Robert Pape

After presenting preliminary data on his research into suicide terrorism in the American Political Science Review in 2003, Pape founded the Chicago Project on Security and Threats (originally, Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism), which he directs. The project is funded by the Carnegie Corporation, the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the University of Chicago, and the Argonne National Laboratory.[4] In December 2009, Security Studies published an issue on terrorism featuring content exclusively from CPOST.

Pape published his first full-length book in 1996, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War, where he questions the conventional wisdom that coercive air power is both effective and relatively cheap. Rather than coercing citizens of the bombed nation to rise up against their government, coercive air power often backfires, resulting in a citizenry that is both surprisingly resilient and loyal to their government. Pape also argues that air power and land power should be integrated and used together in a "hammer and anvil" fashion.

A 1999 RAND report funded by the U.S. Air Force (USAF) "explored the role of air power as a coercive instrument", attempting to rebut Pape's claim.[5] They concluded that, "Although the United States and the USAF have scored some notable successes, the record is mixed."[6] Horowitz and Reiter applied "multivariate probit analysis [to] all instances of air power coercion from 1917 to 1999". Their quantitative analyses essentially matched Pape's qualitative assessment that attacking military targets has improved the chances of success, but "higher levels of civilian vulnerability have no effect on the chances of coercion success".[7]

Pape's Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (2005) contradicts many widely held beliefs about suicide terrorism. Pape argues that there is "little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any one of the world's religions... Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland" (p. 4). Pape also presents evidence that the majority of suicide terrorists do not come from impoverished or uneducated backgrounds, but rather have middle class origins and a significant level of education.

In a criticism of Pape's link between occupation and suicide terrorism, an article titled "Design, Inference, and the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism" (published in The American Political Science Review), authors Scott Ashworth, Joshua D. Clinton, Adam Meirowitz, and Kristopher W. Ramsay from Princeton charged Pape with "sampling on the dependent variable" by limiting research only to cases in which suicide terror was used.[8] Similar criticisms were made by Michael C. Horowitz, who concludes the presence of a occupying power is not a statistically significant indicator of likelihood to incite suicide terrorism.[9] In response, Pape argues that his research design is sufficient because it collected the universe of known cases of suicide terrorism.[10] In a rejoinder, Ashworth et al. discuss how even large samples of the dependent variable cannot be used to explain variation in outcomes, why suicide terrorism in some places but not others, if the sample does not vary.[11] Assaf Moghadam has also criticized Pape's conclusions.[12]

Pape's Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It is co-authored with James K. Feldman, was published in 2010. Cutting the Fuse evaluates more than 2100 suicide attacks (6 times the number evaluated in Dying to Win) in an attempt to identify key factors that explain the ebb and flow of suicide terrorist campaigns. The book recommends that nations to avoid stationing troops where they will be perceived as occupiers threatening local culture and institutions or coercing the government of an occupied state to do things that would be perceived as benefiting the occupiers at the expense of the local population. When occupation is necessary, minimize the threat to local culture by helping local officials to do things they might otherwise want to do but didn't previously have the ability and by treating collateral damage with great sensitivity.[13]

In 1997 and 1998, Pape published two articles examining the efficacy of economic sanctions.[14][15] Pape contests the validity of international economic sanctions in achieving policy goals, judging that only 5% can legitimately be considered successes, as opposed to 34% claimed in the work of other scholars. One of these scholars, Kimberly Ann Elliot, responded to Pape's initial piece, suggesting that Pape had mischaracterized the data, and that his views on economic sanctions and Elliot's views on economic sanctions were "not terribly different."[16] Pape's response, in the same issue of 'International Security', insisted that he had not mischaracterized the data, and that his view of economic sanctions is meaningfully different from the picture put forth by Elliot and others.[17]

In 2015, Pape and neuroscientist Jean Decety received a $3.4 million grant from the Department of Defense's Minerva Research Initiative to study the social and neurological construction of martyrdom.[18] In May 2019, Pape participated in the Christchurch Call, a plan launched by New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern and French President Emmanuel Macron to end the promotion of extremist content online.[19] Pape also presented his research on ISIS propaganda videos to organizations such as the FBI, BOP, SSCI, NCTC, NSC, and SOCOM. In February 2020, Pape and CPOST received a $1.5 million grant to study Arabic-language propaganda.

In January 2018, Pape testified before the House Subcommittee on National Security on the military defeat of ISIS.[20] In August 2019, Pape briefed the National Security Council on an "over-the-horizon" counter-terrorism strategy to end the War in Afghanistan.[21] In November 2019, Pape and the UN Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate (CTED) co-hosted a colloquium at the University of Chicago discussing ways to improve responses to future terrorist attacks and advance academic research on the impact of terrorism.[22]

• Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War. Cornell University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-8014-3134-4 (hardcover). ISBN 0-8014-8311-5 (paperback). Debated in Security Studies 7.2 (Winter 1997/98) p. 93-214 and 7.3 (Spring 1998) p. 182-228.
• Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. New York: Random House, 2005. ISBN 1-4000-6317-5 (hardcover). London: Gibson Square 2006 (updated). ISBN 1-903933-78-1 (hardcover).
• with James K. Feldman, Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It. University of Chicago Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-226-64560-5

• "The Answer (A Partition Plan for Bosnia)," New Republic 208.24 June 14 (1993) p. 22-28. (With John J. Mearsheimer)
• "Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work," International Security 22.2 (Fall 1997).
• "Our Iraq Policy is not Working," New York Times February 24 (2001) p. A-13.
• "The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism," American Political Science Review 97.3 (August 2003) p. 343-361.
• "Dying to Kill Us," New York Times September 22 (2003).
• "Al Qaeda's Smart Bombs," New York Times July 9 (2005) p. A-13.
• It's the Occupation Stupid, Foreign Policy magazine, October 18, 2010
• “Reconsidering the Cases of Humanitarian Intervention,” International Security 38.2 (Fall 2013).
• "ISIS and the Culture of Narcissism," Wall Street Journal June 27, 2016.
• "The American face of ISIS: Analysis of ISIS–related terrorism in the US March 2014–August 2016" Australian Strategic Policy Institute (2017)
• "Days of Action or Restraint? How the Islamic Calendar Impacts Violence," American Political Science Review 111.3 (2017), p. 439-459.
• "A Multilevel Social Neuroscience Perspective on Radicalization and Terrorism," Social Neuroscience 13.5 (2018), p. 511-529.
• "Sri Lanka Attack Shows Islamic State Still a Global Threat," Chicago Tribune April 24, 2019.
• "A Call to Solve Social Media Terrorism" Boston Globe May 13, 2019.
• "FaceApp and the urgent need to see social media as a national security threat," Chicago Tribune July 20, 2019.
• "How to Partner with the Taliban," Foreign Policy August 26, 2019.

• "A Dangerous Blunder in Syria," Boston Globe October 9, 2019.
• "EEG Distinguishes Heroic Narratives in ISIS Online Video Propaganda," Scientific Reports 10, 19593 (2020).
• "Troops in Chicago? Here’s why that would only exacerbate the chaos." Chicago Tribune August 20, 2020.

• Watts, Barry D. "Ignoring Reality : Problems of Theory and Evidence in Security Studies," Security Studies 7.2 (Winter 1997/98) p. 115-171.
• Warden, John A. "Success in Modern War : a Response to Robert Pape's Bombing to Win," Security Studies 7.2 (Winter 1997/98) p. 172-190.
• Mueller, Karl. "Strategies of Coercion : Denial, Punishment, and the Future of Air Power," Security Studies 7.3 (Spring 1998) p. 182-228.
• "A Scholarly Look at Terror Sees Bootprints in the Sand," Washington Post, July 10, 2005.
• Sri Kantha, Sachi. "A critique of the Black Tigers portrayal by terrorism expert Robert A.Pape". https://sangam.org/2010/07/Critique_Pape.php?uid=4009