Where do Terrorists Come From?

Abstract

Which social, political and global factors affect the supply of labor to terrorist organizations? To answer this question, I propose a multivariate model at the national level which includes three classes of factors hypothesized to have a relationship with the supply of labor to terrorism. Drawing on motivation and political opportunism as explanations of terrorism, the three classes of factors are determined as social structural, political institutional, and global capitalist contexts. The data for the dependent variables is obtained from 28 countries between 1991 and 1997. After applying the negative binomial regression model in a cross sectional time series analysis to the afore-mentioned factors, I found that political institutional factors and nations' position in the world system are related to the origins of terrorists.