Abstract:
Since September 11th, there have been massive increases in personal, commercial, and
governmental expenditures on anti-terrorism strategies, as well as a proliferation of programs
designed to fight terrorism. These increases in spending and program development have focused
attention on the most significant and central policy question related to these interventions: Do
these programs work? To explore research evidence regarding this question, we conducted a
Campbell systematic review on counter-terrorism strategies to determine the scope and strength
of evaluation research in this area.
In the course of our review, we discovered that there is an almost complete absence of
evaluation research on counter-terrorism strategies. From over 20,000 studies we located on
terrorism, we found only seven which contained moderately rigorous evaluations of counterterrorism
programs. We conclude that there is little scientific knowledge about the effectiveness
of most counter-terrorism interventions. Further, from the evidence we were able to locate, it
appears that some evaluated interventions either didn’t work or sometimes increased the
likelihood of terrorism and terrorism-related harm.
The findings of this review dramatically emphasize the need for government leaders,
policy makers, researchers, and funding agencies to include and insist on evaluations of the
effectiveness of these programs in their agendas. These agendas would include identifying ways
to overcome methodological and data challenges often associated with terrorism research,
increasing funding to evaluate existing programs through methodologically rigorous evaluation
designs, and paying attention to existing evaluations of programs when implementing them.
Further, programs should be assessed to establish if they cause more harm than good or if they
create unanticipated consequences.
counter-terrorism strategy