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Over the past four decades, and especially in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, many countries around the world have passed various types of counterterrorist legislation. It remains unclear, however, whether such laws are effective in achieving their most important declared goal: reducing terrorist activities. Some scholars believe that counterterrorist legislation should indeed reduce terrorist activities through protecting people and infrastructure, disrupting terrorist plots, and deterring some potential terrorists. Others, however, remain doubtful, suggesting that such legislation often serves merely as lip service or, worse, actually contributes to increasing terrorist activities. Using a newly assembled database on national-level counterterrorist legislation, I conduct a cross-national time-series analysis of legislation and subsequent terrorism for the years 1981–2009. The analyses demonstrate a discrepancy between the short- and long-term effects of national-level counterterrorist legislation. In the short term, laws have no effect on the number of terrorist attacks and their severity. In the long term, however, the cumulative effects of most legislation are counterproductive and harmful, although some types of legislation do produce beneficial results and are associated with a reduction in future attacks.

“COIN,” the counter-terrorism doctrine the United States used during the Iraq War, was in criminological terms overly reliant on militarized “incapacitationist” strategies. Based a on competing “societal reactions” or community-level labeling theory, we argue that COIN failed to anticipate but predictably produced state-based “legal cynicism” in Arab Sunni communities—increasing rather than decreasing politically defiant terrorist crimes. We test our hypotheses with nationally representative surveys and data on terrorist attacks collected before, during, and immediately after the 2007 Surge in US troops. The Surge increased perceptions of unnecessary US-led violence against Arab Sunni non-combatants, provoking cynical beliefs in Arab Sunni communities, creating local contexts in which terrorist attacks increased, and foreshadowing later advances by the Islamic State. Our findings show that oversimplified, incapacitation-oriented control tactics—in domestic policing, in COIN, or in the traditional warfare strategies that are replacing COIN—are likely to contribute to rather than reduce cycles of violence.

The terms terror, terrorism, and terrorist do not identify causally coherent and distinct social phenomena but strategies that recur across a wide variety of actors and political situations. Social scientists who reify the terms confuse themselves and render a disservice to public discussion. The U.S. government's own catalogs of terrorist events actually support both claims.

This study examines the major factors that predict states’ repressive policies, focusing on the relationship between oppositional terror attacks and state repression of core human rights. We rely on a theoretical framework that brings together actor-oriented explanations and socio-cultural approaches. While the former emphasize purposive rational action, international pressures, and domestic threats, the latter focus on the power of ideas and on processes of policy diffusion and cultural norms. Relying on a longitudinal cross-national analysis of panel data for the years 1981–2005, we find substantial evidence for the effects of both actor-oriented measurements and socio-cultural ones. These findings join a growing body of research that emphasizes the importance of the institutional and cultural determinants of states’ counterterrorist policies.