Vortrag von Prof. Dr. Michael Jetter am 27.06.18: „The effect of drone strikes on terrorism and anti-US sentiments in Pakistan“

Im Rahmen des Forschungskolloquiums des Instituts für Wirtschaftswissenschaften der Universität Freiburg möchten wir Sie herzlich zum Vortrag von

Prof. Dr. Michael Jetter

(University of Western Australia)

über das Thema

The effect of drone strikes on terrorism and anti-US sentiments in Pakistan

einladen.

Der Vortrag findet am Mittwoch, 27. Juni 2018, 10:00 Uhr s.t. in Raum 2330 (KG 2) statt.

Abstract:

This paper studies the 418 drone strikes the US has been conducting in Pakistan from 2008 – 2017. The existing literature provides arguments both in favor of and against the use of drones in combatting terrorism: On the one hand, drones are lauded for being a low-risk, affordable option that has killed key terrorist leaders and destroyed their communication channels. On the other hand, the civilian casualties termed as collateral damage are suggested to increase trauma in the civilian population, thereby facilitating the recruitment of prospective terrorists and inciting further terrorist attacks. We aim to isolate the causal effect of drone strikes on subsequent terrorism and anti-US sentiment. Specifically, we employ an instrumental variable strategy based on weather conditions which substantially affect the employability and effectiveness of drones, but are otherwise orthogonal to the terrorists’ actions. Data on drone strikes and terrorism are obtained from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) and the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), respectively, while Twitter and Facebook data are used to capture Pakistanis’ attitudes toward the US. Indeed, our preliminary results suggest that weather conditions serve as a powerful instrument in the first stage, predicting the day-to-day use of drone strikes by the US. Second-stage results then produce a positive and statistically significant coefficient in predicting terror attacks in the upcoming weeks, suggesting that drone strikes encourage terrorism. The corresponding magnitudes are sizeable. We are currently in the process of organizing data from social media sources to further investigate the potential impact of drone strikes on Pakistanis’ beliefs toward the US. We expect the corresponding empirical estimations to be completed by June 2018.