The Insider’s View on Terrorist Organizations

Abstract

This chapter explores the managerial challenges inherent in terrorism by analyzing 108 memoirs written by participants in terrorist organizations that carried descriptions of individual's activities in those organizations. This approach addresses one of the key challenges in studying the internal dynamics of terrorist organizations: the relative dearth of data on what actually happens inside these inherently secretive institutions. Aside from a few highly salient examples (al-Qa'ida, Fatah, al-Qa'ida in Iraq), the internal correspondence of terrorist organizations has not been readily available to scholars and so it is hard to pinpoint the pervasiveness of hierarchy and control inside these groups. The chapter shows that agency problems are pervasive in terrorist organizations and security-reducing paperwork and bureaucracy were present in many of them.