terrorist events inflict psychological costs on targets because they carry shock value. By exploiting uncertainty over the when and where of violence, terrorist actors are in effect able to gain symbolic power over state actors (Juergensmeyer 1997). This was true of several surprise attacks against democracies: Madrid in 2004, London in 2005, Paris in 2015, Ankara in 2015 and 2016, and Brussels in 2016. These events drove home the message that despite surveillance systems, the governments had failed to insulate citizens from these attacks. Even where societies were on high alert and anticipated transnational terrorist violence, the unpredictability of these events underscored the feebleness of the security establishment.8 For example, in the wake of the Brussels attack, commentators stated that while Belgium had been identified as a likely target by ISIS, and worries had been expressed over its status as a cradle of radicalization, the attacks quickly drove attention to the failures of the state’s security apparatus (Ivanovic 2016).
Thus, on one level, the stealth element exacerbates anxieties that even militarily powerful states are at the mercy of transnational militants. We imagine that militants mask their true aims at border crossings and carry out their nefarious plans once they attain territorial access. On another level, however, there is also uncertainty over whether legal travelers are prospective recruits. The National Strategy for Combating Terrorism warned about terrorism’s global reach, that is, its capacity to have transnational and global appeal (United States 2011). Universalist non-secular ideologies, central to the contemporary wave of terrorism, permit groups to broadcast their message to broader, abstract, and often transnationally constructed communities, which they purport to represent and on whose behalf they commit violence (Rapoport 2001). This lends another layer of uncertainty insofar as religion can be utilized as a transnational recruitment mechanism (Juergensmeyer 2003; Lacqueur 1999). The globalization of recruitment also makes detecting and ferreting out operatives more difficult. Foreign fighters, for example, can mask their true intentions when crossing borders.
The stealth element contributes to fears over migration as a conduit for terrorism flows (Bove and Bohmelt 2015). Migration can function as an avenue for transnational terrorism to the degree that it feeds the social and kinship networks that underpin radicalization and recruitment. This possibility focuses on radicalization after migrants have already gained access. A report by the Nixon Center voices these fears: “Migration and terrorism are linked; not because all immigrants are terrorists, but because all, or nearly all, terrorists in the West have been immigrants” (Leiken 2004, 6). The Hamburg Cell, a group of expatriate students that formed around a jihadi radical who had illegally immigrated to Germany, orchestrated the 9/11 attacks. Radicalization is a multistep process (Sageman 2004), whereby host-country context can interact with active recruitment machinations by terrorist groups to produce extremism on host-country soil. States also fear that operatives may hide among the general populace and activate sleeper cells within the host (Dishman 2005). The prospect of infiltration makes it possible that foreign violent actors can lodge themselves within the state, in effect allowing them to repudiate borders and gain a foothold in destination states.
Psychological Impact
The desire to instill and disseminate fear lies at the core of terrorist violence. Fear is what links the motivation to use violence to an anticipated policy outcome (Braithwaite 2013). Fear is the pivot point of terrorist violence and, consequently, public perception is the true target of terrorist assaults. Terrorists use violence to manipulate the expectations of an audience that expands beyond the immediate victims. They intimidate through the promise of future violence to come. The public has a double role as the audience of terrorist violence and the impetus for policy change (Friedland and Merari 1985). By spreading fear, terrorist actors also seek to undermine the government’s competence in the public’s eye (Bueno de Mesquita (2005).
Public fears stimulate policy change insofar as political leaders believe tougher policies will alleviate these fears. For public attitudes to have policy impact, leaders should also factor in these fears. Typically, because democratic leaders are office seeking, they are cost-sensitive and more responsive to these fears. Management of fear is especially important given empirical patterns of terrorism: terrorism is a rare event (Mueller 2006). Risk assessment becomes more inaccurate in the face of high-consequence rare events (Kunreuther 2002). Transnational terrorists embody this phenomenon: terrorist actors capitalize on unpredictability to create a sense of helplessness. Mueller stresses that “the costs of terrorism commonly come much more from hasty, ill-considered, and over-wrought reactions, or overreactions, to it than from anything the terrorists have done” (2005, 222). Precisely because these threats are hard to anticipate, ameliorating fear goes a long way toward effective counterterrorism (Friedman 2011; Khalil 2006).
Scholarship from psychology is insightful in terms of understanding how the public responds to terrorist violence. Persistent terrorism generates a range of ill effects. Moreover, these effects are enduring: terrorism not only dampens public morale but negatively (and perhaps irrevocably) alters the psychosocial fabric of democratic societies (Peffley, Hutchison, and Shamir 2015). We also know that terrorism evokes fear and anger and that these emotional responses are tied to different types of policy demands (Huddy et al. 2005). Fear demands caution whereas anger demands retribution. Attitudes toward terrorism have implications for a range of policy outcomes. Policy change is more likely in the face of terrorism because the political milieu shifts to the right, whereby the public gravitates increasingly toward illiberal and authoritarian attitudes. Chronic terrorism leads to limitations on minority rights (Merolla and Zechmeister 2009). Terrorism rewrites public attitudes by sapping forbearance in societies, thus posing a danger to democratic governance (Peffley, Hutchison, and Shamir 2015). The literature thus conveys that terrorism has direct and indirect effects on policies. More directly, violence can animate specific antiterrorism measures. Indirectly, it shapes public attitudes toward policies and thereby enlarges the scope for policymaking. The public becomes more intolerant of minorities and more willing to support hard-line policies such as increased surveillance, enhanced interrogation tactics, and restricted civil liberties and minority rights (Peffley, Hutchison, and Shamir 2015; Piazza 2015).
So far, scholarship has sidestepped the question of how public attitudes toward violence affect migration and border control. The political attitudes that inspire toughness in antiterrorism may do the same for migration and border control. Widespread authoritarianism and illiberalism should generate a political environment supportive of migration restrictions and border crackdowns. If heightened fears bring in strongman leaders and right-wing governments, this should also bolster policy stringency. Chronic terrorism also foments generalized feelings of insecurity, which are linked not to particular incidents or perpetrators but to beliefs that the state and society are vulnerable (Joslyn and Haider-Markel 2007). Even when threats do not emanate from outside the state or are unrelated to terrorism, leaders can animate latent feelings of insecurity in order to push forward hard-line agendas. The death of a border agent in Texas in November 2017 reanimated the Trump administration’s calls for the border wall (Bever, Hawkins, and Miroff 2017). The incident is unrelated to terrorism, but it can still be leveraged to push the wall forward because of extant fears of outside threats.
There are two insights from previous research about public attitudes toward terrorism that I argue connect fears to policy change. The first concerns the distinction between selfish and communal fears, which mirrors the well-known distinction economists draw between pocketbook concerns and macroconcerns over the national economy. Joslyn and Haider-Markel (2007) show that sociotropic fears rather than personal fears connect more closely to policy demands. Perceptions that the community and the way of life are endangered are more powerful drivers of policy change than personal fears that one’s life is in danger. The second insight is that terrorist threats are prone to othering and, at the extreme, scapegoating those outside of the community (Piazza 2015). Violence stirs resentment, creates demand for punitive measures, and exacerbates ethnocentrism (Feldman and Stenner 1997). The perception that threats emanate from outside the community justifies stringency in migration and border control. Moreover, the link between terrorism and border policies relies on the perception that threats arise from outside the state. Threat perception functions through the prism of nationhood,
