Aid to Women's Empowerment Efforts as an Approach to Counterterrorism: A Time-Series Analysis
Open Access
- Author:
- Tesoriero, Nichole Marie
- Area of Honors:
- International Politics
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- James A Piazza, Thesis Supervisor
Dr. Matthew Richard Golder, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- counterterrorism
ODA
international aid
women's empowerment
transnational terrorism
domestic terrorism
quantitative analysis
time-series analysis
terrorism
development aid - Abstract:
- Can aid to women’s empowerment efforts aid counterterrorism efforts? Due to the consensus that the average terrorist is male, little research exists on how bettering women’s position in society could decrease terrorism. Not only are women active members of terrorist organizations—the number of women taking on violent roles in these organizations is increasing, and they have historically played an integral part in terrorist recruiting. Aid to women’s empowerment efforts may either bolster women’s social and economic position, lessening their support for terrorist organizations, or encourage recipient governments to fight terrorism within their own spheres of influence (or both). This theoretical approach justifies using statistical inquiry via a time-series negative binomial regression analysis to evaluate whether or not aid to women’s empowerment efforts has an effect on terrorism. Terrorism as the dependent variable is approached at two different angles—as transnational terrorist incidents exported by the aid recipient country, and as all incidents (whether domestic or transnational) occurring in the aid recipient country. The results of the analysis support the theory that aid to women’s empowerment efforts may decrease the amount of transnational attacks that an aid recipient country exports. Discouragingly, this study also concludes that the aid may lead to more frequent attacks occurring in the aid recipient country.