Max Abrahms, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, Northeastern University | Faculty Affiliate, Global Resilience Institute
Boston, MA, UNITED STATES
Dr. Max Abrahms’ research focus is international security, especially terrorism
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Biography
Dr. Max Abrahms’ research focus is international security, especially terrorism. He is assistant professor of political science and public policy at Northeastern University, a member at the Council on Foreign Relations, a faculty fellow at India’s Observer Research Foundation, and an editorial board member on the journal Terrorism and Political Violence.
Abrahms has published in many journals such as International Organization, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Comparative Political Studies, Security Studies, and Harvard Business Review. Abrahms is also a frequent terrorism analyst in the media, especially on the consequences of terrorism, its motives, and the implications for counterterrorism strategy.
Previously, he has been awarded fellowships and financial backing from the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, the Empirical Studies of Conflict project at Princeton University and Stanford University, the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College, the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point Military Academy, George Washington University’s Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, the economics department at Bar Ilan University, the political science department at Johns Hopkins University, and the Belfer Center at Harvard University. Abrahms is also the author of Rules for Rebels: The Science of Victory in Militant History.
Areas of Expertise (5)
Counterterrotism Strategy
Political Science
International Security
Terrorism
Public Policy
Education (3)
University of California - Los Angeles: Ph.D., Political Science 2010
Oxford University, St. Antony's College: M.Phil., International Relations 2002
University of Pennsylvania: B.A., Political Science and History 2000
Affiliations (4)
- Northeastern University : Department of Political Science, Assistant Professor
- Council on Foreign Relations : Term Member
- Observer Research Foundation : Faculty Fellow
- Counter-Terrorism Academic Community : Member
Links (3)
Media Appearances (1)
Growing disdain for America’s false democratic ideals
Asia Times
2018-04-10
However, in the 2017 and 2018 attacks in Idlib and in Ghouta, it appears the rebels had more of an incentive to use them. The evidence was video footage solely provided by the UK/USAID-funded White Helmets, which is embedded with the armed opposition with its attendant political agenda, similar to the Eritrea case. Both attacks occurred when the Syrian government was winning, rather than losing ground, which in political science literature is a key motivator for governments to attack their own people out of desperation. As counter-terrorism expert Professor Max Abrahms observed, the structural conditions in this scenario are the exact opposite with Assad winning, so it was the rebels that had the strongest motive.
Articles (5)
The political effectiveness of terrorism revisited
Comparative Political Studies
2012 Terrorists attack civilians to coerce their governments into making political concessions. Does this strategy work? To empirically assess the effectiveness of terrorism, the author exploits variation in the target selection of 125 violent substate campaigns. The results show that terrorist campaigns against civilian targets are significantly less effective than guerrilla campaigns against military targets at inducing government concessions. The negative political effect of terrorism is evident across logit model specifications after carefully controlling for tactical confounds. Drawing on political psychology, the author concludes with a theory to account for why governments resist compliance when their civilians are targeted.
Does terrorism really work? Evolution in the conventional wisdom since 9/11
Defense and Peace Economics
2011 The basic narrative of bargaining theory predicts that, all else equal, anarchy favors concessions to challengers who demonstrate the will and ability to escalate against defenders. For this reason, post-9/11 political science research explained terrorism as rational strategic behavior for non-state challengers to induce government compliance given their constraints. Over the past decade, however, empirical research has consistently found that neither escalating to terrorism nor with terrorism helps non-state actors to achieve their demands. In fact, escalating to terrorism or with terrorism increases the odds that target countries will dig in their political heels, depriving the non-state challengers of their given preferences. These empirical findings across disciplines, methodologies, as well as salient global events raise important research questions, with implications for counterterrorism …
What Terrorists Really Want: Terrorist Motives and Counterterrorism Strategy
International Security
2008 What do terrorists want? No question is more fundamental for devising an effective counterterrorism strategy. The international community cannot expect to make terrorism unprofitable and thus scarce without knowing the incentive structure of its practitioners. The strategic model—the dominant paradigm in terrorism studies—posits that terrorists are political utility maximizers. According to this view, individuals resort to terrorism when the expected political gains minus the expected costs outweigh the net expected benefits of alternative forms of protest. The strategic model has widespread currency in the policy community; extant counterterrorism strategies seek to defeat terrorism by reducing its political utility. The most common strategies are to fight terrorism by decreasing its political benefits via a strict no concessions policy; decreasing its prospective political benefits via …
Why Democracies Make Superior Counterterrorists
Security Studies
2007 The conventional wisdom is that terrorists tend to target democracies because they are uniquely vulnerable to coercion. Terrorists are able to coerce democracies into acceding to their policy demands because liberal countries suffer from two inherent counterterrorism constraints:(1) the commitment to civil liberties prevents democracies from adopting sufficiently harsh countermeasures to eradicate the terrorism threat, and (2) their low civilian cost tolerance limits their ability to withstand attacks on their civilian populations. This article tests both propositions of the conventional wisdom that (a) terrorists attack democracies over other regime types because (b) liberal constraints render democracies vulnerable to coercion. The data do not sustain either proposition: illiberal countries are the victims of a disproportionate number of terrorist incidents and fatalities, and liberal countries are …
Why Terrorism Does Not Work
International Security
2006 This is the first article to analyze a large sample of terrorist groups in terms of their policy effectiveness. It includes every foreign terrorist organization (FTO) designated by the US Department of State since 2001. The key variable for FTO success is a tactical one: target selection. Terrorist groups whose attacks on civilian targets outnumber attacks on military targets do not tend to achieve their policy objectives, regardless of their nature. Contrary to the prevailing view that terrorism is an effective means of political coercion, the universe of cases suggests that, first, contemporary terrorist groups rarely achieve their policy objectives and, second, the poor success rate is inherent to the tactic of terrorism itself. The bulk of the article develops a theory for why countries are reluctant to make policy concessions when their civilian populations are the primary target.
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