Visas and Walls. Nazli Avdan
Avdan 2015). Although transnational terrorism calls to mind the September 11 attacks, in actuality, terrorism is a relatively short-gun phenomenon. Terrorist groups tend to cluster in specific hot spots of high-volume activity (Braithwaite and Li 2007). Nonetheless, even if terrorist operatives are not mobile across borders, and even if organizations do not possess bases of operation in multiple countries, there are other ways in which terrorism can traverse borders. In general, terrorist violence features spatial dependency (Sageman 2004). Even when the tangible assets behind violence (arms, personnel, funds) do not travel across countries, the intangibles that support violence—tactics, ideas, and knowledge—can diffuse across borders. The form that violence takes can spread to other countries as homegrown groups mimic and adopt foreign groups’ tactics (Midlarsky, Crenshaw, and Yoshida 1980). For example, Hamas borrowed the suicide vest from the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka (Horowitz 2010). The decision to go transnational—rather than remain tied to a specific piece of territory—can signal group resolve and capabilities. To the extent that transnational spread permits more interlinkages among groups, transnationalization can also raise group lethality. Not surprisingly, then, ISIS’s ostensible decision to go global by waging a campaign in the West compounded anxiety over the group’s growing reach. Pundits speculated as to whether the attacks on the European continent signaled a tactical shift in the ISIS’s operations, in part to counterbalance its territorial losses in Iraq and Syria (Hegghammer and Nesser 2015). Furthermore, loyalties may also traverse borders, facilitating transnational recruitment (Piazza 2006). Finally, funding and weapons are also smuggled across borders, a dynamic that gains speed and currency with the emerging organized crime-terrorism nexus (Dishman 2005). In sum, transnational terrorism defies and circumvents state borders in a number of ways, most starkly because groups establish bases across frontiers but also through transnational financing, emulation of foreign groups’ tactics, and transnational mobilization and recruitment.
In contrast, the state’s power is hierarchically organized within its own territory. Scholarship maintains that borders are more constraining on states’ armed forces than on transnational actors (Naim 2005; Salehyan 2006; Staniland 2006). Salehyan (2006) places the state’s agents at the far end of a continuum of global mobility. The moral opprobrium on territorial conquest, buttressed by the normative consensus on territorial sanctity, means that in theory at least states cannot easily move troops across neighboring territories (Zacher 2001). International borders constrain different types of flows unequally: capital and then goods occupy the relatively mobile end of the spectrum, whereas the state’s security forces are at the other end. “In sum, the state is limited by its boundaries—the capacity to wield force…. is largely constrained by sovereign borders” (Salehyan 2006, 31). This limitation partly stems from the transaction costs involved in efficient collaboration among states. States confront hurdles when cooperating against atypical threats. To begin with, states cannot agree on a common list of designated terrorist groups (Sandler, Arce, and Enders 2009). They also are not effective at coordinating antiterrorism efforts. In contrast, terrorist organizations sometimes strategically pool their resources together to offset their relative military weakness (Hoffman 1998). They are effective at networking: forming alliances with each other, learning new techniques and modes of attack, and even going so far as to train together even in the absence of ideological commonalities. Terrorist groups excel at developing cross-border connections and are in fact found to be, on average, more centrally connected than criminal networks (Helfstein and Solomon 2014).4
Transnational actors are able to capitalize on the disproportionate constraining effect of borders (Shelley 2006). Smugglers, for example, take advantage of price differentials across borders (Carter and Poast 2015), in addition to being able to relocate operations to skirt state monitoring. Transnational terrorists can similarly reap the benefits of mobility across borders by relocating and regrouping if dislodged from state territories. Terrorists’ ability to network across countries makes it difficult to detect and identify them, which in turn facilitates clandestine entry into states’ territories. To surmount the asymmetrical limitations on state power projection capabilities, states may turn to defensive measures focused on preventing access to territory. Fortifying borders may emerge as a more attractive and feasible strategy when compared to risky endeavors such as air campaigns or ground incursions into neighboring territories (Staniland 2006).5 Arguably, however, technological innovations make a state’s power projection across borders more feasible.6 Drones, for example, can augment monitoring and surveillance regimes. Newer technologies overcome the normative constraint to some extent by permitting states to project power without actual boots on the ground. These technologies, however, are certainly not impervious to criticism.7 In addition, territorial integrity is closely linked to border fixity: as territorial conquest has become uncommon as a form of power maximization, states’ borders have become more and more fixed (Atzili 2006).
The Stealth Element
The spread of transnational terrorism makes it difficult for states to mount a counterresponse, and the stealth element deepens states’ disadvantage in the face of non-state threats. Terrorist groups can leverage information asymmetries to gain an edge against militarily advantaged states. As a consequence, ““an information society” such as that of the contemporary United States would be at an informational disadvantage with respect to networks of individuals whose communications seem to occur largely through handwritten messages and face-to-face contacts” (Keohane 2002, 34). Militants can defy border control, escape law enforcement, and circumvent state surveillance. Contrary to popular perception, however, clandestine territorial access does not always mean that militants slip undetected across borders. It can also transpire when terrorist groups exploit legal channels of territorial access. In fact, fears that terrorists would exploit the refugee regime were at the heart of some European states’ calls for stringency. Surreptitious entry reifies the idea of loss of control over borders and erodes sovereignty (Sassen 2006). Insofar as terrorist actors are hard to detect, conventional notions of defense do not apply to counterterrorism (Cronin 2002; Paul 2005).
Additionally, terrorist events inflict psychological costs on targets because they carry shock value. By exploiting uncertainty over the when and where of violence, terrorist actors are in effect able to gain symbolic power over state actors (Juergensmeyer 1997). This was true of several surprise attacks against democracies: Madrid in 2004, London in 2005, Paris in 2015, Ankara in 2015 and 2016, and Brussels in 2016. These events drove home the message that despite surveillance systems, the governments had failed to insulate citizens from these attacks. Even where societies were on high alert and anticipated transnational terrorist violence, the unpredictability of these events underscored the feebleness of the security establishment.8 For example, in the wake of the Brussels attack, commentators stated that while Belgium had been identified as a likely target by ISIS, and worries had been expressed over its status as a cradle of radicalization, the attacks quickly drove attention to the failures of the state’s security apparatus (Ivanovic 2016).
Thus, on one level, the stealth element exacerbates anxieties that even militarily powerful states are at the mercy of transnational militants. We imagine that militants mask their true aims at border crossings and carry out their nefarious plans once they attain territorial access. On another level, however, there is also uncertainty over whether legal travelers are prospective recruits. The National Strategy for Combating Terrorism warned about terrorism’s global reach, that is, its capacity to have transnational and global appeal (United States 2011). Universalist non-secular ideologies, central to the contemporary wave of terrorism, permit groups to broadcast their message to broader, abstract, and often transnationally constructed communities, which they purport to represent and on whose behalf they commit violence (Rapoport 2001). This lends another layer of uncertainty insofar as religion can be utilized as a transnational recruitment mechanism (Juergensmeyer 2003; Lacqueur 1999). The globalization of recruitment also makes detecting and ferreting out operatives more difficult. Foreign fighters, for example, can mask their true intentions when crossing borders.
The stealth element contributes to fears over migration as a conduit for terrorism flows (Bove and Bohmelt 2015). Migration can function as an avenue for transnational terrorism to the degree that it feeds the social and kinship networks that underpin radicalization and recruitment. This possibility focuses on radicalization after migrants have already gained