What does the political violence literature say are the results of killing leaders (such as al-Baghdadi) on violent social movements? It's quite mixed. ---Thread 1/8---
For instance, @JennaEJordan looks at leadership decapitation strategies and she finds that many organizations, such as Al-Qaida (following Bin-Laden's death) are resilient to their leader's deaths. 2/8 mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.11… She also a new book out. amazon.com/Leadership-Dec…
Zussman & Zussman look at the policy of Israeli targeting of Palestinian militant leaders during the 2nd Intifada using Israeli stock prices. They find different effects for killing political leaders (↓ prices) vs. killing militant leaders ↑ prices 3/8 pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10…
@pbkpotter and @MaxAbrahms find that a lack of leadership through organizational problems, or assassination, increase the propensity of terror groups to target civilians with violence due to this "leadership deficit" 4/8 s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.d…
@J0HNST0N uses the quasi-randomness of successful vs. unsuccessful attempts to remove militant leaders and finds that successful leadership removal increase the probability of war termination, and decrease subsequent militant violence. 5/8 mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10…
@tricbacon and Arsenault argue that the removal of key leaders can lead to terror groups breaking apart. They show that the split between ISIS and Al-Qaida can be directly traced to Bin Laden's death. 6/8 tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…
In the context of cartel-criminal violence, @brian_jphillips finds that decapitation reduces criminal violence in the short-term, but in the long-run increases it. 7/8 researchgate.net/profile/Brian_…
Finally, it should be noted that the death of Prabhakaran marked the end of the LTTE and the Sri-Lankan Civil War. 8/8 content.time.com/time/world/art…
