants. Recently, the Council accepted six new non-Arctic states as non-voting Observer states, joining six others already granted observer status. The new inclusions, China, India, Italy, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea, may appear at first glance to be curious admissions. Certainly they represent important economic and military powers but most exist far from region itself. However, after initial reticence from members like Canada, the Council accepted their inclusion on the basis of strengthening the Council’s legitimacy by undercutting any emerging alternative organizations, like the Arctic Circle Forum from usurping its authority.

We should celebrate the decision by Council members to include new observer states: it allows these states to increase their awareness of Arctic issues and vulnerabilities, it opens up new avenues for cooperation and confidence-building measures, and it rightly spreads the responsibility for protecting the Arctic across the world. But while the Arctic Council remains an enduring and hopeful sign for managing political relations, the Council alone should not be expected to transform the underlying logic that continuously renders environmental security in strategic terms, obscuring the practices which have led to Arctic insecurity in the 21st century.

The driver of Arctic insecurity is not simply the continued militarization or the politicization of the region by its encircling states. The reality is much more complex and multifaceted. In effect, by continuously focusing on security in these strategic terms, we can’t see the forest for the trees. The Arctic “great game” is not simply a metaphor we might use to romanticize geopolitical maneuvers; it is an expression of the profound material environmental shifts that are occurring rapidly and are a result of anthropogenic drivers related to modern carbon-based societies. The continual free-fall in terms of Arctic ice levels and the fact that the region has been warming twice as fast as lower latitudes is likely to have far more important, long-lastingand damaging global effects than a hypothetical, always-over-the-horizon conflict between states competing to protect their localized interests. That is a popular story that obscures the much more difficult and insidious problems related to diagnosing and combatting climate change.

The fact that most states view the opening up of new Arctic sea lanes as a means to exploit vast and newly accessible energy sources reflects long-dominant understandings of both security and the environment. If our understanding of both Arctic security and the Arctic environment continues to be reduced to the international scramble for untapped resources and for newly opened “shipping lanes” (or melted sea ice, if you will), it is unlikely that the hugely alarming and damaging environmental effects of climate change will ever be truly overcome.

It is essential then that environmental security in the Arctic is recast away from traditional and dominant security practices of resource development, national sovereignty promotion, and increased surveillance. While these practices will remain in the future, we still should encourage a much more profound rethink that places greater value not simply on increasing cooperative intergrovernmental forums (though these are important), but on greater collaboration with indigenous populations, on studying the global environmental interconnections between the Arctic and other regions, and on aggressively combatting climate change. Adaptation to the inevitable changes occurring in the region will of course require coordination and strategic planning, and the potential for conflict will be ever-present. But an overreliance on familiar narratives of climate change-induced conflict obscures the much more complex drivers of Arctic insecurity, namely our destructive relationship with the environment and its connection to conventional, strategic security logic.

Cameron Harrington is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at King’s University College and Brescia University College, at Western University (Canada), where he teaches in the areas of environmental politics and international relations. His Ph.D thesis, (pending completion September 2013) builds a framework to combat water insecurity in the 21st century by focusing on the ethics of security.

Cameron tweets via @camharrington and can be reached at [email protected] 

Image source: lafrancevi (HMCS CORNER BROOK on arctic patrol during Operation Nanook)

Since the 9/11 attacks, and the ensuing “war on terrorism,” the U.S. government has engaged in a series of controversial counterterrorism policies. One such policy has been targeted killings, which have been used to try and eliminate the senior leadership of the global jihadist movement. How effective has the practice been?

The recent high profile terrorist attacks perpetrated in the U.K. have generated a resurgence in the debate surrounding counterterrorism tactics. Targeted killings, defined by Alston as the “intentional, premeditated and deliberate use of lethal force, by States or their agents…against a specific individual who is not in the physical custody of the perpetrator,” are one such tactic; frequently employed, yet extremely controversial.  This practice most often takes two forms: kill/capture missions and unmanned aerial vehicle assaults (UAVs). Certainly the most well known of the former is that of the May 2nd, 2011 Navy SEAL raid on Usama bin Laden’s Pakistan compound. The use of UAVs has become much more common, with a recent Director of National Intelligence report indicating that 473 drone strikes had resulted in the deaths of around 2,500 terrorists and between 64-114 civilians.  Such civilian fatalities, criticized by independent organizations to be a low estimate, illustrate the largest criticism of the policy; that it can be, as it is even from China’s perspective, “a blank space in international law (that is) subject to abuse”.

These issues have kindled a spirited discussion among scholars, but have yet to influence the policy’s role as a favoured strategy amongst policymakers.  Former President Obama, whose administration was responsible for the program’s significant expansion, declared just last year that “none of ISIL’s leaders were safe” and they were “going to keep going after them”. President Trump has also indicated that he plans to continue with the program, recently noting that “the terrorists and extremists and those who give them aid and comfort must be driven out from our society forever”.

It would seem that the moral and legal consequences of targeted killings have been, at the very least, overlooked given the intense focus and leeway that has been granted to combating the global jihadist movement (GJM). However, this preference for the use of targeted killings as counterterrorism has become increasingly hard to rectify given the mounting lack of empirical evidence to support its effectiveness.  Indeed, a host of previous investigations into contexts both within and outside of the GJM has yielded a complex picture. This picture is one that does not necessarily indicate resounding ineffectiveness, but one that does not garner particularly strong support for the strategy either. Rather, conclusions regarding the capability of targeted killings vary by how the incident is perceived (discriminate vs. indiscriminate violence), what outcome is studied (group desistance; frequency versus severity), the type of leader killed (position in the group; presence of a tribal elder), and characteristics of the organization (size, structure, and ideology).

Evaluating effectiveness

Image credit: U.S. Air Force photo/Lt Col Leslie Pratt.

Taking into account these nuances, my own work demonstrates that this policy has largely failed to decrease GJM-related terrorism, utilizing the Global Terrorism Database’s definition of, “the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence to attain a political, economic, religious, or social goal through fear, coercion, or intimidation.” Rather, such killings, in the form of both kill/capture and UAVs, have been unsuccessful at decreasing the especially noxious outcomes resulting from jihadi terrorism; namely, casualties, along with the more detrimental attacks involving high civilian deaths and suicide attackers. Perhaps even more disconcerting, the deaths of certain al Qa’ida leaders like that of al-Awlaki, the infamous cleric responsible for many a terrorist’s radicalization, have led to an increase in incidents, or a backlash effect.

Examining a slightly varied predictor in the form of monthly killings has yielded similar conclusions, again in the form of an increase in casualties. Still other al Qa’ida leaders’ deaths have produced decreases in terrorism incidents, while at the same time increasing other types of attacks. This displacement phenomenon is not new to studies of crime and terrorism, but adds to the general conclusion that targeted killings have yet to render consistent successes.

While I have also discovered support for the notion that targeted killings are an effective deterrent, these findings are largely outweighed by the above. It would appear that this tactic, as one of the leading scholars on leadership decapitation Jenna Jordan notes, “is not enough to effectively fight a strong and emboldened terrorist organization.” Nevertheless, it may be too early to designate targeted killings a complete failure.  As Brian Forst has argued, “a failure to find is not at all the same as a finding of failure.” Certainly, other research has noted the short-term benefits like those present in the work of Patrick Johnston and Anoop Sarbahi, the lack of attacks on the U.S. Homeland, and the possibility that there are other purposes to the policy like that of retribution.

Although not directly assessed in my work, the totality of countermeasure evaluations have become increasingly supporting of Laura Dugan and Erica Chenoweth’s contention that conciliatory, rather than punitive efforts, are the key to fighting terrorism. Actions like that of removing curfews, releasing prisoners, or even meeting to discuss issues have demonstrated their effectiveness in decreasing violence within the Israel-Palestine conflict. Even investigations outside the context of terrorism, like Matthew Dickenson’s study of Mexican drug-traffickers, are similarly reflective of the idea that incentives rather than punishments offer the most promise. Specifically, Dickensen has suggested that improving both the economic and law enforcement environments are better counter-narcos strategies than that of leadership removal. Jordan has also suggested that al Qa’ida’s organization, which tends to be bureaucratic, and its communal support, have been integral to its ability to rebound from killings. While such killings have the potential to affect the former, it is the opinion of this researcher that conciliatory efforts may have the best shot at addressing the latter.

Conclusion

All in all, and given the issues surrounding terrorist negotiation coupled with an ideology that is fraught with human rights’ violations, conciliatory actions are likely to remain unpopular. As the U.S. continues to fight a movement that has been responsible for a quarter of all deaths and injuries from terrorism, the policy of targeted killing is likely to remain.  Perhaps, at the very least, this strategy could be coupled with other efforts that address the larger causes and correlates of terrorism, like that of larger macro-level predictors.

Jennifer Varriale Carson is an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice and the Coordinator of Undergraduate Research at the University of Central Missouri.  She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in Criminology and Criminal Justice.  Her work focuses on policy evaluation, particularly the use of quasi-experimental methods in assessing counterterrorism efforts, and can be found in a number of outlets including Criminology and Public Policy, Journal of Quantitative Criminology, and Deviant Behavior.