The abundance of books on terrorism attests to the demand for greater knowledge about the subject. Particularly in terrorism studies, numbers do not always translate to quality. Consequently, a book can make a major contribution not only by offering a new theory but sometimes by refusing to go along with trendy simplistic notions and by articulating fundamental insights that most serious observers of terrorism share. Jacob N. Shapiro’s book The Terrorist’s Dilemma does all these things and more. Shapiro negates the simplistic view of terrorist groups as unitary actors, and he articulates an understanding shared by many scholars concerning the dilemmas that terrorist leaders face when they run a secretive organization. But he goes further by linking the relationship between security, efficiency, and control to the structure of terrorist entities, cautiously testing hypotheses on three sets of case studies of terrorist organizations—from Tsarist Russia, Northern Ireland, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and making thoughtful recommendations about organizational trade-offs that terrorists make and how they should affect states’ counterterrorism policies.
Shapiro’s starting point is that terrorist groups are not unitary actors but organizations, and as such they feature many of the problems that organizations face. However, contrary to most organizations, terrorists use violent means in pursuit of their goals, which in turn puts them under pressure from state authorities. The result is that problems encountered by all organizations get amplified with terrorist groups and force them into making important trade-offs. Similar to other organizations, terrorist groups are bureaucratized entities with a number of layers. So long as all members of a terrorist organization have similar views of its objectives and the way to realize them, the organization faces “only” the extremely difficult challenge of coercing state enemies, which enjoy superior capabilities, to comply with the terrorists’ demands. Because power asymmetries do not allow terrorists to mount a full-scale conventional assault on reigning powers, the achievement of their objectives depends instead on a calibrated utilization of force. Terrorists must strike a hard-to-find balance between the need to inflict pain and the danger of provoking a backlash from authorities and the public whom the terrorists claim to represent and whose support they seek and require. Shapiro elegantly shows how typical organizational defects create particularly adverse consequences in secretive terrorist organizations, considerably intensifying the difficulty of attaining the terrorists’ political objectives.
Similar to the workings of other organizations, in terrorist organizations a small number of managers determine goals and policies and then delegate the implementation of the plan to lower-level operatives. When these rank and file do not fully understand how violence is linked to particular political objectives, disagree with the methods and targets dictated by their leaders, or simply act on the basis of their own interests, they may use violence beyond the parameters determined by the organization’s leadership and abuse the organization’s scarce resources. Such excesses jeopardize the success of the whole enterprise. In legal nonviolent organizations, principals can significantly reduce the danger by using oversight tools. But in terrorist organizations, the need for oversight clashes with the imperatives of security. Regular reporting duties and leadership involvement in directing all operations may reduce undesirable actions by operatives but increase the risk from the state’s counterterrorism efforts. Essentially, it is the conflict between highly important priorities that creates Shapiro’s terrorist dilemma: Terrorists must strike a balance between control and security, even though the achievement of their delicate task often requires them to keep a high level of both.
The Terrorist’s Dilemma makes another important contribution to the scholarship on terrorism by linking the structure of these organizations to the dilemmas of efficiency and control. Whereas many works about the “new terrorism” highlight the benefits of flat structures and strongly imply that hierarchical organizations are a thing of the past, Shapiro’s book offers a nuanced theory in which structure is more flexible and conditioned by four variables: 1) the question of how discriminating the violence should be given the organization’s political objectives; 2) the level of uncertainty faced by operatives about which attacks will serve the political goals; 3) preference divergence within the organization (particularly between leadership and operatives); and 4) the level of security pressure from the state. While this is the most innovative part of the book, it is not presented very effectively, perhaps because the author subordinates it to his effort to present the trade-offs that terrorist leaders face. How to promote two important claims in one book is a great problem for a scholar to have, but Shapiro misses an opportunity to put his level-headed analysis in direct conversation with trendy but rigor-deficient works, and to present a research agenda of immense importance to the field of terrorism studies.
For Shapiro, organizations whose objectives require the use of violence discriminatively are characterized by high uncertainty and preference divergence, and are subjected to only moderate state pressure would prefer hierarchical structure. On the other hand, principals in organizations that allow for indiscriminate violence and do not suffer from the problems of uncertainty and preference divergence, but that are under strong state pressure, will reduce their security vulnerabilities by adopting decentralized structure. Although the reduction of organizational structure to various aspects of control will be vigorously debated among scholars, Shapiro’s argument appears quite compelling overall. And it has significant implications for the study of terrorism because it allows for testing the linkage between these four variables and the structure that terrorist groups adopt. If we see discrimination, uncertainty, preference divergence, and state pressure as representing a typology, we may also be able to examine how these variables relate to one another and whether some are more important than others. Thus, taking Shapiro’s work to its logical conclusions, The Terrorist’s Dilemma could be seen as agenda setting.
The book could also enhance studies of religious terrorism. Underscoring organizational aspects, the author largely dismisses the importance of religious ideology. But a few points he makes suggest that religion may be more important than he gives it credence. According to Shapiro, religious organizations have greater opportunities to screen their operatives, and their involvement with charities alongside violence also improves their ability to control the operatives. These are important points that should be explored. The content of religious ideologies and the particular organizational impact of dissimilar religious ideologies also deserve more serious and explicit attention. That would require abandoning the binary distinction in which an organization is either religious or it is not. There are important distinctions among Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, Hamas, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad that may interact with their organizational dilemmas.
Finally, while Shapiro’s discussion of the link between the level of discrimination needed in terrorist operations and organizational structure is insightful, it cannot be detached from the question of whether indiscriminate violence is ever an effective tool. This omission can be linked to a broader issue, the author’s narrow conceptualization of rationality. His view of rationality emphasizes organizational and operational aspects, such as the match between means and goals and the ability to select the one operational option that offers the greatest payoff. Granted, these are important elements of rationality and are highly relevant to the theory at the heart of the book. But as terrorist organizations rarely succeed, one should at least entertain the rationality of their actions in light of the attainability of their objectives. This is a particularly important discussion given that some religious terrorist organizations seek unreasonably high objectives. If the use of terrorism and the pursuit of certain objectives raise doubts about the sensibleness of terrorist leaders, a book about organizational dilemmas within terrorist groups could benefit from exploring how such issues affect the terrorist’s dilemma.
In sum, The Terrorist’s Dilemma is one of the most important contributions made to terrorism studies in the past decade. Its importance is not limited to its author’s claims but extends further to the studies it is likely to inspire.
