The Relationship Between Domestic Protest and Oppositional Political Terrorism in Connection with the Gulf Conflict

Abstract

The author quantitatively tests eight interrelated hypotheses about the relationship between protests against the allies' participation in the Gulf War and the use of oppositional political terrorism connected to this crisis. Both visual inspection of the data and quantitative analysis supports the relationship between non-Gulf Conflict related terrorism, protest connected to the Gulf Conflict and Gulf-related terrorism. Characteristics of protests, such as number of protesters and presence of violence, however, make negligible contributions to Gulf-specific terrorism. However, these variables in combination with the number of days the coalition forces were in the Gulf account for a moderate amount of the variance. There is also a significant relationship between protest and terrorism as a function of the period of conflict. Whereas protests are high and terrorism is low in period one, the reverse is true for the last period.