• Opening
  • Me?!
  • Writing
  • Analysis
  • Teaching
    • Police Violence videos
    • S videos
  • Media
  • Scholarism
  • Audio/Video
  • Podcasts
  • Students?!
  • Archiving
  • Art
  • Analog (the anti-blog)
  • Other Blog Entries
  • Webpages
  • American Academy of Arts and Sciences Event
  • Online Appendix for Oped
[Christian Davenport]

A Moral Hazard in Counter-Terror Policy?  (A Conflict Consortium Virtual Workshop Joint)

11/8/2015

0 Comments

 
Do restrictions on civil liberties reduce terror attacks?

Earlier this week the CC Virtual Workshop featured Tiberiu Dragu‘s paper, “The Moral Hazard of Terrorism Prevention.” Regrettably, technical issues prevented us from recording the session to YouTube. That aside, we had a fun and interesting discussion.

And why not? Dragu’s provocative answer is “probably not.” More specifically, he argues that once we take into consideration the strategic interaction of government security agents and dissidents, the former will underinvest in detective work (thereby creating demand for their services), and the latter will sometimes plan more attacks than they would have had the government not restricted civil liberties (e.g., speech, association, assembly but also enhancing surveillance and domestic spying capabilities).

To produce these implications Dragu studies a dynamic game theory model involving security agency of a government and a dissident group using terror tactics. The game has two periods: in the first, the group decides whether to execute attacks, and the agency decides how much effort to expend foiling potential plots. As in any game theory model, the trick is to consider how each actor will behave in each period based on its expectations of what will happen over the course of the interaction. This is where the interesting stuff happens as the actors generate expectations about what is likely to have in subsequent periods influencing what they do in the present.

In particular, Dragu compares two circumstances: one in which, following a terror attack in period one, the government does not restrict civil liberties versus another in which, following a terror attack in period one, the government restricts civil liberties. The results of the model indicate that the security agents will work harder to foil plots in the situation with no restrictions than the one with restrictions. In part, this is explained by the fact that without the restrictions these actors have to work a bit harder to figure out what is going on. Higher levels of repression make security force agents lazy, reducing repressive action. Lower levels of repression make security force agents exert more effort, increasing the amount of repressive action that one would see. Further, depending on the values of some of the model’s parameters, the dissidents will plan more attacks. If you know that you are going to be in a situation where it will be harder to meet, plan, train and execute, then you would ramp up your dissident behavior. The paper challenges the conventional wisdom that civil liberties restrictions reduce challenges and advances the agenda that repression needs to be simultaneously disaggregated tactically as well as considered together.

The paper is part of a book length project in which Dragu draws also from his articles published in AJPS (pdf here) and APSR (pdf here). In those works, he expands the discussion to include the incentives of politicians, and the book will engage an array of models that permit him to enrich the sparse models in each of the papers. This should be an important piece.

Terrence Chapman, Ursula Daxecker and Monika Nalepa served as discussants, and raised a number of excellent suggestions ranging from modeling choices to framing and presentation to empirical implications and beyond. Dragu also engaged the group in discussion about some of his ideas for the book length manuscript as well as this individual paper. A good time was had by all.

@WilHMoo & @engagedscholar
0 Comments

    Analog - The Anti-Blog

    By "Analog" I am referring to the adjective (i.e., relating to or using signals or information represented by a continuously variable physical quantity such as spatial position or voltage) and not the noun (i.e., a person or thing seen as comparable to another) for I wished to give voice to my thoughts which have come to me in a more or less continuous manner but which do so in a way that is not consistent in content or form. Thus you will see short stories, brief thoughts, haikus, low-kus and even a political cartoon or two. 

    Winner of Best Blog Post for 2014 by International Studies Association

    Picture

    Archives

    December 2022
    October 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    May 2021
    April 2021
    January 2021
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    September 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    December 2014
    September 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013

    Categories

    All
    Activism
    Art
    Black Power/nationalism
    Communication
    Counter-terrorism
    Data
    Database
    Education
    Elitism
    Ethnicity
    Fashion
    Friends
    Genocide
    Global Blackness
    Hip Hop
    Human Rights Violation
    Identity
    India
    Inequality
    Memories
    Norway
    Passing
    Political Conflict
    Political Tourism
    Political Violence
    Poverty
    Racism
    Republic-of-new-africa
    Research
    Revolution
    Rwanda
    Sexism
    Social Media
    State Repression
    Struggle
    Terrorism
    Travel
    United States
    Untouchability

    RSS Feed

Picture