Signal and the Noise: Threat Assessment in Terrorism and Insurgency

How do state officials evaluate the risk of international terrorism and insurgency? Existing explanations predict that state officials rely on observable behaviors of strength to guide threat assessments, but these indicators often serve as poor proxies of prospective capabilities and produce noisy signals instead. We develop an alternative argument that -- under large amounts of uncertainty -- officials evaluate the risk of future violence through the construction and application of a threat schema. We identify two factors governing the construction of these schema: retrievability of comparable cases and information processing techniques. We examine our theory through a case study of the 1979 Herat Rebellion in Afghanistan, where Soviet and American officials reached opposing conclusions about the conict's prospective trajectory despite possessing similar information. Our findings advance understanding about foreign policy decision-making and threat assessment for terrorism and insurgency.