Chinda, Chris;
Unal, Cigdem;
Marchment, Zoe;
Gill, Paul;
(2023)
The Impact of Public Holidays on Insurgent Attacks: The Case of Thailand.
Terrorism and Political Violence
10.1080/09546553.2023.2222810.
(In press).
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Abstract
This paper analyzes Malay-Muslim insurgents’ attacks in the three southern provinces of Thailand between the years of 2010–2021 and identifies the role of public holidays on the level of violence. The existing literature suggests terrorists consider holidays during attack planning. However, there is a lack of agreement on the effect direction. Some studies have found that holidays are a force for peace while others have found they can act as trigger for more violence. Applying environmental criminology to the timing of terrorist attacks, we argue that the type of the holiday matters. Therefore, we analyze public (secular), Islamic, and Buddhist holidays separately. We show that Islamic holidays witness increased violence while Buddhist and public holidays see reductions. We discuss that Islamic holidays increase the Malay-Muslim insurgents’ motivation to attack by assigning to those dates a higher symbolic value. On the other hand, on Buddhist and public holidays, insurgents may hesitate to attack to avoid the adverse effects of losing public support and triggering a backlash. The results demonstrate the necessity to analyze the temporal dynamics of terrorist attacks.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | The Impact of Public Holidays on Insurgent Attacks: The Case of Thailand |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/09546553.2023.2222810 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2023.2222810 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2023 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. |
| Keywords: | Terrorism; insurgency; Southern Thailand; temporal analysis; religion |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Security and Crime Science |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10173252 |
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