IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/jnlpup/v9y1989i02p207-216_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Fighting Political Terrorism by Refusing Recognition: A Critique of Frey's Proposal

Author

Listed:
  • Friedland, Nehemia

Abstract

Frey (1987) proposed a new information policy designed to lower the utility of terrorist action. The policy is predicated on the assumption that terrorists aim to draw public attention to their cause. Therefore, the terrorists' rewards can be reduced by refraining from attributing a particular terrorist act to any one group. Faced with diminished rewards, terrorists are likely to give up violent action or to resort to tactics that put them in greater jeopardy. The present article offers a thorough analysis of Frey's proposal. It shows that the proposal derives from a too limited view of the terrorist strategy and from unrealistic assumptions about the extent to which democratic governments can control the sources and the dissemination of information. A judgment of Frey's proposal according to criteria drawn from a more comprehensive view of the terrorist strategy leads to the conclusion that the proposed policy is both impractical and counterproductive.

Suggested Citation

  • Friedland, Nehemia, 1989. "Fighting Political Terrorism by Refusing Recognition: A Critique of Frey's Proposal," Journal of Public Policy, Cambridge University Press, vol. 9(2), pages 207-216, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:jnlpup:v:9:y:1989:i:02:p:207-216_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0143814X00008126/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:jnlpup:v:9:y:1989:i:02:p:207-216_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/pup .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.