Understanding the influence of goal-structure on the disbandment of terrorist groups: Don’t judge a book by its cover

Master’s Thesis from the year 2016 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: Peace and Conflict Studies, Security, grade: 1,0, Uppsala University (Department of Peace and Conflict Research), language: English, abstract: Very little is known about the circumstances that lead a terrorist group to cease their operations in one way rather than another. This study seeks to answer the question what impact the goal-structure of a terrorist group has on their disbandment. A new framework describes the structure of goals by differentiating operative and official goals of terrorist groups along their geographical scope, their final goal’s extent, and the respective effectiveness this is accomplished by. I argue that strategic or abstract goal-structures determine the way a terrorist organisation ends. By applying a multinomial logistic regression model with a novel dataset on 155 groups’ goal-structures, I show that a more strategic goal-structure increases the likelihood of splintering and victory, while an abstract goal-structure increases the likelihood of defeat by police or military force whilst also leading terrorist groups to join non-violent political participation.