Countering Terrorism. US vs EU Strategies and their Implications for Human Rights

To achieve their goals, terrorist organizations use a variety of strategies. Terrorists, in fact, must adopt costly signals to demonstrate their determination to achieve long-term objectives, then to gain credibility and listening. Kydd and Walter, two important researchers and political scientists, have individuated five strategies that are used by terrorists to achieve their goals. To investigate these five strategic logics of costly signalling, it is necessary before to introduce other two key-factors: targets and uncertainty.
The first key-factor to consider are the targets. About this point, a distinction must be made between goals and targets. On one side, goals of terrorism, as it has been affirmed in the previous paragraphs, are the ultimate political objectives of a terrorist organizations. On the other side, targets of terrorism are “entities that can deliver the terrorist political goal”.
Terrorist groups interact with two types of targets that they hope to influence: a) enemy government; b) terrorists’ own domestic population. Obviously, what terrorists attempt to obtain from the two targets is different; what these organizations want to get from the enemy, that is for example the government of a state, are concessions, and, whether failing that, they will adopt form of coercion; while what terrorists want to gain with their own population is support and also to control it.

The second key-factor to take into account is uncertainty. There are three types of uncertainty by the targets that can lead to violence – and so that should be investigated to prevent terrorism: a) uncertainty about the actual power of the terrorist group; b) uncertainty about the resolve of the terrorist group; c) uncertainty about the trustworthiness of the terrorist group.
Kydd and Walter have combined the two targets of terrorism with the three subjects of uncertainty; in this way, they have obtained the five strategies of terrorism that are used by terrorists. How it is possible to see from the figure 10, these five strategic logics of terrorism are: 1) attrition; 2) intimidation; 3) provocation; 4) spoiling; 5) outbidding.

Understanding how these strategies exactly work is also a necessary requirement to elaborate effective counterterrorism strategies. In fact, it is not possible to think about the best responses that governments could utilize to prevent terrorism and to protect their countries from attacks without before entering in the mind of terrorists.
In the next paragraphs, I will explain in detail the five strategical logics of terrorism, putting them into connection with historical examples – some very recent, others a little less – of the use of these strategies and examining some responses that the governments of different states decided to adopt.