Ole J. Forsberg, Ph.D.

At its broadest, my substantive research agenda focuses on issues pertaining to conflict and security—both intrastate and interstate. The interstate component addresses the factors that cause state to war with one another, especially why democracies are the targets of violent force more often than they are the users—given that democracies tend to win the majority of the wars in which they fight. Having the solution to this paradox may facilitate policy changes in the states of the world that reduce the probability of conflict outbreak.

The intrastate aspect of my substantive research concerns terrorism—what factors encourage, or facilitate, them to initiate terrorism campaigns. One of the primary goals of this branch of my research is to create a greater awareness that terrorist outbreaks can not only be predicted to some degree, but that there are things we can do to reduce the probability of being the victims of that terrorism. In this research, I draw upon the wealth of theory in both psychology and sociology dealing with the individual and the group and combine it with political science theory dealing with the state and the interactions among and between the states.

Dissertation Research

While my dissertation deals solely with a specific type of terrorism (ethnonational) in a specific region of the globe (Western Europe), the underlying research goals reach far beyond such parochial concerns. Current terrorism research fails to examine the possible fundamental differences between the types of terrorism; all are assumed fundamentally the same. Such assumptions may or may not be warranted. We simply do not know at this point. Occam’s Razor and our desire for scientific simplicity and theoretic elegance both support treating all of the different types of terrorism as one. My dissertation breaks with this convention and closely examines one type of terrorism in one area of the world with the expectation of repeating the study in the future for other types and other regions, testing how well the above assumption holds.

While theories of ethnic conflict do exist, Ethnic Separation Theory and Ethnic Competition Theory spring to mind, they are general-conflict models. Ethnic conflict ranges from simple protest movements to full-scale guerilla wars. The jump (or slip) into terrorism in these theories is not fully explored, and it is not clear that what triggers mass protests differs from what triggers terrorism only by a scaling factor, as is assumed by the current models.

Once the theory of ethnic terrorism is created from combining the results of the separate analyses, expansion of the terror type sets can take place. Currently, as all types of terrorism tend to be categorized as one, determining their separate causes cannot happen. Are ethnic terrorists fundamentally the same as religious terrorists? Do they respond to the same stimuli, both in escalating the terrorism and in retarding it? Common sense would seem to hold that the solutions are different, but until group typology is considered in a very fundamental sense, we will not be able to arrive at those answers.

Future Research

Already, I have expanded my research on the causes of terrorism into some of the perennial questions facing our policy-makers: Do the political wings of terrorist groups increase or decrease the incidence of terrorism? Does conciliation help or hinder the process? Does such official recognition offer a chance to bring the terror groups into the political process or does it simply encourage other groups to use terrorism? In what way does the political orientation of the head of government affect those groups prone to using terror? And, most importantly, why are democracies the usual targets of terrorists? Is it really because they hate our freedom, as President Bush stated?

My terrorism research also easily lends itself to the study of insurgencies and all types of armed risings against the government. How do insurgencies form? Can their formation be predicted? What steps can a state make to reduce the probability of having to deal with an insurgency movement? Perhaps, if we knew these answers, a more-democratic Shah would rule Iran, Sendero Luminoso would be working with the government to make Peru better for its people, and Iraq would be peaceful and truly sovereign.

These are the most important questions in international relations. They are the questions of fundamental significance to both the political leaders and to ourselves, as the answers may help us reduce the number of terrorist attacks, insurgency deaths, and increase the stability of the world.

Additional Ongoing Research Plans

This constitutes the primary substantive focus of my ten-year research plan. For the full plan, add two book-length projects. The first is a statistical meta-analysis of the Democratic Peace Thesis. Few need to be reminded that there is no empirically-supported conclusion concerning the Thesis except that democracies do not war with other democracies under the appropriate definitions. Unfortunately, beyond this point, the empirical evidence of a general pacifism among and between democracies is lacking. Different researchers and different studies have supported the two different sides. My goal is to evaluate, analyze, and synthesize the existing literature into a coherent whole, by examining the statistical techniques the researchers used and how the assumptions underlying those techniques can tell us more about the reality than just the results of the studies themselves.

The second book-length project was to publish my dissertation. However, that has already been accomplished. VDM-Verlag, published a revised version of my dissertation under the title Terrorism and Nationalism: Theory, Causes and Causers. 2007. (Saarbrücken, Germany: VDM-Verlag).

These projects should take me through the next ten years and beyond. The field of terrorism will not cease to be a rich source of interest (or data points) in the years ahead, neither will the Democratic Peace Thesis. A proffered answer can do nothing but raise more questions. But, that is the fundamental strength of science—the never-ending creation of questions from the answers.