ABSTRACT
In his analysis of the political origins of state violence and terrorism, Ted Gurr identified three sets of conditions that affect the decision-making calculus of threatened elites, the situational, structural, and dispositional. This chapter adopts the framework proposed by Gurr to organize the review of the current state of terrorism scholarship. Situational variables include the traits, capacities, and means of opponents in a political conflict. The chapter includes access to "safe havens" in a failed or failing state and a state's use of violence to repress dissent. Structural variables describe the constraints on opponents in a political conflict and includes a discussion of studies that focus on the so-called "root causes" of terror, such as economic inequality, poverty, highly stratified and unequal societies, and the relationship between democracy and incidences of terrorism. Dispositional variables consider the conditions that can be expected to influence how actors regard the acceptability of strategies of violence and terrorism.
