This article examines the connection between a nation’s level of civil society organizational openness and the number of domestic terrorist attacks across 167 countries from 1970 to 2010. Following the contentious politics approach, we conceptualize terrorist organizations as engaged in high-risk movement activity and sensitive to organizational opportunities that make contention more likely. Panel fixed-effects negative binomial regression models support our hypothesis that a nation’s level of civil society openness increases exposure to domestic terrorist attacks. This work connects social movement theory with the cross-disciplinary literature working to understand terrorism by offering an explanation for terrorist attacks that are rooted in the organizational opportunity paradigm. It provides us a useful tool for future work on cross-national social movements in a cross-national perspective, as well as further work on terrorist organizations.

中文翻译：

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民间社会和国内恐怖袭击的风险：来自跨国定量分析的证据，1970-2010

本文考察了 1970 年至 2010 年间一个国家的公民社会组织开放程度与 167 个国家/地区发生的国内恐怖袭击事件之间的联系。按照有争议的政治方法，我们将恐怖组织概念化为从事高风险运动活动并对使竞争更有可能发生的组织机会。面板固定效应负二项式回归模型支持我们的假设，即一个国家的公民社会开放程度增加了国内恐怖袭击的风险。这项工作通过对植根于组织机会范式的恐怖袭击提供解释，将社会运动理论与致力于理解恐怖主义的跨学科文献联系起来。