The Impact Of Natural Disasters On Kurdish Terrorism In Turkey 1987-2011: The Importance Of Adequate Government Responses To Natural Disasters

Abstract

Natural disasters and terrorism present major challenges in their aftermath to a state and its populace, and help to define the identity of nations (Flynn, 2008). Destructive in their own right, previous research has argued that natural disasters also provide the catalyst for acts of terrorism (Berrebi and Ostwald, 2011), complicating the role that state actions hold in response to a natural disaster. Responses to natural disasters by a state however vary (Perry and Lindell, 2003), and this thesis posits that the response to a natural disaster presents a unique situation for a state, through perceived adequacy of its response, to alter the rational incentives for a group to engage in subsequent terrorism. Using Turkey between 1987 and 2011 as a case study, these data suggest that the perceived adequacy of a response to a natural disaster is inversely associated with ethno-nationalist terrorism within Turkey in the following month.