Leadership succession and jihadist beheadings

Why do armed groups use extreme forms of violence? Existing research argues that ideological beliefs, organizational alliances, and efforts to generate publicity or provoke external enemies drive armed groups’ use of extreme violence. Building on existing scholarship, this study explores the incentives of different types of militant leaders to sanction beheading attacks. Leadership transitions create authority crises within armed groups. We argue that these pressures incentivize successor leaders to employ extreme and costly violence like beheadings as a tool of internal consolidation and external signaling. To examine these arguments, we combine an original dataset on the backgrounds and experiences of 206 leaders of 108 different jihadist groups with event-level data on beheading attacks. In doing so, we find that jihadist organizations are significantly more likely to use beheadings under successor leaders. This effect is pronounced among successors who come to power following the arrest or death of their predecessors at the hands of state forces. However, the use of beheadings under successors decreases as their time in power increases, indicating the diminishing returns of using extreme violence over time. These findings contribute to scholarship on militant leaders, the consequences of counterterrorism policies, and the strategic logic of armed group violence.