Fighting together? understanding bilateral cooperation in the realm of counterterrorism

ABSTRACT Since September 11, there has been marked rise in research on the transnational aspect of terrorist organizations, such as Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. However, there has been little focus on when and why nations sometimes cooperate in counterterrorism, while at other times they deal with the challenge of terrorism separately. Our contribution here is two-fold. First, we develop a conceptual framework that identifies the different ways in which polities cooperate when they are executing CT policies. Second, using a newly collected dataset of CT campaigns and state cooperation from 1970 to 2007, we test the theoretical framework in an effort to explain under which conditions countries choose to cooperate or fight alone. The results indicate that traditional power-centric explanations for cooperation matter, but not to the exclusion of less-tangible factors such as identity and the nature of the violence used by the terrorist group.