UA Professor Co-Authors Book Applying Business Principles to Terrorism Activity

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – A new book co-authored by Dr. Walter Enders, a University of Alabama economics professor, applies business principles to terrorism and is receiving high praise from analysts and authorities on the war on terrorism. The book, “The Political Economy of Terrorism,” is now available.

The book was written by authors living on separate sides of the country. Enders, who holds the Bidgood Chair of Economics and Finance at UA, lives in Tuscaloosa. Co-author Dr. Todd Sandler is the Robert R. and Kathryn A. Dockson Professor of International Relations and Economics at the University of Southern California. The two met while working together at Iowa State University. Before their collaboration on the current book, Enders and Sadler co-authored 20 articles on the subject of terrorism since the late 1980’s.

“We applied business principles to terrorist groups and got some very interesting results,” Enders said. In 2004, the National Academy of Sciences awarded Enders and Sandler the Estes Prize for Behavioral Research Relevant to the Prevention of Nuclear War for their joint work on transnational terrorism. The pair used game theory and time series analysis to document the cyclic nature of terrorist attacks in response to defensive counteractions.

Also in 2004, Enders was named the recipient of the Frederick Moody Blackmon- Sarah McCorkle Moody Outstanding Professor Award, one of The University of Alabama’s most prestigious awards. The award is presented annually to a University of Alabama faculty member who is judged by a selection committee to have made extraordinary contributions that reflect credit on the individual, on his or her field of study, on students, and on the University.

“I am proud of the book. It was hard work, and I am glad it’s done,” said Enders. Enders and Sandler worked on the book for about a year. Enders said he hopes readers find the book a informative source on terrorism, noting that while the attacks of 9/11 brought terrorism to the forefront of Americans’ minds, terrorism has been happening outside the United States for many years. Enders said, as an economist, he believes people are rational in their behavior and terrorists are no exception. “Terrorists act rationally. To win the war on terrorism we must assume that our opponents are going to act in their own self interest,” he said.

The Political Economy of Terrorism, being published by Cambridge University Press, presents a widely accessible approach to the study of terrorism that combines economic methods with political analysis and realities. It combines economic methodology – theoretical and empirical – with political analysis and applies the result to the study of domestic and transnational terrorism.

The book already is being called a “must read” for those people charged with conducting the nation’s war on terror. “Those seeking solid analysis instead of the unsupported assumptions, deliberately dire predictions, and partisan prescriptions that comprise much of the current discourse on terrorism will want to read Walter Enders and Todd Sandler’s Political Economy of Terrorism,” writes Brian Michael Jenkins, a noted authority on terrorism and senior advisor to the president of the Rand Corporation. The RAND Corporation is an American think tank formed to offer research and analysis to the U.S. military.

Geoffrey Heal of Columbia University and Howard Kunreuther of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania called “The Political Economy of Terrorism” the “first comprehensive treatment of terrorism that integrates game theory with a statistical analysis of data on terrorist behavior. Enders and Sandler have studied this problem for a number of years and provide a clear and insightful analysis of the challenges that we face in developing policies for addressing terrorism. This book should be of great interest to both researchers and policy makers in the United States and abroad.”

According to Michael Intriligator, professor of economics, political science, and public policy at UCLA, and Senior Fellow at the Milken Institute, “This book is a masterful treatment of the modern scourge of terrorism using the tools of economics, political science and other disciplines. Bruce Russett, Dean Acheson Professor of International Relations at Yale University, said Enders and Sandler are “perhaps the best social scientists doing systematic comparative study on terrorism. This is an essential statement of contemporary theory, evidence and policy implications.”

Enders said he has no plans right now to write more books on terrorism, but he will teach a course on the subject at UA for the 2006 spring semester, Economics 497: Political Economy of Terrorism.

Political Economy of Terrorism can be used as a college textbook and will be available in the trade book section of major bookstores.