Non-state actors in international politics: a theoretical framework

In recent years, there has been a burgeoning of studies related to international terrorism, many related to and resulting from current events and occurrences. However, the enterprise of terrorism scholarship within the framework of political science and international relations poses some interesting dilemmas for the discipline. While other topics in the field have received increasingly rigorous examination, the study of terrorism, comparatively, remains in a nascent stage. Though many of the tools of analysis from other areas of international relations scholarship can be re-applied tfi the study of terrorism, it appears that some must be modified and others discarded altogether. Instead of seeking to fit terrorists, and, indeed, other state actors, into the common rubric of international relations scholarship, I argue here that it is important to reconceptualize international interaction in light of the problems that such actors pose to traditional research. Thus, in the following thesis, I will explore the challenges the study of terrorism poses to researchers in the fields of international relations and political science. After discussing the theoretical foundations and quandaries of the study of international terrorism in political science, I will utilize these remarks as a groundwork for developing a game-theoretic model that incorporates some of these challenges and an econometric model to test some of its implications.