Author ORCID Identifier

Kearns - https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7895-9129

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-15-2014

Publication Title

Studies in Conflict & Terrorism

Volume

37

Issue

5

First Page

422

Last Page

439

Abstract

Conventional wisdom holds that terrorism is committed for strategic reasons as a form of costly signaling to an audience. However, since over half of terrorist attacks are not credibly claimed, conventional wisdom does not explain many acts of terrorism. This article suggests that there are four lies about terrorism that can be incorporated in a rationalist framework: false claiming, false flag, the hot-potato problem, and the lie of omission. Each of these lies about terrorism can be strategically employed to help a group achieve its desired goal(s) without necessitating that an attack be truthfully claimed.

Comments

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism on April 15, 2014, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2014.893480

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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