Terrorist Group and Government Interaction: Progress in Empirical Research

Much progress has been made in the literature on terrorism and political violence over the last decade or more. More specifically, the proliferation of cross-national quantitative empirical work on terrorism has generated numerous advances and insights. While the volume of published work is impressive and the key findings are helpful to both scholars and policy-makers, much remains to be done. This paper argues that future work in this area can be improved with progress in several key areas. Interaction between a violent group and the government it targets is central to much of our theory. However, the theoretical implications of this interaction are not fully exploited with current data and prominent methods of analyzing it. Suggestions are provided that are intended to aid future researchers in addressing this point and in exploiting synergies between cross-national quantitative work and qualitative case study work.