Transnational Terrorism as an Unintended Consequence of a Military Footprint

Abstract

Terrorist groups commonly cite the local presence of foreign troops as a motivation for their violence. This article examines the validity and robustness of the proposition that the deployment of military capabilities overseas provokes terrorist violence against the deploying state's global interests. A cross-national dataset, combining data on foreign troop deployments and transnational terrorist violence directed against states' global interests, is used to create a series of empirical models at the directed-dyad-year level of analysis. Descriptive statistics and multivariate analyses provide corroborative evidence of territorial terrorism. These findings are robust to a wide variety of alternative specifications and to the use of instrumental variables regression to model the potential endogeneity of terrorism to troop deployment decisions.