¿Cuándo fracasa el terrorismo? El papel de la política antiterrorista, la fragmentación organizativa y los costes individuales en el final de Terra Lliure

Diego Muro Ruiz

Authors

Diego Muro Ruiz Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals (IBEI)

Keywords:

terrorism, counter-terrorism, political violence, Terra Lliure, disengagement

Abstract

When do terrorist campaigns end? Why do terrorist groups decline? What are the causes of terrorist disbandment? What are the explanatory factors that account for individual and collective disengagement? This paper analyzes the case of Terra Lliure, a Catalan terrorist group active between 1979 and 1995, in order to identify the independent variables that determine the success or failure of terrorist groups. In accordance to the literature on political violence, the paper develops a multi-level argument that distinguishes three explanatory variables: (1) counter-terrorism; (2) organizational dynamics; and (3) individual factors. The article concludes that a counter-terrorist policy (macro level) based on increasing the cost of participation in an insurgent group is most successful when it coincides with organizational fragmentation (meso level) and individual burnout (micro level).

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Author Biography

Diego Muro Ruiz, Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals (IBEI)

Diego Muro is Assistant Professor in Comparative Politics at the Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals (IBEI). Prior to joining IBEI he was Lecturer (tenured) in European Studies at King's College, London. He has also been Senior Fellow at the University of Oxford, Max Weber postdoctoral fellow at the European University Institute (EUI), visiting professor at James Madison University and visiting fellow at the Centre for International Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

He holds a PhD in Political Science from LSE (2004), a Masters degree in European Studies from the University of Sussex (1999) and a BA in Politics from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (1998). Trained as a political scientist, he has maintained an involvement in politics, sociology and history, working usually within interdisciplinary academic units, and practicing empirical approaches and critical enquiry from political and sociological perspectives. His doctoral thesis on radical Basque nationalism was published by Routledge in 2008 and he has also co-edited a volume on The Politics and Memory of Transition: The Spanish Model, which was also published by Routledge in 2011. His work has also been published in Politics, Nations and Nationalism, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and South European Society & Politics.

His main research interests are comparative politics, social movements, ethnic conflict and asymmetric warfare. He is currently working on a comparative study of terrorist disengagement in Southern Europe.