Articles of the month: June 2021

Some Somali majority clan girls and women receive economic and security benefits from marriage to Al-Shabaab fighters. Yet, the literature treats women’s experiences monolithically and misses the role that race plays in determining the circumstances of such unions. The authors argue that one should not refer to the unions of Somali Bantu girls and women with Al-Shabaab fighters as a “marriage” but rather as sexual and domestic slavery – a form of extraction by Al-Shabaab that works to ethnically cleanse the Bantu from their ancestral land. Drawing on data from an original survey conducted in 2017 of 139 Somali Bantu refugee households who fled to Kenya during the previous year, the authors examine the nature and extent of unions between females from different races with Al-Shabaab fighters. Women and girls from majority clans are more likely to marry fighters freely. Compared to majority clan females, Somali Bantu girls are enslaved by Al-Shabaab fighters at younger ages and typically remain with their own families rather than moving to the man’s household, contrary to Somali’s patrilineal marriage customs. Al-Shabaab fighters do not claim the children they have with Somali Bantu girls and women, whom they despise as a racially distinct minority with low social status. This work underscores the need to avoid the term “marriage” when referring to the sexual slavery of minorities in Somalia by Al-Shabaab and for the international community both to investigate claims of ethnic cleansing as well as support the fledgling Somali government in establishing a system of rule of law.

This study applies routine activities theory to determine whether the characteristics of jihadi-inspired web defacements in the United States vary from all other defacements performed against IP addresses hosted within the United States from 2012 to 2016. We focus on target suitability variables and use a sample of over 2.2 million defacements reported by the independent website Zone-H. We estimated a binary logistic regression model and found that jihadi cyberattacks were rare among all the defacements performed in this 5-year period. Additionally, these findings demonstrated jihadists were more likely to target organizational websites and utilized specific attack methods compared to all other defacers. We contextualize our findings and outline a number of avenues for future research.

Research on terrorism disagrees on whether terrorist activity is at its highest in collapsed states, which are more hospitable to such activities, or whether terrorism increases in more capable states. We revisit this discussion by theorizing an interactive relationship: terrorists prefer to operate in politically-hospitable states, but their attack frequency within these states increases with greater technological capacity, which allows them to expand their military, recruitment, and financing operations. We analyze 27,018 terrorist incidents using regression and causal inference models, conduct a case study, and find robust support for this interactive logic. Our conclusions outline implications for policy and academic work.

nternational attacks by rebel groups are an historically important phenomenon. Yet, few scholars have sought to understand why some rebel organizations “go abroad” and commence international attacks and some do not. We theorize that a rebel group’s decision to attack internationally is partly the result of its home-state’s counter-insurgency strategy. Home-states that employ broad-based repression discourage rebels from engaging in international attacks. By contrast, home-states that employ narrowly targeted repression accelerate rebel decisions to attack internationally. Finally, concessions by the home-state are a sufficient condition for the rebel groups in our data to never attack internationally.

This paper addresses one of the most understudied departments operated by the Islamic State in its "state-building" project, the Department of Agriculture. The research reveals a complex system of governance, designed to maximize the Islamic State’s income and use an extensive bureaucracy to control land, food, populations, and the economy.