The Roots of Terrorism

“Education, Poverty, and Terrorism: Is There a Causal Connection?” by Alan B. Krueger and Jitka Malecková, in Journal of Economic Perspectives (Fall 2003), Macalester College, 1600 Grand Ave., St. Paul, Minn. 55105.

The notion that poverty and ignorance breed terrorism seems to have a seductive appeal that transcends mere facts. Public figures left and right continue to repeat it, even though there’s little evidence to support it, write Krueger, an economist at Princeton University, and Malecková, a professor at the Institute for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Charles University, Prague.

As a rule, they note, better-off and better-educated people are more likely to support and participate in terrorist or militant acts than their less fortunate peers. In a December 2001 opinion survey of Pales­tinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, for example, 86 percent of adults who had attended high school supported armed attacks against Israeli targets, compared with 72 percent of their illiterate peers. And outright opposition to such attacks was much higher in the ranks of the illiterate: 26 percent voiced opposition, compared with only 12 percent of better-educated Palestinians.

Many studies of those who actually commit terrorist attacks follow the same general pattern. Of 129 Lebanese Hezbollah militants who became Shahids (martyrs) between 1982 and 1994, only 28 percent came from impoverished families (while 33 percent of all Lebanese were living in poverty). Thirty-three percent of the killers had been to high school, compared with only 23 percent of the general population. A study of 285 Palestinian terrorists who carried out suicide bomb attacks for other groups between 1987 and 2002 found that they were nearly twice as likely to have finished high school and attended college as other Palestinians. Two of the bombers were the sons of millionaires.

On the other side of the conflict, a look at the membership of Israel’s deadly Bloc of the Faithful, which killed 23 Palestinians during the early 1980s, turns up teachers, writers, entrepreneurs, a chemical engineer, and other high achievers.

Krueger and Malecková look more to politics than to economics to explain terrorism. People who have “enough education and income to concern themselves with more than minimum economic subsistence” are more likely to become engaged in politics, violent or not. And countries that allow fewer political outlets are more likely to produce terrorists. Comparing the home countries of international terrorists who struck between 1997 and 2002, the authors found that countries with basic civil liberties produced fewer terrorists. When political freedoms were taken into account, the poorest countries were no worse incubators of terrorism than the richest.