Written by: Beck

I've long heard that poverty is one of the root causes of terrorism. And it made sense to me, so I never thought to challenge the notion. After all, you take fervent fundamentalist religious beliefs and mix them with a life of financial desperation, and it's not too complicated to see how that could lead someone to the conclusion that the optimal course of action is to pick up an AK-47 and start killing Americans. Bonus points if you get killed in the process.

Looks like that might actually be a completely mistaken view of reality. A logically compelling view perhaps, but ultimately mistaken.

According to research by Associate Professor Alberto Abadie of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, economic poverty is simply not a factor.

Before analyzing the data, Abadie believed it was a reasonable assumption that terrorism has its roots in poverty, especially since studies have linked civil war to economic factors. However, once the data was corrected for the influence of other factors studied, Abadie said he found no significant relationship between a nation's wealth and the level of terrorism it experiences.

"In the past, we heard people refer to the strong link between terrorism and poverty, but in fact when you look at the data, it's not there. This is true not only for events of international terrorism, as previous studies have shown, but perhaps more surprisingly also for the overall level of terrorism, both of domestic and of foreign origin," Abadie said.

What's even more striking, however, is the link Dr. Abadie does find: terrorist activity, both foreign and domestic, has a direct correlation with political freedom. This is the sort of thing which resonates immediately with the theory and conclusions behind Libertarian political philosophy and Austrian (i.e. Mises) economic philosophy. But it's one of the conclusions of those relatively utopian philosophies that I dismissed as unrealistic as they failed to take into account the innate irrationality of much human behavior.

However, the link isn't completely cut and dry--the correlation between terrorism and freedom is not linear. Nations with high levels of political freedom experience very low levels of terrorism. Nations with very low levels of political freedom also experience very low levels of terrorism. The authoritarian restrictiveness on all aspects of human activity in such regimes seems to be sufficient to repress the activities of terrorists.

Where terrorism is most prevalent is in countries with middling levels of political freedom.

Instead, Abadie detected a peculiar relationship between the levels of political freedom a nation affords and the severity of terrorism. Though terrorism declined among nations with high levels of political freedom, it was the intermediate nations that seemed most vulnerable.

Like those with much political freedom, nations at the other extreme - with tightly controlled autocratic governments - also experienced low levels of terrorism.

[...] "When you go from an autocratic regime and make the transition to democracy, you may expect a temporary increase in terrorism," Abadie said.

This creates a conundrum for democratization and state-building efforts in repressive regions of the Middle East and elsewhere. You start with a highly repressive regime--like Iraq. Your goal is to move it to a highly free nation--like America. To get there, however, you have to cross a middle ground which is ripe for terrorism to flourish.

Yet another reason not to lose heart when you hear people talk of "quagmire" in Iraq. We always knew the road would be a hard one. And now the data seems to explain just why that is.

(Hat tip: OTB)