Leadership Decapitation and Strategic Trajectories of Jihadi Terrorist Groups

Counterterrorism policies often incorporate leadership decapitation, which refers to the removal of a militant organization’s leaders through capture or targeted killing. Previous studies of leadership decapitation measure its effects on a limited set of quantifiable variables, especially a terrorist group’s lifespan and attack frequency. Despite the resources and attention devoted to using and studying the tactic, its effects are not well understood.

This thesis explores leadership decapitation of jihadi terrorist groups in relation to strategic trajectory, the combination of a group’s goals and the methods employed in pursuit of those goals. After a jihadi terrorist group’s founding leader is killed by a government, what happens to the group’s strategic trajectory?

This thesis finds that jihadi terrorist groups demonstrate one of three strategic trajectory trends after losing their founders: resilient continuity, relational shifts, or major change. The strategic trajectories of resilient groups are generally unchanged after leadership decapitation, while relational-shift groups change the ways in which they interact with target audiences and other militant organizations. Major-change groups shift their goals or strategic emphasis.

This thesis concludes that killing the founders of jihadi terrorist groups does not produce a single type of strategic trajectory change across organizations. Further, the thesis does not find strong trends or shared characteristics across groups within the same category of strategic trajectory change, meaning that the outcome of leadership decapitation is unpredictable. The thesis asserts that further study and debate must define what constitutes success in the context of strategic trajectory change in terrorist groups.