>"In a [previous study of mine] assessing terrorism's coercive effectiveness, I found that in a sample of 28 well-known terrorist campaigns, the terrorist organizations accomplished their stated policy goals 0 percent of the time by attacking civilians."
>"The seven puzzles...are: 1) terrorist organizations do not achieve their stated political goals by attacking civilians; 2) terrorist organizations never use terrorism as a last resort and seldeom seize opportunities to become productive nonviolent political parties; 3) terrorist organizations reflexively reject compromise proposals offering significant policy concessions by the target government; 4) terrorist organizations have protean political platforms; 5) terrorist organizations generally carry out anonymous attacks, precluding target countries from making policy concessions; 6) terrorist organizations with identical political platforms routinely attack each other more than their mutally professed enemy; and 7) terrorist organizations resist disbanding when they consistently fail to achieve their political platforms or when their stated political grievances have been resolved..."
https://web.archive.org/web/20110727223802/http://lesswrong....
http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20about%20Terror
>"In a [previous study of mine] assessing terrorism's coercive effectiveness, I found that in a sample of 28 well-known terrorist campaigns, the terrorist organizations accomplished their stated policy goals 0 percent of the time by attacking civilians."
>"The seven puzzles...are: 1) terrorist organizations do not achieve their stated political goals by attacking civilians; 2) terrorist organizations never use terrorism as a last resort and seldeom seize opportunities to become productive nonviolent political parties; 3) terrorist organizations reflexively reject compromise proposals offering significant policy concessions by the target government; 4) terrorist organizations have protean political platforms; 5) terrorist organizations generally carry out anonymous attacks, precluding target countries from making policy concessions; 6) terrorist organizations with identical political platforms routinely attack each other more than their mutally professed enemy; and 7) terrorist organizations resist disbanding when they consistently fail to achieve their political platforms or when their stated political grievances have been resolved..."